Josef Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Mass Publications, 1975), 19.
Ross Douthat, “Where Liberal Power Lies: And Why Conservatives Fear the Creep of Authoritarianism, Too,” New York Times, October 17, 2020 →.
Rod Dreher, “Douthat On The Pink Police State,” The American Conservative, October 17, 2020 →.
For context, see Patrick Love and Alisha Karabinus, “Creation of an Alt-Left Boogeyman: Information Circulation and the Emergence of ‘Antifa,’” in Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy, ed. John Jones and Michael Trice (Springer 2020). For examples outside the US, see Jens Jessen, “Der bedrohte Mann,” Die Zeit, April 4, 2018 →; and Margarete Stokowski, “‘Totalitärer Feminismus’ Der Reichsbürger der #MeToo-Bewegung,” Spiegel Kultur →.
“Marx’s theory of historical repetition … turns on the following principle which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself.“ Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; Continuum, 1994, 91). Historical actors necessarily repeat what they know. Repetition may fall short of imitating its model—it then turns into farce. It may succeed and become the continuation of a tradition—it then turns conservative. But sometimes repetition yields something yet unheard of—it then turns into the future. This future lies dormant in the past—as counter-paradigm.
The “we” in this text is indexical. Just as “I” refers to the speaker (who changes in any given context), this “we” refers to the community of those implicated in the thought and sentence in question. Effectively, this means that you, dear reader, create the we while reading it. The term “we” does not have a meaning beyond this.
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, trans. Thomas H. Ford (Verso, 2009), 30.
For an analysis of intersections between queerness and historical fascism, see Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press 2011), 147.
For an introduction to the contemporary historical analysis of Stalin and Stalinism, see Kevin McDermott, “Stalin and Stalinism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, ed. Stephen S. Smith (Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929–1941 (Penguin, 2017).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: A History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999), 203.
For more on this, see Luce deLire, “Towards a Critique of Pure Treason,” Invertigo TV Live Stream, Qalandiya International 2018 →.
On the devastating effects of capitalism, see especially Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019). For a quick and popular take on capitalism, see the documentary Justin Pemberton, Capital in the 21st Century, 2019, based on Thomas Piketty, Le Capital au XXIe siècle (Editions du Seuil, 2013).
Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (Polity, 2007), 5.
Proudhon coins this slogan in analogy to the identification of slavery with murder in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (1840; Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13. But while Proudhon investigates property for its ethical defensibility and its material genesis (property as actual theft of land, for example), we merely state that property can and will go wrong—thus, with property, theft becomes inevitable.
McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), §052.
Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare (Routledge, 1992), 36.
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, trans. Bruce Benderson (The Feminist Press, 2013), 34.
Maxine Wolfe in private conversation with the authors, 2012.
This counts for resistance just as much. “The dominant are waiting for the oppositional to grab them and make them alternative.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Politics of Deconstruction: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera in conversation,” Birbeck, University of London, 2016 →.
The necessary possibilities of loneliness, jealousy, exploitation, poverty, and anxiety may be understood in analogy to the demonstration concerning theft above. For anxiety, see also Jamieson Webster and Luce deLire, “What Do We Even Want From One Another?: Anxiety, Permeation and Identity in the Age of a Slowly Imploding Liberalism,” Public Seminar, April 24, 2018 →.
In “The Apogee of the Commodity,” Anthony Paul Farley inquires into the mechanics of antiblack racism from a similar angle: “The Black is the apogee of the commodity. It is the point—in time as well as in space—at which commodity becomes flesh.” Anthony Paul Farley, “The Apogee of the Commodity,” DePaul Law Review, no. 53 (2004): 1229. A Pink Totaliterian reading of antiblack racism may learn a great deal especially from Paul Farley’s notion of inevitable “ambiguities” (1240) that are tendentially interpreted in the direction of the hegemonial system in place (such as racial capitalism or “white-over-black,” as he writes). For a related, though probably opposed position, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020). Wilderson’s picture rests on the claim that “there is no antagonism like the antagonism between Black people and the world” and that this antagonism is more fundamental to politics and oppression than anything else. It is interesting, however, that the logic of property, and “looting” in particular, figures prominently in the making of Afropessimism. A thorough conversation between Afropessimism and Pink Totaliterianism is surely in order. This conversation will also have to include a thorough reading of Achille Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason (2013; Duke University Press 2017). But this will require a text of its own.
See Bini Adamczak, “Theorie der Polysexuellen Ökonomie (Grundrisse),” diskus 6, no. 1 (2006) →.
For exemplary studies of this constellation, see Jin Haritaworn, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007), 114–65. See also Luce deLire, “L’Ancien Regime Strikes Back: Response to Paul Preciado,” e-flux conversations, January 2018 →.
See for example Luce deLire, “The New Queer: Aesthetics of the Esoteric Left and Virtual Materialism,” Public Seminar, August 19, 2019 →; and Luce deLire, “Queer Feminist Witchcraft,” in Magic: A Companion, ed. Katharina Rein (Peter Lang, 2021), forthcoming.
See also deLire, “L’Ancien Regime Strikes Back.”
