The Part That Has No Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss

Hinged to a conversation between the author and her friend and colleague (now deceased) in Australia in 1993, this essay examines an ethical and conceptual gap that opens between an analytic that focuses on the disruptive nature of enjoyment in heteronormative orders and the distributional price of exceeding the Law in settler normativities. It pivots on the claim that the general availability of intensified potential, like the general availability of enjoyment, doesn’t negate the specific social (dis)orderings that differentiate and then treat different bodies differently. It asks what purchase might accrue conceptualizing this conversation as an instance of a “queer bond.”