The special issue of the online journal Postmodern Culture I co-edited (with Austin Svedjan) on “Afterlives of the Antisocial Thesis” is now live and available for free. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/issue/52747

The issue includes introductory essays by each of us two editors, an interview with Lee Edelman, and an Afterword by Tim Dean. Along with articles by Bobby Benedicto, John Paul Ricco, Tom Roach, Mikko Tuhkanen, and Robyn Weigman—each of which engages with the work of Leo Bersani in new and insightful ways, as they also situate Bersani’s work in relation other notable queer theorists and the legacy of the antisocial thesis in queer theory.

Here’s an excerpt from my Editor’s Introduction, “Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman:”

Bersani’s project…was less the resignification of gay male desire (as though this was all a matter of theorization as performative semiotic reiteration) than the recategorization of homosexuality as (or by way of) homoness (sameness).

In this way, the homo– no longer refers to nor is reducible to homosexuality. Instead, homo points to a degree or a form of sameness shared between two or more persons or things—incongruously or inaccurately—and thus homo no longer functions as a predicate of an actuality, but rather is the speculation via “the intellectual imagination” of an as-yet-to-be-realized virtuality (Bersani, “Gay Betrayals” 43). Which is also not “utopic ambivalence” since it is not ambivalent about any possible reparation, redemption, or conclusion.

As Bersani states in “Gay Betrayals,” “The homosexual, perhaps even the homosexual category (what I have called ‘homoness’) rather than as a person … might be the model for correspondences of being that are by no means limited to relations among persons” (43)…Bersani’s recategorization of homo effectively frees it from the imperative of categorization. Homo suddenly becomes the predicate that relieves us—”we”—of predication. For Bersani, the singularity and specificity (not the fixed identity) of the homosexual and of gay male desire is its evacuation of subjective substantiality and seriousness, which is not to be confused with self-erasure. In other words, de-specifying is the specificity of the homo, thus making the homo curiously queer.