S ∋S / S∋S  S∌S S≠S

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Closure, Foreclosed:

No More Opiates for Anxious Sexualities ♦

Rowan G. Tepper
14, March 2006

♦ Prefatory Notes: I take as given the intimate relationship between sexuality and anxiety. I also take it as a pervasive
phenomenon, whose ubiquity is its own consequence. By the same token, if I can avoid failure, it is only because there
necessarily exists a situation in which this relationship does not exist or has been broken. But this necessary situation re-
invokes anxiety, because the exception destabilizes the system, insofar as it forecloses in advance the possibility of closure.
By thus operating primarily in the psychic and epistemic registers, I risk circularity; but this circularity is telling.
If closure is indeed foreclosed or genuinely impossible, then if I were to succumb to my desire to construct a total theory, I would
be either a false messiah or paranoid. In attempting to bring some degree of coherence to my theory, I risk performing these
possibilities and, in either case, contradicting myself. On the obverse, if I am to speak a word of truth, then some incoherence
will be the necessary result of preserving the openness of the question. This is not to excuse in advance a failure in theorizing,
but to note its conditions of possibility.
I am not exempt from that about which I speak. Indeed, in writing this essay I have experienced the anxiety of which I speak; and
this convinces me that I am not merely writing out of the pipe-dream fantasies of a secure subjectivity. Indeed, this anxiety
was redoubled with my discovery of an essay, which might as well been written about my writing of this essay: I had already
indicated that my participation in queer theory, despite my sexual preference for women, might occasion the anxiety about
which I speak. The essay by Annette Schlichter, “Queer At Last? Straight Intellectuals and the Desire for Transgression”
(GLQ 10:4, 543-564) presents the straight-queer as a possible identity category. This occasions an anxiety on my part
because it is the only sexual identity-category, which I could affirm; and yet I must not affirm it. For my affirmation of that
identity category, which must be possible, would be yet another opiate; both for me, and more importantly for those others
whom my presence makes anxious.

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Signification Anxiety

Signification Anxiety: the fear that signification itself is corroding from within; the fear of an

impending crisis of signification; the incessant, hallucinatory tremors portending a volcanic rupture

of psychic and semiotic closure. Signs of death, sex, and madness haunt us in the throes of signification

anxiety, and for good reason.• These signs signify the imminence of an exteriority that may at any time

irrupt into our most jealously guarded interiority, heralding our exposure to a corrosive, internal void,

overthrowing the structures of meaning with which we order our experience. Anxiety overwhelms us as

we frantically attempt to shut it out of our minds, to shut it out of our hearts; no matter whether we

manage to expel it for a time, anxiety remains forever immanent. Homophobia is a contemporary sign of

signification anxiety; the anxiety aroused by homosexuality is but a symptom: in another register it

signifies a more general phobia,♦ which installed homosexuality as the sign of a hostile exteriority. The

historical fact remains, however, that this signification of homosexuality is at least as recent as the

category itself, and that there have been innumerable phobic precursors to the homosexual, and a great

many indeed would now be considered sexual figures, while others were figures of madness or death.

The homosexual came to occupy the symbolic space once held by the leper and then the madman. Can

any discourse, much less a discourse concerned with sexuality, entirely extirpate this anxiety? We must

also ask why the present domain of sexuality has been so tightly bound up with anxiety, an anxiety for

which these signifiers signify all manner of exteriority and forces of disintegration, which threatens to

transform all language into that of the mad wife of Nahum Gardner, in Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out

