Blackness and queerness are dually constituted within a symbolic order that necessitates their exclusion as the basis for language and meaning

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Duke University Press]//owen

This “ontological incapacity,” in Wilderson’s account, singularly pertains to Blackness, which finds no place in a Symbolic order that rests on it nonetheless. Drawing imaginatively on earlier work by Frantz Fanon and David Marriott, Wilderson observes that insofar as “slaveness . . . has consumed Blackness and Africanness, . . . it [is] impossible to divide slavery from Blackness.”72 Because “the structure by which human beings are recognized and incorporated into a community of human beings is anti-slave,” Blackness remains, and must remain, excluded from the realm of humanity and the prospect of social being. But Blackness as ontological impossibility produces a specific type of being: “the Black,” a sociogenetic identity defined by a specific “grammar of suffering.”73 Extending Fanon’s assertion that “ontology . . . does not permit us to understand the being of the black,” Wilderson proposes the necessity of differentiating “Black being from Human life.”74 He does so by reifying Blackness in the specificity of “the Black,” who is, moreover, a figure of reification from the outset, “an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject.”75 The Black, “who is always already a Slave,” never rises to the status of “a subject who has either been alienated in language or alienated from his or her cartographic and temporal capabilities.”76 To the contrary, the Black remains for Wilderson “an object who has been positioned by gratuitous violence[,] . . . a sentient being for whom recognition and incorporation is impossible,” insofar as “accumulation and fungibility” are the Black’s “ontological foundation.”77 But while Blackness remains definitionally excluded from any Symbolic framing, excluded in its very essence from ontological possibility, only subjects inhabiting the Symbolic could posit, abject, or assume it. “The Black,” then, pace Wilderson, would always “be” a Symbolic subject, one divided into subjectivity by having entered the linguistic order, but one consigned to figure what the Symbolic is unable to accommodate: the (Real) negativity of Blackness. Those read as materializations of the ontological impossibility of Blackness would share the quality of fungibility that Wilderson (with reference to Saidiya Hartman) associates with Blackness itself. Incapable of ontological manifestation within the order of sense, unbound from the putative stability of Symbolic coefficients, Blackness would name what has no being, no identity, and no place. It would have no fixed phenomenal form but only a social and political one and would vanish in every positivity that substantialized or embodied it. Wilderson, however, does attach a property to Blackness, one that particularizes the Black not only as excluded from subjectivity but also as uniquely excluded. That property, as it happens, coincides with Malabou’s analysis of woman, for Wilderson reads the Black as distinctively “positioned . . . by the structure of gratuitous violence” and as “openly vulnerable to the whims of the world.”78 Recall in this context Malabou’s words: “It is necessary to imagine the possibility of woman starting from the structural impossibility she experiences of not being violated.”79 In each case a specific entity in the world, a speaking subject acknowledged as human, though by no means universally, lays claim to the unique position of foreclosure from the field of human “being.” Small wonder, then, that when David Marriott, characterizing Wilderson’s work as situating “black suffering . . . [as] beyond analogy,” declares that for Wilderson “there is always a desire to have black lived experience named as the worst” because “the black has to embody this abjection without reserve,” his words echo Judith Butler’s concern about the work of Luce Irigaray on which Malabou’s feminism builds: “Is it not the case that there is within any discourse and thus within Irigaray’s as well, a set of constitutive exclusions that are inevitably produced by the circumscription of the feminine as that which monopolizes the sphere of exclusion?”80 In each case specifying a type of being as, in its essence, nonbeing gives rise to similar problems. Wilderson’s argument, for example, though more powerful than Marriott suggests, situates Black sentient beings outside the Symbolic order of subjects. It positions them ontologically as materializations of Blackness: essentially and foundationally excluded from the human. But Judy offers a more nuanced project, if no less devastating in its consequences: “to expose the catachresis at work in the biological misnomer of race, to read the Negro as a trope, indeed a misapplied metaphor.”81 The result of this tropological maneuver, for Judy, “is the exclusion of the African from the space of Western history, and the marginal inclusion of the Negro as negativity.”82 Two phrases merit attention here: “marginal inclusion” and “as negativity.” The ontological foreclosure of Blackness produces a Symbolic subject to figure this lack of a proper place or name. Marriott phrases it precisely: “The black has to embody this abjection without reserve.” Like woman, that is, the Black is a subject whose status as a subject is subject to doubt by virtue of figuring within the Symbolic the ab-sens excluded from it. Wilderson rightly recognizes, then, that the logic of anti-Blackness, which is nothing other than logic itself as the syntactic imperative of making-sense, will persist in any social or political variation of the world. With good reason, therefore, his position calls for “a total end of the world.”83 But Black persons, despite the history that places them inextricably in relation to slavery, are not, in any given world, the singular or exclusive embodiments of ontological exclusion. If the “Negro,” for Judy, permits the translation of African unknowability into the register of meaning, then “the Black,” as a category of person, similarly functions as a catachrestic misnaming by which ab-sens, the void of meaning, gets raised up as sens-absexe, fleshed out in a positive identity that reinforces sense. More than just “the Negro,” then, must be read as catachrestic. Queerness, woman, Blackness, trans*: these terms (like countless others that name the null set of a given order) emerge from the division between the negativity that inheres in division as such—the undoing of the world as unity, comprehension, or identity—and that division’s positivization in the catachrestic name of a social being.84 No list could include every figure for the world’s dissolution as comprehension; were that possible, the world would emerge again as totalized, comprehensive. However endless the production of contingent figures for the unbearable, all spring from the inextricability of absens and sens-absexe and thus from the insistence of the not-all that makes the sexual relation impossible. All are rooted in the ontological antagonism that structures the logic of sense by which we are divided into being: divided between the subject of desire and of the subject of the drive, where the former consigns the latter to the status of what is not. For just that reason, and without denying other (mis)namings of exclusion, I primarily refer to queerness as the catachresis of this nothing, of this ontological negation. I say “for just that reason” because queerness, though linked (in contemporary discourse) to nonnormative sexual identities (and I want to insist on the contingency of that link and so on the impossibility of delimiting what queerness would “properly” name), invokes, as I wrote in No Future, the insistence of the drive and of jouissance.85 Infinitely mobile as an epithet for strangeness, out-of-jointedness, and nonnormativity, queerness colors any enjoyment that seems to threaten a world. Such enjoyments, in the libidinal economy of a given culture’s fantasy, may follow from any attribute, including, among others, race, gender, gender expression, sexuality, ethnicity, caste, class, religion, mental or physical ability, marital status, and educational background; the list could go on forever. In the words of Annamarie Jagose, “As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions.”86 Queerness, in this, shares with sodomy (“that utterly confused category,” as Michel Foucault deemed it), a resistance to definition. Foucault describes “the extreme discretion of the texts dealing with sodomy” and the “nearly universal reticence in talking about it.”87 Constructing a valuable link between sodomy as it was understood in the Renaissance and what he then calls “sites of present confusion,” Jonathan Goldberg observes in Sodometries that sodomy’s regulatory efficacy with regard to criminal behavior follows largely from the fact that it “remains incapable of exact definition.”88 Queerness, similarly, refuses limitation to particular persons, objects, or acts. Associated with the power of a drive that subdues the subject’s will or agency and invoking an enjoyment in excess of the pleasures associated with the good, queerness figures meaning’s collapse and the encounter with ab-sens. It speaks to the place of the nothing fleshed out by those who are made to embody it. But those entities (persons, objects, acts) cannot, in themselves, be queer; they lack an ontological relation to ontological impossibility. Rather, they serve as catachreses for the negativity of ab-sens.