Held in common: Romeo and Juliet and the promiscuous seductions of plague
There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,
In that word’s death.1
The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.2
I begin with a proposition I do not mean to pursue: In Foucauldian terms, Romeo and Juliet is shaped by the spectacular power of the Prince.
One could make the case. The interdict Prince Escalus issues against the feud is affirmed (although not until the play’s end); his prediction that lives will be forfeit is fulfilled (although they are not the lives he names); his edict of banishment is obeyed (although not for long); he has the last word (although it obscures more than it controls). I wonder, then, why the claim that identifies sovereignty as an efficient cause feels so odd. One obvious answer emerges from the pleasure of defiance: if the doomed love of Romeo and Juliet attaches beguiling mystique to undisciplined desire, then government shifts to the margins or slips beneath a more dominant force. The parenthetical qualifiers of my earlier sentence overshadow the clauses they modify. But mystique itself might redistribute and replicate the effects of centralized power, controlling unruly energies through the procedures that celebrate them; so Carla Freccero asks of the play’s final, static memorials, ‘Isn’t this what “politics,” by which here we understand a certain social order, wants?’3 Collaborative idealization of a rebellious union absorbs idiosyncrasy into sociality. If you can’t beat them, arrest and appropriate the forces that join them.
And yet, Freccero notes, ‘Shakespeare is having it both ways’, poising a legible public sign against ‘the meaningless, absolute, irrational queer force’ of the death drive.4 Jonathan Goldberg instead argues that readers have it both ways, as he critiques transcendental and heterosexist readings of Romeo and Juliet: ‘what makes their love so valuable is that it serves as a nexus for the social and can be mystified as outside the social’.5 Goldberg and Freccero situate the twofold impulse differently, but these are cognate dualities. Each illuminates taxonomies of scale, which might conserve the individual at the expense of the communal or consume the individual in the service of the social. The disparate vectors of conservation and consumption matter less than the imperative that assigns proper objects to those drives. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, then, the question of how to value their desire-imbued bodies gives way to the question of what can be built on a symbolic carapace emptied of flesh. As synecdoche or sacrifice, as icon or caution, the merged corpus of the lovers promises a future purged of infectious excess.6 Goldberg and Freccero resist the functional paradox that would have it both ways, pushing back against a double move which, as it subsumes compliance and deviance under the paradigm of use, fixes persons within social abstractions. Their readings recognize the queer force of itinerant desires, emphasizing drives and bonds that refuse to fit or fade or be still. Here I want to turn that project towards the seductive potential of contagion, and consider the lethal reciprocities that render subjects pervious to one another. More specifically, I want to think about plague.
In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘We need to re-think death, the ultimate subtraction, as another phase in a generative process’. Braidotti contends that ‘this life-death continuum’ reveals the force of communion: ‘It connects us trans-individually, trans-generationally and eco-philosophically’.7 Her analysis resonates with other attempts to rethink community through death, and to recalibrate embodied personhood as a condition that traverses insular subjectivity.8 Such arguments reach back, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Georges Bataille’s influential formulation:
I propose to admit, as a law, that human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds; this notion has, in itself, a certain logical force. If elements are put together to form a whole, this can easily happen when each one loses, through a rip in its integrity, a part of its own being, which goes to benefit the communal being.9
Dis-integrated beings, whose wounds bleed beyond the bounds of functional sociality or autonomous personhood, pose an alternative to Michel Foucault’s docile bodies and Louis Althusser’s always-already subjects.10 This alternative has a particular bite for Romeo and Juliet, in which dying is at once over-celebrated and curiously under-motivated. One could say that death, as ritual sacrifice, serves the needs of a disembodied social order; one could say that ‘embodied subjects are interacting and inter-killing’ to translate reckless actors into static signs.11 Yet there is something insufficient about this account, if only because Romeo and Juliet themselves are insufficient to a sacrificial causality. Even Harold Bloom finds the aftermath of their deaths more bathetic than sublime: ‘What is left on stage at the close of this tragedy is an absurd pathos’.12 I suggest that the unhindered transfer of bodily fragilities points to something other than social parable or individuated pain. In a play that sequesters its privileged subjects first in a synoptic chorus and finally in an epitaphic couplet, the joint predicament of mortal, sexual bodies activates modes of communion that cause a stutter in social taxonomies. It is on these terms that we might understand infectious communion as queer.
