Abstract

Strategically pursuing the time-honoured notion of tactical essentialism I explore some of the unworked themes from my old porno-theories concerning the sexual as a site of reflection, the literal deferral of jouissance in favour of a moment of insight. In order to do this I locate my argument in pages from the diaries of an old friend and bar colleague in Paris, J, which extend over three decades of gay life and contain innumerable scenes of sexual abandonment, written in a lucidly quotidian prose. I work from a series of Thursdays, which contain descriptions of J's weekly visits to the Keller Bar and in which, from the early 1990s, I figure from time to time. The unfolding of queer theory from early Butler onwards will thus be exposed to the light of ‘witness’ or ‘oral experience’, rethinking this old contradiction of people's history and cultural studies and taking some measure of theory's adequacy to make abstractions of such material. J was a founder member of Act Up-Paris and of the Sex Grenades, friend of Guillaume Dustan and others, so his accounts are anyway charged with an environment whose figuring in queer theory is essential to its ongoing development.