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Papers by Tim Dean
VIRAL TIMES, 2024
This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a gre... more This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, on the language used to think about them. If we treat viruses as essentially enemies of human health and flourishing, then we will be perpetually at war with the virosphere that surrounds and, indeed, pervades us. Here I consider how counternarratives of viral intimacy that emerged from the HIV pandemic might spark different ways of talking and thinking about living with viruses in the age of COVID-19. Pursuing this inquiry, I ask after the role that psychical fantasy plays in thinking about virality beyond the bioscientific rationalities that often regard the virosphere in militaristic terms, as enemy territory to be conquered. How, in short, might humans inhabit the virosphere otherwise? Such questions grow out of my ongoing work on HIV and AIDS, which has been sharpened and renewed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The key difference in transmission routes between the human immunodeficiency virus and the novel coronavirus prompts reflection on the biopolitics of respiration: what is at stake in our sharing of the air? COVID-19 revealed the extent to which we are intertwined by virtue of our constantly inhaling each other-intertwined with viral processes and with all those, human and otherwise, who breathe the same air. This chapter endeavours to think through the multiple and often conflicting implications of getting inside one another without physically touching.
University of Regina Press eBooks, 2019
Oxford Literary Review, 1998
seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the link... more seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 2010
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2001
Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious, 1991
A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, 2014
Cliniques méditerranéennes, 2006
Dans Cliniques méditerranéennes Cliniques méditerranéennes 2006/2 (n 2006/2 (n o o 74) 74), pages... more Dans Cliniques méditerranéennes Cliniques méditerranéennes 2006/2 (n 2006/2 (n o o 74) 74), pages 61 à 78 Éditions Érès Érès
Paragraph, 2012
The issue of queer theory's return to France evokes a complex problematic of translation, includi... more The issue of queer theory's return to France evokes a complex problematic of translation, including yet-to-be mourned losses that have been sustained througb tbe wear-and-tear of multiple journeys, over the years, from French to English and now back again. As tbe essays in tbe special issue of Paragraph demonstrate, so much gets lost in translation that we are justified in speaking of psychic-as well as intellectual and linguistic-tolls exacted by tbe intercultural traffic in ideas. A work of mourning, or of active forgetting, therefore remains. What struck me most in reading these rich essays is how the geopolitical, linguistic problematic of transmission across national borders is complicated by tbe temporal factor of intergenerational transmission. It is not just a question of what may be lost (or, indeed, gained) in translation but of what has been lost and gained between generations. Two generational shifts are involved, since tbe transformation of the post-'68 ferment in France into tbe queer theory moment of the early nineties is redoubled by tbe transformation, twenty years later, of that predominantly North-American queer efflorescence into our fractured present moment. Tbis dual generational shift, together with tbe double linguistic crossing, accounts for what Adrian Pdfkin, in bis contribution, calls 'the impossibility of a unifying optic'-an impossibility that I happily adopt as my alibi here. The contributors manifest disparate ways of dealing with those intercultural and intergenerational transmissions, not least because they bail from different cultural vantage points and possess different generational perspectives. From a US-based perspective, I am interested in how queer theory looks from across the Atlantic and how, despite the ease of communication in our electronic, globalized
Contemporary Literature, 2000
[H]ow do we encourage and develop an ethic that goes beyond intrahuman obligations and includes n... more [H]ow do we encourage and develop an ethic that goes beyond intrahuman obligations and includes nonhuman nature? Gary Snyder, 'A Village Council of All Beings" n 1996, Gary Snyder published a long poem cycle that he had been working on for forty years. Comprising thirty-nine interlinked poems, Mountains and Rivers without End is hugely ambitious; far more than a national epic, the book is conceived on a planetary scale. Among other things, it weaves together geology, ecological concerns, East Asian landscape painting and Noh drama, Native American mythology, and ethical reflection. Yet any such summary cannot do this book justice. It represents the culmination of Snyder's career. In my account of Mountains and Rivers without End I want to argue that since it harmonizes a vast range of disparate utterances into a collective voice, the poem's voice should be understood as impersonalthat is, as something other than Snyder's individual voice or the My work on this essay was conducted under the auspices of a yearlong research workshop on Mountains and Rivers without End at Stanford University. I am grateful to the Stanford Humanities Center, and its director, Keith Baker, for the residential fellowship supporting my research, and for sponsoring the Mountains and Rivers workshop. The participants in that workshop, inspired by its convener, Mark Gonnerman, formed an ideal community in which to study the poem and its multiple contexts.
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics... more 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, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.
PORN ARCHIVES, 2014
e volume's title, Porn Archives, conjoins terms with opposing connotations: pornography evokes an... more e volume's title, Porn Archives, conjoins terms with opposing connotations: pornography evokes an ostensibly private experience, while the archive conjures publicly accessible records; porn tends to be semisecret, uno cial, and stigmatized, while archives signify o cialdom and state approbation; porn's appeal lies partly in its lack o respectability, whereas archives are nothing i not respectable-so much so, in fact, that putting pornography into the archive is widely regarded as a good way o killing its appeal. I porn is juicy, then the archive is dry as dust. Archives o er sites o preservation and permanence, whereas porn is commonly considered to be ephemeral and amenable to destruction, no less so by its fans than by the police. Given these opposing meanings, in what sense can we speak o "porn archives"? is volume is built on the premise that pornography as a category emerges in tandem with the archive, through historically speci c procedures o sequestration. Rather than being opposed, pornography and the archive come into being together as functions o modernity. Although historians and critics (such as Lynn Hunt, Walter Kendrick, and Frances Ferguson) have recognized pornography as a central feature o modernity, insu cient attention has been paid to the role o archiving practices in pornography's historical development. We suggest that it is impossible to understand the contemporary proliferation o porn without appreciating the history o its archivization. e chapters assembled here respond to that gap in historical understanding by thinking through the complex interrelationship between various pornographies and the archives that condition them. is project has become both possible and necessary as a result o rapid advances in digital technology that, over the past decade or so, have dramatically increased not only access to porn but also awareness o the signi cance o archival techniques. Whether or not we consult porn online, we're all constantly accessing archives electronically in ways that prompt re ection on the status o the archive. In this context, it has become evident that critical dis-P R O O F Tseng Proof • 2014.06.17 08:07 9553 Dean • Porn Archives • Sheet 11 of 495 2 TIM D E A N cussion o digital porn would bene t from a much broader historical consideration o predigital archiving practices, all o which depend on di erent media technologies. Hunt, for example, argues that "it was only when print culture opened the possibility o the masses gaining access to writing and pictures that pornography began to emerge as a separate genre o representation." It is the conjoining o a new technology with widespread access to it that makes pornography possible. Focusing on the technologies o print culture, Hunt pushes the date for "the invention o pornography" as far back as the sixteenth century, toward the dawn o modernity.
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, 2017
This commentary on Avgi Saketopoulou's article develops her startling claim that sexual perversio... more This commentary on Avgi Saketopoulou's article develops her startling claim that sexual perversion may be psychically useful. It does so by elaborating the twin concepts of ébranlement (shattering) and enigmatic signifier that Saketopoulou derives from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche in order to consider an analogy between the work of perversion and the work of psychoanalysis. If sado-masochism holds a psychically transformative potential comparable to that of clinical analysis, then on what grounds should one practice be prioritized over the other?
Rereading Mario Mieli today, I am catapulted back to the time when I first encountered his manife... more Rereading Mario Mieli today, I am catapulted back to the time when I first encountered his manifesto, published then in an abridged version under the title Homosexuality and Liberation by London's Gay Men's Press in 1980. I read Mieli alongside other works of gay liberation, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism during those heady days of university in the late eighties. AIDS cast a shadow, but not dark enough to obscure the radical ideas that were expanding the consciousness -if not completely blowing the mind -of this first-generation college student from the provinces. Mieli's book wasn't part of any syllabus; there were no gay studies or queer theory courses at universities in those days -though there would be soon. We were gearing up to invent queer theory, and Mieli offered a template for how it might be done. Yet because queer theory turned out to be 'Made in America,' its European history was largely erased. Reconsidering Towards a Gay Communism now, in this unabridged English translation, provides an opportunity to rewrite the origin myth of queer theory and politics in a more international frame.
This article offers a retrospective view on Unlimited Intimacy by evaluating the status of pharma... more 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). Situating the pragmatics of PrEP in a discussion of the medicalization of gay sexuality, it argues that Truvada has biopolitical side effects that warrant critical attention. Drawing on queer theorist Beatriz Preciado, the article elaborates a concept of 'pharmacopower' to contextualize the development of chemoprophylaxis in the history of sexuality.
