Gay orgies under the big top

Re-sexualising the queer debate

Abstract

In Freud’s Drive (2008), Teresa de Lauretis tries to keep the Freudian concept of the drive together with the Foucauldian category of biopolitics, through the mediation of Fanon’s understanding of race. Indeed, according to Jean Laplanche, the drive does not coincide with the instinct, but it leans on the instinct and sticks onto the bodily surface. By doing so, it individuates an intermediate region between the physical and the psychic, like the one where race spreads out and biopolitics acts upon. From this region, the drive troubles the inscription of the subject into the social order, pushing it towards its dissolution. We should start from there if we wish not only to overcome vain dichotomies in queer theory between essentialism and constructivism, or between political and apolitical thinking, but also ‘to do justice’ to Freud and Foucault. And if we wish to stay queer while doing queer theory.