Handkerchiefs

31 December 2015
Anonymity, Collective Afterlife of Things, Social Ethics
Leave a comment

 

4648095c4b5a46c5e402568ba86e731a

Throughout my childhood growing up in Utica, NY, I was very close with my paternal grandmother and we spent a tremendous amount of time together. One of our regular afternoon rituals was to go to any one of her three preferred grocery stores: Grand Union, A&P and Chanatry’s. While the first two were part of a national chain, the last was a smaller, locally-owned store. Chanatry’s may have had more than one location, but back then my grandmother preferred the one on Culver Avenue in East Utica, next to the castle-like turreted Armoury, and across the street from the WPA-era Buckingham (public) Pool. In many respects I think it was my grandmother’s favourite of the three, and without question, it was mine.

UticaParkwayEast_Postcard

Armoury, Utica, NY

 

Municipal Swimming Pool, Culver Avenue Utica

Municipal Swimming Pool, Culver Avenue Utica, NY

Back then, in the late-1960s and early-’70s, years before UPC scanners were introduced, grocery store cashiers manually entered into the cash register each price that was written on or, in the form of a small sticker, affixed to each item. Of course, due to simple human error, every once in awhile a cashier, in the process of punching those only somewhat forgiving raised buttons on the register, would “ring up” the wrong price.

Out of this developed a sense that certain cashiers were more careful and accurate than others. Or at least this was my grandmother’s view of things. So at some point early on in her patronage of Chanatry’s, she evidently identified one of the cashiers as the most reliable, and would actually schedule her shopping trips to coincide with this woman’s shift (in those days, pretty much every cashier was a woman, and in Utica, usually middle-aged and white).

Terry. That was her name; the cashier whom my grandmother nearly swore by, and into whose “line” she would always go, regardless of how long that line was. But Terry was not only my grandmother’s preferred or favourite cashier, she was for me the only cashier in the world. There’s no doubt that my grandmother was largely responsible, at least initially, for the affection that I felt for Terry, but I also think that something else was at play, and that is what I want to write about here.

Besides the oil-cured black olives stored in big plastic bins at the deli counter in the back of the store—which I would beg my grandmother to buy for me—the other big attraction, the one thing that I eagerly anticipated more than anything, was to see Terry. After winding our way through the few narrow aisles of the store, finally we would be ready to approach her cashier’s station. “Her’s” in the sense that, if I remember correctly, she was always working at the same number/line.

Once we got up to the front of the line, both Terry and my grandmother would make a big deal out of the fact that I was there. My grandmother saying something like: “Look who I brought with me today!” and Terry responding with: “It’s my little boyfriend John.” One year, for I think Valentine’s Day or perhaps it was for Terry’s birthday, I wanted to give her a gift. It was either my mother or my grandmother who found a small box of embroidered handkerchiefs for me to present to Terry the next time we went to the store. That pretty much solidified our relationship, and many many years later, after I had moved away from home to attend university in New York City, my mom or grandmother would tell me that Terry would continue to ask about me and remind them of the handkerchiefs that I gave her.

The point that I want to make by telling this story, is that separate and apart from fulfilling the job description or being (my grandmother’s) personal ideal type of “grocery store cashier,” Terry, that actual person, was for me in those early years of my childhood, one of my first experiences of what in my current work I am theorizing as “the commerce of anonymity.”

“Commerce” obviously based upon the commercial context of the situation, but also in terms of a certain reciprocal exchange between us that stood to the side of the mercantile, and yet did not either rely upon life-biographical details nor was directed toward the goal of developing into some sort of personal friendship beyond the context of the store. It is in the absence of the latter two aspects that this everyday rapport between Terry and I can be understood as anonymous.

Anonymous in the sense of “pre-predicative,” to the precise extent that I did not relate to Terry based upon her job description (how strange that would have been for a 5-year old to do), nor based upon her being a personal ideal type of cashier, as she was for my grandmother. Instead, the picture that I have of her, and that I would argue was the picture that I had of her back then as a little boy, is/was not a portrait of identity, but of anonymity. Which is to say: neither the genre of the type, nor the generic genre of the general, but an anonymity that was named Terry, and that for me—precisely in its anonymity—was an early source and sense of the social.

 

 

Delectatio morosa

22 December 2015
Continental Philosophy, Mourning, Roland Barthes, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us
Leave a comment

Since the 12th-century, there has been in Christian moral theology a notion of taking pleasure in “expectantly waiting (Lat. moratur) in the desire for an object that remains absent because it is inaccessible or prohibited” (Dictionary of Untranslatables, 792). It is not a delay of pleasure, but rather of pleasure in the delay of satisfied desire, that is enjoyed by and in the imagination. In other words, it is the pleasure that one derives from desiring, and it is this pleasure-in-desiring that affirms that there is pleasure inherent in desire itself—and thus not only in desire’s fulfillment (a point that was clear to Lacan in his reading of the “paradox of fore-pleasures” in Freud).

It is important to underline that this “morose delectation” is not the postponement or infinite deferral of pleasure, nor is it entirely divorced from desire. Rather, it is the pleasure that is enjoyed in the very relation to desire. Neither the negation nor the positive presence of the object of desire, delectatio morosa is what we might describe as a neutral yet wholly pleasurable relation to desire.

I am interested in this Scholastic notion because it strikes me that it provides us with a way to think about the “neutral mourning” that I have theorized in my recent reading of Roland Barthes as its own form of pleasure. What I suggested in that chapter of The Decision Between Us dedicated to Barthes, is that in the midst and in the wake of mourning the recent death of his mother, Barthes sought what he had described as “a desire for the neutral,” and that this desire was, at the same time, a desire for a vita nova (“new life”—the eponymous name for the “novel” that he had begun to outline just before he died).

Drawing from his knowledge of Zen Buddhism, his fascination with Rousseau’s far niente (doing nothing), and his memory of a young Moroccan boy sitting on a low wall, I argued that Barthes imagined the neutral (and mourning) as a scene of just sitting, doing nothing. “To be idle, without master, and yes, perhaps even to be without guide (mother), and finally to be able to just sit without equivocation, without profit or debt, sin, prostration, or will-to-possess…something like the neutral sitting of a neutral mourning.”  Drawing further upon the etymology of the Latin word morosus, we can now understand this scene of neutral mourning as a scene of pleasure—of delectatio morosa. “In Italian…morosita means ‘delay’ (particularly in acquitting oneself of a debt or an obligation)…and where the English “moroseness” is rendered by malinconia [“melancholy”]…and in Spanish, where…moroso means ‘lazy'” (Untranslatables, 792).

When mourning is the act of the imagination enjoying its waiting in desire, it is neutral. It is in this way that neutral mourning is neither morbidly morose mourning nor melancholia, but instead is a desire for the neutral and its own form of neutral pleasure.

 

 

 

 

“Halls of Narcissistic Indulgence”

4 December 2015
Gender & Sexuality, Sex & Sexuality, Visual Culture
Leave a comment

locker-room

 

In a column today for Salon.com, “Who’s Really Getting Naked at the Gym,” Paula Young Lee responds to a recent New York Times article about the re-design of gyms, and how millennial men evidently want more privacy in the locker room.

Working within a 30-minute deadline, Paula contacted me to get my response to the Times article (which I had just read early that morning) and my observations and opinion on the situation, as I see it, in gym locker rooms today. Like all of Paula’s articles for Salon, this one is super-smart, bitingly funny and thus a great read.

Paula is the author of the best-selling, award-winning, Deer Hunting in Paris (2013). Here’s her take on the naked millennial male body:

The naked body is vulnerable because it’s stripped of culture. Abject and ashamed, it is reduced to the visible signs of health, musculature, fitness, thinness, and other markers that determine hierarchy inside a group. It is the condition of being stripped of status that is unbearable, prompting the young to reassert the armor of their street clothing as quickly as possible. Their insecurity isn’t lodged in their bodies but in their unstable social positions, which is why more powerful men– the “old guys” who, in theory, ought to be embarrassed by the grizzle and the hoar–don’t care two figs what you think of their butt cracks or belly buttons.