VIRAL TIMES, 2024
This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a gre... more This chapter explores the basic proposition that human coexistence with viruses depends, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged, on the language used to think about them. If we treat viruses as essentially enemies of human health and flourishing, then we will be perpetually at war with the virosphere that surrounds and, indeed, pervades us. Here I consider how counternarratives of viral intimacy that emerged from the HIV pandemic might spark different ways of talking and thinking about living with viruses in the age of COVID-19. Pursuing this inquiry, I ask after the role that psychical fantasy plays in thinking about virality beyond the bioscientific rationalities that often regard the virosphere in militaristic terms, as enemy territory to be conquered. How, in short, might humans inhabit the virosphere otherwise? Such questions grow out of my ongoing work on HIV and AIDS, which has been sharpened and renewed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The key difference in transmission routes between the human immunodeficiency virus and the novel coronavirus prompts reflection on the biopolitics of respiration: what is at stake in our sharing of the air? COVID-19 revealed the extent to which we are intertwined by virtue of our constantly inhaling each other-intertwined with viral processes and with all those, human and otherwise, who breathe the same air. This chapter endeavours to think through the multiple and often conflicting implications of getting inside one another without physically touching.
University of Regina Press eBooks, 2019
Oxford Literary Review, 1998
seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the link... more seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 2010
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2001
Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious, 1991
A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, 2014
Cliniques méditerranéennes, 2006
Dans Cliniques méditerranéennes Cliniques méditerranéennes 2006/2 (n 2006/2 (n o o 74) 74), pages... more Dans Cliniques méditerranéennes Cliniques méditerranéennes 2006/2 (n 2006/2 (n o o 74) 74), pages 61 à 78 Éditions Érès Érès
Paragraph, 2012
The issue of queer theory's return to France evokes a complex problematic of translation, includi... more The issue of queer theory's return to France evokes a complex problematic of translation, including yet-to-be mourned losses that have been sustained througb tbe wear-and-tear of multiple journeys, over the years, from French to English and now back again. As tbe essays in tbe special issue of Paragraph demonstrate, so much gets lost in translation that we are justified in speaking of psychic-as well as intellectual and linguistic-tolls exacted by tbe intercultural traffic in ideas. A work of mourning, or of active forgetting, therefore remains. What struck me most in reading these rich essays is how the geopolitical, linguistic problematic of transmission across national borders is complicated by tbe temporal factor of intergenerational transmission. It is not just a question of what may be lost (or, indeed, gained) in translation but of what has been lost and gained between generations. Two generational shifts are involved, since tbe transformation of the post-'68 ferment in France into tbe queer theory moment of the early nineties is redoubled by tbe transformation, twenty years later, of that predominantly North-American queer efflorescence into our fractured present moment. Tbis dual generational shift, together with tbe double linguistic crossing, accounts for what Adrian Pdfkin, in bis contribution, calls 'the impossibility of a unifying optic'-an impossibility that I happily adopt as my alibi here. The contributors manifest disparate ways of dealing with those intercultural and intergenerational transmissions, not least because they bail from different cultural vantage points and possess different generational perspectives. From a US-based perspective, I am interested in how queer theory looks from across the Atlantic and how, despite the ease of communication in our electronic, globalized
Contemporary Literature, 2000
[H]ow do we encourage and develop an ethic that goes beyond intrahuman obligations and includes n... more [H]ow do we encourage and develop an ethic that goes beyond intrahuman obligations and includes nonhuman nature? Gary Snyder, 'A Village Council of All Beings" n 1996, Gary Snyder published a long poem cycle that he had been working on for forty years. Comprising thirty-nine interlinked poems, Mountains and Rivers without End is hugely ambitious; far more than a national epic, the book is conceived on a planetary scale. Among other things, it weaves together geology, ecological concerns, East Asian landscape painting and Noh drama, Native American mythology, and ethical reflection. Yet any such summary cannot do this book justice. It represents the culmination of Snyder's career. In my account of Mountains and Rivers without End I want to argue that since it harmonizes a vast range of disparate utterances into a collective voice, the poem's voice should be understood as impersonalthat is, as something other than Snyder's individual voice or the My work on this essay was conducted under the auspices of a yearlong research workshop on Mountains and Rivers without End at Stanford University. I am grateful to the Stanford Humanities Center, and its director, Keith Baker, for the residential fellowship supporting my research, and for sponsoring the Mountains and Rivers workshop. The participants in that workshop, inspired by its convener, Mark Gonnerman, formed an ideal community in which to study the poem and its multiple contexts.
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics... more 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, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.
