Ecological criticism and queer theory seem incompatible, but if they met, there would be a fantastic explosion. How shall we accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme splice? I'll propose some hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesn't quite exist—queer ecology. (The pathbreaking work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.) This exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles, but please bear with me on this test flight. Start with the basics. Let's not create this field by comparing literary-critical apples and oranges. Let's do it the hard way, up from foundations (or unfoundations). Let's do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands, in another key. Let's do it because our era requires it—we are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it look less natural), while we actively and passively destroy life-forms inhabiting and constituting the biosphere, in Earth's sixth mass extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a reality.

It is sometimes said that unlike other epics Beowulf does not start in medias res, but it does; Beowulf has a backstory, which we are deep into when the poem begins. The backstory is not told in the poem, however, so modern readers may miss it entirely. It is found in the poem's analogues and was the focus of most Beowulf scholarship until 1936, when J. R. R. Tolkien turned our attention to the monster fights in the foreground. Following Tolkien, today's readers focus on what the poem does say, taking little or no interest in the analogues. There is quite a difference, however, between reading Beowulf as complete in itself and reading it intertextually, as part of a cycle of tales. An intertextual reading yields many surprises, among them a hidden incest theme. Beowulf is haunted by this and other dark matters, repressed in its textual unconscious.

In “Tomida femina” (“A swollen woman”), a tenth-century charm written in Occitan, the vernacular of the south of France, a birthing woman and her helpers intone magical language during the most intense moments of childbirth. The poem permits us, with brief but uncommon intimacy, to imagine the lives of women long ago. It takes its place in a European tradition of birthing charms, including others written in Latin, German, and English. These charms, and in particular “Tomida femina,” provide an image of vigorous medieval women in childbirth that precedes the images of women in other secular Romance lyrics—young girls in love in the Mozarabic kharjas, idealized ladies in troubadour songs, and passionate aristocratic women in the poetry of the Occitan trobairitz.

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

In Paradise Lost Milton introduces Adam and Eve by lingering on their appearance, but instead of presenting a detailed catalog of the couple's physical attributes, he focuses on their hair. This essay challenges earlier readings of Adam and Eve's locks by examining Milton's imagery in the context of hair's cultural and spiritual value. Comparing depictions of hair in sixteenth-century sonnets and cavalier seduction poetry reveals how Milton appropriates the early modern aesthetic of sprezzatura to convey Adam and Eve's unique innocence. The essay shows that Milton's description is not merely superficial, nor even merely symbolic. Rather, when read in relation to early modern theories of hair's etiology and to Milton's own animist materialism, hair in Paradise Lost literally embodies Adam and Eve's prelapsarian love. Their clustering and curling locks enact the couple's amorous reciprocity and signify the paradoxical strength and fragility of their Edenic marriage.

