Archive

Daily Archives: 24 August 2019

Women and Sex and Talk

24 August 2019
Continental Philosophy, Gender & Sexuality, Lectures & Events, Queer Theory, Sex & Sexuality, Social Ethics
Leave a comment

Mahité Breton and I have proposed a seminar for the upcoming American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA conference), Chicago, March 2020.

Women and Sex and Talk

Over 20 years since Candace Vogler’s important essay “Sex and Talk” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1998), and in the midst of the #MeToo movement and what has been referred to as the “#MeToo novel,” this seminar focuses on what women talk about when they talk about the pleasures, risks, inconsistencies and incoherencies of sex, desire, and intimacy, by looking at recent work by female fiction writers.

While mainstream discussions and debates on these issues often operate based on the premise of self-expression as the enunciative modality leading to self-mastery, writers such as Miriam Toews (Women Talking), Dana Spiotta (Friends and Innocents), Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends), Jamie Quatro (I Want to Show You More), and Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing), have crafted narratives that affirm Vogler’s claim that “not all intimacies are affairs of the self,” and that the stories one tells about sex are not always speech acts in search of one’s sovereign subjectivity.

In light of this, what can the contemporary sex novel teach us—precisely through the de-personalizing virtues of fiction—about how women might talk about intimacy, sex, desire and pleasure in ways that make room for the unbearableness—indeed the near-unspeakableness—of sex. How might these so-called #MeToo novels, operate in distinction to the discursive self-assertion and “self-conscious rational agency” and “stable system[s] of sexual self-representation” (Vogler, 344) that are hallmarks of sex talk in the #MeToo movement?

The novels referenced above are stories of non-sovereign resilience “liberated from the fetters of selfhood” (Baumeister, Escaping the Self, 1991), and portray sex beyond romance and the sentimental romantic novel; a liberal egalitarian model of intimacy and love; and the imperative that sex be morally redemptive, psychically and emotionally fulfilling—and indeed, at times, the source of a secure sense of self. As Vogler argues: “at least some kinds of sex (I want to say, goodsex) can’t happen unless people stop worrying about who they are, and what the activity means to them, for them, and about them” (358). To talk about sex without these worries, might be a way to open both sex and talk to the political. Perhaps in terms of configurations of readerships of these contemporary novels, and the public conversations and differently structured intimacies that might ensue, in which the personal is not premised to be the only space of the political (or the sexual). We welcome papers on the novels and authors listed above, as well as other literary and theoretical works on women, sex, and talk, from a range of national and social-cultural contexts.

Loss, Adjectives, Aftertime in Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End

24 August 2019
Collective Afterlife of Things, Mourning, Social Ethics, Time and Temporality
Leave a comment

In Yiyun Li’s autobiographical novel, Where Reasons End (Penguin Random House, 2019), a mother has conversations with her recently deceased son—a sixteen-year-old who has committed suicide. In many of their conversations, they debate the virtues and value of nouns versus adjectives, in which the boy always argues in favour of the latter (his “guilty pleasure” as he says). He lives in that space between somewhere and nowhere, and in that time that he refers to as aftertime. 

Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

Since, in my recently published essay on the film Moonlight (“Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight,” CR: New Centennial Review, volume 2, number 2, 2019), I too have argued in favour of the adjective when it comes to the language of affective relations to loss and death, I was struck by the presence of these very same questions in Li’s novel, and its own meditation on an adjectival sense of things, including the time of those affective relations, keyed to the temporality of the moment.

Like afternoon, afterword, aftermath, and afterlife, in which the prefix “after” does not negate the continuance of what it precedes and modifies (noon, word, mowing [etymologically], life), aftertime at once marks the finitude of time, and an a-temporal zone that follows time.

It is in the chapter of Where Reasons End, titled, “Inertia,” where Yiyun Li creates an opening in the story in which her son can make clear that in his suicide, that is, in his decision to unfollow, he has neither unfollowed life nor death, but instead has unfollowed time. It is in this way that he exists aftertime, as that zone in which he is no longer behind time, following it (but he also cannot be said to be ahead of time either), but instead exists after the temporality of corporeal existence in his unfollowing of time.

It is life and death that can only be followed, but never unfollowed. As the son suggests, aftertime is the only time that can be unfollowed, as it slips away, in time, from life and from death.  The temporality of the moment, in its temporal passing—in its slipping away—is intimately related to the temporal unfollowing that is aftertime. It is the time and place where reasons end. This time and place of aftertime and after life and death, cannot be cohabited by mother and son: he in his death, and she is in her life and her mourning, writing, and sadness.

She tells us that hers is not the “sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano” but the kind of “sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby.” Here we note that the stillborn birth is not not a birth—but is still (a) birth. It is a birth into death; that moment when birth and death coincide. Such that birth is not the burst into existence but rather a loss that is still affectively borne (carried) in its very momentariness by the mother. Here in the novel, for the mother, it is a sadness that cannot be brought to term (in the sense both of born or ended), yet is not interminable either (as in melancholia) since it has been born (as still). It is in this way that one might argue that the moment is the birth of stillborn temporality.

Stillborn is an adjective of time and specifically of momentary temporality: the aftertime of afterbirth that is afterlife. Such an adjectival existence might be what the son has in mind when he says, “There are ways to live not as a noun, or inside a noun, or among other nouns” (67). That is: ways of living separate and apart from identity, interiority, or community, but instead as exposed to the intimacy of the Outside, not beyond. At one point the mother asks: “How long does it take for the frozen [adjective] to become fossil [noun]?” (83).

There is here an ethical rapport to loss that pertains neither to mourning nor melancholia, in that it allows the fadable to fade and the erasable to be erased (74). It is about allowing things in their singular passage to pass, rather than to try to contain or enclose these inevitable passages (these fade outs and die-offs). As the son points out to his mother: “A noun is a wall, an adjective is a window” (66).

Could it be that nouns are the ways in language in which we try to hold on to things, whereas adjectives allow us to let those same things go?

And does this amount to some sort of proof of what the son realizes and comes to argue: that it is adjectives that are indispensable, and not nouns? Such that qualities might be the things-themselves (the unspeakable), and not merely the modifier of things? And that the adjectival can be a source and sense of freedom—including the ability to live free of things (of nouns). “The world would be a wilder place for imagination if you let adjectives go free without having to modify something, he said” (84)—something such as a life.

Later in the novel, we encounter the question of naming those someones who have lost someone, and the absence of any such names. “What do you call a parent who’s lost a child, a sibling who’s lost a sibling, a friend who’s lost a friend?” (114). As Yiyun Li points out, we are without names for those who have suffered the loss of someone. Except for orphan, widow and widower, there are no nouns to name the one’s who have lost—thereby pointing to the limits and sheer absence of nouns (but perhaps of all words, all language) when it comes to existential loss.

It is loss that cannot be followed or unfollowed by words—it is unspeakable. It is the place where reasons (and nouns) end. Loss’ time is always aftertime.

%d bloggers like this: