The Argonauts  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The Argonauts (2015) is a book by American writer Maggie Nelson which mixes philosophical theory with memoir.

Nelson also explores and criticizes ideas from several philosophers including Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

It is a work of "autotheory", offering thinking about desire, identity, family-making, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. In the memoir, Nelson documented the changes in her body throughout pregnancy with her son, Iggy, and that of her husband Harry Dodge's body after commencing testosterone and undergoing chest reconstruction ('top surgery').

Nelson has described it as reflecting 20 years of living with and learning from feminist and queer theory.

Citations

"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"

--"Against Interpretation" (1964) by Susan Sontag

"Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly."

"Alles was überhaupt gedacht werden kann, kann klar gedacht werden. Alles was sich aussprechen lässt, lässt sich klar aussprechen."

-- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is — simply the outline of a becoming.”

“What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing.”

--Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet from Dialogues II

“So basically, becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That’s a very funny idea.”

--Catherine Opie from VICE, July 1992

“I want the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as a an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public.”

--Susan Fraiman from Cool Men and the Second Sex

“The bad reading [of Gender Trouble] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. […] This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.”

--Judith Butler from “The Body You Want: Liz Kotz interviews Judith Butler” Artforum, November 1992

Additional Butler texts:

Bodies That Matter

“If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”

--Jacques Lacan from “Presentation on Psychical Causality” Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity by Adrian Johnston

“Babies do not remember being held well — what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough.”

“Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them.”

--Winnicott D.W. Winnicott on the Child

“It’s not possible to to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered self consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.”

--Denise Riley from The Language, Discourse, Society Reader

“What if where I am is what I need?”

--Deborah Hay from Using the Sky

“Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility — to be happy?”

--Audre Lorde from The Cancer Journals

“[A] moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.”

--Sara Ahmed from The Promise of Happiness

“Although I had a strong conviction that my relationship with George was not an affair of the state, the threat of imprisonment on the road frightened us.”

-- Mary Oppen from Meaning a Life

“You can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.”

-- Leo Bersani from Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays

“The only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is — working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows.”

-- Pema Chödrön from Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

“Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive — recurrent, eddying, troublant.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from Tendencies

“Given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term [queer]’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”

“Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.”

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from Epistemology of the Closet

Additional Sedgwick texts:

• A Dialogue on Love
• “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”
• Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“To be femme is to give honor where there has been shame.”

-- Mykel Johnson quoted in butch/femme by Sally Munt

“One doesn’t really shatter when one is fucked up, despite Bersani’s accounts of it as such.”

-- Michael Snediker from Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

“Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.”

-- Peter Sloterdijk from Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology

“He is born and I am undone — feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child… for two years there’s no me here.”

-- Alice Notley from “A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl’s Forehead” Mysteries of Small Houses: Poems “In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discourse coherence.”

-- Luce Irigaray from This Sex Which is Not One

“What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted?”

-- Anne Carson from Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)

“I do not want female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.”

-- Paul B. Preciado from Testo Junkie

“Turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last.”

-- Lucille Clifton from “Turning” Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir

“We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.”

-- William James from The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1

“And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look.”

-- Dodie Bellamy from The Buddhist

“One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her — flirting to herself at the sink — lay back on the huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down…”

-- Allen Ginsberg from “Kaddish” Kaddish and Other Poems

“But is ‘mother of’ precise? / Should I say ‘singers of’ instead? … Is it good to call these others as my moms the way I have? Is it care, & if it is have I gave honor in my song?”

Dana Ward from “A Kentucky of Mothers”

“I think we have — and can have — a right to be free.”

-- Michel Foucault from “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” The Advocate, August 1984

“Queerness names the the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”

--Lee Edelman from No Future

“[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic… as well as one of the most fervent divinations of maternal power — all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it.”

--Julia Kristeva from “Women’s Time” Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy

“And then they began to speak (liberals, all of them) about their fear of blacks, and their judgement of black, and I had to announce to them that my husband and children were black, before hastily departing. This event has been repeated so many times, in multiple forms, that by now I make some kind of give-away statement after entering a white-only room, one way or the other, that will warn these people there ‘which side I am on.’ […] On these occasions, more than any others, I feel that my skin is white but my soul is not, and that I am in camouflage.”

-- Fanny Howe from The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life

“The extraordinarily difficult task imposed upon the child’s primary caretaker not only by the culture but also by Being itself is to induct it into relationality by saying over and over again, in a multitude of ways, what death will otherwise have to teach it: ‘This is where you end and others begin.’”

-- Kaja Silverman from Flesh of My Flesh

“You know so much about people from the second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out.”

-- Eileen Myles from “Interview with Eileen Myles” work/book March, 2001

“One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing.”

--Monique Witting from “A Lesbian is Not a Woman” French Feminism Reader

“The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned eve in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.”

--Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor from On Kindness

• Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis
• Jacques Derrida, The Post Card
• Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Alice Munro, “Wild Swans” The Beggar Maid
• Alice Notley, Disobedience
• Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?
• Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
• Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder; The Red Parts

Visual Art Referenced

• A.L. Steiner, Puppies and Babies
• Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
• Harry Dodge, Selected Video
• Annie Sprinkle, 100 Blow Jobs
• Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting

See also

• Argo
• Argonaut
• Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975)
• Mary Ann Caws
• Claude Cahun