Romeo and Juliet, like the plague writings with which it shares a linguistic preoccupation and a historical moment, theorizes the communities forged by contagion. This is not in itself a startling insight. ‘From its first visitation in 1348 to well after its last in 1666, the bubonic plague inhabited England and the lives of her citizens’, Rebecca Totaro writes. ‘No one escaped its threat. No one could imagine immunity’.13 Given the rapid cycle of outbreaks, any effect of widespread transmission, whether affective, corporeal or conceptual, metonymically extends towards epidemic potentialities. Still, I want to underscore a corollary effect: the dynamics of contagion cannot sustain hierarchical distinctions between the social and the individual. Neither rampant infections nor the strategies that oppose them divorce idiosyncrasy from sociality.
Plague explodes such discretions as it situates both threat and response within a collective frame, the logics of which do not entirely cohere with a disciplined public sphere. If, as the play’s language insists, Romeo suffers a degenerative malady – ‘I have lost myself, I am not here. / This is not Romeo’ (1.1.197–8) – his condition of self-loss does not segregate him from others. When Mercutio draws him back into legible identities and affinities – ‘Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art’ (2.4.89–90) – he embraces his own death: ‘why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm’ (3.1.103–4). The ‘you’ who bears the mark of disease intervenes among the ‘us’ who constitute sociality; whether disowned or claimed, the touch is transferred. To read Romeo and Juliet as saturated with epidemic potential is to see affiliation as a welter of capricious indiscretions. Live bodies connect in deadly bonds that endanger privileged systems, even as dead bodies share spaces that breed lively fusions of flesh. Contagious in both life and death, communal intercourse blurs the line between transient persons and enduring structures, and expands propagation beyond generative descent. To put this in bare terms: Futurity cannot be sanitized when mass graves undergird the project of social survival. At the end of Romeo and Juliet, on what ground do those golden statues stand?
Words
This analytic trajectory has certain risks. I could define plague as crucial context, and veer towards historical determinism. I could cite the early modern fondness for analogies – or rather our retrospective notion of that fondness – and reduce the play to a microcosmic token perched atop a macrocosmic frame. I could trifle with equivalence, and apply the torque that renders textual formations identical with one another. In each case, I would anatomize contagion to provide something like diagnosis or cure. I want instead to highlight the play’s own troubled, nonlinear relationship between prodigal bonds and systemic constraints, its oscillating, overlapping investments in contagion and quarantine. It intrigues me that the critical history of Romeo and Juliet often manifests awareness of forces that cannot be accommodated, even when the investment in closure runs deep; so Northrop Frye asks, ‘But when we have a quite reasonable explanation for the tragedy, the feud between the families, why do we need to bring in the stars and such?’ His answer – ‘we shouldn’t assume that tragedy is something needing an explanation’14 – circles back to that question about our need. We may not need the plague to understand the play, but we – even an unexpectedly expansive ‘we’ – do seem to want more than sonnets or statues or a flock of sacrificial lambs.
