Queer Theory Without Names: A Response to Queer Theory's Return to France , edited by Oliver Davis and Hector Kollias, Paragraph 35:2 (July 2012) (original) (raw)

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