Abstract
The way in which we study history has significant bearing on what desire we study, and how we study it. For instance, our embrace of difference as the template for relating past and present produces a compulsory heterotemporality in which chronology determines identity. Thus, the famous distinction between identitarian sexuality and sodomitical desire is produced by a historicism that grafts desire onto chronology and follows a logic that is hetero rather than homo. Even when it is ostensibly studying homosexuality, then, historicism rejects homo tendencies that violate knowing distinctions between times and desires. This schism between the object of study and the mode of that study has flourished the more scholars have tried to denaturalize sexuality and emphasize its difference over time. While admirable in its resistance to anodyne universal humanism, such an attempt has fixed sexuality in terms of hetero-time, and concludes, every time, that the history of sexuality is always the history of difference between past and present. In contrast to these temporal and sexual reifications, Unhistorical Shakespeare outlines the idea of homohistory, in which desires always exceed identitarian categories and resist being corralled into hetero-temporal camps. Arguing that the fantasy of sexual coherence is always already homophobic in its valorization of fixed difference at the expense of queer sameness, homohistory posits a methodological resistance to sexuality as historical difference.3
But this love of ours is immoderate, inordinate, and not to be comprehended in any bounds. It will not containe it selfe within the union of marriage, or apply to one object, but is a wandring, extravagant, a dominnering, a boundlesse, an irrefragable, a destructive passion.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy ofMelancholy1
If the word ‘History’ did not carry with it the theme of a final repression of différance, we could say that differences alone could be ‘historical’ through and through and from the start.
—Jacques Derrida, “Différance”2
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), 11.
David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999). I discuss Kastan’s argument more fully in my chapter on Cymbeline; the issue of narcissism is taken up again in the chapter on Venus and Adonis.
Tom Boellstorff, “When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time” (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13: 2–3, 2007; 227–48), 231.
Judith Halberstam, in “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion” (GLQ 13.2–3, 2007; 177–95), 181–82. Also see her In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005).
Dana Luciano, “Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far from Heaven” (GLQ 13:2–3, 2007; 249–72), 259
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004). However, the notion of temporalities based on difference has also been used to make the argument against a homogenizing notion of teleological time in which, for example, everything designated premodern existed only in order to lead up to the modern moment. For an instance of this
Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Commodity in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000). For him, disjunctive and nonsynchronic temporalities are desirable for the study of history since it breaks up the notion that there is only one sense of time within which we can study all cultures, across time.
See, for instance, Joan W. Scott’s essay on “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity” (Critical Inquiry 27 [Winter 2001], 284–304), where she describes echoes as “delayed returns of sound… incomplete reproductions…. An echo spans large gaps of space (sound reverberates between distant points) and time (echoes aren’t instantaneous), but it also creates gaps of meaning and intelligibility” (291).
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995).
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), especially the first two chapters: “Crisis” and “Constitution.”
Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 371, n. 68.
Wai-Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112.5 (1997): 1060–71. By ending her essay with a consideration of Eve Sedgwick’s queer reading of Billy Budd, Dimock gestures towards the coexistence of homohistory and homosexuality (1068). More recently, Dimock has outlined a theory of what she calls “deep time” (Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time [Princeton UP, 2006]) in which conceptual connections can be made across centuries regardless of their chronological time. In her introduction to the October 2007 issue of PMLA (122.5), Dimock further critiques totalizing notions of genre, arguing instead for a “kinship network, muddying temporal, spatial, and generic lines, [that] invites us to rethink our division of knowledge. There is much rethinking to do” (1386).
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).
Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) is a brilliant example of what it means to question the composition and role of the archive, rather than taking its status for granted. Indeed, Derrida’s etymological analysis of the “archive” suggests a link between the concepts of origin (arche) and authority (archons: the house of the judge).
New Historicism has famously had difficulty defining itself, or even in sticking to a single name; see Stephen Greenblatt, and Louis Montrose’s essays in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989).
See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1991), especially 1–91.
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© 2008 Madhavi Menon
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Menon, M. (2008). The Argument. In: Unhistorical Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614574_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614574_1
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