Posthumanism, Landscapes of Memory, and the Materiality of AIDS in South Africa

In When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa, Didier Fassin concludes with a warning about the thought-stifling effects of the “imperious necessity to act in the world” (276). Comparing the temporalities of academic work to a journalist producing a newspaper friendly snapshot of South African society, Fassin eloquently defends an arduous and indefinite process of bearing witness. Similarly, in the preface to Queering the Non/Human, Michael O’Rourke asks that we heed the exhortation by editors Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird to get “tangled up in re-making and re-creating a world, [to] open ourselves to the spaceing of the world” (xxi). In juxtaposing these two disparate works through the lens of their creative responses to the shared impersonal demand to better account for the complexity of an uncanny world, this review will illuminate the ethicopolitical stakes of such ontological redescription. Can new queer materialisms, confronted here by the deadly materiality of AIDS, not only help resist the blunting of critical thought but also produce new ways of engaging struggles for survival?

To grapple with such a question, Queering the Non/Human pushes queer theory to the limits of recognizability while defending its continued relevance. The editors emphasize the uneasy instability of queer as an academic methodology and political orientation and insist that queer itself must be submitted to a radical critique through the encounter with the non/human. Acknowledging the danger of a disciplinary biopolitics where once disruptive categories and terminology become a manageable mode of scholarly regeneration, this dedication to non/humaning the queer is the most ambitious and provocative part of the book.

Claire Colebrook’s opening piece, “How Queer Can You Go? Theory, Normality, and Normativity,” takes us to the heart of this tension. She argues we have never truly been queer theorists, but instead have performed queer studies, or the use of theory for a pre-given queer politics that contests normativity within certain theoretical boundaries. A truly queer theory, based on her generative reading of Deleuze’s radical transcendentalism, would be thought without an image, “to think of the emergence of qualities, potentialities, or Ideas that effect an aleatory point” (22). Why invest in notions of queerness or sexual difference if the goal of theory is to map the traces of ungraspable and groundless relations? One is left wondering how to effect the movement from queer studies to queer theory if we are truly to theorize without the aid of preconstituted commitments. In other words, what new modes of relation, unpredictable in advance, emerge from nonhumaning the queer?

Didier Fassin’s sensitive ethnographic work in When Bodies Remember provides an interesting response to this question because it is suspended somewhere between queer studies and queer theory as outlined by Cole-brook. He uses the new descriptive tools of the latter to simultaneously bring into relief the political commitments lost in the frothy wake of such a profound movement. Fassin believes that his descriptive project is a necessary step in opening up new political possibilities in South Africa, where the controversy over so-called AIDS denialism has spiraled into mutual recriminations and accusations of bloodied hands. The question subtending his project is how to balance the deadly urgency of AIDS with the need for new descriptive tools, without allowing the ethicopolitical stakes to subsume his ontological approach or vice versa.

Fassin ensconces his testimonial and narrative evidence of the ravages of AIDS within the dense field of South African political ecology. The articulation of political urgency all too often comes through the spectacular display of suffering or innocence intended to self-evidently communicate “truth.” Noreen Giffney’s essay in Queering the Non/Human, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism,” illustrates how these manufactured calls for engaging the political block the necessary task of theorizing. In her refreshing reading of No Future: Queer...