I do not think of Delany’s writing in this way as in any sense heroic. We are creatures of our erotic particularities, of the systems of power and discourse we negotiate, and of their intricacies and interweavings. To put it in extreme shorthand, between the erotic particularities and the metacognition in Delany’s writings, there is little interest in the way of an oedipal self to straighten and deparadoxify.
Delany’s great achievement is precisely to have refused this gambit. But as we know from Michel Foucault, the account of sexuality being repressed tends to be invoked for what he calls “the speaker’s benefit” - to make the speaker seem transgressive and even heroic, while unwittingly serving the larger mandate to bolster a regulating discourse of sexuality tied to recognition and identity. It is also true that, early on, Delany was writing with surprising openness and even matter-of-factness about minority sexualities and practices when repression and supression of such discourse were even more the order of the day. Philosophically, you might say, it is related to what Alfred North Whitehead called the propositional nature of reality. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want.” This intimate relationship between constraint and freedom - more intimate and more convulsive than dialectics can account for - is part of the architecture of the world Delany theorizes and builds in his work. Here we find a way of articulating constraint as a core principle of evolution and of the even more general emergence of complex order, or as one of Delany’s characters puts it: “there are some directions in which you cannot go. As some of us are also driven to know - and as poets know and those versed in dynamical theory know: constitutive constraints are pure positivities for the systems driven by them. On the one hand, this statement might make you feel sorry for Freud: was he really such a control freak that he could get no inexplicable pleasures? On the other hand, you might feel inclined to disbelieve him: if he is first moved by something and proceeds to get pleasure only if he can figure out why, are we supposed to believe that being moved by it was not pleasurable in the first place? Here we come up against the reductiveness of the Freudian arc of arousal and release, which tends to disavow all the pleasure except what’s found at the very end.īut finally - and this is what brings us to Delany - we can at least affirm with Freud that the pleasure of what moves us specifically - of what I think must be called erotic particularity - can be resonantly linked with the pleasure of metacognition.Īs even Freud may not have disavowed, some kernel of the erotic particularities that drive us must remain opaque, and this opacity might on the one hand be characterized as the grain of sand around which the pearls of our selves and lives and metacognitions are secreted, or on the other as that which in practice we do well to treat simply as fact. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. Whenever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. This time, it made me think of Freud’s famous essay “The Moses of Michaelangelo.” Freud acknowledges upfront that “works of art exercise a powerful effect on me” and that No doubt this “Mandate To Explain” was installed in my brain during my training as a literary critic. When I began thinking about how best to honor Samuel Delany today, I felt some sense of obligation to explain what for me has been the transformative effect of reading Delany’s work, especially from the standpoint of queer studies. Trigger warning: this essay includes snippets of cultural theory, so if you’ve had traumatic experiences with it, please be careful. Samuel Delaney interviewed at ReaderCon 2011 (watch video here).