• On the relations between sex and anxiety, the following articles were instrumental in the formation of my theory, although
spatial constraints have prohibited treating them specifically: Mario Felt, “Extinction Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage and
Modes of Citizenship,” Theory and Event (2005, 8:3), A. Kiarina Kordela, “A Grammar of Secsual and Visceral Reason,”
parallax (2005, 11:3, 55-71), Philip M. Bromberg, PhD, “One Need Not Be a House to Be Haunted” Psychoanalytic
Dialogues (2003, 13:5, 689-709) , R. Joseph, “The Limbic System and the Soul: Evolution and the Neuroanatomy of
Religious Experience,” Zygon (2001, 36:1, 105-136)
♦ I first designated this phobia with the term “heterophobia,” in contrast to “xenophobia,” to indicate a fear of that which is
internally heterogeneous to any order or community. Upon reflection, I came to realize that using the term would be ill-
advised, for its connotative dimension would carry homophobia with it. A forteriori, the word does not appear in the OED,
nor does it appear in other dictionaries, leaving the term without denotation. There is, perhaps, a little signification anxiety in
my last minute disavowal of the term: I fear that my discourse would bear the connotative taint of homophobia, had I
retained the term.
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Of Space,” a language that contains “not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns, “ a speech

that indicates that “something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be.”1

To paraphrase the title of Paul De Man's essay, there is an immanent resistance to queer theory,

For, on the one hand, if queer theory can carry through with its project at all, it must resist the anxieties

that drive attempts to secure and close an order of signification, whether closure is to be effected through

exclusion or confinement; such a theory, however, stumbles against an internal limit and fails because

coherence would require a stability that is rendered impossible by a decisive lack of closure. If, on the

other, a queer theory achieves coherence and does not resist the desire for closure, it would necessarily

have failed to resist signification anxiety, which demands the exclusion of that which defies established

semiotic orders. In either case failure is assured, but not all failures are the same. For, as De Man writes,

“it is better to fail at teaching what should not be taught that to succeed in teaching that which is not

true.”2 It is thus that I, signifiable neither by queer nor straight, but perhaps by both, endeavor not to

succeed but rather to fail at failure, and, to the extent that my limited rhetorical ability will allow me to do

so, to overstep the borders that once I sealed, and thus teach what should not be taught; for the 'should

not' is the imperative whispered in the dark night of signification anxiety.

That I should have written so lengthy an introduction and discarded so many drafts is no

coincidence; such writing is implicit in any discourse concerning sex. For as we know from Foucault's

History of Sexuality, an anxious restlessness produces the discourse and concept of sexuality in an

attempt to soothe itself, and to thereby reassure itself that, through the knowledge that it produces and the

exclusionary practices it induces, the discourse on sex will serve to establish a stable semiotic order, fix

its limits, and decisively banish the subversive signifier beyond the wall of sleep. It is thus hardly

surprising that the signifier that sexual discourse excluded was one that it defined for the first time: he

whose love dared not speak its name became the homosexual. His crime was no longer against nature,

but rather against the stability of a system of identification. As Lee Edelman writes, homosexuality had

been:

...constituted as a category, then, to name a condition that must be represented as determinate, as legibly identifiable,
precisely insofar as it threatens to undo the determinacy of identity itself; it must be metaphorized as an essential

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 condition, a sexual orientation, in order to contain the disturbance it effects as a force of disorientation.3

Leaving aside for the moment the nature of the disturbance and disorientation that the category and

signifier of homosexuality aims, and fails, to contain, we must note the pertinence of Foucault's remark

that, under the conceptual aegis of sexuality, sex functions as a “fictitious unity... as a causal principle, an

omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique

signifier and as a universal signified.”4 Consequently, the “specification of individuals” determines the

homosexual signifier as signifying “a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet

anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology,”5 while, according to the same logic, his or her sexual

acts and predilections signify his/her homosexuality and prescribe his/her identification as homosexual.

This takes place when “the subject's relation to sexuality... is reinterpreted as essential or metaphoric,” and

when homosexuality must produce a “metaphor for the 'singular nature' that now defines or identifies a

specifically homosexual kind of person”6 from any of his or her acts. The introduction of an essential

relationship between sex and subjectivity prematurely closes the signifying chain: the metaphoric relation

ensures that sex doesn't go anywhere; the self-reference that it establishes ensures that, while sex may not

be going anywhere, the metaphoric relation quickly becomes radioactive and disperses, even as it decays.

