The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS - Softcover

Haver, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804727287 ISBN 13: 9780804727280

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Examining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A-bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Haver is Associate Professor of History at Binghamton University

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Examining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A-bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history. It argues that those objects which are presumptively given to thought under the rubrics of “AIDS” and “Hiroshima/Nagasaki” pose an essential threat, in their existentiality, to conceptual thought and, ultimately, to rationality altogether. It therefore argues that any serious thinking about AIDS and nuclear terror must think the essential insufficiency of thought to its putative objects—the insufficiency of “society” to think sociality, the insufficiency of “history” to think historicity.
The author first attempts to think the incapacity of every invocation of historical consciousness (or, indeed, of “history” itself) to think the existential historicity of that event which is presumptively not only its object but its ground. Readings of works by Nishida Kitaro, Ota Yoko, and Takenishi Hiroko written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attempt to mark the limit of historical consciousness. The author then considers erotic sociality in the time of AIDS, specifically as articulated in texts by David Wojnarowicz, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, anonymity, the erotic, and nomadism.

Aus dem Klappentext

Examining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A-bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history. It argues that those objects which are presumptively given to thought under the rubrics of AIDS and Hiroshima/Nagasaki pose an essential threat, in their existentiality, to conceptual thought and, ultimately, to rationality altogether. It therefore argues that any serious thinking about AIDS and nuclear terror must think the essential insufficiency of thought to its putative objects the insufficiency of society to think sociality, the insufficiency of history to think historicity.
The author first attempts to think the incapacity of every invocation of historical consciousness (or, indeed, of history itself) to think the existential historicity of that event which is presumptively not only its object but its ground. Readings of works by Nishida Kitaro, Ota Yoko, and Takenishi Hiroko written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attempt to mark the limit of historical consciousness. The author then considers erotic sociality in the time of AIDS, specifically as articulated in texts by David Wojnarowicz, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, anonymity, the erotic, and nomadism.

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The Body of This Death

HISTORICITY AND SOCIALITY IN THE TIME OF AIDSBy WILLIAM HAVER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1996 Board of Trustees
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-2728-0

Contents

Preface....................................................................xi1 Not Even a God Can Save Us Now...........................................12 First Excursus on the Divine Right of the Historian......................253 Apocalypse Now-Forever-Whenever..........................................514 Four Itineraries in Search of a Narrative................................745 Y Su Sangre Ya Viene Cantando............................................1196 Second Excursus on the Divine Right of the Historian.....................1607 The Death of Michel Foucault.............................................177Notes......................................................................205Index......................................................................217

Chapter One

Not Even a God Can Save Us Now

The Originary Multiplicity of the AIDS- Object

What is called AIDS is, for consciousness and for thought, a necessarily impossible object. As such, and in itself, AIDS is radically unthinkable, resisting objectification, interpretation, the understanding, meaning, and the aspiration to transcendental subjectivity absolutely; AIDS belongs to that to which every teratology, phenomenology, or hermeneutic is necessarily and forever inadequate. In this project I shall therefore not attempt to interpret and therefore understand AIDS, to think what is radically unthinkable. Rather, my project is to think the specific determinate unthinkability of what is strictly speaking unthinkable; to think the multiple impossibilities for thought designated by the term "AIDS"; to think the status of AIDS not only as object (in its objectness or objectity, its Gegenstandlichkeit), but also in and as the exigency that is its material objectivity; to think the impossibility of the object, but also the objectivity of its impossibility; to think AIDS as, and in, its material multiplicity, its material exigencies (both the multiplicity of its exigencies and the exigency of its multiplicity). In other words, I am trying to think the thought of AIDS as the limit that is at once the failure of thought and the sole condition of possibility for thought; I do so because I am persuaded that any thinking or acting with respect to the AIDS pandemic that aspires to any effective consequence must subject itself to such an onto-epistemological panic, not as a putatively salutary propaedeutic humiliation (the discipline that would subjectify us in disciplinary bondage), but as a necessary response to the exigency of the existential, the material force of the Real of AIDS.

There is now a substantial body of work that testifies to, records, and is itself part of the process by which the object we recognize and sometimes claim to know as AIDS has been constituted, and is continuously reconstituted, out of an amorphous terror. This process, which has produced for the subject who is supposed to know the massively overdetermined object called AIDS, is undoubtedly necessary, and in any event unavoidable. But it has nevertheless not been without its contradictions. For part of what has happened in this constitution of an object for consciousness in and through material discursive practices, particularly in the past few years, has been what might be termed the normalization, routinization, and, indeed, commodification of AIDS. AIDS has long since become big business, not only for the pharmaceutical industry, for governmental regulatory and social service agencies, and for the health-care industry, but also for those whose labor it is to produce knowledge, for scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists among others. AIDS is now a career, the business of topical papers and books produced by academics on the make, for example.

Concomitantly, the so-called phenomenon of AIDS has become very much part of the texture of the quotidian, central to our commonsense perceptions of the way the world is, and thereby to our sense of commonality. For example, many of our undergraduate students have never known, and perhaps never will know, sex without latex; we are now being urged to think of HIV seropositivity, and indeed of "AIDS itself," as a chronic condition on the order of diabetes; we are, in short, becoming persuaded that AIDS belongs to the normative rather than the extraordinary, that AIDS is chronic rather than a crisis. We have erected, in place, perhaps, of other erections, entire structures of intelligibility and comprehensibility on and around the pandemic, structures that themselves render AIDS normative and routine: the business of AIDS, constructed and carried on around an impossible object, has become—like genocide, nuclear terror, racism, misogyny, and heteronormativity (or what I would prefer to call orthosexua1ity)—business as usual. The unthinkable has been rendered thinkable, the impossible possible, the extraordinary normative. And this process, however inevitable and in fact necessary it may be, is nevertheless at the same time a forgetting of the Real of AIDS, an avoidance of the exigencies with which the force of that Real confronts us, a refusal to think the limits of what can be thought, a disavowal of historicity. What is at stake here is a "something" rather more than epistemological bad faith, a "something" that is quite central to the constitution, validation, and valorization of our knowledges; that "something" might be called the aspiration to transcend the limit at which predication (and specifically every discourse on AIDS) exhausts itself in an infinite congestion of the proper, an aspiration to transcend the Real of AIDS, to transcend historicity—a transcendence that would be achieved through rendering AIDS comprehensible, and a grounding of that comprehensibility in ontology, in taking the objectness of AIDS to reside in the presumptive positivity of what is. In other words, neither a god nor the social sciences can save us now. But perhaps salvation (transcendence) is beside the point; how, then—or rather, how now—might we begin to think the specific unthinkability, the determinate nontranscendent materiality, of AIDS?

In the first instance, I think we must work toward thinking of this impossible object that is called AIDS as a multiplicity. We must think the impossibility of the singular AIDS-object to be multiple, and that multiplicity to be central to both the objectness and objectivity of AIDS: the impossibility of the AIDS-object resides in its originary multiplicity. First, and perhaps most obviously, the phrase "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" refers precisely to a syndrome, which is to say, to a congeries of opportunistic (that is, radically contingent) infections: so-called "active" or "full-blown" AIDS is not a disease; there is no "AIDS virus." Indeed, scientific opinion remains divided on whether the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is singular; and there is mounting evidence that, even if it is a single virus, "it" may be mutating. AIDS certainly, and HIV possibly, are/is multiple. Second, and a large literature bears witness to the fact, AIDS is not, and never has been, merely a medico-scientific object; it has always already been at once also a social, political, economic, historical, philosophical, and literary object. Which means that AIDS was not, either logically or chronologically, first of all a medico-scientific object that somehow then became an object for other knowledges. This is perhaps obvious, but it bears emphasis because it implies—necessarily I think—not merely that AIDS, as object and in its objectness, is discursively constituted (a commonplace in many quarters), but also that "it" does not exist in some primordial ontological viral plenitude, only subsequently subject to the disciplines of knowing. Which means that in its multiplicity, and as its multiplicity, it can bring down more than one house of epistemological cards: a jeux Descartes, indeed. Third, and equally obviously, perhaps, AIDS (so-called) is a very different object in Kinshasa than it is in New York, in Chang Mai than in San Francisco, in Tokyo than in Port-au-Prince, for women than for men, and so forth. But this "and so forth" is the index, not merely of a cultural relativism, but also (and thereby) of the infinite proliferation of difference, the index of a limit where precisely because there is always, with respect to the object, something more to be said, nothing has been, or can definitively be said. This does not mean that we cannot, least of all that we should not, think and talk about AIDS; but it does mean that such a thinking must always also be something other than a subject thinking about an object. It is not that multiple interpretations coagulate around a singular object (in which case the truth of AIDS would simply be—unaccountably—missing, as if the AIDS-object were simply out of its ontological place), but that in its radically originary multiplicity, AIDS gives the lie to every possible ontology, perhaps to the very possibility of ontology. There is yet a further implication to this "cultural multiplicity" of the AIDS-object: the urgent questions of racism, misogyny, heteronormativity, "and so forth" can henceforth no longer be thought of as separate "social problems," distinct from AIDS. For example, we live in a situation in which very few people indeed will identify themselves as racists. If such people themselves constituted the problem of racism, the problem (given a well-armed thought police) would soon be eradicated: we live, however, in a racist world without racists (in other words, racism is not in the first instance a psychological problem). My argument is that racism, misogyny, heteronormativity, "and so forth" are expressed nowhere but in structural determinations—for example, of AIDS policies. Conversely, and for purposes of the present argument more important, AIDS, by virtue of the originary multiplicity of the AIDS-object, cannot be considered apart from questions of racism, misogyny, heteronormativity, "and so forth." This is not to say that they are somehow all the same thing; it is to say, however, that despite their quite heterogeneous genealogies, by virtue of their originary mutual imbrication in the present conjuncture, they structure and reinforce each other: in this sense, the AIDS-object is not accidental.

