Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno (review)

Randall Halle uses the latest findings in queer theory as a pilot to read through and critique selected works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others, in an attempt to trace a specific history of social philosophy – one that both postulated and relied on a homogeneous definition, if not an essentialist understanding, of the human subject wherever forms of desire and categories of morality are concerned. The guiding and most ambitious question of the author's project is whether, and in what ways, a queer critique of social philosophy can "contribute to new forms of political life" (1). Halle's exploration is, as one would expect, historically grounded, an approach that seeks (and at times struggles) to combine synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. Crucial to the understanding of this study is the author's redefinition and usage of the term queer. In the linguistic matrix of queer, Halle sees a specific "approach to history," one that "recognizes that within the sum of all social structures of a period [i.e., within the socius] certain moments of disruption and exclusion will appear alongside moments that constitute and bring stability" (2). It is the social philosophy of the authors scrutinized that is to fill the term queer with historical context, not the other way round.

Covering the mesh of some of the most influential discourses of nineteenth- and to some extent twentieth-century philosophy, the study shows how the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Adorno – who, in Halle's well-argued queer reading, fall alongside Herder, Fichte, and Habermas under the category of "satisfied perverts" (12) – streamlined the parameters of desire by constructing a narrow view of the permissible. In its centre rests (who would ever have predicted otherwise?) the heterosexual desiring subject. Important here is that in each of the five chapters Halle pinpoints the connections between heterosexuality on the one side and universal rationality, morality, freedom, equality, and, most significantly, citizenship on the other.

Chapters one and two focus on the prejudiced and narrow-minded reasoning of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, respectively. These two intellectual giants successfully institutionalized what Halle aptly terms "the heterocoital imperative," a reliance on heterosexuality as an a priori goal. Wisely, Halle keeps to exposing the moments where queer reasoning goes counter to the heteronormative rationale. This allows him to show, for example, how Kant weaves the "web of modernity" (39) that strings together gender, sexuality, economics, politics, and morality – in short, the very categories we recognize today as the fabric that makes up the modern individual. Its ordering principle for Kant, so Halle, is the nuclear family. The family, at least in theory, acts as the guarantor of homogeneous, rational, moral living and is the central signifier of contained (hetero)sexual desire. For Halle, who relies heavily on Foucault and knows how to unmask binarisms (without directly referring to them), the Kantian moral (or rather, social) philosophy emerges therefore also as the birthplace of the modern queer; for Kant's rationale differentiates, as well as it denounces, the irrational individual: the person whose desires are counter- (that is, not re-)productive, heteronomous, and out of control, and are thus posing a threat to both self-governance and public order.

Following in the footsteps of Kant, Hegel's reliance on the "heterocoital imperative" and the nuclear family structure ensures that Hegel's model of the nation state becomes a queering apparatus. Here Halle's use of queering acquires a negative meaning, becoming synonymous with coersive. Basically, he sees Hegel's social philosophy as a totalizing rather than a universalizing philosophy, one in which the "essence of national discourse" is not just the link between territory and population, but also between genealogy and state or, more strongly worded, "between life to be cultivated and life to be excluded" (67). Marx, then, as Halle points out correctly, while recognizing the role of desire in the makeup of the individual, failed equally...