Abstract.

This paper begins by discussing the limitations of two contrasting schools of thought in queer theory: the antisocial and antiutopian turn of Lee Edelman and the more optimistic theories of Jose Esteban Muñoz. By this, both theorists explore how the queer body can and cannot be oriented towards non and heteronormative temporalities. However, this paper aims to uncover the lack of how the queer body can be phrased towards brighter futures and tomorrows. I propose the formation of a new hermeneutic, termed excitable-differends, through the collation of Jean-François Lyotard’s 1983 The Differend and Judith Butler’s 1997 Excitable Speech. I focus on the genres of discourse in Torrey Peters’ 2018 novel Detransition, Baby and how Peters’ fiction alerts us to excitable-differends present in fiction and the real world. Through this, Peters’ novel demonstrates how the formation of new temporal idioms disrupts heteronormative conceptions of temporalities and “bear[s] witness to the [excitable-] differend” (Lyotard xiii). This paper demonstrates how a return to Lyotard and Butler can fill the aforementioned lack in how the queer body is phrased towards brighter futures. 

For the last twenty years, one of the central preoccupations of queer theory has been how the queer body is, can be, and cannot be orientated towards non and heteronormative temporalities (Ahmed 20). Consequently, there have been two emerging schools of thought: the antisocial, antiutopian turn of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman and the more optimistic figurations of Jack Halberstam and Jose Esteban Muñoz. Edelman, in his infamous 2004 polemic No Futures, makes the provocative claim that queerness is antithetical to the idea of the symbolic “Child”: and, therefore, ontologically under the shadow of the “absolute value of reproductive futurism” (2). By this, Edelman’s polemic is primarily concerned with how heteronormative biological reproduction renders the queer body incapable of imagining a future. Consequently, Edelman maintains that queerness must embrace its otherness and exist outside the logic of reproductive futurism. Contrarily, Muñoz opposes this antisocial turn in queer theory; he instead reframes queer temporalities under the “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). Muñoz achieves this by reconfiguring the utopian theories of the lesser-known Frankfurt school thinker Ernst Bloch. For Muñoz, Bloch “offers us hope as a hermeneutic”, allowing new formations of positive temporalities to form.

            In the spirit of Muñoz “queering” Blochian utopia, I would like to propose my own hermeneutic through the employment of the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean- François Lyotard’s 1983 The Differend in conjunction with Judith Butler’s 1997 Excitable Speech. A differend, Lyotard claims, situates a wrong (tort) between (at least) two parties that cannot be phrased. This is because the genres of discourse that the parties insist on are utterly heterogeneous and incommensurable to one another (xi). Therefore, when one is alerted to a differend and to articulate this wrong, Lyotard claims one must “bear witness to the differend” (xiii) through the formation of new idioms. However, simply “bear[ing] witness to the differend” cannot resolve a differend without incurring further damage or differends. The imperative is that one must try, and a lesser evil is done in attending to the wrong (Lyotard 140). For this paper, I am proposing my own portmanteau of Lyotard and Butler called an excitable-differend that will allow us to explore how queer subjects can be phrased[1] towards the future. Through this, this essay will explore how Torrey Peters’ 2018 novel Detransition, Baby alerts us to excitable-differends present in trans fiction. Moreover, through discussions of transphobic and queerphobic differends, this novel “bears witness to the[se] differend[s]” (Lyotard xiii) and allows new temporal idioms to form that can orientate trans and queer subjects towards a possible future or horizon.

Excitable differends: Towards a Temporal “Speech”.

            The Differend: Phrases in Dispute is a highly complex piece of “formal” philosophical work that is carefully structured insofar as each “chapter” is painstakingly laid out to ensure that witness is paid to all parties of the differends discussed. The usageof “formal” here is imperative, as it speaks to the numbered Wittgensteinian paragraphs and the chapter headings: “Preface: Reading Dossier; The Referent, The Name; Presentation; Result; Obligation; Genre, Norm; and The Sign of History”. Furthermore, throughout each section, there are additional numbered sections called “Notices”, in which Lyotard discusses (at length) various philosophers, writers, and contexts. This layering of differend writing structures aids in his discussion of how “phrasing” or “language games” (Wittgenstein; see also Lyotard The Postmodern Condition) silence one party of the differend so that another group can be empowered. In the “Reading Dossier”, Lyotard lays out how each phrase is composed of a phrase universe containing a referent, a meaning (s), an addresser (s) and an addressed (xi). These, therefore, constitute a phrase whereby a phrase “happens” and, unlike Wittgenstein, is not reliant on a human’s utterance, nor is it restricted to the linguistic sphere. A phrase can be the movement of a cat’s tail or a significant historical event like Stonewall, and even silence can be a phrase (Lyotard 11).

            If there is one central differend for Lyotard, it would be the result of the Shoah, specifically Auschwitz – a recurring complexity for Lyotard throughout his oeuvre. Lyotard explores the differend that arises from Auschwitz through an analysis of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, specifically, his infamous statement that the proof of the existence of gas chambers is dependent on those who have seen them “with [their] own eyes” (Faurisson qtd. in Lyotard 3). Consequently, to testify about the existence of the gas chambers, one must have seen it, thereby experiencing it; however, to witness them, one is rendered silent as to phrase Auschwitz is to phrase death. Therefore, the witness’s name is erased, erasing the proper name Auschwitz and the linkages that grant meaning to the referent (the Shoah). Thus, a perfect crime occurs where one “neutralises the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of testimony; then everything is as if there were no referent (no damages)” (Lyotard 8). When one erases the name, the referent is neutralised, resulting in zero witnesses or victims. No crime can be said to have occurred within the parameters of the genre of discourse on which Fuarrison insists.

            Furthermore, Lyotard analyses Adorno’s modelling of Auschwitz as an example of a negative dialectic insofar that it becomes the “name without a speculative ‘name’, not sublatable [irrelevable] into a concept” (88). Auschwitz is the place that destroys the phrase and, therefore, the proper name. Furthermore, Lyotard extends Adorno’s argument to assert that the destruction of the phrase results in “Auschwitz [becoming] the forbiddance of the beautiful death […] If death can be exterminated, it is because there is nothing to kill” (100-101). The “forbiddance of the beautiful death” speaks to the intertextual structure of The Differend, as a “beautiful death” references the politics of Plato’s “Trial of Socrates”. Consequently, death occurs based on phrases expressed as a political decision denied to the camp’s victims. The witness to Auschwitz is expected to give testimony to an unspeakably, unnameable, and unthinkable event. Consequently, the absolute destruction of the name results in Auschwitz existing, nameless, outside of time and space (56-58).

            Similar to The Differend, Butler’s Excitable Speech is another complex philosophical work. While Lyotard analysed phrases and phrase universes, Butler developed J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts to explore how “words wound” (6). Butler begins by invoking the Althusserian notion of interpellation through Austin’s idea of the “illocutionary speech act perform[ing] its deed at the moment of the utterance”, whereby the “’moment’ in ritual is a condensed historicity; it exceeds itself in past and future directions” (3). Therefore, to be injured by speech is to be decontextualised from the act insofar that there are two results to receiving hate speech. The first result is a decontextualisation of the subject’s social being concerning their place in time and space, and the second is the comparison to physical harm; the act is like a slap in the face. However, Butler maintains that the former element indicates a different form of injury, by which the disorientation of a hate speech act can be a form of a temporal threat (to either a past trauma or a future further violent action).

Consequently, the subject’s social being is interpolated in the present to be dependent on the violent address of the Other (Butler 5, 9). Contrary to Austin, Butler argues that “injurious[s] names” (2) are not illocutionary but perlocutionary, whereby a slur “both subordinates and enables” (163), thus allowing the subject an interpolative space to reclaim the slur, e.g., the n-word, the f-slur, or perhaps best encapsulated through the reclamation of the term queer. To illustrate Butler’s analysis, let us analyse two forms of violent speech acts:

• An act of homophobic hate speech, e.g., referring to a gay man or woman as “f*g” or “dy*e”.
• The intentional or unintentional act of “deadnaming” or using incorrect pronouns for a trans person.

