Post on 27-Jan-2015
description
Power Failure: the Queer Ethics of Rhetoric
by Kendall Joy GerdesMIGC 2013: “Failure”
February 16, Milwaukee
Emmanuel Levinas
“Telephone,” anyone?
It is through the condition of being a hostage that there can be pity, compassion,
pardon, and proximity in the world – even the little that there is, even the simple
“after you sir.”
– Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution” (1968)
rhetoricity
static?
power failure
“Can we think about this refusal of self as an antiliberal act, a
revolutionary statement of pure opposition that does not rely upon the liberal gesture of
defiance but accesses another lexicon of power and speaks
another language of refusal?”
– J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure