Tim Dean

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In 2024, I conducted an email conversation with Tim Dean, with a particular focus on his latest chapter, ‘An unlimited intimacy of the air: Pandemic fantasy, COVID-19 and the biopolitics of respiration’ (2024). Below is our conversation.

The chapter examines imaginative writing about AIDS in light of improved medical treatments for HIV, suggesting that every example of AIDS literature functions as a time capsule documenting its historical moment. Yet, the literature of AIDS is haunted by unfinished pasts that scramble its temporalities and unfix its historical locations. This chapt...

This Afterword takes stock of the antisocial thesis by reconsidering the significance of Jean Laplanche's influence on Leo Bersani's work. Emphasizing the distinctness of Laplanche's theory of sexuality, the essay differentiates among four positions in the antisocial thesis debate: Bersani's, Lee Edelman's, José Muñoz's, and Dean's own. Contending...

Este artigo oferece uma visão retrospectiva do livro Unlimited Intimacy, avaliando o status da mediação farmacêutica no surgimento e desenvolvimento do bareback como prática sexual. Ele examina a recomendação de saúde pública dos EUA de 2014 de que pessoas soronegativas devem começar a tomar Truvada, um medicamento anti-HIV, para profilaxia pré-exp...

This essay reevaluates Walt Whitman’s poetics of presence via three new books (by Lucy Alford, Mark Doty, and Peter Riley), arguing that the poet’s commitment to an undifferentiated ontology is as much a part of his radicalism as is his inclusive democratic politics. That undifferentiated ontology (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you...

This essay considers the “descriptive turn” in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis,...

This article offers a retrospective view on Unlimited Intimacy by evaluating the status of pharmaceutical mediation in the emergence and development of bareback as a sexual practice. It examines the US public health recommendation of 2014 that HIV-negative people should begin taking Truvada, an AIDS drug, for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Situat...

AIDS transformed gay writing by confronting it with death on a scale hitherto unknown. When, in 1981, gay men started dying from what we now call AIDS, nobody knew how it was transmitted or how infectious it might be. The ensuing social panic around this new disease spawned a representational matrix that was designed primarily to insulate the uninf...

This chapter considers the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with queer theory, examining the similarities and differences between their respective accounts of sexuality. It traces the origins of queer theory to AIDS activism, women-of-color feminism, the philosophical deconstruction of sexual and gender identities, and the influence of Michel...

This essay reconsiders biopolitical theory in relation to Michel Foucault's pursuit of the problematic of pleasure during the final decade of his work. The question of pleasure straddles the temporal and methodological gulf that separates the first volume of his History of Sexuality from the second and third volumes eight years later. In seeking to...

“O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, /Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached /By time and the elements; but there is a line /You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it /Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses /Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. /The bottom of the sea is cruel. ” /A vivid warning about transgression, these lines by the...

Leo Bersani's contributions to Queer Theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it” [197]), Bersani's writing on sexuality has disrupted the conceptual coordinates of queer theory, a field that officially welcomes the disr...

Calvin Thomas says on the first page that he wanted to call his book Adventures in Abjection—a title whose éclat is sadly lacking in the string of nouns concocted by his publisher. The official title faithfully itemizes the book's subject matter and focus, while the wished-for-one suggests the spirit in which Thomas's research and writing were unde...

Barebacking—when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex—has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that mo...

This chapter argues that the death drive can also be a force of invention and creation rather than a will to destruction. The emphasis on the creative yet impersonal agency of the drive contests the ideological alignment of the future with heteronormative kinship structures or reproductive politics, and thus resonates with group formation based on...

This introductory chapter reflects on the future of the humanities with the help of an interdisciplinary group of renowned theorists and scholars including Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, and Irigaray. It addresses questions such as: What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities...

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties ab...

This essay uncovers a basic compatibility between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis by elaborating their shared commitment to antipsychologism. Observing that queer theory has its political origins in the Aids crisis and traces its intellectual genealogy to Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem, the essay contends that queer theory actuall...

Summaries of the discussions at two recent conference sessions: “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” (MLA Annual Convention, 27 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC) and “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space” (Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 29 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC).

Eliot, the smoothy whose whole career was an inside job, demands to be unmasked: his Englishness should be torn aside, his courtesy revealed as cowardice, and, above all, the coolness and distance of his verse reread as a front for emotional torment and the hiss of racial spite. Anyone who announces, as Eliot did, that poetry is an escape from pers...

Lacan died before queer theory came into existence, though he surely would have engaged this new discourse - as he engaged so many others - had he lived to know about it. His psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and of adaptation to social norms shares much in common with queer theory's political critique of social processes of normalization....

Diacritics 32.2 (2002) 21-41 This paper tackles a problem that is exemplified by, but not restricted to, Slavoj Žižek's work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so wi...

Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors,...

This paper offers an antiessentialist, psychoanalytic account of gender by arguing against Butler’s deconstructive critique of gender essentialism. We develop an alternative to Butler’s conception of gender as performative by focusing on those aspects of gender that resist meaning and representation. Using Lacan’s concept of the real, we argue that...

This reply to the commentaries by Corbett, Hansell, and Stern explores whether Lacan's concept of the real can—or should—be translated into more readily recognizable terms. It extends our previous discussion of impossibility by arguing that not all ideas and experiences can be brought within the realm of the known and familiar. We suggest that impo...

Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient's speech. That this is self‐evident is no excuse for our neglecting it. And all speech calls for a reply [Lacan, 1953].

Outlines a theory of rhetoric, sexuality, and embodiment that is both immoderately antifoundationalist and antirhetoricalist. Considers what in rhetoric or discourse exceed language, namely, desire, whether that be heterosexual or homosexual. Attempts to eliminate the stigma associated with the "gay Lacanian." (TB)

Discusses the concept of realness in transsexual (TRS) identification (IDN), focusing on realness as an effect and on the real as generative of effects. Theories of TRS IDN in the books of M. Garber (1992), E. Newton (1972), and J. Butler (1990) are criticized for their purported basis in the works of J. Lacan (1977). Gender performance theories si...

From the discussion of ‘the American unconscious’, it should be evident that the modernist dictum ‘Make it new’ constitutes not only a methodological imperative for poetic technique but also an ideological imperative upon which American culture is founded. Since ‘Make it new’ has been the imperative all along for American literature too, the questi...

Freud concludes one of his last works, Civilization and its Discontents — which was published in 1930, the year of Gary Snyder’s birth — by announcing the prospect that ‘we may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities’. Although Freud explicitly articulates earlier in the text that he will resist t...

This section elaborates in two stages what I mean by ‘the American Unconscious’: first, by concentrating on the unconscious dimension with an explanation of my psychoanalytic methodology; and secondly, by specifying more historically the constitutive features of the American unconscious — what, that is, American culture has to repress in order to c...

work: the tendency to treat aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced. Whether or not one employs the vocabulary and methods of psychoanalysis to do so, this approach to aesthetics has become so widespread in the humanities that it qualifies as a contemporary critical norm. As a norm, it may be subject to debate and...