The first “speech act” renders the gay person under the threat of potential future physical violence, whereby that hate act brings their social and physical body into the social being of the heterosexual matrix. Consequently, Butler argues, the Other takes their agency and autonomy, resulting in the “subject’s linguistic death” (28). However, Butler also states there is a result where the slur “both subordinates and enables” their identity, allowing space for interpolative affirmative identification (163), a celebration of difference in the face of the oppressive Other. The second example of a hate speech act is particularly troubling, as “deadnaming” (intentional or unintentional) provides a much more damaging form of temporal harm. By this, the trans subject’s present identity is brought into conflict with their pre-transition state of being, and their future state of being is haunted by both their deadname and the event where they were deadnamed. Consequently, Butler’s theory of perlocutionary “injurious names” (2) falls flat; their identity is not affirmed (in the crude sense) as the f-slur can to a gay man. Instead, it is wholly negated without any chance of interpolative affirmative identification.

Consequently, rather than the injurious “deadname” affirming identity, they are alerted to an excitable-differend that is neither illocutionary nor perlocutionary. This is because “phrases come to be attached to this [dead]name” (Lyotard 55); it destroys the subject’s referent to a state of being in time and space. The victim cannot speak and cannot testify to their abuse. “Negation [is, therefore,] at the heart of testimony” (54) and can only work through their wrong done to them through the formation of a parallel timeline by using new idioms to “bear witness to the differend” (xiii).

The “Child” is the excitable-differend.

            For this essay’s literary analysis of Peter’s Detransition, Baby, I would like to return to and expand on Edelman’s 2004 polemic No Futures. Through analysing the Derridean metaphysics of presence, Edelman explores the impossibility of queer politics, ferociously proposing a new set of antiutopian queer ethics. He maintains that queerness defines the limits of politics in the heterosexual matrix: “queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one” (17). Queerness exists outside the Lacanian Symbolic Order of the Child, whereby the threat of this symbolic Child becomes fascistic, thus rendering queerness without future and ontology. Consequently, for Edelman, queerness becomes symbolic of the death drive; the discursive logic surrounding queer sex is always focused on death, and thus the future is rendered non-existent. Queer sex, therefore, “must be borne away from this fantasy of futurity secured, eternity’s plan fulfilled, as a ‘a new generation is carried forward.’’” (41). However, in Detransition, Baby, Peters places Edelman’s polemic on trial to explore how queerness can be orientated towards the future. This is shown in the opening few pages of the novel, whereby the trans woman protagonist, Reese, remarks,

Thus, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and grave into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability. (Peters 10).

Reese’s remarks here on the nature of how trans people have no choice but to reject the future when their death is a “statistical probability” as opposed to a “wild and willful choice”. These lines emphasise the lack of options a trans woman has concerning how futurity depends on reproduction (Edelman). This is most notably explored later in the narrative, the dependency on the cis-woman, Katrina, for a possible family.

Detransition, Baby, is a novel that is very much in conversation with Edelman, and Peters interrogates his arguments from No Futures. Rather than engaging in Edelman’s negative ethics, Peters proposes a new form of ethics based on an intimate fight to orient oneself towards the future through creating a queer nuclear family; I term the quantum family. Peters’ engagement with Edelman goes beyond intertextual references to “No Futurism” dotted throughout the narrative (Peters 10). She purposefully structures the novel against the grain of Edelman’s figurations. Rather than engaging in “No Futurism”, she structures the novel’s chapters as temporal referents to the titular “baby” conception. Each chapter is titled either weeks, months, or years before and after the baby’s conception by Ames and Katrina. Consequently, Peters’ novel experiments with a new form of queer temporality, “conception-time” – by this Peters, frames Edelman’s heteronormative symbolic Child as the very concept that enables the quantum family to be orientated towards the future.

One such episode of the novel that rejects Edelman’s negative ethics is the scene where Reese and Katrina are shopping for baby products in the “Buy Buy Baby” (267). Katrina and Reese are collated into a pseudo-lesbian relationship, where Reese becomes the linguistically pregnant woman; the pair are asked when their due date is, and “Reese realizes that the woman is speaking to her. […] these two lesbians have a quasi butch-femme thing going, and the femme one is assumed to be the child” (269). Reese is given a gift by Katrina, who interjects when Reese cannot remember the due date, “December fifth”. In these tender moments of fluidity, Peters explores how language, specifically, idioms, can orient a queer person to the future. Thereby, Peters constructs a future from the genres of discourse that the heterosexual matrix insist on denying for queerness

             At its core, Detransition, Baby is a novel concerned with the complexities of language to explore different perspectives and experiences; it is a novel that deals first-hand with the incommensurability of language. Therefore, Peters’ novel alerts us to an excitable-differend: the Symbolic Child and the unborn baby that centres the novel’s title and plot. Peters’ novel bears witness to this excitable differend by carefully examining how trans people fight for love outside the heteronormative nuclear family. Furthermore, the novel formulates new literary idioms to propose a new form of the queer family that can be orientated towards a queer future; I designate this family as the quantum family. The notion of a “quantum family” is not purely located in human language; it is a phrase that embodies a form of hope, a family that experiences the fluidity of sub-atomic particles, engaging in wave-particle duality. Consequently, like how Lyotard raises the linkages of the phrase the “raised tail of the cat” (77), the quantum family allows queerness to exist outside of the fascistic discourse of the Child and instead be under the “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 1). The quantum family allows new temporal idioms to form, that orientate the queer family to a “horizon”.

Violence differends: On hate speech in Detransition, Baby.

            For the final section of this essay, I would like to bring Lyotard and Butler into direct conversation with Detransition, Baby through an analysis of hate speech in the novel and the controversies surrounding its publication. Consequently, I will discuss transphobia and transphobic attacks. The publication of Detransition, Baby, wrought a plethora of hateful responses from so-called “Gender-Critical Feminists” (Cain). However, the longlisting of the novel for the Women’s Prize For Fiction brought Peters’ novel into the foreground of the contemporary visceral debates on trans rights in the U.K. and the U.S. As reported in the Guardian, an open letter claimed that “the moment you decided that a male author was eligible, the award ceased to be Women’s Prize” (Wild Women’s Writing Club qtd. in Cain). Moreover, Reese’s ironic commentary on internalised misogyny was used as justification for the effective deadnaming of Peters: “Every woman adores a fascist” (59). Despite the italicisation of the phrase, the abuse thrown at Peters on social media websites like Twitter and Goodreads would result in the “subject’s [Peters] linguistic death” (Butler 28). However, the intentionally wounding act of referring to Peters as a “male author” does not “subordinate and enable” (Butler 163) Peter’s identity; it intentionally negates Peter’s ontology and future. Consequently, the referent to Peters’ ontology and novel is destroyed; her work is negated and relegated to what Lyotard calls a “nameless place” (55). She, therefore, ceases to be a writer, as Peters’s only referent to womanhood has been destroyed by the transphobic attack on her work. Thus, Detransition, Baby as a publicised object alerts us to an excitable-differend.

            Furthermore, this rendering of Peters as a “male author” (Wild Women’s Writers qtd in. Cain) results in Peters and her novel becoming monstrous. By monstrous, I am referring to Paul B. Preciado’s 2019 speech to L’École de la Cause Freudienne, Can The Monster Speak; Preciado’s speech was cut short due to uproar by the attendees. Preciado’s speech lambasts psychoanalytic discourse and accuses it of placing him in a “’ cage’ as a trans man. I, a body branded by medical and juridical discourse as ‘transexual’ […] I am the monster who speaks to you” (12). Preciado’s statement speaks to how “Gender-Critical Feminists” seek to “cage” trans people and render them “monsters” for daring to exist outside of the heterosexual matrix. Consequently, such an injurious excitable-differend is difficult to confront and “bear witness to” (Lyotard xiii). Therefore, we must look to the novel to see how Peters deals with such acts of blatant transphobia.

