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blsphmr.bsky.social
partisan of hate
@blsphmr.bsky.social
140 followers 110 following 1.7K posts
defiled, beaten, molested; tranquil without light.

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blsphmr.bsky.social
want might be another problem, but want’s based on memory, on fantasy, on the way things might have been. without these I couldn’t want him, but I could have created him anyway as something to avoid, as a barrier to desire and hence its fixation. (Gary Fisher)
black x gay x (black x gay) for some kinky sexual gratification built on and fueled by self-hatred. That’s not simple enough, I know, but which came first: the sex or the hatred? Indeed, I believe it was none of the above. It was FEAR. Fear of being hurt (because I am black) leads to an excitement which strangely mimics the excitement I feel when a man (particularly—[?] though I have precious little variation to contrast this with the general—especially—[?] (particularly a white man, although I know, have known, few black men [fewer brown (and no yellow)] (particularly a white man—though the word, if not the idea of particular comes out of an imagination—or lack of it!—or out of a strategy for a sexual future that includes mainly, if not only white men—because certainly little or nothing in my past would require me to imply distinction between or to qualify or to filter out the white man from the pool. […] […] little or nothing required that I distinguish him, qualify him or filter him from the pool, since pool here (for him and for me) implies no variety, no turbulence, no movement, not a ripple, no nothing: pool doesn’t imply at all, it doesn’t do anything except watch itself unwatched (?) … ahhh! then perhaps it does im-ply, that is M-ply like white narcissus—or like the tv serial that tests its own worth […] by dangling its own suspense week after week, foreshadow unresolved, unresolvable—like what narcissus remembered, suspended and constant, though always in ecstatic jeopardy of folding in on himself; the face in the pool threatens to imply. And if it threatens to imply something not itself then it risks breaking the silence, risks revealing me to me, know if not … no I don’t know what a white man sees below the surface of himself, if not me, ‘cause certainly I’ve been taught that I’m this way through and through, a dark dense star, horribly attractive, irresistible, a lodestone, the plunge at the very heart of … what now can only be perceived as ripples. Unresolved till unresolvable […] So, particularly (especially or primarily) a white man, when he holds and protects me from others like him, brings me an excitement which strangely and uniquely parallels that which he causes me when he threatens or frightens me. Of course, if my white man goes he takes his protection and his comfort. … Obviously, then: without him, why would I need him. Want might be another problem, but want’s based on memory, on fantasy, on the way things might have been. Without these I couldn’t want him, but I could have created him anyway as something to avoid, as a barrier to desire and hence its fixation.
December 1, 2025 at 3:49 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
esses momentos do haunted life onde marriott debate masoquismo, narciso/poça e olhar [gaze] deixaram bastante claro pra mim o pq benedicto realiza diálogo com esse livro pra pensar sua própria ética/erótica.
By taking the lid off, Wright allows others to see how they too are propelled by the implacably hostile but seductive forces of racism which increase in severity with each black demand for equality, with each black demand for the desirable and respectable goal of citizenship. These demands should not, however, be confused with a simple masochistic relation to superegoic law. For Wright, black masochism comes into being as the demand that blacks have a right to enjoy the obscene pleasures of the law that whiteness forbids them from having: the black masochist, far from being a nonviolent subject who gladly submits to the law, demands that the law punish him severely so that he too can then experience the satisfaction of desire that derives from the law’s forbidden intimacy to himself. What Wright is describing here—in dialogue with Wertham—is a temptation that takes the form of a violent seduction in which the black sacrifices himself. This is the meaning of his unconscious guilt—he needs to be punished so that he can proclaim himself a citizen with access to the forbidden pleasures of freedom. It is because he is deprived of being and forced to renounce desire that the black experiences the whiteness of the law in terms of what both allows and commands his rebellious servility. Rather than reflecting Narcissus, the pool sees itself reflected by him, but the transfer offers no secure, or stable, site of reflection: the reflector is always in need of reflection. Ask the pool what it sees and it will answer: a beauty mirrored, yes, but also a reflector in mourning; the pool realizes that behind the image which now fails to appear there is, in fact, nothing. The critical intervention of the story, part of its shock, is that Narcissus, and we as readers of the myth, have not considered the pool as anything other than a means to reflection. This realization derives from the nonidentity between the visible (the object seen) and the visual (the experience of seeing): both Narcissus and the pool are the mirror reflection of each other; they reflect the other’s act of looking in ways which suggest mimetic reflection but subvert it. It’s an experience that confounds pleasure and loss with the threat of annihilation. Endowed with a fleeting life that appears to be the double of both the subject reflected and the image received, a dissemblance seems to have slipped into the pool’s resemblance: “But was Narcissus beautiful?” asks the pool. For a moment it sees itself through Narcissus’s eyes, but then something else—a grief born out of loss, an unwillingness to abandon its former semblance, takes over. But what this illusion veils is the absence lurking behind the mirror—the lack in whose vision the gaze of the other can be seen. What is terrible about this, however, is that this is all one sees. […] the pool in Wilde’s “The Disciple” is mournful not because Narcissus has died, but because of the loss of Narcissus’s capacity to reflect back the pool’s own image, a loss valued more than the original which cast it; and even here desire is stricken not by death but by the deathliness of the reflected image whose reflection is so beautiful because so deadly. That is, what is mournable about the image is that it can only be secured against an always absent world, and hence its forming is always the experience of an endless dying, and that in some ways the image reveals what it necessarily lacks, because loss and absence is the quintessence of its being. Looking back, the pool mourns what is lost in the loss of this object—that is, the capacity of the object to reflect what gives it “life”; but what the pool also loses is the fiction, or at least the fantasy, that the beauty reflected was its and its alone. That is, what is lost is the fiction that the image permits a relationship (of identity and not alterity) of the pool to itself. Narcissus has died, but it is the loss of the reflected image—not the image itself, the image of the self when it was there in his eyes—that is dreadful (and deadly). It is this awareness—of the mirror, or image, as an insubstantial resemblance of life as lived; the mirror, or image as inseparable from its eidolon (from this body whose reflection or simulacrum it is)—that also recurs in endless stories of blacks pursued by persecutory doubles or imagoes. One soon becomes aware of how racism is experienced as an encounter with a mirror image in which one sees one’s double, one’s simulacrum, one’s ghostly semblance—a specter which you greet with frustration and impotence, because of its inseparable hold on one’s life. I would suggest that if Looking for Langston is compelling it is because what we see is a screen in mourning, a screen on which the looker finds himself having to offer atonement for, or denial of, or excuse for, what is unobtainable and lost, a game in which the desire to look—gay and interracial—finds itself mirrored by the seductive, ultimately vicious, lure of racist reflections.
December 1, 2025 at 11:57 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
semana.
November 29, 2025 at 12:27 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
síntese útil para mim no momento.
tweets de @jatella no x: “black porn studies and the more general turn to pleasure, en-joy-ment, and leisure have furnished the rather quixotic and circular idea that sex, on one hand, is a racial affair and that for that very reason it should be beholden to no further political obligation.” “that is, it assumes the race-sex nexus is so overladen w/ political meaning that the radical gesture could only be concession to the terms of engagement set forth (porno-troping) in some disidentificatory way, which frees itself *from* by freeing itself *to* the sexually abject.”
November 27, 2025 at 1:16 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
mas o ensaio dele termina apostando numa espécie de virtualidade tb (“he must wait”), algo que marriott critica em bersani/phillips no final de seu ensaio; se não ignoramos a socialidade a inumanidade da falta parece ser a única saída ética possível. não me convence, mas eh uma imagem bonita.
The “grown man with his legs high in the air” is “unable to refuse the call of suicidal ecstasy” because he represents the fact of castrated being that Bersani later refuses. Bersani seems to fear that this figure will remain alone, unable to forge “new relational modes,” and so he imbues him with a desire for sameness that would have him get of his back in search of his “inaccurate replication.” However, one could say that if this figure appears alone, it is not because he must remain so, but only because he must wait, for the jouissance he would repeat, that brought him there, takes place at the point of encounter between the other within and the otherness of the Other. It is this otherness, this lack, which is the inhuman basis of sameness and that will bring other failed subjects to him, already shattered, to be shattered again.
November 26, 2025 at 4:12 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
me pergunto se ele já leu esse texto pós-hl do marriott tho onde ele critica diretamente bersani e (self-)shattering. me pergunto oq ele faria com o texto.
primeira página do ensaio ‘no second chances’ de david s. marriott. Bersani’s attempt to exclude borders from the reimagining of a queer, impersonal intimacy is perhaps doomed by the very nature of futurity itself. The future has no borders; it can only be recognized through untoward happenings that we neither know nor understand until afterwards; in any case, the virtual is no better a defense of contingency than is a bug chaser’s desire to be possessed unto death. That the logic of virtuality renders some kind of discontinuity between narcissism and desire absolutely inescapable is in fact demonstrated by Bersani’s attempt to rescue some notion of “universal singularity.” But the very word he uses to name this singularity, the very name he gives to that from which he excludes the ego’s warlike frontier, is none other than the word that most commonly names violent confrontation: the word shattering. As if this were not ironic enough, exactly the same split can be found in Bersani’s other favorite word: virtual. How is it that a word that expresses most simply the redemption of malign narcissism should be also the one most impervious to shattering? How is it possible to discuss the question of impersonal intimacy when that question already subverts the very term of the virtual used to discuss it? Is it inevitable that the same split that divides the ego from itself the moment jouissance comes near it should divide the virtual from itself in the very same way? And can the virtual actually be shattered by that very split? If Bersani’s unstated question was, “What are we really doing when we love others?” it becomes clear that, whatever else we may be doing, we are at any rate being done in by more than our own words.
November 26, 2025 at 11:17 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
deve ser a parte que mais me incomoda no ensaio, onde ele deixa explícito sua demanda ética/erótica. eh difícil não reduzir esse texto ao anedótico por causa da forma como foi escrito; pra mim se as coisas só se dão dessa forma, necessariamente e nesses termos, eh pq o texto eh um set fechado.
Indeed, for the queer of color to indulge the call to self-annihilation might be for him to fulfill the master’s wish to see his obliteration; for him to stare the would-be agent of his death in the face would be for him to find himself reflected in the other’s executioner’s eyes and thus for him to discover himself as nothing but absence. “To recognize that I resemble the white racist other, that I resemble myself in him even in my own desire,” writes David Marriott, “would be tantamount to admitting the inadmissible: that I am not myself and that my most proper being is over there, in that reflecting double who enrages (shames, despoils) me.” To admit as much would be to run the risk of affirming the racist orders that would predestine some for death and, thus, “that past ruination may be repeated.” This risk, however, is also “the risk of the other to oneself, a threat that must be embraced and borne precisely because sexuality is the meaning of this risk”. To do the contrary, to look away, to eschew the risk that sexuality is would be to succumb, like Magnotta, and like the boyfriend twin, to fantasies of being predicated on the unending pursuit of an image we might call our own.
November 26, 2025 at 11:07 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
[…] neither Jew—of the two types—has all that much choice when it comes to enjoying freedom. pain or delusion, resistance or assimilation: the semblance of the choice expressed really concerns how one accepts anti-Semitism. “Sartre is not offering a choice in action,” Rosenberg adds.
What the “authentic” Jew has to achieve—“in pride and humiliation,” “in horror and hate”—is what may, at first, seem deeply inappropriate: to make the Anti-Semite into a witness of his refusal to be nothing more nor less than a Jew. “Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew,” Sartre writes, “[the authentic Jew] knows that he is one who stands apart, untouchable, scorned, proscribed—and it is as such that he asserts his being. His freedom lies in the affirmation of who he is; it is a kind of freedom in which he consents, says yes to the hate that defines him—and nothing more. There is something incongruous in this freedom, or at least its desire, that resembles an impulse to be the Other in me; this impulse is as nothing compared to what Sartre calls Jewish inauthenticity: the wish to be me in the Other. The inauthentic Jew is always “possessed by the consciousness of being a Jew”; it is his fervent wish that passers-by take him for “only one man among others, and like others,” yet he feels himself “compromised by the demeanor of the first passer-by, if that passer-by is a Jew”. For Sartre, such shame and trauma is the evidence of a betrayal; it is an attempt to run away from himself. But there is an ambiguity here: if Jewishness is, in essence, always mediated by the gaze of the Other, and the Jew can only see himself as others see him, why is the wish to see oneself as only one man among others condemned as masquerade, while the other wish, the wish to become a pariah, is seen as a result of knowledge and conscious choice? (This question anticipates Fanon’s reading of René Maran’s novel Un homme pareil aux autres.) Racial inauthenticity, as far as I am concerned, is no worse a choice if the question is how one lives in a state or culture driven by a wish for racial separation and/or compassionate pity for racial differences (am I alone in seeing the deeper antipathy in the latter?). Or, as Rosenberg puts it, why should we be “willing to lose ourselves as we were for the sake of the men we might become”? Further, why is the wish to stand apart, to be untouchable and scorned, distinguished as the work of commitment, while the wish to belong is, at best, an irreal and deluded desire for freedom? Why is chosen pain and suffering a sign of more personal responsibility rather than less? And finally, what, after all, does Sartre’s Hegelian motif of experience as negation have to say to the ethics of being Jewish? Part of Rosenberg’s dismay at Anti-Semite and Jew may be related to the fact that neither Jew—of the two types—has all that much choice when it comes to enjoying freedom. Pain or delusion, resistance or assimilation: the semblance of the choice expressed really concerns how one accepts anti-Semitism. “Sartre is not offering a choice in action,” Rosenberg adds. The Jew, he continues, can no more “choose” his situation than Oedipus: the gaze that defines who one is is always hidden; one approaches it as one approaches absence—it is an emptiness that is both unforeseeable and unknowable. The choice to be or not to be a Jew—the words recall Hamlet—only delivers one to the interminability of not knowing; the choice itself can never begin or end for it represents “the way of despair”.
November 25, 2025 at 5:59 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
(ele diz: “death is in fact mine to claim”) qnd até agr marriott, no livro, no que diz respeito ao homem negro (hétero), não fala sobre essa espécie de ‘auto-instituição afânica’ (e se há prazer aqui, como não ler isso como uma modalidade de self-shattering?) de maneira tão favorável…
There’s more. In Black Skin, White Masks the white woman is inspiriting: loving her is to realize an unavoidably painful experience of loss. She conveys the promise of mastery to the black man, but only insofar as he negates himself as black. It’s a self-institution achieved through an obliteration of being in which the self takes pleasure in the annihilation driving the self to expend itself. She is the fantasy supporting this aphanisis of the subject. The black man’s reward is a kind of morbid sovereignty. The servility he formerly resembled now transformed into mastery over his own symbolic death. This is her gift to him—a reemergent mastery achieved through her mediation and iconic recognition. She unveils the phantom buried deep within, whose loss the ego carries as its mask.
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
Authentic manhood: isn’t this an embarrassing expression?
November 24, 2025 at 12:45 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
sexton, 2010.
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic instance and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task. Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political and intellectual circles today: “Don’t play Oppression Olympics!” The Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge amounting to little more than a leftist version of “playing the race card.” To fuss with details of comparative (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a callous immorality. However, as in its conservative complement, one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture of competition, the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack. This point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black suffering mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to admit to significant differences of structural position born of discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies, actual or potential. We might, finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness inherent to the concept of “people of color” to the precise extent that it misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy—thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others. The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its framework—which does not mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthought—is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation—it is not the beginning and the end of the story—but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.
November 22, 2025 at 10:32 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
21. disturbing attachments: genet, modern pederasty, and queer history – kadji amin (22 de novembro)
November 22, 2025 at 1:49 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
ehh gatinhas.
[…] queer is not slick but rather the stickiest of terms. It has been made sticky not only by its career, its course within mostly U.S.-­centered academic conversations, but also by its historical emergence in precisely the U.S. scene of the 1990s that contemporary Queer Studies often seems so eager to forget and to move beyond. Forgetting this history is useful to the field, precisely because it permits us to refuse to define or to historicize queer, to say we are holding it open to indefinite becomings, all the while making implicit and explicit arguments that draw both their conviction and their appeal from queer’s affective charge, that is, from its disavowed historicity. My argument, to be clear, is not that Queer Studies needs to confine itself either to the historical time and place of queer or to the “object” of same-­sex sexuality. To the contrary, I am arguing that any redeployment of queer outside its narrow context of emergence that keeps queer’s affective histories intact—seeking, for instance, to preserve the convergence of same-­sex sexuality, political urgency, and radical transgression—is unwittingly reinscribing its 1990s U.S. origin story. For one reason why queer scholarship on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as on earlier historical periods, tends to be marginalized within the field as a whole is because it examines sites in which queer operates in markedly different ways from what has been canonized within Queer Studies. In their introduction to a 2016 special issue of GLQ on Queer Studies and area studies, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel incisively critique the tendency of queer scholarship to mine the global South for examples rather than epistemologies, failing to attend to how such key “concepts as loss, margin, normative, and nonnormative” emerge from a U.S. political context. Recent U.S. politics and histories inform not only the conceptual apparatus of Queer Studies, but also the very affective method by which new subjects, politics, practices, and concepts are claimed as queer in the first place. Finding a “match” between a historical or area studies example and one of queer’s affective connotations—such as shame, camp irony, or radical opposition—can offer a gateway from Sexuality Studies to Queer Studies scholarship, a wider audience, and a certain theoretical cachet, but at the cost of reinscribing queer’s U.S. affective histories at the center of work on new contexts.
November 22, 2025 at 1:44 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
dos diários de um auto-identificado ‘joão hashi’ (não vou divulgá-lo). a citação eh do próprio richard fung.
“How and to what extent is desire articulated in terms of race as opposed to body type or other attributes? To what extent is sexual attraction exclusive and/or changeable, and can it be consciously programmed? These questions are all politically loaded, as they parallel and impact the debates between essentialists and social constructionists on the nature of homosexuality itself. They are also emotionally charged, in that sexual choice involving race has been a basis for moral judgement.” Fung was asking some of the same questions about sex and race that I’d been pondering as a white male. However, the negative stigma of the RQ label had cowed me into silence. (As Fung’s partner, Tim McCaskell, once said: “Smart rice queens learn to keep their mouths shut.”)
November 22, 2025 at 12:10 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
semana.
November 22, 2025 at 12:50 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
amando muito o livro pra falar a vdd e a maneira como elu articula affect theory na análise me ajuda a situar e resituar os meus próprios antagonismos e juízos em relação a Certas Questões Contemporâneas.
Just as appreciating a vista as a landscape requires a prior aesthetic sensitization, sensing a landscape of revolt requires a habituated “affective mapping,” for instance, of how an emotion like anger distinguishes objects, subjects, and avenues for action within a subjective scene. What one identifies as the object of anger, as of love, is determined by the learned ability to sense one’s anger (or love) as putting into relation elements within a particular landscape. A shift in the scale of the landscape of one’s revolt therefore modifies both how this revolt feels and to what (violent, activist, coalitional, denunciatory) actions it can be imagined to lead. The transnational expansion of Genet’s landscape of queer revolt therefore modified his feelings about prison, transporting them from ambivalent love to indignant anger, while disaggregating imprisonment as the stable ground of his own position of queer revolt. […] the expanded transnational landscape within which Genet learned to affectively apprehend both prison and the figure of the European queer outlaw was not more true than the narrower one that had nurtured his prior feelings of love for prison, hatred for France, and queer revolt. It need not be a matter of grading landscapes of revolt, but of understanding what they enable as well as what enables them to change. Genet’s discovery of the complicity of the European queer outlaw as colonial stooge impelled him to affectively apprehend his revolt on a vaster scale, correspondingly shifting both the target of his anger and hatred and the site of his alliances.
November 21, 2025 at 1:42 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
sobre como mesmo o artista pervertido-mor acaba sendo deserotizado pelo entendimento, pelo estudo.
Reading the long, overburdened, and didactic manuscript of “The Language of the Wall,” one has the impression that Genet wanted to put everything that he discovered in his research—every moralizing discourse, every debate on penology and profitability, every one of the colony’s financial contributors, every negotiation with a head of state, every colonial war, and every historical event that occurred during Mettray’s existence—into his film. The result is a script that seems intent on proving the same points over and over again, “day after day,” as its subtitle indicates, and in excruciating detail. As a result, “Language” has little of the affective or narrative power of Genet’s other works. If it does not succeed in moving its readers, however, it does give the impression of being, in itself, the record of a passion. Every scene is infused with a newfound zeal for meticulous research, maniacal documentation, and indignant denunciation. Through this strange document, itself sheltered in an archive, one glimpses Genet, possessed by the archive, producing an unwieldy and uncinematic dramatization of that archive. The denunciatory passion of “Language” certainly was not the product of any tardy discovery that the penal colonies were inhumanitarian, a discourse against which Genet pitted his early novels. Rather, it was born of Genet’s discovery of how Mettray fit into a vast governmental-­colonial-­military-­economic network of administration and exploitation. In his research at the Mettray archives, Genet discovered, not the abuse of Mettray’s inmates, which he had trained himself to love, but their use, which he could not pardon. The denunciative and expository passion encoded in “Language” seems driven by a newfound animus—absent from Genet’s early works—against prison, the penal colonies, and the broader system of imperial, economic, and governmental interests in which they play a role. It registers a profound shift—from intimacy and love to outrage and denunciation—in Genet’s feelings regarding prison, carceral cultures, and, especially, his beloved penal colony of Mettray. If Genet had long regarded himself as a creature of prison—someone whose sexuality was formed in incarceration, whose most profound sympathies were with the imprisoned, and whose cherished sense of being an abject outlaw required prisons and police to set him apart as such—then the animus of “Language” is, significantly, directed against all that had so far constituted him as a queer outlaw. Obsessively tracing the complicities of former Mettray prisoners with the project of French colonial exploitation and rule results in a demystification of the position of the outlaw—Genet’s own position—whose perversity and amorality his early novels so often celebrate. What drives “Language” is thus the energy of a certain self-­denunciation resulting from Genet’s discovery of Mettray’s—and therefore his own—complicity in a series of nationalist, imperialist, and capitalist projects. This was more than an intellectual exercise in leaping from the micro to the macro level in order to understand the interrelations and contradictions between large-­scale economic, governmental, and geopolitical forces. It required Genet to embark on his own project of attachment genealogy in order to relentlessly scrutinize his own foundling myth. “Language” is the document of this project of genealogy: an inquiry that unsettles contemporary categories, such as that of the queer outlaw, that are naturalized as the very foundation of identity and action. This is a form of historical inquiry with affective repercussions—the loss of the position of exemplary social abjection and uniquely resistant criminality, an affective shift from love of prison to rage against it, and, most importantly, the ability to not only understand but also sense oneself within an empirically vast transnational landscape of revolt.
November 21, 2025 at 1:42 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
Whatever the reason, it is not the imago of the Negro that makes the colon into a fetishist, but her obedience to a phantasm; it is not the phantasm or imago that is traumatic, but the interpellation it later calls forth and that is unconsciously displaced as such. Whether that passion or obedience is moved by love, or compelled by fear, or moved (as is more common) by hatred and fear commingled, Fanon insists that the myth of the Negro necessarily extends to all aspects of life in the colony and that people submit to it whether they choose to or not. Accordingly, we should not immediately infer that Mlle B. is a racial fetishist out of sexual perversity rather than out of cultural obedience. If it is true that the phobic object forms itself out of the stereotype (with the ambiguity that that implies—the stereotype as the material from which desire is built, and the stereotype as the disfiguring of desire by culture), only to find the stereotype returning to haunt this fantasy of the black object at its root—then it is reasonable to suppose that the stereotype, the one that returns to the ego its own murderous-shameful attachment, is in fact standing for a fear of disintegration that is the originary trace of the other within us. And if the contingency and violence of the stereotype is already occupied by the returning violence of the ego, Fanon makes it clear that the ego’s neurosis just is where the stereotype returns—and the stereotype just is the real occupying the ego. The enemy attacking the ego from within and against which it seeks to indemnify itself using phobia is, then, the ego, for whom the contingency and violence of the other is intolerable precisely because it originates in its own fetishistic attachments. We must therefore distinguish the determination of the fetish-as-stereotype from the fantasies that sustain it, which derive pleasure from the mortification so consecrated, but which leave us undisturbed in our everyday relationships, allowing us to explore our relations to feelings of insecurity, but only in the absence of any crisis of self-relation or dissolution. The fetish is our way of enjoying—or consuming—our own acts of sublation. And this concealed unconcealment is both enjoyed and, in the end, necessarily repeated. We are fetishists not in our relation to forms of appearance, but in relation to what is always missing from appearance, which we metaphorically assume to be masked. We act as if this absence is inscribed on the surface of appearance but its meaning lies elsewhere. Racial fetishism, in other words, points to an illusion at work in social reality itself: people are racial fetishists in how they act, and not necessarily in how they think. If the fetish is a defense against uncertainty, a defense crucial to the belief that it is possible to draw a veil over the (misrecognized) implications of castration, this is because psychically it represents a cultural disciplining of (egoic) enjoyment through (racial) splitting and displacement. Politically, fetishism leaves us unfree within our representations, but frees us from the presuppositions and outcomes (the compensations and the punishments) of mutual exposure to ourselves and others.
November 20, 2025 at 10:52 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
the promise of a new relational mode can only be fulfilled by the impersonal narcissist if the sameness he seeks is based on something other than categories of human difference. otherwise, his failure will remain a failure like any other.
