Queer Anarchy: Muñoz and Schürmann Go on a Date

ABSTRACT

This article deconstructs the influence of Giorgio Agamben in José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia in order to demonstrate the failure of Agamben’s paradigm of (im)potentiality to properly account for the strategies of Muñoz’s queer anarchist (non)politics of disidentification. The work of the undertheorized gay Heideggerian thinker Reiner Schürmann is drawn out to supplement a queer (non)politics latent in both Schürmann and Muñoz. Focusing on the Derridean influences, a constitutive autoimmunity of queer temporality is developed as a means of prefiguring the queer utopia to-come through praxis as pure means. The article closes with Muñoz-inspired reading of the lesbian Blood Sisters, who during the height of the AIDS crisis embodied the queer anarchist praxis identified in Munoz’s Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications. Taken together, the article concludes, politics becomes unassimilable to the queer subject, who is always in excess of signification and actuality.