Carla Freccero

They are all sodomites

T wo images: a cartoon of Osama bin Laden being sodomized by a U.S. bomb with a picture of the penetrated twin towers in the background, and a news shot of a bomb headed for Afghanistan with the words “High Jack this Fags” scrawled on it. In Sex and Conquest, Richard Trexler, a social historian, describes what he calls a regime of penetrative penality that understands the anal penetration of males by males in heteronormative contexts as a form of punishment for various crimes, especially theft. Here sodomy is a form of humiliation, the subordination of an inferior male (the penetrated) to a dominant one (the penetrator). Perhaps this is a sufficient explanation for the curious linkage of sodomy, the suicide attack, Osama bin Laden, and Afghanistan. And, yet, is it not strange that these events should be understood as a sodomitic encounter between men? In Sodometries, Jonathan Goldberg analyzes the excessive deployment of sodomy in accounts of European encounters in the New World. The alleged first letter Cortez sent back to Spain proclaims: “They are all sodomites!” Goldberg proposes the rhetorical figure of the preposterous—the confusion of before and behind—as the logic at work in the discourse of conquest. Preposterous evokes sodomy. Preposterous is also both spatial (a displacement) and temporal (a reversal). The conquerors use the accusation of sodomy—that preposterous act—to rationalize their slaughter of the people so accused: these people have perverted nature and thus deserve to be exterminated. Thus the accusation of sodomy is a ruse of power, a post hoc construction of a sodomitical body to justify subsequent conquest and penetration. Preposterous logic, indeed. Goldberg suggests that what marks the indigenous man as sodomitical is also

Toward a Psychoanalytics of Historiography: Michel de Certeau's Early Modern Encounters

Michel de Certeau’s analyses of the subject of (Western) historiography, outlined in The Writing of History and Heterologies, attribute to that subject’s formation an originary encounter, historic and symbolic, which would shape the contours of a ‘‘psychoanalytics’’ of Western historiography as the subject’s will to know—to render into writing and thus produce a logos of and on—the ‘‘other.’’ Certeau’s narrative of the European ‘‘discovery’’ of America is thus an allegory of the relation to the other in all its forms. And yet this particular encounter, articulated through two texts and a period (the Renaissance) that serve as canonical markers of the birth of modernity in anthropological and philosophical fields of inquiry, carries with it an overdetermined resonance in historical as well as symbolic registers. The early modern Franco-American transatlantic journey that inaugurated both an ethnographic and a philosophic discourse on the other produces, in Certeau, a melancholic masculine subject of historiography at the end of modernity, one whose loss is cannibalistically encrypted as the loss of (the/an)other man. The heteronormative repudiation of the lost erotic body of the