I suggested that the link between epidemic contagion and anarchic communion is in part metonymic, an inexorable, indecorous slide from idea to idea and from word to thing.15 I would add that the link is also in some odd sense homonymic. This intuition is difficult to unpack, but it attempts to describe a shift across registers, through which structural resemblance at the level of expression becomes conceptual correspondence at the level of effect. Interrelation may fuse with pestilence because they sound the same in their articulation of signs: ‘Affliction is enamour’d of thy parts / And thou art wedded to calamity’ (3.3.2–3). Such messy compounds recall Freccero’s description of queer forces in language: ‘queer can also be a grammatical perversion, a misplaced pronoun, the wrong proper name.’16 For Romeo and Juliet, of course, wrong proper names are much to the point, and a grammatical perversion can be a sentence of death: ‘Then “banished” / Is death, misterm’d’, Romeo declares (3.3.20–1).17 What I want to get at here is a relationship between communion and contagion that is intimate and correlative but not unidirectional or causal. While it only echoes the play to say that love is a plague, it introduces a different dimension to say that plague, through the sheer ruthlessness of perilous association, has a great deal to do with love. It is after all in the context of plague that Théodore de Bèze invokes ‘that general band especially, wherwith man is bounde unto man, and that which without the taking away of humanity it selfe, cannot be broken’.18 In pandemic time, when the social world seems as fragile as the bodies that inhabit it, narrow protocols of coalition open outward to more volatile terms and forms.
The path along which I approach Romeo and Juliet is laid out by Mercutio’s thrice-repeated curse: ‘A plague o’ both your houses’ (3.1.92; 100–1; 107). The fame of the line tends to obscure its commonness. Shakespeare uses at least thirty versions of the curse, giving it voices famous (Richard III, Falstaff) and obscure (the Third Fisherman in Pericles), valences vitriolic (‘A plague upon your epileptic visage’) and comic (‘a plague o’ these pickle-herring!’).19 It is this quality of the common – common as quotidian, common as shared – that I want to press. For Romeo and Juliet, plague binds the literal disease that quarantines Friar John to the conceptual disease of deadly passion, mobilizing a rhetoric of morbidity inseparable from the rhetoric of desire. In its commonness and its commonality, the cliché that equates desire with disease resists the artifacts of exceptionalism. Contagion, as irrefusable connection, yokes flesh acts to speech acts, intermingles valued subjects with disposable persons, and locates intimate attachment not in a fixed relationship to social forms but in a supple, capacious lexicon of ways in which all mortal bodies might touch.
In a brief 2005 essay, Matthew J. Bolton proposes that we understand Mercutio’s curse as a speech act. ‘Mercutio’s dying words may possess more than rhetorical power, for it is a plague on a house that impedes Friar Laurence’s messenger and that hence leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet’, Bolton notes, and concludes, ‘Friar John’s internment in the sick-house may therefore be attributable neither to accident nor to fate, but to the dying Mercutio’s occult revenge upon the families that have killed him’.20 Whatever Mercutio’s witchy mad skills, Romeo and Juliet surely links a material causality – a friar’s encounter with ‘the infectious pestilence’ (5.2.10) – to an imagistic preoccupation with communion as disease. Here I am inclined to understand the curse not as necromantic nor even as performative, but rather as indicative of a bridge between the contagion of bodies and the contagion of ideas, across which words migrate into bodies and bodies into words. Thomas Dekker models this interpenetration in his appeal to plague victims: ‘with your bodies cast a ring about me: let me behold your ghastly vizages, that my paper may receive their true pictures: Eccho forth your grones through the hollow truncke of my pen, and raine downe your gummy teares into mine Incke’.21 Within the idiom of plague, language is interlaced with flesh. And if this is merely coherent with early modern theories of porosity, it is nonetheless worth noting that some words are more communicable than others.
I do not dismiss the speech act; I find it useful to consider the Prince’s edict and Mercutio’s curse as locutions that aspire to inherent realization. ‘Throw your mistemper’d weapons to the ground / And hear the sentence of your moved prince’ (1.1.87–8): this is strong stuff, immediate as a ruler’s word should be. One might wonder why Escalus doesn’t stop the bloodshed earlier, but cynicism whispers that it could prove politic – a delicate balance of dangerous powers – until it kills too many useful subjects. From this angle the feud has a preservative effect, isolating each family in the static exactitude of sanctioned self-replication. When Capulet tells Juliet, ‘And you be mine I’ll give you to my friend; / And you be not, hang! Beg! Starve! Die in the streets!’, his violent chastisement may not oppose the priorities of his monarch (3.5.192–3). If we follow the thought farther, we arrive at a linguistic rivalry between Escalus and Mercutio. Where Escalus’s decree mandates separation, Mercutio’s curse demands union: the phrase ‘a plague on’ is a commonplace, but the word ‘both’ makes plague itself a common place, a site at which warring factions meet. The feud, well-regulated by the sovereign, conserves through quarantine; the curse, ill-conceived by a subject, destroys through contagion; people die; plague wins.
Yet I do not think this is what happens at all. A different line of thought might begin with skepticism about the Prince’s efficacy. ‘Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, / Profaners of this neighbour-stained steel – / Will they not hear?’ (1.1.81–3): the question hints that quarantine fails because no one listens to the man who speaks it. In his long poem The Triumph of Death, John Davies, like most writers of plague treatises, argues that an epidemic reduces civil authority either to culpable neglect or to profound irrelevance: ‘The Magistrates did flie, or if they staid, / They staid to pray, for if they did command, / Hardly, or never should they be obaid’.22 But people do listen to Escalus, and recur to his words: ‘The Prince expressly hath / Forbid this bandying in Verona streets’ (3.1.87–8); ‘The Prince will doom thee death / If thou art taken’ (3.1.135–6); ‘What less than doomsday is the Prince’s doom?’ (3.3.9). The problem is rather that sovereign will circulates amidst a generalized awareness of deadly possibilities. In a broad sense such awareness is characteristic of discipline; we glimpse the panopticon when Benvolio warns, ‘Here all eyes gaze on us’ (3.1.52). But the vectored precision of discipline becomes indiscriminate and diffuse when law is just another word for nothing left to lose. Before the Prince speaks, we hear the citizens: ‘Clubs, bills and partisans! Strike! Beat them down! Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!’ (1.1.72–4). This reveals not only that the feud’s infection has spread, but that it has suffused its constituents with sameness. ‘Two households both alike in dignity’ have become symptoms of a general condition rather than discrete objects of sovereign control (Prologue, 1). ‘If ever you disturb our streets again / Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace’ (1.1.96–7): those words ‘if’ and ‘again’ capture the mix of belatedness and deferral that disaggregates the speech act. When the ruler suspends power in a counterfactual ‘if’, the spectre of that power travels into a common place, where subjects amalgamate and forfeiture becomes enfolded within the larger contagion of ideas. One word for that place might be ‘doom’, with its manifold definitions: ‘A statute, law, enactment’; ‘The last day of one’s life’; ‘The action or process of judging’; ‘Final fate, destruction, ruin, death’.23 Each meaning circulates in the late sixteenth century. How then can one separate the curse from the law, or the plague from the Prince?
Both Escalus and Mercutio set out to prescribe violent revisions of the relationship between the individual and the social; both are caught in the time trap that renders their words descriptive of a communal endemic state. The infection first appears in the prefatory sonnet, carried by the word ‘alike’; it travels across discipline and desire, law and rebellion, rivalry and alliance, so lines of distinction instead weave a web. ‘Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished’, the Prince promises in his faintly epilogic speech, but these amorphous groups and equivocal acts take no shape (5.3.308). This is the last gasp of a taxonomic system that has ceased to bear its own weight. Quarantine and contagion reveal their intricate interdependence as bodies and ideas converge to coincidence. The unbounded ardor that spreads from Juliet’s ‘borrow’d likeness of shrunk death’ (4.1.104) to the fatal crossings of Juliet, Romeo and Paris originates in the methodical confinement of Friar John: ‘the searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Seal’d up the doors and would not let us forth’ (5.2.8–11). The letter returns to Friar Laurence – ‘I could not send it — here it is again — / Nor get a messenger to bring it thee, / So fearful were they of infection’ (5.2.14–16) – who must read the transposition of his intent. ‘The sender, we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form’, Jacques Lacan writes, and concludes, ‘a letter always arrives at its destination’.24 We might find that destination in the last line of Davies’ quatrain: ‘Death dares all Authority withstand’.
In the final scene, the Prince asserts a proper, if improbable, recuperation of government: ‘Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while / Till we can clear these ambiguities / And know their spring, their head, their true descent’ (5.3.216–18). But the speech pivots on a point of implication, for the Prince has already admitted he has skin in this game: ‘I have an interest in your hearts’ proceeding; / My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding’ (3.1.189–90). The fall from dispassion into kinship twists the end of the later speech: ‘And then will I be general of your woes / And lead you, even to death’ (5.3.219–20). This pledge invites attention. We could note that it remains unfulfilled within the scope of the play; we could confine the moveable, mutable dead within the cordon sanitaire of a sonnet and a couplet.25 We could let the last scene manufacture eternization and certainty, individuation and iconicity, whether we commend or condemn these products. But we would ignore the ephemeral, interrelational, seductive perils with which the play is so deeply concerned. This is where I do think Romeo and Juliet is shaped by the Prince: not by his invincible power of decree, but by his helpless openness to contact. The epidemic consummation he anticipates – ‘even unto death’ – does not happen in our view, but its appearance as a deferred subjunctive reminds us that any separation between the actual and the counterfactual dead is only a matter of time. We do not just inherit symbols from this play; we inherit sharp questions about the discrete boxes that populate symbolic systems and the imbricated spaces in which people live. Even as the play indulges in clichés of exceptionalism and immortality, it foregrounds that other, collective truism voiced by Capulet: ‘Well, we were born to die’ (3.4.4).
Graves
If anyone approximates a speech act, it might be Juliet: ‘I should kill thee with much cherishing’ (2.2.183). Yet here again I read the locution as descriptive, and indeed I would describe all those heavy-handed ironies – ‘My grave is like to be my wedding bed’ (1.5.135); ‘Alas poor Romeo, he is already dead’ (2.4.14); ‘I dreamt my lady came and found me dead’ (5.1.6) – as the verbal tics of an infected world. All bonds can prove deadly in such a world. We could listen to Mercutio: ‘Nay, and there were two such, we should have none shortly, for one would kill the other’ (3.1.15–16). We could listen to E. K. Chambers: ‘Love comes into life like a sword, touching here a man and there a woman, and scorching them with a terrible flame’.26 We could listen to Alan Sinfield: ‘The processes of desire were uneven and risky and, pursued under pressure, might be threatening to the psyche and, at least in the drama, to life’.27 And we could listen to plague writers: ‘It was confusion but a friend to greet, / For, like a Fiend, he baned with his breath’.28 Vocabularies within and around the play speak a shared conviction: the ties that hold persons in common create lethal contiguities, so that any touch might kill.
My question, still, is how this kind of affiliation – intimate, indiscriminate, fecund, fatal – intersects social imperatives. Those imperatives persist in Romeo and Juliet; to think otherwise would be to imagine that desire and death could exempt subjects from ideological inscription. ‘Love, from the start of the play, is implicated in the social, not separate from it’, Goldberg writes; more than two decades later, Crystal Bartolovich stresses ‘the social interdependence on which all life, all “individuals” – indeed all love – depends’.29 I can only agree; the escape from social subjectivity is precisely as easy to fantasize as it is difficult to achieve, for radical individualism is an illusion calibrated to serve corporate ends. But I wonder whether an unquantified multiple of persons might become, at least to a degree, socially unintelligible through being individual in that other sense of indivisible.30 What if love and death attach not to unique beings or dyadic units, but to messy heaps? What might such cumulations mean for identity and sociality?
