“Of Queer Neutrality” Jacques Khalip’s deeply insightful review of The Decision Between Us

In his remarkable review essay [PDF] of my book, The Decision Between Us, Jacques Khalip (Professor of English, Brown University) beautifully illuminates the ways in which something as ordinary as a blank sheet of paper is—for me, in my thinking and in this work—an aesthetic event and an ethical scene. Not a place or product in the service of judgment, but the spacing of decision. The measure of which lies in the separation or apartness that sustains the between-ness of our being-together.

With great care Khalip attends to the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of my argument, and makes evident how “art and art’s ethical deliberation are…of a piece in this study,” and how “art measures (even if it is measureless) the infinite demands of an ethos that appears and disappears under our feet.”

Of the many, many things that I appreciate about Khalip’s reading, I especially value his foregrounding of my chapter on Roland Barthes, “Neutral Mourning,” and its reading of Camera Lucida alongside Barthes’ lectures at the Collège de France and the mourning diary that Barthes kept immediately following his mother’s death. For here is where a Roland Barthes emerges whom I believe is so deeply informed by Maurice Blanchot and Blanchot’s own philosophy of the neutral. It is also here where we truly begin to gain a sense of what it means for Khalip to cast my work as its own form of “queer neutrality” and what import this might have, not only for queer theory, politics and ethics, but also for the study of the work of Barthes and Blanchot.

As the concluding paragraph, Khalip writes,

If The Decision Between Us impresses upon us an ethics that is not coterminous with the self-possessed subject, the galvanizing effect of this reasoning is to bring into view an awareness that art is the intensification of an ethics-beyond-ethics, a kind of thinking that occurs beyond mere identity, narration or historical contextualization. Among the various illuminating moves in Ricco’s book is its immersion in the various environments it evokes and theorizes, at once setting up scenes while at the same time distancing the reader from them, page after page. As readers, we cannot help but waver between decision and indecision with each of Ricco’s arguments—every movement forward compels a further critique and judgment. Indeed, the book is buoyed by the anonymous, aesthetic power between decision and indecision, not as a choice between positions but as a contamination in the very space of the two that propels unending, queer deliberations.

I am deeply and sincerely grateful for this review, and as my work continues to move on, I will remain indebted to Jacques Khalip’s reading.