Indeed, even with sameness thus grounded in a virtual being that lover and boy both are and not yet, it is hard to imagine how it can be apart from the exclusionary logic of difference that Bersani works to avoid. The problem becomes apparent when Bersani reverts to the more familiar language of psychoanalysis. In Freudian terms, he writes, “we might say that the boy sees and loves his ideal ego in his lover—except that this ego is not exactly something that he has lost and that he projects onto someone else, the over-valued object of love. On the contrary: it is what the lover loves in him. In a sense, the lover recognizes his ideal ego in the boy; desiring the boy is a way of infusing the boy with an ideal self that is both the boy’s and the lover’s.” If the problem with the ideal ego is that it is imposed from without, as Bersani makes clear in “Erotic Assumptions,” he attempts to recover it here by, in effect, creating a closed loop between the boy and the lover, in which neither has lost or imposed the ideal ego because it was always there as virtual being. To see the lovers in this manner, however, requires either that they be severed from sociality, insulated from that which would make the ideal ego they share into something other than what they already are, or, dangerously, it would mean expanding the loop they are in and positing an ideal ego, a virtual being, that members of a group “already share” but that is “not reflected in everyone else.” Is the impersonal narcissist even a failed subject then? In the opening passage, Bersani suggests that his failure is a function of his need to have his “identity cloned, or inaccurately replicated.” But isn’t this what all subjects need, apart perhaps from the self-shattering subject in its most mythologized form? The promise of a new relational mode can only be fulfilled by the impersonal narcissist if the sameness he seeks is based on something other than categories of human difference. Otherwise, his failure will remain a failure like any other. The homo-ness of impersonal narcissism thus might be seen to take two other paths: one headed toward a notion of universal being, another toward a model of correspondence that requires further abstraction into form. In both cases, however, categories of human difference still prove hard to elude. Kaja Silverman, responding to Bersani’s turn to form, lauds the possibilities of thinking about the ego in formal terms: “It’s deanthropomorphizing,” she writes. “It permits us to begin conceptualizing relationality outside the usual human categories, which have become very reduced in recent years through the insistence on race, class, gender, etc. It helps us to understand that what we are at the level of the ego may be a much more complex issue than we are accustomed to imagining, having to do not only with mothers, fathers, lovers, etc., but also with line, shape, composition, color”. The last word should already give us pause, for it points to the difficulty of trying to separate “human category” from formal property. In a sense, this is what is largely unconsidered in the work on impersonality. When Bersani describes the boy in Socratic love as “seeing himself in the lover as in a mirror,” for instance, he does not consider what it would mean if color interrupted the scene.
November 20, 2025 at 8:47 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
ele eh mt foda slk.
This is not to suggest, as “colorblind” discourses might, that the terms of socio-symbolic difference can simply be done away with. The subject remains, after all, a subject of the symbolic; it depends on the signifier that structures reality. The psychoanalytic account of the subject, however, gives us a means to apprehend the nature of this dependence and, importantly, to regain the critical distance from logics of identity and difference that has been ceded in the name of “repair.” It reminds us, for starters, that difference itself is produced and secured paranoically, as a result of the subject’s attempt to cover over its lack, to disavow castration by turning the wholeness that was “never had” into “something lost,” something to be obtained through the recovery of a missing piece. This relation to the lacking object, a relation of desire, is an ordinary part of subjectivity. It is a relation, however, that is both limited and fraught, for it operates under a fantasy of wholeness that only makes available a mode of enjoyment doomed to disappointment. […] the subject’s lack of being is transformed into a “something that is missing” that is “always in the horizon”. In this way, it rearticulates the displacement of negativity that being requires and that allows difference to function as an organizing principle in the first place. As we have seen, difference can only appear through the elimination of the “difference within the very category of difference”. This is demonstrated by Edelman’s account of how the writing of the “homosexual” secures sexual difference, and by my suggestion that homosexuality’s reinvention might be seen as the product of its disarticulation from the ontological negativity it once represented. […] […] For while Eng’s analysis of white male heterosexual anxiety seems to imply the need for an ethics grounded in a refusal to disavow castration, or an affirmation of the subject as constitutively lacking, Racial Castration cannot actually articulate or adopt such an ethics, since the work as a whole is itself an objection to having been castrated, a protest against being rendered lacking by a white gaze that refuses “to see at the site of the Asian male body a penis that is there to see”. This line, repeated in various ways throughout Racial Castration, gives voice to the fantasy of wholeness and the castration anxiety woven into the very complaint that Eng’s text formalizes. The problem, it seems, is that while Eng’s critique of white male heterosexuality acknowledges castration as a universal condition, that is, “as the metaphoric re-inscription and containment of a loss which happens much earlier, at the point of linguistic entry”, this condition is unaccounted for in the case of the Asian male subject. No longer designating a lack that no symbol can counter, castration instead becomes, when thought from the vantage of the racial subject, a form of privation “gratuitously imposed from without,” an effect of racial/colonial injustice, a wrong to be corrected. In other words, castration in Racial Castration comes to name both ontological negativity and social negation, but the slippage from one to the other goes unremarked, as the questions raised by the former vanish once concern is centered on the racialized subject’s experience of lack. […] […] the view of lack as a condition to be rectified by disavowing negativity continues to shape queer of color critique. […] Like Eng, Nguyen does not have an account of an originary negativity that is operative within the Asian male subject. As such, he is not inclined to see that the conversion of bottomhood into a “new mode of social recognition” is not a purely corrective gesture, that saying no to being shattered means reproducing the castration anxiety that fuels the racial castration of Asian men. Here we might note that Nguyen’s fear that self-shattering would “amplify” the violence of racial castration proceeds from and repeats the conflation of ontological negativity with social negation. Racial castration, however, does not produce the lack of being to which ontological negativity refers. Rather, it is, or should be seen as, a cut that leads to a lack of signifier, a violence that deprives the subject in question of a means to veil the lack that is common to all. Read this way, one might argue more broadly that it is not self-shattering that amplifies social negation, but social negation that amplifies castration anxiety, compelling those who find themselves “deprivileged” to renounce the lack that is already within, to seek refuge in the signifier, and to find sustenance and enjoyment in the attempt to reclaim a wholeness that never was.
November 20, 2025 at 7:56 AM
blsphmr.bsky.social
pior que elu matou muito aqui.