Bèze calls on ‘that general band’ to argue that citizens should risk infection to preserve communion. Romeo and Juliet, like early modern plague writing, flatly asserts that anyone might die, and neither obscures nor evades the consequent proposition that everyone might die. The explicitness of ubiquitous mortality creates situational ideologies, systems of valuation and intersection that interrupt dominant orthodoxies. Situational ideologies remain ideological – they represent ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’31 – but the terms of imagination and existence change. So categories, in Romeo and Juliet, lose crystal distinction to confused overlap as events press towards death. Marriage shifts from structured reparation – ‘For this alliance may so happy prove / To turn your households’ rancour to pure love’ (2.3.87–8) – to mutual annihilation: ‘These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume’ (2.6.9–11). The feud provides a formula for action based in distinction – ‘Now by the stock and honour of my kin, / To strike him dead I hold it not a sin’ (1.5.58–9) – until it condenses too many debts of kind: ‘My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt / In my behalf — my reputation stain’d / With Tybalt’s slander — Tybalt that an hour / Hath been my cousin’ (3.1.111–14). The clear utility of affiliation and partition yields to the apparent disarray of condensation and consumption, a move not from order to chaos but from a socially legible logic to one that is more urgent and more obscure. For Juliet, that second logic undoes the difference between eradication and survival. When she believes Tybalt and Romeo are dead, she recognizes an apocalyptic moment: ‘Then dreadful trumpet sound the general doom, / For who is living if those two are gone?’ (3.2.67–8). When she knows Romeo is alive, the cataclysm expands: ‘to speak that word / Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet, / All slain, all dead. Romeo is banished, / There is no end, no limit, measure, bound, / In that word’s death’ (3.2.122–6). This is irrational only by familiar metrics, and Juliet already inhabits strange norms. Her series of deaths – imagined, feigned, consummated – is less progression than reiteration. When Friar Laurence says, ‘Lady, come from that nest / Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep’ (5.3.151–2), he attempts to unravel strands that have fused. ‘Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain, / And Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before, / Warm, and new kill’d’ (5.3.195–7): this is where we end, in a tangle of bodies and timelines and names and bonds.32
When no one is immune, more flexible if also more terrible ways of being in common appear: ‘Friends here kill’d friends, womb-fellowes Kill their Brothers / Fathers their Sons, and Daughters kill their Mothers: / By one another (strange!) so many di’de / And yet no murder here, no Homicide’.33 Units of kinship and alliance do not succumb to barrenness; they explode into generation, but their creation is the teeming promiscuity of mass graves. In an epidemic context, Andrew Marvell’s famous claim – ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace’ – has the feel of arrant fantasy. When Juliet consents to her death trick, she pictures ‘a vault, an ancient receptacle / Where for this many hundred years the bones / Of all my buried ancestors are pack’d’ (4.3.39–41). That crowded space drives her to predict a riot of dissolute intercourse:
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefathers’ joints,
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud,
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone
As with a club dash out my desperate brains?
(4.3.49–54)
Romeo, too, finds little privacy in a grave where his embrace has been pre-empted: ‘Ah, dear Juliet, / Why art thou yet so fair?’ he asks; ‘Shall I believe / That unsubstantial Death is amorous, / And that the lean abhorred monster keeps / Thee here in dark to be his paramour?’ (5.3.101–5). Whatever death’s desires may be, the collection of corpses exerts a magnetic pull on everyone else: ‘Hide me nightly in a charnel-house / O’ercover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones’ (Juliet, 4.1.81–2); ‘Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight. / Let’s see for means’ (Romeo, 5.1.34–5); ‘O, I am slain! If thou be merciful, / Open the tomb, lay me with Juliet’ (Paris, 5.3.72–3). The tomb that should assure a final segregation – only Capulets rot here – becomes a catholic destination. Lady Capulet observes that the public has joined the rush: ‘O, the people in the street cry “Romeo”, / Some “Juliet”, and some “Paris”, and all run / With open outcry toward our monument’ (5.3.191–3). If Romeo and Juliet must give us a monument, golden statues could give way to this: a tomb bursting with deviant desires, intermingling friends and enemies and beauty and bones, entwining and ending family lines, erasing distinctions between vitality and mortality, and drawing all subjects into an unseemly confusion of persons and passions that will not stop for death.
