BODIES OUT OF RULETransversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film

UNIWERSYTET PEDAGOGICZNYIM. KOMISJI EDUKACJI NARODOWEJ

W KRAKOWIEPRACE MONOGRAFICZNE NR 686

Tomasz Sikora

BODIES OUT OF RULETransversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film

Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego • Kraków 2014

Reviewersdr hab. Dominika Ferensdr hab. Paweł Jędrzejko

© Copyright by Tomasz Sikora & Wydawnictwo Naukowe UP, Kraków 2014

Cover design Przemysław Branas

ISSN 0239–6025ISBN 978–83–7271–859–8

Wydawnictwo Naukowe UP 30–084 Kraków, ul. Podchorążych 2tel./fax 12 662–63–83, tel. 12 662–67–56e-mail: wydawnictwo@up.krakow.pl

Zapraszamy na stronę internetową:http://www.wydawnictwoup.pl

Printed by Zespół Poligraficzny UP, 8/14

Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction 9

1. Multiculturalism and Its Monsters 272. Fleshed Out: On Meat and Excess 393. Performing the (Non)Human 504. Bodies, Boundaries, and the Death Drive 625. Desiring Bodies and the Vicissitudes of Transgression 796. The Pornography of Bare Life 957. Queer Epidemics 116

Coda 140References 143Summary in Polish 155Index of Names 158

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Acknowledgments

A single author’s name on the cover of a book never does justice to all the humans and nonhumans who have, in various ways, contributed to its mak-ing. My special thanks go to Dominika Ferens and Paweł Jędrzejko, whose invaluable comments helped make this book more readable. Many of the ideas that found their way into the book emerged through intellectual inter-actions with numerous people. At the risk of leaving some of them out, let me name my friends and collaborators from the InterAlia journal (www.in-teralia.org.pl): Tomasz Basiuk, Dominika Ferens, Tomasz Kaliściak, Marze-na Lizurej, and Rafał Majka. No less important for the development of my arguments was the inspiration I have been drawing from the work of Polish Canadianists, including (but not limited to) Anna Branach-Kallas, Mirosława Buchholtz, Krzysztof Jarosz, Michał Krzykawski, Agnieszka Rzepa, Eugenia Sojka, and Zuzanna Szatanik. This list should be complemented with a num-ber of Canadian scholars as well, particularly Smaro Kamboureli and Eva C. Karpinski, whom I  had the pleasure of meeting in Kraków in 2010. My more recent cooperation on several projects with Michael O’Rourke and Stanimir Panayotov must also be acknowledged as an important source of intellectual stimulation.

Over the past several years Stephen Tapscott’s and Ruth DyckFehderau’s generosity has made it possible for me to do research in the United States and Canada. I am also indebted to the JFK Institute at Freie Universität in Berlin for the research grant I received in 2007. The Pedagogical University of Cracow has been supporting my research endeavours financially and oth-erwise ever since it became my academic home. I am also grateful to my col-

leagues at the Institute of Modern Languages for creating such a friendly and supportive work atmosphere on a daily basis.

I would like to thank young artist Przemysław Branas for permission to use his work on the book’s cover.

Without the continual emotional support from my friends – Zuza, Nika, Ania, Bartek, Przemek – I would not have been able to do much, if anything at all. I must mention my canine companions as well: Lola (2000–2011), Bibi, and Morfi, the fountains of unflinching nonhuman affection; many of the thoughts included in this book have been conceived during our daily walks.

My deepest gratitude goes to my partner Rafał, whose inexhaustible pos-itivity keeps my persistent and multiple negativities in manageable propor-tions.

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Introduction

This book has been slow to develop.1 Rather than grow organically into a functional whole, shaped into a coherent being by a transcendental thought, it tended to sprawl rhizomatically in ever new directions. Rather than repre-sent a thematically demarcated territory, it has constantly confused mimesis with performance, subject with method, exegesis with transtextual flows and exchanges. Within the organicist, corporeal metaphorics that are often used to talk about books (one talks, for example, of a text’s “main body,” headings, footnotes, etc.), this book might be described as, if not exactly a “body with-out organs,” then at least, in keeping with its title, a “body out of rule.”

1 Approximately half of the book’s content is based on my earlier publications, which have been modified so as to better fit the book’s overall framework. These articles include: “Multiculturalism and Its Dungeons: The Canadian Gothic and the Politics of Difference” in: De la fondation de Québec au Canada d’aujourd’hui (1608–2008): Rétrospectives, par-cours et défis/From the foundation of Québec City to Present-Day Canada (1608–2008): Retrospections, Paths of Change, Challenges (ed. Krzysztof Jarosz, Zuzanna Szatanik, and Joanna Warmuzińska-Rogóż. Katowice: PARA, 2009, pp. 209–219); “‘Meat on Display’: (In)humanity and Corporeality in Barbara Gowdy’s Gothic Stories” in: Canadian Ghosts Hopes and Values (ed. Maciej Abramowicz and Joanna Durczak. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2008, pp. 171–181); “Performing the (Non)Human: A Tentatively Posthuman Reading of Dionne Brand’s Short Story ‘Blossom’” in: TransCanadiana, Polish Journal of Canadian Studies (3:2010, pp. 113–123); “‘Murderous Pleasures’: The (Female) Gothic and the Death Drive in Selected Short Stories by Margaret Atwood, Isabel Huggan and Alice Munro” in: Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and “Race” (ed. P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen, London: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 203–216); and “Indocile Bodies: Bodily Transgressions in Selected Canadian Movies” in: Romanica Silesiana (5:2010, pp. 281–293). In chapter 6 I have used some material from “Liaisons Dangereuses: Pornography, Modernity, Power” in: NMEDIAC, Journal of New Media and Culture (7:2010, http://www.ibiblio.org/nmediac/fall2010/liaisons.html).

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To be sure, reflection on bodies (or, better, flesh), together with the forc-es that animate them and the rules that constrain them, is a persistent motif in this book. Subjected to organicist rules whose aim is to make them function-al and well-regulated (or healthy) wholes, corporealities2 prove unruly and precarious, stubbornly resistant to the rule of the Rule. Bodies remain deep-ly unreliable: susceptible to diseases, deformations, drives, desires, and ulti-mately death; on a more positive side, they are also almost infinitely capable of registering ever new sensations and pleasures, and of interacting with the world (and other bodies) in unexpected, unprecedented ways. Bodies fail us and/because they exceed us; much as they attempt to immunize and protect (or fortify) themselves, they are always oriented towards other bodies, other experiences, other states of being. This unreliability or instability, which is at the heart of all embodied existence, must breed numerous fears and anxieties, which are then played out and cathartically alleviated in/through a variety of socio-cultural practices: ritualistic, discursive, aesthetic (or representational), political, etc.3 One can easily trace them in literary and cinematographic im-aginaries, in relation to the political realities (or “corpo-realities”) of a  his-torical moment. Conceptualizations and representations of bodies are thus a  good starting point for analyses of political and social cultures and their discontents. Situated at the crossroads between (messy/unorganized/dirty) nature and the (purifying) symbolic order of culture, bodies are forever sites of intense categorizations and regulations. A traditional Western approach to this border status of the body is well expressed by the Polish phenomenolo-gist Roman Ingarden, who asserts in his “Little Book on Man” (published in Polish in 1972) that human nature consists in transcending the animality that persists in the human being; without this transcendence, understood here as the creation of values, Man slips back to his animality, which, says the philos-opher, is his death (1972: 26). Some recent developments in posthumanist theories and animal studies, informed in part by gender and queer insights, aim at a fundamental revision of this human-animal divide, entailing, among

2 Contrary to obvious linguistic evidence, in many contexts I  cannot help but read the word “corporealities” as “corpo-realities.”

3 This insight derives mostly from Mary Douglas’s ground-breaking observations in Danger and Purity (1966), especially chapter 7, “External Boundaries.”

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other things, a rethinking of the materiality of living bodies, so problematic for most of the inherited Western philosophies.

Corporeality continues to trouble the modern liberal humanist subject and, consequently, the socio-political systems that he has instituted.4 My use of the masculine pronoun in the preceding sentence is intentional, for although the liberal humanist subject poses as generic (ungendered, unraced, unsexual-ized, etc.), it is always-already latently masculine, as the bulk of feminist theory has demonstrated. The “he” does not suggest that only biological men (how-ever that category is defined) may claim to occupy the position of a liberal hu-manist subject, but that in terms of cultural categorizations this fundamental model of Western subjectivity derives from a masculine rather than a feminine socio-cultural position. Indeed, certain developments within feminist theory and research (followed by postcolonial and queer developments), through their insistence on embodiment, have seriously undermined this allegedly uni-versalist “human” subject. It is fair to say, then, that if much of Euro-American modernity has aimed at making bodies more controllable and more reliable (through technologies of surveillance, hygiene, discipline, etc.), the process has been driven by the masculinist anxiety over the unruly and “feminine” realms of corporeal existence that, however reluctantly, men have to partici-pate in. Parallelly, much of modernity’s political development has been direct-ed at strengthening the state’s regulatory security/immunity systems, whose role is to prevent “bodies politic” from becoming vulnerable and/or degener-ating into a state of natural/feminine anarchy, a nature without rules.

Just like the body, or “woman,” nature has been an arena of the most confusing and contradictory conceptualizations, as well as the most intense,

4 The term “liberal humanist subject” is broad and, admittedly, somewhat nebulous. It usually connotes a subjectivity which lays claims to modernity and universalism (univer-sal human nature, universal ethical principles, etc.); which depends on disembodiment, or at least on a heavy disciplining and regulating of bodies and desires; which is predi-cated on secular rationalism and individualism (personhood); which believes in per-sonal freedom (and its extension – the free market) as well as the naturalness of private property; which is (or rather believes to be) unmarked by race, gender, sexuality or class (and as such is white, male, straight and middle-class by default); which, finally, holds onto clearly demarcated boundaries between the human, the animal and the machinic (or cybernetic). For a more in-depth discussion of the (neo)liberal humanist subject in queer and posthumanist frameworks, see Sikora 2012 and 2013.

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or even violent, attempts at reading an order into/out of the “slovenly wil-derness” (to borrow a  phrase from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar”) that nature is thought to be in its “original,” unorganized state. The provable presence of such an order would imply a teleological meaning inherent in nature, and thus it would offer solid grounding for the symbolic order’s normative claims concerning the body and, more generally, the totali-ty of social existence. Newton’s laws of mechanics and Linnaeus’s systematics of life were certainly among the most important paradigm-shifting scientific models that, despite later developments within both physics and life sciences, still largely determine popular imaginings of the “natural order.”5 Nature has been made to represent a normative ideal, even as it has continued to be per-ceived, with suspicion, as internally unstable, always susceptible to monstrous degeneration of one sort or another, to a dangerous redrawing of pre-estab-lished boundaries that separate units and categories (or taxa). The project of modernity has depended crucially on devising a natural order of identifiable entities or units that can be grouped, through formal correspondences and/or internal essences, into proper families. It is against this filial/hereditary tax-onomization that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose a  rehabilitation of contagion, a  subversive ecology based on “unnatural participation”: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production” (1987: 241). The logic of contagion or epidemic involves combinations which are “neither genetic nor structural” and it exposes “the only way Nature operates – against itself” (1987: 242).

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In a sense, then, this book sets out to move across (rather than against) organic wholes and taxonomic families. In the Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology,

5 Charles Darwin’s theory, equally revolutionary, is a  much more complex issue that I do not have the space to explore here. In certain interpretations it anticipates the an-ti-normative “posthuman” understandings of nature (and the place of humans within it) that serve as an important background to my considerations in this book. See, for example, Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (2004) and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011); for a suc-cinct summary, see Levi R. Bryant’s blog entry “Five Darwinian/Posthumanist Theses” (2012).

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the force that defies organic units or taxa and cuts across any received order of things is named desire; it is the connective force that works through the molecular, the contagious, the monstrous.6 Desire is what makes it possible at all to imagine a different order of things, or a plethora of different orders, or even a complete anarchy of things. I am thus attentive to all the (non)figures that cause an overflow, a  loosening of boundaries, a  collapsing of separate “selves,” an emergence of new connections and new assemblages. Now, to be radically and consistently against wholes and units, “consistently inconsist-ent,” would be unsustainable in the long run, to say the least. One can hardly deny the existence of perceivable, experiential “wholes”; there are organisms, no doubt; there are individual authors and their individual works; there are bodies of theory, and so forth. However, rather than look at units, and thus stabilize their phenomenological and epistemological status, I make the con-scious choice to look beyond unitary formations, to see how they participate in transversal flows and molecular exchanges, how they form new assemblag-es, how they defy customary taxonomies and identitarian economies.

I borrow the concept of “transversality” from Deleuze and Guattari, es-pecially as elaborated in A  Thousand Plateaus.7 Transversality is intimately connected to the French duo’s central idea of the rhizome, which opposes genealogy and emphasizes “transversal communications between different lines” (1987: 11). Transversals are defined as lines of deterritorialization (or lines of flight) crucial for the processes of becoming (rather than reproduc-tion). As explained by Adam Bryx and Gary Genosko,

transversality assembles heterogeneous components under a  unifying viewpoint, which is far from totalising. […] The transversal dimension of fiction fundamen-tally counters the principles of the world of attributes, logos, analytic expression, and rational thought with the characteristics of the world of signs and symptoms, pathos, hieroglyphs, ideograms and phonetic writing. […] [T]he transversal di-

6 Adjectives have the advantage of being relatively less prone to getting easily reified into stable objects of knowledge, so that “the monstrous,” for example, is preferable to “mon-sters.”

7 The concept of transversality was introduced by Félix Guattari in 1964 (see Genosko 2005: 287) and by Gilles Deleuze in his book on Marcel Proust published in that same year. It then appears in the thinkers’ co-authored magna opera Anti-Oedipus (1972) and especially in A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

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mension or the never-viewed viewpoint draws a line of communication through the heterogeneous pieces and fragments that refuse to belong to a whole, that are parts of different wholes, or that have no whole other than style. The ephemeral images, memories and signs of the odours, flavours and drafts of particular settings are swept along at various rhythms and velocities in the creation of the nontotalising trans-versal dimension of fiction that is not reproductive, imitative or representative, but depends solely on its functioning. (2005: 286)

Driven by desire, transversal movements, whether in literary/cinematic texts, other forms of cultural production, or in social practices, defy estab-lished taxonomies and epistemologies, they ignore the rules that organize tex-tualities and socialities into organs and organic wholes. At the molecular level, where transversality is said to most intensely operate before its effects become visible at the higher (molar) levels, no rules apply and no borders hold fast.8

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A prefix is a peculiar part of speech. Not quite a word, it is none the less a carrier of meaning, or rather the carrier of a potential change in the meaning of other words. It is a free-floating particle, released from a fixed relation to other parts of speech. Lacking full meaning or an “identity” of its own, it can attach itself, almost parasitically, to an unspecifiable number of other words. Perennially incomplete, it is an agent of production and transformation. In linguistics, prefixes are sometimes grouped according to their productivity, i.e. their ability to attach themselves to other lexical items. The prefix trans- is productive not only because of its linguistic attributes (it may occur, as one dictionary puts it, “in combination with elements of any origin: transisthmi-an, trans-Siberian, transempirical, transvalue” [“trans” at Dictionary.com] and as such produces what is known in linguistics as hybrids), but also because of a cultural trend observable over the last decade or two, a trend that must correspond to an underlying social and psychological need of the denizens of

8 In Tom Conley’s concise formulation, Deleuze’s use of molecularity counters “the orth-ogonal and massive pensive […] system of Cartesian philosophy to arrive […] at a sens-ibility touching on the chemical animism of all things” (2005: 173). “Things molar,” on the other hand, “relate to aggregates of matter and not to either their molecular or atomic properties, or their motion” (2005: 171).

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late postmodernism. Various trans- words proliferate, including transgender, transhuman and transcultural. In this respect it is similar to the prefix post-, which has also proved quite useful and productive in the wake of the orig-inary shift from our understanding of ourselves as “modern” to “postmod-ern”9 and, more recently, another shift from the “human” to the “posthuman” (see chapter 3). Both prefixes are also related in meaning, as both pre-suppose the existence of a boundary or a caesura. Post- marks the cutting line between a “now” and a “then”; it marks a qualitative change from one state to another. Trans- may have similar connotations, with its dictionary meaning explained usually as “across, beyond, through”; it connotes movement to “the other side” of something (e.g. transatlantic), into another state or place (e.g. trans-form or translate), a transcending of a border. The difference might be that post- is more of a temporal category that indicates a succession, while trans- has more spatial connotations and does not preclude movement in many dif-ferent directions.10

The notions of tranversality and productivity, as well as the prefix’s ten-dency to easily form “hybrids,” situate trans- close to the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of desire. Against the psychoanalytic, and particularly the Lacanian, tradition which defines desire through lack, Deleuze and Guattari developed a view of desire as going far beyond the level of an individual psyche that gets shaped through the Oedipal set of relations within a bourgeois family. Instead, they claim, desire is primarily a  productive social force which incessantly forms new connections and creates new assemblages. Desiring-production takes place through enabling new flows and connections, through hybrid-ization and contagion, and thus it opposes Oedipal reproduction through filiation. If filiation is vertical, reproductive and hereditary, desire works hori-

9 For a discussion of several post- words (especially postmodern, postcolonial, and post-national) specifically in the Canadian context, see Buchholtz 2008, 11–37.

10 On the recent uses of the prefix trans- in relation to Canadian literature and culture, and more specifically to Smaro Kamboureli’s TransCanada project, see Branach-Kallas (2010: 35–36; 50–56) and Szatanik (2011: 59–60). Kamboureli’s TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph, established in 2007 and dedicated to transnational and transcultur-al exchanges, was closed down in 2013. One of the important outcomes of the Institute’s activity is the book Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, 2007).

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zontally to produce – transversally and non-normatively11 – ever new col-lectivities and assemblages. Its logic is additive, defined through an infinite horizontal conjunction: and… and… and… and… This is the logic of an epi-demic that I have mentioned above. As I see it, trans- belongs to this horizon-tal and transversal order of desire rather than the vertical order of reproduc-tion. It bespeaks hybridization, a kind of “promiscuous mixing” that defies borders, prohibitions and normativities. As such, it always threatens society with a crisis, it breeds monsters, but the monsters may as well be regarded as “promising,” as Donna Haraway declared in her seminal essay “The Promises of Monsters” (1992). Trans- may thus hold a promise of a Deleuzian “line of flight,” a shedding of the (unbearable?) burden of a taxonomized identity generated by modern regimes of knowledge/power.

Such a characterization of the various trans- movements of desire operat-ing within society and culture shows affinity to queer theorizing (and it is not beside the point to point out that etymologically “queer” comes from an old Germanic word meaning “across”). With its profound distrust of identitarian closures, queerness can be seen as a powerful agent of social transformation that goes far beyond a recognition of gay and lesbian subjectivities and the ex-tension of certain rights onto these groups (most remarkably the right to mar-ry same-sex partners). In a queer perspective, once achieved, stable identities – sexual or other – tend to stand in the way of desire, in the way of further transformations that would produce new social subjectivities and collectivi-ties. Identities – as well as corresponding stable “cultures” from which they are believed to derive – are exclusionary and reductionistic. As an obstacle to the free flows of desire, identitarian practices align themselves with the order of the death drive, defined in Deleuzian terms as the perverse production of lack. Taking as my point of departure Freud’s perplexing idea that the death drive is, at its core, closely bound up with the drive for self-preservation,12

11 The norm, as Michel Serres asserts, “is a line perpendicular to the horizon, the orthog-onal, standing up straight, casts no shadow, as little as that of the sun at high noon. What can be said, then, of the right angle and of its force, except that its efficacy is at its highest point? The normal, like many of our concepts, is a crest, an optimum concept: maximum force and minimum discourse” (1982: 197). Hence, the transversal is, by definition, an-ti-normative.

12 For more on this point, see Sikora 2011.

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I posit an understanding of the death drive as the tendency of an organ/or-ganism/organization to preserve itself in its boundaries, in its structure, in its “essence,” an essence which can only appear to it as fate itself.13 This tendency for petrification of an identity, a minority, a culture, etc., is countered, in the social and psychic field, by the productive forces of desire, which cut across received or imposed taxonomies, across genres, species and identities, thus constantly redrawing boundaries (at a  molecular and/or molar level), dis- and reconnecting various flows and entities. Desire opposes finality, closure and “death” understood as a void, a nothingness, pure negativity. Even if we grant that various forms of identity are temporarily necessary, in the long run any particular identitarian formation will appear stifling and deadening.

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The Canadian artists and works I address in this book question various boundaries: national, ethnic, social, sexual, human, organic, and other; or, to put it differently, they move in the space of the transnational, transeth-nic, transsocial, transsexual, transhuman, transorganic, transgeneric, etc. The works, together with the characters that inhabit them, cross boundaries and propose a wide variety of “unnatural alliances,” to use Patricia MacCormack’s apt phrase. These hybrid assemblages “are inherently unnatural and resist nat-uralisation because they cannot be placed within taxonomy – they move too fast and transform too quickly” (MacCormack 2009: 145). From these con-siderations a critique of liberal multuculturalism can be derived, and together with it a critique of a narrow, Eurocentric (liberal) humanism. Arguably, the official model of multiculturalism works to prevent hybridization rather than to promote it, it stabilizes difference and attempts to regulate it by the legal machinery of the modern state, in its various shapes and versions. The artis-tic visions that I have chosen to concentrate on move far beyond this official model and call for a transcultural and dynamic understanding of subjectivi-ties, since all culturally defined categories – national, ethnic, sexual, etc. – are always already hybrid, i.e. unable to claim any pure essence of their own, and

13 It is not by coincidence that, as Christian Kerslake points out, “the death drive […] has origins in Freud’s discussion of fate” (2007: 146).

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always open to further transversal redrawings of boundaries, following the transformative, contagious paths of desire.

If queerness can claim any “privileged” position in this process, it is be-cause, in Michel Foucault’s (very Deleuzian-sounding) words, it offers

a  historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the “slantwise” posi-tion of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. (1997: 138)

While, admittedly, Foucault’s original word was “homosexuality,” not queerness, given the semantic and conceptual remappings that have taken place in queer theory since he made the observation (remappings, it must be added, for which Foucault’s body of work has been foundational), the substi-tution seems justified. Or at least it seems justified in light of the understand-ing of queerness that I propose in this book, one that is close to the Deleuzo-Guattarian notions of transversality, desire and virtuality.14 Queerness is that which, while always related to the corporeal, disrupts an established “order of things” and threatens it with the spectre of a different order or, indeed, the spectre of taxonomic anarchy, where no entity can ever be securely fixed in its “proper place.” In this sense even queerness as such, let alone “queer theory” as a body of knowledge, can claim a stable position within a system of knowl-edge. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s elaboration of Sylvan Tomkins’s notion of “weak” versus “strong” theory (see Sedgwick 2003: 133–6), as well as Michael Warner and Laurent Berlant’s description of queer theory (which should rather be called “queer commentary,” in their view) as unassimila-ble to “a  single discourse, let alone a  propositional program” (1995: 343), I do not aspire to develop a consistent methodological algorithm that would place all identifiable “units” in a single epistemological grid, even if that grid were to be designated “queer”; one can easily find such a  neatly codified, canonized, and museumified version of “queer theory” in theory textbooks, where it is reduced to a rather limited number of claims about the “construct-edness” or “performativity” of human sexuality. If the question of sexuality

14 The connections are analyzed in more detail in Sikora (2011).

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(or sexualities), as an important aspect of embodied social existence, does come to the foreground in this book from time to time, it is vital to bear in mind that queer theory is not in any simple sense “about” sexuality, but rather it starts from a critique of sexual categorizations to move on and problematize all epistemological categorizations that provide a foundation for a supposed-ly stable edifice of “modern knowledge.” In other words, the present book lays no claims to being a systematic study of any single subject or a systematic elaboration of any single theory; instead, it is subtended by a  resistance to systematizations, because, arguably, every systematization is inevitably an act of epistemological violence and subjugation.

If not a  systematic exposition of a  subject, I  propose that the book be treated as an exercise in reading: reading bodies, texts, and social/cultural practices at the same time. It is transversal reading across media, codes, and conventions; more than that: it is reading that is constantly transversal to it-self, always, in a way, “outperforming” itself in its transversal movement. While it cannot but recognize “organic” wholes, such as works, authors (authori-al oeuvres) or cultures, transversal reading tends to look past and/or across them; that is, rather than act as a unifying force and add coherence, it becomes a centrifugal force that dis-organizes and re-assembles. In the kind of reading I envisage, the reader’s gaze is not fixed on a subject, a figure, or a work, with the intention of delineating its contours; instead, s/he looks “slantwise” so as to create an occasion “to reopen affective and relational virtualities” in the so-cial and cultural fabrics (Foucault 1997: 138). Such a gaze necessarily locates, but does not territorialize. It could be argued that the postulated transversal reading does not “do justice” to the texts it parasitically feeds on. On the other hand, if it somehow “betrays” those texts, if it is not set on being faithful to them, it is not at all out of bad will, but because in weaving its own transversal texture(s), it resists the temptation to “museumify” any particular work, motif, author, or genre – and in this sense, perhaps, it is in fact more “true” to the texts it traverses than other possible kinds of reading.

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A great number of Canadian Studies books and essays seem to return, more or less explicitly, to the perennial question of Canada’s troubled sense of nationhood vis-à-vis its ethnic diversity and internal tensions. Admittedly, this question is hardly avoidable when bringing up the Canadian context, and

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consequently it is not entirely absent from my book. Such considerations, important as they are for the proposed readings, are not, however, meant to simply explain the vagaries of Canadianness. In my “strabismal” readings, one eye looks at the specificity of the Canadian context, but the other one looks at the centripetal and centrifugal forces that operate within societies and cul-tures to create as well as to destabilize reified units (bodies/identities) and taxa (groupings). Manifesting themselves in social and cultural practices, these forces produce and reproduce certain sexualities, corporealities, ethnic-ities, etc., as we come to know them. Consequently, whenever I make state-ments about “things Canadian,” as I inevitably do, they are not to be read as truth claims, but rather as statements made possible (and current) in certain socio-historically determined discursive frameworks, which presuppose a rel-atively stable signified for, say, “Canada” or “Canadian literature” – however contested these terms may be at a given moment. In other words, the only explanatory power such statements can claim concerns not “essences,” to be sure, but the (self-)definitions and narrative conventions that make the very concept of “Canadianness” thinkable and speakable in the first place. My more general goal, however, for which the selected Canadian representations provide more specific occasions, is a critique of the modern liberal humanist mind which enforces its own normative version of the “distribution of the sensible,” to borrow a  term from Jacques Rancière,15 or its own regulatory systematizations, to use a more Foucault-inflected (or should I say, Foucault-infected?) formulation.

Every culture (as much as we are able to designate it as a singular, self-reg-ulating culture) generates its own excesses, monstrosities and transgressions. In the following readings of Canadian literary and cinematic texts I am less interested in delineating an “essentially Canadian” kind of monstrosity or transgression, and instead I focus on how liberal humanism, which I assume to be modernity’s basic ideological matrix, breeds its corporeal monsters and transgressions, as found in Canadian cultural and political imaginaries,16 es-

15 Rancière defines the “distribution of the sensible” as the “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (2004: 12).

16 In De-shamed. Feminist Strategies of Transgression: The Case of Lorna Crozier’s Poetry (2011) Zuzanna Szatanik focuses on a different aspect of transgression in the Canadian

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pecially in relation to Canada’s official discourse of multiculturalism. It can-not be denied, of course, that Canada’s monstrosities and transgressions have been largely informed by its material-historical realities, such as its “extreme” geography and climate, its historical processes, its ethnic diversity, its nation-al myths, its political culture, its aesthetic conventions, etc. What is usually foregrounded in similar contexts is the vastness of the Canadian land, the harshness of the weather, and the politics of multiculturalism which aims to regulate the social diversity regarded as both dangerous and at the same time promising. Considering my focus on corporeal transgressions and monstros-ities, it is not surprising that the main narrative and aesthetic modes I choose to concentrate on throughout the book are the Gothic, the grotesque, the pa-rodic, and the queer. What I find particularly interesting is how these modes intersect with Canada’s emphasis on multiculturalism, as well as other aspects of modern political arrangements that may be summarized, after Foucault and others, under the general rubric of “biopolitics.” The grotesque, with its explo-rations of the excessive and the hybrid, is an aesthetics that transgresses any re-ceived notions of the “properly human” and thus may serve as a starting point for the more recent theorizations of the “posthuman.” The Gothic, as I read it, is a textual mode that registers the post-Enlightenment discontents with the Cartesian model of subjectivity and the anxieties that res extensa (including the material body) must necessarily arouse in the disembodied res cogitans. Thus, the Gothic anticipates the Freudian splitting of the modern subject (into the conscious and unconscious, the id-ego-superego triad, or the subject of enun-ciation versus the subject of the enounced), and, consequently, counters the grand Cartesian project of knowledge building.17 The parodic and the queer,

context (and beyond). By combining feminist, queer and affect theories with a study of Lorna Crozier’s poetry, Szatanik looks at possible strategies of transcending the kind of shame traditionally associated with women (or “Woman” as a social construct).

17 The “deadliest blow” to any imagined unity of the human subject was, in the Freudian framework, the idea of the constitutive role of the death drive; for a closer discussion of this concept see chapter 4. Freud’s indisputable merit was to reinvent the subject as a dynamic system rather than a punctual cogito; he shifted psychological metaphorics to energy flows, (dis)equilibriums, movements, affective and libidinal investments, etc. Simultaneously, he made the subject a  function of the operations of the Oedipal castrating machine, a  repetitive and normative (self-)processing that produces order-ly, self-policing, bourgeois subjects. Deleuze and Guattari took the “splitting” aspect of

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through their performative subversions of dominant truth regimes and modes of signification, problematize the epistemological axioms governing the liberal humanist mind even further, and offer possible “lines of flight,” or ways to resist the normative taxonomies that regulate present-day socio-political existence.

*

The book contains transversal readings of several literary and cinematic works. Most of the bodies one finds in these works are, generally speaking, “bodies of difference,” i.e. bodies marked as different through their gender, sexuality, race, age, or simply their monstrosity. These bodies refuse to be fully disciplined, hygienized, and regulated, and instead they commit various acts of transgression, though not necessarily with the intention to transgress; rather, the transgressions are an effect of some forces (or, in psychoanalytic parlance, “drives”) that animate human (and nonhuman) flesh and endow it with some sort of agency. It is at this “molecular” level that the principle of transversality – with its disregard for received entities and organisms – seems to be most productive. The body’s agency, in turn, threatens the liberal hu-manist notions that classify and normativize social beings into their roles and categories.

I am aware that most of the authors as well as characters discussed in the book are white, with the notable exception of Dionne Brand and her character Blossom (and to a  lesser degree the Haitian-Canadian character of George in Greyson’s Zero Patience). Like gender or sexuality, race is one of the cru-cial parameters that makes particular bodies problematic and sets them apart from the “generic” white standard. While more readings of othered racialized corporealities would certainly enrich the book,18 my main point is situated, so to speak, beneath the level of the skin, i.e. in flesh, which stands for the un-differentiated common “meat” of embodied existence, if not of the material

Freud’s project to its extreme logical consequences by dismantling the Oedipal machine and proposing a schizoanalysis in place of psychoanalysis.

18 For an extensive discussion of racialized female bodies in recent Canadian fiction, see Branach-Kallas (2010). Chapter Three of the book, with its focus on “gothic bodies” in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees, may well be read as complementary to some of the readings offered in this book.

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world at large.19 The culturally defined marks of difference, such as gender, race or sexuality, remain crucial for regulating social relations, to be sure, yet at the more fundamental level of unruly and “unorganized” flesh, threatening social categories “from below” with the spectre of what could be called “meat com-munism,” the visible markers of difference are exposed precisely for what they are: social constructs. This is not to suggest, of course, that the notion of flesh is not itself mediated through cultural discourses; my main point is that flesh – as opposed, in modern Western imaginaries, to organicist understandings of the “body” – is a notion capable of destabilizing the certainties of the liberal humanist mind. Or, in other words, what is disconcerting about bodies is that they can never become fully organized into self-sufficient and well-regulated entities because of the anarchic and precarious flesh that the “clean and prop-er” body20 of a modern subject must always, in the last instance, depend on.

The opening chapter juxtaposes Canada’s official rhetoric and norma-tive politics of multiculturalism with the concept of the “Canadian Gothic.” Structured loosely around a reading of David Cronenberg’s epochal body-hor-ror The Fly (1986), the chapter exposes the way in which Canadian multicul-turalism aims to regulate the Monster of (radical) Difference by postulating a universalist and normative notion of the “human.” Through the figure of the man-fly-machine hybrid, the movie envisages a transversal line cutting across parameters of difference, even as it reinforces the idea that if the present so-cial/human order is to survive, such “unnatural alliances” (MacCormack) re-sulting from bodily transgressions should better be aborted in due time.

19 My thinking of “flesh” in this book is certainly indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-enological philosophy of the world as flesh, which could be summarized in the following quote: “The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world ul-timately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. […] There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 138).

20 The phrase “clean and proper body” (corps proper) is adapted from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, where it is described as a body sublimated or cleansed of any “trace of its debt to nature” (1982: 102) through the symbolic work of marking boundaries and instituting a “separation between feminine and masculine” (1982: 100) and, subsequently, other kinds of separation necessary to produce entities “subject to law and morality” (1982: 100).

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A similar problematization of the proper parameters of the “human” is to be found in Barbara Gowdy’s collection of short stories We So Seldom Look on Love (1992), to which I turn in chapter 2. Through a whole gallery of her grotesque characters, Gowdy exposes the messy excesses of nature in general, and of human flesh in particular. This underlying messiness contradicts the neat categorizations imposed by the liberal humanist taxonomies that pre-dominantly organize contemporary social existence in the spaces customarily referred to as “Western democracies.” Even the basic concept of the “oneness of One” is rendered highly problematic: one (an individual body or identi-ty) is always unstable, always artificially demarcated and maintained, always threatened by the (feared and simultaneously desired) possibility of moving beyond oneself and merging with an “other.” Despite all the normative en-deavours and claims to a natural order and a corresponding social order, at the most elemental level, the level of the world’s “meat,” both natural and social existence turn out to be more about “promiscuous mixing” (nature naturally operating against itself, to invoke Deleuze and Guattari again) than about neat systematizations.