PORN ARCHIVES, 2014
e volume's title, Porn Archives, conjoins terms with opposing connotations: pornography evokes an... more e volume's title, Porn Archives, conjoins terms with opposing connotations: pornography evokes an ostensibly private experience, while the archive conjures publicly accessible records; porn tends to be semisecret, uno cial, and stigmatized, while archives signify o cialdom and state approbation; porn's appeal lies partly in its lack o respectability, whereas archives are nothing i not respectable-so much so, in fact, that putting pornography into the archive is widely regarded as a good way o killing its appeal. I porn is juicy, then the archive is dry as dust. Archives o er sites o preservation and permanence, whereas porn is commonly considered to be ephemeral and amenable to destruction, no less so by its fans than by the police. Given these opposing meanings, in what sense can we speak o "porn archives"? is volume is built on the premise that pornography as a category emerges in tandem with the archive, through historically speci c procedures o sequestration. Rather than being opposed, pornography and the archive come into being together as functions o modernity. Although historians and critics (such as Lynn Hunt, Walter Kendrick, and Frances Ferguson) have recognized pornography as a central feature o modernity, insu cient attention has been paid to the role o archiving practices in pornography's historical development. We suggest that it is impossible to understand the contemporary proliferation o porn without appreciating the history o its archivization. e chapters assembled here respond to that gap in historical understanding by thinking through the complex interrelationship between various pornographies and the archives that condition them. is project has become both possible and necessary as a result o rapid advances in digital technology that, over the past decade or so, have dramatically increased not only access to porn but also awareness o the signi cance o archival techniques. Whether or not we consult porn online, we're all constantly accessing archives electronically in ways that prompt re ection on the status o the archive. In this context, it has become evident that critical dis-P R O O F Tseng Proof • 2014.06.17 08:07 9553 Dean • Porn Archives • Sheet 11 of 495 2 TIM D E A N cussion o digital porn would bene t from a much broader historical consideration o predigital archiving practices, all o which depend on di erent media technologies. Hunt, for example, argues that "it was only when print culture opened the possibility o the masses gaining access to writing and pictures that pornography began to emerge as a separate genre o representation." It is the conjoining o a new technology with widespread access to it that makes pornography possible. Focusing on the technologies o print culture, Hunt pushes the date for "the invention o pornography" as far back as the sixteenth century, toward the dawn o modernity.
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, 2017
This commentary on Avgi Saketopoulou's article develops her startling claim that sexual perversio... more This commentary on Avgi Saketopoulou's article develops her startling claim that sexual perversion may be psychically useful. It does so by elaborating the twin concepts of ébranlement (shattering) and enigmatic signifier that Saketopoulou derives from the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche in order to consider an analogy between the work of perversion and the work of psychoanalysis. If sado-masochism holds a psychically transformative potential comparable to that of clinical analysis, then on what grounds should one practice be prioritized over the other?
Rereading Mario Mieli today, I am catapulted back to the time when I first encountered his manife... more Rereading Mario Mieli today, I am catapulted back to the time when I first encountered his manifesto, published then in an abridged version under the title Homosexuality and Liberation by London's Gay Men's Press in 1980. I read Mieli alongside other works of gay liberation, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism during those heady days of university in the late eighties. AIDS cast a shadow, but not dark enough to obscure the radical ideas that were expanding the consciousness -if not completely blowing the mind -of this first-generation college student from the provinces. Mieli's book wasn't part of any syllabus; there were no gay studies or queer theory courses at universities in those days -though there would be soon. We were gearing up to invent queer theory, and Mieli offered a template for how it might be done. Yet because queer theory turned out to be 'Made in America,' its European history was largely erased. Reconsidering Towards a Gay Communism now, in this unabridged English translation, provides an opportunity to rewrite the origin myth of queer theory and politics in a more international frame.
This article offers a retrospective view on Unlimited Intimacy by evaluating the status of pharma... more 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). Situating the pragmatics of PrEP in a discussion of the medicalization of gay sexuality, it argues that Truvada has biopolitical side effects that warrant critical attention. Drawing on queer theorist Beatriz Preciado, the article elaborates a concept of 'pharmacopower' to contextualize the development of chemoprophylaxis in the history of sexuality.
This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including... more 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 about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, disposable population swithin a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future
fordham.bepress.com
http://fordham.bepress.com/education/1
American Literary History, 2017
Sexualities , 2024
In 2024, I conducted an email conversation with Tim Dean, with a particular focus on his latest c... more 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.