Perry Zurn

Whether in journalism or medicine, education, law, or television, trans writers and trans studies scholars consistently develop this critique of the representational totalization of trans people, whereby they are and have been made whats, not whos; objects, not subjects; voiceless, not vocal; passive, not active; dehistoricized, not historical; and single, not multiple. In what follows, I aim to supplement this critique by attending to the role of curiosity both as a technique of (trans) objectification and as a practice of (trans) freedom, on both the individual and social level. That is, I trace how curiosity—through the monadic and collective acts of gazing, inquiring, investigating, and imagining—functions as part of the project of the representational totalization of trans people but also as part of trans people’s own praxis of resistant de-totalization.

It's too easy to say of Mai '68 that the police are incurious while protesters are curious, that administrators are incurious and students are curious. A more honest assessment of these moments, striated as they are with social tensions, would identify at least two modes of inquiry and two sets of questions vying for dominance: the one located on the side of the status quo, the other on the side of change. In what follows, I provide historico-theoretical resources to justify that assessment. I first review Michel Foucault and Jacques Ranciere's theories of the police, identifying the incipient role of curiosity in their accounts both of resistance and of power and the police. I then turn to the Prisons Information Group (GIP), where I trace the clear clash between state curiosity as implemented by police and resistant curiosity as practiced by GIP activists. Finally, in light of this clash, I explore implications for interpreting Mai '68 and Black Lives Matter as instances of curiosities at war.

Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities.

The word “intolerance” bears almost exclusively negative connotations. It is treated invariably, almost ideologically as a vice. What would it mean to reconceive of intolerance as a virtue—or, at the very least, a positive affect? In this essay, I analyze two complementary archives of positive intolerance: the records of the Prisons Information Group (the GIP) and the writings of one of its members: Michel Foucault. For the GIP, intolerance—as a militant refusal of intolerable material and political conditions—is essential to the prison activist effort. Relatedly, for Foucault, scholarship—as the creative and/or critical act of naming and changing public awareness of intolerable conditions—can be a mode of political intolerance against an oppressive state. When paired together, these two archives trouble the easy severance of theory and practice, suggesting both that prison resistance efforts involve intellectual assessments of the intolerable and that engaged scholarship often doubles as intolerant activism. Both archives, moreover, agree that such intolerant activism is always rooted in personal investments and local struggles. This analysis allows me to suggest that, if the struggle against forces of marginalization and exploitation mobilizes resistant intolerance as a political and intellectual strategy, then intolerance may very well be commendable. It might, in fact, be virtuous.

Timothy Morton insists that ecology requires intimacy between ecosystems and organisms, living and non-living beings. Paradoxically, Morton suggests that intimacy incurs a sense of strangeness between things. In a similar vein, Michel Foucault, as a predecessor of queer theory, commends human intimacy as an act of resistance against institutionalized sexuality. Such intimacy, Foucault suggests, enhances our sense of strangeness to ourselves. In this essay, I not only grant that queer theory and ecology share an emphasis on intimacy but I argue this intimacy must be defined as the transmutation of distance, a drawing close that simultaneously estranges. Through Gaston Bachelard, I link this account to a poetics of intimate space.

In this paper, I argue that a) Cartesian wonder is properly interpreted through Irigaray’s theory of phallic economy and that b) when Cartesian wonder is explicitly reinterpreted through Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference, it must be considered in the mode of écriture. To support these two contentions, this paper unfolds in five parts. I begin by giving an account of Cartesian wonder and an account of Irigaray’s theory of phallic economy and the ethics of sexual difference. After showing how Cartesian wonder is best read as part of the phallic economy, I turn to develop Cartesian wonder and Irigarayan wonder differently, in the mode of écriture [writing]. In order to do so, I first establish that Cartesian wonder, by virtue of its status as a precondition of rational discourse, is aroused through written things, and then I explore how Irigarayan wonder might best be considered between written entities, between two books as bodies. I thus read Descartes out from Irigaray, then back into and through Irigaray.

Quite shortly after the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was formed, Michel Foucault delivered a public announcement in which he called for a generalized practice of “active intolerance” against a wide range of disciplinary institutions. Due to three consistent scholarly reductions of the GIP’s legacy, the sense of “active intolerance” remains nebulous at best. Cast, by turns, as merely the offshoot of Foucauldian theory, a point of prison data collection, or a short-lived social movement (forgetting its lengthy successor: the Prisoners Action Committee), the GIP has been regularly interpreted as a relatively circumscribed intellectual enterprise. Against these three reductions, we develop an account of the GIP as an inherently collaborative abolitionist effort that was trained on subjugated knowledges. And this, in fact, is the work of active intolerance.

This essay argues that publicity is a necessary precondition for both politics and philosophy. Against the backdrop of the traditional dismissal of publicity as a leveling of difference, the author develops Foucault’s positive use of publicity in the Prisons Information Group as a technique of differentiation. The essay therefore proceeds in four parts: 1) it contextualizes the Prisons Information Group within Foucault’s life and work, 2) it identifies four specific modes of publicity utilized by the group, 3) it argues that, through these modes, Foucault embraces classically troublesome elements of publicity (like noise, superficiality, and anonymity) as expressly transformative, and 4) it develops a consequently positive account of Foucauldian leveling. The essay concludes that publicity involves the collective transmigration of thought, word, and deed requisite to both the political and philosophical life.

This chapter develops criteria of work and failure implicit within the Prisons Information Group (GIP). Reading the group’s documents in conjunction with the thought of Michel Foucault, the chapter asks: How did the GIP characterize work or attribute failure and how did Foucault understand both in this period? By analyzing these discursive practices together, the essay first identifies five criteria of failure: discursive, structural, systemic, deconstructive, and productive failure. Second, it tests the GIP against each criterion, marking where it does and does not fail. The chapter therefore offers an internal assessment of the GIP, one that is sensitive to the movement’s own discourse and development. In closing, the chapter draws several implications from this analysis of failure for contemporary prison activism and analysis.