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Empty Signifiers, Cancerous Signifiers

If the metaphorical relation induces, through a short circuit of signification, “a systematic

organization and orientation of desire... misunderstood as a metaphor,”7 and if at the same time

signification anxiety inflects all sexual discourses; the metaphorical bond that inscribes a determinate

sexual identity should be seen as a response that seeks to regularize systems of signification.

Homosexuality is thus enjoined to make itself legible: to produce its own distinctive inscriptions, to

divulge the secret code that would permit its clandestine recognition. Because the category of

homosexuality was imposed, as with sexuality itself, upon a diverse field of practices, the graphesis of

homosexuality causes the inscriptions and signifiers of homosexuality to proliferate indefinitely. The

ubiquity exhibited by the inscriptions of homographesis permits homosexuality to be signified wherever

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one looks, while the undecidability of its own signification threatens to unleash the second operation of

homographesis upon identities it painstakingly inscribed in the service of “the ideological purpose of a

conservative social order intent on codifying identities in its labor of disciplinary inscription,”♦ which

would activate “a resistance to that categorization, intent on de-scribing the identities that order has so

oppressively inscribed.”8

If the force that drives the ideological operation of homographesis, inscription, both as signifier

and as signified, did not find its sustenance in anxieties over the preservation of semiotic and psychic

closure, it stands to reason that even given the metaphorical relation, the homosexual signifier might not

have become different from other signifiers of sexual identity. This is not at all the case, for insofar as

homosexuality is required to bear the overdetermination of sex itself and become limitlessly “available to

signification,”9 precluding determination because “there will always be another signifier to determine

retroactively the meaning of all that have come before.”10 Overdetermination as signified and

indetermination as a signifier “...cede[s] to it the power to signify the instability of the signifying function

per se, the arbitrary and tenuous nature of the relationship between any signifier and signified.”11

What is at stake here is the exclusion that attempts to put a halt to the homographic operation and

to determine the absolute limits of the system of sexual signifiers. Exclusion, as we will see, produces

heterosexuality as an empty signifier, a simulacrum of heterosexual identity, coming into existence only

when homosexuality is excluded and identified with the radical negation of the system of signification. In

this operation, however, signification anxiety is twice redoubled. If, on the one hand, “heterosexuality is

always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and

failing,”12 then this failure indicates an unfillable void at the heart of heterosexuality, Moreover, if

heterosexuality is ultimately devoid of real content, it is because its signification depends upon the

exclusion of homosexuality, which can never be completed. If, on the other hand, homosexuality turns

out to signify “the potential permeability of every sexual signifier – and by extension, of every signifier as

♦ That a conservative social order not only desires, but also requires this inscription, evinces a correlation between socio-
political conserve positions and a heightened need for stability, systematicity and cognitive closure. This correlation has
been noted in psychological studies, including: Malgorzata Kossawka and Alain Van Heil,“The Relationship Between Need
for Closure and Conservative Beliefs in Western and Eastern Europe.” Political Psychology, (Volume 24, Number 3, 2003)
501-518.
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 such – by an 'alien' signification,”13 then the exclusion of homosexuality might not provide for systemic

closure at all. Rather, it may mean that sexual signifiers cannot be excluded and that they ensure the

impossibility of closure, for what they signify always returns to haunt heterosexuality in the form of a

disruptive signification, a colonization of the heterosexual signifier that ruptures closure from within.

Signification anxiety returns as the homosexual signifier is recognized as cancerous, for the signifier has

lost, or never had, a determinate signification, while at the same time it subverts the structures of identity

and difference, and with it, legibility itself. The cancerous sign signifies that the system itself harbors its

own dissolution and disorder; the self is the host of a disruptive other that “establishes the permanent

incapacity of th[e]‘self’ to achieve self-identity… [and] is the very condition of that self’s possibility,”14

and forecloses the possibility of closure; revealing the idea of a closed system to be a literal pipe-dream;

the illusion of determinate identity is opium for anxious identity.

