Freccero, construes temporality as asynchronic, noncontinuous, and nonidentical. At least since his 1995 essay “The History That Will Be,” he has attempted to think beyond periodization, arguing that “historic possibilities must depend upon mobilizations that would be unthinkable if history were segmented across uncrossable divides.”51 Striving to keep “temporal multiplicity in play,” he objects that recent projects in the history of sexuality may “have shown that the present draws upon various incommensurate strands, [but] have tended nonetheless to divide these strands among previous discrete moments and to draw them in relationship to a consolidated present.”52 “Discrete moments”—that is, periods—are defined by Goldberg not only by their boundedness but by their relationship to a “consolidated present.” Periodization thereby is identified with “teleological similarity,” which “can imagine the past under the sign of difference, but not the present.” Extending “Sedgwick’s insistence that any time period is characterized by the ‘unrationalized coexistence of different models’” to the unrationalized coexistence of “different temporalities,” he maintains that “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains unresolved terrain. Or, rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”53 Rather than a spectral haunting that seeks a reciprocal relation with the past, Goldberg explores the multitemporality, nonidentity, and noncorrespondence of the early modern, the recognition of which can expose the “imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities.”54 In his 2009 book The Seeds of Things, Goldberg seeks the queer within the hetero by exploring, as he puts it in a related essay, the “multiple materialisms to be found in early modernity,” extending the meaning of “queer” to a consideration of physics because “queer theory is not and never was just about sex in itself.”55
Menon makes many of the same theoretical and rhetorical moves as Freccero and Goldberg, but her special interest is in pressing against all forms of desire’s confinement, whether that of sexual identity, terminology, literary form, chronological boundaries, or historical method. Because desire, in her view, always exceeds identity and is “synonymous … with queerness,” she “insists that we refrain from identifying sexuality, and revel in pursuing the coils of a desire that cannot be contained in a binary temporal code.”56 Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film begins by arguing that “our embrace of difference as the template for relating past and present produces a compulsory heterotemporality in which chronology determines identity.”57 In other words, scholarly attention to historical difference produces a relationship to time in which sexual identity is causally related to chronological explanations; correlatively, queer studies scholars who do not suspend all chronology are not only normativizing but, in her words, “governed by dates.”58 Subjection to the datelines of chronological time is then translated into teleology: “Defined as the doctrine of ends or final causes, teleology depends on a sequence leading to an end that can retrospectively be seen as having had a beginning.”59 Disrupting this purported causal chain via “homohistory, in which desires always exceed identitarian categories and resist being corralled into hetero-temporal camps,”60 Menon exploits what she sees as the tight congruence of literary form with historical and political structures, in order to access what she calls, in her book’s final sentence, “the homo in us all.”61 Her term “compulsory heterotemporality,” echoing Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” reactivates sexual normativity as the cause and effect of “straight” temporality and historiography. Adopting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies,62 Menon writes that “the temporal version of decolonization—what may be termed dechronolization—would involve taking anachronism seriously and defying difference as the underwriter of history.”63 Under the banners of homohistory and unhistoricism, Menon rejects not only historical difference but what she sees as its theoretically suspect corollaries—facts, origins, authenticity, and citation or naming—to which she believes historicists naively adhere.
Composing what increasingly seems a united front, these scholars resist historicism on the grounds that it exaggerates the self-identity of any given moment and therefore exaggerates the differences between any two moments. Against what they view as a compulsory regime of historical alterity, they elevate anachronism and similitude as the expression of queer insurgency. Their readings offer persuasive examples of how queerness animates and troubles ostensibly heterosexual literary texts and cultural discourses. Their strengths as critics reside in the ability to see beyond heterosexuality’s inscription on textual form as well as their attentiveness to the vicissitudes of desire and the failures of sexuality. Their contributions as theorists include their fashioning of a queer analytic that encompasses a range of relations that do not conspire to any intelligible identity. Furthermore, a deep ethical commitment to deconstructive exposure—as a mode of reading, as politics, as theory—informs their provocations. Whether one applauds, as I do, or abhors, as others might, the political implications of continually exposing identity’s contradictions and indeterminacy (a debate now three decades old), their readings amply demonstrate the stresses and fractures within the normative, as well as the distinctive capacity of literary texts to solicit our awareness of such productive contradictions.
Readings, however, are not the same thing as history; more precisely, deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts, while they contribute much to historical understanding, do not necessarily conduce to a historical explanation. For all the undeniable utility of deconstruction, in particular, as an interpretative protocol, these critics, I submit, overestimate its analytical capacity and explanatory power. Although deconstruction exposes the contingency of—and thus implicitly historicizes—truth claims, the extent to which its largely synchronic hermeneutic can succeed as a full-scale historiographic method remains unresolved. Whereas deconstruction may be an extraordinary technique for elucidating queerness in time, it has not, at least not yet, demonstrated a satisfying capacity for analyzing temporality in all of its dimensions, including elucidating forms of queerness across time.64
So how is it that these scholars make their argument with such persuasive force? To understand this, we need to attend to the rhetorical maneuvers and conceptual conflations that underlie their indictments of difference, chronology, and periodization. First, an associational logic pervades their work, wherein historical difference, chronology, periodization, and empirical facts are positioned in an endlessly self-incriminating and disqualifying feedback loop. These conflations reflect a general tendency toward analogical argumentation. As should be clear from their own words, Goldberg, Menon, and Freccero’s rejection of “straight temporality” forges a tight metonymic chain among the alleged operations of sex, time, and history. They accomplish these linkages via rhetorical maneuvers whereby difference and sameness are constellated with concepts that stand in as near cognates: not only hetero and homo, but distance and proximity, multiplicity and self-identity, change and stasis, disidentification and mimesis. These close cognates allude to both abstract theoretical principles and specific material realities. Yet, drawn as they are from different epistemological registers—psychic, social, temporal, formal, historiographic—and abstracted from contexts of space or time, they are rhetorically deployed so as to cross seamlessly from one conceptual domain to another. This unmarked analogic process forges a metonymic chain, whereby a tug on one link causes movement in another. However, because these analogies are asserted presumptively rather than argued, and sustained by the play of metaphors rather than by discursive or material connections, when the conceptual space or difference between these concepts becomes inconvenient, they are silently sundered—allowing great latitude for equivocation.
It remains unclear why analogical argumentation—familiar to readers of medieval and Renaissance texts as a dominant style of reasoning65—might be especially suited for queer analysis. Nor is it clear why a particular mode of analogical thinking, that signified by the rhetorical trope metalepsis, is heralded by Freccero and Menon as an exemplary queer analytical tool. Metalepsis occurs when a present