And as she quotes me as saying:

“Old guys have been parading around locker rooms for decades, and younger guys have been less prone to let it all hang out,” Ricco explains. “So this homosocial dynamic of nudity isn’t anything particularly new. But I would argue that there has never been more voyeurism and exhibitionism in the locker room than there is now.” Indeed, he affirms, “I would say that male bodies—and especially young muscular male bodies—are putting themselves on display more than ever.”

Lots more in the article, including where I talk about “halls of narcissistic indulgence.” Enjoy! And see you at the gym.

Lecture: “On the Commerce of Anonymity”

1 December 2015
Anonymity, Art, Drawing, Lectures & Events, Mourning, Portrait, Social Ethics, Visual Culture
Leave a comment

Here is the link to the audio file on YouTube of my Lecture, On the Commerce of Anonymity, that I presented on November 20, 2015, as part of the Emerging Research in Comparative Literature Series, at the University Toronto.

I want to thank Fan Wu and Jesscia Copley for the invitation to present some of my current work, and to all those in attendance that evening for their engaging questions and responses. I also want to thank Bao Nguyen for his editing of this audio recording. Finally, my thanks to Shaan Syed, whose work—the focus of this talk—continues to be such an important provocation and inspiration for my own.

For the final section of the paper that I did not have the time to present, see my earlier post on “anonymous and neutral mourning.”

sky-blue afterimage

1 December 2015
AIDS, Art, Film, Mourning, Poetry, Queer Theory, Visual Culture
Leave a comment

1460.original

A blue delphinium on World AIDS Day.

I have walked behind the sky.

For what are you seeking?

The fathomless blue of Bliss.

To be an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with reassurance.

Suffering from CMV, a virus that among other things causes a retinal infection, and without the sort of treatments developed in the past decade or so, can lead to blindness, Derek Jarman persisted in his work as an artist and in his film Blue (1993), created one of the most uncompromising visualizations of blindness and the limits of visual representation in the time of AIDS.

As an “empty sky-blue afterimage,” Blue exposes us to the empty afterimage that is the blue of the sky. Sky-blue is the nominative-adjective pairing that describes and names an emptiness and an afterimage. But only in the sense that one speaks of the city being empty, or has the undeniable sense that the blue of the sky is the ground that remains after every image.

In the middle of his book, Derek Jarman’s Garden, there is a poem, the first line of which locates the poem, the book, the garden and the gardener “under this blue sky.” Jarman’s stony Dungeness garden became a blind man’s world, as blind as “the stone in the air” in Paul Celan’s poem, “Flower.”

The stone.

The stone in the air, which I followed.

Your eye, as blind as the stone.

—

Flower—a blind man’s word.

To stare at the sky, as a gardener might do, is to be caught up in the visual enthrallment of staring at nothing, and to find this blindness of sorts to be irreparable—simply enough. Or, if not to stare at the sky, then to stare at what the sky makes possible: “I can look at one plant for an hour” as Jarman writes, “this brings me great peace. I stand motionless and stare.” This is also the stance and regard that Blue solicits from us and asks us to endure, to sustain.

Like the flowers that close Jarman’s garden book, and the delphinium that is placed at the end of Blue, perhaps these are the few words that remain after unsparing loss, the words that are more persistent than any final word could ever be. These would be the words dedicated to the friend who did not save my life, voiced by the body of this death. These are the words that continue “to go without saying,” by a perceiving that continues to go without seeing. Blind man’s words: Flower. Blue. Adieu.

[Adapted from my book, The Logic of the Lure, 2003]

Anonymous and Neutral Mourning

23 November 2015
Anonymity, Continental Philosophy, Mourning, Queer Theory, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us, Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Last week, as I was preparing a public lecture on “The Commerce of Anonymity,” I began to think more about the conceptual relations between anonymity and the neutral, and in particular the ways in which together they might bear upon acts of mourning.