In Paradise Lost, Milton imagines a cosmos at odds with orthodox theology, making a heretical departure that parallels his reluctance to dwell on the Crucifixion and his Arian Christology. Belief in a plurality of worlds threatens the integrity of the Trinity: it exalts the omnipotence of the creator, while it limits the significance of the redeemer. In effect, it produces a tension best resolved by Milton's position that the Father and the Son are two distinct beings—the former uncreated, infinite, and immutable and the latter created, finite, and changeable. This distinction enables Milton to fashion a theory of salvation that transforms Christ's sacrifice from a singular, traumatic event to an ethical decision that other created beings can emulate. These heterodox views constitute the theological underpinnings of his radical republicanism, which embraces an idea of human dignity and agency antithetical to the tyrannical politics of torture and blood sacrifice.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was not a historian of sexuality, but she was keenly aware of the historicity of sexuality and erotic desire in ways unlike other major figures in queer theory. This fact has gone largely unnoticed in queer studies, a field dominated by literary and cultural critics that has an uneasy relation with academic history. An example of the historicity of Sedgwick's theories of sexuality can be seen in her famous critique of Foucault's Great Paradigm Shift—that imaginary moment in the late nineteenth century when the category of the modern homosexual was thought to displace the category of the sodomite (Epistemology 44). The formulation of axiom 5 in Epistemology of the Closet—“the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity” (44)—reveals a deep consciousness of the “irreducible historicity of all things … discerning the time-and-place specificity of a thing, identifying the ways in which it relates to its context or milieu, and determining the extent to which it is both enabled and hamstrung by this relationship,” to cite the historian Hayden White's description of history as critique (224). If Foucauldian genealogy (or a “history of the present”) “begins with an analysis of blind spots in our current understanding, or with a problematization of what passes for ‘given’ in contemporary thought” (Halperin 13), it is vital, as Sedgwick puts it, to “denaturalize the present, rather than the past” (Epistemology 48). Sedgwick's vantage point on a queer past pivots around “homosexuality as we conceive of it today” (45), a phrase as resonant now in sexuality studies as was Foucault's reference to the homosexual as a species (Foucault 43). So entrenched are the modern categories of identity that Sedgwick repeats the phrase over and over in her cogent analysis of our current conceptions of sexuality. Such insistent differentiation between an alien past and an equally—if not more—alien present, the distinction between “them” and “us,” reverberates across the history of homosexuality. Consider, for instance, Matt Houlbrook's discussion of men who refrain from using “‘gay’ in the way we would use the term today” (xiii) or Jonathan Ned Katz's understanding of the presentness of our present standpoint—“what we today recognize as erotic feelings and acts” (6).

Just a few days after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's death last April 12, I received an e-mail from Lee Edelman. “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that Eve was the only person who really thought this day would come.” Lee's “really” resonates with a talk Eve gave a decade ago. I don't recall that she shared it with me at the time she wrote it, or I may have forgotten, not wanting to take in what she was saying. The piece was made available to me as Eve's literary executor, a task I agreed to several years ago in something of the same state of mind: not wanting to accept what I knew I was agreeing to, not wanting to believe what Eve realized would come. I'm aiming now to put together a volume of Eve's writing that represents her work since Touching Feeling appeared in 2003. Thanks to David Kosofsky, I have on one of those mass storage devices the contents of Eve's computers; there I found “Reality and Realization,” the 1999 talk to which I refer. It was “learning that a cancer I had thought was in remission had in fact become incurable,” Eve wrote, that made “inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle-passes the considerable distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.” Just this shuttle, I would suggest, colors much of the work Eve was doing toward the book on Proust she was writing in the last several years.

All my feeling for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick comes from her writing. I wasn't a friend. I never met her or even heard her give a public lecture or present a paper. The closest we came was being bound together, one after the other, in the same edited anthology, my essay on sequence and precedence in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and its various adaptations following an extract from her A Dialogue on Love. If Sedgwick's essay and mine can be said to speak to each other, to strike a conversational pose, as though the breadth of a page might be mistaken for the more sociable span of a bar or table, it is only to point up the spuriousness of this effect. For whatever weight of significance the closing section of Sedgwick's essay might seem to license my finding in this happenstance—“I don't resist … secretly fingering this enigmatic pebble. I can't quite figure out what makes its meaning for me” (“Dialogue” 351)—is made implausible with the page's turn by the brutalist facade of my first sentence: “Sequence is its own alibi” (352).

I'm Writing this Essay on a Green Hermes 3000 Manual Typewriter from the 1950s. A Painting Student Gave it to Me; He found it on the street.

I imagine telling Eve about this typewriter. She would have understood how a material instrument—ink-flecked platen, jade-pale space bar—can change syntax: to looms and to Victorian textures her sentences responded, and I recognize, in her prose's rhythms, the period-specific thrill of stretched syntax, and the renunciatory satisfaction of curtailing a clause before it can exercise its right to conclude.

Although, in a self-deprecatory moment, she claimed to disregard music, I often fantasized about inviting her to my apartment for an evening musicale. On my Steinway M piano, I'd play a harmonically indecisive piece from Proust's era—a Fauré impromptu. She'd forgive my technical deficiencies; she'd comment on the performance's abreactive ambition (she taught me the word abreactive), my attempt to neutralize shame by exulting in it, my finger labor a haptic game affiliated with her favored arts—masturbating, interpreting, containing, hugging, sitting, retreating.

Eve's Tenure at Amherst—She Taught in the English Department from 1984 TO 1988—Coincided with the Tenth Anniversary of coeducation at the college and the early years of the AIDS pandemic. She found on her arrival a culture that had neither fully welcomed its female students and faculty members nor begun to acknowledge its homophobia. Eve gave early on a witty and provocative lecture to the campus community called “Sabrina Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” which enlisted as a feminist icon a nude female statue that had been glorified and abused throughout its long association with Amherst. Known today mostly by Eve's former colleagues and students (and the occasional still-disgruntled alumnus), the talk catalyzed campus activism and lead ultimately to the founding of the Women's and Gender Studies Department, perhaps the first in the country to adopt that compound name. Those familiar with Eve's later work may be surprised by her lecture's full-throated feminism—Between Men had yet to appear, and queer theory was hardly a gleam in anyone's eye. Even after a quarter century, however, its inventiveness and turnings of phrase could be mistaken for no one else's. Readers of PMLA may appreciate particularly the opening section of the talk, reproduced below, for the window it provides onto an academic culture then on the brink of transformation. It also powerfully conveys, beyond any reminiscence I could provide, what Eve sounded like the moment I first heard her speak in public.

Leo Bersani's contributions to Queer Theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it” [197]), Bersani's writing on sexuality has disrupted the conceptual coordinates of queer theory, a field that officially welcomes the disruptive. What has made Bersani hard to assimilate is less his psychoanalytic emphasis on the ineluctable masochism of sexuality (a principal reason for the aversion to sex) than his insistent conceptualization of sexuality in aesthetic terms. Although his work has never shied from the rebarbative aspects of erotic life, it is, in fact, Bersani's speculations about relationality as irreducibly aesthetic that have proved tougher for the field of queer theory to countenance. (Queer theorists take sexual variance in stride; we have a harder time dealing with art.) It is not merely that Bersani draws examples from literature, painting, sculpture, and cinema when discussing erotic relationality. More fundamentally, his earlier work claimed that art has effects on the human subject akin to those of sexuality, while his later writing proposes a specifically aesthetic subjectivity—rather than the sexual kind—as the preferred basis for relating to the world beyond the self.

In 1986 Leo Bersani published a book entitled The Freudian Body. I love that title. From the first time I heard it, over two decades ago, up through this very moment, I have continued to love that title. To be honest, I wish it were mine—which is why I borrowed it for my essay here. I'm not exactly sure what I take this title to mean—probably something like a definitive delineation of a Freudian theory of the body. I'm not exactly sure what I take it to promise—probably something like a reconceptualization of the body beyond positivism, beyond Christian views of nature, beyond biologistic ideology. It sounds like something I really want. One thing is for sure: the title made me want to read the book.

And so the first time I read this book, I was disappointed, frustrated, and even a little angry. I did not find “the Freudian body” promised by the title. “Bait and switch,” I thought bitterly. “You fucking tease!”

