The Argonauts (19 page)
Authors: Maggie Nelson
People are different from each other
. —Sedgwick
But while
I can’t change, even if I tried
, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it’s a piss-poor one for others. —Mary Lambert
Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places
femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other
has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both. —Fraiman
Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop
. —Edelman
[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic … as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power—all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it
. —Julia Kristeva
The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it
. —Deleuze/Parnet
But I worry that such expressions only underscore the
“ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times,
there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means
. Means anything.”
—Sedgwick
Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people
. —Sedgwick
You know so much about people from they second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out
. —Eileen Myles
What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing
. —Deleuze/Parnet
One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing
. —Monique Wittig
The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic … [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible
. —Adam Phillips/Barbara Taylor
Most people decide at some point that it is
better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming
. —Butler
Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my
aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced
(creativeness). —Deleuze/Parnet
Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. —Preciado
At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists:
it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are
able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices
. —Sedgwick
Italicized account of Harry’s mother’s death, which begins
at a certain point i woke up
. —Harry Dodge
The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time
. —Eula Biss
Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough
. —Winnicott
But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. —Andrew Solomon (paraphrase)
Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration
. —Deleuze/Guattari
When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children,
the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing
. —Phillips/Bersani
MAGGIE NELSON
is the author of four previous books of nonfiction:
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
(2011; named a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year),
Bluets
(2009),
Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions
(2007), and
The Red Parts: A Memoir
(2007). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including
Something Bright, Then Holes
(2007) and
Jane: A Murder
(2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a 2013 Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2007 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.
Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.