Chapter 3 continues the discussion of the problematic normativity of the modern idea of “humanity” by looking at Dionne Brand’s short story “Blossom.” Brand does not fit easily into the Canadian (or, more specifi-cally, Ontario) Gothic rubric that most of the other writers discussed in the book could be said to represent, yet the obvious grotesqueness of the pro-tagonist’s racialized body as well as her “insane” behaviour – grotesque and insane, that is, when placed in the contemporary white Canadian context – situate Blossom close to the other “bodies of difference” that, in my readings, challenge the borders of the “properly human” and other social taxonomies. Albeit the application of the concept of posthumanism in a racial context, at-tentive as it should be to lingering histories of colonial dehumanization, may still seem problematic, it is, in fact, highly instructive: due to her perceived monstrosity, Blossom defies the liberal humanist version of subjectivity, the modern economies of “authenticity” and the regulatory mechanisms of mul-ticultural policies.

Chapter 4 looks more closely at what may be termed the “Female Gothic” mode in Canadian literature, as represented by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and (to a lesser degree) Isabel Huggan. What I find interesting in the discussed

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short stories is how this textual mode excavates, from the layers of the ordinary and the quotidian, the underlying negativities (which in psychoanalytic par-lance are attributable to the death drive) that puncture the apparently smooth fabric of social life. In contrast to the blatant grotesqueness of Cronenberg’s, Gowdy’s or Brand’s characters, the stories by Atwood, Munro and Huggan ex-pose the monstrosity of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the monstrous. Monstrosity is defined here less through promiscuous hybridizations, and more through the “pure negativity” of hatred and murderousness inscribed into the psychic structure of the human subject, as conceptualized in the Freudian framework. The central paradox that transpires through these narratives is that a  healthy and well-integrated social subject is necessarily constituted by and shot through with the “inhuman” and (self-)destructive drives that render the self’s boundaries hopelessly precarious.

Chapter 5 offers a general consideration of the notion of transgression, particularly in relation to excess, desire and corporeality, and looks briefly at some modes of transgression employed by selected Canadian filmmakers. Dissociated from the liberal humanist (implicitly masculine) subject, and shifted onto the material level of (usually coded as feminine) “flesh,” desire is an ontological principle or force that traverses, alienates and defamiliariz-es. Bodies, in this account, acquire some sort (material/desiring) agency of their own. I illustrate my points with a brief discussion of the work of David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and Bruce LaBruce, as representative of what may be called a  “transgressive tradition” in Canadian cultural imaginaries, inti-mately connected with the categories of the Gothic, the grotesque, and the monstrous.

Chapter 6 offers a more detailed analysis of Bruce LaBruce’s 2008 movie Otto; or, Up with Dead People in the context of the modern phenomenon of pornography. Often considered transgressive in some way or another, por-nography has been one of the main sources of moral panics, which have ac-companied modern biopolitical regimes at least since the 18th century. It is mainly this biopolitical dimension that I  read into LaBruce’s pornozombie horror pastiche, where the posthuman figure of the zombie points at the late postmodern anxiety over the uncertain boundary between being alive and be-ing dead. I see this as a question of (un)livability, or the question of how mod-ern, and more specifically late capitalist/neoliberal arrangements of power,

render some people feeling dead or at least unsure if, in the postmodern world defined through endless simulation, they are actually living or just being arti-ficially animated to simulate life (“Are we alive or as if we were alive?”). The zombie – as an index of flesh, or even the fundamental “meat of the world” (not unrelated to Agamben’s concept of “bare life”) – may be interpreted, again, as a reference to the body’s agency working against the regulatory and organizational operations of biopolitical power, which I connect with the no-tion of the preservative impulse of the death drive.

Finally, in the book’s last chapter, I  continue a  reflection on contem-porary biopolitics by looking at John Greyson’s 1993 musical parody Zero Patience. This time I  concentrate on the epidemiological/immunity para-digm which, in line with Donna Haraway and Roberto Esposito, I  see as one the central technologies of biopower in the post-AIDS world, if not since the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, seen by Esposito as the inauguration of the modern politics of life. My argument is that the fear of contagion/epidemic (actual or more metaphorical) fuels the contempo-rary politics of containment and immunization. I  read Greyson’s movie as a  queer critique of such biopolitical stratagems and, more generally, a  cri-tique of any politico-epistemological systematization that aspires to institute a universal and “imperial” truth regime. Ultimately, what I postulate in my queer reading of Greyson’s queer text is a  reclaiming of the dreaded figure of the virus – a  figure of transversality par excellence. A  virus is blind to or-gans and organic units; instead, it mutates and spreads indiscriminately in unanticipated ways; oblivious to its “identity,” it constantly mutates and dest-abilizes existing communication codes. For better or worse, the virus – as an agent of indelible ontological opacity – intervenes and deregulates. This is how I envisage my “viral readings” as well: as interventionist and deregulative.

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Multiculturalism (or, more precisely, liberal multiculturalism) remains one of the official policies of the Canadian government, regulated chiefly by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1985). In the face of the weakness of Canadian na-tionalism and statehood, threatened as they have always been by internal conflicts, primarily the conflict between Quebec and the Anglophone part of Canada,21 the idea of multiculturalism has become an umbrella term believed by many to be the defining feature of contemporary Canadianness. This offi-cial “management of diversity,” concurrent with the more general engineer-ing of social life by the modern state, can be seen as a preventive strategy to shrink the areas of potential conflict. The politics of multiculturalism is one of the instruments employed by some modern states in order to create and sustain a healthy, well-regulated civil body politic.

But if multiculturalism is supposed to regulate Canada’s public space and discourse, if it constitutes Canadian society’s “living room,” so to speak, then a certain strand of postmodern Gothicism may be described, by contrast, as Canada’s hidden or not-so-hidden “dungeons,” to invoke a clichéd architec-tural trope of early Gothic fiction. Indeed, it has been argued at least since the 1970s that Canadian literature is pervaded by Gothic themes, moods and con-ventions, even though particular meanings of “Gothicism” must be adjusted

21 On the myth of Canadian national unity (and the affective responses to the spec-tres of potential disunity) see especially Chapter Four of Daniel Francis’s National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History (1997). For a  critical close reading of the Multiculturalism Act, see especially chapter two of Smaro Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (2000: 81–130).

Multiculturalism and Its Monsters

1

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to Canada’s specific historical, spatial and socio-political circumstances. This Canadian version of Gothicism may be broadly defined as a predilection for the grotesque and the excessive which threaten the established boundaries, so dear to a culture outwardly dedicated to moderation and stability, to a pursuit of consensus in the spirit of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect. Thus, the Canadian Gothic explores the limits of consensual politics and a stable order, and it concentrates instead on grotesque incongruities, cancerous growths, dangerous transgressions, and uncontrolled sexual impulses. In an indirect way, then, the New Northern Gothic poses a challenge to Canada’s official multiculturalism.

Not that the Canadian Gothic is necessarily opposed to multiculturalism. Indeed, the flagrant visibility of ethnic and cultural diversity (together with the extremities of climate and geography) is probably one of the most im-portant sources of Gothic anxiety within Canadian culture. Yet the Canadian Gothic challenges the narrow framework adopted by the official, “human-istic” multiculturalism, dedicated to the moderation of intercultural and in-ter-group relations, and keen on finding the “middle-ground” of mutual un-derstanding and respect between different cultures and individuals. But how will multiculturalism deal with entities that defy understanding and go beyond our capacity for respect, or even simple disrespect? Take, for example, Seth Brundle, the man-and-fly hybrid from David Cronenberg’s classic horror The Fly, or the monsters that populate Barbara Gowdy’s stories from the collection We So Seldom Look on Love, including a very romantic necrophiliac girl and a two-headed man. I do not argue, of course, that these (and other) authors call for complementing the Multiculturalism Act with an extra provision that would guarantee (human? citizen? hybrid?) rights to man-fly crossbreeds and two-headed subjects, although we are already witnessing voices that call for the recognition of special political rights for primates and/or androids. What I argue is that through such grotesque imaginaries, driven by anxieties over the body’s (or rather flesh’s) unruly agency that renders any and all bound-aries perennially unstable, the normative and regulative machinery of mul-ticultural politics is called into question. It would be fair to say, I think, that this postmodern strand of Gothicism tests the concept of multiculturalism against its furthest imaginable limits that reach the realm of the inhuman and the monstrous. What one can learn from these Gothic works is that diversity

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is more radical and less manageable than bureaucrats and administrators have dreamt of; and that identities, just like bodies, are never as stable, clean and manageable as many would like them to be. They can even turn monstrous, unexpectedly, for no particular reason. In other words, the Canadian Gothic, at least in some of its aspects, could be argued to represent a very radical (if fantasmatic) form of multiculturalism, one that relinquishes the urge to iden-tify and classify entities into manageable constituencies.

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The way I see the Canadian Gothic in relation to multiculturalism seems to differ from the one suggested by Justin D. Edwards in Gothic Canada. Edwards asserts that “the Canadian gothic becomes an important textual mode for trying to come to terms with a postcolonial past and its multicul-tural and diasporic complexity” (2005: xxi). If so, does the Canadian Gothic have a therapeutic effect, the way a re-enacted trauma, in psychoanalysis, al-lows the subject to come to terms with the painful past and reconstitute him/herself as a unified self? Or does it re-open the old wounds again and again, sustaining the trauma rather than curing it? Or – let me posit a third, seem-ingly insane possibility – does it both cure and sustain the illness? In my view, the Canadian Gothic, even if does have some therapeutic effects (one could agree, after all, that a  dramatization of a  fear is often the first step towards containing it), positions itself at the very limits of the apparently seamless no-tion of “Candianness,” in the gaps and points of rupture, in the paradoxes of Canadian existence. With its disparate histories (indigenous, French/English colonial, immigrant, queer) Canada may appear, both to itself and to the outside world, a Frankensteinian nation(-state), an arbitrary entity stitched roughly together from a number of heterogenous elements and maintained by the enforcement of the politics of multicultural consensus. This is a vision of Canadian culture that I  find, though in a  milder formulation, in Smaro Kamboureli’s introduction to her anthology of Canadian multicultural liter-ature, Making a Difference, where Canadian history is described as “haunted by dissonance,” a history that “bursts its seams” (1996: 1). Kamboureli right-ly juxtaposes the irreducible multiplicity of voices and experiences against “persistent attempts to compose a unified vision of Canadian culture” (1996:

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1). In a  well-known essay “Disunity as Unity” (2004) Robert Kroetsch attempts to neatly reconcile the centrifugal and centripetal forces operating in Canadian culture by proposing that, paradoxically, the lack of an agreed-on national metanarrative is what holds Canadians’ story together. Disunity unites, says Kroetsch in a logical tour de force that not everybody would buy into. Unity thus remains a preferred term, a desirable social and cultural ideal, a reflection of the mythical idea of Order’s final victory over Chaos. But the opposite is also true: Order breeds the monsters of Chaos, as the Canadian Gothic amply attests.

Justin D. Edwards’s Gothic Canada ends where my project begins. In the last chapter, entitled “Beyond the Textual Body,” Edwards discusses “the strand of Canadian neo-gothicism” which questions the borders of humanity by exploring “the grotesque realm in which humans merge with animals and people amalgamate with machines” (2005: 152). As Edwards rightly points out, this questioning of the “human” occurs mostly at the level of corporeality and the uneasy links between flesh and identity. Yet the conclusions Edwards draws from his brief discussion of selected Canadian authors remain some-what too general:

Underlying the Canadian taste for order and stability, beneath a culture systemat-ically advocating and practicing moderation and consensus, these texts reveal an extremely subversive streak – a sort of northern grotesque – which one might attrib-ute to the peripheral position Canada occupies with respect to the centers of power. (2005: 164)

Clearly, what interests Edwards are not so much the possible consequen- ces of these questionings of the human through investigations of the animal-ized or technologized body, but rather how they relate to the Canadianness of the works he chooses to discuss. In my own project the question of “Canadianness” is secondary, which does not entail, of course, that the cul-tural (as well as physical or political) specificity of Canada can be ignored. The “peripheral position” of Canada may indeed be seen as analogous to the pe-ripheral position of corporeality (or, to be more precise, excessive corporeali-ties) in much of contemporary Western culture. Such peripheral topographies attributed to Canada often result in the feminization and queering of Canada’s spaces in cultural representations, as Szatanik and Krzykawski point out in their introduction to Bodies of Canada (2011).

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“Gothicism” is not to be used as a  term promising a  unified vision of Canadian culture, as it clearly cannot encompass the diversity of Canadian cul-tural expression, even if we agree that it is “an important textual mode” within it.22 Besides, as a literary and cultural convention whose beginnings are usually located in late 18th-century English culture, it is admittedly rooted in white Western traditions, even if writers of other than Western backgrounds employ the convention as well, or if readers choose to read non-Western texts through Gothic spectacles. On the other hand, no Western tradition can be claimed to be “pure” any more (if it ever could) in an increasingly multi- and transcultural world, and Gothicism is inevitably susceptible to appropriation, hybridization and transformation. For the purposes of this book I choose to define Gothicism in general, and the Canadian Gothic in particular, as an expression of mod-ern Western fears, traumas, and anxieties related to the complex interplay be-tween the forces of control, constraint and confinement on the one hand, and everything that escapes these forces, i.e. an excess, a  remainder, a  “leakage,” on the other. I see it as more than a set of aesthetic conventions (especially in the postmodern context, characterized as it is by a playful reshuffling of inher-ited cultural conventions); I see it also as a particular mode of knowing akin to psychoanalysis (see chapter 4). Much of Canadian literature and film seems to be troubled, or haunted, by uncanny, excessive corporealities; one thinks here, for example, of David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin or John Greyson in film, or Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy, and Dionne Brand in fiction. In their complex explorations of the body vis-à-vis cultural norms of health and beau-ty, (latent) animality and technological developments, these authors test and question the most fundamental of all values: humanity.

That a  reflection on the borders and meanings of the “human” should be at the center of contemporary philosophical enterprises cannot come as surprise in this post-Holocaust and postcolonial era. Additionally, with the ever more astonishing inventions of advanced science and technology, we are intensely haunted by the spectres as well as materializations of the inhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman. Artists and scientists (the distinc-

22 Agnieszka Rzepa (2009) offers a different key to reading Canadian literature, namely that of magic realism. The two modes are not unrelated, however, since Canadian magic realism “seems to be often accompanied by elements specific of North American gothi-cism” (Rzepa 2009: 41).

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tion becomes somewhat blurred at times) provide us with human-animal hy-brids, human-machine hybrids, or even human-animal-machine hybrids.23 At this late stage of (post)modernism, no longer capable of the programmatic optimism of the Enlightenment, many find the received notion of the “hu-man” to be increasingly insufficient. There exists in modern culture an iden-tifiable desire to get out of the present conceptual box and move beyond: if not ahead (what do we know about progress?), then at least elsewhere. The Enlightenment concept of Man, subsequently filtered by bourgeois culture, regulated by the social engineers of the modern State and largely reduced to the status of a consumer by the corporate culture of late capitalism, turns out to be too rigid, too impoverished, and too confining. This post-Cartesian ex-ploration of humanity involves the issue of what it means for human beings to be embodied beings, to live in flesh, to be meat. Bodies obstinately refuse to remain clean and proper; instead they acquire an agency of their own, some sort of independent (or cancerous) life. They shamelessly and defiantly pa-rade their materiality, malleability, and instability. What strikes me as a recur-rent gesture in many of the works of the Canadian Gothic is that of displaying the body’s (and the material world’s) inside – its very meat – to the curious eye of the audience. In the process bodies inevitably lose their integrity (a ma-jor theme in The Fly; cf. Smith 2000: 74), which invalidates the witty dictum, proposed by Robert Kroetsch, that there is a way in which disunity may some-how serve as a unifying factor. This “aesthetic of the obscene” employed by some Canadian authors exposes the dungeon as the living room’s necessary “Other,” and thus it transgressively undermines the rules that govern the pub-lic, the normal, the presentable.

*

Probably the best-known Canadian director to date, David Cronenberg, came to international prominence as the maker of the so-called “biological horror,” i.e. horror movies that explore the most corporeal aspect of human ex-istence, relishing in representations of blood, wounds, open flesh and disease. “Contemporary horror,” says Linda Ruth Williams, “has specialized in making the inside visible, opening it up and bringing it out and pushing the spectacle

23 At the end of Cronenberg’s Fly, for example, Brundle-fly merges with one of the telepods and becomes a double hybrid, as it were.

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of interiority to the limit to find out what the limit is” (1999: 34). In his films Cronenberg often returns to the question, What does it mean to be human? What does it mean for a human being to have an “animal” body which can at any moment develop an independent, cancerous life of its own? How does sex-uality threaten our precarious social selves? And what does technology do to our bodies and, consequently, to our (unstable) identities? The human/non-human boundary is constantly tested, revealing the inadequacy of the narrow, moderate, bourgeois definitions of the “human.” In Cronenberg, the body is always (potentially) monstrous, always potentially inhuman – not by nature, but because of how we have come to perceive the monstrous in the first place (“I  think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all”; Rodley 1992: 82). Cronenberg sees very clearly the dialectic that links the beautiful and the repulsive (“some of the things […] in my films are meant to be repulsive, yes, but there’s a beautiful aspect to them as well”; Rodley 1992: 66), a dialectic that corresponds to the distinction I made above between the scenic and the obscene. Interestingly, it is not only at the level of imagery that Cronenberg employs the body; he also aspires to involve it at the level of the film’s reception: the appeal of horror, he asserts, lies in the fact that it goes “right into the viscera, before it goes to the brain” (Rodley 1992: 60). Thus the movie seems to acquire the status of a virus or a parasite that penetrates the viewer’s body and mind,24 possibly causing some sort of disease or mutation that might eventually re-position the viewer’s sense of “humanness.”

A classic example of Cronenberg’s fascination with the “idea of a creative cancer” (Rodley 1992: 80) and his visual taste for the excesses of flesh is the above-mentioned 1986 cult horror The Fly. In his Frankesteinian quest for a new, revolutionary means of transport (a quest triggered, appropriately, by something as trivial and corporeal as the scientist’s own motion sickness), Seth Brundle ventures to penetrate into the basic material level of existence of both inanimate and living objects, including humans. After his own seemingly suc-cessful teleportation, when he feels purified and “the real me finally” (a very iro-nic statement, since – in the best of the Greek dramatic tradition – the audien- ce knows what he does not: that he is already “mixed” with the fly), his aspira- tion to “dive into the plasma pool” becomes even more urgent and vocal. The

24 The most vivid literalization of this parasitic quality of the moving pictures is found in Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome.

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simple lesson of carnal knowledge that he receives from Veronica (through sexual intercourse) is not enough for him. He shouts at her accusingly:

You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick gray fear of the flesh! Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring! […] I’m not just talking about sex and penetration, I’m talk-ing about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh!

This drive to expose and tinker with the most elemental “meat” of the phys-ical world is the very stuff that modern science is made of. Science is, no doubt, the ultimate pornographer and penetrator of our times. One could recall here Rembrandt’s famous Anatomy Lesson as an early example of “carnal pornogra-phy.” Not that before the 17th century European art was not permeated with representations of the body, often dead and/or mutilated, but Rembrandt’s painting captures modern science’s nascent interest in the “inside” of things, not merely the phenomenological surface.25 And so when Brundle’s telepod turns a baboon’s flesh inside out, and when Brundle himself turns into an ob-scene human-insect hybrid, we are still in Dr. Tulp’s mesmerized audience.

Seth Brundle turning into a fly Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdB02IufaW0

25 According to Roy Porter and Georges Vigarello (2005), the systematic study of human anatomy dates back to the 16th century, with the first anatomical theatre built in Padua in 1594.

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But Seth Brundle’s discovery of the body is simultaneously a discovery of the weak, feminine element in him. With all the superhuman strength and virile potency that he acquires as a result of his fusion with the fly, he actu-ally becomes vulnerable and loses control over his body, which now can be compared to the pregnant body of a woman. It is fair to say that one of the main anxieties that the film dramatizes is the male fear of losing control over his sexuality and body, a  lack of control that is culturally equated with the feminine. In a chapter entitled appropriately “David Cronenberg’s Anatomy Lessons” Linda Badley suggests that the protagonist “turns into a “girl” in several senses” and he represents “the male subject’s confrontation with the alien or “female” terrain of the body” (1995: 128). It is hardly surprising that the danger of “feminization” comes from a woman: it is the Eve-like Veronica who introduces Brundle to flesh, and as she does so, his innocent Adamic body happens to be penetrated by a piece of his machinery. (It is not beside the point to mention that machines are also traditionally gendered as fem-inine.) Sodomized, as it were, the male body “opens up” and becomes sus-ceptible to monstrous transformations, unruly and uncontrolled. The effect, then, is that the body “takes over” and acts out its own script whose ending no one can quite foresee – except we know it has to end tragically (as all mon-sters must end tragically for the “human” to survive). Brundle becomes Dr. Frankenstein and his monster in one, while Veronica, with the help of her former husband (an unlikable but properly manly and heroic character) and the physician who performs the abortion, manages to keep her body and her “self” in line with social norms and expectations.

Arguably, the gender dynamics depicted in The Fly can be read as, among other things, a metaphorization of Canada’s and the United States’ national and international imaginaries. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act was adopt-ed at a  time when Ronald Reagan was still in office and Rambo was inter-nationally recognized as the supreme representation of the United States as a  world actor (while the actor-turned-politician was internationally recog-nized as the Rambo of world politics).26 With such a supermasculine neighbor, liberally oriented Canada with its politics of multiculturalism could only be coded as feminine, or at least not-masculine-enough. Multiculturalism, that

26 For an insightful analysis of the politico-semiotic dimensions of Reagan’s America see Neil Renwick’s America’s World Identity (1999).

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soft liberal policy calling for respect and political correctness, has never been officially adopted in the United States. Cronenberg’s 1986 classic can thus be interpreted as a dramatization of Canada’s perception of its own insufficient virility, its vulnerability to transformation which can lead, ultimately, to an un-foreseen monstrosity. The famous (and later disproved) hypothesis that the HIV virus entered North America through a Canadian citizen, Gaëtan Dugas, referred to as Patient Zero, could only add to that sense of Canada being the “weak link” of North America, an opening through which alien bodies could infiltrate the continent.

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If the Canadian politics of multiculturalism is perceived as dangerously soft, it is because it makes room for exceptions in the liberal political system based firmly on individual rights and freedoms. In his seminal discussion of multiculturalism, Charles Taylor argues against the procedural model of lib-eralism represented, for example, by the United States, a model that is “in-hospitable to difference” (1994: 60), or even “inhuman (because suppressing identity)” and “highly discriminatory” (1994: 43). The multicultural model, on the other hand, is ready to make certain exceptions on behalf of collective goals, particularly the survival of “distinct societies” such as les Québecois. Even if such crucial pictures of the 1980s and 1990s as the US produced Alien series and The Fly share a morbid fascination with transforming bodies and/as pregnancy (particularly male pregnancy), in the former (US produced) it is usually breach of procedures that allows the enemy to penetrate the hu-man, whereas the Canadian director concentrates on the paradoxes of iden-tity and the instability of cultural and biological boundaries. In its constant management of difference, multicultural liberalism parameterizes, weighs and measures, draws a line and scissors (or censors) out, in order to ward off any potential cancerous monstrosity. Yet, for the better or worse, monsters do tend to reappear, precisely as the very embodiment of difference, because, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us, “the monster is difference made flesh” and its “very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure” (1996: 7).

Monstrosity, however scary, has one secretly longed-for effect: it erases the parameterizations of existing identities and thus releases the tensions and

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anxieties related to the hard task of sustaining and managing clear boundaries. In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s words, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural ap-paratus through which individuality is constituted and allowed” (1996: 12). At the level of sheer biological existence all human politics, all gender, or class, or ethnic differentiation dissolves into a universal “meatiness.” “Insects have no politics,” as Brundle-fly perceptively remarks. In the absence of any po-litical project, it is the body that acquires a form of agency. And as it trans-forms itself in an unpredictable direction, it cannot leave identity intact. Says Brundle: “I know what the disease wants. It wants to turn me into something else. Something that has never existed before, mutation as monstrous birth. Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.”

The disease, let us notice, is attributed with volition and an internal logic of its own. The transforming body will give birth to a new form being, com-plete with a distinct new identity – or else, with no identity at all, at least not in the human sense. Much as this prospect sounds terrifying, it is also strangely attractive: driven by desire (even if only at a molecular level), “most people would give anything” to get rid of the burden of their identity, to mix illegit-imately and promiscuously with other forms of being, to transform and hy-bridize, even if the hybrid must be perceived as a monster and rejected by the society of “proper humans.” In the end, monsters carry with them a certain promise, as Donna Haraway would have it: the promise of a much-dreaded, much-desired change. It is my contention, then, that through its various mon-sters, the Canadian Gothic entertains the dangerous fantasy of the dissolution of the (multi)cultural state apparatus that assigns individual and group iden-tities and imposes rules deemed necessary for the body politic to function properly within predefined parameters of permissible difference.

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Mark Neocleous observes that “[t]he monstrous […] points to our un-derstanding of the precariousness of human identity, the idea that human identity may be lost or invaded and that we may be, or may become, some-thing other than we are” (2005: 5). Canadians, who are said to be constantly aware of the fragility of their national and cultural identity, may be particularly

sensitive to the precariousness of all identity – human, cultural, gender, sexual or other. Arguably, by fetishizing difference, administrative multiculturalism attempts to prevent interbreeding and hybridization, stabilize the cultures and identities for their effective management. The Canadian pursuit of consensus is often argued to moderate the “dangerous character” of certain social and cultural differences which might potentially trigger conflict, violence or disin-tegration of social and political institutions. Radical difference is monstrous, but difference acknowledged within reasonable limits can be safely contained and managed. And so it seems that the goal of the politics of multiculturalism is to blunt the sharp teeth of the Monster of Difference.

In her critique of the liberal politics of multiculturalism Stephanie A. Smith wonders: “[H]ow is it that the concept of diversity has been neatly disengaged from any complex consideration of how difference comes to be at all? How is it that ‘diversity’ now appears to denote nothing more than ac-ceptable stylistic or cultural variations on the theme Human?” (1998: 189). Multiculturalism is all too easily understood as a simply hygienic practice, like hair- or nail-trimming or the excision of unwanted, potentially cancerous tis-sue in an attempt to cut the “human” to its proper shape and measure. Some artists choose to retrieve the monster from the dungeon, revive it and give it a  voice, even if, in the end, it must be killed again, or at least tamed and pacified. But, as we have learnt from Gothic narratives, the monster always re-turns. Return it must, inasmuch as the modern human, in order to constitute itself within its proper humanistic borders, must ceaselessly carve itself out of the monstrous.

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Canada is often described as a land of excess, mostly due to the vastness of its wild spaces and the harshness of its climate. Arguably, this sense of excess finds one of its manifestations in the Canadian aesthetics of the grotesque, often projected onto material bodies; such corporeal excesses, in turn, often challenge the borders of what counts as “properly human.” Thus, through what may be called the postmodern Canadian Gothic, some artists test the notion of the human, especially as it remains haunted by the ghosts of the “inhuman” or the “more-than-human.”27 That is, again, how I see Gothicism: as an anxiety over the boundaries of “humanity” and the secret desire to move beyond the “human.” My approach in all these considerations is strongly ma-terialistic: it is the materiality of body which marks the limits of (in)humanity. In this chapter I concentrate on the short fiction by Barbara Gowdy, where bodily functions and deformations serve to unsettle the boundary between the human and the inhuman, between the most “collective” form of identi-fication (humankind) and its ultimate, if unnamable, other. One of the im-portant questions these stories seem to be posing is, what monstrosity, what inhuman acts are needed to create, to delineate, a “human”?

In the stories collected in We So Seldom Look on Love bodies are endowed with a very intense presence. So much so that even emotions have a very pre-cise corporeal location: in the story “The Two-Headed Man” anger manifests itself through a pressure above the left ear, “fear is between the eyes” (1996: 118), and so on. Indeed, the materiality of things “immaterial” is clearly one

27 As Lyotard asks rhetorically and provocatively, “what if what is ‘proper’ to hu- mankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?” (1991: 2).

Fleshed Out: On Meat and Excess

2

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of Gowdy’s concerns. In the opening story “Body and Soul” the blind girl who regains eyesight holds a kitchen clock and cries in distress, “But where’s the time?” (1996: 32). Later she looks at the back of a painting of two Scotty dogs and cries again, “But where’s their backs? Where’s the back of them?” (1996: 39). In Gowdy’s stories there is no “back” to the concrete, visible world; the only way abstract things exist at all is through their material symptoms, so to speak. This rule applies to bodies and souls, as well: the body is the only site, the only medium, of mind and identity. To use a more Gothic vocabulary, ghosts and spirits exist and terrify exactly through the imprint they leave on the surface of the material world. Materiality itself is where our anxieties re-side; matter is ghostly enough, as Henry David Thoreau noticed in a famous passage, whose emotional intensity can only be compared with a most terrify-ing Gothic encounter: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, – that my body might, – but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. […] Talk of mysteries! […] The solid earth! the actual world! […] Who are we? where are we?” (2009: 64). Ultimately, it is matter, and particularly the mate-riality of the body, that haunts us. Gowdy’s protagonists are alternately fasci-nated and terrified by their own or other people’s bodies. Through her charac-ters Gowdy explores various bodily functions, surfaces, holes, hinges, exten-sions, metamorphoses, leakages, excesses, phantom limbs, etc. In a properly grotesque manner, as described classically by Mikhail Bakhtin, the body is eternally unfinished, unclosed, unstable.28 Behind this instability of the body there lies the instability of individual identity as well as the instability of the category “human” in general.

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The distinction between the human and the inhuman has been haunting us, self-declared “humans,” ever since Reason proudly declared its dominion and appropriated, or perhaps colonized, the human, while the anxieties played

28 In Bakhtin’s own words, “Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separat-ed from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world” (1984: 26).

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out in Gothic creations are a good reflection of this haunting. Significantly, at the time when the inaugural Gothic novel was published (Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, 1764), the French philosophés published their summa of all conceivable knowledge, L’Encyclopédie, a supposedly definitive systematiza-tion of “the sciences, arts, and crafts.” In his recent study of 18th-century no-tions of cruelty James A. Steintrager draws our attention to the Encyclopedia’s definition of inhumanity as a “vice that places us outside of our species, that makes us cease to be men; hardness of heart concerning which nature seems to have made us incapable” (2004: 18). This definition clearly poses a num-ber of serious questions (some of which are tackled by Steintrager). If inhu-manity places us “outside of our species,” what then places us safely within it? Simply nature? But then, does not Reason place us outside of the rest of the natural world? If humanity is, in some way, an escape from the state of pure nature, from some primary biological determinism, inhumanity seems to be closer to the essence of humanity compared to a voluntary confinement with-in narrowly defined limits of humanity grounded simply in nature. Besides, if the inhuman is that which transcends the human, should it not be considered a different, monstrous species, judged by other than human, monstrous cri-teria? (“How can men judge me?” (1996: 133), asks the two-headed man, questioning the applicability of “merely human” laws in his own, monstrous case.) Steintrager aptly observes: “The inhuman would thus be outside of the human, at least as nature intended it. But if humans are notwithstanding capa-ble of this so-called vice, is not the inhuman within the human?” (1996: 18).

In his remarks on different kinds of inhumanity Lyotard mentions “the infinitely secret one, of which the soul is a hostage” and continues to say that “the anguish is that of a mind haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it, sending it delirious but also making it think” (1991: 2). The Gothic metaphor Lyotard employs here is very symptomatic. For Lyotard, the uncanny relationship between humanity and inhumanity is dramatized most fully in education, which is a necessary process in the passing from the not-yet-fully-human, “the obscure savageness of childhood,” to what can be properly called human. But education, with all its humanizing effect, turns out to be inhuman itself:

if the name of human can and must oscillate between its native indetermination and instituted or self-instituting reason, it is the same for the name of inhuman. All ed-

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ucation is inhuman because it does not happen without constraint and terror […]. And conversely, everything in the instituted which, in the event, can cut deep with distress and indetermination is so threatening that the reasonable mind cannot fail to fear in it, and rightly, an inhuman power of deregulation. (1991: 4–5)

“Constraint and terror,” the fear of over-regulation and the fear of dereg-ulation, the tension between control and excess – these are the themes and motifs I  identify as central to the Gothic sensibility. The underlying anxiety seems to be that of the proper measure, of what is “just right” and what is “too much.” What amount of power is “just right” for the creation of the human, and when does the power become oppressive and inhuman? In an ironic turn, that which creates the human threatens to call that very humanity into ques-tion;29 that which shapes us into the proper human form, may at the same time push us beyond, towards the inhuman. At the risk of falling into a logical vicious circle, I would propose thinking inhumanity as an excess of human-ity, and thinking the human as an excess of that which (inasmuch as it goes beyond simple and pure nature) cannot be named other than inhuman. To put it more simply, the “human” is always a question of the interplay between measure and excess.

The (in)human drive toward excess (which has much to do with what we call desire) has also been noticed by Diana Fuss. In her introduction to the collection of essays on contemporary revisions of the category of humanity, she observes:

We take our title from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, where the “all too” syn-tactically locates at the center of the human some unnamed surplus – some residue, overabundance, or excess. […] this excess may be internal to the very definition of the human, an exteriority embedded inside the human as its condition of possibility. (1996: 4)

29 This logic may bring to mind Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the Schmittian idea of the “state of exception” as the institution on which the law-giver’s sovereign force is founded. As the Italian philosopher points out, “only because its validity is suspended in the state of exception can positive law define the normal case as the realm of its own validity” (1998: 17). In other words, that which institutes a rule or a law can only do so by virtue of its power to suspend that rule or law.

