07 December 2009

queer ecstasy














José Esteban Muñoz on the ecstasy of James Schuyler, via Heidegger, in
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009):

"In Being and Time Heidegger reflects on the activity of timeliness and its relation to ekstatisch (ecstasy), signaling for Heidegger the ecstatic unity of temporality--Past, Present, and Future. The ecstasy the speaker feels and remembers in [Schuyler's] "A photograph" is not consigned to one moment. It steps out from the past and remarks on the unity of an expansive version of temporality; hence, future generations are invoked. To know ecstasy in the way in which the poem's speaker does is to have a sense of timeliness's motion, to understand a temporal unity that is important to what I attempt to describe as the time of queerness. Queerness's time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time." (25)

In his conclusion, Munoz brilliantly brings together this Heideggerian version of ecstasy with the queer affectivity of the Magnetic Fields's "Take Ecstasy With Me":

"Take ecstasy with me thus becomes a request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional, a time that is not queerness. Queerness's time is the time of ecstasy. Ecstasy is queerness's way. We know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality. But let us take ecstasy together, as the Magnetic Fields request. That means going beyond the singular shattering that a version of jouissance suggests or the transport of Christian rapture." (187)

Evoking Bernini's The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, read by Lacan, Kristeva, and others as the shattering of the self (and particularly, of the female self) through jouissance, Muñoz demands an ecstasy beyond individual self-shattering, a collective ecstasy or ecstatic collectivity that might name a queer futurity. C.f. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on being beside, Judith Halberstam on queer time & queer place, Shoshana Felman on madness and the speaking body.