Extract
Queer Vitalism
This essay is about vitalism and the ethical urgency of returning to the problem of life. This urgency, I will argue, far from being a recent, radical and necessarily transgressive gesture, has always underpinned (and presupposed) highly normative gestures in philosophy, literature and cultural understanding. Indeed, the very notion and possibility of the normative, or the idea that one can proceed from what is (life) to what ought to be (ways of living) has always taken the form of vitalism. For the purposes of this essay, then, I will define vitalism as the imperative of grounding, defending or deriving principles and systems from life as it really L·. From this it follows that there will be two forms of vitalism, for there are two ways of understanding this notion of 'life as it really is'. For the most part 'life as it really is' is reduced to actual life: here, vitalism begins from living bodies (usually human, usually heterosexual, usually familial) and then asks what it means to live well. We could refer to this, following Deleuze and Guattari, as an active vitalism because it assumes that 'life' refers to acting and well organised bodies. However, there is another way of understanding 'life as it really is,' and this is to align the real with the virtual. For Deleuze and Guattari this leads to a passive vitalism, where 'life' is a pre-individual plane of forces that does not act by a process of decision and self-maintenance but through chance encounters.
By understanding life as virtual we no longer begin with the image of a living body, and are therefore able to consider forces of composition that differ from those of man and the productive organism. Those queer theories that account for the self as it is formed in the social unit of the family fail to account for the emergence of the self and the genesis of the family; in so doing they remain at the level of the actual and of active human agents. Passive vitalism is queer, by contrast, in its difference and distance from already constituted images of life as necessarily fruitful, generative, organised and human. A passive vitalism is also queer in its transformation of how we understand the work of art. The notion of the 'aesthetic' has its origins in perception - referring to - and also to the subject. For Kant, the work of art is to be judged only in its capacity to enliven the subject's capacity to give order and synthesis to the world; beauty is the experience of material as perfectly harmonious with the subject's conceptualising powers, while the sublime r...See the full content of this document
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