History’s Tears

Abstract

In a 2005 issue of PMLA, Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon revisited some of the terrain charted in Goldberg’s groundbreaking Queering the Renaissance (1994) in an effort to alter the ways in which we do the history of sexuality. The challenges they pose to historiography in that article will have, or ought to have, if they have not already, serious ramifications, both within and beyond the field of early modern or Renaissance queer studies. I also have no doubt that the methodological propositions Goldberg and Menon make will be enormously productive for those historians who seek to queer the past, and to undo the history of homosexuality. My worry, and it is a major concern, is that the kind of anti-teleological project they propose may only be useful for queering the past and challenging ‘the notion of a determinate and knowable identity, past and present’ (Goldberg and Menon, 2005, p. 1609, my emphasis). That is to say, Goldberg and Menon’s essay closes off the future, refuses an ethical opening onto the queer future, says fuck the future in much the same way that Lee Edelman does in his polemical book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). What I wish to argue is that Goldberg and Menon have fallen under the sway of Edelman’s anti-social thesis and that this move represents a dangerous turn not just for queer historiography, but for queer ethico-political thought more generally.

To be offered, or to receive the offer of the future, is to be historical. (Nancy, 1993, p. 164)²

This essay began life as a presentation entitled ‘Unhistoricism, Homohistory, Identity and Heterotemporality: On Learning to Live with Ghosts (with Derrida and Goldberg)’, for ‘Queering History: A Roundtable Discussion’, which I organized at the School of English and Drama, University College Dublin, March 2006. I would like to thank Goran Stanivukovic for his comments on that version and for his own inspiring essay ‘Beyond Sodomy: What is Still Queer About Early Modern Queer Studies’ (2009). A later version appeared with the present title, ‘History’s Tears’, at the medieval studies blog In the Middle at the invitation of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who commented on the post, especially Jeffrey, Eileen Joy, Michael Uebel and Holly Crocker. Madhavi Menon also very generously responded to what is, I must admit, an often ungenerous reading on my part of an essay, ‘Queering History’, that I deeply admire.