My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community

[4] Disaster, Failure, and Alienation

[4] Disaster, Failure, and Alienation [150] The sentences are instantly recognizable and their effect all the more disastrous in that they often come in familiar forms and settings from people you know and like. The voice of a relative at the other end of a long-distance phone call, the lover across a restaurant table, the friendly doctor you’ve been seeing for years are now telling you that “There’s been an accident” or “We need to talk about something” or “I’ve got some bad news,” and literally in no time, before a second sentence is even uttered, a deathly frigid emptiness descends upon your body and your mind, leaving you with a void where your life used to be, your own past now alien to you and the future all but inconceivable. Somehow you know that the moment articulates a before and an after, but the whole thing is so brutal that the relation between the two looks unclear. Pieces of time no longer seem connected by causality or narrative coherence, or basic chronology, for that matter. Without warning, the friend has become a monster, the room as strange and hostile as a faraway planet, and the familiar suddenly appears distant and other. Nothing has changed, of course, for the otherness you feel is purely your own. You now feel alien, not just in relation to the world around you but, more violently, to yourself. Sometimes experienced as a split and sometimes as a shattering, the sudden obsolescence of your old self feels as though something has been taken away from you, but also as though something has been added, some foreign entity that is now a defining part of you—an ache, perhaps, both a pain and a yearning; or depression, the visitor that just won’t leave; or a virus, a foreign body so intimate it makes your own body foreign. What first came to you as emptiness or lack soon turns into a burden : the subtraction was also an addition. What has been stolen from you now has the weight of unwieldy luggage you have to carry along from this moment on—even though you haven’t the faintest idea where on earth you could possibly be going now. AIDS, “Auschwitz,” and the Disaster of Community Not unlike feelings of shame and self-hatred, a personal disaster is initially experienced as the hyper-individualizing sensation of being singled out of the realm of the social even if, as in a nightmare, others do not always seem to notice and your surroundings appear eerily unaffected by any of it. Mado, Charlotte Delbo’s friend and fellow deportee, remarks on her return from the camps: “I died in Auschwitz and no one sees it” (267 [MJ 66]; translation modified). After his HIV diagnosis, Hervé Guibert wonders, “Does it show in my eyes?” as he moves about the city: My blood, unmasked, everywhere and forever . . . , naked around the clock, when I’m walking in the street, taking public transportation, the constant target of an arrow aimed at me wherever I go. (To the FriendWho Did Not Save My Life, 6) [Mon sang démasqué, partout et en tout lieu, et à jamais . . . mon sang nu à toute heure, dans les transports publics, dans la rue quand je marche, toujours guetté par une flèche qui me vise à chaque instant. (14)] Personal disasters, however, are no more personal than shame or self-hatred. Caught up in norms and judgments, all are, in fact, always collective in nature . If I didn’t specify what statements could follow “There’s been an accident ” or “I’ve got some bad news,” it’s because I didn’t need to. People need not share specific experiences to feel the same sinking sensation ( just as shame may have different causes in different people yet feels the same to all, outlining collectivities of affect rather than of experience). The reason is that these sentences, and others of the same kind, are instantly recognizable for what they are: collectively shared markers of life-altering news. Alienating as they may be, they are first of all familiar statements—repetitions. One is aware that there has been a disaster only to the extent that one correctly identifies its common markers, be they linguistic signs or actual events that instantly fall into something like a discursive mold. The awareness of the disaster, in other words, is bound to the idea of community, and alienation is at the...