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It becomes clear from the above considerations that humanity (and the same could be said about inhumanity) is as much about (the drive towards) excess as it is about (the drive towards) control and containment. The mech-anism of creating the human is thus the process of cutting the monstrous ex-cess down to its proper size. But this cutting itself transpires to be inherently inhuman, which leads us to an aporia at the very heart of humanity. The excess which is “internal to the very definition of the human” must be excised to cre-ate a proper human figure, but at the same time it can never be fully excised, it always leaves a trace and creates another excess. Unless, of course, you man-age to excise “the whole thing” (if ever “the whole thing” could be said to exist, in the first place), leaving only some kind of Blakean “human abstract” behind.

William Blake never tired of praising “the road of excess” which in his philosophical vision “leads to the palace of wisdom” (1972: 150); another of his famous “Proverbs of Hell” says: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” (1972: 152). Zygmunt Bauman makes a similar point in his discussion of excess:

[…] the idea of norm would never occur and would have no content were it not for the experience of excess. In the opposition between things excessive and things “just right,” excess, contrary to its pretences, is the prior, the un-marked member. The idea of “norm” can solidify only as a sediment of excess. Were there no redundancy, the idea of usefulness would hardly be born. “Too” is lying, when it says that were the “excessive” taken away, the norm would be restored. The truth is that were the excesses out of the way, the void would yawn where the norms were supposed to reside. (2001: 86)

In Gowdy’s stories excess is, indeed, “the prior, the un-marked mem-ber.” All the attempts to cut the excess down to fit the prescribed standard necessarily fail: the norm is never fully restored and the excess is never fully eliminated. True, the norm creates a comfortable and relatively secure space. After her mother’s body is torn apart by a gunshot, Marion – the protagonist of “Flesh of My Flesh” – is told that the police “drew chalk outlines of her mother’s remains on the kitchen floor, and every once in a while Marion was struck by the strangely comforting sensation that those outlines fitted along her own skin” (1996: 193). Yet Marion is forever doomed to be haunted by

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the body’s frailty and instability: even when she opens the Bible to find the divine message, she reads the line from Luke 8:44: “And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any” (1996: 204). If the norm guarantees tempo-rary security against bodily and mental excesses, at the same time it threatens us with another kind of excess: an excess of control, an amputation so deep that it hardly leaves anything behind.

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The concept of the human is rigorously normative. It is not self-ground-ing, though: to legitimate itself, it needs grounding in a realm that transcends the human. Gowdy identifies and explores two conceptual apparatuses through which humanity, in its present form, is parameterized, normativized and defined in opposition to anything impure, monstrous and inhuman: the religious discourse and the claims of science. While the former offers an un-masked version of transcendence, the (in)human God who discursively charts the borders of humanity, the latter finds a different route to the legitimation of its version of the human. Modern science derives from the project of building “true and certain knowledge” (to quote one of its founders, Descartes) on the basis of, and with the use of, self-legitimating Reason. This objective knowl-edge, however, must in the end veer towards the inhuman, hence it constant-ly poses ethical problems, of which Gothic literature has always been keenly aware (at least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). Because it must transcend any actual human experience and strive for the inconceivable heights of more and more abstract and complex sophistication, the “objective knowledge” of modern science takes on itself the burden of inhumanity in order to find solid ground for its conceptualization of “man.”

In Gowdy’s story “The Two-Headed Man” one of the heads, Samuel, saws the other head, Simon, off, because, as he says emphatically, he seeks “to rid himself of a monstrosity” (1996: 129). In contrast with blasphemous Simon, Samuel is a Christian fundamentalist, who sees his Siamese brother as “a devil embedded in my flesh, […] an incarnation of what the scriptures enjoin every man to expunge from his being” (1996: 134). Samuel’s decapi-tation, if not self-decapitation, was to him an act of ascension: “Ascend! the

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scriptures command us. Ascend to the realm of purity!” (1996: 128). In an-other story, “Sylvie,” the trimming of a monstrous body into a proper human form is grounded in science. Initially the protagonist believes, and is believed, to have a Siamese twin, Sue, who happens to be just a pair of legs, a vagina and intestines. Then, Cinderella-style, she meets Dr. John Wilcox and her life is supposed to turn into a fairy-tale. Sue is degraded from the noble position of a separate human being (however crippled and deformed) and redefined as an autoparasite, a redundant pair of legs, an excess of flesh. On the night before what is now simply called “an amputation” Sylvie tells herself excited-ly, if not without misgivings: “I’m going to be a normal,” except she does not really know “what being a normal means” (1996: 61). In both stories proper humanity represented by a full, coherent person, is achieved through an act of cutting off, trimming, paring down. But the amputations do not seem to bring the expected results: neither Simon nor Sylvie can be finally reduced to One, they remain forever between one and two, or perhaps between one and a million. Samuel’s wound swells into “one huge hideous boil” which, he believes, “must be lanced.” To make matters worse, the narrator alternates between Samuel and Simon, which suggests that now both identities reside in one head. In “Sylvie,” we are led to believe that after the operation the protag-onist is left depressed. We do not know the cause of this depression, but we can speculate that it has something to do with Sue’s potential for unrestrained sexual pleasure, which has probably been amputated together with the bodily organ in which it dwelt. It is clear that Sylvie and Dr. Wilcox were not meant to live happily ever after.

It is legitimate to say, I  think, that the normative force of the religious idea of purity has, in modern times, been largely translated into the normative force of “the laws of nature”; or, more precisely, into the force of the norma-tive interpretations of scientifically defined laws of nature. Gowdy’s charac-ters, however, are often aware of “the frailty of natural laws” (1996: 222–3), as one of them puts it. The body defies what many of us would believe are stable natural laws, the hard bottom of our biological existence. What is nat-ural, after all? How natural, for example, is the artificial chimp mother made up of a “felt-covered, formula-dispensing coat hanger” (1996: 213)? To what extent do the artificial arms mentioned at the end of “Body and Soul” become a part of one’s own “real” body? Or how natural is the surgically construct-

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ed penis in “Flesh of My Flesh”? What kinds of extensions and prostheses do our bodies and our identities have? What physical or mental organs get amputated, with or without our consent, with or without our knowledge? Just as new territories are found (to be conquered and colonized, no doubt), other territories are lost. “New territory” (1996: 66), says Dr. Wilcox, with a clear colonial undertone, after he deflowers Sue, but “technically speaking” not Sylvie.30 He is even more flabbergasted to learn that Sylvie experienced two orgasms, “one in each place” (1996: 67), which begs the question of the proper “site” of identity: would it not be fair to say that the capacity to expe-rience an orgasm constitutes a separate individual? (After the surgery Sylvie probably loses both her capacity for orgasm and her phenomenal memory; the excess that has been removed and turned to waste proves to have been crucial for Sylvie’s, or rather Sylvie-Sue’s experience of herself/themselves.) Many other characters discover (or are discovered by) new forms of desire, new bodily sensations, new kinds of love: Emma the nymphomaniac, Ali the exhibitionist, Matt the necrophile’s lover. Bodies and identities are as unsta-ble and unpredictable as nature itself with its frail and temporary laws.

Nature is all about excess, it breeds monsters, it allows all sorts of illegiti-mate pairings, combinations and fusions. If nature teaches us a lesson, it is not a lesson in morality, but rather in what I call “promiscuous mixing.” Anything can connect with anything else and even worse: anything desires to connect with anything else. The so-called “natural” will mix with the so-called “artifi-cial,” body parts will be planted into other bodies, prostheses will be attached and detached, lives will mix up with stories, stories will mix up with other sto-ries, living bodies will mix with dead bodies and so on, and so forth. Gowdy’s stories reflect this fascination with “promiscuous mixing,” with how things connect, mix and merge, how they plug into each other or unplug and dis-connect: we find here bodies that are fragmented, limbs and organs detached and then recombined; we find prosthetic arms in “Body and Soul,” a  liver transplant in “The Presbyterian Crosswalk,” Beth’s fragmented dolls (1996: 81), “a  man’s hands not attached to any particular man” (1996: 98), a  hy-

30 The motif of the erotic/sexual interest that hides behind science’s apparent neutrality and disinterestedness will re-emerge in my readings of the pornographic elements in the work of Bruce LaBruce (chapter 6) and the Richard Burton character in John Greyson’s Zero Patience (chapter 7).

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brid partner made up of two different men (1996: 110), “breasts like Picasso eyes” (1996: 105), etc. The stories themselves display their “hybridized” na-ture: they are made up of various disparate parts and voices.31 Even if Sylvie controls the narrative in the story properly named after her, Sue is not com-pletely silenced: the legs communicate, they kick, fret, and tingle, they have an urge for sex. Sue wants to speak, she wants to communicate her monstrous knowledge to the world in whatever way available to her. Similarly Simon and Samuel compete for control over their shared body and their shared narrative in “The Two-Headed Man.” A narrative seems to be always actively involved in both instituting a norm and breeding monsters.

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Gowdy’s monsters know they are monsters. Not that they are born with that knowledge: before going to school “the last thing Sylvie suspected was that the legs were alarming. There was nobody to tell her” (1996: 45). Once they recognize themselves as monsters, they seem to silently acquiesce to the norm that labels them abnormal. “Obviously, making love to corpses isn’t normal,” admits the nameless necrophiliac girl in “We so Seldom Look on Love,” yet she remains strangely unapologetic about her practices. Sylvie al-most unquestioningly accepts the fairy-tale scenario in which her future hap-piness is to be guaranteed by the amputation of the redundant pair of legs and her marriage to Dr. Wilcox. These monsters do not strive to change the norm: they either aspire to the state of normality through some process of adjust-ment, or else they agree to live outside the norm, at the scarcely charted pe-ripheries of humanity. They may even accept their monstrous status as a form of sacrifice; as Sylvie says on seeing a perfectly beautiful newborn baby, “it was all right being deformed if deformity had to exist for there to be such per-fection” (1996: 55). However unstable or arbitrary, the norm is there and it

31 In her essay “’The business of invoking humanity’: Barbara Gowdy and the Fiction Gone (A)stray” María Jesús Hernáez Lerena relates the question of connectivity or “jointed-ness” to the short story genre in general, and the grotesque mode of writing in particular: the literary grotesque “shows parts that have mysteriously or arbitrarily come together and apart” (2003: 717) and it “displaces our standardized ways to connect adjoining parts into a whole, which we then tend to call ‘identity’ or ‘story’” (2003: 716).

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exercises its real power over our minds and bodies. Much like ghosts, it exists only through the material effects it produces. And it does work: it cuts, shapes, directs, represses, selects, arranges. Gowdy makes visible the largely unno-ticed workings of “normality.” Indeed, it is only appropriate that monsters, etymologically related to “demonstration,” should make something visible, something that would “normally” be considered unspeakable and obscene. Sylvie’s mother is outraged at the idea of traveling freak shows which offer “meat on display” to curious audiences (1996: 53). But Sylvie herself is quite happy to join one of such shows and she feels more at home there than in the other, more modern version of the freak show: the operation room in a clinic.

One might hypothesize here that the uncanny and blurred line separat-ing the human from the animal coincides with the uncertain distinction be-tween the postulated “meat with soul” and the shameless “meat on display.” Under no circumstances should man be confused with meat. No wonder, then, that when human flesh becomes food (for animals or, even worse, for “fellow” human beings), most people will see it as a monstrosity and respond with abject fascination. It is not a coincidence that in most cultural traditions monsters feed on human flesh. The capacity to become food does not agree very well with the idea of “meat with soul”; as one of Gowdy’s characters ob-serves, the food chain is “obscene” (1996: 164). Human beings (at least as construed in the Western liberal humanist tradition) refuse to recognize “the law of the food chain” as reciprocal, i.e. they refuse to display themselves as meat, which would place them at the level of obscenity. Indeed, Gowdy’s bod-ies are obscene, not to say pornographic, in that they constantly reaffirm their materiality against any attempts at denying it. But this corporeal obscenity is what “we humans” share with the rest of the material world: Ali the exhi-bitionist discovers that display is “the most inaugural and genuine of all de-sires” (1996: 111), a desire that seems to underlie the whole material world, more basic than a sexual act. It is perhaps the rules of “human modesty” that prevent us from seeing this unrestrained obscenity of the world, the elemen-tal and universal “meat” that craves for display. Emma’s father from the sto-ry “Lizards” is well aware of that obscenity: he subscribes to the American Journal of Proctology “for its dazzling, full-colour photos of the colon” which “you’d think were of outer space” (1996: 162).

Gowdy’s monsters know that they are monsters not only because they have acquired and internalized a  sense of “normality,” but also because they suffer from another excess, an excess of knowledge. They know too much – that is, perhaps, why they must die. They have access to illicit carnal knowledge, which should remain hidden, buried safely in the unconscious. Gothicism, of course, always attempts to dig that knowledge out, for better or worse, and I  agree here with those critics (like Mark Edmundson) who see Freud’s opus as a profoundly Gothic narrative. The subject – if it wants to be a good and healthy subject – must not remember that which constitutes it, just as the norm must not remember that which had to be excised to insti-tute and legitimate itself as norm. It is this constitutive forgetting, this bliss-ful non-knowledge, that Gowdy brings to light. “They know,” Sylvie thinks “horrified,” referring to her extra pair of legs which are to be amputated soon. “They know. They are licentious” (1996: 68). At the same time she fears that along with her redundant legs her memory will disappear, too. But what can the legs know? How can they know? What memory, what knowledge lies bur-ied in the flesh? Whatever they know, it is certainly not the knowledge dreamt out in Descartes’s head, the knowledge based on “clear and distinct” concepts corresponding to clear and distinct objects. It is the knowledge of monsters.

It is clear that Barbara Gowdy’s stories can be placed firmly in the context of the ongoing debate about our concepts of humanity and in-/nonhumani-ty. Her particular contribution falls into the categories of the Gothic and the grotesque, which dramatize our anxieties over the boundaries of (in)human-ity as they relate to excessive forms of corporeality and sexuality. The stories expose the forces of normativity, which strive to create functional human “units” through cutting and trimming, a  forced forgetting, an imposed and cruel coherence. The rules of coherence and propriety are never fixed, howev-er: the boundaries of “just right” turn out to be arbitrary and unstable, which condemns “proper human subjects” to perennial uncertainty and leaves them vulnerable to the danger of waking up one day in the excessive and monstrous body of a Kafkian bug.

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“Posthumanity” made its triumphant entrance into the academic, as well cul-tural, scene over the 1990s, largely as a response to the postmodern critiques of (or explicit calls for the abolition of) the Enlightenment project of Man. It is clearly indebted to Nietzsche, for whom the death of God entailed the death – or the overcoming – of Man. In the postmodern setting this line of thinking concentrated largely on the critique of the modern liberal humanist subject, the mainstay of rationality, free will, agency, political and economic liberty, etc. The spectacular developments of science and technology also contribut-ed to the sense that the traditional notion of the human was critically inade-quate. Technophiles began to prophesy the end of the human as we know it, not just in terms of philosophical definitions, but very literally and physically: we are all turning into cyborgs, they would assert, moving to another level of evolution, possibly with a view to discarding the body completely in the future. Much of this angst mixed with hope was fuelled by the postcolonial framework of the second half of the 20th century. The massive colonial enter-prise launched at the end of the 15th century brought Europeans in contact with new “beings,” whose precise status in relation to humanity was yet to be established. This, of course, forced Europeans themselves to reflect upon their own humanity, which finally led to a more or less stabilized concept of Man (clearly Eurocentric, yet often claimed as universal) by the early eighteenth century. No wonder, then, that the collapse of the colonial world order caused a new crisis in the definitions of the human, threatening the Enlightenment idealization with various postcolonial “hybrids.”

To some proponents (particularly to techno-oriented trans-/posthu-manists), posthumanism is an ontological claim: human nature itself, or the

Performing the (Non)Human

3

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human mode of existence, is transforming. We may argue about the actual phase of that transformation, but the direction seems clear and inevitable. To others, the claim is more modest and involves a revaluation of the Eurocentric notions of the human that have dominated much of the world over last cen-turies; it is just a particular historical notion of Man that is changing. The use of the term may be descriptive and/or proscriptive: it may be a strategic ges-ture that calls for a redefinition of the human in the face of the felt failure of the Enlightenment project (combined, as it certainly was, with the colonial project). Thus, posthumanism may be understood as a new form of human-ism, perhaps a democratization of that notion and a critical investigation of its boundaries and regulatory uses. Whether a radicalization of humanism, or a new philosophy in its stead, posthumanism certainly calls for a reposition-ing of the human vis-à-vis various nonhumans, such as animals, machines, gods and demons, as well as for a careful investigation of the Eurocentric no-tions of the human which have been granting “humanity” to certain subjects only provisionally (cf. Brydon 2007: 3).

On the other hand, posthumanism may be treated with suspicion by those groups that, in more or less recent history, have been subjected to var-ious forms of dehumanization (due to their skin color, for example). It may be seen as another trendy “post-” formation, in line with post-racialism, post-gender or post-sexuality. In an impassioned book on the currency of race in today’s world, David Theo Goldberg investigates carefully what is at stake in the general calls to erase race. While the goal seems noble – a world without race as a category that polices people’s lives, experiences and social engagements – “we are being asked to give up on race before and without addressing the legacy, the roots, the scars of racisms’ histories, the weights of race. We are being asked to give up on the word, the concept, the category, at most the categorizing. But not, pointedly not, the conditions for which those terms stand” (2009: 21). One of the dangers of this antiracialism is that “[d]ehumanizing is no longer so readily recognizable when “the human” is either only recognized as those like us or the limit conception is so porous, so neb-ulous, as to make no one sure of who counts and who does not, of who is first person and who avatar” (2009: 361). The notion of the posthuman may thus be employed to cover up the instances in which humanity is painfully denied to certain people, or granted to them “on principle,” but without any social or

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political commitment. The erasure of the category human, it could be argued, works for the benefit of those who occupy in the “family of man” privileged positions. Paraphrasing bell hooks, it’s easy to give up your human status if you got one, if it has never been problematized for you, if it just goes without saying.32

As a black, immigrant, Marxist, lesbian, woman writer (I  juxtapose the terms “lesbian” and “woman” on purpose, given the sometimes troubled re-lationship between the two) Dionne Brand is keenly aware of the legacies of various forms of dehumanization. As a writer and a university professor, she participates in the critical investigation and contestation of “human history” and “human nature.” In our post-Derridean times it is a commonplace to say that every professor is (to some extent) a  writer, just as every writer is (to some extent) a professor, which is not to conflate the two terms or deny the distinctive roles that professors and writers usually play in social life. Both weave the fabric of the textual and conceptual universe in which we are ful-ly immersed. Even if writers are more commonly regarded as repositories of experience, whereas professors as repositories of knowledge, the distinction between experience and knowledge escapes clear demarcations: there can be no knowledge without experience (and experiment), just as, arguably, there can be no experience without knowledge (at least the self-knowledge of being an experiencing subject). In other words, if knowledge is understood as sedi-mentation and systematization of experience, the way we experience also de-pends immensely on structures of knowledge, on how we know the world and ourselves in the world. The difference could also be rephrased with reference to the classical terms of Aristotelian narratology: writers could be described as more mimetic and imaginative in that they enact experience as well as in-vite novel ways of experiencing through writing, whereas professors are more diagetic and discursive in that they attempt to communicate ideas at a level abstracted from direct experience; writers are more about showing, profes-sors more about telling. Yet neither of these “techniques” seems sufficient in itself; no wonder that some scholars who see the limitations of academic modes of textualizing and conceptualizing the world decide to complement

32 “It never surprises me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying ‘yeah, it’s easy to give up iden-tity, when you got one’” (hooks 1990: 28).

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their production of knowledge with authoring literary texts, while some writ-ers for whom literature has an important educational and self-reflexive dimen-sion take up university positions. In their production of texts and ideas, both groups move inevitably between the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract, the word and the idea; but also: between the known and that which is only starting to emerge as knowledge, from the first stirrings of expe-rience, perception and realization.

It could be argued, further, that every “body of knowledge” entails or projects a world of its own, an Umwelt, to use Jakob von Uexküll’s famous ter-m;33 and that every “body of knowledge” needs a living material body. I am re-ferring here to the mostly phenomenological and feminist tradition of think-ing about knowledge as (always already) situated, embodied, “in-history-ed.” From this insight one could go as far as to claim that the idea of “one world” (so prevalent in a time defined primarily through globalization) is somewhat suspicious and derived from the universalistic humanist framework that post-human thought attempts to challenge. A  posthumanist perspective, then, might posit instead a  multiplicity of world-knowledges and, consequent-ly, a multiplicity of “lived worlds.” This is, indeed, the starting point for my reading of Brand’s short story “Blossom.” By presenting a radical experience (radical, that is, in the context of a modern Western socio-political space), the story may be read as advocating a multimundialism, i.e. a de-hegemonization and de-homogenization of the notion of one world inhabited by one human-ity with a fundamentally unified human experience. In this sense my reading is a posthuman one in that it “aims to open up possibilities for alternatives to the constraints of humanism as a system of values” (Herbrechter and Callus 2008: 107). It certainly does not promote a solipsistic atomization of subjects nor a dehumanization; rather, it examines the “catalogue of assumptions and values about “what it means to be human” (Herbrechter and Callus 2008: 95), the way the appellation “human” is invoked in the present global regime, so indebted to the humanistic universalism of the Enlightenment.

33 An Umwelt may be defined as a “subjective-self-world” (cf. Uexküll 1987: 148) or the “felt” world as it emerges through an organism’s semiotic interactions with the world that surrounds it.

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*

Blossom is a black, old, mad woman, an immigrant, an obeah, a speak-easy owner – enough to make her a figure of abjection, fear and fascination in the Western, specifically Canadian, context. From the moment she arrives in Toronto, she occupies a liminal position not only in relation to the category of citizen, but also that of human. Probably the first thing that strikes the reader is the heavily non-standard English employed by the narrator, which is one of the strategies of challenging “the fixity of Western hegemonic positions,” as Charlotte Sturgess has it (2003: 61). “No language is neutral,”34 as we know: Western societies invest heavily in the “proper” use of language: eloquence still serves as a measure of education, intelligence, national or ethnic belong-ing, and even humanity itself. No wonder, then, that a denial of a proper lan-guage proved to be a useful tool in the centuries-long project of dehuman-izing the colonized other. With her mingling of the tenses, disregard for the subject and verb agreement (in person and number), and avoidance of pos-sessive forms and objective pronouns, Brand’s narrator poses a threat to the prevailing Western conceptualizations of “objective” time and space, separate “persons” and their interconnections, as well as the relationships between the human and the nonhuman. Charlotte Sturgess points out the shifting degrees of opacity and transparency that characterize the language of the narration and concludes that “language itself partakes of the radical “shape-shifting” going on in the story, as subjectivities merge and distinctions between the natural and the supernatural collapse” (2003: 61). In my reading, these shifts indicate not only a critique of a unified, consistent, self-contained subject pro-moted by the Western subjectivity regime, but also a critique of the Euclidean concept of a universal and uniform space, in which local distinctions do not amount to much. Just as language is to be understood as a medium – with its materiality, density, opacity, etc. – so is space. What is more, if the Euclidean space corresponds to the space of writing (a reproducible inscription that can travel noiselessly through time and space), Brand’s narrator’s sense of space is much closer to an embodied “hereness,” or a  closeness, presupposed by orality as narrative style.

34 It is the title of Brand’s acclaimed collection of poems (1998).

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Indeed, critics have repeatedly stressed the importance of spatial cate-gories in Brand’s work, particularly the relationship between a “here” and an “elsewhere.” In part, this may be the writer’s deliberate dialogue with, and a  problematization of, Northrop Frye’s famous “Where is here?” question (Frye: 222), so central, according to him, in the Canadian literary imagina-tion. Brand asks this question again in a new context, in a world undergoing rapid diasporization and globalization, even as it continues to struggle with its complex postcolonial legacies in particular localities and particular bodies. Diana Brydon, for instance, states that “[f]rom the beginning, she [Brand] has stressed the ways in which lives lived in one place are implicated as much in what happens elsewhere as in what happens here” (2007: 3). This presuppos-es a notion of geographic, political and social space that is not simply based on a two-way relation between the local and the global, but rather imagines space, in keeping with an ecological paradigm, as an endless field of densities and forces in which every embodied locality is specific, but simultaneously always related though a series of mediations to every other locality. Cultures, like people, do travel, but the travelling is never simply repositioning a stable element from place A to place B in uniform space; it is, rather, a constant pro-cess of translation, mediation and transmutation. Like bodies, identities or sexualities, Brand’s “spaces and geographies always already fluid and floating” (Sarnelli 2011: 131) and the only movement is the deterritorializing move-ment of desire.

This “ecological” sense of space could also be applied to the space of hu-manity, i.e. the imaginary space in which humans can claim to be humans. It should not be understood as uniform space, simply divided into geographic quarters, as some prophets of globalism see it. Being human means different things to different people in different places. As people (and cultures) trav-el, humanness must necessarily face a  never-ending chain of translations and hybridizations. If some kind of universalism could still be attached to the notion of humanity, an apt metaphor for it should be the Earth’s atmos-phere and ecosystem rather than a flattened plane inhabited by interchange-able and fundamentally identical subjects, abstracted from local conditions and interrelations. The “local,” however, should not have a  fixed referent, it should be construed as infinitely scalable between micro and macro lev-els (in her dream Blossom inhabits a  place “big one minute, […] small,

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next minute, as a pin head”; 1992: 38–9). I agree with Brydon’s statement that “Brand’s writing counters versions of humanism in which white privi-lege constitutes full humanity, assigning racialized others only provision-al acceptance within its parameters” (2007: 3); the critic then borrows the term “planetary humanism” from David Scott to describe Brand’s rear- ticulations of local, national and global citizenship (2010: 7). It might be more fruitful, however, to substitute the notion of a planetary humanism with that of a multihumanism. Not only would the latter term help discard the un-desirable baggage of the colonizing and hegemonizing uses of the human, it would also emphasize the irreducibility and unfixability of every instance of “being human.” Multihumanism would not, in any case, aim to archive a fi-nite number of variations “on the theme Human” (Smith 1998: 189), but it would be constantly alert to any new formations and configurations arising within the space of the human; ultimately, it would point in the direction of an even more daring notion, that of “ecohumanism.”

Such is the case, I believe, with Blossom. She is much more than a “uni-versal human subject with some local colour” imagined, arguably, by Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism. (The word “colour” sounds sadly ironic in this context, and it almost inevitably presupposes the apparently neutral whiteness as the non-colour of universalism.) Her transformation “from serv-ant to goddess,” as Renk puts it (1999: 105), happens through madness and possession, i.e. a violent dismantling of the forms of subjecthood offered to her by the Westernized, globalized, postcolonial world. What motivates her (even beyond her conscious intentions) is accumulated rage: against male domination, white moral ugliness, suffering (which seems almost genetically inherited), the cage of victimization, the forces of social coercion, and ulti-mately – against dehumanization practiced in the name of a certain hegemo- nic concept of the human. One could go as far as to claim that temporary madness is a necessary (if dangerous) step on the way to breaking free from the stifling normativism of the notion of the human as a rational being, sus-tained through centralized self-control, self-management, and self-regulation. Blossom breaks out of the shell with a force that threatens her very being as a subject. That the source of her self-empowerment comes from the non-hu-man Other is of utmost significance: her power, agency, and dignity are not granted by any socio-political regime; they are derived from the very margin-

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ality she inhabits, from her own story. She moves from the less-than-human to the more-than-human, from victim to warrior, from reactive to proactive. Interestingly, each significant step on her way to self-empowerment involves a displacement or a decentring of her subject position. The first time she ex-plodes into frenzy, she keeps shouting “Make me a weapon in thine hand, oh Lord” (1992: 33); the second bout of madness is also characterized by a loss of a subjective self: she hears somebody scream and only after a while does she realize the scream comes from her (1992: 37). But even at a less intense moment, a  moment of making a  conscious decision about her life (getting a man), she “jumps” out of her-self: “Something tell she to stop and witness the scene” (1992: 35). Progress is only possible through acts of transgression, crossing or even losing boundaries (cf. Renk 1999: 103-5), releasing the con-scious grip on one’s identity and allowing oneself to be “possessed” by an idea or a spiritual force transcending one’s present self. The act of transgression, says Taussig in a different context, is “in itself fraught with the perils of inde-terminacy constitutive of Being no less than threatening it with dissolution” (1993: 126). In a sense (definitely in the Western sense) Blossom is no longer self-possessed: by giving up self-control and self-possession she gains self-em-powerment, as beautiful and frightening as her “freeness dance.”

Jumping is what the story begins with: “Blossom’s was jumping tonight” (1992: 31). The form of the protagonist’s name causes instant confusion: why the possessive case? By shifting the expected nominative to the genitive, is the sentence supposed to usher us into the problematic of “possession” and/or indeterminable subjectivity? Should it be read as “Blossom’s body”? Movement and dance are certainly an important trope in the story, a phys-ical manifestation of the “war” that the protagonist wages against Suffering and the world that produces it, but also an expression of beauty and freedom. Peggy Phelan has remarked perceptively that “[i]n moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of the body, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy” (1993: 150), where metaphor stands for the order of stable and reproducible identities, whereas metonymy stands for contigu-ity, movement, an escape from the rigid logic of identitarian categorizations. She goes on to assert: “In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of ‘presence.’ But in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something

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else – dance, movement, sound, character, ‘art’” (1993: 150). In the case of Blossom the “something else” is not so much art as the non-human Other, the spiritual force that allows her to perform her being, her more-than-hu-man self with freedom and beauty. Through dance Blossom’s body loses its initial fixity and governability only to become a body “under erasure,” clearly present (how else could the dance be performed?), yet always on the point of falling, disintegrating, erasing itself in the trance-like performance. Just as she experiences a loss of her body in her dream (“she feel as if she don’t have no hand, no foot and she don’t need them”; 1992: 39), so she loses herself in the grotesque dance she performs for the speakeasy patrons, “dancing on one leg all night, a calabash holding a candle on she head” (1992: 41). What a display of fragile equilibrium, of strength and possession! Blossom’s dancing body is a body she no longer fully possesses; rather it is possessed by, or shared with, the goddess Oya. In this way Brand’s character falsifies the Western claim that one body can only host one self (which is not so distant from the one nation–one state equation). If the dancing body is metonymic of presence, as Peggy Phelan puts it, we can never be sure what/whom exactly Blossom’s body “presences” for us in her dance.

*

To what extent Blossom actually is Oya? Possession explodes the Western economy of identity, being one with oneself. Sometimes Blossom and Oya merge, at other times they remain distinct. In this case, therefore, identifica-tion follows the logic of mimesis: identity “has to be seen not as a thing-in-itself but as a relationship woven from mimesis and alterity within [post-]co-lonial fields of representation” (Taussig 1993: 133). What is more, Blossom’s dance is certainly not performed for entertainment, but as ritual. This turn to magic (Blossom also becomes a healer) may be seen as a turn to primitivism with its extensive use of mimesis, as elaborated by Michael Taussig. Following Walter Benjamin, Taussig asserts that modernity as an “age of mechanical re-production” witnessed a resurgence of the mimetic faculty, richly represented in “primitive” cultures. Mimesis itself is broadly explained as the compulsion to become the Other, while the mimetic faculty is defined as

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the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mi-mesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power (1993: xiii).

Mimesis is thus closely related to “what was once called sympathetic magic” (1993: xviii), it fuses the copy and the original, thus undermining the primacy of the original and the derivational character of the copy. As far as Blossom is concerned, through mimesis she becomes a  copy/a  representa-tion of Oya, and consequently she acquires the goddess’s power. But it could also be said that she actually becomes Oya, at least on certain nights, when Oya “comes to her.” She is Oya and she is not; sometimes she becomes the thing she represents, at other times she does not, which of course undermines the very logic of representation and identity. During her night dance the distinc-tion between the two entities disappears, Blossom loses her human individua- lity. Copy and original are never stable in their positions, they exist in a con-tinuous tension, in mutual co-definition, in the open space of mimesis. It is the material body of the priestess that provides the necessary “substance” to the spirit and is thereby invested with magic powers; but it would be equally true to say that it is Oya that becomes a representation of Blossom’s rage and her mental victory over Suffering, and it is this very appropriation of the goddess’s image that is the source of Blossom’s strength and fearlessness.

Blossom’s turn to Oya could easily be misread as a  return to a  myth-ical past, a  restoration of an original and authentic spirituality that stands for a prelapsarian (i.e. precolonial) paradise. However, it seems more plau-sible that, if anything, it is a return to the power of mimesis. Blossom does, of course, draw on her experience of the past (which seemed irretrievable, unusable, dead), yet the past is not a “tradition” to be reproduced, but a force to be exercised; it is not a paradise lost and regained, but an alternative, an elsewhere (let us remember, however, that every elsewhere is also, on a differ-ent perceptual scale, a “here”). Through dance Blossom re-enacts the spiritual drama that merges her own experience, the collective experience of black people and the mythical struggle between Oya the warrior and Suffering. She thus escapes the “organized mimesis” (Adorno and Horkheimer’s term quoted by Taussig) of modern civilization where racism is a “manifestation

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of what is essential to modern civilization’s cultural apparatus, namely con-tinuous mimetic repression – understanding mimesis as both the faculty of imitation and the deployment of that faculty in sensuous knowing, sensuous Othering” (Taussig 1993: 68). But before she eventually escapes the fossil-ized structures of racial degradation and abjection that have been pressing her into her “proper” social place, Blossom tries out several other possibilities: she immigrates to Canada, like many other Trinidadians; she takes the menial jobs available to “people like her”; she attempts to improve her status through education; after the doctor’s attempted rape, she resorts to a street protest, in the best tradition of the civil rights movement; she decides to get a man because “all she girl pals had one” (1992: 35). All of these are more familiar avenues to dignity and self-empowerment in a modern socio-political regime, but none proves effective in her case. It is another plot, another drama – the one happening as if beside her, beyond her conscious control – that finally takes over her previous self (could we see this as an ironic act of reverse colo-nization?) and creates the Blossom-Oya hybrid. Only the violence of spiritual possession seems capable of countering the violence of the organized mime-sis that produces racism.