Although sophisticated queer theory has publicly cast off “naive” 1970s accounts of the revolutionary effects of sexual liberation and the efficacy of sex as a method of political coalition across difference, its field habitus remains infused with the intoxicating sexual utopianism of the 1970s, which envisions queer erotics as unlocking revolutionary social, political, and temporal possibilities or, on the antisocial side, as dissolving otherwise intractable disciplinary social identities. In defining erotohistoriography as “a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development,” Freeman exemplifies the ways in which a liberationist affective history animates queer theoretical practice. In noting this, my purpose is less to critique Freeman’s generative work than to acknowledge the ways in which, to a queer theorist, nothing could be more natural than to expect to find a gravitational pull between queer erotics, progressive politics, and counternormative temporality. This “naturalness,” I am arguing, is itself the product of an incompletely recognized liberationist inheritance. Encoded less in its theoretical apparatus than in the expectations and methods by which the affectively dense term queer bundles together the politically radical, the futural, and the nonnormative, this liberationist inheritance accounts for the fact that work on queer time has tended to be attuned to capricious mobility and alternative futures, in contrast to scholarship on racialized or postcolonial time, which has sought to tend to the still open, still damaging wounds of the historical past. Focusing on the ways in which queer time keeps hurtling back to a shameful past it can neither supersede nor shake off puts work on queer temporality into conversation with scholarship on the dilemma of postcolonial and racialized time: that of the stuck past, of historical change that fails to be completely revolutionary, and of identities and communities built out of the emotional detritus of history. This approach is also the only way to contend with those painful, politically ambivalent, and disturbing aspects of our affective histories that continue to have effects, even when ignored or disavowed, and that therefore signal unfinished intellectual and activist labor for the present. Such a project is contingent on Queer Studies confronting its liberationist inheritance in order to, at long last, deidealize the queer erotic.
November 19, 2025 at 8:13 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
nossa mas ele era mt nojento qq isso bicha.
In his posthumously published 1986 memoir of his political activism, Prisoner of Love (Un captif amoureux), it is often the case that when Genet calls the Panthers to memory, a sexualized imagery comes to mind. At one point, he pauses in the midst of a sexual analogy in order to explain why it is that the Panthers necessarily evoke phallic images of male sexuality: “At the beginning of 1970 the Party still had both the suppleness and the rigidity of a male sex organ: and it preferred erections to elections. If sexual images keep cropping up it’s because they’re unavoidable, and because the sexual or erectile significance of the Party is self-­evident. Not so much because it was made up of young men, great screwers who would just as soon shoot their load with their women in the daytime as at night, but rather because their ideas, even if they seemed rather basic, were so many sprightly rapes committed against a very old and dim but tenacious Victorian morality.”
November 19, 2025 at 7:20 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
the white sexual fantasy of being shattered, by passive anal sex with nonwhite men, into prehistoric time, relies on a slippage from the specific histories of black and/or arab racialization to the fantasy of race as a figure for the prehistoric inhuman itself.
M.’s account is of crucial interest in its underlining of the temporal aspect of self-­shattering. His narrative delineates a mode of sexual ecstasy ignited by the explosive incompatibility of the temporalities inhabited by the white man and racialized other. The complimentary play of echoes between the “Arab beast” and the “beast” released within the white man indicate that jouissance is fantasized simultaneously as the release of the (racialized) inhuman within the (white) human and as a devolution to an archaic stage in species evolution. In other words, M. is fantasizing a shattering-­into-­archaic-­beastliness impelled by the encounter of civilized white time with the prehistoric time of the racialized other. Here, the specificities of the history of Arab racialization are lost in the fantasy of the prehistoric—itself a historical product of colonial racial “science”—which might well be evoked, with equivalent efficacy, by an interchangeable series of nonwhite ethnicities. The use of the trope of prehistoric beastliness to render distinct nonwhite ethnicities ahistorically equivalent is apparent also in the illustrations that accompany “The Arabs and Us.” These illustrations reprise the popular French comic starring the white French boy, Bibi Fricotin, and, beginning in 1947, his African friend, Razibus, and depict them having oral and anal sex. Razibus was drawn, at the time, using extremely simianized racial iconography, such that he appears more monkey than boy. When contextualized in relation to the text, the result is that the African as monkey signifies the Arab, and that this conjoined figure of simianized racialization is the object of Arabophilic desire. Simianization is key here, since it is a figural rendition of the European scientific racist fantasy that nonwhite peoples were further down the evolutionary scale, and closer to man’s evolutionary past as ape, than white men. The white sexual fantasy of being shattered, by passive anal sex with nonwhite men, into prehistoric time, relies on a slippage from the specific histories of black and/or Arab racialization to the fantasy of race as a figure for the prehistoric inhuman itself.
November 19, 2025 at 6:27 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
aliás… eu não fazia ideia de que a crítica do tim dean ao dwight mcbride era tão redutiva e *fraca* assim pqp eu teria vergonha.
