The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Negative Logic and a Positive Point of View

Diagnosis 27 NegativeLogicandaPositivePointofView I once complained about this last point to a friend. He’s HIV negative, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I hastened to add,“Well, this may sound unreasonable of me, but I guess it’s what you could call poz logic.” “No,” he retorted in the next breath,“it’s not a logic, it’s a point of view.” Fair enough. The conversation took place in French, and I had used the phrase “une logique de séropo”—­ a poz person’s logic—­ which didn’t anchor what I called logic to an objective reality but to the subjectivity of someone drifting ,rudderless,across rough seas,a far less stable proposition than the word logic alone would imply and perhaps even a contradiction in terms. So for the next couple of days, I mulled over this, wondering what the differences are between these two ways of thinking and whether each enjoys a particular relation to a specific serological (or sero-­ logical) status. First of all, logic and point of view are not mutually exclusive. Because logic lays claim to the unspoiled, unsoiled objectivity that endows it with its legitimating power, it would be tempting to attach it to seronegativity, that is to say, to the status that represents the lack of contamination. In other words,logic is“clean.”This could still account for the fact that HIV-­negative people often behave illogically; they’re only people, after all, material and imperfect vessels for abstract ideas. The inherent problem in the link between logic and purity is that the latter is not a permanent state. What defines the uncontaminated isn’t its current status but the capacity to lose it, its susceptibility to infection. As an HIV-­ positive person, the fact of my contamination will never change. (Even in the unlikely event that someone discovered a cure that could rid my body of the virus, I don’t think that I could ever again feel uncontaminated.) An HIV-­ negative person, however, cannot make a parallel claim to permanence, and if an HIV vaccine ever comes along, there are other viruses out there. To think of oneself as clean presupposes that one identifies in relation to dirt—­ a negative relation, to be sure, but a relation nonetheless. The notion of logic in relation to HIV status thus appears problematic from the get-­ go. Logic is logic much like reason is reason—­ thanks to the expulsion of what it isn’t yet still is. A point of view, then, represents a sort of ill logic, and it does so in two possible ways (at least) that make this mode of thinking especially pertinent in the context of HIV and AIDS. The illness of logic may be caused by some external entity that came into contact with it and entered it—­ a contingency in the full etymological sense of the term.Another way for logic to become ill would be for it to suffer from internal dysfunction, that is, 28 Diagnosis a self-­ generated inability to put things, such as life, the world, and so on, in order. The first model would pertain to virology, the second to immunology. But if logic isn’t strictly objective, a point of view isn’t strictly subjective either. Instead, we may think of a point of view as situational in that it indicates a certain localization in the world. It constitutes the thinking mode of the self-­ in-­ context. But situations, not to mention the world in which they take place, are both complex and ephemeral, unstable in terms of time and space. A point of view never reflects a person’s organic relationship to a point that would guarantee the stability and clarity of a view. It always comprises a multiplicity of points, referenced or indexed, and thus a mode of viewing that doesn’t imply objectification. It neither unifies the viewing subject nor reifies the viewed object. It is in that sense that a point of view cannot be strictly subjective (meaning, internal). Not only does it involve elements located in the world outside the subject, it also disrupts the very possibility of an enclosed, autonomous subject. A point of view can therefore ground no claim to normativity. It emerges from a relational engagement with a variety of contexts—­ historical, social , scientific, moral, political, and so on—­ that are widely available for the sharing. It is contingent, but not in the way that ideology is the outcome...