AIDS and the National Body

216 Pages·1997·7.6 MB·English

by  Yingling, Thomas E

AIDS and the National Body
Edited by Michble Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon,
and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Thomas E. Yingling
Edited, and with an introduction by Robyn Wiegman
Duke University Press Durham & London 1997
© 1997 The Estate of Thomas E. Yingling
“Editor’s Introduction,” “The Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts,”
“The Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism; Reading Yingling,
Reading Gunn,” and “Caesura” © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oo
Typeset in Melior by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Acknowledgment of copyrights and Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed
page of this book.
The Dream Visitor
Approximately one month before the appearance of my first Kaposi’s
sarcoma lesions, I had a dream in which I was visited by a figure.
He did not enjoin me to repent, as does the dream visitor in Parting
Glances. In fact, he had been dispatched with knowledge. There was
some important communication between him and me, but the issue
here was that he couldn’t speak. This man was a Holocaust figure—he
was on his way to the trains: millions dead, and they all knew it, and
no one did anything. What I recall—in addition to the shabby dignity of
his demeanor—was the utter boundlessness of the injustice of what¬
ever ignorance it was we were condemned to and by in our communi¬
cation. AIDS had shifted from a question of morality to one of episte¬
mology. Then, I am reading Wittgenstein, and I come across this: “Look
upon this tumor as a perfectly normal part of your body’’—what is a
perfectly normal part of my body? AIDS had shifted to humor. But this
is the move one must make, and in order to do it, one must not “look
on” but read, and it is the question of reading with uncertain terms that
AIDS forces upon us. The whole business of the national body begins
here.
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