Their critiques of the non-humanist subject are too generalized and predictable, which backfires and makes their analyses counterproductive.

In The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects, which was released in the spring of 2017, I put pressure on these theories on several levels, of which I’ll merely mention one, namely that I think that something essential gets lost in translation when American queer theorists appropriate 20th-century French critiques of the so-called humanist subject. It is true that Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari were all highly critical of the notion of the sovereign, autonomous, and agentic subject that we have inherited from Western philosophy in part because they, like earlier thinkers such as Adorno and Levinas, saw the connection between this subject and violence; they understood that this subject’s quest for selfmastery was linked to its quest to master the world, and that the results were disastrous, ranging from slavery and colonialism to Nazi Germany. However, I do not think that continental theorists, generally speaking, sought to destroy the subject as such. Instead, they were interested in what subjectivity might look like after the collapse of the arrogant humanist subject. They wanted to destabilize this subject, to undermine its sovereignty, challenge its autonomy, and dilute its agency. Yes, there was much talk about the subversion of the subject, desubjectivation, and even, in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, of pulverizing the subject. But, ultimately, there was also an idealistic reaching for an alternative, for a subjectivity that would be less sure of itself and therefore more capacious, creative, and open to otherness. Undoubtedly, some of this idealism persists in even the most negative of queer theories in the sense that their negativity usually contains utopian longings. However, I think that queer theory’s flagella tion of the sovereign, autonomous, and agentic subject is by now so ritualistic, undertaken in such a habitual manner, that it has become too predictable to be genuinely critical. I of course understand why it is happening. Particularly now that we are watching President Trump and his corporate allies parade on the political stage, it is easy to recognize the figure of the white-straight-masculinist, self-contained, self-satisfied, and self-confident subject that posthumanist theorists have criticized for decades. But I think that a distinction needs to be drawn between the Trumps of the world and the vast majority of the world’s population. In other words, I think that the call to annihilate (q uq) “the subject” misfires when it is indiscriminate, for when it is generalized, it becomes aimed at individuals who have never come anywhere near to approximating the sovereign subject. That is, it seems to me that the last thing that those who have been dispossessed by social inequalities such as homophobia, sexism, racism, poverty, or neocolonialism need is further dispossession; self-annihilation cannot possibly be a goal for those who already feel annihilated by structural violence, who already lead precarious lives. Likewise, I have a hard time imagining that those who have experienced various forms of Halberstamian failure, for instance those who are unemployed or cutting themselves, view these experiences as sexy forms of political rebellion. Halberstam’s queer art of failure is arguably written from the perspective of those who have already succeeded. Likewise, queer theory’s calls for self-annihilation assume that there is a self to annihilate to begin with. Against this backdrop, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination is an important corrective.