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