ABSTRACT
Juxtaposing Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein (1993) with the eponymous philosopher’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), this talk demonstrates the ways that Jarman’s film warns its viewers against the conceptual and political problems created by treating “queerness” as a metaphysical abstraction. For Jarman’s version of Wittgenstein, this sense of queerness was the product of homobophic self-loathing, which in turn distorted his account of what or who could be part of “the world”–i.e., everything that is the case. I take Jarman’s film and the Tractatus itself as opportunities to bring these issues to bear on recent theoretical accounts that emphasize either the indefinability or unrepresentability of queerness.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Joshua Gang is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses in British and Irish literature, literature and philosophy, and critical methods. He is the author of Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press, Hopkins Studies in Modernism, 2021). His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, journals including Critical Inquiry, ELH, PMLA, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. He is currently beginning work on a new project on the nature of moral and aesthetic value in modern British fiction.