The Explanation For Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

by Paul Morrison

"The claim 'I'm straight' is the psychosexual analogue of 'The check is in the mail': if you need to say it, your credit or creditability is already in doubt." So begins Paul Morrison's dazzling polemic, which takes as its point of departure Foucault's famous remark that sex is "the explanation for everything."

Combining psychoanalytic, literary, and queer theory, The Explanation for Everything seeks to account for the explanatory power attributed to homosexuality, and its relationship to compulsory heterosexuality. In the process, Morrison presents a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis and its impact on the study of sexuality. In bold but graceful leaps, Morrison applies his critique to a diversity of examples: subjectivity in Oscar Wilde, the cultural construction and reception of AIDS, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the practice of bodybuilding, and the contemporary reception of the sexual politics of fascism.

Analytical, witty and astute, The Explanation for Everything will challenge and amuse, establishing Paul Morrison as one of our most exciting cultural critics.

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Brenden O'Donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morrison's book critiques liberalism in a way that does not dismiss or ignore the project of gay activism. Of course, it is not very merciful toward it either, which I appreciate and find very helpful. The “trace-and-expose” logic founded by theorists like Eve Sedgwick, which assumes that there is a definable enemy of gay liberation, constantly creates its object of critique as it aims to overthrow it (144). At the core of this liberal mistake, it seems, is our culture's relentless hold on the narrative, the epitome of which being the process of psychoanalysis. Morrison's attack on psychoanalysis risks making the book into nothing more than an account of the Foucaultian turn in literary studies. But he takes his argument so far beyond literature that, by the end of the book, his references to Oscar Wilde look like campy metaphors.

At first Morrison's criticism of narrative (via psychoanalysis) is supported by his analysis of The Picture of Dorian Grey. The chapter “End Pleasure” raises the stakes on narrative, claiming that it is used as a frighteningly effective tool for heterosexism: “The pandemic [HIV/AIDS] has resolved, rather than occasioned, a crisis in signification” (55). Heterosexist (liberal and conservative) media sells recognition of a person's HIV+ condition as a “belatedly revealed truth” (54) in the story of that person's life. Media sources may very well demonize the disease, humanize the gay person, and (often prematurely) mourn their loss. But it does all this without his or her consent. The only alternative to being told your own truth, to surrendering control over the representation of your life, is sinking to “the erotic excess that is called perversion” (81).

Cultivating criticism in narrative as “a good or goal in itself” (59) raises the same curtain on liberalism that Edelman's future does; it shows that the presentation of cultural concepts can mask the high stakes of gay subjectivity. Morrison, unlike Edelman, pays much attention to these high stakes, dedicating a whole chapter to confronting charges of paranoia and irrationality. The books feels like it comes full-circle without hitting me over the head with a sentimental liberal agenda. It's one of the most self-aware and carefully executed works of scholarship I've read in a long time.