At once drawing me back to ideas that I recently presented in chapter 5 of my book, The Decision Between Us, on Roland Barthes’ neutral mourning, and also closer to more recent events in which many of us find ourselves mourning the deaths of largely unknown or anonymous others, I returned not only to Barthes’ work, but also to Maurice Blanchot’s, in order to try to think about how a politics and ethics of the anonymous and neutral might disrupt or refuse some of the more dominant and prevailing responses to such violent atrocities and mass deaths.

In his book, The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot writes that,

The anonymous after the name is not the nameless anonymous. The anonymous does not consist in refusing the name in withdrawing from it. [Thus we might say that the anonymous is the withdrawal of the name through (as) the name of the nameless]. The anonymous puts the name in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let itself be passed through because the name does not name, but is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless (34-35).

The name is the passage through which the anonymous passes. And in its passing/withdrawing through the name, the anonymous leaves the place of the name empty, as if the anonymous were the place-name (if not place-holder) for the name.

What I want to suggest is that as the neutral name (neuter) of the name, the anonymous, when mourned, calls for an equally neutral mourning. For Barthes, there is indeed a form of mourning that is without codification and assimilation, and without any one proper place. Hence, it is not only without memorial or monument, it is, Barthes argues, therefore also socially untenable. Moving away from the will-to-possess toward the will-to-love, this neutral mourning represents the second type of “neutral” that Barthes is (more) interested in. It is differentiated from the first-degree neutral (i.e. the suspension of conflicts), while at the same time being distinct from the “desperate vitality” (a phrase that he derives from Pasolini), that he takes to be equivalent to a hatred of death. Thus while Barthes does not use the phrase, I think we find here what amounts to a conception of neutral mourning. Within the context of my current thinking and writing, I want to suggest that such neutral mourning is at the same time, anonymous mourning, specifically the mourning of those who go by anonymous names (in the departure of the departed, in passing).

For just as for Blanchot, “the anonymous puts the name in place” yet only to be the place of passage for the name and its emptying out of nomination, so with Barthes, the temporality of the neutral is nothing more than a moment or instant, specifically an opportune opening—what we might think of as the kairos to Blanchot’s anonymous topos.

This itinerancy of the anonymous and the neutral is what makes them both operate as lures, yet not in terms of a name, but as predicates or adjectives. Which is to say, as a certain kind of aesthetic provocation and attraction, and an opening of the ethical. For what Barthes more fully says about the kairos of the neutral is that “perhaps the Neutral is that: to accept the predicate as nothing more than a moment: a time” (Neutral, 61). The kairos (or opportune moment) of the neutral, is the non-nominalizable singularity (of space and of time) that is anonymity (as in the German neuter form Das Moment: cause, force, momentum).

Neutral mourning is the will-to-love that moment of departure that passes between the anonymous and the predicate—between any one name and passing quality. The neutral and the anonymous are thus not the names (or not only the names) but the adjectives or predicates of an originary movement, force and temporality of the momentums and moments of being together (i.e. the commerce of anonymity).

In light of recent events, this is what we must respond to, counter-sign (“not in our names”), and thus begin to take responsibility for—prior to and in excess of political and theological sovereignty. It is in this way that we might affirm, as Michael Naas has argued, “that there can be no sovereign last word [or name] to put an end to the violence or the endless discussion” (The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments, 167).

 

 

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

12 November 2015
Anonymity, Art, Continental Philosophy, Maurice Blanchot, Mourning, Queer Theory, Reviews, Roland Barthes, Social Ethics, The Decision Between Us
Leave a comment

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.

The Sharing Economy: Slow and Amicable Destruction

22 October 2015
Social Ethics
Leave a comment

I hope it is clear, but in case it isn’t, allow me to press the point that the current so-called “sharing economy” is exactly opposite to the political, ethical and aesthetic dispositions and social relations to which this blog site (and my work in general) is dedicated, in its focus on “a shared sense of things.” For the latter is precisely about something other than the attempt to completely monetize, economize, data-ize, rationalize, and capitalize, the spaces and experiences of rapport through which the social—as sense of the common—is created, shaped, shared and sustained between us. Such spaces and experiences of rapport are not part of any network. In fact, if a shared sense of things means anything, it does so to the extent that it seeks to affirm those things about life that remain un-networked—and perhaps even incapable of ever being “linked in.”

