Queer Philology and Chronic Pain: Bersani, Melville, Blanchot

Where ontology stalls, philology moves.

—Werner Hamacher

Toward the end of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche describes philology as “the art of reading well . . . without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for understanding.”¹ This very Jamesian proposition of desire sustained through patience and subtlety leads Nietzsche to the apothegm, “Philology as ephexis in interpretation” (ac, 51). Ephexis, which has been glossed variously as “skepticism” (H. L. Mencken), “undecisiveness” (Alan Schrift), and “constraint” (Richard Weisberg), comes from épochè, meaning “suspension.”² Citing the same Greek root, Roland Barthes proposes “suspension (épochè) of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, putting on notice, the will-to-possess” as the first condition of “the desire for Neutral.”³ In Barthes’s terms, ephexis is a koan about the possibility of recognizing desire in the absence of the terrorisms of its will-to-possess. This essay philologically considers the word like as it bears on the possibility of desiring neutrality without breaching its first condition, of being persuaded by a desire not despite but because of its depletion. Liking is the overlap of a Venn diagram between wishing to feel desire less than one does and wishing to feel it more.

Like the neutral, the affective, and the mimetic, the grammatical repertoire of like is queer in its capacity for incapacity, even as so compressed a turn of phrase only distorts what in liking seems mostly boring. Its semantic ancillariness and affective insipidity are strongly felt (which is to say, at the same time, not felt) in the blistering opening sentence of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”: “There’s a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”⁴ Such a sentence is exemplary of the way the word like can get overlooked; for all the responses to Bersani’s text, I’m struck by the paucity of any that take seriously its turn to liking and not liking. Like’s peculiar invisibility as the condition out of which its sometimes surprising and disorienting density arises has led me to think about liking in terms of the inexorable everydayness of chronic pain.

My predisposition to think about like as a matter of pain and palpability has a lot to do with the fact that when I discovered Bersani’s essay as an undergraduate, I “liked” sex—as opposed to “loved” it—more than I would care to admit. Liking it felt simultaneously like an affective downgrade and a euphemism for not liking it more. My desire to like it more than I did—the extent to which I experienced liking as a metaphysical quandary—coincided not only with my first romantic relationships with men but also with my first inklings of chronic pain. Holding up queer theory to myself to see what fit and didn’t fit, I found that the fantasy of voraciousness that overshadowed this mere liking of sex was unstably predicated on the extensive, nervous labor of trying to bracket a rickety, brittle-feeling body long enough to experience the jouissance of that body being emptied out. And so despite Jean-Luc Nancy’s supposition that “it is not impossible that in the end we will discover that ‘the sexual relation’ behaves like ‘being’ [l’être] (understood as verb and act) in relation to what will therefore be ‘being’ [étant] for it (that is, the entwined couple), my first “sexual relation[s]” never felt enough “like ‘being’”; they felt like being like.⁵

One of the strange things about the fatigue of chronic pain is that nerves are indefatigable. They treat each twinge with the same sensitivity as a first stimulus (whenever or whatever that would be). In trying to understand the experience of feeling constantly (a limb, a joint, an angle, a humidity) what other bodies disregard, learning to be attuned to like—the experience of this otherwise transparent, receding word as vivid and non-dismissible—has become a way for me to think about the non-inurable body’s response to ongoing affliction. How can disability teach us about the experience of taking a word like like...