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction (1976; Vintage 1990); Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (La Découverte, 2009); and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Preciado, Testo Junkie, 47.
Preciado, Testo Junkie, 23.
Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (University of California Press, 1997).
Singer, Erotic Welfare, 35.
See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. E. Richardson, trans. Richard Nice (Greenwood Press, 1986), 46–58; Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Polity, 2007); and Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012).
“Few people consciously want babies to be commodities. Yet baby commodities are a definite part of what gestational labor produces today.” Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now (Verso, 2019), 15.
Note that the neoliberal couple form is incredibly adaptable: polyamory, for example, is not a solution but merely an extension of the bourgeois ideology of libidinal agriculture. It is the spatial equivalent to sequential monogamy. While some people plow one field after the other, others have several, mostly non-interfering partnerships at the same time. The model may appear franchised (play partners, sugar daddies, escort services) or protected by limited liability (friends with benefits, affairs, and flings). But as long as these are founded on the idea of exclusion and negative freedom they will be but extensions of the overall commodification of everyday life. In this sense, polyamory is pink-washing neoliberalism.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and The Witch: The Body and Primitive Accumulation, (Autonomedia, 2004), 80. For the context of Pink Totaliterianism, we are interested in the collective material dimension of this quote, not in the fantasy of a wholesome “common” that somehow magically cures us from capitalism. We reject this fantasy as romanticism. For a more contemporary take on the “commons,” however, see Comrade Wark: “Without an information commons, all classes become captives of the vectoralist privatization of education. This is an interest the hacker shares with farmers and workers, who demand the public provision of education.” Wark, Hacker Manifesto, §198. See also Ziauddin Sardar, “alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the darker side of the West,” Futures 27, no. 7 (September 1995): 777–94 →.
The term “Queerocracy” is borrowed from New York City–based group Queerocracy. There is no affiliation between the authors and the group, although we admire their activism. We recommend you support them—financially or otherwise. For more on the group see →.
Consider in this regard: “All returns to {normal} in the aftermath of a {transition} have to be fought because {the old normal} has … objectively {ended}, and hence the ‘return’ would be to a counterfeit {normality}, one characterized by reduction to the exoteric and lack of subtlety. From this perspective, invoking {normality} as the domain of the genuine is derisory, since in many cases {normality} did at one point or another undergo a {transition}.” Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (self-published, 2009), 29 →. “{We have to tackle} three tasks … concerning a {transition}: 1) to reveal the withdrawal of {normality}, and therefore that a {transition} has happened {or is happening} … ; 2) to resurrect what has been withdrawn by the {transition in a different constellation, to piece the elements of the pre-transition situation back together in a new constellation}, which is the task assigned to the protagonist{s} … ; 3) and, in some ominous periods, to imply symptomatically … that a {transition} is being prepared … thus functioning as an … implicit appeal for thoughtful intervention by the minority of contemporaries to {allow} the imminent {transition to happen}.” Toufic, Withdrawal of Culture, 22.
Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, no. 30 (Winter 2018) →.
Preciado, Testo Junkie, 137.
Preciado, Testo Junkie, 137.
For a systematic account of a choice-based “personal aspiration model” of transitioning, see Christine Overall, “Sex/Gender Transitions and Life Changing Aspirations,” in You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, ed. Laurie J. Shrage (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Chu, “On Liking Women.” At bottom, this is an expression of the virtuality of desire, which Deleuze exemplifies in a “child who begins to walk … No one has ever walked endogenously. On the one hand, the child goes beyond the bound excitations towards the supposition or the intentionality of an object, such as the mother, as the goal of an effort, the end to be actively reached ‘in reality’ and in relation to which success and failure may be measured. But on the other hand and at the same time, the child constructs for itself another object, a quite different kind of object which is a virtual object or centre and which then governs and compensates for the progresses and failures of its real activity: it puts several fingers in its mouth, wraps the other arm around this virtual centre, and appraises the whole situation from the point of view of this virtual mother … The real mother is contemplated only in order to provide a goal for the activity, and a criterion by which to evaluate the activity, in the context of an active synthesis.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 99.
For an opposite perspective, compare Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Materiality (Columbia University Press, 2010).
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–54; and Hilary Malatino, “Tough Breaks: Trans Rage and the Cultivation of Resilience,” Hypatia 34, no. 1 (Winter 2019). For a critical perspective on rage from a black trans perspective, see Kortney Ryan Ziegler, “Uses of Black Trans Male Anger,” HuffPost, April 12, 2013 →.
J. A. Micheline gives a particularly powerful example: “In an attempt to survive, before I knew that I’d done it, I became what they asked of me. I became soft-spoken; I became committed to reason … And I am so satisfied to be the monster that they have created … My sharp rhetoric only highlights the softness of their foundation. My patience only provides them rope—rope with which they inevitably hang themselves.” J. A. Micheline, “Ritualizing My Humanity,” in Becoming Dangerous, ed. Katie West and Jasmine Elliot (Weiser Books, 2019), 209.
