This is the public roundtable discussion of my recent book, The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes. It was held on April 1, 2016 at the University of Toronto, and featured remarks by David Clark, Stacey D’Erasmo, Jacques Khalip, Etienne Turpin and Tom McDonough.

I am deeply appreciative of the generous time and care that each of them has devoted to my work, and the many new insights that their precise observations, re-framings, and juxtapositions generated. It is certainly a rare occasion for an intellectual discussion in the academy to be structured less around questioning critique, and more in terms of a willingness to go along with another thinker and writer’s thinking and writing for awhile. Resonances and shared affinities and devotions emerge, and this is truly a genuine gift.

But I am equally grateful for David, Stacey, Jacques, Etienne and Tom’s commitment to making this roundtable discussion a real intellectual event and not simply a panegyrical celebration. They came not only as admirers but as readers, willing to probe the larger political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of my work, and to situate those paths in relation to other contemporary discussions and events (e.g. the Anthropocene, queer pedagogy, the refugee crisis, the marriage plot, and the un-livable). And to open up my work to that of others: Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Gertrue Stein, and Deborah Britzman—to name those that immediately come to mind.

Which also means that they did me the great honour of not imitating my style of theorizing, my particular way of speaking through a written text, and of rhetorically constructing an argument. Instead, they brought everything that makes their own work so distinct and uniquely theirs, and spoke in the very voices that have drawn me to their work over the years. This public conversation was neither a series of forgeries nor a canonization of a book or its author, but an exploration of what jointly emerged as the obscenity and scandal of thinking and perhaps trying to live in terms of “queer neutrality.”