History and the flesh: Caravaggio's sexual aesthetic

This chapter describes some responses to the questions by reading some poses in a number of Caravaggio's paintings. It argues that what makes Caravaggio's paintings queer is their relation to hermeneutics and to history—to the hermeneutics of historiation. The chapter argues that Caravaggio's poses refer to a dehiscence in the symbolic order, the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made to signify monolithically. The drive need not be obscured by desire. It can also change its aim from one that it primarily sexual to one that is primarily social. The particular sexual aim of jouissance is translated into a social aim on the condition that jouissance be desexualized. Historically preceding the invention of "the homosexual," this homo-ness is a "self-shattering" jouissance intrinsic to homosexuality, an "anti-identitarian identity" that defines homosexual sociality through the confrontation of that identity with anti relationality.