Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

conspire to any intelligible identity. Furthermore, a deep ethical commitment to deconstructive exposure—as a mode of reading, as politics, as theory—informs their provocations. Whether one applauds, as I do, or abhors, as others might, the political implications of continually exposing identity’s contradictions and indeterminacy (a debate now three decades old), their readings amply demonstrate the stresses and fractures within the normative, as well as the distinctive capacity of literary texts to solicit our awareness of such productive contradictions.

      Readings, however, are not the same thing as history; more precisely, deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts, while they contribute much to historical understanding, do not necessarily conduce to a historical explanation. For all the undeniable utility of deconstruction, in particular, as an interpretative protocol, these critics, I submit, overestimate its analytical capacity and explanatory power. Although deconstruction exposes the contingency of—and thus implicitly historicizes—truth claims, the extent to which its largely synchronic hermeneutic can succeed as a full-scale historiographic method remains unresolved. Whereas deconstruction may be an extraordinary technique for elucidating queerness in time, it has not, at least not yet, demonstrated a satisfying capacity for analyzing temporality in all of its dimensions, including elucidating forms of queerness across time.⁶⁴

      So how is it that these scholars make their argument with such persuasive force? To understand this, we need to attend to the rhetorical maneuvers and conceptual conflations that underlie their indictments of difference, chronology, and periodization. First, an associational logic pervades their work, wherein historical difference, chronology, periodization, and empirical facts are positioned in an endlessly self-incriminating and disqualifying feedback loop. These conflations reflect a general tendency toward analogical argumentation. As should be clear from their own words, Goldberg, Menon, and Freccero’s rejection of “straight temporality” forges a tight metonymic chain among the alleged operations of sex, time, and history. They accomplish these linkages via rhetorical maneuvers whereby difference and sameness are constellated with concepts that stand in as near cognates: not only hetero and homo, but distance and proximity, multiplicity and self-identity, change and stasis, disidentification and mimesis. These close cognates allude to both abstract theoretical principles and specific material realities. Yet, drawn as they are from different epistemological registers—psychic, social, temporal, formal, historiographic—and abstracted from contexts of space or time, they are rhetorically deployed so as to cross seamlessly from one conceptual domain to another. This unmarked analogic process forges a metonymic chain, whereby a tug on one link causes movement in another. However, because these analogies are asserted presumptively rather than argued, and sustained by the play of metaphors rather than by discursive or material connections, when the conceptual space or difference between these concepts becomes inconvenient, they are silently sundered—allowing great latitude for equivocation.

      It remains unclear why analogical argumentation—familiar to readers of medieval and Renaissance texts as a dominant style of reasoning⁶⁵—might be especially suited for queer analysis. Nor is it clear why a particular mode of analogical thinking, that signified by the rhetorical trope metalepsis, is heralded by Freccero and Menon as an exemplary queer analytical tool. Metalepsis occurs when a present effect is attributed to a remote cause; it links A to D but only by eliding B and C. Since several steps intervene between the cause and effect, metalepsis comprises a “compressed chain of metaphorical reasoning.”⁶⁶ Metalepsis can be rhetorically powerful (as has been shown to be the case in Shakespearean drama),⁶⁷ but nonetheless is vulnerable to critique as fuzzy logic. Freccero, for instance, suggests that metalepsis is particularly queer and theoretical: “the reversal signified by the rhetorical term metalepsis could be seen to embody the spirit of queer analysis in its willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things. To read metaleptically, then, would be to engage in queer theorizing.”⁶⁸ More interested in its status as a repressed or failed rhetorical device, Menon uses metalepsis as an interpretive crux for reading absent sex scenes in Shakespearean drama, scenes of implied consummation, which, despite their failure to be staged, nonetheless link social cause to tragic effect. While there is much to admire in the way these critics demonstrate that “the ‘farfetched’ nature of metalepsis telescopes time so that the far appears near, and vice versa,”⁶⁹ their willingness to “embrace the accusation of metalepsis”⁷⁰ fails to translate into a cogent defense of metalepsis as a mode of queer argument.

      To the contrary: a metaleptic sleight of hand enables the ground of critique to keep shifting.⁷¹ At times, it seems that the allegation of teleology is directed against scholars who invoke any form of sexual identity, even one located in the present, and even if construed as indeterminate and internally riven. At other times, the accusation appears aimed at scholars’ attempts to track terms, concepts, and forms of intelligibility by means of the temporal frame of chronology or diachrony. At times, it appears that the complaint is scholars’ failure to treat sex solely as representation, an interpretative choice that renders them immediately vulnerable to charges of empiricism and positivism. At other times, the indictment widens to encompass the entire discipline of history and the concerns and methods of historians. Through an on-again, off-again associational reasoning dedicated to the wholesale rejection of alterity-cum-heterotemporality, these investments mingle, come together, merge, and sometimes fall apart.

      Recognizing that such rhetorical maneuvers underpin the charge of teleology,⁷² we might be justified in asking just what forms of similarity are being celebrated and what kinds of difference are discarded. A case in point is the talismanic invocation of “the homo.” Despite the catchy phrase “homohistory,” it remains unclear how expanding the possibilities of “the homo,” “with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism,” automatically enacts resistance to “a present assumed identical to itself.” Nor is it clear why “the homo” necessarily would be queerer than alterity, unless the corresponding shorthand of “hetero” is so essentialized as to be always already normativizing. Might historical alterity not sometimes offer its own pleasures (as well as accurately describe certain pre- and early modern modes of intelligibility)? How is it that “the homo” signifies similarity and identification across time while simultaneously signifying resistance to any such identification with sexual categories in the present? Just what is conveyed, in psychic, social, temporal, formal, and historical terms, by the über-concepts “homo” and “hetero”? How much analytical weight and presumed congruence can these master terms and their pseudocognates bear? To what extent are they in sync, when, and why? In these scholars’ hands, “homo” and “hetero” serve as mobile conceptual lynchpins, used theoretically to suture together diverse phenomena; but they fail to attach to, much less elucidate, specific social conditions or material embodiments.

      Sexuality, the diverse enactments of erotic desire and physical embodiment; temporality, the various manifestations of time; and history, historicism and historiography, the aggregate repertoire of cognitive and affective approaches to the past, are not intrinsically connected. Neither straight identity nor heterosexual desire is the same as linear time. Not every diachronic or chronological treatment of temporality need be normativizing, nor is every linear arc sexually “straight.” A scholar’s adherence to chronological time does not, in and of itself, have any necessary relationship to sexuality, much less to sexual normativity. Neither does a scholar’s segmentation of time into periods. The act of periodizing is of routinized professional significance, functioning for many historians and literary critics as rote convenience, not to mention a structure underlying the academic job market. It is worthwhile to question the value of any conceptualization that has been reified in this way, as well as to insist that scholars recognize their complacency and complicity with its arbitrary application. Periodization produces some unfortunate effects, including misrecognitions of the exemplarity and/or novelty of one’s chosen purview, as well as falsely universalizing claims based on ignorance of what scholars concerned with other times actually do. But conventional periods are only one way to slice and dice the past; time, conceived as “the phenomenal ordering of events,”⁷³ is both ontological and epistemological; as such, it can be segmented in multiple ways, with the concept of “the period” changing according to the question