The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

  This is a deflation, but not a dismissal. It is also a new possibility.

  When Iggy had the toxin and we lay with him in his hospital crib, I knew—in a flood of fear and panic—what I know now, in our blessed return to the land of health, which is that my time with him has been the happiest time of my life. Its happiness has been of a more palpable and undeniable and unmitigated quality than any I’ve ever known. For it isn’t just moments of happiness, which is all I thought we got. It’s a happiness that spreads.

  For this reason I am tempted to call it a lasting happiness, but I know I won’t take it with me when I go. At best, I hope to impart it to Iggy, to allow him to feel that he created it, which, in many ways, he has.

  Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough. Some might read in this a recipe for the classic ungratefulness of children—after everything I’ve done for you, and so on. To me, at the moment anyway, it is a tremendous relief, an incitement to give Iggy no memory, save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real.

  That is what my mother did for me. I’d almost forgotten.

  And now, I think I can say—

  I want you to know, you were thought of as possible—never as certain, but always as possible—not in any single moment, but over many months, even years, of trying, of waiting, of calling—when, in a love sometimes sure of itself, sometimes shaken by bewilderment and change, but always committed to the charge of ever-deepening understanding—two human animals, one of whom is blessedly neither male nor female, the other of whom is female (more or less), deeply, doggedly, wildly wanted you to be.

  After Iggy is released from the hospital post-toxin, we celebrate with one of our living room dance parties, just me and the three Irish guys, so called to honor the otherwise un-addressed genetic link each of them has to Irish stock. We play “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe over and over again (after years of noise metal, Harry now also keeps abreast of the Top 40, so that he can discuss the finer points of the new Katy Perry, Daft Punk, or Lorde). Iggy’s big brother holds him by the armpits and spins him around in a wild circle while we scramble to make sure Iggy’s chubby legs don’t hit any windows or end tables. As one might expect for brothers seven years apart, they almost always play too rough for my liking. But he loves it! his brother says whenever I tell him to take the heavy faux-fur blanket off Iggy’s head for a moment, so we can be sure he hasn’t smothered. But for the most part, he’s right. Iggy loves it. Iggy loves playing with his brother and his brother loves playing with Iggy in ways I could never have dreamt. His brother especially loves dragging Iggy around his schoolyard, bragging about how soft his little brother’s head is to mostly preoccupied peers. Who wants to touch a really soft head? he yells, as if hawking wares. It stresses me out to watch them play, but it also makes me feel like I’ve finally done something unequivocally good. That I’ve finally done my stepson an unequivocal good. He’s mine, all mine, he says as he scoops Iggy up and runs off with him to another room.

  Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. No lack, only desiring machines. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration. When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing.

  But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don’t know. I know we’re still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Parts of this book appeared, in different forms, as a talk for Tendencies (a series in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick held at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, cu-rated by Tim Trace Peterson); as a zine for A. L. Steiner’s 2012 Puppies and Babies installation (published by Otherwild); in the magazines jubilat, Tin House, and Flaunt; and in the anthology After Montaigne (University of Georgia Press, 2015). This book was supported throughout by a Literature grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, for which I remain grateful.

  Special thanks as always to PJ Mark, for his shrewd intelligence and ongoing faith in me: I stand lucky and grateful. Thanks also to Ethan Nosowsky, for his profound editorial wisdom and support, and to Katie Dublinski. For their advice, assistance, and/or inspiration, I also wish to thank Ben Lerner, Eula Biss, Tara Jane ONeil, Wayne Koestenbaum, Steven Marchetti, Brian Blanchfield, Dana Ward, Jmy James Kidd, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jack Halberstam, Janet Sarbanes, Tara Jepsen, Andrea Fontenot, Amy Sillman, Silas Howard, Peter Gadol, A. L. Steiner, Gretchen Hildebran, Suzanne Snider, Cynthia Nelson, Andrés Gonzalez, Emerson Whitney, Anna Moschovakis, Sarah Manguso, Jessica Kramer, Elena Vogel, Stacey Poston, Melody Moody, Barbara Nelson, Emily Nelson, Craig Tracy, and the Purple Team at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. To my Irish guys: thank you for your daily presence, support, and love. I’m so glad you found me.

  In loving memory of those who departed during this book’s time: Phyllis DeChant (1938–2010), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), Lhasa de Sela (1972–2010), and Maximum Dodge (1993–2012). You are missed.

  This book would not exist without Harry Dodge, whose intelligence, foxiness, vision, fortitude, and willingness to be represented have made this project, along with so much else, possible. Thank you for showing me what a nuptial might be—an infinite conversation, an endless becoming.

  Note to the Reader: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. Because of limitations in the conversion of printed books to reflowable ebook files, there is not an adequate way to reproduce those marginal citations alongside the main text in the ebook. Therefore, all quoted text that is not attributed within the body of the text is listed below, with italics indicating the quoted material.

  I stopped smugly repeating Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and wondered anew, can everything be thought. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is—simply the outline of a becoming. —Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet

  (What is that triangle, anyway? My twat?) —Eileen Myles

  Many feminists have argued for the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public. —Susan Fraiman

  When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? —Judith Butler

  If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so. —Jacques Lacan

  It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. —Denise Riley

  The bad reading [of Gender Trouble] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender: stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism…. When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in. — Butler

  What if where I am is what I need?—Deborah Hayr />
  The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. —Sara Ahmed

  And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you. —Ahmed

  Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? —Elizabeth Weed

  In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. —Susan Sontag

  If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority. —Leo Bersani

  You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. —Pema Chödrön

  Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand. —D.W. Winnicott

  In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence. —Luce Irigaray

  What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted?—Anne Carson

  I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. —Beatriz Preciado

  A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last. —Lucille Clifton

  It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery. —Butler

  We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. —William James

  And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look. —Dodie Bellamy

  I think we have—and can have—a right to be free. —Michel Foucault

  The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window … the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window. —Naomi Ginsberg, to Allen

  This reading treats Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter “a tergo” as a primal, coded fantasy of gay male sex, a scene of proto-homosexuality. —Lee Edelman (paraphrase)

  People are different from each other. —Sedgwick

  But while I can’t change, even if I tried, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it’s a piss-poor one for others. —Mary Lambert

  Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both. —Fraiman

  Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. —Edelman

  [Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic … as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power—all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it. —Julia Kristeva

  The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. —Deleuze/Parnet

  But I worry that such expressions only underscore the “ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism … the flat fact that, since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything.” —Sedgwick

  Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. —Sedgwick

  You know so much about people from they second they open their mouths. Right away you might know that you might want to keep them out. —Eileen Myles

  What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing. —Deleuze/Parnet

  One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing. —Monique Wittig

  The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic … [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. —Adam Phillips/Barbara Taylor

  Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming. —Butler

  Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). —Deleuze/Parnet

  Faced with the warp speed of this “new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism,” especially from my station of fatigue, exchanging horniness for exhaustion grows in allure. —Preciado

  At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists: it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices. —Sedgwick

  Italicized account of Harry’s mother’s death, which begins at a certain point i woke up. —Harry Dodge

  The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. —Eula Biss

  Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough. —Winnicott

  But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. —Andrew Solomon (paraphrase)

  Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration. —Deleuze/Guattari

  When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. —Phillips/Bersani

  MAGGIE NELSON is the author of four previous books of nonfiction: The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (2009), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), and The Red Parts: A Memoir (2007). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a 2013 Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2007 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation
. Since 2005 she has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.

  Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.

  Table of Contents