A comment on Friedman and Rossi’s dialectical theory and the study of HIV/AIDS: thought to the second power

Abstract

We need more scholarship like this. Friedman and Rossi work toward a powerfully dialectical understanding of what I would risk calling neoliberalism’s defining epidemic. The effort to think a totality of social relations and processes is one of the dialectic’s central characteristics, and indeed this paper touches on so many different dimensions of HIV/AIDS that it is difficult to do it justice. So I want to highlight a specific question: the standpoint from which dialectical thinking proceeds, the way in which ‘‘standpoint’’ is one of the categories that defines the dialectic itself (my own standpoint being that of a scholar trained in literary and cultural studies who focuses on convergences between Marxism and queer studies). And I want to begin, hopefully in good dialectical fashion, by moving briefly away from this paper’s focus, precisely in order to return to it. The paper highlights a number of normative tendencies that characterize neoliberalism, including a tendency to erase the social itself (‘‘there is no such thing as society’’) by scapegoating groups perceived as most at risk of HIV infection, as well as a reformist and legalistic tendency to absorb and reshape grassroots activism. A striking manifestation of both tendencies can be found in the way in which a normalized ethic of marriage has become commonsensical within antihomophobic ‘‘politics’’—so commonsensical that it appears to be a box outside of which it is increasingly difficult to think, marriage rights (along with the right to serve in the military) having become something like the absolute horizon of such ‘‘politics.’’ To cite another of Thatcher’s neoliberal mantras, here again there seems to be ‘‘no alternative.’’ The asceticism of settling down in the suburbs, of dressing up one’s libido in the privatizing sanctity of marriage and inheritance rights, is the neoliberal heart of what one can only in a trivial way call a contemporary ‘‘politics’’ of sexuality (hence the scare quotes), since these ‘‘politics’’ seem much less driven by grassroots movement than by lawyers and highly funded lobbies. The