The Imp of the Perverse

Nicholas de Villiers's fine study Opacity and the Closet shows signs of what "ails" Queer studies. It also just might offer some inkling of a "cure." Theoretically, however, De Villiers does not set himself a tall order; in fact, the explicit argument of the book is remarkably limpid for a book on the opaque: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Andy Warhol all use varieties of performed opacity to stymie the confessional narrative constitutive of the operations of the closet. De Villiers offers careful readings of these deployments as a riposte to remarkably bossy posthumous biographical/critical work. It is now nearly an industry: Foucault, the theorist of the confessional, exposed! Barthes's elegant salvos on the slipperiness of language: repression plain and simple. Warhol's expansive vacuity read as deeply psychological. Each subject was, this chorus of voices insists, too much a subject himself to sally a radical critique of subjectivity.

De Villiers's is a necessary rescue mission, and expertly set examples make it a meaty read. His command of contemporary French popular intellectual culture would alone recommend his discussions of Foucault and Barthes. Obviously, the "intellectual flavors" of Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol are quite different, but de Villiers makes the case that they are tacticians of high-gloss refusal. The implicit argument of the book, which I discuss in this review, is that identity politics, inimical to Queer theory, is alive and remarkably well at the heart of Queer studies. In a perhaps all-too-familiar brand of institutional irony, Queer theory, one of several important critiques of identity politics, bore Queer studies, now a stronghold for the same.

De Villiers's preface features Bartleby's famous refusal, "I would prefer not to," suggesting that tactics of opacity complicate what has become a rote "Foucauldian" call-and-response. We ought not attempt liberation; it is a ruse. Confession, as a means to this fictive freedom, is a ruse. In the face of the power smog monster, agency itself: ruse! There are enough tired rehearsals of this gory revenge drama. Only someone invested in not theorizing anymore would insist that Foucault's engine either perform a perpetual motion miracle or park itself in a station. Enter de Villiers: what happens when you acknowledge the epistemic force of the closet but refuse showily to come out of it or stay in it? What happens when you perform not confessing and not not confessing all at once? The double negative, as with many supercharged doubly-negated performances, clearly doesn't always equal a positive. At the limit, for example, being alive, being not alive, and being undead macramé a curious arabesque out of binary (digital: 1/0) yarn. One part of Bartleby's locution—when yanked from its Melvillian socket that seems missing from Giorgio Agamben's praise for the scribe who won't scrib and from Gilles Deleuze's description of "I prefer not to" as one of Bacon's imploded heads—is imperiousness. The agent is still in charge of the action. "I'm not particular," the later-story follow-up phrase, which often gets lost in the shuffle, may be a more powerful and involuted version of willful opacity.

Perhaps, for reasons to follow, we might take up "not being particular" rather than "preferring not to" as theorists. First of all, it is an opacity that is at once refusal and invitation, an opacity with tonal range. It can be gracious, even stylish: Give me coffee or tea, I don't mind. Or acid; minding would be far too much trouble. Opacity is interruption of a form—the interview, the conversation, the autobiography, the theory—but it is not always strident. The variety of examples de Villiers teases out—Foucault's explosive laughter when he is introduced to the idea of a cancer that kills only homosexuals, Barthes's more delicate proposition of his "very queer desire 'to give imprecise answers...