Sunday, March 16, 2014
Calvert (Omni Shoreham)
My paper investigate the fear of the transmission of homosexuality in contemporary France. This fear was expressed in the streets of Paris in the spring of 2013 over the course of demonstrations against "marriage for all", and especially through the denunciation of "the theory of gender" ("La théorie du genre") I argue that this epistemological panic has been an element of many corners of psychoanalytic and literary discourse in France for a long time now. They see a "death drive" or a "malady of death" in homosexuality, in other words a refusal to become eternal through procreation. This topos is also at work in certain queer theories: Lee Edelman has thus taken up this imaginary of instantaneity and sought to give it a positive dimension (No Future, 2004). I will thus propose a critical analysis of the discourse on transmission in light of Marguerite Duras's book, The Malady of Death. This book is all the more important for having inspired a series of studies that form today's New French Theory on American campuses (Jean-Luc Nancy, for example). Yet if these studies question the notion of community, they all abstain from taking its original queer dimension into account (the paragon of the unachieved community for Duras is the impossible love relation between a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman).