On the other hand, if you want to slowly and amicably destroy social relations, including, as Sherry Turkle has recently argued, that essential and vital experience of the social called “conversation,” then invent a social network and call it Facebook. Or, if you want to slowly and amicably destroy the sense of home, including an ethics of hospitality, then invent a rental economy and call it Airbnb. If your target is education, and you want to slowly and amicably destroy those moments of pedagogical insight that uniquely happen in the classroom and other spaces of intellectual discussion and debate, then invent massive online open courses and call them MOOCs. And if, within the economy of education, your target is that uppermost echelon known as academia, then invent an online network of entrepreneurial competition amongst PhDs and call it Academia.edu.

As we are well aware, this networking of everyone and everything (and every place) and hence every experience, has resulted in the amassing of an unprecedented amount of wealth by a very few people. For example, as Nicholas Lemann reports in his absolutely chilling New Yorker profile of Reid Hoffman (CEO of LinkedIn), Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012 when it only had 13 employees. As we are also aware, most of these new social media companies generate little-to-no actual revenue. Their value at this point lies in the extent of the networks that they create. To the extent that we create profiles on these sites, sign-in and post content, is the extent to which we feed this market and generate this value for them. But we must also realize that precisely to the extent that we are increasingly networked is the extent to which we are increasingly starved of  a shared sense of things. Slowly and amicably.

To do justice to things and each other

24 September 2015
Art, Collective Afterlife of Things, Continental Philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy, Queer Theory, Social Ethics, Things, Time and Temporality, Visual Culture
Leave a comment

I recently led a discussion amongst all of the Fellows at the Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto) of William Haver’s essay, “The Art of Dirty Old Men: Rembrandt, Giacometti, Genet,” published in Parallax, in a special issue that I edited on “unbecoming,” (vol. 11, no. 2, 2005). Here are my introductory remarks.

One of the principal assertions in the study of Visual Culture, including what WJT Mitchell, one of the founders of the field has elaborated as “picture theory,” entails the philosophical reclamation of “picture thinking”—the kind of thinking that Hegel had attempted to thoroughly denigrate. At the same time, such methods that for awhile comprised what was referred to as the “visual turn,” entails an embrace of Kant’s notion of the schema, precisely in order to think in non-symbolic and non-representational ways not only whatever the word “culture,” designates in “visual culture,”  but also “visuality,” of which “images” are just one of the many “things” in question. But as these names imply, “picture thinking” or “picture theory” are also ways to engage in thinking and the practice of thought, and not only through pictures (as though images were merely forms of mediation between the mind and the world), but more deeply and perhaps more philosophically, about thought “itself:” its source, its practice, its durations and its interruptions. In the wake of our reading of Deleuze, we can speak of “the image of thought,” in which that image might be a thing in addition to possibly being a conceptual personae or an affective perception or intuition. This is of serious consequence, since there is an inextricable relation between thought and things (to quote the title of Leo Bersani’s most recent book), and needless to say, it this relation that resides at the heart of our theme at the Jackman Humanities Institute this year, and our common theme of “things that matter.”

As we begin to parse the relation between thought and things, we might turn to Jean-Luc Nancy, who states—in one of his books on Hegel, in fact—that “thought sinks into things only to the extent that it sinks into itself—which is its own act of thought” (Restlessness, 15). Thus the ways in which thought sinks or penetrates into things, or simply acts in the vicinity of things, is the way in which thought thinks. This image of thought is the intuition of sense—its literality and visuality—in which the Kantian schema proves to be nothing other than an image. As Fredric Jameson has recently pointed out, this is what Einstein’s thought experiments consisted of, and, we might add, how quantum theory thinks about things. Namely: through non-representational yet still referential pictures, including diagrams. As Jameson explains, in all of these instances, it is the signifier that determines the signified, and the effect determines the cause. These are formulas that we are utterly familiar with, in our various engagements with post-structuralism and deconstruction.

This is also the inverse temporality that I am interested in, and that motivates the research project that I am pursuing here at the JHI on the collective afterlife of things. It is a temporality that does not only track the effects of the present on the past, but of the future on the present. This temporality is rendered literary and is visualized in the science fiction sub-genre of the time-travel narrative; and in fact it is in a recent review of a new theoretical study of this genre, where Jameson, in the very last sentence of his article, draws the stunning conclusion that “temporality is then nothing but a time-travel narrative.” (“In Hyperspace,” review of Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, by David Wittenberg, Fordham; London Review of Books, 10 September 2015).

This is where I think William Haver’s essay on “The Art of Dirty Old Men,” enters the discussion, and its provocation not about the history but about the historicity of thought, which is to say, thought’s sinking into things/into itself, which in turn is to speak of thought’s image. For whereas in these sci-fi  time-travel narratives there is, as Jameson explains, “the transcendental necessity of superspace in any narrative rendering of time,” Haver argues that due to the force of finitude, meaning “non-transcedence,” such narrative renderings of time are interrupted (including in the disciplinary discourses of “history” or “art history” and their own aspirations toward a transcendental perspective in the form of explanation, interpretation and understanding). Further, it is not so much that time-travel becomes impossible, but more precisely that it now must be thought as generating not temporality, but what Haver describes as “a-temporal disjunct simultaneity,” or more simply: the sense of finitude—finitude’s historicity. Yet to all of this we must ask: why is this case?

Haver’s answer is that it is because of the material impasse of existence, the fact that existence, or what he describes as the “identity and equality of sentient being” is abject in its non-transcendence. Meaning, the finitude of bodies, thoughts and things, in their incommensurable singularity and sheer exteriority: things that is, other than in terms of the instrumental, meaning or significance, the calculable or the numerable. In other words: the dirty old man whose look butted against Genet’s own non-contemplative and impersonal seeing. “Material impasse” describes the impasse or essential insufficiency of thought to its objects (in a word: materiality) and that which in its materiality is irreducible to a thing.

In “On the Solitude of Things,” a chapter of an unpublished book on Genet and the political, Haver at one point makes clear that “it is not…simply a matter of resigning or refusing one’s transcendence, of abandoning the distance of perspective. Rather it is a matter of sustaining the syncopations every historicization elides, of inhabiting the infinite yet absolutely proximate distance between evidence and experience, between interpretation and evidence, between transcendence and finitude” (Solitude, 10).

Genet speaks to this interruption of the time-travel narrative and thus of temporality, in a way that underlines how this experience—which Haver will go on to theorize as not only the conviction of the aesthetic, but also the experience of the ethical and the political—when he (Genet) writes (first block quote on page 29) about the sensuous pleasure of his hand in a boy’s hair, and how even though he (Genet) “shall die, nothing else will.”

 A little while ago I wrote that though I shall die, nothing else will. And I must make my meaning clear. Wonder at the sight of a cornflower, at a rock, at the touch of a rough hand –all the millions of emotions of which I’m made –they won’t disappear even though I shall. Other men will experience them, and they’ll still be there because of them. More and more I believe I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which show other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions flowing through all creation. The happiness my hand knows in a boy’s hair will be known by another hand, is already known. And although I shall die, this happiness will live on. ‘I’ may die, but what made that ‘I’ possible, what made possible the joy of being, will make the joy of being live on without me.

(Genet, The Prisoner of Love, NYRB, 2003 translated by Barbara Bray, 361)

This is not a transcendental time-travel narrative, in which one travels back to (or from) the future, but is instead what I wish to theorize as the collective afterlife of things, in which the abject non-transcendence of our finitude is what we share between us (the fact and condition of “social ontology”), and not in some future end of times, but here, now when we see a clothespin left behind on a line, or look at a Rembrandt, a Giacometti, or in our encounters with any number of other things. As Haver argues, the “thing” of painting or of seeing provokes an accidental intuition of the identity and equality of sentient being as that which is predicated upon nothing (no sufficient principle or reason) and thus is absolutely unjustifiable. To give ourselves over to this unjustifiable existence, would be to begin to do justice to things and each other.