Lipwork

This essay reflects on the arguments developed in Lynne Huffer’s recent book Are the Lips a Grave? It focuses specifically on the politics of dissensus, nondialectical thinking, the disciplining of knowledge, and institutional gatekeeping that have come to define philosophy, women’s studies, intersectionality, and desubjectivation. The reflections are motivated by a desire to take seriously feminist theory’s antifoundationalist foundations in reapproaching the ethical rifts that have divided queer theorists from feminists. In place of a liberatory sexuality or a new materialist privileging of life itself, the essay argues for a conception of eros as strange, an erotic undoing that reimagines ethics as a Foucaultian limit-attitude to help us negotiate the problems of our time.