The Tension Between My Epigraphs' Formulations Might be Taken as The Animating Energy of Queer Theory. If the first provides queers with a vision of our sexuality as flatteringly significant, the second insists with punishing concision that this significance resists translation into social equality. More precisely, the two statements could be seen as mutually constitutive: it is the social abjection of the sexually deviant that makes our sexuality interesting, as it is the excessive symbolic interest of our difference that has made us socially volatile. Or at least this has been one guiding assumption of queer theory, which has leveraged some of its most imaginative work by arrogating to queerness a symbolic centrality out of all proportion to queers' acknowledged numbers or to our social power. It is no accident that Leo Bersani articulates the unpleasant reality principle in this little epigraphic debate. His writing is justly famous for its suspicion of the rhetoric of identitarian dignity and for its refusal of conceptual consolations of all kinds; Bersani's habit of accentuating the negative made his work the inevitable reference point for PMLA's May 2006 Forum on the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory (Caserio et al.). And yet for all Bersani's insistence on exposing the fantasies of transcendence undergirding our culture and our criticism, his writing is perhaps even more remarkable for the way it has managed to combine that scouring sensibility with a sense of ethical and political promise. Refusing the culture of redemption won't, of course, quite save you. But Bersani's work has always suggested that it could be beneficent (a favorite word of his).

Even Though the Range of Aesthetic Objects that Have Captured Leo Bersani's Attention Over the Years is Wide, The Novel remains one of the more privileged objects among them and could arguably be taken as the point of departure for many of his reflections. His attention has been on the modern French novel in particular, from Honoré de Balzac to Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett—Proust and Beckett being two of the writers to whom Bersani has returned with the most frequency and inventiveness over the years. In the 1960s Bersani began elaborating a critical agenda for the reading of novels in books such as Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965) and Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970). His critical references in these books are also mainly French or francophone. He positions himself in various kinds of opposition to literary critics of the time like Jean Starobinski, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as the early Roland Barthes. This is also the moment when a certain number of other now familiar French thinkers were beginning to be read in the United States, and so Balzac to Beckett opens with a favorable reference to Michel Foucault, the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Jacques Derrida, the author of Of Grammatology. Bersani notes that these two books represent “in recent years … the most brilliant analyses of the history and consequence of those habits of thought” that believe that “significance precedes experience, which is both expressive and deceptive and which therefore needs to be decoded or interpreted” (4). For Bersani it is a failure of critical imagination to assume that present experience comes to be meaningful solely or primarily in relation to prior structures of meaning, which are simply rehearsed or repeated, instantiated or exemplified, by way of new experience. One could do worse than imagine that at the core of all Bersani's work is an effort to challenge the priority or precedence given by many writers and critics to significance over experience, and it is in this light that an association with some of the critical impulses (impulses that strive after yet-to-be-determined futures) of Derrida and Foucault makes a certain sense. Starobinski, Poulet, and Richard are often grouped together as “phenomenological critics,” critics who view a literary work as the expression of the patterns and structures by means of which a particular consciousness apprehends the world and who view the critical task as that of revealing the patterns or structures of apprehension that characterize a particular artistic subjectivity and allow it to produce a particular image of the world. Bersani's disagreement with these critics had to do with their focus on the “secret thematic selves which inform the writer's work but which the language of the work does not explicitly express.” Thus, “the writer's self” is equated to the work's “principal theme,” and such criticism places an emphasis on “centers … from which particular performances ‘radiate’ and back to which the critic draws the work” (Balzac 16–17). Bersani's preference, in opposition to this “centripetal” critical impulse, has been for “centrifugal” forces, both in art and in criticism: “My commitment to … open-ended, projective, and self-contesting art … will be expressed by a critical emphasis on those occasions in fiction which tend to disintegrate theme” (19).

I chose the title of this essay in part because I will be discussing Leo Bersani's work on painting and cinema, and Doing so as a friend rather than a rival or adversary. But the three words in my title also describe how Bersani himself approaches the visible world: when he sees something, he looks with it, not at it. He is drawn to artists who look in the same way—artists who challenge the notion that seeing is a one-way action, which a seer performs on a visual object. Terrence Malick is a particularly good example of this type of artist, since he not only looks with the world but also makes this action the center of his films. As Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit put it in their discussion of The Thin Red Line, Malick shows us both “the world his characters are registering” and “the imprint of the act of looking on the subject of the looking” (Forms 146).