            In the novel, numerous examples of transphobic “injurious speech acts” exist, ranging from Katrina drunkard “outing” Ames to instances of AIDS scaremongering. However, the character of Stanley represents the linguistic manifestation of the heterosexual matrix’s rendering of trans life as monstrous. Consequently, Stanley’s Janus-like quality represents cis society’s obsession and revulsion towards trans-life. This is most poignantly shown in the novel when Amy confronts Reese about her affair with Stanley; the moment creates the parallel timeline that grants the possibility for the novel’s plot. The exchange escalates when Amy states, “I want to punch him in the face”, before continuing to say to Stanley, “Just stay the fuck out of it, dude”. The challenging of Stanley’s masculinity causes Stanley to respond with a form of temporal hate speech where he sneers, “No, dude […] I don’t think I will. I don’t like little f*ggots threatening me” (Peters 252-253 censorship my own.). Stanley’s intentional misgendering of Amy, followed by the homophobic speech act, exemplifies Butler’s injurious speech. However, there is a dual wounding in such acts which denies any form of temporality for Amy. The misgendering, coupled with the ironic homophobic slur, is indicative of the character Stanley being the emblematic manifestation of the heterosexual matrix’s distaste and obsession towards trans existence. This instance of hateful speech leads to a transphobic attack where Stanley attacks her, and the “concrete of the sidewalk crack[s] against her face” (254). This leads to the breaking of Amy’s nose, which, for Amy, was the symbol of her femininity. As a result of this transphobic attack, a new futurity is created, dependent on Amy existing as a negative phrase, in a nameless state of being as Ames. By the negative phrase, I am referring to how Lyotard claims that the “differend is the unstable state and instance of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be […] by what one ordinarily calls a feeling” (13).

Consequently, we are alerted to an excitable-differend that cannot be overcome; Amy has no perfect “horizon” (Muñoz). The violent transphobic assault has generated a new phrase universe of alternative temporal idioms. Despite the antiutopian consequences of such an attack, Amy has constructed their own futurity by conceiving their child and creating a new quantum family. One that exists beyond the phrase universe of the oppressive heterosexual matrix.  

Queer theory has been preoccupied with theories concerning queer ontology (Muñoz), phenomenology (Ahmed), and negative ethics (Edelman). Therefore, there has been a distinct lack of how the queer body can be phrased to orientate oneself towards a better potential future. Although poststructuralist philosophy has dwindled in academic popularity in recent years, this essay has proposed how revisiting such theories as The Differend can allow for new avenues of queer literary analysis. Furthermore, the usage of this essay’s neologism, excitable-differend, proposes an avenue for confronting violent queerphobic and transphobic “hate speech acts” (Butler). This is achieved by carefully examining the genres of discourse that compose such excitable-differends and how new idioms can be formed that allow the witness to better “bear witness to the differend” (Lyotard xiii). Consequently, by discussing Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby, this essay attempts to bear witness to excitable-differends present in the novel and the real world, allowing new temporal idioms to form under a “warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 1).

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.

Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1996.

Butler, Judith. ‘Excitable Speech’ A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997.

Cain, Sian. “Women’s prize condemns online attack on trans nominee Torrey Peters.” 7 Apr 2021. The Guardian.. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/07/womens-prize-condemns-online-attack-on-trans-nominee-torrey-peters-detransition-baby. Accessed 20 Feb 2023

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.

Grebowicz, Margret. “Introduction After Lyotard.” Gender After Lyotard. State U of NYP, 2007. pp. 1–9.

Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU P, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Manchester UP, 1983.

Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.

Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby. Serpent’s Tail, 2021.

Preciado, Paul B. Preciado, Paul. Can the Monster Speak? : A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Translated by Frank Wynne. MIT Press. 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/exeter/detail.action?docID=6568606. Accessed 4 Mar 2023

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[1] I am using “phrased” to mean orientate.