Blossom’s empowerment does not come from any social or political institution, certainly not from the State. It is the politics of recognition, ac-cording to Charles Taylor (1994), that underlies the modern idea of multi-culturalism as practiced, for example, by the Canadian regime. This is what Blossom rejects and transcends: rather than claim an authentic identity that needs recognition and protection, she develops a different route to self-affir-mation which can do without the Western identitarian logic. In the end, it is not the good old-fashioned civil rights method that she endorses; rather, she starts somewhere else, from a different economy of the self. She succeeds in freeing herself from the economic and sexual exploitation, as well as the stifling definitions of being a “proper” human subject, by becoming Other and carving a space (or a heterotopia) that is beyond the reach of the State apparatus, however well-meaning the State attempts or professes to be (sig-nificantly, most of her activity takes place at night, as if “out of sight” of the State, in an obscure place only known to “those who had to know”; 1992: 42). Her performance of the human is embarrassingly, terrifyingly, beautifully different from our received notions of humanity. It is “primitivistic.” Hers,

I think, is a shift from metaphor to metonymy, from reproduction to mimesis, from recognition to magic, from representation to medium, from human to transhuman, where trans- does not refer to the technological enhancement of human capacities (as it most often does), but to the ability to go outside of the little box that modernity has called “human.” From my (tentatively) posthumanist perspective, to “be” human is to constantly perform human by becoming – or blossoming into – Other.

Thus, Canada’s policy of multiculturalism seems to have little to offer to Blossom-Oya. Multiculturalism applies to, as well as demands, the liberal hu-manist subjects of the modern western political regime, while Blossom is part of a different grouping, a different (postsecular?) constituency which involves the world of spirits, goddesses and hybrids. Undoubtedly, at a certain level multiculturalism may be conducive to the empowering of racialized subjects, but at another level it stabilizes the category of race and turns human differ-ence into a museum, a catalogue, an archive. Blossom, on the other hand, is and is not woman, black, human; there is no measure for her, she will not be turned into a stable unit, she dwells in excess. She is authentic in being Oya’s copy, in becoming Other, rather than claim an authentic “indigenous” iden-tity, a pre-defined essential truth about self that seeks recognition. Her truth is always in the making, always unpredictable; not detached from history, but never fully determined by it; a blossoming of self-creation which draws from the beyond-human, the more-than-human, the nonhuman in order to peren-nially create and perform the human.

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Over the last few decades, especially since the 1976 publication of Margot Northey’s The Haunted Wilderness, “Gothicism” has become one of the key concepts through which Canadian literature and culture are interpreted. This “Canadian Gothic” is sometimes referred to as the “Northern Gothic” to con-trast it with the “Southern Gothic” customarily associated with the literature of the southern states of the USA; however, the idea of a Northern Gothic in-vites a broader perspective that would include, for instance, the Gothic tradi-tions of the Scandinavian countries. The constitutive elements of the Gothic tradition in Canada are often said to include, among other things, the pre-cariousness of Canadian national identity, the menacing presence of extreme natural conditions, the dangerous closeness of Canada’s powerful neighbour and the ghostly presence of the “silenced” others, such as First Nations, im-migrants, women and people of queer sexuality. In his introduction to the already quoted book Gothic Canada, Justin D. Edwards explains the Canadian Gothic through “the prevalent fragmentation of subjectivity at the heart of ‘Canadianness’” (2005: xiv) and links it to the country’s colonial past and its multicultural present. More generally, the critic goes on to assert,

Gothic discourse in Canada arises out of a language of terror, panic and anxiety. It is a discourse of regulation, establishing cultural modes of conduct by constructing taboos and regulating desires. It imagines the signs of depravity to be readable and attempts to contain that which is depraved, even while it recognizes the impossibi- lity of such a task. It is a language that articulates, or simply gestures toward, deeply buried anxieties, which produce a fear of contamination once those anxieties have been unearthed. (2005: xvii)

Bodies, Boundaries, and the Death Drive

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Edwards, together with other scholars, has been criticized for too hast-ily declaring the Gothic mode to be the defining mode of Canadian culture, rather than one textual mode among many others, such as the (post)colonial and (post)national discourses, the documentary tradition, First Nations and immigrant literary forms. Moreover, it is a mode clearly rooted in the cultural traditions of the white (particularly Anglophone) majority, and thus elevating it to the position of a “core” discourse in Canadian literature commits the same old sin of claiming hegemony for white Anglophones and obliterating, or at least diminishing, other cultural traditions. On the other hand, it can be argued that cultures and cultural forms of expression influence and permeate each other, so that there is nothing improper in applying the Gothic category to “minority” literatures as well. Indeed, the very multiplicity of different iden-titarian positions present in Canadian culture only feeds the Gothic sensibili-ty, so deeply concerned with the inability to find a unified and stable identity.

*

It is a commonplace to say that Margaret Atwood has employed Gothic modes and conventions from the beginning of her literary career, so much so that the term “Atwood (or Atwoodian) Gothic” has acquired a  critical currency in its own right. Alice Munro’s stories, usually set in some Ontario small town, have also been classified as (Southern) Ontario Gothic. Another Ontario writer, Isabel Huggan, though less commonly associated with Gothicism, blends autobiography and fiction and employs minute realistic observation (in keeping with the documentary tradition in Canadian writing) to write about “the lives of girls and women” (to use Munro’s phrase). As women who write primarily about women, the three Canadian authors can also be said to belong to the “Female Gothic” tradition, in a sense indebted to Ellen Moers’s first use of the term in the mid-1970s, but necessarily much more nuanced now, after several decades on the academic market, and par-ticularly after the post-structural paradigm shift in the humanities. With the rise of anti-essentialist gender studies in the 1990s, distinguishing the “fe-male” Gothic mode from the “male” one is at least problematic and must be done with caution. Still, however elusive and debatable, the term Female Gothic continues to prove useful and intellectually productive, “a flexible and

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recognizable term for an area which is if anything gaining in vigour and com-plexity,” as Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace conclude in their introduction to a special Female Gothic issue of Gothic Studies (2004: 6).

The (Anglo-)Canadian context seems particularly apt for discussions of the Female Gothic, given the strong presence of female voices in Anglophone Canadian literature from early on. It is not a coincidence that in the Afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie Atwood claims the nineteenth-century au-thor as the paradigmatic “personality” for past and present Canadians, with her ambivalent or even “schizophrenic” feelings about a  predictable set of Canadian concerns (wilderness, patriotism and so forth; 1970: 62). Should this ambivalence in itself be not Gothic enough, Atwood adds to it Moodie’s ghostly afterlife, her pervading spectral presence in modern-day Canada. Arguably, the Female Gothic tradition in its Canadian version is more often than not closely attuned to the quotidian rather than the extraordinary or the grandiose: it does not need to rely on the hackneyed props, settings and con-ventions of classical Gothic narratives, but rather it thrives on the familiar, the ordinary and the everyday. Moreover, if one of the stock motifs of early Female Gothic fiction was the essentially innocent and virtuous female fig-ure victimized by a tyrannical male figure, the feminist-inflected narratives of Atwood, Munro and Huggan escape that traditional “victimology,” without denying the power differential that places most men in the position of social and cultural domination and most women in the position of social and cultur-al subjugation.

Conventional Gothic plots involve a house (classically an old castle with secret chambers and underground passages) which often becomes a woman’s prison. In view of the nineteenth-century conceptualizations of femininity as intrinsically linked with the domestic sphere, these plots seemed an apt meta-phor for women’s social position. Not surprisingly, then, much of the “Female Gothic” tradition coincides with what might be termed the Domestic Gothic, that is, the kind of narrative that focuses on the home and the family. The ex-aggerated castle, typically found in conventional Gothic fiction, can be seen as a hyperbole for an “ordinary” house, with essentially the same power rela-tions, the same “unspeakable mysteries” and equally extreme mental states. The home is thus exposed as a fundamentally Gothic space, and the family as a fundamentally Gothic institution; this is where monsters and madmen are

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bred. With time, the grotesque excesses of Gothic fiction gave way to more re-alistic representations. As Helene Meyers points out in her study of contem-porary femicidal narratives, today “the Gothic world tends to be coterminous with, or the same as, the ‘real’ world. Contemporary femicidal plots bring the Gothic and the quotidian together” (2001: 24).

In this respect Meyers’s argument is not far from Mark Edmundson’s, who claims that contemporary American culture (and, considering American culture’s global impact, we may extend the argument to include much of the Western world) is thoroughly suffused with Gothicism. Today, it seems, the Gothic has become an everyday affair, while our sense of the “everyday” is being defined or determined by our Gothic imagination. It is the combination of macabre and everyday ordinariness that strikes us in the Josef Fritzl case, which has recently stirred up so much debate and morbid fascination. In April 2008 it was revealed to the bewildered world public that 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, a respectable citizen from the town of Amstetten in Austria, had been keeping his daughter, Elizabeth, imprisoned in the basement of his house for 24 years, during which time he raped her repeatedly and (grand)fathered sev-en children. Fritzl’s story makes a perfect Gothic plot, except it did not take place in an isolated castle or mansion, but in a most ordinary house, in a small town not unlike the ones described in, say, Alice Munro’s stories.

While much of the criticism concerned with Northern Gothicism tends to concentrate largely on the paralyzing excesses of wilderness and the ex-treme weather conditions, I choose to look more closely at the (female) do-mestic Gothic, keeping in mind how much it is intertwined with the literary mode of wilderness Gothic. Vis-à-vis the overpowering wilderness, home (traditionally a “feminine” sphere) is supposed to be a place of relative safe-ty, stability and familial familiarity. It is precisely this expectation of home’s safety and predictability that the Domestic Gothic seeks to challenge. After all, it is not merely a coincidence that one of the most common theoretical concepts invoked in discussions of Gothicism is Freud’s unheimlich (“unho-mely”), so closely connected with the Heimlich (Freud 2001a). “Home” is by definition internally ambiguous, familiar and disturbingly alien at the same time: the uncanny lies hidden in the folds of the apparently smooth surfaces of the everyday.

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Ultimately, it is not quite clear to me if reading the Gothic through Freud is necessarily a more fruitful idea than reading Freud though the Gothic, as Mark Edmundson does in Nightmare on Main Street. Edmundson places Freud in the long line of Gothic writers including Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley, crediting the “father of psychoanalysis” with a new variety of Gothicism that the critic calls “internalized Gothic” (1997: 7). For Freud, says Edmundson, the psyche “is centrally the haunted house of terror Gothic” (1997: 32). Hidden in our minds (the more technical term would be “repressed,” of course) lie the dark secrets that only surface at certain mo-ments (or should we say “at certain intervals”) as they break through the thin crust of everyday ritualistic propriety. In the final analysis, Freud’s considera-tions suggest, those dark secrets are attributable to what he termed the death drive, that is, the inherent forces of aggression, (self-)destruction and negativ-ity. The death drive and the uncanny seem to be closely yet vaguely connected through the concept of repetition, or more precisely “repetition compulsion.” The compulsion to repeat a certain pattern of behaviour, particularly a trau-matic one, represents destructive or self-destructive impulses and thus be-comes an observable manifestation of the death drive. In The Uncanny Freud does not mention the death drive (he will introduce the term a year later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), but he does highlight the repetition compul-sion as that which lends “to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic char-acter” and constitutes the underlying determinant of the uncanny experience: “whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as un-canny” (2001a: 942, 943). The exact nature of the relationship between the notion of the uncanny and that of the death drive remains highly debatable, but when reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle it is difficult to avoid the im-pression that the “discovery” of the death drive gives Freud a very uncanny feeling: he could not be more explicit about his resistance to his own hypoth-esis. It looks like the death drive is a concept that “ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (2001a: 944), to quote Schelling’s definition of the uncanny, quoted by Freud. The new idea – new at least in Freud’s theoret-ical system – seems to be at the same time familiar (many of the cases he had studied before seemed to suggest it) and alien (it fundamentally changed his theory and could be regarded as a “foreign body within psychoanalysis itself,” in Nicholas Royle’s formulation; 2003: 91).

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In the Canadian context the idea of home becomes even more precarious and paradoxical. While the First Nations were, to a large extent, deprived of their original “home” and confined to “Indian reserves” (the subsequent re-location of most natives to urban settings is sometimes experienced by them as another kind of exile), the various immigrants – including the so-called “founding nations,” the English and the French – often remain torn between their loyalty to their original homelands and their attachment to the new land, which often proves very inhospitable to the newcomers due to its climate and hard natural environment. As mentioned above, Northrop Frye famously claimed that the most central question in Canadian literature is “Where is here?” Referring back to that claim (and using the Gothic trope of haunting), Marlene Goldman asserts that “[t]he ghost of Northrop Frye haunts Canadian writers and readers who remain fascinated by the unsettled and unsettling question: Where is home?” (2008: 179). This question is clearly related to recent (re)conceptualizations of Canada as a  postcolonial space: the 2004 collection of essays devoted to theorizing English-Canadian postcolonialism is entitled, significantly, Unhomely States, and Cynthia Sugars’s introduction explicitly links Canada’s postcolonial unhomeliness with Freud’s idea of the uncanny (2004: xx). The same connection is made by Justin D. Edwards in his introduction to Gothic Canada: “To settle the nation, to carve out a sense of homeliness on a foreign terrain, has been part of the Canadian imperial enter-prise. […] The uncanny […] is tied to the unsettled, the not-yet-colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized, or the decolonized” (2005: xx).

While the analyses of short fictions that follow could be easily and quite rightly classified as psychoanalytic ones, I am far from positing psychoanalysis as holding up the “truth” that the stories somehow embody and narrativize. Rather, in my theoretical framework both Gothicism and psychoanalysis are just two historically and culturally formed accounts of “human nature,” large-ly interrelated at that, as Mark Edmundson has demonstrated. The Canadian variations on (Female) Gothic conventions add a specific “local flavour” to these accounts: Canadian settings, metaphors and preoccupations. To put it simply: there are no truths outside of cultural determinations, and Canadian culture, like any other, creates its own truths (and counter-truths) using the descriptive and cognitive apparatuses inherited from, among others, Gothic and psychoanalytic traditions. Various forms of (repressed) negativity, or

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death drive, constitute the backbone of those (dark) truths, as expounded in the short stories I discuss below.

*

There is something fundamental about hate, judging from the four short stories I  am going to focus on in this chapter, namely Margaret Atwood’s two stories (also referred to as prose poems) “Horror Comics” and “Making Poison,” Isabel Huggan’s “Celia Behind Me” and Alice Munro’s “Fits.” “Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love,” proclaimed Freud (2001b: 139), at the same time coupling hate with the instinct of self-preservation. (Atwood’s classic, if by now somewhat disfavoured, assertion that Canadian literature revolves primarily around the theme of “survival” may be recalled in this con-text.)35 As such, hate acts “as the first differentiating boundary between inside and outside” and thus it “ensures the permanence of that boundary and is its constituting principle” (Jeammet 2005: 729). The Gothic experience, on the other hand, is often related to the transgression of boundaries. In some way, hatred simply is the boundary between “me” and the hostile (yet seductive) “not-me,” whereas the transgressive movement, even if ultimately (self-)de-structive, may be seen as a love instinct or desire, the urge to shed one’s pres-ent shape or identity, to transform, to mix and blend with the “Other.”

For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that the narrator in “Horror Comics” and “Making Poison” by Margaret Atwood is the same adult woman who rec-ollects certain “illicit” activities from her childhood. In both cases the narrator claims to have an accomplice to her little crimes: her friend C. in “Horror Comics,” with whom she stole horror comics from drugstores and threw snowballs at random people, and her nameless brother in “Making Poison,” with whom she made poison and, possibly, used it against “some innocuous child” (1983: 10). The girls in the former story are clearly trying to come to terms with their inner fears and anxieties, by – paradoxically – sustaining or inducing them, not unlike the soldiers who, in Freud’s example from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, compulsively re-enact their traumatic experiences.

35 Cf. Margaret Atwood, Survival (1972). For a  useful summary of the controversies surrounding the book, see Nischik (2000: 175–7), Buchholtz (2008: 17–18), and Macpherson (2010: 16–17).

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Through play, which takes the form of an exaggerated dramatization of horror stories or throwing snowballs, they relocate their visceral terrors to the sphere of apparently safe, rule-governed symbolizations. Even if it is temporarily neu-tralized, the terror will resurface periodically, triggered, for instance, by the look of pure hatred on the face of the woman who got hit by a snowball (was it by accident, really?). This sudden flash of the menacing Real, to use a Lacanian term, of the negativity beyond the symbolic order’s capacity to contain it (see, for example, Lacan 2006: 324, where the Real is described as “that which sub-sists outside of symbolization”), is playfully provoked by the girls’ behaviour, but it sends them into real terror, even though they cover it up with theatrical laughter. The girls seem to be tempting fate: they test the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour, fearing fear and desiring it at the same time. (A similar kind of ambivalence will be found in Munro’s “Fits,” where the inhabitants of Gilmore are both attracted to and repulsed by the macabre shooting; gen-erally, it is the rule that governs the psychology of the horror genre.) If they masochistically invite punishment, which they eventually receive, if they long to be caught at a moment of transgression, it is because the hatred of the Other, however scary, re-affirms their own “boundaries.”

Atwood’s “Making Poison” also contains a moment of transgression, of testing the limits of aggression, but at the same time the limits of memory, trauma and representation. The impulse to make the poisonous substance seems to come out of nowhere (“living in the city” is mentioned in a way that might suggest a possible reason, but it sounds quite ridiculous and is quickly cancelled out with the statement “we probably would have made the poison anyway”; 1983: 10). What is more, “people like to make poison” (1983: 10) just as they like to make cake. Both activities seem to be structurally inscribed in the state of “being human,” both need to be repeated; as such, they may be construed, Freud-wise, as the death drive (Thanatos) and the love instinct (Eros), respectively. The poisonous desire is not directed against any particu-lar person, it is a kind of general, structural negativity; all the narrator and her accomplice want is “an object, a completion” (Atwood 1983: 10), an affir-mation of their status as (separate) subjects, the ego clearly demarcated from the non-ego, with its momentary illusion of “fullness” and completion. They can only achieve it through a hateful destruction of an object, any object. The “completion” can never be stable or permanent, of course, given that part of

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the poison comes from inside the subject itself: the piss which they added to the poison. The boundaries can only be maintained through a constant repe-tition of the objectifying or abjectifying gesture, through acts of expulsion and destruction. In Atwood’s “Horror Comics,” the maintenance of boundaries is invoked through C.’s forced resistance to a bodily leakage (she had to cross her legs lest she should pee out of enjoyment) and her “hygiene panic” (her mother tells her not to use school toilets “for fear of catching some unspeci-fied disease”; 1983: 13). Self-preservation – keeping oneself within one’s own boundaries – and the hatred directed against external objects are intimately tied up.

Even if we recognize hatred, negativity and aggression as structural, per-haps foundational, elements of psychic and social life, we cannot overlook the extent to which they remain culturally tabooed or repressed. In what amounts to a classic example of a “double bind” situation, the injunction “Be a good girl/boy!” remains in conflict with the inevitability of the negative impulse, almost included in the injunction itself (does it not say, ultimately, “Kill yourself!” by denying the negativity that somehow sustains you?). That, of course, poses a serious problem to any post-Freudian narrator, especially to a first-person narrator like the one Atwood uses in her stories. Assuming that the narrator is supposed to tell us the “truth” about herself, how can she possi-bly reveal, and at the same time conceal, her negativity? “Am I innocent?” asks the narrator in “Making Poison,” and the reader may only speculate whether her loss of memory is a conscious manipulation or an unconditional process of mental repression that pushes traumatic material into the black hole of the “forgotten.” The truths of the ego are not the truths of the whole subject; in-deed, the truths of the ego are often blatantly untrue in relation to the whole subject. For Freud, the repressed truth (or the truth about repression, which is nearly the same thing) comes out by accident, by mistake, as a side effect. The truth cannot be told innocently, of course; paradoxically, lies can tell us more about the “truth” of a subject than any truth delivered by the plotting ego. In another story from Atwood’s collection, “Murder in the Dark,” which is more than anything else a self-reflexive comment on the art of storytelling, the narrator concludes: “by the rules of the game, I must lie. Now: do you believe me?” (1983: 30). The narrator of “Horror Comics,” an “innocent girl” the reader is prone to believe, uses a  number of tricks to indicate, without

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quite revealing, the hatred that drives her: she equates herself metaphorically with a vampire, and then finds a double in the person of the angry woman. In a way, then, she is a vampire, she tells us the truth, but only by lying. The virtuous female of the early Female Gothic is no longer possible: she turns out to be a “vampire,” after all, as contaminated with negativity as everybody else.

Like those in Atwood’s stories, the narrator in Isabel Huggan’s “Celia Behind Me” (Elizabeth) is an adult woman who recalls her childhood trau-mas. In contrast to Atwood’s narrator, however, she explicitly talks about her hatred: “I  hated Celia with a  dreadful and absolute passion” (1999: 355). Celia is “a chubby, diabetic child” who looked “bland and stupid and fruitlike” (1999: 354). The narrator is caught in between two incompatible worlds: her mother’s moralizing threats and instructions – “you be nice to her!” (1999: 355) – and the “amorphous Other Kids” (1999: 356), whose acceptance she desperately seeks. What is at stake is the narrator’s self-esteem and the way other kids will categorize her: “For I knew, deep in my wretched heart, that were it not for Celia, I  was next in line for humiliation” (1999: 355). Her violent rejection – or, indeed, abjection – of Celia, with her laugha-ble name and grotesque body, corresponds to the abjection of the monstrous with which “good people” do not ever wish to identify. Elizabeth is a border case, and her anxiety comes from standing too close to the abjected entity, from not being securely located on the “right” side of the boundary. Her ego needs a clear border to make itself distinct from the repulsive ambiguity of the abject, which, in Kristeva’s definition, “does not respect borders” (1982: 4) and thus threatens the ego’s positive, meaningful and separate existence. In an “exhilarating, clear-headed instant of understanding” the girl attacks Celia inside a culvert and beats her up with what seems to be a pretty serious mur-derous intention. The culvert or tunnel (evocative, perhaps, of the cave from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India) is a clear reference to the anus and the psy-chological processes associated with anality; the culvert is annular and dirty, and the girls like to call “POOpy!” inside it. Even the title of the story may be construed as subtly connoting anality: the placing of Celia behind locates her in the abjected sphere of the anus and defecation; like excrement, Celia must be vehemently negated as “not me.” What happens in this negative space, in this void, is a violent discharge of Elizabeth’s negative psychic energy, an uncontrolled outburst of “pure hatred” (Huggan 1999: 358). In traditional

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psychoanalysis, of all bodily zones the anus is the closest to destructiveness and the death drive, it comes closest to dissolution of identity and to dead matter or waste. On the other hand, it is also connected to a kind of (mostly repressed) pleasure – the pleasure of both “discharge” and “retention,” while toilet training is closely related to the “civilizing” effect of repression, self-con-trol and painfully earned self-esteem; it is no coincidence that after the assault Elizabeth hides away in a school toilet.

Huggan’s narrator is an ambiguous figure. Accustomed as we are to plots of conversion, redemption and regeneration, we probably expect Elizabeth to recognize her past mistake and regret her violent treatment of Celia. That never happens, however: at the end of the story Elizabeth confesses unrepent-antly: “I was never able to forgive her” (1999: 360), not even after Celia dies at the age of 17. At the same time, it is difficult not to identify with the narra-tor, at least partly, even though that forces us to admit to our own negativity. The reader probably feels that there is something wrong in the spanking she gets from her parents as punishment, and it is as much about the violence of the punishment as it is about the fact that it is administered partly “for per-sonal revenge” (Huggan 1999: 359), out of the feeling of shame and humili-ation that the parents experience. In retrospect, should we acknowledge the parents’ act as legitimate, Elizabeth’s violence would also prove vindicated. (The violence of the “amorphous Other Kids” should not be neglected, ei-ther.) Originally, the girl’s hatred stems from being too closely associated with abjected Celia; later in life, the hatred is a result of Elizabeth’s unwanted discovery of her own negativity; how can we ever forgive those who falsify, de-liberately or not, our own positive self-image? Elizabeth’s impossible choice is to negate her self-esteem and descend humbly into the hell of abjection, or else to reassert her boundaries and become a “bad girl” in the act. The fact that her negativity is countered by the social organization’s structural nega-tivity (the Law, represented in the story by her parents), leaves her, again, in a double-bind situation (“don’t use violence, or else society will use violence against you”).

In his discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, David Punter summa-rizes “the root of Gothic” in the following way: “in psychic terms we are con-fronting the loss of the body, the making over of the body into the control and power of another,” and he adds that “we are looking here in particular at

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women’s experience” (1998: 61). Elizabeth’s violent outburst can be viewed as a powerful return of the body with its anal impulses, while her unregenerate attitude may be a refusal to have her body “stolen” for the control and power of another. On the other hand, however, assuming that Celia, who is so dan-gerously similar to Elizabeth, functions as her alter ego, Elizabeth’s outburst can also be read as an effect of a misplaced self-hatred. In any case, whether we see her aggression as sadistically directed at an external object or as a redirect-ed self-destructive impulse, it is exactly what saves her. That “salvation” does not come without a price, though: a painful recognition of an internal “dark-ness far more frightening than the echoing culvert” (Huggan 1999: 360).

*

There is a silence, a void, a wound at the core of Alice Munro’s “Fits.” Just like the “Gilmore people,” the reader is confronted with two mysteries, two unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable) facts: a  murder-suicide with no apparent motive, and Peg’s strange behaviour after she discovers the dead couple. Peg is not “absolutely shattered,” as her fellow townspeople expect her to be. On the contrary, she is unnervingly composed, calm and unmoved. If anything, her husband notices “her gracefulness, lightness, quickness, and ease around the kitchen” (Munro 1991: 124) in a more distinct way. Even more disturbingly, as the narrative develops we learn that she actually walked all the way up to the bedroom, where the fatal shooting had happened, unde-terred by the dead man’s remains splattered around in the hall. This we learn from the constable’s account, not Peg’s; in her conversation with Robert she claims to have seen the man’s shod foot sticking out of the room.

Paradoxically, by behaving in such an ordinary, unmarked way, Peg ap-pears unnatural, almost inhuman or monstrous. The quotidian becomes un-canny, whereas the macabre, through Peg’s behaviour, acquires the features of the (strangely) ordinary. Peg resists the Gothic cravings of her townspeo-ple, the “ghoulishness” that her son Clayton rebukes. She only loses her usual calmness once: when Clayton confesses how he used to think, during his par-ents’ fights, that one of them would come to kill him with a knife. “She who al-ways seemed pale and silky and assenting, but hard to follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines fixed in steady, helpless, un-

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apologetic pain” (Munro 1991: 126). This description is as intriguing as it is ambiguous: her somewhat ghostly form gains more definition (but not more life) as she realizes she can function, in the mind of her own son, as a potential murderer, a killing mother; at the same time, her pain is described as helpless and unapologetic, as if she could not really rule that painful possibility out. Robert, described as a very friendly person, is also haunted by a murderous memory: during a  violent argument with his ex-partner Lee, who accuses him of aggression concealed behind his friendliness and eagerness (1991: 127), both lovers “trembled with murderous pleasure, with the excitement of saying what could never be retracted; they exalted in wounds inflicted but also in wounds received […]” (1991: 127). Murderousness is thus exposed as a  permanent, essential element of all human relationships, including the relationships we would normally associate with love rather than hate. (Not surprisingly, Sigmund Freud noticed the same emotional ambivalence in re-lation to our close ones in his clinical practice, which led him to conclude that “our own temptation to kill others is stronger and more frequent than we had suspected”; 1918: 116–17.) Ultimately, what the text gives us rather sadisti-cally is not the usual satisfaction of knowing and the comfort of certainty, but rather the agony of unknowing that tells us to expect the least expected.

Peg’s ambiguity can be viewed as hieroglyphic. The term “hieroglyph” refers to a sign that used to have a meaning, but since the conditions for its understanding are no longer present, the meaning is lost and what we per-ceive is just a “dead letter” whose significance is no longer accessible. Rauch makes an interesting parallel between the “deadness” of the hieroglyph and what the human corpse communicates to us: “I, too, could be dead; I, too, might not be understood by others” (2000: 215). A hieroglyphic reading of the two corpses seems unproblematic, but one may wonder why Peg should be a figure of such radical inaccessibility. We are prone to assume somebody must be able to explain her behaviour: Peg herself, or the narrator or a psychi-atrist; her experience must be communicable, it must be able to make sense to us. Yet Munro consistently refuses to make sense of the killing or Peg’s behaviour. Not that the events are senseless, they simply resist interpretation. The hieroglyph, says Rauch, “is the metaphor for the remnants of experience that need to be read, put together, instead of interpreted” (2000:16). Peg’s family, her townspeople, the narrator and the readers are not in the capaci-

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ty to explain her experience, which remains radically “other,” irreducible to an explanation, confined to the “there and then” of Peg’s encounter with the massacred bodies. In the end, the hieroglyph must, obviously, be dealt with (or metabolized) somehow, it must be incorporated into the cognitive grid of the people around Peg (as well as the readers) – but this can happen not through explanation, but through (let me use a medical term) “encystment.” In other words, the hieroglyph will be like a foreign body enveloped by flesh – alien, yet at the same time a part of one’s own body.

But it would be a mistake to posit the otherness of a hieroglyph as op-posed to the quotidian. Indeed, the everyday teems with hieroglyphs, which we have been trained either to ignore or to interpret and weave neatly into our coherent narratives. That is why, I think, Munro emphasizes closeness. For some reason Peg comes so close to the corpses that she gets bloody stains on her shoes and her coat. Robert’s long walk at the end of the story brings to mind not only Peg’s previous husband, who left her to go to the Arctic, but also her discovery of the dead couple, which is paralleled by Robert’s dis-covery of the tangled “bodies” of “dead” cars and trucks: “He was so close he could almost have touched one of these monstrosities before he saw that they were just old cars” (1991: 129). He walks away, as it were, only to find closeness and to see how the monstrous turns into the ordinary. A number of feminist authors have emphasized the importance of touch and closeness. Luce Irigaray, for example, contends that “[w]e lack a culture of proximity or closeness which has to accompany the discovery of the other as other” (2004: 6). The Polish philosopher Jolanta Brach-Czaina, who derives much of her philosophizing from minute observations of most ordinary, everyday phenomena, begins her essay “The Metaphysics of Meat” with the following assertions: “You need to touch raw meat. Hold it in your hand. Squeeze. Let it ooze through your fingers. And you need to touch a dead body” (1999: 217; translation T.S.). The untranslatability of experience resides in closeness, in touching that which from afar may look like a “monstrosity.” Unsurprisingly, it is often women philosophers and artists, such as Irigaray, Brach-Czaina or Munro, who seem to be more alert to the profundity of the quotidian and who elevate the ordinary to the status of the metaphysical.

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The untranslatability of experience is also conveyed through Munro’s use of an impersonal, third-person narrator, who may at first seem omniscient, but then deconstructs her or his own narrative (the gender of the narrator cannot be securely determined) and exposes the “holes” in the narrator’s knowledge as well as the unreliability of the sources. For example, the passage that describes how Peg discovered her dead neighbours begins innocently enough with a  detached, “objective” tone, but after a  logical explanation is given for Peg’s decision to go upstairs, the flow of the narration is interrupted with a parenthetical remark which calls the explanation into question: “(This, in fact, was Robert’s explanation to himself. She didn’t say that, but he for-got she didn’t)” (1991: 114). What looks like a smooth, seamless narrative is suddenly exposed to be an unreliable, second-hand reconstruction: Peg’s account is filtered through Robert’s hardly noticeable, “natural” rationaliza-tion, and then adopted into the main, generalized voice that the trustful read-er almost automatically assumes to simply “tell the truth.” Peg, in fact, resists any truth regime; it could even be argued that she refuses to be entangled in a (Gothic) plot: she will not be entrapped or em-plotted by the plotting nar-rator. In a classic example of what constitutes a plot, E.M. Forster claimed that the sentence “The king died and then the queen died” is a primitive story that simply consists of a sequence of events, whereas “The king died and then the queen died of grief” qualifies as a proper plot (1956: 86). Leaving aside the heavily gendered character of this example, as well as its formalist datedness, we have every right to ask: how can we be sure that the queen really died of grief? (One may recall Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” in which the hero-ine’s death is, very wrongly, attributed to the joy that overwhelms her when she learns that her husband, whom she believed dead, is actually alive and coming home.) Munro rejects the entrapments of a plot (and we should not forget that so many traditional Gothic plots revolve around the imprisonment of a female victim) and she chooses what Forster called “story.” In “Fits,” the king killed the queen and then killed himself, for no apparent reason, while the princess confuses everyone by walking around without any sign of shock. But the story does not simply consist of a sequence of events; I would rather say it consists of many intersecting surfaces and silences.

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*

In all the stories discussed above, female characters avoid victimization, so characteristic of traditional Gothic plots. In Atwood’s “prose poems” and Huggan’s short story this refusal is realized mostly through reclaiming neg-ativity, which in Atwood’s case is also reclaimed for the female narrator. In Munro, the “victimological” status of her characters is uncertain: we can hardly say anything about the late Mrs Weeble, since we do not know if the murder-suicide was “consensual” or not, whereas Peg remains a deeply am-biguous figure, a figure that does not fit, contrary to the story’s title. On the one hand, we may regard her as a zombie of some kind or other: lifeless, unde-fined, caught up in the repeatability of everyday womanly or motherly duties; on the other hand, however, with her enigmatic or “unnatural” behaviour she scandalizes the whole community, while her excessive ordinariness appears almost monstrous. Munro’s story may be read as an attempt at recuperating the value of closeness and asserting the unknowability and untransferabili-ty of experience. Or, rephrasing the argument in the postcolonial terms pro-posed by Justin Edwards, the uncanny of the story resides in its “unsettled, the not-yet-colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized” terrain of the (feminine) experience of closeness.

Despite all differences, the four short stories discussed above share the basic recognition of the structural inevitability of the negative (or the death drive) in social life. The characters discover and reluctantly acknowledge the emptiness or “darkness” that resides within them, the primary hatred or mur-derousness that most people would rather see safely locked away in criminal files, but which prove, at every turn, to be part and parcel of everyday life. Canada’s external vastness, often hostile and barely inhabitable, becomes an apt metaphor for this hostility or negativity that shows itself within the do-mestic, the familial and the individual. An exquisite illustration of the relation-ship between the overwhelming presence of excessive natural forces and the apparently safe “walls” of culture, whose primary locations are the home and the self, is the Canadian director Guy Maddin’s 1992 movie Careful. I read this surrealistic movie as an allegory of Canada itself: living in constant fear of an imminent avalanche, the inhabitants of an Alpine village cultivate close family relations, which turn out to be streaked with incestuous desires and murder-

ous intentions – usually kept within the dark “mines” of the unconscious. In the Canadian Gothic, it seems, the dangerous “outside” conditions and repre-sents the psyche’s monstrous “inside,” which must be carefully managed and kept under control lest it destroy whatever fragile balance exists in a socially functional individual.

Having recognized the constitutive negativity in one’s psycho-social ex-istence, the narrators and characters in the short stories discussed above can no longer claim innocence of any kind (which is perhaps one of the major lessons the Gothic mode has to teach, more generally). On the other hand, however, how can anyone be pronounced guilty once negativity proves to be “a force of nature,” quite beyond one’s conscious control? Clayton aptly re-marks in “Fits” that earthquakes or volcano eruptions are not only perfectly natural, but they are bound to recur periodically; the sublime and destructive powers inherent in nature – indeed a necessary part of its creative energies – seem to correspond to the inner urges of aggression and death drive in the fabric of psychic and social life. Or, as Atwood’s quasi-naïve narrator sums up: “People like to make poison. If you don’t understand this, you will never un-derstand anything” (1983: 10). Contrary to the modern belief that “experts” can trace a murderous act back to an identifiable and exceptional cause, the three Canadian authors seem to imply the constant presence of the negative, always potentially on the verge of “eruption,” in the most mundane routines of everyday life.

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A large number of thinkers and cultural theorists have asserted, on different grounds, that transgression is culture’s most fundamental question, or even its constitutive principle. Many possible genealogies could be drafted for this modern Western preoccupation with transgression; one of them could choose to see the first major modern transgressor in the Enlightenment’s enfant terrible, Marquis de Sade. Another important moment was, unques-tionably, Nietzsche’s (in)famous declaration that God is dead. Sigmund Freud’s body of theory comes to mind as yet another breakthrough, despite the Viennese doctor’s carefully protected image of middle-class respectabil-ity and scientific integrity. In Chris Jenks’s useful account of transgression, for example, Freud’s work is discussed somewhat reluctantly: almost like a poltergeist, Freud “will not go away” (Jenks 2003: 45), as if to insist on his rightful place.36 While no single trajectory can be delineated to explain the multifarious presence of the concept of transgression in contemporary cul-ture and cultural theory, Freud has been an undeniable influence on many 20th-century theorists as well as practitioners of transgression, most notably Georges Bataille. It could even be argued, as the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis does, that “real and fantasized transgression is at the heart of all psychological mechanisms, as the result, or source, of a conflict” and that psychoanalysis itself, as a “scientific corpus,” is predicated on a “transgres-sive epistemological curiosity” (Kipman 2005: 1792). The latter point may,

36 Here is the full quote from Jenks’s book: “His [Freud’s] work is not truly nor simply about margins in social life but I do not know where else to put him and he will not go away” (2003: 45).

Desiring Bodies and the Vicissitudes of Transgression

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in fact, be extended beyond the level of epistemology and cautiously applied to some postmodern theorizations of transgression (following, for instance, the thought of Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze), which are not simply con-cerned with analyzing the phenomenon in a  positivistic manner, but often posit themselves as culturally transgressive in their own right. A different tra-dition derives from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his followers, with their insistence on culture’s materialistic foundations. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s classic The Politics and Poetics of Transgression continues and critically expands the Bakhtinian perspective, while carefully avoiding its own self-ro-manticization as an instance of transgressive practice.

Although relatively easy to define as “that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries” (Jenks 2003: 3), transgression involves a complex com-pound of psychological, social, legal, religious, and other aspects. All bound-aries are of a symbolic nature, and so is necessarily transgression (which en-tails, among other things, that any transgression is context-specific, defined as such only in relation to a particular symbolic system). Assuming, after Mary Douglas, that the body “provides a basic scheme for all symbolism” (1966: 202), one may argue that the “primary stage” for any subsequent kinds of transgression lies in the (symbolically mapped-out) materiality of the human body. Says Douglas, “[t]he body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious” (1966: 142). Because “all margins are dangerous” (1966: 150), anything that is corporeally marginal becomes heavily invested with “power and danger,” and thus subjected to the most intense and violent boundary po-licing. At the same time Douglas very carefully distances herself from a theo-retical framework in which the body determines a culture’s symbolic structure in any particular way. As she says, “[e]ach culture has its own special risks and problems. To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power de-pends on what situation the body is mirroring.” (1966: 150). Consequently, Douglas insists that “we should try to argue back from the known dangers of society to the known selection of bodily themes” (1966: 150). In my own methodological practice, however, the movement is bidirectional: the other-wise known fears and desires of a culture help read the body’s mappings and uses, but equally well the representations and conceptualizations of the cor-poreal help identify the culture’s fears and desires. Thus, in studying Canadian

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culture I look at its heavily policed margins that mark the most intense sites of danger, while one of the most fruitful ways of “looking at the margins” is in-vestigating the representations of the body and its excesses (keeping in mind that particular excesses are perceived as such differently in different cultures.) In other words, one may be able to delineate the contours of a culture (how-ever ragged, discontinuous or paradoxical) by concentrating on the transgres-sions that it performs on its own symbolic boundaries.

A  distinction could be made between transgression – which is always performed by a subject from within the boundaries of a norm, a law, a rule, and as such it is known or felt to be a transgression (whether premeditated or in hindsight) – and another phenomenon defined as an “external” intru-sion of excess (akin to the Lacanian Real) into the symbolic realm. On second thought, however, this distinction may turn out to be purely theoretical: when we say “subject” we tend to think of the Cartesian, or liberal humanist, sub-ject, the self-conscious initiator and performer of actions; yet when we take into account drive and desire, the picture becomes much more problematic. Who is the “I” of desire? Or in other words, how can a subject claim any de-gree of unity and reasonableness, when it is driven by forces that by far ex-ceed its capacity for self-control and threaten the very “core” of its identity? In this sense, at least, certain acts of transgression are performed simultaneously from within and without the symbolic limits; desire is the “secret agent” of the excess that, from within the subject, crosses the boundary, or pushes the subject to cross it. But it would be clearly a mistake to simply dissociate desire from the subject as an alien element, because desire clearly helps constitute the subject in its subjecthood. What I am grappling with here is the tenability of the notion of some sort of agency that could be ascribed to excess in general, and corporeal excess in particular. I assume that both excess and desire-in-flected subjectivity are constituted in the act of drawing the boundary and that, just as the subject’s agency is constantly undermined by the workings of drive and desire, so the (not fully subjectified) excess is endowed with a cer-tain kind of agency that could be called “semiotic” in the Kristevan sense of the word, i.e. an agency that exceeds the relationship between a symbolically constituted subject and his/her (imaginarily unified) body.37

37 The subject, as Kristeva contends, is “always both semiotic and symbolic” (1984: 24). The latter mode is a social effect, whereas the former is rooted in the “primary processes”

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The body occupies a similarly ambiguous position in relation to the sub-ject. Apparently possessed, contained, and controlled by the subject, insofar as it seems to coincide with the boundaries mapped onto it by the Symbolic, it is never free from its excesses. Those excesses become more pronounced when uncontrollable urges or changes are experienced or perceived in the corporeal realm. When struck with a disease, or simply when maturing or ag-ing, “my” body becomes less “mine,” its fundamental materiality (and thus foreignness) comes to the foreground. (As Linda Ruth Williams remarks in her discussion of David Cronenberg, “[t]hat the body has an agenda of its own, quite separate from the conscious concerns of the moral self, makes it more alien than the aliens”; 1999: 33.) Desire, capable of “capturing” the body and hijacking it from the control of the subject, has an equally alienat-ing effect. Unsurprisingly, due to a powerful modern association of mascu-linity with self-control (and, conversely, femininity with its lack) the process through which the male subject’s grip on its body and identity lessens is often perceived as a process of feminization and, consequently, monstrosification. Through my brief analyses of selected Canadian films I test out the proposi-tion that the body (as an instance of self-organizing matter) can be attributed with some sort of agency. Bodies may be regulated and policed into docility, as Foucault had it,38 but not without resistance, revenge, or revolt.

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Canada’s cultural representations may be said to move back and forth between an “official” aesthetics of the scenic and a pervading fascination with the perverse, the abject and the obscene.39 To see Canada’s “official” face one

inscribed genetically and physiologically in the body as (discontinuous) drives (Kristeva 1984: 29) and manifesting itself in language through rhythm, rhyme, tone, intonation, etc. The semiotic is necessary for the establishment and functioning of the symbolic, and taken together they constitute the two modalities of the signifying process (1984: 23–4).

38 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). 39 The movement between the scenic and the obscene is not uniquely Canadian, to be sure.

My point here is that in the Canadian context the aesthetics of the scenic and that of the obscene feed on specific geographical, historical and social circumstances (and on each other).

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only needs to glance at a random selection of Canada’s promotional materi-als, such as documentaries or photo albums, or an equally random selection of images googled up when the search term is simply “Canada.” It is no co-incidence, either, that the artistic Group of Seven, which “claimed to find in the local landscape a distinctive national identity, and claimed to have found a uniquely Canadian style for expressing it” (Francis 1997: 141), achieved the status of Canada’s major showpiece, a “national wallpaper,” as Robert Fulford put it (Francis 1997: 135). On the other hand, the fascination with the obscene and the (bizarrely) sexual has also been an element of Canadian self-definition for some time. As early as in 1945 Earle Birney described Canada, with an ev-ident gender and colonial bias, as an adolescent boy who “keeps his prurience stealthy” (1995: 18). The trope of Canada’s persistent immaturity that Birney employs here is characteristically linked with both the country’s alleged in-ability to achieve a  mature form of nationhood and its inordinate interest in sex. Over the 1980s and 1990s, with the work of many artists and writers (such as David Cronenberg, John Greyson, Guy Maddin or Bruce LaBruce in film), Canadian prurience has become much less stealthy. So much so that Katherine Monk’s 2001 book on Canadian film prominently features “weird sex” as characteristic of Canadian cinema (Weird Sex and Snowshoes), while Thomas Waugh’s 2006 volume The Romance of Transgression in Canada is an impressive 600-page history of Canadian queer cinema.

To say that much of (mainstream) Canadian cinema is “famously in-trigued by unusual, atypical sexual practices and identities” (Allan 2001: 138) has, indeed, become something of a commonplace. Following some earlier usage Jason Morgan calls this genre “perversion chic,” as characterized by “a preference for narratives originating at the margins of society” and featur-ing necrophiliacs, pedophiles, and homosexuals, among others (2006: 211). In Katherine Monk’s somewhat oversimplified account Canadian films’ pre-occupation with bodily and sexual excesses result from the society’s general repressiveness: “The French-Canadian soul is haunted by the Gothic com-plications of sex and the Catholic Church, while the English Canadian soul by Victorian codes of physical denial. Sex=Guilt in Canadian society […]” (2001: 120). To avoid a  paradox that seems inherent to this logic (how is it that, with so much repression, the cinema does indeed produce such a re-markable excess of sex?) it seems much more reasonable to use a Foucauldian

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perspective, in which the workings of discourse and power regulate sexual be-haviors and representations, even as they enable the production of new kinds of behaviors and representations. Over the last decade or so, “weird” sexual-ities, as represented in film, literature and other media, have been providing new metaphors for (postmodern) conceptualizations of Canadian nationality as somehow queer. Jason Morgan, for example, asserts that “in the perversion chic films, Canadian nationalism is demonstrated to be queer because it trans-gresses the normative basis of the nation” (2006: 223). In this and similar accounts Canadianness is construed as inherently queer and transgressive.

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Set in a mountain village, perennially surrounded by the snow- and ice-bound Alpine landscapes, Guy Maddin’s queer and neo-Gothic tour de force Careful may be read as a parable of Canada itself. The village owes its existence to the “carefulness” of its inhabitants, who must never raise their voice lest they trigger an all-destroying avalanche. Moderation, discipline and the habit of hushing up are believed to save the village from the otherwise certain an-nihilation. Yet descents into the “mines” of the unconscious are unavoidable and, in the end, they expose the dark undercurrents of incestuous desire and murderous intentions that shake the very fundaments of the villagers’ social life. In this Freudian parable Maddin exposes the precariousness of culture, whose main purpose is to regulate and police social and familial relations. Unreliable like the layer of mid-spring ice on a lake (one cannot but think of the famous scene from Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter when the school bus sinks slowly into the icy lake), culture is constantly threatened by an ex-cess of the physical. In Canada, whose name stems from the Iroquoian word for “village,” a perceived excess of land, together with the perceived infirmity (or immaturity) of a national consciousness, translates culturally into a set of Gothic anxieties over the uneasy relationship between culture and the (exces-sive) body. It may be generally true that Canadian society cultivates an official ethos of moderation in the face of very immoderate physical conditions, but, as Justin Edwards points out, “underlying the Canadian taste for order and stability, beneath a culture systematically advocating and practicing moder-ation and consensus” there lies “an extremely subversive streak – a  sort of

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northern grotesque” (2005: 164). This subversive streak explores those trans-gressive acts that challenge the well-policed boundaries of a moderate culture, particularly the excesses of corporeality and sexuality.

An Alpine landscape from Careful Source: http://nathanabels.blogspot.com/2010/11/careful.html

Often associated with the melodramatic, Maddin’s films contain enough transgressive elements (including a son eating the corpse of his father, inces-tuous love, or simply Count Dracula) to deserve the Canadian Gothic label. True, the transgressions featured in his work are highly stylized and clad in a lot of humor, but I do not believe that this fact makes them in any way less “seri-ous.” One may recall, in this respect, a very short story by Margaret Atwood, “Horror Comics,” in which two girls neutralize their very real fears, and dis-tance themselves from their own latent “vampirism” or hate, by mock-dram-atizing cheap and obviously exaggerated horror comics (see chapter 4). In social life transgressions are real, just as avalanches do happen. (Reportedly,

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Maddin’s intention was to endow the themes of Careful with “real avalanche potential”; Toles 2001: 329.) Critic Steven Shaviro, who identifies yearning and humiliation as the two powerful, central emotions organizing Maddin’s cinematic universe, points to a number of excesses particular to Maddin’s art: an excess of narrative, an excess of display, an excess of emotion. He goes on to explain that the campy ludicrousness permeating Maddin’s work “is the mask under whose cover the cultivation of extreme feelings becomes possi-ble. We cannot help looking ridiculous when we are overcome with passion, or driven by desires that have no hope of success and no rational grounding” (2002 : 217). Again, the excessiveness at the level of aesthetics, narrative and visual representation is made to both expose and emotionally contain the ex-cesses of the body and of desire.

Interestingly enough, the film has been (half-jokingly) called by its mak-ers (Guy Maddin and George Toles) both “pro-incest” and “pro-repression.” Or, as Maddin explains, “It started out as pro-incest. […] I went and shot it and the pro-incest kind of got lost and I think it ended up being that whenever anyone did act on their impulses, they were punished in an Old Testament fashion instantly. […] So it ended up being a  pro-repression movie […]” (Beard 2005). It seems that the offhand humor with which Maddin uses the pro- and anti- labels undermines their ultimate adequacy. Rather, it is the in-terplay between (illicit) desire and repression – dramatized as real or fanta-sized transgression of some sort or another – that lends vitality to social life as well as to artistic creation. The effect Maddin achieves by escaping as far as possible from “psychological realism” into excessive and campy melodrama-tization is not only an emotional detachment that makes the “horror” of the body (with its drives and desires) more bearable, but also a perspective that – if not exactly post- or inhuman – could at least be dubbed “parahuman.” The human subject (at least in its liberal humanist version) is not the centre of attention; it proves to be secondary to the primacy of corporeality, which always exceeds any social norms and forms of repression.

* Through eerie settings, contrived narratives, histrionic performances and

anti-naturalistic aural effects (e.g. poor synchronization) Maddin achieves an oneiric mood in which, just as in a  dream, human subjects become decen-tered, displaced and secondary to some uncanny logic beyond the characters’

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(and pretty much the viewers’) reach and comprehension, a  logic of excess and desire. A  similar effect, although with much less humor attached, may be found in the films of David Cronenberg, a master of the “biological hor-ror.” Particularly Videdrome, Naked Lunch and eXistenZ blur the line between what is commonly experienced as reality and worlds created by hallucination. The protagonists of many of his films are (traditionally male) subjects torn apart (sometimes literally) by uncontrollable desires and/or bodily transfor-mations. It could be argued that, like Maddin’s Careful, Cronenberg’s art is pro-repression and thus, apparently, anti-transgression;40 some critics (nota-bly the fellow Canadian Robin Wood) accuse him of a  fundamentally con-servative bias that forecloses any liberatory potential. Thomas Waugh is very adamant in his condemnation: Cronenberg is an “obsessive homophobe” who is “[t]raumatized by the penetration of the male body” and “resolves the stress by littering the landscape with dead queers” (2006: 397). Along similar lines, some feminist critics point to his films’ misogyny, or at least their phal-locentric sexual politics (Barbara Creed’s analyses are particularly revealing in this respect; 1998, 2000). Others, however, advocate a different interpre-tative stance; Kelly Hurley, for example, recognizes a posthuman potential in Cronenberg’s work and calls for a correspondingly posthuman politics of in-terpretation. It is along these lines that I choose to read Cronenberg’s (early) ouvre as troubled by the constant interplay between the transgressive agency of the corporeal and the normative constraints imposed by the liberal human-ist notion of the disciplined and well-regulated body.

Criticized, on the one hand, by conservatives for bold representations of sexuality, corporeality, abjection and various sorts of monstrosity, and, on the other hand, by some progressives for an underlying “reactionary” agenda, Cronenberg claims, interestingly, an unusual ability to see a problem “from all sides” at once, without having to choose a particular stance (Rodley 1992: 118). This is probably what allows him to say: “It seems very natural for me to be sympathetic to disease” (Rodley 1992: 84), and at the same time har-bor a clear nostalgia for the (male) human subject, doomed to some inhu-man transformation, disintegration, and/or self-annihilation (William Beard

40 Actually, it may very well be argued that a pro-transgression stance is secretly correlated with a pro-repression one, inasmuch as repression is transgression’s condition of possi-bility.

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stresses this nostalgia in The Artist as Monster, particularly in the chapter on Videodrome; 2006: 121–164). The pathos of the last scene of The Fly depends largely on the monster’s proof of its very last vestige of humanity when the human-fly-machine hybrid begs for death. (It is a suicidal drive, ultimately, that seems to be constitutive of the human subject, as opposed to a non-hu-man monster which “has no politics,” as Brundle-fly puts it; Veronica’s hu-manity is also tested and confirmed through the act of mercy-killing.) It could be argued that the radical potential of Cronenberg’s films lies not so much in a  deliberate strategy of transgression, but largely in the very immediacy of the cinematic image and its ability to “infect” the mind of the viewer, in a virus-like manner. Even if one interprets his movies as essentially “pro-re-pression” (which is usually understood as coterminous with conservative), the images – once unleashed – do not simply go back to the dark recesses of the mind; they might begin to breed, multiply and parasitically dominate the “host body.” One may recall, in this respect, fiery condemnations of carnal sins as well as detailed descriptions (or visual representations) of infernal suf-ferings in pre-modern Europe which, quite contrary to their stated intentions, bred a Western sado-masochistic imaginary for centuries to come. This is how I  understand the subversive power of images, even if they are not made to serve the purposes of an overtly pro-transgression narrative. (The quasi-viral quality of images was, of course, thematized and fleshed out in Videodrome, where recorded images have the ability to invade and transform not just hu-man minds, but also – if not primarily – human bodies.)

A man losing control of his body (which entails its, and his, feminization) is one of the most consistent motifs in Cronenberg’s films. It is the relative independence of the body that fascinates the director, as he explains in this oft-quoted passage:

I don’t think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like coloni-alism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It’s a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate. (Rodley 1992: 80)

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“Long live the new flesh!” (Videodrome) Source: http://lastframe.tumblr.com/post/24048034108/

videodrome-david-cronenberg-1983

The colonial analogy sounds quite relevant, given Canada’s past and its postcolonial present. The kind of rebellion Cronenberg describes, howev-er, rather fits the American Revolution, against which the Canadian regime eternally defines itself. In a psycho-political reading, then, Cronenberg’s en-during fascination with “rebellious” flesh could be related (but certainly not reduced) to Canadians’ ambiguous feelings towards their powerful southern neighbor; obviously intrigued by Americans’ clamorous claims of independ-ence, many Canadians embrace a more conservative tendency that empha-sizes balance, moderation, and evolutionary change. At least at some level, then, Cronenberg’s “message” about the transgressions could be read as a Maddinian admonition “Careful!,” an irresistible fascination with and, si-multaneously, a warning about the dangerous excesses that may result from the uncurbed drive to transgress. Indeed, most theorists agree that transgres-sion, though ostensibly challenging the authority of a law or a border, in fact secretly affirms the law or the border and confirms its validity; or in other words, the law depends on its transgression and (secretly) demands it, which provides a classic example the so-called “double-bind” situation (a self-con-tradictory message), possibly inherent in all law-making and law-enforce-ment.

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If Cronenberg has been accused of making films that sometimes bor-der on the pornographic (Crash, most notoriously), in the films of another Canadian director, Bruce LaBruce, pornography is an ever-present element, or one of their constitutive elements. LaBruce situates himself as far as pos-sible from a  “pro-repression” bias and the “celluloid transgressions” that Cronenberg and Maddin may be associated with. Instead, LaBruce adopts the role of an eternal and unregenerate transgressor: his is a cultural politics of transgression par excellence. Using homosexuality as some sort of cultural cap-ital, he declares boldly: “Homosexuals are, by definition, outlaws and crimi-nals. That’s what makes it so exciting.” (1997b: 63) He defies not simply the general heteronormativity of Western culture, but – with an equal zeal – the homonormativity represented by some LGBT organizations (for instance, he calls the US Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “a quasi-Sta-linist organization which attempts to police gay imagery in Hollywood mov-ies”; 1997a: 25). Like Cronenberg, LaBruce vehemently denounces external censorship of any sort, yet his self-imposed limits of the “representationally proper” lie much further than Cronenberg’s: as a self-proclaimed porn-star he acts out outrageous sex scenes with a literality that transcends any overt or metaphorized sexual perversions featured in Cronenberg’s works.

LaBruce came to international prominence as a  representative of the Toronto queercore movement and the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. But, as one can learn from Thomas Waugh, “LaBruce’s work has never been fi-nanced by public agencies” and “not a single of his four or five […] video fea-tures is available from Canadian distributors” (2006: 221). In a sense, then, he is Canada’s “dispossessed child,” almost a persona non grata who chose to take permanent residence in Berlin (just like another fellow Canadian trans-gressor, the electro-punk vocalist Peaches). The Canadian gay writer Stan Persky (strangely enough also a part-time resident of Berlin, apparently a per-ceived promised land for an assortment of Canadian rebels and non-conform-ists), places LaBruce in the tradition of Canadian film-making that I referred to earlier as “perversion chic”:

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If Canada is typically all about moderation, reticence and compromise, the Toronto filmmaker is all about homosexual excess. Oddly enough, his sexually extreme mov-ies can be said to be fairly typical of Canadian cinema. Although LaBruce’s films intentionally verge on porn, deal with homosexual fascism, and graphically, as they say, feature full-frontal S&M sex, right-wing homo skinheads, and various other obsessions […], their preoccupations aren’t all that different from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, Denys Arcard’s [Arcand’s] Love and Other Human Remainse [Love and Human Remains], John Grayson’s [Greyson‘s] Lillies or Lynne Stopkowich’s [Stopkewich‘s] Barbara Gowdy-inspired paean to necrophilia, Kissed. Canadian films have a tendency to be kinky and, in that sense, La Bruce is simply working in the tradition. (2003)

Still, of all the directors mentioned by Persky, LaBruce is probably the most radical in pushing the boundaries of the proper, the acceptable and the licit in the sphere of aesthetic representation and the sexual politics behind it.

In his film Otto, or Up with the Dead People (which I discuss in more detail in the following chapter) LaBruce plays with the figure of gay zombies. The eponymous hero believes he has died and come back from the grave. As he needs money to “unlive,” he agrees to take up a part in a movie which actually tells his story. The movie is directed by Medea Yarn, who at the same time shoots a film about a gay zombie revolt against consumerist society. When alive, Otto was a sensitive gay boy and a vegetarian son of a butcher. After he comes back, he craves for meat, preferably human meat. And thus a compul-sive escape from meat – both being and eating meat– is necessarily haunted by a craving for meat. The figure of a zombie itself comes closest to the idea of an “acting body” without soul, flesh endowed with some strange agency, a hu-man being reduced to meat; in fact, both death and sex seem to have that re-ductive effect. Commenting on the films of Bruce LaBruce, David McIntosh asserts: “Of all our industrially exploitable selves, the eroticized meat self is the most authentic, the most renewable and the most liberating” (1997: 151). Meat desires meat, matter desires matter – beyond our conscious, self-policed selves. Meat wants to eat meat, just as it wants to be eaten. And since there exists in our culture a strong ban on eating human flesh (man should not be-come meat to fellow human beings, nor to other living creatures), perhaps our refusal to participate in what the writer Barbara Gowdy calls “the obscene food chain” gets compensated for by the excesses of our sexuality. In Otto there is a provocative scene in which one zombie copulates with a wound in

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the abdomen of another, after pulling out and consuming his intestines.41 The movie suggests that sex, eating and the cultural consumption of images (as driven by the capitalistic imperative to consume) are all implicated in one another.

Otto Source: http://www.brucelabruce.com

LaBruce never ceases to be aware of the constant interplay between sex-ually-ridden transgression and the mechanisms of capitalistic co-optation and commodification; even political and/or sexual radicalism gets caught up (perhaps inevitably so) in desire’s “general economy” dominated by the

41 In all fairness, it must be said that a wound-copulation scene appeared earlier in Cro-nenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash.

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forces of modern-day capitalism. LaBruce’s iconoclastic turn to pornography is quite significant, as pornography occupies a very nodal position, culturally and politically; it is perennially the target of the regulatory aspirations of the state; it is always situated close to the borders of legality and legitimacy; and it is exploited extensively by capitalism’s logic of (easy) profit. Unlike many other artists, who shun associations with pornography, LaBruce insists that his work is, indeed, pornographic (yet irreducible to pornography alone); he avoids the conventional tendency to redeem sexual representations in art by making references to some higher artistic values, which of course is not to suggest that his work is deprived of artistic values. Simultaneously, his work diverges from standard commercial pornography primarily in that it self-con-sciously and critically investigates the connections between the free market, money, media, sex and desire. One of his main preoccupations as an artist, then, seems to be how to “produce” transgression without falling into the pit-falls of commodification, nor claiming to be radically separated from capital-ism’s circulation systems.

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The three directors whose work I have briefly discussed have each a dif-ferent way of dealing with and representing transgression, especially bodi-ly transgression. In Maddin’s work, the alienating and traumatizing effects of transgressive desires are softened aesthetically by campy stylizations and a great deal of humor, whereas the overall politics of his films oscillates uncan-nily between a pro-transgression and a pro-repression perspective. The latter point may also hold true for David Cronenberg’s cinema, despite the visual excesses, based on an aesthetics of disgust, that he employs to investigate the vexing fleshiness of human existence. Still, it is possible to claim, as some crit-ics do, that certain elements of his oeuvre, such as the sheer visual force of his images or the posthuman sympathy for the disease, the virus, and the parasite (all serving as apt metaphors of the body’s fundamental independence) give his work more transgressive potential than is often acknowledged. Finally, Bruce LaBruce may claim the honor of being the most transgressive artist of the three, and the only one with a deliberate queer agenda, where “queer” is understood broadly as the constant use of sex, body and desire to destabilize existing economies, norms and aesthetics. Bodies, with their own economies

and their strange kind of agency, are not utopian sites of escape from the so-cial and political realm, as some might think, but are always intimately tied up with the general social economies in which they act and desire. By and large, the work of these three directors clearly attests to the continuing trans-gressive tradition in Canadian cinema and culture, a tradition that challenges the “scenic aesthetics” through which mainstream Canada often chooses to represent itself.

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Following on the work of Michel Foucault, as well as some other scholars, one could characterize modern regimes of knowledge (and, consequently, power) through the nexus of visibility, legibility, identification, classification and regulation.42 It would be easy to claim that the progress of science has rad-ically reduced, if not eliminated, the field of the “invisible”; thanks to sophisti-cated technologies we are able to watch life at the bottom of the sea, the con-stituents of an atom, the tiny details of the human body or the unimaginably distant galaxies. In a sense, visibility – or at least the visibility made possible by the scientific-technological conditionings of perception – has reached, or is about to reach, its limits. Yet this coming close to the limits has heightened the awareness of the “constructedness” of visibility as such: the naïve notion of visibility, according to which things simply wait to be noticed (through, say, a micro- or a telescope) is replaced by the recognition of the active role of the observer in the construction of visible objects, or of the very conditions of visibility as such. That which is visible (and thus may be said to “exist”) is always mediated (through technology, for example) and always open (or vulnerable) to representation.

42 A great number of theorists, whether directly inspired by Michel Foucault or not, have addressed the question of visibility, identification, and classification. Some are cited below in this chapter; many others are related to queer and (trans)gender theory, in-cluding, notably, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. It is also an important area of theorization in postcolonial and race studies, e.g. in the work of Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha. I am not suggesting, of course, that these fields of study are mutually exclusive, as my chapter on Dionne Brand makes clear.

The Pornography of Bare Life

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The development of new media introduces new regimes of seeing, a new “delimitation of […] of the visible and the invisible” (Rancière 2004: 13), which has important cultural, social and political consequences. The next stage in the setting up of a modern knowledge/power regime (although I do not claim a simple temporal sequence here, I posit “stages” for analytical clar-ity only) is legibility. The visibility of a familiar, legible sign is different from that of a sign that comes from an unknown alphabet (provided we are in a po-sition to assume that what we see is actually a meaning-carrying element). It is a stage, as it were, of fleeing from the monstrosity of an illegible universe, a stage of seeking the rules of legibility, deciphering “hieroglyphs,” attributing meanings. For signs to possess stable and legible meanings it is essential that they remain identifiable: d and g must not replace each other, or else “god” will become “dog.” The loss of a sign’s relative stability (i.e. the correlation be-tween the signifier’s recognizable shape and the signified “meaning”) would quickly lead to a lack of communication. Once identifiable (because recogniz-able and reproducible), elements become ready for being classified into sets according to certain stable attributes (and the other way round: possessing particular attributes determines the identification of an element). And, finally (although all the “stages” should rather be understood as overlapping or over-laying one another), a systemized world consisting of elements that belong to their proper categories becomes a world that can be easily regulated, managed and manipulated – technologically as well as (bio)politically.

It is in this theoretical framework that the phenomenon which has come to be known in modern times as “pornography” may be analysed.43 The ques-tion of visibility is closely related in this case to the pursuit of such parameters of reading and identification that will expose pornography for “what it really is” and wherever it is. As John Berger states aptly, we “only see what we look at” and “looking is an act of choice” (1972: 8), a choice that cannot but be affected by what we already know. To see pornography is, therefore, both an effect and a confirmation of some particular form of knowledge: “now I know it’s porn!” as well as “now I know how to identify porn!” It is a form of knowl-edge that gives modern institutions of power jurisdiction over certain rep-

43 For an extensive analysis of how photographic “machines of the visible,” in conjunction with what Foucault dubbed scientia sexualis, produced the genre of hardcore porn, see Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989).

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resentations, i.e. gives power the right to classify representations as permitted, restricted or banned.

Contemporary regimes of seeing, which have also produced pornogra-phy as we know and see it, developed in conjunction with the new media, such as print, photography, film, and the Internet. Pre-Enlightenment folk cultures (mostly oral) with their bawdy jokes and tales remained largely outside of the state’s regulative interventions. However, as soon as sexually explicit material appeared in print, the state’s functionaries began to perceive it as a threat to the population’s morality. One telling example comes from Britain at the end of the 18th century: disgusted by Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel Monk (1796),44 Thomas James Mathias, treasurer and librarian in the royal household, appealed in his satirical work The Pursuits of Literature to the state to “supply the laws” that would “restrain” obscene literature:

Why sleep the ministers of truth and law? Has the State no control, no decent awe, While each with each in madd’ning orgies vie, Panders to lust, and licens’d blasphemy? Can Senates hear without a kindred rage? (Mathias 1801: 365–7)

The series of rhetorical questions leave no doubt that the state does in-deed have adequate tools, let alone the  right, to regulate obscenity on the grounds that, if unchecked, it must lead to anarchy (1801: 368). In a  foot-note Matthias goes as far as to threaten Lewis personally with Common Law indictment for obscenity (1801: 245), not least because the Gothic author was also a Member of Parliament, and thus a high-ranking representative of the state and a law-maker himself. Clearly, the 18th century, probably even more than the previous one, realized the power of print: after all, a single pam-phlet could bring an empire to a crisis (as did Thomas Paine’s Common Sense). No wonder, then, that modern states have gone to great pains to maintain as much control over potentially dangerous political writings as possible; one could even hypothesize that censorship of one sort or another has always been, and continues to be, essential to modern polity. Obscenity marks the absolute limit of free speech, beyond which there expands a  dark realm of

44 On the historical connections between Gothicism and pornography as genres largely defined in/by legal texts and practices, see Gamer (1999).

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irredeemable negativity, the banished evil that demarcates the boundaries of the (desirable) body politic. In a sense, pornography stimulates an immuno-logical response in modern political bodies, and as such it is as much illicit as it is indispensable for keeping the body politic “in good health” and immune to corruption – that very corruption that it represents.

