![]() ![]() See, e.g., Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2002). Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapoiis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), esp. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 105–65.įredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 578. Delany, “To Read the Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, rev. ![]() Delany, “Street Talk/Straight Talk,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 41–57.įredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), 159. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 100–02. Delany, Trouble on Triton (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 302. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 233.įor another Adornian reading of Delany that turns on this question of difference and particularity, see the discussion of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, in Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 146–64. Jeffrey Allan Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Delany is moreover a key exhibit in Jameson’s studies of “the desire called Utopia,” studies to which the title of this essay tips its hat, for reasons that will become clear below. Samuel Delanys The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals offers a variation on that distinctive kind of literature-theory hybrid readers of Delany know well. And a certain fetishizing of difference is, for much contemporary Marxian scholarship, one of the key characteristics of the contemporary cultural/ideological landscape this is another way of saying that it is one of the current conditions of Marxist theory itself. 2 Delany is well known as a thinker of difference, perhaps especially in the Nevèrÿon series in which The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (hereafter TPC) appears. Here, it is instead a sudden, incomprehensible “plague” to which a now-infamous corporate and governmental non-response appears, I will propose, as a form of lethal in-difference: an identity-logic in an Adornian sense of the term, smothering fragile urban queer worlds, smothering difference as concrete particularity. The paucity of scholarship on this text is all the more striking given its routine identification, in the words of one Delany scholar, as “the first novel-length work of fiction on AIDS from a major publishcr in the United States.” 1 Appearing in 1984, it depicts that brief window of time between the appearance of the epidemic in New York and the official identification of the virus that catalyzes it: before the condition to which names now refer was conceptually stabilized by names. This novel, I will argue, is about the conditions and capacities of systemic forms of social knowledge. Samuel Delany’s The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals offers a variation on that distinctive kind of literature-theory hybrid readers of Delany know well. ![]()
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