Funeral rites, queer politics

Abstract

This text builds on Jean Genet's funeral rites and on psychoanalytic theory to construct a model for a psycho-political technique. The text then confronts the model with contemporary political struggles in the contexts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of AIDS. We find that the technique we articulate is not only identity shattering (hence queer), but also contingent, temporary and unstable. Moreover, this psycho-political technique operates below micro-politics: it depends on distributed, fissured subjectivities; it therefore cannot be adapted to a political discourse where fully fledged subject positions are supposed. In some sense, we admit, this unstable 'nano-politics' is bound to eventually fail. We then discuss what might be the telos of, and motivation to engage in, such queer, pre-subjective, psycho-political technique.