Texts
CV
Lecture/Inferno (from the Comedy)
This is a text which insists it’s a “performance lecture” in order to hold three things that do not ostensibly belong together—Dante’s Inferno, Barthes’s final lecture course at the Collège de France, and a lesbian writer from The L Word, Jenny Schecter—as three concurrent, contested sources for a single unstable “I”. Everyone in it, including me, is a stand-in for someone else, and nobody has quite memorised their lines.
Sharing preoccupations with my other essays (claiming, possession, the collapse between critic and subject), Lecture deals with childhood bereavement, grief-logic, and a bit of fraudelent theological romance.
It runs on two registers at once: a body text (the present performance) which deals in scenes (from The L Word—incessantly confused by its own POV), stage directions and tangents, and footnotes which doubt, source, confess, count, make jokes, and qualify beneath it. *This is not a difference in tense so much as a difference in position.* There’s a third register too, but I shan’t get into it here.
Read an excerpt (including introduction) here.