If AIDS in its originary multiplicity thus disrupts the ontological as such, and if the term "AIDS" nevertheless marks one of the sites at which the Real in its existential materiality imposes an irrecusable exigency upon us, then it would seem necessary to specify this disruption as clearly as possible. I shall attempt to do so under four rubrics: the global (as something other than totality), the erotic (as zero-degree aisthesis), historicity, and sociality. Which means, taken together, the political.

The Global

In order at least to begin to think AIDS in its globality, which would mean to think the global both as totality and as the simultaneous surpassing of every possible or ideal totality, as totalization and at the same time as the impossibility of totalization, therefore, we might consider the obvious.

First, there is nothing to suggest that either AIDS or the HIV seropositivity that is held to be the condition of possibility for the appearance of AIDS is a unique phenomenon. Nothing suggests that there exist no other viruses, perhaps considerably less fragile and even more readily transmitted but equally deadly, that are capable of achieving pandemic status: whether or not AIDS is the first pandemic of its kind, there is no reason to believe that it will be the last. Which means that, even were we to entertain fantasies of a heroic science discovering the magic bullet (the lost object of desire if ever there was one), the specific impossibilities with which AIDS confronts us would yet appear with a perhaps even greater virulence. One might as well suppose that nuclear terror disappeared with Fat Man and Little Boy. In other words, we are confronted with radically different material conditions of possibility for existence.

Second, AIDS is obviously global in that it ("it" in its multiple singularity and singular multiplicity) is truly pandemic; there is quite literally nowhere on the globe that is "outside" the pandemic. This is undoubtedly an effect of the radically and irreversibly changed material conditions of possibility for viral transmission brought about by the urban explosion, the incessant movement of people and peoples, the virtual simultaneity of such movement among urban centers across the great air bridges that connect them in an infinite hyphenation, and so forth. Technology has made the Human Immunodeficiency Virus the world's first true cosmopolitan. Very schematically, we might therefore say that AIDS and its allotropes are global both synchronically and diachronically, and are so precisely in the very movement that renders the mutually exclusive opposition of synchrony and diachrony unstable. From these rather obvious observations we must, I think, pursue certain irrecusable possibilities.

Globality, I have said, indicates both totality and the excess, surplus, or surpassing of every possible totality, both a necessary totalization and an equally necessary impossibility of totalization. We cannot have done with the category of totality or the movement of totalization (a concept, a movement absolutely necessary to the thought of the very possibility of the social and human sciences) precisely because the AIDS pandemic totalizes in an integrated viral relationality, at least possibly, otherwise heterogeneous (or even heteronomous) "elements." AIDS unites such "elements" in the totality of an annihilation-in-common, in a technological mass death, in utter nihility. In effect, AIDS is a holocaust; in that this holocaust bespeaks totality-as-utter-nihility, it belongs to the order of other holocausts, actualized or merely promised, such as nuclear terror, ecological disaster, and previous (or concurrent) genocides. I do not think there is any possibility for a consequent thinking with regard to the AIDS pandemic without this thought of totalization, any more than there is with regard to nuclear terror, ecological disaster, or other genocides. But in each case, such a totality must be thought of as a totality present only in its material effects. In other words, there is a totalization at work here, but because the totality as such is only present in its effects, it is by that token absent for consciousness and knowing; the "global" here, then, marks the thought of a material effectivity.

Globality, however, also denominates the excess, surplus, or surpassing of any totality that could be posited as the privileged object, albeit in a certain ideality, of and for consciousness and knowing. AIDS is global, I have said, in that it is pandemic; there is no "outside" of AIDS, "it" is a phenomenon of mass death (which is not a death-in-general: no one has ever died "in general"). Now the fact that there is no "outside" of AIDS, the globality of AIDS, does not necessarily mean that everyone will eventually succumb to AIDS-related causes. But it does necessarily imply that AIDS defies the logic of separation and containment. Here, "globality" signifies nothing but a certain material impossibility of separation and containment. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus is the first true cosmopolitan, respecting neither geographic, cultural, sexual, class, nor racial boundaries; the only boundaries the virus respects are those of the skin, bleach, latex, and nonoxynol-9. Yet the institutional, political, economic, and cultural histories of the pandemic are histories of truly abject failures to contain AIDS effectively within what are often enough taken to be virtually natural, indeed ontological, and above all practical separations. And this both in terms of its etiology and its epidemiology. At both levels (and it is precisely here that the distinction between public and private is revealed to be essentially stupid), AIDS discourse has by and large sustained a fatal nostalgia for the clean and proper body, which is also a no less fatal nostalgia for the clean and proper body politic.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Body of This Deathby WILLIAM HAVER Copyright © 1996 by Board of Trustees. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804727287
• ISBN 13: 9780804727280
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 244
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar