Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol

NOTES

Preface 1. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 3. 2. Ibid., 25–26. 3. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 7. 4. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68. 5. Ibid., 70. 6. Ibid., 73. 7. Ibid., 88. 8. Ibid., 81. 9. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 247. Cf. Mordecai Marcus, “Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double,” College English 23 (1962): 365–68. On “conceptual personae ,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Note, however, that there they refer to Bartleby as an “aesthetic figure” (66). 10. Ibid., 254. 11. Ibid., 255. 12. Ibid., 261. Introduction 1. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 218. 167 Notes 2. Ibid. 3. Samuel R. Delany clarifies how the meaning of “coming out” has in fact shifted: “A temporal moment (and a sociological location) in the transformation from a homosexual discourse to a gay discourse may be signaled by the appearance in the 1969 fall issue of the Village Voice of the locution ‘coming out to’ one’s (straight) friends, coworkers, and family (a verbal act directed toward straights) and its subsequent displacement of the demotic locution ‘coming out into’ (gay) society—a metaphor for one’s first major gay sexual act. Between the two locutions lie Stonewall and the post-Stonewall activities of the gay liberation movement” (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [New York: New York University Press, 1999], 118). 4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 59. 5. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus explain how Sigmund Freud’s model of interpretation, characterized by Paul Ricoeur in terms of the “hermeneutics of suspicion ,” became “a general property of literary criticism even for those who did not adhere strictly to psychoanalysis” (“Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 [2009]: 5). 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On knowingness, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 7. “The Ambiguously Gay Duo” has been a recurring cartoon since 1996 on Saturday Night Live, created and produced by Robert Smigel and J. J. Sedelmaier, featuring superheroes Ace and Gary in a parody of the relationship between Batman and his sidekick Robin. 8. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 70. 9. See Didier Eribon, “To Tell or Not to Tell,” in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 46–55; David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995), 123–26. 10. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 70. 11. Quoted in Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking about a Virus, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 64. 12. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989), 291–92; Renaud Camus, Tricks (Paris: Persona, 1979). 168 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 13. See D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Leo Bersani, “The Gay Absence,” in Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 31–76. 14. Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 331. 15. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 179. Augustine dramatizes the way in which the confession to God is meant to be overheard when he explains how moved he was when he read the Psalms, and how he wishes the Manichees (his former religious sect) could eavesdrop on his religious fervor: “As I read the fourth Psalm during that period of contemplation, I would have liked them to be somewhere nearby without me knowing they were there, watching my face and hearing my cries, to see what the Psalm had done to me. . . . Without me knowing that they were listening, lest they should think I was saying things just for their sake...