I really did meet Quentin Crisp, of all places at the Australian Consulate in New York, at a reception for the artist known as Pope Alice. We really did play the game. Later, he accompanied us to a Chinese restaurant and regaled us with stories and scarfed down a huge meal, until he went strangely silent and then threw the whole lot up. Pope Alice simply covered it with a tablecloth and asked for the check. His best-known book is Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (Penguin Classics, 1997).
See Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
See Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (MIT Press, 2017). But the problem of naming an outside to Western metaphysics is that it too often becomes its other and mirror image.
The key work of Plato for media theory, and hence for this dialogue, is Phaedrus. See Plato, The Collected Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Darren Tofts, Memory Trade (Craftsman House, 1998).
This reading borrows freely, and not faithfully, from Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October, no. 102 (Winter 1983). All of the readings in this text are unfaithful, of course, to remain true to its method.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, from the Preface.
This is a potted version with some modifications of the Nietzchean critique of Marxism in Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (Verso, 2021) and Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, 1993) and my own A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004).
On which see Ann K. Clark, “The Girl, a Rhetoric of Desire,” Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (1987).
Here I wonder if we can’t improve on Jay Prosser’s critique of Judith Butler in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (Columbia University Press, 1998). The norms around which performances of gender oscillate, a copy without an original, nevertheless have as their strange attractor the negative of a Platonic idea or form.
With apologies to Oscar Wilde. The original line is from Lady Windemere’s Fan, but The Decay of Lying is the more obvious influence on this essay. Both in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Harper Perennial, 2008).
Julia Serrano, Whipping Girl (Seal Press, 2007).
“LGBTQ+ ‘Panic’ Defense,” National LGBT Bar Association, 2019 →.
See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Harvard University Press, 1996). This text makes two points pertinent here. Firstly, that violence installs and affirms the law, so law alone won’t save us. Secondly, that in nonviolent forms of being together—Benjamin’s example is the conference—there is no sanction for lying. Which is extendable into the concept that there’s no idea regulating the nonviolent communal form that would require sanction.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” Gay Liberation Quarterly 1, no. 3 (1994). Stryker builds from the rage of feeling treated as monstrous to an affirmation of the monstrous. We are going to take a slightly different path here, starting from the figure of the trap rather than the monster.
See Andrea Long Chu, Females (Verso, 2019). I’m rather turning the tables on sister Andrea, making being female the second-best thing in the world and being a trans woman the best thing in the world, as she who in actively shaping a response to the unbidden desire to transition can escape the order of truth and posit a new value.
Willow Verkerk, Nietzsche and Friendship (Bloomsbury, 2019) has a rather more careful reading, informed by trans studies, of Nietzsche on gender.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Their figure of becoming-woman is an elaboration of Nietzsche by way of Judge Schreber.
Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies Today,” boundary2 online, August 20, 2014 →; Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 2008). Stryker’s concept of the cut as an edit to the body, further elaborated by Hayward, points towards an anti-Platonist metaphysics of the corporeal edit.
Sheri Hoem, “Community and the ‘Absolutely Feminine,’” Diacritics 26, no. 2 (Summer 1996) picks up the thread of a game among the bros of postwar theory—Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy—as to what a community could even be that had nothing in common, and how Duras interrupts them. It’s maybe no accident that Kathy Acker was reading some of these texts at the time she was finishing Pussy, King of the Pirates (Grove Press, 1996)—a book which one could read as a theory of femmunism, of the being-together of femmes who approximate no idea, who do not police each other’s differences, who have nothing in femmon.
See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2019). The insufficiency of that utopia for trans women comes up via Muñoz’s treatment of Kevin Aviance, and the problem of femme expression in gay male spaces, where it might be better to say it is all too often concentrated into the figure of the drag performer so it can be disavowed. But rather than a critique of Muñoz, a differentiation, a different utopia, neither more nor less.
See McKenzie Wark, “Femme as in Fuck you,” e-flux journal, no. 102 (September 2019) →.