The Queer Time of the Lesbian Premodern

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” move through the lexicons of recent critical and queer theory, spectrally accompanying rethinkings of time, event, and the past, present, and future.2 States of emergency demand it, as do life inside times of war and states of exception that have become (or were they always?) historical norm.3 At such times critics and theorists look to others who have spoken during states of emergency and tried to teach us. These are the ghosts Jacques Derrida writes about as the paternal and quasi-paternal figures who rise up to warn and admonish and enjoin us, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or like Abraham’s God, to attend to the way “the time is out of joint” and to assume, as Hamlet calls it, the “cursèd” ethical and political burden of setting it right, to sacrifice ourselves in a “vanishing present” and in the name of a future to come, without knowledge of what setting it right entails for a future we cannot know.4