Yet again, the difference between Pink Totaliterianism and the left opposition is subtle but crucial. Comrade Wark captures a similar thought as follows: “To the hacker there is always a surplus of possibility expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual. This is the inexhaustible domain of what is real, but not actual, what is not but which may become … To hack is to release the virtual into the actual,”—and thus to proclaim the primacy of the actual over the virtual— “to express the difference of the real” (Wark, Hacker Manifesto, §074). Here, it looks as though “the virtual,” just as the classically Marxist version of nature, was in itself a passive object to the cultivating intervention of human actors (which picks up on centuries of the identification of virtuality, mere possibility, and nature as matter to a forming intellect). Simultaneously, comrade Wark’s “virtual” has relevance only in relation to “what is actual”—it is “what is not but which may become” (Wark, Hacker Manifesto, §074). What articulates itself in her text is an inherent “metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for” the transcendental signified (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 49), which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign, thus putting to rest that “strange movement of the trace”—in other words, the virtual (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 66). In this case, the transcendental signified is the “inexhaustible domain of what is real” (Wark, Hacker Manifesto, §074) and ready to be hacked (is it an accident that “to hack” originally refers to the violent expropriation of resources from the material world?). The virtual, the surplus possibility in Comrade Wark’s picture, is subsumed under actuality. It has no life of its own, no nonhuman agency. It remains to be shown where it manifests its factual agency against the grain in Comrade Wark’s text, but these crucial subtleties require a separate inquiry. Suffice it to say that to Pink Totaliterians, that “strange movement of the trace” is simultaneously the strange movement of an originary desire that makes itself felt. That is why a Pink Totaliterian must ultimately aim for a theory of seduction more than for a theory of production (see Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 1977, Semiotext(e), 2007, 37–38).
Comrade Wark has put forth a powerful analysis of a parallel development in what she calls the “vectoralist class” and the “hacker class” (Wark, Hacker Manifesto, §021). However, despite her striking analysis of the mechanisms of extraction, appropriation, and accumulation, the notion of libido is strangely absent from her approach. This is no accident. Omission of the power of libidinal economy was a major shortcoming of original socialist accumulation in the communist states and the way in which socialist theories have understood class conflict and the workings of capitalism more generally. For neoliberal capitalism, a particular analysis of libidinal economy is not necessary, because the production of scarcity works in its favor. Survival and trauma motivate capitalist consumption. “Communism was an idea, a dream palace whose attraction derived from its seeming fusion of science and utopia” (Kotkin, Stalin, 6). What remains open in Comrade Wark’s proposal is simply this: Why do anything? What is the motivational force behind resistance? It is the typical omission of the idealist, left opposition (for another powerful example, see Rose Buttress, “A New Social Contract,” Mask: The Rant Issue, 2017). But if you can’t say anything about the causal forces driving concrete action, your political proposal will remain flat footed. In short: while comrade Wark’s proposal is inherently Marxist, Pink Totaliterianism is inherently Spinozistic.
For more on this, see Luce deLire, “Post-#metoo: My, Your, Our Pink Totalitarianism,” e-flux lectures, May 11, 2018 →.
For more on this, see “From the Lecture Notes of Comrade Josephine” →.
Anonymous, “Against the Gendered Nightmare: Fragments On Domestication,” Bædan, no. 2 (2014): 87.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 183.
See Preciado, Testo Junkie, and Illouz, Cold Intimacies.
For a related fictional scenario, see Torrey Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (self-published, 2016).
Preciado, Testo Junkie, 31.
Mira Bellwether, Fucking Trans Women, vol. 1 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).
We think that gender terrorists should involve trans men in their actions so as to make sure that all necessary precautions for their protection are met.
Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn (2000; Columbia University Press, 2018), 57.
Winston Churchill quoting Stalin from a private conversation they had in Moscow during Churchill’s visit there in 1943. Winston Churchill, The Second World War – Volume 3: The Grand Alliance (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 448.
For context, see Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counter-Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework, a Perspective on Capital and the Left (New York Wages for Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press, 1975).
Paul B. Preciado, “La statistique, plus forte que l’amour,” Libération, August 1, 2014 →.
For more on this, see Luce deLire, “Pink Totaliterianism.”
For more on this, see “From the Lecture Notes of Comrade Josephine” →.
DeLire, “L’Ancien Regime Strikes Back.”
Note, however, that mere abstract demolition of the couple form leaves us to the social blizzard that drives people into the couple form in the first place. Decoupling is not an end in itself. It is a precursor for other social relations. That is why “decoupling” is not “breaking up.” The latter singularizes the participants. “Decoupling” is a collective transition into a social form beyond the two.
McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019).
“C’est en ce sense que la révolution (pink) est la puissance sociale de la différence, … la colère propre de l’Idée sociale.” Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition (Presses Universitaires de France, 2015), 268.
Many thanks to the Center for New Media and Feminist Public Practice (Volos), Walid Abdelnour, Spencer Compton, Nilgün Corogil, Antonia Grousdanidou, Feray Halil, Simon Kubisch, Comrade Sampaguita, Danny Schwartz, Nina Tolksdorf, Rose Buttress, Comrade Wark, and all participants in the workshop Digital Enclosures.