For a plague-stricken populace, the mass grave is a constant preoccupation defined as improper union. Dekker chastises London for indifferent, indecent funerals: ‘thou tumbledst them into their everlasting lodgings (ten in one heape, and twenty in another) as if all the roomes upon earth had bin full. The gallant and the begger lay together; the scholler and the carter in one bed: the husband saw his wife, and his deadly enemy whom he hated, within a paire of sheetes’.34 His vivid apostrophe to a prospective victim concludes, ‘If thou art in love with thy selfe, this cannot choose but possesse thee with frenzie’.35 Loss of separateness becomes loss of self, a drastic uncoupling both from individual autonomy and from ordered sociality. And that uncoupling facilitates unlimited re-couplings, consummated in a postmortem orgy of overpopulated sheets. One need only glance at John Donne to see how sexual proscription and social discretion fall to the same coalescent force: ‘Miserable incest, when I must bee maried to my mother and my sister, and bee both father and mother to my owne mother and sister … when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction, if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equall to Princes, for they shall bee equall but in dust’. Like Dekker, Donne concludes his passage with the utter vitiation of self: ‘This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that wee can consider’.36
The problem is less annulment than permeability, a contiguous diffusion troubled by knowledge of the borders it violates. In Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, ‘The cadavers in a mass grave aren’t the dead, they aren’t our dead: they are wounds heaped up, stuck in, flowing into one another … Through another concentration, bodies are only signs annulled’.37 This is a trenchant critique of how we discard persons whose classification has shifted from worth to waste. Yet the wounds that flow towards coalescence also define Bataille’s account of communion. Mass graves lay bare the ambivalence of inter-implication within an epidemic of bonds. When communion becomes a contagion that slides into dissolution, on what grounds does one choose between a desire for isolate security and an acceptance of unsafe intimacy? Plague is, by early modern definition, an event that disables elective faculties; few decide to fall ill, and many remain in spaces of danger out of necessity rather than choice. At the same time, however, the very vastness of its scale establishes an interrelational system of local choices, at once alternative to and operative within established social structures. If we can imagine a decision to engage made under the coercive imposition of proximity, a meaningful determination that confounds agential and fatalistic states, we might glimpse affinities and pluralities that unsquare the box of social subjectivity.
I find contagion a useful fulcrum for ideas about how queer methodologies continue to expand, reaching beyond the identities and acts privileged either by their historical situation or by our historical knowledge. It is, at least arguably, difficult for sexuality to escape taxonomies of social value when it is seen through the lens of particular persons and procedures. Can an infinitely multiplicative interpenetration transect boundaries with enough force to challenge instrumental dispositions? While this question does not lend itself to a simple ‘yes’, it does illuminate a synthesis of action and passion that neither idealizes a subject nor disposes of an object. For those cumulated persons who neither escape contagion nor choose it, the shared dilemma of presentness might beget reciprocities of recognition and desire. And if such bonds are precarious, contingent, mutable, elastic, ambivalent, unexpected, opportunistic or transient – if they occur at an angle to orthodox patterns of connection – it is perhaps in this sense that they resonate as queer. Still, I want to conclude by stressing the limits of the model I have proposed. To draw out the epidemic interrelations in Romeo and Juliet is not to conjure a queer utopian future; inextricable from the nexus of contagion and communion is an awareness that there may be no viable future at all. Nor does this sort of ‘no future’ license its implicated persons to abjure sociality. Contagion actuates annihilation rather than nihilism, negation rather than abnegation; it lacks the explosive grandeur of self-shattering or the implosive splendor of jouissance. If the intimacies I trace have heterodox force, such force inheres in a communion that reveals something intrinsic to sociality itself. Symbolic systems are contingent on bodies that do more than fuel a machine. The interdependence of abstract structures and transitory persons becomes visible at moments of common risk, when desirous, porous, blighted, conjoint and moribund bodies fill the space of social subjects. This is what we might see if we refuse to sheathe fickle flesh in constant gold.