Dean’s investment in depathologizing fetishism leads him to be wary of queer critiques of racial fetishism which, he warns, “tacitly repathologize fetishism” in ways that he finds troubling. Taking on Dwight McBride’s protest, in “The Gay Marketplace of Desire,” against the dehumanization of a racial fetishism that would reduce him to the stereotypical bearer of a big black cock, Dean, striking the note of a nonjudgmental libertarianism of desire that is also sounded in French gay liberation texts, warns against the “Orwellian” connotations of any effort to submit fantasy to political dictates, even antiracist ones. Dean takes issue with both McBride’s humanism and his alleged moralism. He argues that all desire “impersonalizes” its objects by fragmenting them into infraindividual partial objects: “Under the sway of the unconscious, erotic desire fragments and partializes those totalized forms that consciously we recognize as persons. It is not whole persons whom we find sexually arousing but partial objects; we find an individual to be arousing by discerning in him or her the lineaments of a partial object.” Far from distressing queers, this should be cause for celebration, since desire’s depersonalization and partialization of its object dissolves precisely those static, hierarchical identities that Dean, in harmony with much queer psychoanalytic criticism, takes to be the disciplinary basis of social oppression. Desire, for Dean, is necessarily fetishistic, and fetishism fragments the static identities of heteronormativity and racism alike. What McBride should be protesting, Dean implies, is not racial fetishism, but racial stereotyping: “Stereotypes concern identity, not desire; by contrast, fetishism is a form of desire largely independent of identity.” Dean’s implication is that, as a form of desire that functions independently of identity, fetishism cannot be racist, since racism works by reifying identity in the stereotype. He offers a handy method of distinguishing the two operations: “Stereotyping works synecdochically by taking the part for the whole (African American male sexuality is reduced to the big black dick), whereas fetishism works with parts that, strictly speaking, do not form part of a larger whole.” Fetishism is saved, as it involves partial objects whose referent is not ever a “whole,” and stereotyping alone must be to fault for racist modes of desire. But “racist modes of desire” are precisely what cannot be accounted for here. By insisting that desire and identity are mutually exclusive and that “stereotypes concern identity, not desire,” Dean leads us to counterfactually conclude that neither identities nor stereotypes, including racial stereotypes, are capable of inciting desire. Hence, according to his own logic, there can be no racist desire—no desire that is animated by racist stereotypes rather than innocently and, one must suppose, arbitrarily racialized part-­objects.
November 19, 2025 at 6:13 PM
blsphmr.bsky.social
what m. desires is neither the part for itself nor the part for
a whole but rather a scripted fantasy scenario whose positions are enabled by the mutual interanimation of a series of racist historical fragments.
Presenting himself as the most articulate theorist of the group, M. analyzes sex with Arabs as the ideal means of attaining the dissolution of his ego that he understands to be the apex of sexual enjoyment. The devil is in the details here, and M. makes it clear that in order to achieve the desired annihilation of his personhood, he pursues exclusively passive sex with an interchangeable series of Arab men who do not, or who are not permitted to, pursue any relation beyond the anonymous fuck. What he seeks, in other words, is precisely the highly eroticized figure of the aggressively phallocratic Arab-­Islamic bugger that French gay men at the time were teaching one another to anticipate and to desire as well as to criticize and to fear. For M., the pleasure of such an encounter is that “you feel negated, killed, by this Arab who butt-­fucks you [qui t’encule]. And it’s awesome.” At this point, G. and P. have already articulated various components, which they sometimes problematize, of their desire for passive anal sex with Arabs, such as an indiscriminate search for “erect cocks,” “the desire to feel like a hole,” a means of “consuming virility,” and a mode of desire in which “you think of sticking them in your ass, and that’s all. And it stops there.” M. goes on to analyze the workings of racial fantasy that sustain such fetishistic desires in a locution that shifts from “me,” detailing his own fantasy, to “he,” contrasting it with the Arab’s lack of any fantasy life, to “we,” joining his subjectivity to that of the other white French men in the group: “Me, I get off [jouis] intellectually on the idea of abandoning myself to him. He fucks, but he doesn’t have that intellectual distance. We remain intellectuals playing at abandoning ourselves to savagery, to the beast.” Crucial to the pleasure of white self-­annihilation is a highly scripted fantasy scenario, in which the white man, who fancies himself as an intellectual with a highly developed ego and psychic life, abandons himself to “the Arab beast,” himself brutely unthinking and devoid of any fantasy life, who proceeds to execute the white man and annihilate his highly developed subjectivity with his giant cock, while releasing “the beast that sleeps within” — the “beast” of subjectivity-­destroying jouissance inside of the “civilized” white man. What M. desires is neither the part for itself — Arab cock —nor the part for a whole—Arab cock for the tyrannical Arab bugger—but rather a scripted fantasy scenario whose positions are enabled by the mutual interanimation of a series of racist historical fragments—the bestial and uncivilized native, colonialist hierarchies of intelligence and psychic complexity, despotic Orientalist Arab hypervirility, anticolonial Arab masculine potency, the sexual threat of a postcolonial “Arab invasion,” gay liberationist Arab phallocracy, and so on… The erotic/phobic narrative fragments thus assembled are historically and logically incoherent—the uncivilized native beast occupies an entirely different position within European-­authored evolutionary, civilizational, and historical hierarchies of being than the Oriental despot. This assemblage is called up, not because it makes sense, obeys historical progression, or corresponds to intellectual and political beliefs, but because it is efficacious—it impels the ecstatic self-­annihilation that, for M. and psychoanalytic queer theory, constitutes the apex of sexual intensity. Within this scenario, the erotic/phobic assemblage—what Dean would assimilate to the stereotype—at once incites desire and achieves the depersonalizing shattering of self, ego, and identity more efficaciously, one is led to believe, than would sex with mere (white) human beings. Fetish versus stereotype, stereotype versus desire, racist dehumanization versus universal depersonalization … the boundaries simply will not hold.
November 19, 2025 at 6:07 PM