3
The Impossible System of Sexuality
Here I will, for a time, subdue the anxiogenic rhetoric in the interest of articulating an

account of the peculiar structure of sexuality that determines it as a site of struggle and domination,

and which incites innumerable attempts to close its set of signifiers and ensure the linear signifying

relation between sexuality and the self; the same structure that ensures that such attempts succeed only on

the condition of the exercise of violence and foreclosure. That is if, as Edelman argues, sexuality would

“designate a systematic orientation of desire,”15 it then follows that the act of violence and foreclosure

operates to guarantee the systematic character of sexuality and its signification. If sexuality is to be

considered as a signifying system it must, consequently, fix its limits and attain systemic closure;

sexuality must do this in order to determine its own signs. For, as Samuel Weber writes: “No single

signifier or signified can be determined apart from the play of difference, but that play itself must be

limited in order for determination to take place.”16 Furthermore, this systematization and

institutionalization of the discourse on sexuality has “as its proper function and property, precisely 'to

maintain the parallelism' between signifier and signified, and thus to guarantee the integrity and stability

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of the sign.”17 In response to signification anxiety, systematization would thus serve to establish a

metastable order of signification that would impose a fictive “continuity between sex, gender, and

desire...” a fantasy of a world with “no breakage, no discontinuity between 'sex' as biological facticity

and essence, or between gender and sexuality.18

There is a real problem that ensures the metastability of this fantastic system: the very same

problem that also ensures repeated attempts to establish such a system. In fact, the problem is twofold: if

sexuality is to constitute a system of signification, it must establish its limits through a radical exclusion;

at the same time, if sexuality is to also determine identities, it must comprise the totality of signifiers that

signify the sexual identity of a subject. Homographesis is the logical consequence of this double-bind

through which the textual inscription of sexual identity re-incorporates the sign, which had been radically

excluded. It remains in question, however, precisely what necessitates this incorporation of

homosexuality, and why this incorporation fails – and produces heterosexuality as a simulacral form and

phantasmatic content, in the form critiqued by Butler.

It stands to reason that prior to the conceptual advent of sexuality and, along with it, sexual

identity and orientation, what is now considered under the heading of sexuality was, at the time, merely a

part of another system of signification. In such a time it was still possible to fully exclude the signification

of non-normative sexual practices precisely because there was no sexual system to close; the system

whose stability was thereby signified was called, with some dissimulation, the order of nature. Thus these

signs and practices could, by virtue of their merely contingent relation to subjects, be unproblematically

excluded from the order of signification. Thus, in Ernesto Laclau formulation, “the systematicity of the

system is a direct result of the exclusionary limit, it is only that exclusion that grounds the system

itself.”19 This, however, is insufficient to close the system of signification. For if the exclusion is to

signify the limits of the system; and if, following Saussure, signifiers can only have value relative to other

signifiers, the exclusionary operation alone cannot signify the system's limits. Again, Laclau provides the

next step:

Only if the beyond becomes the signifier of pure threat, of pure negativity, of the simply excluded, can there be
limits and system. But in order to be the signifiers of the excluded, the various excluded categories have to cancel

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 their differences through the formation of a chain of equivalences to that which the system demonizes in order to
signify itself.20

In effect, the system and its limits can only be signified by a signifier that is empty; for, as the limits of

the system are the limits of signification as such, they cannot be positively and directly signified, “except

through the subversion of the process of signification itself,”21 an operation that produces

...empty signifiers within the field of signification because any system of signification is structured around an empty
place resulting from the impossibility of producing an object which, none the less, is required by the systematicity of
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the system... a positive impossibility

What, then, is the impossibility that is signified by empty signifiers? Could it be that empty

signifiers signify nothing else but the simulacrum of the object required for the system's existence?

Rousseau's “noble savage”, “state of nature” and “social contract” are exemplars of pre-sexual empty

signifiers that produced the lost objects that the closure of the system required in order to legitimate itself.

