essays &
theory
I mostly write about and research the things that interest me, which as of late includes language, translation, place, the day and the night, and whether that is because I am still developing as a thinker or because I have it all worked out is, between you and me, not my largest concern. please enjoy:
ARCA: a critical
assay on light & reflecting
My foray into critical writing, where I assay how the vocabulary of textual criticism applies to the adoptee. Using psychoanalytic, literary, poetic, and classical sources, it reads an adopted life as a damaged manuscript, and asks what it would mean to leave the next one open.
Whatever we may be, for better or for worse, we are thus initially and “naturally” “idiots of the family.”
— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
I used to speak to God / then my mother died / now I speak to my mother
—Anonymous Instagram post
Whatever the literature of adoption has become in the three decades since Nancy Verrier proposed that every relinquished infant carries a “primal wound” out of the first separation (VERRIER 1993), those of us who were adopted, and who later went on, as I did, to spend a handful of our formative years among the declensions of a dead language, have been trained twice over as editors: once by the circumstances of our birth, which hand us the record of our origin already corrupted, its first lines illegible and its signatories unnamed, and once again by the discipline itself, which teaches us to regard every gap as an invitation to conjecture even as it warns that our conjectures will be shaped, inevitably and perhaps fatally, by the needs of the present from which we make them….
ULTRA: reading for
desire in an emended body
Dipping my toes into gender and sexuality studies, with literature and frames provided by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A work in progress and a companion to ARCA, it starts from a bag left at home and asks what it means to be loved, edited, and seen.
That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
They may decide their fate and identity
— Grimes (@Grimezsz), Twitter, February 21, 2020
Most of us who are read as men in public, have been trained, early and without much discussion, as editors of our own surfaces.¹ We learn which readings of the body a stranger will accept and which he will take as corrupt, and we correct the text before it circulates. We straighten the hip and still the wrist, we drop the voice half a step before ordering at a counter, and we leave the bag at home. Iris Marion Young observed that feminine bodily comportment is often lived as a kind of hesitation, a body that occupies space as though space might object (YOUNG 1980). The self-editing man performs a version of the same hesitation in reverse. What he hedges is not weakness but the evidence that he would like, sometimes, to be looked at softly, which is to say the evidence of what the internet has lately taught us to call the “babygirl.” ² Most of these corrections are made silently, by the editor alone, and leave no trace in the text. Occasionally, however, an emendation is proposed by someone else, and when it is, the crux becomes legible…