Friendship as a Way of Life

Tom Roach

Description

Borrowing its title from a 1981 interview of Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life develops the philosopher's late work on friendship into a novel critique of contemporary GLBT political strategy. Tom Roach brings to life Foucault's scant but suggestive writings on friendship (some translated here for the first time), emphasizing their ethical implications and advancing a new and politically viable concept—friendship as shared estrangement. In exploring the potential of this model for understanding not only social movements such as ACT UP and the AIDS buddy system, but the literary and artistic work of Hervé Guibert and David Wojnarowicz as well, Roach seeks to reclaim a politics of friendship for queer activism. The first book devoted exclusively to Foucault's work on the subject, it reassesses Foucaultian queer theory in light of the recent publication of the philosopher's final seminars at the Collège de France. Its provocative thesis returns Foucault's concept of biopower to its home in sexuality studies and places queer theory front and center in current biopolitical debates.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Between Friends

1. A Letter and Its Implications

2. An Ethics of Discomfort

3. Ontology Matters

4. Labors of Love: Biopower, AIDS, and the Buddy System

5. Common Sense and a Politics of Shared Estrangement

Epilogue: Whatever Friends

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• Activism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438440019
• Langue: English

Extrait

Friendship as a Way of Life
Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement
TOM ROACH

Hervé Guibert, “L'ami,” 1980. B/W photograph. Reproduced with the permission of Christine Guibert.
David Wojnarowicz, “A Painting to Replace the British Monument in Buenos Aires,” 1984. Acrylic on street poster. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roach, Tom.
Friendship as a way of life : Foucault, AIDS, and the politics of shared estrangement / Tom Roach.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4000-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3999-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Friendship. 2. Friendship—Philosophy. 3. Gay and lesbian studies. 4. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984 I. Title.
BF575.F66R587 2012
177.6'2—dc22                                                                                                                                                   2011010771
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Gary

Wonder at the sight of a cornflower, at a rock, at the touch of a rough hand—all the millions of emotions of which I'm made—they won't disappear even though I shall. Other men will experience them, and they'll still be there because of them. More and more I believe I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which show other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions flowing through all creation. The happiness my hand knows in a boy's hair will be known by another hand, is already known. And although I shall die, that happiness will live on. “I” may die, but what made that “I” possible, what made possible the joy of being, will make the joy of being live on without me.
—Jean Genet , Prisoner of Love
Acknowledgments
Like all intellectual endeavors, this is a collaborative work. First and foremost, I would like to thank my doctoral dissertation advisor, Cesare Casarino, for his support, guidance, and challenge. At every stage of this project he instilled in me the necessary confidence and determination to see it through. I am also indebted to my doctoral dissertation committee—Robin Brown, Lisa Disch, and John Mowitt—whose advice and input shaped the contours of this work. Richard Leppert, Tom Pepper, Michelle Stewart, Elizabeth Walden, Nicholas De Villiers, Cecily Marcus, and Roni Shapira Ben-Yoseph likewise played significant roles as interlocutors. Indeed, I am grateful for the generosity and camaraderie of the entire faculty and graduate student body of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota as well as my colleagues in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at Bryant University. Special thanks to Jason Weidemann at the University of Minnesota Press for his sage counsel in matters of academic publishing.
This work would not have been possible without the financial support of Bryant University's Summer Research stipend, and the University of Minnesota's Harold Leonard Memorial Film Studies Fellowship, Graduate Research Partnership Program, and Doctoral Dissertation International Research Grant. These awards afforded me time, that most precious of all commodities, to conduct archival research at l'Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine in Paris and Caen, the AIDS Activist Video Preservation Project in the New York Public Library, and the David Wojnarowicz Papers in New York University's Fales Library. My special thanks to José Ruiz-Funes and Catherine Josset at IMEC, Ann Butler and the helpful staff at the Fales Library, Christine Guibert for permission to reprint Hervé Guibert's photograph, “ L'ami ,” and to Jamie Sterns from the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and the P.P.O.W. Gallery for permission to reprint David Wojnarowicz's painting, “A Painting to Replace the British Monument in Buenos Aires.”
An alternate version of Chapters 1 and 2 was published as a single essay, “Impersonal Friends: Foucault, Guibert, and an Ethics of Discomfort,” in new formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 55 (Spring 2005): 54–72. Portions of Chapters 2 and 3 appear in “Murderous Friends: Homosocial Excess in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003)” in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 29.2, 2012. A truncated version of Chapters 4 and 5 was published as “Sense and Sexuality: Foucault, Wojnarowicz, and Biopower” in Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship 6.3, 2009. Also appearing in Chapter 4 is an extract of a book review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire . This review can be found in Cultural Critique 48 (Winter 2001): 253–54.
I am beholden to my editors at SUNY Press, Andrew Kenyon and Larin McLaughlin, for believing in this project and helping steer it to completion. Additionally, the careful reading and productive suggestions of the manuscript's anonymous reviewers doubtless improved the quality of this book. Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, and William Haver likewise provided insight and encouragement in the project's final stages. I am humbled by and immensely appreciative of their support.
Finally, to Gary Thomas, to my friends, and to my family: You inspired me, put up with me, and cheered me on throughout. Thank you.
Introduction
Between Friends

Hervé Guibert, “ L'ami ,” 1980.
The philosopher is the concept's friend; he is potentiality of the concept…. Does this mean that the friend is the friend of his own creations? Or is the actuality of the concept due to the potential of the friend, in the unity of the creator and his double?
—Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy? 5)
A concept is created in the intellectual interstices of two philosophers, two friends. It is not rightfully their concept, of course; it is, as Deleuze and Guattari note, their friend, the doubling (even quadrupling) of their friendship. The property of neither, the potentiality of both, the concept emerges as a third term between two. Its arrival enacts the principal features of its conceptual persona: the relational terms of a lived friendship and the theoretical implications of each thinker's work on friendship are actualized in this event. It is thus a singular concept generated in common; this in itself is its purpose, its raison d'être . Although the result of a profound intimacy (between thinkers and thought, between individuals), it resists assimilating its originary differences into an identity. It holds these friends at remove, in suspension, nurturing and continuously soliciting their individual and shared power. As such, this concept of friendship bears the imprint of a historical relationship yet points toward a posthumous political project with a life of its own. Michel Foucault provides the textual components, Hervé Guibert the visual, and I venture a name: friendship as shared estrangement. 1
The title of this book, respectfully borrowed from a 1981 Foucault interview of the same name, and the photograph gracing the cover, Hervé Guibert's “ L'ami ” (1980), perhaps say as much about this concept of friendship as the words contained herein. Although each thinker certainly offers a unique understanding of friendship, I am interested here in articulating a concept that emerges in between. In terms of the physical space of this book's cover, then, I suppose I am charting the territory amid the title and the photo, creating overlays and drawing form lines to make legible and navigable that fertile zone between two oeuvres. In that common space lies this book's primary concept, friendship as shared estrangement. In that common space the concept's very formulation enacts its political strategy. Friendship as shared estrangement is a communal invention (of Foucault and Guibert, between myself and the two, and, most importantly, as I argue, among caregivers, activists, and Persons with AIDS [PWAs] throughout the AIDS crisis), dead set against the privatization of its constituent excesses. It is political by its very nature and i