Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

pretext 25
with phenomenality, in itself their recourse to phenomenality politely
postpones judgments. Indeed, phenomenophilia would seem to be the
province mostly of solitary, conflictedly heterosexual and vaguely homosexual
unmarried and mismarried men of dubious or unusually configured
health. In this book, Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche are surrounded by
penumbral characters such as Wordsworth, Kleist, Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Pessoa, and Wittgenstein, and associated discourses
of addiction and deviance. Unfolding within the closet in Eve
Sedgwick’s sense—the closet as a figure for the islanded mind with a good
reason to select its own society32 —the phenomenality/dissatisfaction connection
reveals the impact of queer imagination on post-critical thought.
It is not simply that Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno need to
be included in the annals of queer literature (they already have been). 33
Rather, the phenomenality/dissatisfaction axis shows that the annals of
queer literature pose what is taken to be, as the subtitle of The Is-Ought
Question puts it, “the Central Problem of Moral Philosophy.” In and through
its tact, looking away sheds light on interior and exterior depths of obligation
to the given; the dilemma of givens experienced as mutually exclusive
(the dual intransigences of what is and what ought to be, each of which
may be brought to support either the socially normative or the socially
marginal); and the vast cultural generativity of phenomenophilia as a psychological
strategy. Cavell notes that “if we speak of perversions of human
existence, this will encompass disturbances of satisfaction no more sexual
32. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990).
33. On Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche, see for example Wayne Koestenbaum, Double
Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989); David L.
Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” CR: The New Centennial Review
1 (2001): 201–289; and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, respectively. Adorno’s relation
to queer sexuality has been interpreted variously. Thomas Pepper argues that
Adorno makes available a critique of the “property relation of human beings” without
noticing that this relation “is even more primordial than the gender relations it conditions”;
he suggests that homophobia in texts like the Minima Moralia entry “Tough
Baby” serves to distance the implications Adorno’s thought might have for gender (Singularities:
Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997], 48, 42). For more on homophobia in Adorno, see Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions:
Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996).
Adorno’s determined advocacy of homosexuals’ civil rights, however, expresses his vision
of a society free of coercion.