Preparations: on (queer) assemblage

from Jaspir K. Puar’s “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 2005 23(3-4): 121-138.

Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly Is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. (122)

…

The strategy of encouraging subjects of study to appear in all their queernesses, rather than primarily to queer the subjects of study, provides a subject-driven temporality in tandem with a method-driven temporality. Playing on this difference, between the subject being queered versus queerness already existing within the subject (and thus dissipating the subject as such) allows for both the temporality of being and the temporality of always becoming. (127)

Queerness as a ballistic mode of becoming: one cannot finally be queer, but only go on continuing to become queer or queered: assemblage – rhizomatics – cyber-teratologies

While intersectionality and its underpinnings – an unrelenting epistemological will to truth – presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming/s beyond being/s. (128)

Necropolitics: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.”[1]

Queerness must consistently account for nationalism and race within its purview. (131)

In pondering the queer modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the self or of the other, but both simultaneously; self-annihilation as the ultimate form of resistance and self-preservation. (128)

Orgies of death.

This body is not a beginning or an end……..

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[1]From Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture 2003 15(1): 11-40.