Let us return to our starting point, she said.
Which, for me, was Ed Cohen’s ‘Who Are "We"? Gay "Identity" as Political (E)motion (A Theoretical Rumination)’, the revocation of the call to sameness, the interrogation of the unit(y). Cohen expresses his ‘dis-ease’, and I ball my young fists and paint his banner with my words (amusingly, I eagerly valorise his dissent as another call to arms). He is railing against the incomprehensible presumption that binds us – ‘we’ are ‘one’. Cohen’s brow furrows, hairs strike each other like matches, and fire-thought burns in the pit in me. He is disquieted, and I am drawn out of myself to feel him kin at the time when we are joined in smashing kinship to pieces. We are united in our snub; this idolatry of ethnicity is not for us.
I get ahead of myself. The starting point.
The starting point for Cohen is the paradox; who is the ‘we’ implied by the collective endeavour? How, in what ways, and to what extent, can/should/must/does one organise around the principles of sameness to the consequential elision of difference? His disquiet has weight; Cohen is talking about the predication of affinity on sexuality. He wants to know what internal differences, inter and intra group, are occluded when we come together under the auspices of identity to do politics. I want to go further (his opposition is a rudiment to me) – I want to know what is foreclosed when I self-categorize at all. For me, at this, the starting point, some few years ago, the interpellation enacted when sex becomes another name for ‘me’ is something I want to know, question, decide, with my tongue. This is verbal, physical, and visceral; it is the crux. I sniff a presumption in the air, and I lope away sneering.
The starting point begins to divide; it is twofold. There is a metaphysics of sexuality, and there is my renunciation of it. The metaphysics is likeable, he seeks my trust with promises of what I might do. He says to me; ‘this is who you are’. Even within the context of this metaphysical statement is a lie. Consider – ‘this is who you are’. There is an ontology pointed to by these words, they succeed a metaphysics of presence, that there is a ‘this’ to be named. When Cohen expresses his discomfort with the idea that sexual difference might be a reason for affinity, he does so because the fundamental question of his identity is presumed to have been answered. He has been rendered static, immobile, by the desire to position him within the collective.
Consider this then, the second starting point, where the metaphysical statement becomes the deferral enacted in the form of a question. We say, instead, ‘this is who you are?’
The world comes rushing back. By supplanting the statement of identity with the question of it, we prevent against the violent disclosure imminent in the labelling of sexuality. The first starting point, the declaration, ‘you are gay’ masquerades as the end of personal exploration, and as the beginning of politics. I make my claim to the contrary; only in the perpetuality of personal exploration, might politics happen.
Let us return to our starting point, she said. For a time, I have.