The emptiness of the signifier ensures the arbitrariness of its signification; an arbitrariness that is

sufficiently metonymic to ensure that any representation that approximates the imaginary signified will be

adequate to effect a temporary systemic closure, a provisional completion of its system of signs. And yet,

the empty signifier cannot be decisively filled; that which is signified must continually approximate the

empty signifier – and fail – and each failure re-awakens signification anxiety, for the possibility of closure

retreats in the presence of empty signifiers. This necessary failure of the signified to be exhaustively

signified deprives signification of any guarantee that it is linear and univocal.23

This failure points to a transformation of this problem, which came about with the advent of

sexuality. This failure had to be displaced so that signification anxiety might not disruptively permeate the

general order of things; while sexuality had emerged as the site upon which the impossibility of closure is

dramatized – within the self. Sexuality, then, became so bound up with subjectivity that its significations

came to exercise a determinant role on identity, producing such signs as “homosexual,” “heterosexual,”

“female,” “male,” each of which signifying a determinate and stable sexual identity. Correlatively, an

imperative was imposed upon the sexualized subject: a demand that the subject signify his or her

sexuality. Because signification anxiety is precisely anxiety over what Butler refers to as “psychic

excess” over the subject, sexual regulations were nothing new; the constitution and signification of

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properly sexual identities was the novelty: a novelty that became host to a redoubled signification anxiety.

The anxiety is redoubled precisely because, with sexuality, the subject finds the source of anxiety

within the self: an excess of desire and possibilities, which forecloses the possibility of instituting an

exclusionary guarantee. The significance of this excess, as Judith Butler writes, is that:

Psychic excess is precisely what is being systematically denied by the notion of a volitional 'subject' who elects at will
which gender and/or sexuality to be at any given time and place. It is this excess which erupts within the intervals of
those repeated gestures and acts that construct the intervals of those repeated gestures and acts that construct the
apparent uniformity of heterosexual positionality, indeed which compels the repetition itself, and which guarantees its
perpetual failure.24

Here the systematization of sexuality comes into play, acting to reduce this excess to the subject; the

systematization of sexuality is to read each and every excessive signifier as a metaphor for the subject’s

identity. Thus sexuality repeats the exclusive gesture of systemic closure, which, on the one hand,

generates an empty signifier in its idealized self-image – the sign of heterosexuality; and which, on the

other hand, generates the sign of homosexuality and the signifiers of a plenitude of perversions, which

cannot be excluded. As these signs are constitutive of identifications, they cannot simply “cancel their

differences through the formation of a chain of equivalences to that which the system demonizes in order

to signify itself,”25 and in doing so, signify the ideal content of the existing order. Instead, they subvert

the possibility of signifying that order; by remaining internal to sexuality these queer signifiers appear as

symptoms of an incurable semiotic cancer.

The shock produced by the affiliation of non-normative sexual signification and identities with

what is signified by “cancer” rapidly dissipates as we read about the signification of “cancer” in Maurice

Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster:

Of mythical or hyperbolic ‘cancer’: why does it frighten us with its name, as if thereby the unnamable were designated?
It claims to defeat the coded system under whose auspices, living and accepting to live, we abide in the security of a
purely formal existence, obeying a model signal according to a program whose process is apparently perfectly
normative. ‘Cancer’ would seem to symbolize (and ‘realize’) the refusal to respond: here is a cell that doesn’t hear the
command; that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic. It does still more: it destroys the very idea of
a program, blurring the exchange and the message: it wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of
signs. 26

Which is to say, that the system is threatened from within by queer signifiers that signify a refusal of the

system, a refusal of the codes of heteronormativity, a refusal that is not their withdrawal from the system,

but rather a threat, immanent to the system, to the stability and meaningfulness of heteronormative codes.