In Thomas Jefferson’s political philosophy the state’s prerogative to guard the population’s morality is one of the key tenets. In a famous passage, im-bued with corporeal metaphors, he states that “[i]t is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a can-ker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution” (1781–4). His main objection here is to the “bad manners” of the working classes (which should therefore remain in Europe, lest they pollute the American people), of which sexual manners are no doubt an important part. Jefferson’s ideas would ring down the centuries, more audibly at times of large-scale moral panics, when the strongest enemy to the nation was envisioned not as an external force, but as a moral corruption “eating to the heart” of America’s laws and constitution. (This argument is used in the opening scene of the movie The Notorious Betty Page, which tells the story of the cult porn model at the time of the Cold War. “Communism will never defeat America. No, it’s something from within,” says a priest testifying to the corrupting impact of comic books and pornography on American youth.)45

Arguably, moral panics – as common to modern polity as periodic cri-ses to the capitalistic economic order – are governed by an underlying fear of variously defined dirt which gets out of place (to invoke Mary Douglas’s classic formulation) and out of control; as such, it is likely to become con-tagious, deadly and, ultimately, apocalyptic. One of the key factors, then, is the spread of dirt, its easy availability. This is where the mass media become intimately combined with moral panics: print culture, and later other me-dia, made all sorts of “dangerous” material relatively easy to distribute and obtain. Scientific and technological progress has always triggered anxiety, as exemplified by the modern myth of the mad scientist (beginning with

45 Richard Nixon expressed a similar opinion, actually suggesting a direct cause-and-effect link between debauchery and communism: “the relaxation of sexual mores leads inexor-ably to every kind of debauchery, until in the end it brings about the redistribution of wealth and the equal sharing of property” (Arcand 1993: 118).

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Dr. Frankenstein) who crosses moral boundaries and precipitates a  disas-ter. Unsurprisingly, the intersection of technophobia and sexophobia has become one of the most fertile grounds for moral panics, with the Internet as the most recent example (cf. Marwick 2008). The history of moral panics goes back to the 18th century, at least (cf. Binhammer 1996), but there have been certain shifts of focus over time. As could be seen in the examples men-tioned above, “classical” moral panics were mostly about the protection of a republic from the perils of anarchy. The moral panic of the late 1940s/early 1950s was still very much about the integrity of the republic in the face of an evil enemy, yet the focus shifted significantly in the direction of youth as the most vulnerable group. This trend continued, with the child becoming the last bastion of conservatism, the mainstay of civilization, the embodiment of what Lee Edelman (2004) calls “reproductive futurism.”46 (In 1859 French poet Charles Baudelaire was disgusted by some high-born ladies who looked unflinchingly at pornographic photos, yet he showed no concern about “children on their way back from school who took pleasure in these follies”) (1955: 229). A  more recent development, resulting from the expansion of the neoliberal worldview and its privatization of nearly all spheres of life, has made moral panics much more focused on individuals: nowadays they are less about the common good, and more about the psychological well-being and the “correct development” of a child.

Whereas the beginnings of the pornographic “genre” were demonstrably bound up with an overtly political project,47 most of contemporary commer-cial porn (with the notable exception of some art porn created by the likes of Annie Sprinkle or Bruce LaBruce) seems to have shed any political ambitions. But even the apparently apolitical pornography can still be seen as thoroughly political (in a sense markedly different from the one invoked in recurrent mor-al panics), although its relationship with power remains rather ambivalent. By 46 Drawing heavily on Jacques Lacan, Edelman (2004) argues that “reproductive futur-

ism” (best represented by the figure of the Child) is the collective fantasy that gives mandate to and organizes all current political discourse.

47 Following on the ground-breaking work of Lynn Hunt (1993), authors such as Robert Darnton (2000) and Paul Willemen (2004) point to the overtly political and philosoph-ical nature of much of 18th-century pornographic literature in France. Those so-called philosophical books were “vehicles of social criticism” and often served to bash “aristo-crats, clergymen and the monarchy” (Darnton 2000: 91).

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promising a utopian sexual heaven, it may be said to divert people’s attention from political issues; its anti-transcendentalist insistence on the physicality of the body, however, seems to threaten the purity of the modern body politic. With its emphasis on alternative (often forbidden) kinds of knowledge and carnal practices, it promises a  transgression; but at the same time, through its outlawed status, it seems to legitimize power, just as God’s ban on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (which is, more than anything else, carnal know-ledge) is an assertion of his power. By exposing material bodies, pornography exposes the bottom line of power’s domain, the Agambenian bare life;48 by foregrounding the filth of the obscene, it makes it possible for sanitized public space to emerge and serve as the stage on which power may “present itself,” while retaining the right to regulate visibility itself. The body politic must never be an overtly sexual body, a body driven by desire, as sexuality remains strongly associated with losing control, going animalistically “wild” and being stripped of dignitas. The modern state’s regulation of bodies and sexualities – both repressive and productive, as we have learnt from Foucault – serves to keep the sexual safely “in its place” (the private, the marital, the reproduct-ive), so that the state itself may appear as nobly desexualized. Yet on closer scrutiny we discover, just as Joseph K. does in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, that what we have taken for respectable law-books is, in fact, nothing but cheap pornography (2009: 42).

Pornography is not so much a legitimate child of modernity, but its un-foreseen bastard, kept in a  secret cell, disinherited and denied. On the one hand, it reflects the episteme which determines the paradoxical place of “the body” and “sexuality” in modern times (paradoxical because the “repres-sion” and regulation of bodies is matched by the compulsion to continually express, expose and experiment with the sexual/the corporeal). On the other hand, however, pornography threatens to uncover the very workings of mod-ern (bio)power, its claims to the regulation of social and individual life, its production and control of “bare life.” Indeed, pornography could be seen as a representation of bare life itself. Agamben credits Marquis de Sade, arguably the first modern pornographer, with staging the theatrum politicum as “a theater

48 “The ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power” (Agamben 1998: 187).

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of bare life, in which the very physiological life of bodies appears, through sex-uality, as the pure political element” (1998: 134). Even if, as Paul Willemen (2004) claims, the philosophical potential of early pornography has never been fully realized, it has not completely dematerialized, either: it remains la-tent in representations of nude bodies and sexual practices. Pornography can thus be seen as a site where the bare life usurped (or, indeed, produced) by modern biopower is, precisely, laid bare. The emperor is naked, so to speak.

With its underlying vision of radical egalitarianism, pornography has been pushed to the very margins of modern polity, heavily regulated and depolit-icized. Simultaneously, it has proliferated and permeated modern societies due to the ever expanding possibilities of mass media. Yet porn has not been simply adopting and adapting new tools of representation and distribution; arguably, it was the media that followed a “drive for pornography,” i.e. the development of new media was fuelled by the urge to further pornographize regimes of seeing. In the 19th century Baudelaire remarked on the natural af-finity between photography (which to him had no artistic value whatsoever) and pornography: “The love of pornography, which is no less deep-rooted in the natural heart of man than the love of himself, was not to let slip so fine an opportunity of self-satisfaction” (1955: 229). Early film theorist Siegfried Kracauer saw the essence of film as an “unveiling” of the material world (Kracauer 1997), while his friend Walter Benjamin argued that through an uncanny closeness and an excess of detail photography and film strip physical objects of an “aura” (Benjamin 2008).49 Frederick Jameson goes so far as to claim that “the visual is essentially pornographic” and pornographic films are only “the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body” (1992: 1). Arguably, behind this pornographic drive to see the material world laid bare there lies a more fundamental scien-tific (and, ultimately, Judeo-Christian) impulse to lift the “veil of nature” and discover an apocalyptic truth (apocalypsis means “unveiling”).

49 Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” is not far, I think, from Agamben’s (2010) analysis of grace as that which covered Adam and Eve’s nakedness in Paradise, before it was lost. The loss of the aura is, for Benjamin, tantamount to a loss of distance, which parallels Baudrillard’s point that through an excess of detail and close-up pornography abolishes distance, and thus renders the work of seduction impossible (1990).

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After years of “trial-and-error,” so to speak, the US judiciary developed in 1973 the so-called Miller (or three-prong) test in order to ascertain what kind of obscenity falls outside the constitutional protection of free speech: “A work may be subject to state regulation where that work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest in sex; portrays, in a patently offensive way, sexual con-duct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and, taken as a  whole, does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (Miller v. California, 1973). What is being assessed, then, is an extra value that may or may not redeem an obscene representation and save it from a ban, while the inevitable arbitrariness of such assessment is abated by recourse to expert knowledges. The Canadian legal culture has developed a markedly different, more “communitarian” approach to obscenity. Without going into much de-tail, what is being assessed in Canadian judiciary practice are the “accepted standards of tolerance in the contemporary Canadian community” (Towne Cinema Theatres Ltd. v. The Queen). The Supreme Court’s landmark deci-sion shows a fair amount of pragmatic flexibility in that it admits both the mu-tability of the communal standards in time and the fact that “the community may tolerate different things for different groups of people depending on the circumstances” (Towne Cinema Theatres Ltd. v. The Queen).

What is most peculiar, however, is that Canadians’ standards of toler-ance are to be assessed not according to what individuals deem proper or ac-ceptable for themselves; instead, what matters “is what Canadians would not abide other Canadians seeing because it would be beyond the contemporary Canadian standard of tolerance to allow them to see it” (Towne Cinema Theatres Ltd. v. The Queen). According to this legal formulation, the social norm is not so much a question of shared values and beliefs defined in some positive terms (as seems to be the case with the treatment of obscenity in US legal culture); nor is it a question of what I personally would or would not like to be able to see; rather, the limit of the acceptable is set by a negation (“would not abide”) and a reference to a determinable communal standard. In an almost perfect illustration of Lacan’s idea of the Big Other,50 there are always some amorphous “other Canadians” whom “other Canadians” seek to

50 Jacques Lacan elaborates on the concept of the Big Other (L’Autre) in The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1991). For an accessible discussion, see chapter 1 of Slavoj Žižek’s How to Read Lacan (2007).

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protect from “undue exploitation of sex.” By transcending “personal views,” the criterion acquires the quality of, if not objectivity, then at least intersubjec-tivity. Presumably, such a definition of the community standards was adopted with a view to avoiding a situation in which the larger community is terrorized by the moral standards of a minority (say, a religious one). On the other hand, it seems to foster a kind of ethical hypocrisy where, for example, I may person-ally enjoy watching extremely violent porn, but I cannot bear other Canadians to watch it. In fact, the “contemporary Canadian standard of tolerance” that is being posited, or invoked, in an act of judgement only exists precisely through that performative act of judgement, whether executed by a judge, or by the invisible hand of “other Canadians,” i.e. the Big Other.

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In his collection of essays, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce presents himself as a “reluctant pornographer” (1997b). His cinematic and photographic work comes out of the “homocore” tradition of the early 1990s, later renamed “queercore,” which combined the punk contestation of oppressive social rules and political systems with a  vehement affirmation of “deviant” sexualities. Consequently, LaBruce’s work weaves together pornography, formal experi-mentation, the DIY aesthetics derived mostly from the punk movement, and political critique. This potentially explosive mixture, however, remains unpre-tentious, antidogmatic, and flavoured with an auto-ironic sense of humour. LaBruce is proud to quote a critic who called him a pornographic Brecht be-cause of the defamiliarization and distanciation techniques that the Canadian filmmaker frequently employs, such as “films within the film, the mixture of black-and-white and color, the use of sound and music that seems to be at odds with the visual image” (Plante 2008). He does so, he further explains, in order to “make the audience self-conscious and aware of its own voyeurism” (Plante 2008). To put in a broader context, one might say such techniques problematize the very question of “visibility” and ways of looking: in LaBruce seeing is never innocent, it is always mediated and fabricated through tech-nologies of representation; always conditioned culturally, socially, and polit-ically. Every image (for instance bodies involved in a sexual act) is entangled in a network of correlations between genre conventions, a politico-moral re-

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gime, the capitalist market, the media, and desire. Consequently, LaBruce’s pornography is one that analyses the conditions of its own production and its circulation within particular socio-cultural and politico-economic systems.

Although, on the one hand, LaBruce claims to be a “reluctant” pornogra-pher, on the other he invariably affirms porn as “the last bastion of radicalism” (Hays 2011). Pornography, he goes on to argue, carries on “that tradition in the gay movement of having sex become the conductor, the essence of the movement” (Hays 2011), in contrast to the mainstream LGBT move-ment, which has become conservative, conformist and consumerist, and thus “dead,” or – more precisely – “undead” (cf. Spiv 2011). Much as he explores porn’s multifarious “systemic” implications, without regarding it, naively, as an inherently transgressive or liberatory practice, irrespective of its produc-tion and consumption contexts, he nevertheless emphasizes pornography’s effectiveness in affecting the viewer’s cognitive and corporeal spheres. Though heavily regulated by both the state’s and the market’s laws, porn seems to con-tinually resist full control, to always harbour a kind of excess that may become a springboard for cultural, social and/or political contestation.

In her book on female characters in the work of Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter asserts that “[p]ornography, like satire, has an inbuilt reactionary mechanism” (Carter 1979: 16) and that it is usually tolerated because it al-most always reinforces a given society’s dominant values and ideas (Carter 1979: 18). Rather than mobilize radicalism, it serves to neutralize the disrup-tive potential that sexuality possesses; it is not conducive to a change in the social relations of power, but to solipsistic masturbation: “pornography keeps sex in its place,” that is “under the carpet” (Carter 1979: 18). Such claims seem to contradict LaBruce’s faith in porn’s radicalism and “impact force,” yet on second thoughts Carter’s and LaBruce’s arguments are not as divergent as they may seem: if the former criticizes pornography for its lack of a radical vision of social change, its conformity with dominant power and its enforced “moral standards,” the latter is set on creating porn that is, indeed, “socially engaged.” As long as pornography remains “in its place,” i.e. safely fenced off, clandestine, separated from the public sphere, so long it is relatively tolerat-ed. However, as soon as it creeps out from under the carpet, then – in keep-ing with Mary Douglas’s classic formula – it becomes dirt, a plague, a threat for the foundations of civilization. Both Carter and LaBruce (as well as other

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“pro-pornographic” contemporary artists) advocate a reclamation of pornog-raphy for the sake of social change. For LaBruce, porn is not simply a matter of an individual orgasm, but a social, political and even moral (in a markedly anti-conservative sense) one, since “the sexual is the political” (Plante 2008). As he admits himself, “Strangely, I’m not really that interested in pornogra-phy per se; I’m more interested in what you can do with it as an ideological weapon” (Spiv 2011).

*

Late postmodernity has become dominated by the Foucaultian questions of biopolitics, or the disciplining and regulation of life (and, consequently, death or mortality) by institutions and discourses of power. These questions have been brought up, among others, by Giorgio Agamben, who placed in the centre of his politico-legal thinking the figure of homo sacer or the outcast, represented, for example, by the Muselman in Nazi death camps (Agamben 1998: 185). Much (but perhaps still not enough) has been written on peo-ple excluded from the social, political and symbolic order; people deprived of a “legal personality,” such as refugees and immigrants, certain categories of prisoners, stateless persons, the mentally ill, people in a prolonged coma, all those invisible for the system, all those whose legal (not to say “ontic”) status remains unspecified and precarious. They exist in a grey area and one cannot be sure to what extent they still count as citizens, humans, living beings. No wonder, then, that Western popular culture has witnessed a spectacular re-turn of the myth of the living dead in recent times. Slavoj Žižek goes so far as to claim that this myth is the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” (Žižek 1991: 14). Ontologically, the zombie is a deeply disturbing figure: dead, and yet possessing some sort of agency; no longer a human be-ing, and yet not completely separable from humanity. As a harbinger of an apocalyptic end of the world (not unlike pornography, for its opponents), the zombie is an inexhaustible source of anxiety and insecurity. The living dead is a thoroughly biopolitical figure: on the one hand, it is the homo sacer excluded from the order of fully acknowledged humans/citizens, but on the other it is the precondition of that very order: it is its existence, after all, that provides the order’s raison d’être, precisely as a barrier against everything that threat-

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ens to destroy the “human” order. If one were to posit a more general rule, it would be possible to say that every body politic generates its own homines sacri, its own zombies, its foreign bodies, which it must subsequently labori-ously fight off.

The figure of the zombie is often juxtaposed with another “undead” creature, that is the vampire. Both characters have been employed to convey a plethora of meanings. Since its introduction at the end of the 18th century, the vampire has always functioned in Western popular culture as, among oth-er things, a metaphor of sexual desire, whereas the zombie – who entered the cultural mainstream mostly thanks to George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead – has been read from the outset as a metaphor of Western con-sumerism and conformity. The classic vampire is an aristocrat and an intellec-tual; an average human, when turned into a vampire, becomes an ennobled, sublime, and tragic figure. No wonder that in keeping with the aristocratic origin of the vampire myth, its central motif is blood, while the myth itself may be read as a metaphor created by the rising bourgeoisie to represent the degeneracy of European aristocracy (as result of endogamy, moral corruption etc.). Still, one cannot fail to sense the aura of nobility around the vampire, because much as the bourgeoisie gradually deprived aristocracy of their priv-ileges, political power and capital, it continued to revere its refined cultural heritage. In a way, Karl Marx repeated the same “vampirizing” gesture when he compared capitalists to blood suckers (see for example Marx 1992: 342). For him, the metaphor is almost literal: capitalism draws the “life substance” from the workers, transforming them precisely into something like the living dead: biologically alive, yet in terms of their human potential to think and act creatively – actually dead (cf. Neocleous 2005, chapter 2; Edmundson 1997: 19–20).

As we know it today, the zombie is an offspring of the massification of production, consumption, culture etc. It is not a sophisticated aristocrat with a tragic flaw, but rather an unthinking animal governed by the most primitive instincts. The zombie does not seek noble blood: it is meat that craves meat. No place for pathos or moral dilemmas: we deal with a ruthless barbarian, who even lacks a language to communicate or negotiate in. As a figure of “other-ness,” the zombie is far more radical than the vampire, who is able, after all, to control his instincts up to a degree and who can explain to humans his or her

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tragic fate in a common language. Indeed, the vampire possesses some special kind of magnetism. In many respects it is not only human, but all-too-human. The zombie, on the contrary, is by definition “not sexy”: it is revolting, fetid, abject. If the vampire remains a figure of sublimation, or more precisely of the internal struggle between sublimation and uncontrollable desire, the fleshy (or meaty) and primitive zombie seems to be a figure of the ultimate, irrevo-cable desublimation.

In the context of the following discussion of Bruce LaBruce’s movie Otto; or, Up with Dead People, it is worth saying that in the 1980s and 1990s the vampire became one of the major cultural metaphors for the AIDS epidem-ic. After all, vampirism resembles a contagious disease that spreads via direct bodily contact, while the irrepressible desire attributed to vampires was read as suggestive of the allegedly rampant sexuality of gay men. Thus, the Canadian flight attendant, Gaëtan Dugas, who was wrongly accused of bringing the HIV virus to North America, was portrayed in the media as a truly vampiric per-sona: a gay man with no moral or sexual restraints (cf. Hanson 1991; I write more on Gaëtan Dugas in chapter 7). If, therefore, in the first decade of the 21st century one of the leading queer film artists, Bruce LaBruce, decides to employ the motif of a zombie is his art-porn movies, one may want to inter-pret this as more than simply a cultural fad that expresses the fears, anxieties and fantasies of postmodern, late capitalist societies, but also an artistic and political intervention in the established ways of reading queerness, desire, and the discourses that have developed around AIDS.51 His movies Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and LA Zombie (2010) can be read as, among other things, as a commentary on the formation and functioning of modern, biopo-litical regimes of knowledge/power based, as I have said above, on visibility, legibility, identification, classification and regulation. These mechanisms are a point of reference for the (non-normative) bodies and desires, the (non)identitarian and (non)communitarian formations that the Canadian film-maker concentrates on.

51 LaBruce invokes the zombie metaphor in a different context, too: he compares gay men at a cruising spot to the living dead – stripped of identity and reduced to desiring/de-sired “meat” (cf. Hays 2011).

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*

Otto; or, Up with Dead People is a  unique mixture of different genres, aesthetics, and styles, including pornography, horror (especially of the gore and zombie kind), self-referentiality, pastiche and parody, silent cinema, so-cio-political critique, etc. Judging by the standards of LaBruce’s whole ouvre, Otto is probably the least pornographic and most “popular” or mainstream of his movies; LA Zombie, by comparison, contains much more hardcore por-nography, even if it is delivered to the viewer by means of a very avant-garde visual aesthetics. Otto is a picaresque story of a homeless gay zombie roaming the streets of Berlin. The young protagonist believes he is a living dead, but he might as well be a homeless kid suffering from schizophrenia, which the direc-tor emphasizes repeatedly in interviews. Otto has an insatiable craving for raw meat, which is somewhat ironic given that before his (social) death he was a delicate vegetarian boy, and a butcher’s gay son. As he needs money to “un-live,” he shows up at a casting for a gay zombie movie directed by Medea Yarn (modeled after the American experimental filmmaker Maya Derek), entitled Up with Dead People. Set in the near future, this movie within the movie fea-tures homosexual zombies who – unlike their more classic Hollywood cous-ins – have developed some basic ability to think and communicate (which, of course, makes them more “human”).52 Increasingly harassed and killed by humans, the gay zombies finally instigate a revolt. Medea is an ardent feminist and follower of Herbert Marcuse, and her movie is intended as a radical de-nunciation of the oppressive capitalist society that the zombies rise up against. On meeting Otto, Medea decides to make another movie devoted exclusively to him. In effect, what we watch is a patchwork made up of the two movies within the movie (one on the gay zombie revolt, and the other on Otto) as well as the framework narrative that shows the making of the two movies and

52 LaBruce reinterprets the zombie myth in several ways. Otto is not only a gay/queer zom-bie endowed with consciousness, sensibility and the ability to speak, but he is also equal-ly alienated from both the community of the living and that of the dead (cf. Nova 2008). He is more than a simple symbol of the exclusion of “gay” from “heteronormative” soci-ety; if anything, he is a symbol of the violence inscribed in any instance of identification and categorization, which is evidenced by his recurrent escapes from identity, legibility, classification and surveillance. The movie ends with another escape: the scene of leaving Berlin and heading “north.”

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Otto’s “real” story. This formal structure causes various planes of fiction and (supposed) reality to overlap and blend. Significantly, Medea’s movie about Otto ends with his self-immolation, whereas in LaBruce’s more “optimistic” ending Otto heads north to find “more of his kind.” The optimism of the main story is emphasized by the kitschy motif of a rainbow that appears in the sky as Otto walks away.

Only a few of the film’s scenes could be classified as properly pornograph-ic. One memorable moment is the scene from Medea’s movie where a zombie who has just come back to (un)life devours his partner’s entrails and then copulates with him through the hole in his abdomen. The scene anticipates LaBruce’s next movie, LA Zombie, which is another picaresque, no dialogue story of a zombie who tracks down dead gay bodies and “fucks them back to life” (Kramer 2011). LaBruce thus reverses the dominant discourse built up around HIV/AIDS: casual, serial sex is life-giving rather than fatal.53 (LaBruce readily admits that “there is a definite AIDS subtext to Otto, who can be inter-preted as the horrific outward manifestation of a modern, political disease”; LaBruce 2012: 56) There is another scene in Otto – one of the crucial ones, in my reading – which concludes Medea Yarn’s movie within the movie, Up with Dead People: the gay zombie revolution turns out to be a general orgy in which copulating bodies are mixed with pieces of meat. It is not clear whether the scene is meant as an ironic commentary on the political impotence resulting from a dissipation of the potential for radical social change into transgressive fantasies and sexual activities, or else an affirmative indication that sexuality is the medium and the only motor of any “true” revolution. LaBruce keeps repeating in interview after interview that he largely identifies with Medea Yarn and her Marcusean political philosophy (cf. Spiv 2011), although the somewhat exalted and loquacious character seems to be exaggerated, if not

53 See also chapter 7. The issue of how the culture of barebacking challenges the dominant discourses of HIV/AIDS as a deadly danger has been taken up by Tim Dean in Unlimited Intimacy (2009); in his own words, barebacking “raises questions that complicate how we distinguish life-giving activities from those that engender death” (6). The complex relationship between life- and death-giving have also been problematized, in the con-text of abortion, by feminist scholars; see Soros 1998. Lee Edelman combines the two perspectives (without making an overt reference to the HIV/AIDS context, but discuss-ing more generally the link between queerness and the death drive) in the introductory chapter of his No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), especially pp. 14–16.

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outright satirized. On the other hand, however, self-irony is not a trait Bruce LaBruce could be said to lack.

The zombie revolution/orgy Source: author’s screenshot (DVD)

In an authorial commentary on this revolution/orgy scene, Bruce LaBruce states that the connection of pornography and meat seems very ap-propriate to him. Needless to say, the association of the sexual act with eating is a topos that goes back to “times immemorial,” while meat (next to fleshy fruit) is an apt and widely used metaphor for the human flesh. In pornogra-phy the human body is represented as obscene bare meat, stripped of all tran-scendence (soul), which would be able to somehow “redeem” the meatiness of human existence and transpose it into a  spiritual dimension (just as the eucharist in Christianity sublimates the consumption of Christ’s body).54 As Bruckner and Finkielkraut point out, “to merit being called dirty, it is neces-sary to be twice stripped: once of clothing, and then of transcendence” (quot-ed in Arcand 1993: 29). Meat evokes multiple and often contradictory con-notations. On the one hand, its appearance (when raw) and smell (especially

54 Not unlike Medea Yarn, the Polish philosopher Jolanta Brach-Czaina claims that “every-thing is food, including us” and that the world is a universal community of meat, “a cos-mic feast of cannibals” (1999: 168).

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when rotten) may easily trigger disgust, which places meat, and especially car-rion, on the verge of the abject. Yet, on the other hand, meat is also associat-ed with the most sophisticated pleasures of the palate. Flesh necessarily con-notes wound, death, corpse, but at the same time, as food, it is constitutive of life; it is passivity (deadness) metabolized into life activity. It affects the most primitive instincts: its consumption is believed to raise the level of aggression as well as the libido and sexual potency. Meat seems to mock separate individ-ual identity, and instead points at the radical and monstrous openness to be-ing penetrated, eaten, transformed. Most of the time meat is associated with something very elemental, with matter in its purest – and thus dirtiest – state.

Meat is one of the leitmotifs of LaBruce’s Otto; as Medea Yarn proclaims, “The world is meat. We are meat.” Before turning into a zombie, Otto was a cute and delicate boy, a vegetarian son of a butcher father, happily in love with another boy. After his death (which need not be understood literally as physical death; it might as well be the kind of social death that schizophren-ics or homeless people experience), Otto craves for meat: preferably human meat, but since getting it is not easy (and Otto seems unable to hurt or kill anyone), he confines himself to raw animal meat. Sex becomes a “natural” substitute for cannibalism (after one of the erotic scenes the walls of the room are smeared with blood and for a  brief while Otto’s partner appears to be dead). What we see in Otto’s character, then, is a  desublimation of desire: he changes from a  delicate, sensitive boy into a  meat-craving, if still rather shy and self-restrained, predator. One may wonder to what extent his earlier vegetarianism was an escape from his own meatiness, the meatiness of the world, and consequently a disavowal of death and dirt, including some more “radical” and culturally forbidden forms of desire. 55 Homosexuality may still be relatively tabooed and denounced, yet a “sanitized” version of it (good gay citizens, good consumers, monogamous spouses etc.) is increasingly permit-ted into mainstream social life, and thus not so “radical” anymore. A certain “hygienic” aesthetic quality of the flashbacks showing Otto’s pre-zombie life

55 It is disputable who denies the meatiness of “human condition” more: the human-ist-vegetarian or the carnivore who places him/herself on top of the food chain. Logically, it is the cannibal who denies the human meatiness the least; while the vegetarian argues that “no meat is to be eaten” and the carnivore argues that “I can eat meat, but I am not to be eaten,” the cannibal follows the rule: “I eat meat and I am meat to be eaten.”

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contrasts with his grotesque, abject appearance, smell and behaviour: Otto himself becomes meat, or carrion. His irrepressible hunger for meat may be seen as a metaphor of “liberated” desire as a foundation of human existence. Existence is an endless food chain, a universal feast: physical, sensual, and sex-ual. Meat is no knower of “identities,” and the act of eating annuls distinctions and differentiations, just as desire does.

In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter argues that in his works de Sade “explores the inhuman sexual possibilities of meat” (Carter 1979: 138) – not the body – and that he describes sexual relations in terms of butchery and meat. He creates a spectacle permeated with scientific curiosity, the precision in inflicting pain and suffering, an objectification of the human body, scopo-philia, gory excitement, and, finally, an expectation of meat consumption as a  sort of perverse parody of the sacramental meal. In a  world governed by metaphysics and the idea of God, “sexuality is inhuman” (Carter 1979: 141), it becomes a domain of cruelty made possible by the enormous inequalities in power relations. It is “bare power” that is responsible for the “meating” of those who are powerless; the only rule here is “eat or be eaten” (Carter 1979: 140). And so meat is an effect of enslavement and abjection, but on the other hand it is precisely meat that may become the basis of a radically egal-itarian social vision: if “we are all meat,” then we’re all radically equal. Meat may be seen as Agambenian “bare life” – so bare that it is even stripped of its skin. The body seen as meat ceases to be an integrated body, a body-whole; instead, it is fragmented, cut up with a butcher’s (or a surgeon’s) knife, torn with teeth; a body, that is, with no hierarchy of organs. Once we deprive the body of its “soul,” we are still left with a world of fleshly sensuality, celebrated in Western art through the tradition of the nude; but once we strip the flesh of its skin, as Carter observes, we are left with meat pure and simple (Carter 1979: 138), with all its obscenity, all its “carnography.” The skin is meat’s last raiment, the last border of decency (as nudity, in itself, does not have to con-note obscenity; to the contrary, in the Christian tradition it often connotes purity and innocence). Beyond this border lies the kingdom of pornography, which is perhaps why the medico-artistic works of Gunther von Hagens, fea-turing mummified and skinless human bodies, provoke so much opposition (see Goeller 2007: 272–4).

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Like pornography, the figure of the zombie also reduces humanity (or, more precisely, a particular notion of humanity) to the level of meat, without soul and subjectivity, but a kind of meat marked with a strange, non-rational agency. No wonder that this “meatification” of the human being is frequently condemned from various positions, usually by invoking traditional “humanist” values. Some critics go as far as to compare the tendency to expose meatiness to a “holocaust pornography” that consists of images of the utterly degraded and dehumanized bodies in Nazi death camps; Paul Virilio’s adamant criticism of the postmodern fascination with “teratology” is a case in point (Virilio 2003: 50-55). Others, however, view this meatifying practice much more favourably, often in posthumanist terms; what it promises is the opportunity to liberate the modern human from the tyranny of the Cartesian subject, accused – as it sometimes is – of contributing to the most dehumanizing practices of mod-ern times. In other words, for all its beautiful-sounding rhetoric, the Western humanist subject is not a protective shield against dehumanization, but rath-er – inadvertently – its very cause. This view is advocated, among others, by Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry in their “Zombie Manifesto” (2008). The zombie stands for an excess of corporeality; not the corporeality subjected to the disciplining regimes of hygiene and attractiveness, however, but rather the most disavowed and abject kind of corporeality. It is flesh without an ego or a cogito, without consciousness and will, without purpose and plan, yet capa-ble of moving and acting. It is a human being minus soul, minus subjectivi-ty, minus citizen, minus life; or, even better, a human being minus powerful modern dialectics driven by such binary oppositions as body-soul (mind), subject-object, citizen-alien, master-slave, life-death, or human-nonhuman. The zombie figure may thus be construed as the antithesis of a civilized liberal subject who rationally controls and manages his/her desire.

What is it that animates that “lump of meat”: a  living corpse or a por-nographic body? One could follow Slavoj Žižek in assuming that the motor of this sarcous activity is the death drive, Freud’s “compulsion-to-repeat,” i.e. the locking up of corporeality in a self-propelling cycle, a  loop. Žižek inter-prets the death drive in terms of zombie undeadness, “a spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death” (2003: 93). The death drive is the “blind indestructible insistence of the libido,” “an uncanny excess of life,” an impulse of undeadness that transcends the cycle of life and death. As I have argued

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elsewhere, this libidinal self-preservative excess is to be found in everything that tends towards structural integrity: a self, an organism, any organic/func-tional “one” (cf. Sikora 2011). While in Freud, Lacan or Žižek the death drive is posited as a structural element of the human psyche (if not all living matter), in Deleuze and Guattari it is a historical effect of capitalism, a distortion of de-siring-production, a perverse desire for lack (Baugh 2005: 62-3). The death drive, that self-preservative compulsion to repeat, may also be seen as an ef-fect of the work of power, a looping of desire within an imposed organization of labour, so to speak, where subjugated elements are made to work for the sake of an organism’s (self’s, system’s) integrity. If so, the bodies represented in pornography and in zombie movies are, on the one hand, meat caught up by the death drive in a cycle of repetition (the living dead compulsively eating out the brains or the flesh of their victims, human sex-machines compulsively repeating the sexual act in porn movies), but on the other hand the craving for meat/flesh is, at a deeper level, a symptom of productive desire, construed in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, as a molecular force that transcends any identity and creates infinite series of connections and transformations (see, for exam-ple, Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 72).

*The above propositions make it possible to argue that Bruce LaBruce

(and some other porn artists) attempt to reclaim “the meat of life” from the “yoke” of the death drive. In the movie Otto, for example, meat is used as a medium of desire rather than a medium of the death drive. Although a large part of mainstream pornography is, indeed, populated by zombies, i.e. crea-tures driven by the death drive and labouring (unawares) for the benefit of the dominant biopolitical regime, LaBruce’s “critical pornographism” aspires to, above all, lay bare the workings of (bio-)power that keeps producing the living dead: creatures that are in one sense socially alive in that they possess a certain kind and scope of agency, but in another sense socially dead in that they remain stuck in the incessant compulsive repetition of a particular “or-ganic” socio-political order. No doubt porn “meatifies” human beings, but the lesson to be learnt here is not to restrict or ban pornography, but rather to consider how modern biopower succeeds in making people into passive consumer zombies. In a way, pornography is power’s negative: where power seems to “elevate” an individual by bestowing on him or her a form subjectiv-

ity (capable, for sure, of resisting that very power from which it derives), porn shows how power, at the very same time, produces “human meat” as that which must be captured by it (power) through the modern technologies of subjectification that consist in the internalization of the that power’s own mo-dus operandi. In other words, the subject that one becomes must, in a sense, grab the “bare meat” not unlike the European colonizer took control of a con-quered land. By banishing pornography and “bare meat” from the field of “proper” representation, the biopolitical regime makes social actors into slaves of the death drive, into vehicles of (its own) insistent undeadness. (Let us not forget that the original myth of the zombie, as it emerged in Haitian folklore, referred to a slave unable to break free from the necessity to work even after death; see Rutherford 2013: 29-34). What one should challenge is not the meatiness of human existence as such, but rather the dialectic in which it gets caught up through the institutional operations of power. “Mortified” meat as a product of the work of power is very different from meat as a living tissue of the world, the medium and material of desire.

It is precisely because a  large part of pornography (especially of the mainstream type) is one of the tools used for making us into social zombies, it is at the same time a  place from which that process can be seen and re-sisted. Arguably, the kind of porn that can make “dead people” rise up, as in LaBruce’s Otto, is still possible. Instead of locking individuals up in their mas-turbatory bubbles, pornography could mobilize them to engage in “social ac-tion,” to create new collectivities and assemblages, in opposition to the bour-geois-liberal ethics that consider sex and pornography a “dirty little secret” which should be relegated to the strictly private sphere; such privatization only makes it easier for various forms of disciplining power to contain their subversive potential. To be truly subversive, I  propose, pornography must annul the liberal axiom of the private and the public, and to stage the direct confrontation of bare power with bare meat. It is not about transgression for transgression’s sake, which often ends up reaffirming the ban and justifying the order’s self-preservation. It is, rather, about seeking new ways of “being alive” in a situation where power, by imposing particular modes of visibility, legibility, identification, classification and social regulation, produces for us, and at our expense, an unlivable life, a bios abiotos.

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In the previous chapter I discussed briefly some of the differences between the cultural figures of the vampire and the zombie. What they have in com-mon, besides the quality of “undeadness,” is a virological and epidemiological imaginary that, as I want to argue, has become central to late modernity. Both vampirism and zombie-ism are like a contagious disease: they are unpredicta-ble, their causes and sources are difficult, if not impossible, to detect, they get transmitted through direct bodily contact (blood and/or flesh), they spread exponentially and are difficult to contain, they spell chaos, if not an apoca-lypse. Indeed, the internet is replete with information on the alleged vampire virus (V5 or K-17, or other) or else the zombie virus (LQP-79 or the C-virus, or other), and comparisons to HIV are often explicit.56 A  growing number of cultural theorists (leading among whom are Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka)57 assert that in a globalized culture of networks and ever increasing connectivity, “contagion” becomes, for better or worse, the underlying logic of major social phenomena. “The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion,” Hardt and Negri state bluntly (2001: 136). In the realm of the in-ternet and the media the idea of “going viral” has itself gone viral, not to men-tion the very familiar idea of the computer virus, itself, as Buiani points out, traceable to the discovery of the HIV virus (2009: 87) and the more general virological rhetorics that developed, over the 1980s and onward, in science, politics and other social spheres. (Incidentally, if HIV inspired IT specialists

56 See, for example, South African Vampyre Culture Center; Rannals 2013. 57 See Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007)

and Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012).

Queer Epidemics

7

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to think of malicious information codes in virological terms, a later hypoth-esis, proposed in 2003, concerning HIV infection – the Trojan Exosome Hypothesis – has probably borrowed its name from information technology; see Gould et al. 2003.)

The last two decades or so have seen a (viral) proliferation of movies fea-turing epidemics or contagions, often with a (post-)apocalyptic twist.58 Some evocative titles include, among many others: Epidemic (1987, Denmark, dir. Lars von Trier), Outbreak (1995, USA, dir. Wolfgang Petersen), 12 Monkeys (1995, USA, dir. Terry Gilliam), Contagious (1997, USA, dir. Joe Napolitano), Virus (1999, USA, UK, Germany, Japan and France, dir. John Bruno), Contaminated Man (2000, USA, UK and Germany, dir. Anthony Hickox), Infection (2004, Japan, dir. Masayuki Ochiai), Mulberry Street (2006, USA, dir. Jim Mickle), 28 Weeks Later (2007, UK, dir. Danny Boyle), Pandemic (2007, USA, dir. Armand Mastroianni), Carriers (2009, USA, dir. David Pastor and Àlex Pastor), and Contagion (2011, USA and United Arab Emirates, dir. Steven Soderbergh). Among the less mainstream classics of the plague/epidemic genre critics list two early (pre-AIDS) movies directed by David Cronenberg: Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). These and other mov-ies, diverse as they are, evidence a voracious demand for an apocalyptic thrill, to be sure, combined with the postmodern inclination for morbid “teratol-ogy,” akin to an aesthetics that Mark Dery has called the “New Grotesque” (1999: 145–166). But they also point to an epidemiological frame of mind which, arguably, underlies much of current (bio)political practice. Expanding zones of access and contact, the reasoning goes, call for enhanced preventive measures, based primarily on surveillance and identification. Public health is increasingly becoming a high security issue; or, rather, state security and pop-ulation control are increasingly framed in terms of (global) epidemiological prevention. As Ronnie Lippens puts it, in reference to anti-terrorism, the pres-ent international relations conceives of the global Empire “as a complete, or-ganic body of free-but-organic-and-therefore-orderly flows that however needs to be kept intact by means of epidemiological interventions aimed at excluding or neutralizing viral entities” (2004: 125, emphasis original).

58 The category of epidemic/contagion movies frequently overlaps with that of zom-bie/vampire movies; one notable recent example is the 2013 blockbuster World War Z (USA), directed by Marc Forster.

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Giorgio Agamben’s influential idea that modern Western regimes operate increasingly on the principle of the “state of exception,” where the executive power is justified to use any security measures beyond its legal prerogatives in a state of “higher necessity,”59 corresponds to the epidemiological paradigm that I am sketching out here. “Normally” the state of exception would apply to war conditions: either a war between states, or a civil war within a state. In Hobbesian terms, the very existence of the state is justified through its pri-mary function to ward off both kinds of war, or, indeed, the war of all against all. In late modernity, however, the “state of exception” – when not related to an open war as such – has come to be understood largely in epidemiological terms. An infection that might prove lethal to a body politic, or to humanity at large, is an ever-present possibility, and because of that all resources – sci-entific, technological, political, and social – must be mobilized for the sake of “survival” (however selective the idea of survival turns out to be, on closer scrutiny). As Bashford and Hooker aptly note,

The uncontrollability and unknowability of contagion, its surprise appearance in other bodies, in other places, in other creatures, invites systems of control and knowledge: hence the huge scientific and bureaucratic machine of public health, touching on so many levels of conduct and social organisation, from the personal and local to the national and international. (2001: 2)

Thus, modern sanitary regimes, instituted for the sake of salus populi, have a  deeply political justification: the prevention of an apocalyptic pan-demic of social disorder and the protection of the community’s security. The imagined epidemic refers to a variety of possible threats: a “real” contagious disease, a deadly computer virus, an extermist idea that leads to acts of terror-ism or rebellion, a market crisis, a weakening of the “moral fiber” of a society (through, for instance, pornography), etc. Since any of these (and more) is a constant possibility, the state of exception becomes permanent, which legiti-mizes modern governments’ ever expanding control, surveillance and “neces- sary” preventive actions. In short, modern regimes can be said to be mostly panic-driven.

59 “One of the theses of the present inquiry is that in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule” (Agamben 1998: 20).

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Within the epidemiological paradigm, the two major strategies em-ployed by modern biopolitics are, arguably, containment and immunization. Simply speaking, containment refers to any policy that seeks to prevent a dan-gerous phenomenon (a “real” or “figurative” epidemic) from spreading. The US “containment doctrine” during the Cold War was supposed to prevent “communism” from spreading; today, it is “islamism” and terrorism (noto-riously conflated) that have become the usual suspects. A variety of sanitary measures are undertaken to prevent an uncontrolled spread: identifying out-breaks (and particularly the “patient zero” of an epidemic and the pathogen’s routes), physical elimination of possible animal pathogen carriers (e.g. burn-ing poultry), quarantines, etc. Equally, if not more, important are immuno-logical discourses and policies, which have gradually come to occupy a cen-tral place in contemporary socio-political and cultural imaginaries. In Donna Haraway’s classic statement,

the immune system is an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and ma-terial “difference” in late capitalism. Pre-eminently a twentieth-century object, the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics. That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological. (1991: 204)

According to Haraway, the importance of the immunity discourse in late capitalism stems from its intersection with the discourses of self and other that regulate epistemological categorizations and, consequently, the current parameters of socio-political life. As understood in current medical usage, the immune system must constantly differentiate self from non-self, it “must rec-ognize self in some manner in order to react to something foreign,” in Edward S. Golub’s formulation (quoted in Haraway 1991: 203). The question arises, “When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to entire institutionalized discourses in medicine, war, and business?” (Haraway 1991: 224). Invoked in order to justify particular forms of social organization and political action, immunology and its scientific vocabulary are themselves thoroughly imbued with cultural assumptions about selves and others, and particularly the desired or undesired interactions between them. However,

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Haraway contends, immunity can also be conceived in terms of shared specif-icities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage with others […]; of situat-ed possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial fusions and dangers” (1991: 225).

The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito’s take on the biopolitical im-munity paradigm differs in several respects from Haraway’s, although not in contradictory ways. It is worth pointing out that in Esposito’s view a concep-tualization of (legal or medical) immunity must necessarily be understood in conjunction with a  conceptualization of community within the modern biopolitical paradigm that he traces back to the beginnings of modern politi-cal philosophy, especially Hobbes’s foundational Leviathan (1651). Esposito defines immunization as the (communal) organism’s internal mechanism which protects it not by “frontal opposition” but through the strategy of “exclusionary inclusion or exclusion by inclusion” (2011: 8). My conten-tion in this context is that if present-day multiculturally-oriented liberalism seems to be ready to recognize certain kinds of difference and fold them into its posited body politic, this is happening largely in terms of the Espositian logic of immunization, i.e. a body politic internalizes a certain amount of what seems to constitute a  danger in order to immunize itself against that very danger. “To survive,” Esposito asserts, “the community – every community – is forced to introject the negative modality of its opposite, even if the opposite remains precisely a lacking and contrastive mode of being of the community itself” (2008: 52). He compares the immunization of a political body to vac-cination, which consists in introducing into it a “fragment of the same path-ogen that it wants to protect itself from” (2008: 46). In effect, immunization “saves, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or collective” by subjecting it “to a  condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand” (2008: 46). Shifting the view to the modern liberal bodies politic that have become relatively favourable to certain notions of “multi-culturalism,” I would claim that under these current regimes carefully select-ed forms of difference must be administered in tolerable doses, they must be closely regulated and made functional by and for the system, so that a more radical (and contagious) difference is prevented from jeopardizing the sys-tem’s status quo.

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Contagion and epidemic can thus be argued to constitute the nodal point that brings together major issues of late modernity: questions of defining self versus other, the importance of recognizability and identifiability, the vulner-ability of bodies and bodies politic (and hence questions of state security), the medico-political imperative to control and contain, and the viral nature of the media and communication; the list is not exhaustive, to be sure. For example, if the major issue in current international politics is, as many believe, the phe-nomenon called “terrorism,” it is certainly framed to a large degree in epide-miological terms. Terrorism itself aims at spreading an uncontrollable panic in a given population, which means it considers fear to be contagious; the use of the media (e.g. the videos of bloody executions of captured “enemies”) is another dramatization of this attempt to trigger an epidemic of fear. The ter-rorists’ message is also perceived as a contagious “pathogen” whose dissem-niation must be brought under control, however difficult this seems to be due to the decentralized communication networks that have proliferated thanks to technological developments and an ever increasing access to those tech-nologies. The fear of terrorism is, in turn, used by governments to terrorize their citizens into complicity and obedience; in other words, an official (con-trolled) panic – in the form of a declared “state of exception” – is employed to ward off the fatal panic that might be caused by terrorists. Terrorism is pos-ited as a high security risk that threatens to weaken and possibly kill the body politic “from within,” which might be imagined either as “one of us” (one of the body’s cells) turning cancerous and deadly, or as a pathogen that enters the body from the outside to wreak havoc inside it. The state’s monopoly on violence is thus inseparable from its monopoly on fear: an administration pro-tects the population from other “illegitimate” forms of fear, just as the official use of violence is justified in terms of protecting the body politic from other (and allegedly deadly) forms of violence.

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Considering the paramount importance of immunological categories in late modernity, the proliferation of “contagion” movies is hardly surprising. The two epidemiological strategies of biopolitical control I singled out above – containment and immunization – find ample illustration in such movies.

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In Soderbergh’s Contagion (USA/United Arab Emirates, 2011), for instance, it is crucial to both find the “patient zero” and trace the paths of the virus’s spread, and to devise a vaccine before it is too late, i.e. before the whole pop-ulation (if not the whole humanity) gets killed by the disease. The movie’s plot is rather predictable and the “message” conventionally moralizing, but there is one aspect that merits mention here, namely the fatal discrepancy be-tween the need for urgent action (finding and administering a vaccine) and the legal procedures that, if duly observed, would take much too much time.60 In other words, the movie offers a justification of the breach of legal proce-dures in the “state of exception” caused by the pandemic. The protection of life – Hobbes’s conservatio vitae that Esposito declares the originary gesture of modern biopolitics – is posited as the highest law that justifies any neces-sary sacrifices. Similarly, in the more recent World War Z (dir. Marc Forster, USA/Malta, 2013) devising a vaccine is literally a matter of humanity’s life or death. We also find an element of individual sacrifice here, but the epidemio-logical “lesson” that the movie teaches is that in a globalized world the politics of containment is no longer tenable in the long run (the walls around Israel, though temporarily effective, eventually prove insufficient) and so the only salvation is in immunization through vaccination. In the late modern world some “classic” dichotomies must be redefined. One of them is the distinc-tion between the inside (self) and the outside (other): the inside (self) must recognize its vulnerability to and dependence on the outside, or its ultimate permeability. Another is the distinction between poison and cure (or enemy and friend): the only way to protect human beings from the deadly zombie virus is, paradoxically, internalizing a different pathogen that makes humans “invisible” to the more deadly virus. In Espositian terms, it is life’s “negative modality” (an illness that, however deadly, can be kept under control) that is used in order to protect life from an apocalyptic destruction.

Although epidemic/contagion movies have many models on which to base their more or less fantastic and apocalyptic plots (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, the Spanish flu, not to mention the Black Death or smallpox), it is, arguably, the AIDS epidemic that for several reasons has become a primary

60 It must be noted, however, that in Contagion it is not the government that sidesteps the law, but a brave scientist who is ready to risk her own life for the common good (and, perhaps, for her professional career).

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instance of the epidemiological paradigm of late modernity. Its importance as a reference point has to do with its sheer scale, of course, as well as the fact that it has been the first disease of such scale since the Spanish flu of 1918–1919 that has killed millions of people in the developed Western world, especially in North America. Moreover, it has engendered complex political and cultur-al responses (including the queer activism of the 1980s and the queer theory that followed in its wake). Indeed, the epidemic itself as well as its medical, cultural, social and political contexts may be seen as a vivid dramatization of the mechanisms of modern biopolitical regimes, driven as they are by the fear of dysfunction and disorder, concomitant with the fear of some sort of socially transmitted contagion. Modern sanitary and medical regimes, instituted for the sake of salus populi, have proved to have a deeply political justification, i.e. the prevention of an apocalyptic pandemic of social disorder and the pro-tection of the community’s security and futurity. Indeed, through the logic of catharsis, the genre of apocalyptic contagion movies may itself be seen as a  functional element in the socio-psychological immunization of the public against “more real threats” present in social life, or more precisely against the governments’ and other powerful institutions’ claims as to what constitutes such threats and what counteractions they necessitate.

In her classic essay “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification” Paula A. Treichler famously asserted that AIDS was not only an epidemic of an infectious illness, but an epidemic of meanings as well (1987: 268). As she explains,

“AIDS” is not merely an invented label, provided to us by science and scientific naming practices, for a clear-cut disease entity caused by a virus. Rather, the very nature of AIDS is constructed through language and in particular through the dis-courses of medicine and science; this construction is “true” or “real” only in certain specific ways – for example, in so far as it successfully guides research or facilitates clinical control over the illness. The name “AIDS” in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look “through” language to deter-mine what AIDS “really” is. Rather we must explore the site where such determina-tions really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language. (1987: 262)

The cultural constructedness of “AIDS” does not deny the reality of the lived experience of people living with AIDS (or HIV) or the people around

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them; rather, it makes those experiences intelligible and communicable. It also makes the disease controllable at least in symbolic terms, even if it re-mains incurable, because the act of naming and creating stories (whether personal narratives or medical discourses) helps to contain and tame the dan-gerous, socially and epistemologically disruptive phenomenon. The disease and the devastation it causes, however painful, become more emotionally “ac-ceptable” when inscribed into explanatory, or simply meaningful narratives. At the same time, however, none of the narratives (even the scientific one, despite its authoritative status) can offer a final explanation, and so AIDS re-mains “a nexus where multiple meanings, stories and discourses intersect and overlap, reinforce and subvert each other” (Treichler 1987: 269).

Arguably, the AIDS epidemic brought about a  new level of critique of the socio-cultural formation of identities, bodies, sexualities, communities, and more; a formation that is always invested and contested politically, even though the scientific discourse more often than not claims a  political neu-trality that seems to lend it credibility and authority. The scientific commu-nity was caught red-handed, as it were: the definitions and interpretations of AIDS kept changing due to the debates among scientists themselves, the attitude shifts in the media and in the general public, politicians’ decisions (or, more accurately, their prolonged inaction), and, significantly, the attention grabbing campaigns of the grassroots movement known as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The AIDS crisis has become a nexus of contest-ed meanings, convictions, affects and practices, where the political, the per-sonal, the medical, the communal, and the cultural proved to be implicated in one another in ways more numerous and more subtle than most people may have suspected. And nobody can tell, as Treichler observes, “whose meanings will become ‘the official story’” (1987: 287), at least for the time being. In fact, the more or less established HIV/AIDS narratives continue to be chal-lenged and alternative narratives offered. Most of such alternative narratives, including the controversial 2009 documentary House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic (directed by Canadian born Brent Leung), are dismissed as conspiracy theories and/or “AIDS denialism,” and accused of causing large--scale damage to people’s health and lives. And yet, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus on the “official story” of HIV/AIDS, despite the fact that the disease seems mostly explained away and contained, if not yet effective-

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ly cured, doubts and uncertainties persist and questions multiply rather than disappear, within and without scientific circles. There is something in the very nature of the disease and epidemic (inasmuch as we understand it as, precise-ly, a disease and an epidemic) that seems to defy any ultimate explanations and biopolitical regulations. I would even risk the statement that with HIV/AIDS science may have reached the very limits of knowledge as we know it, the limits of any belief that science can faithfully represent, through its classi-fications and cause-and-effect explanations, the true nature of the real world. It is certainly able to offer provisional definitions, preventive guidelines and temporary remedies, but unable to get a full grip on the virus and the disease it is believed to cause. As with Heisenberg’s principle in quantum physics (to use a somewhat far-fetched analogy), AIDS marks the end of certainty in cul-tural and scientific definitions of diseases.61

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John Greyson’s 1993 movie Zero Patience is, among other things, a play-ful comment on the multiple narratives that claim to uncover or contain the “truth” about AIDS. The very fact that Greyson, a major representative of the so-called New Queer Cinema, chose to tell the story in the highly unlikely – given the seriousness of the subject matter – genre of a musical comedy draws the viewer’s attention to the importance of linguistic and narrative conven-tions and how they impact our expectations, emotional reactions and under-standings of the “truth” behind the story.62 In this respect alone, as well as in many others, Greyson ridicules the somber tone and the sensationalism of the dominant discursive conventions applied routinely to AIDS. The film’s campy

61 For an overview of AIDS-related theory and activism, see especially Watney (1987), Crimp (1988 and 2004), and Treichler (1999).

62 To be sure, Zero Patience was not the first comedy about AIDS. In 1985 the German filmmaker and activist Rosa von Praunheim made the low budget black comedy A Virus Knows No Morals, which may have been one of the sources of inspiration for Greyson. Matthew Sini argues that the New Queer Cinema in general was characterized by a par-ticular predilection for a  transgeneric aesthetics whose purpose was “to critique both the ideological implications of the [mainsteam Hollywood] genres as well as the notion of genre itself” (2011). Sini concentrates on American cinema and does not mention Greyson.

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humour and, more generally, its multiple breaches of decorum, are more than just subversion for subversion’s sake; not unlike Bruce LaBruce’s Brechtian distanciation techniques mentioned in the previous chapter, they convey the idea that, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the genre is the message.”63 Or, to put it somewhat differently, whatever societies take to be the “truth” depends crucially and inevitably on the alleged truth’s discursive framing. This is, obviously, one of the key insights found in the writings of Michel Foucault; in a much quoted passage he ascertains that each society has its “regime of truth” which consists of the types of discourse that determine a society’s criteria for distinguishing true and false statements (1984: 73). In modern societies, continues Foucault, this regime of truth is an effect of “sci-entific discourse and the institutions which produce it”; it is “transmitted un-der the control […] of a few great political and economic apparatuses (uni-versity, army, writing, media),” but at the same time it is open to “political de-bate and social confrontation” (1984: 73). Greyson’s Zero Patience explores several intersecting or conflicting discourses, their institutional frameworks and the various media in which they materialize, and it weaves a dense mul-tidimensional narrative that sheds any simple notion of “truth.”64 The movie is a complex elaboration on the “epidemic of signification” (Treichler 1987, quoted above), the “crisis of representation itself” (Watney 1987: 9), and the “epidemic of blame” (a  phrase used in the movie by the leading character, Sir Richard Burton) triggered by AIDS. Even the title itself, let me note in passing, is an ingenious and politically charged resignificaton of the notion of “patient zero” as used in epidemiological discourse: the quest for the cause/origin is replaced by an urgent call for action.

Appropriately enough, the movie’s opening scenes, as well as the first mu-sical number, make a reference to the Tales of the Arabian Nights, itself a frame narrative consisting of a large collection of imaginative (as well as “exotic”) tales. The aspect of the Arabian Nights that has come to be highly valued in the West (other than the literary quality of individual stories, of course) is the way in which storytelling becomes a strategy of deferring death in general, and of

63 McLuhan’s seminal proposition was, of course, that “the medium is the message” (1994: 7–21).

64 On how “framing” organizes notions of reality, see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Easy on the Organization of Experience (1986).

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abating the ruler’s fatal anger in particular. Fiction becomes, literally, a matter of life and death (or, even better, of livability and diabality), but also a way of dealing with authoritarian power and the “truths” it decrees or the realities it creates and sustains. Choosing Sir Richard Francis Burton65 (whose major biography was published three years before the film’s release) as the unlikely leading character points in a number of ways at the question of discursively and institutionally produced “truths.” Not only the translator of the The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and Kama Sutra, the Victorian personage is also referred to as an explorer, geographer, cartographer, writer, soldier, spy, diplomat, orientalist, ethnographer, linguist, and so on. Above all, Burton must be seen as an empire-builder, both through his geographic exploits and the “knowledge” he so extensively produced. This dizzying range of occupa-tions reveals Burton as an ambiguous, multidimensional figure – a  man of knowledge, a man of action, a man of imagination – and a scandalous one at that, given his eager interest in matters sexual (among other things, he carried out a massive study of penis size). One of Burton’s actual theories, expounded in an essay appended to his translation of the Arabian Nights and quoted in the movie, is that of the so-called “Sotadic Zone,” i.e. a zone where pederasty is a widespread and acceptable social phenomenon. Related to climatic fac-tors, the Sotadic Zone left England (but not North America) safely protected from the danger of pederasty.66

In Zero Patience the “historical” Burton blends with the fictional char-acter who happens to be an immortal taxidermologist and diorama designer working for the Natural History Museum in Toronto. Burton’s “truths” are always framed or showcased: through his dioramas, his narrations, or the vid-eo documentary he sets about to make for his cherished Hall of Contagion on

65 The Burton character is probably another witty resignification performed by Greyson: an important person in the early days if the epidemic was Democrat Congressman Philip Burton, one of the first US officials to push for AIDS-related research and legislation.

66 In his “Terminal Essay” attached to volume 10 of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1886) Burton asserts that “[w]ithin the Sotadic Zone [including France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt] the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a  rule, are physically incapable of per-forming the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.”

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the alleged Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic. In Burton’s hands, the world as we know it becomes a diorama full of stuffed animals, wax figures, artifacts and “special effects,” all placed in a frame narrative that pretends to be a truth-ful, factual, scientific representation of reality. A scheming, fame-hungry char-acter, Burton proclaims to his boss: “We must be fearless in our pursuit of scientific truth, no matter how controversial or unpopular!” before break-ing into a song about his vision of a “culture of certainty” and an “empire of knowledge”: “Classify and label, find the answers out,/A culture of certainty will banish every doubt.” Burton wants to persuade his boss to endorse his project to research the still mysterious causes of AIDS:

Geography has mapped every river, every glade,Yet we still have much to learn about the mystery of AIDS. Let’s explore this foreign body, learn the customs of its cells, Classify its nooks & crannies, pull its chains and ring its bells.

In an attempt to find a simple chain of cause and effect, Burton posits the necessity to identify the patient zero of the epidemic:

We will never find a cure, till we isolate the source , Once we know where it came from, we can kill it off by force. What’s the origin of this virus? Europe, Zaire, or Haiti?The clues are here before us, Patient Zero holds the key.

The colonial echoes in Burton’s reasoning are not incidental. Donna Haraway, alongside many other scholars, emphasizes “the residue of the his-tory of colonial tropical medicine and natural history in late twentieth-centu-ry immune discourse,” including the AIDS discourse (Haraway 1991: 223). Michael Hardt and Anonio Negri state succinctly:

As AIDS has been recognized first as a disease and then as a global pandemic, there have developed maps of its sources and spread that often focus on central Africa and Haiti, in terms reminiscent of the colonialist imaginary: unrestrained sexuality, moral corruption, and lack of hygiene. (2001: 136)

Burton’s original project (before his love affair with Patient Zero) is a ne-oimperialist and totalitarian one: it is a project of nothing less than an epis-temological colonization of the world, a turning of the world into a museum.

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The ghost of Patient Zero is a  character based on Gaëtan Dugas, al-though the name does not appear in Greyson’s movie, effaced by the generic term “Patient Zero.” Dugas was a Québécois flight attendant who was widely believed in the mid-1980s to have been the Patient Zero of the AIDS epi-demic: a superspreader who wilfully infected thousands of men. Suggested by some epidemiologists, the hypothesis gained an enormous currency thanks to Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987). Dugas was othered in the US as Canadian; othered in English Canada as Québécois; othered from heterosexual society as queer; othered from the community of “good citizens” as promiscuous and irrespon-sible; othered from the healthy as the bearer of the “gay cancer.” Greyson’s Zero Patience is, among other things, a reflection on this exoticizing and stig-matizing gesture, an epistemological and social othering, a distancing whose logic, I would argue, is not far from the logic of quarantine. When MacKenzie, the Natural Museum manager, expresses his doubts about Burton’s Patient Zero project (“A promiscuous, irresponsible, homosexual Canadian – hard-ly a  positive role model, Dick”), the latter replies with emphasis: “He was French-Canadian” and thus wins his boss over. The other “othered” charac-ters include the Haitian-Canadian George or even the Green Monkey (per-sonified in the movie as a stone butch woman), the mythical transmitter of the virus to homo sapiens, now represented in Burton’s diorama as a stuffed specimen. Situating Zero/Dugas within the US-Canadian national dynamics, Robert L. Cagle cogently remarks:

Nationality, sexuality, and HIV status became intermingled in this portrait of a monster whose only concern, other than maintaining his youthful good looks, was getting off – at any cost. […] Patient Zero became a vampiric spectre of the AIDS generation, a phantom who drained the life out of vital young men while fussing and primping in a futile attempt to maintain his rapidly withering beauty. (1995: 71)

As an alien and shameful disease (doubly alien: allegedly gay-related as well as imported from the “dangerous Outside,” i.e. Africa via Canada), AIDS was not mentioned in public by President Ronald Reagan until 1985. As I pointed out in the chapter on Canada’s politics of multiculturalism and its relation to the cultural and literary mode referred to as the Canadian Gothic,

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this more general gesture of othering had one more specific dimension, which involved Reagan’s ambition to boost America’s self-confidence and propagate its masculinist image as a “superheroic state,” to use Neil Renwick’s phrase (1999: 154). This narrative rendered Canada – with its declared commitment to peacekeeping, conflict resolution and multiculturalism – an effeminate and vulnerable weakling. One could hardly find a  better personification of this idea than “a promiscuous, irresponsible, homosexual [French] Canadian.”

Sir Richard Burton and Zero Source: author’s screenshot (DVD)

For lack of any other name, “Zero” in Greyson’s movie comes to func-tion as the Dugas character’s proper name. In a simple reading, this renaming or, rather, denaming may be read as a critique of the erasure of the “real” per-son, or more specifically his/her “real” experience and biography, from dom-inant cutural narratives. While Burton’s cynical use of Zero as a demonized, destructive figure is exposed and censured, no “true” Zero is ever directly ac-cessible, either; after all, we only deal with the nameless ghost. It is interesting how, especially in light of queer theory’s anti-identitarian stance, this erasure of name/identity effected by dominant, authoritative discourses becomes, in fact, an opportunity for a renarrativization, or, better, a chain of renarrativi-

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zations that evade an identity position without at the same time erasing lived experience or memory.67 Greyson’s Zero is a paradoxical and liminal figure, irreducible to a single narrative. As a ghost, he occupies the nonspace between the living and the dead, but even his spectral status becomes “queered” in that he retains an exclusive visibility and materiality for Burton,68 which tech-nically speaking would make him a hybrid between an immaterial ghost and a fleshy zombie; let us keep in mind his promiscuous vampiric inclinations, too.69 Moreover, as a “zero,” he occupies the nonland between the positive and negative70; he is a (non)figure, a screen onto which multiple images and narrations get projected. Even though he originally wishes to be made visible (he asks Burton to make him appear), in the end he gives up on that wish, and instead chooses his zero-ness, so to speak, because whatever identity he might be granted through one definitive narrative or another (that of a  demonic Typhoid Mary or that of a  hero whose cooperation with scientists proved crucial for early AIDS-related research; negative or positive) would seem to fix the “truth” about him. It is not that Zero/Dugas is utterly unnarrativizable – stories are necessary for survival, as both Scheherazade and Greyson know very well; it is rather that all narrations should be aware of their own generic conventions and limitations, their epistemological and political ramifications,

67 In the opening song, Zero pleads: “Tell the story, clear my name.” The basic meaning of this “clearing” of his is obvious: as Zero’s appearance in Burton’s video attests, he just wants the world to know he is innocent. But “to clear” may also be read as “to make transparent” or invisible, or simply “to remove.”

68 This narrative ploy must also be read as a dramatization of the all-important question of queer (in)visibility, the question of who is visible to whom, in what ways, and under what circumstances (see, for example, Hennessy 2000, especially chapter 4, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture”). A recent development in theorizing (and politiciz-ing) queer visibilities has been animated by queer theory’s turn to Jacques Rancière; see especially the 2009 issue of the Borderlands journal, “Rancière and Queer Theory,” edited by Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O’Rourke. Rancière’s approach also pro-vides one of the key methodological tools for Tomasz Basiuk’s main line of argument in Exposures (2013: 11, 34, 373–6).

69 Cf. Hanson 1991 and my discussion in chapter 6. 70 It is worth noticing how the opening credits play with plus-, minus-, and zero-like shapes.

More generally, the movie revolves around various meanings and usages of “positive” and “negative.” e.g. George’s song “Positive,” where its basic meaning is “certain.”

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the precariousness of their truth claims (always contaminated with “fiction”), etc. The nullification of Zero’s name/identity opens up the space for an end-less chain of resignifications, which may be playful at one level, but also deep-ly political and/or “heartfelt” at another. As I have argued elsewhere, queer could indeed be defined through a “productive emptiness,” a sort of “negative capability,” to borrow a term from Keats, or the Platonian chora, reinterpret-ed by Julia Kristeva in terms of what she calls the Semiotic (Sikora 2012: 46, 53). Against the usurpations of the Symbolic order, which aims to fix all true meanings and identities, the Semiotic enables the never-ending movements of significations and resignifications (Sikora 2012: 53).

*

Zero Patience was Greyson’s satirical response to the discourses and prac-tices that grew around AIDS, especially the normative accounts that acquired the status of an official story (the truth itself) and started to dominate public space; accounts that followed the parameters of the apocalyptic epidemic im-aginaries that I mapped out briefly at the beginning of this chapter.71 More specifically, Greyson’s movie was a response to Randy Shilts’s 1987 book And the Band Played On, which quickly gained the status of the definitive history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic (not least because of its sheer size). Shilts’s credentials were strong: as a well-known gay journalist he could claim (or be claimed) to be an “unbiased representative of the gay community.” The book spurred massive opposition from what was later designated a queer movement; significantly, the organization that proved pivotal for a revision of queer sexualities and socialities, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed in the very same year, 1987. It is beyond the scope of my discussion here to summarize the critiques, but what they had in common, generally speaking, was the ambition to maintain a  non-homophobic and sex-positive perspective that would not yield to dominant (straight) concep-tual frameworks and narratives that demonize (gay) promiscuity, promote moral rectitude, and rely on established “truths” about AIDS, sexuality, com-

71 On the associations of queerness with apocalypticism see Sedgwick 1990: 127–130.

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munity bonding, etc.72 As Douglas Crimp put it in one of the most influential essays of the nascent queer critique, “[t]he fact that Shilts places blame for the spread of AIDS equally on the Reagan Administration, various government agencies, the scientific and medical establishments, and the gay community, is reason enough for many of us to condemn the book” (1987: 239). Actually, Crimp’s essay ends with a reference to John Greyson’s 1987 music video “The AIDS Epidemic” as an example of “a new phase in gay men’s responses to the epidemic,” a phase in which, “we are now reclaiming our subjectivities, our communities, our culture […] and our promiscuous love of sex” (1987: 270). While the reference to an imagined “us-ness” of gay men seems problematic, especially since earlier in his essay Crimp criticized Shilts precisely for assum-ing that “what all gay men want is identical” (1987: 242), the general critique of the ways in which queer sexualities and socialities are made, through rep-resentational techniques, to fit into mainstream scenarios remains valid.

