Queer Apocalypses

"Though I don't always agree with his readings, I never fail to recognize Lorenzo Bernini as a serious thinker grappling with crucial issues in contemporary queer theory and politics. Queer Apocalypses announces the emergence of major new voice in the field and contributes valuably to the ongoing development and vitality of queer thought." (Lee Edelman, author of "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive" (2004)) "Lorenzo Bernini's book, Queer Apocalypses, gives an extremely smart, rigorous and comprehensive overview of what has been called antisocial queer theory. Along the way, he provides an account of the rise of queer theory in the US and situates this genre of queer critique in relation to certain European traditions of thought and Italian academia. This book should find an eager audience among readers of queer theory, Europeanists, not to mention people interested in zombies, apocalypse and the end of everything." (Jack Halberstam, author of "The Queer Art of Failure" (2011) and "Female Masculinity" (1998)) "Queer Apocalypses is the first monograph of international reach discussing the antisocial theories developed by the most radical US gay thinkers. With disciplinary rigor and theoretical lucidity, Lorenzo Bernini interrogates the relations between gender, sexuality, and politics, bringing the avant-garde of queer thinking into dialogue with the ethic of relation formulated by European feminism. The result is a critical inquiry that finally sheds light on a key aspect of contemporary political philosophy." (Adriana Cavarero, author of "Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood" (2000) and "Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence" (2011))

This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory.This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce’s movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chanceof a non-heroic political agency.