Where Is It That We Were Together?: Nomads, Combinards, and the Queer Knight with Two Swords
Eileen A. Joy

[abstract for a chapter to be contributed to Fragments For a History of a Vanishing Humanism, ed. Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, and Betsy McCormick)

Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with, walked with?—the brother, the friend. Darkness, light, strife and love, are they the workings of one mind, the features of the same face? Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you made. All things shinin’. (Jim Caviezel as Witt, The Thin Red Line)[1]

Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. (Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” [interview], Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth)

This essay will explore the tension between two assessments—one medieval and one modern—regarding what might be called the question of the “species” of the human individual. First, in Book 12, Chapter 21 of De civitate dei, Augustine wrote that, unlike all other living creatures and animals, God chose to create the entire race of man from only one individual, “not certainly, that he might be a solitary bereft of society, but by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection.”[2] But according to most contemporary social theorists—such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash—the late modern individual, in contrast to the individual living in the premodern world, has been, in a sense, completely cut loose from her social bonds and does not even retain, as a remainder, her own intact selfhood (whatever “intact” might mean). According to Lash, this individual is “a combinard” who “puts together networks, constructs alliances, makes deals,” and “must live, is forced to live in an atmosphere of risk in which self-knowledge and life-chances are precarious.” Further, she is a nomad who lives in “regularizable chaos” at “the interface of the social and the technical.”[3] In Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s formulation, the modern individual is caught in a continual self-reflexive processes of “disembedding without reembedding” and the human being is “a tray full of sparkling snapshots”: only “a choice among possibilities, homo optinis.”[4] One of the reasons for this state of affairs, according to Giddens, is that, whereas “in premodern settings . . . time and space were connected through the situatedness of place,” in late modernity social relations are “lifted out” from local contexts and rearticulated “across indefinite tracts of time-space.”[5]

Beginning with Bauman’s statement that society has “always stood in ambiguous relation to individual autonomy: it was, simultaneously its enemy and its sine qua non condition,”[6] and through a reading of the purposeless “quest” of Balyn, the knight with two swords, in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, this essay will propose that the supposedly late modern “combinard” had already emerged in a Middle Ages that could be as multi-local and non-linear as Bauman’s “liquid modernity.” It will be argued that “the human” has always been in the process of coming “unstuck” from what might be called the consolations of local times and places and tightly-woven “family” groups, partly because the idea of the heroic individual “mastering” the world—whether the knight in Camelot or the financier on Wall Street—has been essential to the valorization of the human subject, while at the same time, that same heroic individual can only ever really succeed or fail on the terms set by the group in relation to which she is always coming “undone.” This is ultimately problematic for any humanism that would depend on a notion of a particulate being whose individuality is supposedly uniquely separate (and sacred), yet always has to be “attached” somehow to the group who would recognize the rights (or sanctity) of the “person.” Following the thinking of Leo Bersani that “we are neither present in the world nor absent from it,”[7] this essay will ultimately argue for a conception of the human person as itself a type of queer location (a “highly localized site of awareness” in the words of David Gary Shaw[8] or an embodied form of disorientation in the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed) through which human subjectivity is not ever full exceeded, but should be moved, in its always "slantwise" singularity and with intense affectivity, toward “a community grounded in anonymity and held together by an absence of both individuality and leadership.”[9]

Endnotes