In 1993 Shilts’s journalistic novel was made into an HBO movie. Whether by accident or not, Greyson’s Zero Patience and Ottawa-born director Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On premiered on the very same day: om-inously enough, September 11.73 It is not my intention to posit a simple bina-ry opposition between “gay” and “queer” stances, yet I find it most instructive to juxtapose the two movies with a view to highliting the difference between “gay” and “queer” narrative framing. The American movie is, properly, a high drama that capitalizes on sensationalism, sentimentalism, and uncomplicated moralism. With all the parts neatly divided between the “good guys/gays” and the “bad guys/gays,” Spottiswoode’s docudrama, after Shilts’s book, misplaces the question of (sexual) difference onto the question of individual moral qualifications or, at best, the ignorance of “scientific facts.” (The gay mob that opposes the ban on bathhouses in San Francisco does not realize it is acting against its own best interest; “they’re only human,” Dr. Selma Dritz comments condescendingly in the HBO movie.) The difference between Spottiswoode’s “gay” stance and Greyson’s “queer” one dwells mostly in the

72 For a multifaceted discussion of the postmodern and antiliberal politics of ACT UP, see Aronowitz 1995.

73 The year 1993 saw one more important AIDS movie: the tear-jerking Hollywood block-buster Philadelphia (directed by Jonathan Demme). For an insightful discussion of the movie’s latent homophobia, see Edelman 2004: 18-19.

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gap between the naturalizing authoritativeness of the former (“that’s exactly how it was!”) and the renarrativizations and resignifications that Greyson’s movie performs as it evades any final “truth regime.” (Indeed, any organiza-tion of the epistemological – and thus ideological – construct of “reality” that poses itself as the “truth” or the “natural order” itself must be seen as a phallic investment.) Like Shilts’s book, the HBO production “demonstrates so clear-ly that cultural conventions rigidly dictate what can and will be said about AIDS” (Crimp 1987: 245); any sayable truth is always an effect of a particular convention. The convention adopted by Greyson in Zero Patience, however, is precisely one that aims to question the limits of every possible convention, or at least to expose each convention’s provisional character. Spottiswoode’s dra-ma, on the other hand, following Shilts’s work, “adopted a no-longer-possible universal point of view – which is, among other things, the heterosexual point of view,” to quote Douglas Crimp once more (1987: 245). Spottiswoode’s is a heroic, regenerative tale in which the good will of the good people prevails, sooner or later, over the ignorance, excessive ambition and ideological biases of other people. It is about getting things right, so that humanity can survive.74 As countless apocalyptic or near-apocalyptic movies make clear, saving the world is always saving the world as we know it: the heteronormative, patriar-chal, liberal humanist world that either exorcises queerneess out of existence or else, more “progressively,” normativizes it into its own institutional, con-ceptual and moral frameworks.

*

Greyson’s parody – a very serious parody, no doubt – is an exercise in telling the story of a deadly epidemic not in apocalyptic terms. In its antihe-roic playfulness it does not posit any clear-cut villains or heroes. Not even the HIV virus itself, personified as a flamboyant drag queen, gets the honor of being the story’s hated villain. In response to the “epidemic of blame” that surrounds the actual disease, the drag queen virus exclaims: “Blame? I’m a vi-

74 The quest for a point of origin (here: the source of the epidemic’s outbreak) is insepar-able from thinking a possible end, an apocalypse (here: a pandemic). To identify “pa-tient zero” is deemed essential to containing the epidemic, and thus preventing the end of the world.

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rus, right? Sickness is my job. If I was really responsible for the worst epidemic of the twentieth century, you can bet I’d be boasting about it! Mary, I’d ask for a promotion!” Indeed, in a humourous yet somewhat didcatic tone, it/she/he goes on to warn against “everyone who says they’re an authority, who talks with certainty!” Paradoxically, the virus that Zero talks to makes him “appear” (he becomes visible to Burton’s camera), if only for a minute or so, which may be read as Greyson’s ironic comment on how it took a deadly vi-rus to make queer people temporarily visible to mainstream media and high profile politicians. More generally, the virus stands for the indelible uncer-tainty and undecidability inscribed into any and all epistemological grids that organize our understanding of the world.75 The drag queen as such, as a cul-tural phenomenon, occupies a similarly undecidable position: defined by the “straight mind” (to adapt Wittig’s useful term)76 as a “fake” woman behind which there sits a “true” (i.e. biological) man, in a queer understanding the drag queen points in a very different direction, the direction of the undecida-bility of “fact” versus “fiction,” “identity” versus “masquerade,” “male” versus “female,” etc. It points, that is, towards an infinite chain of signification, in which this or that “truth” is merely a politically enforced effect.

While the “straight mind” can only imagine the virus (as well as the queerness that it is sometimes made to stand for) as apocalyptic, Greyson’s film, in a sense, shows how the HIV virus is reclaimed by queer culture itself – a culture that developed largely in response to the AIDS crisis. Deadly as it is, HIV not only destroyed “the best minds of a generation” (to paraphrase

75 Incidentally, the word GRID was an acronym of the first designation of what later came to be known as AIDS (it stood for “gay-related immune deficiency”); see, for example, Shilts 1987: 121. Arguably, the association of “epistemological grids’ with GRID, though not connected by any causal relation in the “real world,” may reveal the way in which AIDS participates in the categorizations and systematizations that “empires of knowledge” impose on our perception of reality. For a brief moment in 1982, the newly discovered disease came very closely to conclusively proving the existence of a “gay es-sence” visible to the disease-carrying virus, and, consequently, recognized by the state and other powerful, life-regulating institutions.

76 According to Wittig, the straight mind “develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time” and it produces “general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individ-uals” (1992: 27).

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Miss HIV Source: author’s screenshot (DVD)

the opening line of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), but it also triggered new ways of thinking sexuality, social relationality, political action and forms of knowl-edge building; it must be seen not just as a blind assassin, but a productive force as well.77 Actually, the reclaiming of HIV has been literalized in the “bug-chasing/gift-giving” subculture, in which gay men proactively seek to get (or transmit) the virus. Not only is the virus eroticized here, but it also enables the creation of new forms of new forms of kinship and new levels of intimacy.78 Shockingly to many, gay or straight or otherwise, the subculture spurns the dominant culture obsessed with health and hygiene, and the soci-ety dedicated to the regulation of bodies, desires, identities and relationships. It thus problematizes the idea of a good or livable life, and it blurs the line between what is “life-giving” and what is “death-dealing.” The members of gay men’s bareback/bug-chasing subcultures (based on unprotected sexual

77 It is not completely irrelevant to mention that more and more scientific research is done on the use of HIV for the treatment of some diseases, especially cancer; see, for example, Rossolillo et. al. 2012.

78 See Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy (2009). For an informed critique of Dean’s theses in the context of the so-called antisocial and antirelational positions in queer theory, see Basiuk 2013.

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activities, often with a view to getting the “gift” of the HIV virus) certainly do not live up to the ideal of a responsible, good, value-adding citizen, par-ticipating in the (implicitly straight) “common good” and working towards “a better future.” Although the positive aspect of the bug-chasing network is emphasized (e.g. extending the limits of intimacy or creating new modes of social connectivity), there also transpires the more negativist message of “no future,” as postulated most forcefully (though in a different context) by Lee Edelman (2004).79

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, the gay community and its allies demanded urgent action from the government, the healthcare system, phar-maceutical corporations and other social institutions, but simultaneously they defended their autonomy and resisted the institutions’ regulatory incli-nations. The promotion of safe sex techniques by AIDS activists was often seen as a way of saving gay men’s “promiscuous love of sex” (Crimp 1987: 270). But within a decade, once the idea of safe sex became part of the offi-cial gospel and an instrument in the regulatory operations of the state, some gay men started to feel alienated from the confining safe-sex culture, of which the relatively small but visible bareback subculture is a vivid manifestation. While the mainstream LGBT movement pursued further protection – and thus, inevitably, supervision – from the state by demanding, for instance, the right to same-sex marriage, a number of queer activists and theorists have re-sisted that direction, which came to be known as “homonormativity,” a term coined by Lisa Duggan and defined as neoliberalism’s sexual politics.80 Just as safe sex was appropriated by the official epistemological regimes that regulate

79 In a nutshell, Edelman argues that queers should reject any kind of “reproductive futur-ism” and instead embrace the figural position they are being ascribed within the current social order, i.e. the position of negativity (or the death drive). Queerness would thus act as a constant reminder that there is, there can be, no future at all, or that all futurity is nothing but fantasmatic: “Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothing-ness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy Screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony’s always explosive force” (2004: 31).

80 Duggan defines homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest dominant hetero-normative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promis-ing the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (2003: 50).

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social practices, so – I would argue – the spirit of early queer resistance was skillfully rearticulated, within an increasingly dominant neoliberal milieu, as a personalized “risk management” or, in Antke Engel’s apt phrase, “virtuous management of difference” (2013: 183). Once taken up and handled by the immuno-political machine of the modern state, the AIDS crisis was used suc-cessfully by neoliberalism to solidify and reinforce its claims and its grip on social relations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To put it bluntly, if you learn to use a condom and live in a stable monogamous relationship, then the spectre of contagion is contained and you prove yourself to be a virtuous citizen, worthy of, say, the right to marry. It is perhaps no accident that recent-ly, at a time of the growing dissatisfaction with the neoliberal order, the AIDS crisis in general, and the history of ACT UP in particular, have come to attract a refreshed attention. The year 2012 alone saw two documentaries devoted to this subject: How to Survive a Plague (USA, dir. David France) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (USA, dir. Jim Hubbard).

Despite the fact that John Greyson’s Zero Patience was made two decades ago, it remains more than just a document of its time. It continues to be an important and relevant comment on queer’s cultural, social, political, ethical and epistemological resistance to “straight” framings and fixings. I choose to read the movie through the idea of queerness as a sort of viral contagion81 that refuses to be contained, policed and regulated by the immunological appara-tuses of contemporary biopolitics. Queerness is a figure of the impossibility of being appropriated and taxonomized: like a virus, a zero, a ghost, a vampire

81 The association between “homosexuality” and contagion is age-old, of course, and con-tinues to be perpetuated, in one of its versions, by the popular myth that homosexual-ity is “caused” by (early) seduction, and although genetic explanations seem to prevail in recent years, the fear of “gay contagion” still persists. Indeed, Gregory M. Cochran, American physicist and professor of anthropology, has proposed his own theory of male (not female) homosexuality’s origin, in which he literalizes “gay contagion” as a  viral disease: “Now that we know that human male homosexuality looks like a disease caused by some infectious organism, the next question is how that could happen – how could some virus change sexual interest? I  don’t think that anyone can be sure of the exact mechanism at this point. I think we can be fairly confident that it is caused by an infec-tious organism, from the information we have and general evolutionary considerations […]. All this is speculative, of course: but the idea that male homosexuality is caused by a pathogen makes good evolutionary sense, unlike every other explanation ever pro-posed” (2005).

or a zombie, it dwells between the living and the dead, between presence and absence, between the positive and the negative. Posited, as it often is, as a por-tent of death, self-annihilation (cf. Bersani 2010: 29) or the apocalypse itself (cf. Sedgwick 1990: 127–130), it nevertheless proves to be a creative social force that traverses, connects, transforms, hybridizes, disrupts and reassem-bles. The “queer virus” is no respecter of identities, persons, races or species. It claims no origin, no telos, no family tree, just a horizontal movement, an epidemic propagation which “has nothing to do with filiation by heredity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 241). The apparently “innocent” and scientific search for origins and certainties is mocked and rejected for the sake of a mu-table queer diaspora without an origin (as Gloria Anzaldúa puts it, “I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races”; 1987: 80). Queerness “in-troduces disorder into communication,” to borrow Jacques Derrida’s charac-terization of the virus (in Brunette and Wills 1994: 12), it questions every con-sensual version of reality and tirelessly disrupts the apparently stable (because institutionally stabilized) relationships between signifiers and signifieds, on which the world’s intelligibility and classifiability so crucially depends.

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Coda

This book begins with a mention of the corporeal metaphors that are of-ten used in reference to (let me use one here) textual bodies. While most com-monly associated with music, “coda” comes from the Italian word for a tail. If so, a book that ends with a coda reveals itself as a monstrosity: a human body with an animalistic atavism, or else an extension that may, indeed, be read as a rhizomatic “line of flight” pointing towards a different future. I am instantly reminded of Hiromi Goto’s short story “Hopeful Monsters” (2004), where the protagonist, Hisa, gives birth to a girl with a “caudal appendage.” Hisa’s initial shock is soon followed by another: her mother confesses that Hisa her-self was born with a tail. What is more, all the three babies she had miscarried before giving birth to her only surviving child Hisa had tails, but Hisa’s, the mother says reassuringly, was the longest (which, we are led to believe, was somehow the reason she “made it”). Hisa’s disgust at her daughter’s tail slow-ly gives way to fascination and appreciation. After her mother entreats her not to repeat her mistake (by which she means, as we may guess, allowing the doctors to cut Hisa’s tail off), the protagonist decides to “steal” her baby from the hospital, leave her partner and head, with her child and mother, for some “warmer climes.” (In one of the funniest episodes of the story, she se-cures the help of a lesbian couple whom she briefly met before and who, she believes, will understand “what it’s like not to be normal”; 2004: 166.) As she walks out of the hospital, her monster daughter in her arms, she can feel her phantom tail behind her, “a graceful length that slid through air, weaving a subtle pattern” (2004: 168). After an intense identity crisis, Hisa comes to embrace her own and her daughter’s “abnormality,” which marks the end of her blissful ignorance/innocence and the beginning of an unknown future.

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The baby’s tail seems to have a life of its own: it twines around Hisa’s wrist “in a reflex of survival” (2004: 163). The situation is reminiscent of Barbara Gowdy’s character Sylvie, who agrees to have her extra pair of legs amputat-ed; according to a different epistemological taxonomy, however, the legs are not simply a  redundant excess of flesh, but Sylvie’s Siamese twin Sue, who possesses her own kind of agency. Hisa decides to save her yet nameless child from a medical correction and, possibly, originates a new species of “tailed” humans. This is what the note at the beginning of the story would suggest, as it refers to American geneticist Richard Goldschmidt’s saltational hypothesis of “hopeful monsters,” i.e. organisms who, due to some felicitous macromu-tation, acquire an adaptational advantage and trigger an “evolutionary leap.”82

Now, as far as my monstrological competences go, “true” monsters are not the hopeful ones. They do not (cannot/should not) breed, and they are not supposed to start a  lineage. As soon as they do, they cease to be mon-sters and they become a legitimate and reproducible “species”; true monsters, I will insist, must be “intransitive.” I am thus not quite sure if I should wish, after Mary Shelley, that my monster of a book, my “hideous progeny,” should “go forth and prosper,” as she has it (2013: 7). A true monster, let me repeat, is one of a kind, and therefore doomed to extinction; which, after all, is also the fate of Dr. Frankentein’s hapless (and nameless) monster. The only kind of agency I could wish for the book is the transversal agency of a virus.

*

Wary as I am of such general statements, I will risk saying that a great deal of Western thought, especially of the Cartesian extraction, displays a tendency to dehistoricize itself, to obliterate its own temporal materiality,

82 Dismissed for a long time by mainstream biologists, and occasionally appropriated by creationists as a proof of the falsity of Darwin’s theory, Goldschmidt’s hypothesis has recently drawn a new wave of attention from evolutionary scientists. The title of an arti-cle presenting the results of a recent study could, indeed, serve as the title of my book: “Transgressive Hybrids as Hopeful Monsters.” According to the article, “Recent work on hybridization and gene exchange suggests an underappreciated mechanism for the sudden appearance of evolutionary novelty that is entirely consistent with the princi-ples of modern population genetics. Genetic recombination in hybrids can produce transgressive phenotypes, ‘monstrous’ phenotypes beyond the range of parental popula-tions” (Dittrich-Reed and Fitzpatrick 2013: 310).

its strenuous material/semiotic flows, translations and mediations. A  truly Great Idea is expected to shine through the historico-material circumstances of its production, to constitute a transtemporal instant with the intensity of an epiphany. If it does, in some cases, allow for a temporality, it is the teleo-logical temporality of a thesis to be proved rather than the rhizomatic tempo-rality of promising monstrous outgrowths (the reference is, again, to Donna Haraway’s essay “The Promises of Monsters,” 1992). In opposition to the ver-tical/transcendental/hylomorphic83 notion of a book, Deleuze and Guattari propose a horizontal/cartographic/nomadic one. “Writing has nothing to do with signifying,” they boldly assert. “It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (1987: 25–6). Thus, a book must be seen as nothing but a history of the mappings and remappings it performs across fields, disciplines, taxonomies, codes, and representations. It is better under-stood as moving through the messy spatio-temporal materiality of Descartes’s res extensa rather than claiming a disembodied existence in the transtemporal nonspace of res cogitans, which attempts to impose its systematizations onto the perceived messiness of the world. The “realms to come” remain radical-ly unpredictable, of course, residing as “virtualities” outside of the order of Oedipal repetitions and reproductions.84

Let this coda, this tail, this redundant supplement, become another transversal line that cuts across the book’s “proper body,” across any terri-tory or organismic systematization it might possibly claim. Let it redirect the book’s flows from any remnants of the Oedipal economy of filiation to the transformative (non)economy of contagion.

83 For an in-depth discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of hylomorphism, see Protevi 2001.

84 On the relation between the Derridean notion of the “to come” and queerness as an anti-Oedipal force of desire, see Sikora 2011.

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Warner Brothers.Maddin, Guy, dir. 1992. Careful. Canada, Cinephile.Mastroianni, Armand, dir. 2007. Pandemic. United States, Hallmark Entertainment. Mickle, Jim, dir. 2006. Mulberry Street. United States, After Dark Films. Napolitano, Joe, dir. 1997. Contagious. United States, Universal Pictures. Ochiai, Masayuki, dir. 2004. Infection. Japan, Toho Company.Pastor, David and Àlex Pastor, dirs. 2009. Carriers. United States, Paramount Vantage.Petersen, Wolfgang, dir. 1995. Outbreak. United States, Warner Brothers.Praunheim, Rosa von, dir. 1986. A Virus Knows No Morals [Ein virus kennt keine]. West

Germany, Filmwelt. Romero, George A., dir. 1968. Night of the Living Dead. United States, The Walter Reade

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Streszczenie

Niniejsza książka, której tytuł można przetłumaczyć jako Ciała bezrządne: transwersalne odczytania wybranych opowiadań i  filmów kanadyjskich, ma dwojaki charakter. Z  jednej strony jest spojrzeniem na kwestię (problematycznej) cielesności w wybranych utworach filmowych i  literackich, które osadzone są w  kontekście kultury (czy raczej wielokultu-rowości) kanadyjskiej, a szerzej – w kontekście nowoczesnej kultury zachodniej, za fun-dament ideologiczny której można uznać liberalny humanizm. Z drugiej strony, książkę można odczytywać również jako propozycję o  charakterze teoretyczno-metodologicz-nym, której główną osią jest zaczerpnięta z filozofii Gilles’a Deleuze’a i Félixa Guattariego idea transwersalności, rozumiana jako ruch „w  poprzek”, ruch deterrytorializacji, czyli przecinania zastanych integralnych całości i tworzenia nowych „nienaturalnych” połączeń. Proponowany sposób lektury wybranych tekstów, inspirowany różnymi koncepcjami teo-retycznoliterackimi, kulturoznawczymi i filozoficznymi, pokazuje ograniczenia liberalne-go humanizmu i podważa jego główne założenia, wpisując się po części w trendy badawcze i kulturowe określane mianem „posthumanizmu”. Opisywane tu ciała, jako nośniki różnicy (płciowej, seksualnej, rasowej, wiekowej i wszelkiej innej), nie poddają się w pełni spo-łecznym mechanizmom dyscyplinującym, higienizującym i regulującym. Ciała te popeł-niają akty transgresji, choć nie zawsze czynią to świadomie i celowo; często postrzegana transgresja jest skutkiem działania sił (czy też, w języku psychoanalizy, „popędów”), które nadają ludzkiemu ciału (czy wręcz ludzkiemu „mięsu”) swego rodzaju sprawczość. Taka cielesna sprawczość uderza w działania nowocześnie pojmowanej (bio)władzy, która dąży do sklasyfikowania, znormatywizowania i sparametryzowania wszystkich aktorów, praktyk i  relacji społecznych. Jednym z wymownych przykładów regulacyjnej funkcji biowładzy jest, moim zdaniem, oficjalna kanadyjska polityka wielokulturowości, której przeciwstawić można kulturowe imaginaria generujące obrazy nadmiaru, transgresji, potworności, nega-tywności i anarchii. Obrazy te wykorzystują często postmodernistyczną estetykę gotyku, groteski i (queerowej) parodii.

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Pierwszy rozdział rozprawy zestawia założenia kanadyjskiej polityki wielokulturo-wości z  ideą radykalnej różnicy, reprezentacje której można odnaleźć w tekstach wyko-rzystujących konwencje szeroko pojętego gotyku. Przykładem takiego tekstu może być klasyczny horror Davida Cronenberga Mucha, w którym hybryda człowieka, muchy i ma-szyny podaje w wątpliwość szereg tradycyjnych, humanistycznych kategorii poznawczych, w tym określoną normatywną definicję człowieczeństwa. Podobnego rodzaju problema-tykę można odnaleźć w opowiadaniach Barbary Gowdy, którym poświęcony jest rozdział drugi. Poprzez groteskowe postacie, w których na plan pierwszy wysuwa się cielesny (czy też „mięsny”) eksces, autorka podważa proste i jasne taksonomie, wokół których organi-zują się nowoczesne społeczeństwa zachodnie. Materialna rzeczywistość ciał zakłóca „do-brze skrojone” kategoryzacje społeczno-kulturowe oraz wynikające z  nich normatywne nakazy i zakazy. Poprzez lekturę opowiadania Dionne Brand pt. „Blossom”, rozdział trzeci analizuje wysoce problematyczną normatywność zachodniocentrycznej idei „człowieka”. Groteskowa, wręcz abiektalna bohaterka opowiadania – wiekowa, czarnoskóra imigrantka, która prowadzi nocną „melinę”, a jednocześnie w ekstatycznym tańcu wciela się w postać bogini Oya – nie mieści się w ciasnych kanonach człowieczeństwa przewidzianych przez liberalno-humanistyczną politykę wielokulturowości. W  rozdziale czwartym zestawione są – pod szyldem „kobiecego gotyku” – opowiadania trzech autorek: Margaret Atwood, Isabel Huggan i Alice Munro. Tym, co łączy omawiane teksty, jest wydobycie z codzien-nej egzystencji „zwykłych ludzi” głębokich pokładów negatywności, które psychoanaliza określa mianem popędu śmierci. Nienawiść i mordercze instynkty – zwykle uznawane za wynaturzone i „nieludzkie” – okazują się w tej gotycko-freudowskiej wizji nieodzownym, strukturalnym elementem relacji społecznych oraz mechanizmów samozachowawczych.

W kolejnych rozdziałach dominują przykłady zaczerpnięte z kanadyjskiej kinemato-grafii. Rozdział piąty skupia się na pojęciu transgresji i  oferuje krótki przegląd transgre-syjnych motywów i strategii w twórczości trzech reżyserów: Davida Cronenberga, Guya Maddina i Bruce’a LaBruce’a. Animowane „pozaludzkimi” popędami i pragnieniami ciała nabierają w  filmach tych twórców swoistej sprawczości, która problematyzuje tradycyj-ne zachodnie rozumienie podmiotowości. W  rozdziale szóstym przyglądam się obrazo-wi Otto, czyli niech żyją umarlaki Bruce’a  LaBruce’a  w  kontekście zjawiska pornografii. Zaproponowane przeze mnie odczytanie filmu łączy figurę żywego trupa (z definicji na-znaczoną pewnym nadmiarem cielesności/mięsności) z kwestiami biopolityki, a zwłasz-cza z pytaniem o (niepewną) istotę „bycia żywym” w obecnych reżimach polityczno-spo-łecznych. Ostatni, siódmy rozdział kontynuuje rozważania biopolityczne, skupiając się bardziej szczegółowo na kwestiach epidemiologii i  immunizacji jako kluczowych obsza-rach zainteresowania współczesnej biowładzy. W tak zarysowanym kontekście omawiam musicalową komedię Johna Greysona Zero Patience, której tematem jest kryzys politycz-

no-społeczny – a także epistemologiczny – spowodowany epidemią AIDS. Film Greysona można odczytywać jako queerową krytykę epidemiologicznych (w szerokim sensie) zabie-gów biowładzy, a zwłaszcza jej autorytarnych systematyzacji i taksonomizacji, które usta-nawiają pewien „reżim prawdy” i są koniecznym warunkiem skutecznej regulacji praktyk i podmiotów społecznych. Na koniec, poprzez lekturę filmu Greysona, postuluję queero-we odzyskanie budzącej postrach figury wirusa jako figury par excellence transwersalnej – przekraczającej wszelkie zastane granice, tożsamości i kategorie poznawcze.

158

AAbramowicz, Maciej 9 Adorno, Theodor 59 Agamben, Giorgio 26, 42, 100, 101, 105,

112, 118 Allan, James 83 Anzaldúa, Gloria 139 Arcand, Bernard 98, 110 Arcand, Denys 71 Aristotle 52 Aronowitz, Stanley 133 Atwood, Margaret 24, 25, 31, 63, 64, 68–

71, 77, 78, 85

BBadley, Linda 35 Bakhtin, Mikhail 40, 80 Ballard, J. G. 92 Bashford, Alison 118 Basiuk, Tomasz 131, 136 Baudelaire, Charles 99, 101 Baudrillard, Jean 101 Baugh, Bruce 114 Bauman, Zygmunt 43Beard, William 86, 87 Benjamin, Walter 58, 101 Berger, John 96 Berlant, Laurent 18

Bersani, Leo 139 Bhabha, Homi 95Binhammer, Katherine 99 Birney, Earle 83 Blake, William 43 Boyle, Danny 117 Brach-Czaina, Jolanta 75, 110 Branach-Kallas, Anna 15, 22 Brand, Dionne 22, 24, 25, 31, 52–56, 58, 95 Brecht, Bertolt 103, 126 Bruckner, Pascal 110 Brunette, Peter 139 Bruno, John 117 Bryant, Levi R. 12 Brydon, Diana 51, 55, 56Bryx, Adam 13 Buchholtz, Mirosława 15, 68 Buiani, Roberta 116 Burton, Philip 127 Burton, Richard Francis 127 Butler, Judith 95

CCagle, Robert L. 129 Callus, Ivan 53 Carter, Angela 104, 112 Chambers, Samuel A. 131 Chopin, Kate 76 Cochran, Gregory M. 138

Index of Names

159

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 36, 37 Conley, Tom 14Creed, Barbara 87Crimp, Douglas 125, 133, 134, 137 Cronenberg, David 23, 25, 28, 31–33, 35,

36, 82, 83, 87–90, 93, 117

DDarnton, Robert 99 Darwin, Charles 12, 141Dean, Tim 109, 136 Deleuze, Gilles 12–16, 18, 21, 24, 80, 114,

139, 142Demme, Jonathan 133 Derek, Maya 108 Derrida, Jacques 52, 139, 142 Dery, Mark 117 Descartes, René 14, 21, 32, 44, 49, 81, 113,

141, 142 Dittrich-Reed, Dylan R. 141 Douglas, Mary 10, 80, 98, 104 Dritz, Selma 133 Dugas, Gaëtan 36, 107, 129, 130, 131Duggan, Lisa 137 Durczak, Joanna 9

E Edelman, Lee 99, 109, 133, 137 Edmundson, Mark 49, 65–67, 106 Edwards, Justin D. 29, 30, 62, 63, 67, 77, 84 Egoyan, Atom 84, 91 Embry, Karen 113 Engel, Antke 138 Esposito, Roberto 26, 120, 122 Euclid 54

FFinkielkraut, Alain 110 Fitzpatrick, Benjamin M. 141 Forster, E. M. 71, 76 Forster, Marc 117, 122

Foucault, Michel 18–21, 80, 82, 83, 95, 96, 100, 105, 126

France, David 138 Francis, Daniel 27, 83 Freud, Sigmund 16, 17, 21, 22, 25, 49,

65–70, 74, 79, 84, 113, 114 Fritzl, Josef 65 Frye, Northrop 55, 67 Fulford, Robert 83 Fuss, Diana 42 GGamer, Michael 97 Genosko, Gary 13 Gilliam, Terry 117 Gilroy, Paul 95 Ginsberg, Allen 136 Goeller, Alison 112 Goffman, Erving 126 Goldman, Marlene 66 Goldschmidt, Richard 141 Golub, Edward S. 119 Goto, Hiromi 140 Gould, Stephen J. 117 Gowdy, Barbara 24, 25, 28, 31, 39, 40,

43–49, 91, 141 Greyson, John 22, 26, 31, 46, 83, 125–127,

129–135, 138 Grosz, Elizabeth 12 Guattari, Félix 12, 13, 15, 18, 21, 24, 114,

139, 142

HHagens, Gunther von 112 Hanson, Ellis 107, 131 Haraway, Donna 12, 16, 26, 37, 95, 119,

120, 128, 142 Hardt, Michael 116, 128 Hays, Matthew 104, 107Heisenberg, Werner 125 Henessy, Rosemary 131

160

Herbrechter, Stefan 53 Hernáez, María Jesús Lerena 47 Hickox, Anthony 117 Hobbes, Thomas 26, 118, 120, 122 Hooker, Claire 118 hooks, bell 52 Horkheimer, Max 59 Hubbard, Jim 138 Huggan, Isabel 24, 25, 63, 64, 68, 71–73,

77Hunt, Lynn 99 Hurley, Kelly 87

IIngarden, Roman 10 Irigaray, Luce 75 Jameson, Frederick 101

JJarosz, Krzysztof 9Jeammet, Nicole 68 Jefferson, Thomas 98 Jenks, Chris 79, 80

KKafka, Franz 49, 100 Kamboureli, Smaro 15, 27, 29 Keats, John 132 Kerslake, Christian 17 Kipman, Simon-Daniel Kracauer, Siegfried 101 Kramer, Gary 109 Kristeva, Julia 23, 71, 81, 82, 132Kroetsch, Robert 30, 32 Krzykawski, Michał 30

LLaBruce, Bruce 25, 46, 83, 90–93, 99,

103–105, 107–111, 114, 115, 126 Lacan, Jacques 15, 69, 81, 99, 102, 114

Lauro, Sarah Juliet 113 Leung, Brent 124 Lewis, Matthew 66, 97 Linnaeus 12 Lippens, Ronnie 117 Lyotard, Jean François 39, 41

MMacCormack, Patricia 17, 23 MacDonald, Ann-Marie 22 Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl 68 Maddin, Guy 25, 31, 77, 83–87, 89, 90, 93Marcuse, Herbert 108, 109 Marwick, Alice 99 Marx, Karl 52, 106Mastroianni, Armand 117 Mathias, Thomas James 97 McIntosh, David 91 McLuhan, Marshall 126 Mehtonen, P. M. 9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23 Meyers, Helen 65 Mickle, Jim 117 Miki, Roy 15 Moers, Ellen 63 Monk, Katherine 83 Moodie, Susanna 64 Morgan, Jason 83, 84 Munro, Alice 24, 25, 63–65, 68, 69, 73–77

NNapolitano, Joe 117 Negri, Antonio 116, 128Neocleous, Mark 37, 106 Newton, Isaac 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich 42, 50, 79Nischik, Reingard 68 Nixon, Richard 98 Northey, Margot 62 Nova, T. 108

161

OO’Rourke, Michael 131 Ochiai, Masayuki 117

PPaine, Thomas 97 Parikka, Jussi 116 Pastor, Àlex 117 Pastor, David 117 Peaches 90 Persky, Stan 90, 91 Petersen, Wolfgang 117 Phelan, Peggy 57, 58 Picasso, Pablo 47 Plante, Mike 103, 105 Porter, Roy 34 Praunheim, Rosa von 125 Protevi, John 142 Proust, Marcel 13 Punter, David 72

RRadcliffe, Ann 66 Rancière, Jacques 20, 96, 131 Rauch, Angelika 74 Reagan, Ronald 35, 129, 130, 133 Rembrandt, van Rijn 34 Renk, Kathleen 56, 57 Renwick, Neil 35, 130 Rodley, Chris 33, 87, 88 Romero, George 106 Rossolillo, Paola 136 Royle, Nicholas 66 Rutherford, Jennifer 115 Rzepa, Agnieszka 31

SSade, Marquis de 79, 100, 104, 112 Sampson, Tony D. 116 Sarnelli, Laura 55

Savolainen, Matti 9 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von

66 Schmitt, Carl 42 Scott, David 56 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 18, 95, 132, 139Serres, Michel 16 Shaviro, Steven 86 Shelley, Mary 44, 66, 72, 141Shilts, Randy 129, 132–135 Sikora, Tomasz 11, 16, 18, 114, 132, 142 Sini, Matthew 125 Smith, Andrew 64 Smith, Murray 32 Smith, Stephanie A. 38, 56Soderbergh, Steven 117, 122 Soros, Erin 109 Spiv, Alsdair 104, 105, 109Spottiswoode, Roger 133, 134 Sprinkle, Annie 99 Stallybrass, Peter 80 Steintrager, James 41 Stevens, Wallace 12 Stopkowich, Lynn 91 Sturgess, Charlotte 54 Sugars, Cynthia 67 Szatanik, Zuzanna 9, 15, 20, 21, 30

T Taussig, Michael 57–60 Taylor, Charles 3 6, 60 Thoreau, Henry David 40 Toles, George 86 Tomkins, Sylvan 18Treichler, Paula A. 123–126 Trier, Lars von 117

UUexküll, Jakob von 53 Uexküll, Thure von 53

VVigarello, Georges 34 Virilio, Paul 113

WWallace, Diana 64 Walpole, Horace 41 Warmuzińska-Rogóż, Joanna 9 Warner, Michael 18 Watney, Simon 125, 126Waugh, Thomas 83, 87, 90

White, Allon 80 Willemen, Paul 99, 101 Williams, Linda 96 Williams, Linda Ruth 32, 82, Wills, David 139 Wittig, Minique 1 35 Wood, Robin 87

ŽŽižek, Slavoj 102, 105, 113, 114