differences 37.2 is out now! — featuring essays from D. N. Rodowick, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Jonathan Basile, Mylène Yannick Gamache, Sarah Cavar, Willa Smart, and Adam J. Frank. Read it here: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
differences
@differences.bsky.social
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a journal of feminist cultural studies | differencesjournal.org
![An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Generally, antinarrative theorists define queerness as a force of negativity that ruptures the illusory structures of identity (see Edelman, No and Bad). Narrative perpetuates these structures by promising a satisfying closure that will never arrive. Butler similarly challenges the desire for 'narrative closure for our lives' (Giving 64). They are especially critical of those who idealize a coherent, definitive life story as key to a healthy psyche. In fact, they go so far as to suggest that 'something we might tentatively call the truth of the person [ . . . ] might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic
articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form.' While
they embrace the enigmas that exceed narration, Butler nonetheless refuses 'to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence' as a queer ideal. Rather than opposing incoherence to identity, Butler defines incoherence as the existential price of our relational being. In their words, '[O]ur ‘incoherence’ establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.' We simply cannot do without incoherence. But too much incoherence can lead to painful or even unlivable states of fracture, and as Butler cautions, '[T]he suffering that belongs to conditions of dissociation should not be underestimated' (52). We need some measure of coherence to survive.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6phcm4yufghwwc67rd7ecymq/bafkreih7swt6qevxfrhlgkdansbyi5elbzqhmyllqdt5ijszefep7noxfm)
![An excerpt from the linked article, which reads, in part: "If psychoanalysis has managed to survive fads, the twists and turns of history, and even the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic movement itself, it is due to three main reasons: first, the structural impossibility of establishing any kind of alliance with the mechanisms of power, whatever they may be; second, its unavoidable will to protect the truth as a singular event, never extrapolated, in no case extensible to the universal, and above all separate from any moral pretension; and third, its determined orientation toward the Real, the Real of the speaking being’s suffering. [...] Because a therapy that makes disease the prodromal sign of the human condition, a therapy that seeks not to cure the human being of his essence but rather to confront him with his incurability, a therapy that neither promises nor consoles, is at the very least a particular therapy."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6phcm4yufghwwc67rd7ecymq/bafkreigzf7l2d7nr4qztst7pse4iobgle2onjvmwbelyc6dnk3roz4f34u)
![An excerpt from the linked article, which reads, in part: "Returning to Spillers, we can think of this hieroglyph as a historical-traumatic force: not necessarily an object a, but a collective, unrepresentable marking resembling the psychoanalytic object in its transfer between black generations. It constitutes a singularity that, indeed, might be untreatable but that shares similarity across deep space and time. Spillers considers such resemblance (or 'poaching,' in her words) a psychoanalytics, a project that 'unhook[s] the psychoanalytic from its curative framework and [tries] to recover it in a free-floating realm of self-didact possibility that might decentralize and disperse the knowing one.' This poaching experiment is distinct from psychoanalysis proper in that the hieroglyph is not completely consigned to the unconscious but occupies an interstice between conscious/unconscious, requiring a protocol that psychoanalysis might not recognize as legitimate or efficacious."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6phcm4yufghwwc67rd7ecymq/bafkreian6jbo2twouw3ew6hrdv4g26acaspnblnx5iaamcwpt5ukx7dk5i)
![An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Thinking with Saidiya Hartman’s insight that the 'demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, [which] entails much more than the end of property in slaves,' I contend that mobilizations of abolition in the main operate through a constitutive disavowal of slavery’s ongoingness (even, and perhaps most especially, as they avow the prison as historically linked to the trans-Atlantic slave trade). More specifically, I argue that a brutal empiricism, constituted in abolitionism’s originary iterations, authorizes contemporary abolitionist politics. I do so by interrogating how the insistence on and focalization of the prison rather than slavery symptomatically reveals political-libidinal investments in the reproduction of antiblackness. In short, I argue that to assert the prison as the object of abolition is to both presume and reify an antiblack historiography..."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6phcm4yufghwwc67rd7ecymq/bafkreihulwkz3c3oerdaswpsfrsnlskj3vtveeszbbroxaydbvi7vfzinq)