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In the discursive production of queer signifiers, the ‘cancerous’ character of the sign threatens to invade

and disorder heterosexual signification, and puts into motion the process of

Cultural inscription, of homosexual possibilities, [and] by deconstructing the binary logic of sexual difference upon
which symbolic identity is based, [it] effectively disrupts the cognitive stability that the visual perception of
'sameness' and 'difference' would otherwise serve to anchor. Insisting on a second order of visually registered sexual
difference, homographesis both responds to and redoubles an anxiety about the coherence of those identities for the
solidification of which it is initially called forth.”27

While the same operation implies that “the historical positing of the category of ‘the homosexual’

textualizes male identity as such” and forces heterosexual male identity to “perform its self-evidence… to

represent its own difference from the derivative and artificial ‘masculinity’ of the gay man,”28 thus

evincing that homographesis is like

Cancer, from this perspective… a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate,
through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power. This task was accomplished in
other times by leprosy, then by the Plague. Something we cannot understand maliciously neutralizes the authority of a
master knowledge.29

In so far as homographesis calls heterosexual identity and with it, all identity, into question, it spurs the

panicked attempt to embody and enact the idealized heterosexuality, which despite having been signified

can never realize itself. Thus, homographesis not only exposes the fact that

…heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is
always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that is, that it 'knows' its own possibility
of becoming undone: hence its compulsion to repeat which is at once a foreclosure of that which threatens its
coherence30

It also the force that initiates and compels the repetition of idealized heterosexuality, as well as the force

that ensures that this repetition will be interminable – or else, heterosexuality would become

indeterminable.

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4
Signification Panic: Closure and Catastrophe

We are left with anxiety and panic. Queer signifiers did not cause this anxiety; neither did

straight signifiers. All sexualities are afflicted by this anxiety, and it is not only sexuality that

occasions it, for the anxiety is, at least, familiar to all. If this anxiety were not so pervasive we might,

perhaps, better come to grips with ourselves. It is true that we are haunted by signification anxiety,

insofar as a psychic excess, or subjective lack, insistently accosts us with our own non-self-identity; it

exposes us to “the metonymic slippage, the difference internal to the ‘same’ signifier, that metaphor

would undertake to stabilize or disavow. [Which] articulates a difference, that is, from the binary

differentiation of sameness and difference, presence and absence: those couples wedded to each other in

order to determine identity as sameness or presence to oneself.”31

Do we yet have the strength to cheerfully confront this deepest of anxieties? Have we the power

to sur-vive the abyss that opens beneath us, when our familiar and reliable systems of meaning lie

splayed out before us, raped by the intrusion of the unbearably real? Can we abide the abyss that is

heralded by the penetration of the system by a foreign element, which was always, nevertheless, already

within; the phobic object, which initiates the apoptosis of semiotic and thereby psychic closure? In truth,

we sur-vive the abyss every time that, disintoxicated, we experience the limits of meaning, or what

amounts to the same thing, when we signify the limits of meaning. Perhaps I should come clean and just

say it; there is, perhaps, no amount of rhetoric that can conceal my anxious tremors and lend my words

the force of meaning. That’s it. I’ll come out with it; but I’ll say it only on the condition of an

understanding, which realizes that I will very likely be misunderstood.

That which signification anxiety indicates is the very possibility that, not only does signification

suffer from an internal corrosion, a cancer of signs, but more emphatically, that there may actually be

nothing to signify or by which to be signified. It is an anxiety that calls into question the very possibility

of meaning itself, one that puts the possibility of language and speech radically into question. It indicates

(for it cannot signify) the fear of an aphansis, a breakdown of language, which would constitute a

capitulation to a possibility that we frantically attempt to abjure, by means of incessant speech.

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Signification Anxiety indicates a fear of an interior other whose presence is both psychic excess and

foreclosure of closure; it is anxious about the de-scription of all identities that queer signification enacts.

The multiplication of pleasures would certainly also multiply possible identity positions while, at the same

time, dismantling the self, as we know it. What is ultimately feared in Signification Anxiety, homophobia,

and perhaps in an anxiety I might elicit as a straight practitioner of queer theory, is precisely the looming

figure of the catastrophe that would emerge out of the absence of closed, stable and systematic

signification: a catastrophe that is, like Blanchot’s disaster, infinitely deferred – and yet has already come

to pass. Signification anxiety thus indicates that, as Walter A. Davis writes,

Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects. Subjectivity is founded in anguish before
the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror, fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us,
resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution…. People live in dread of this situation,
projecting fear of a breakdown into the future, because the breakdown has already occurred.32

Signification anxiety is the recoil from the breakdown or absence of meaning that threatens the

self with dissolution; this, at last, provides a provisional explanation for the privileging of sexuality as

determinant of identity. Although the space and words necessary to do justice to the problem, I must

suggest, that not only the determining relation of sexual signification to identity, but also the anxious

repetitions of heterosexuality and the inscription/de-scription of identities enacted by homographesis, all

find their way to sex because, as Joan Copjec writes:

Sex is the stumbling-block of sense. This is not to say that it is prediscursive; ...sex is produced by the internal
limit, the failure of signification. It is only there where discursive practices falter – and not at all where they succeed in
producing meaning – that sex comes to be.33

And it is precisely because, in her account, sex is constituted by the failure of reason, that it is always

surprising, shocking: the site of where “the surprise of otherness” opens us from within by “mark[ing]

the point from which the imperatives of the not-self make themselves felt.” 34 And thus the questions that

I have raised, and to which I have, perhaps, failed a little in response, must remain open on this site, so

that they might not be foreclosed. That the openness of the questions regarding sex and self can resist the

anxiety that demands the immediate transformation of open questions into a definite answers, for their

openness inhabits us; this resistance maintains a critical tension that engenders an infinitely multiple field

of possible responses – it is this multiplicity that anxious and phobic subjectivity seeks to foreclose with

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 the question.

Φ
Coda

If signification anxiety is the resistance inherent in queer theory, it poses a threat only as long

as it does not come to language and is not, itself, resisted; for as theory, “the more it is resisted, the

more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the language of self-resistance,” but on a more somber

note, De Man continues, “What remains impossible to decide is whether this flourishing is a triumph or a

fall.”35 It is precisely this impossibility of decision that must be preserved and survived: the decision itself

would mark our fall and failure.

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1 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space,” E-text: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecolouroutofspace.htm
2 Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
pg. 4
3 Lee Edelman, “Homographesis,” in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge,
1994), pg 14
4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, Translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), pg 154
5 Ibid, pg 43
6 Edelman, pg 8
7 Ibid.
8 Edelman, “Homographesis,” pg 10
9 Ibid, pg 6
10 Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” in Supposing the Subject, Edited by Joan Copjec (New York & London:
Verso, 1994), pg. 19
11 Edelman, pg 6
12 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin,
Eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, pp. 307-320. (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), pg 313
13 Edelman pg 7
14 Butler, pg 318
15 Edelman, pg 8
16 Samuel Weber, “Closure and Exclusion,” in Interpretation and Institution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), pg 6
17 Ibid, pg 7
18 Butler, pg 317
19 Ernesto Laclau, “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter for Politics?” in Emancipations (London & New York: Verso, 1996), pg
38
20 Ibid, pg 38-9
21 Ibid, pg 39
22 Ibid, pg 40
23 See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, Part One, Chapter One. The temporal linearity of the sign demands univocal
signification – one signifier signifies one signified, and if the signified also serves as a signifier, it does not signify its own
signifier.
24 Butler, pg 315
25 Laclau, pg 39
26 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1995),
pg 86
27 Edelman, pg 12
28 Ibid
29 Blanchot, pg 87
30 Butler, pg 314
31 Edelman, pg 14
32 Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pg 104
33 Copjec, pg 18-9
34 Barbara Johnson, “Nothing Fails Like Success” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987), pg 15
35 De Man, pg 19-20

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