A_Sociality as a Model Figure of Ambiguity

Abstract

Ambiguity has been the guiding motive of my queer theoretical considerations from the very beginning. Early on I propose to characterize queer politics through strategies of undisambiguation or equivocation (VerUneindeutigung) rather than diversification or abolishment of heteronormative sexual difference (Engel 2002). In the essay I will reconstruct the different epistemological steps from undisambiguation through queer politics of paradox to what I call today ‘queerness as lived ambiguity’. I will explicate how the notion of ambiguity fulfills a double function in queer theory, namely underlining ambiguity’s livability (multidimensional identities are neither stable nor coherent) and explaining its political potential (overcoming clear-cut borders and simplified antagonisms). In the main part of the essay I will focus on a_sociality as figure of ambiguity, arguing that queerness as lived ambiguity goes along with an understanding of relationality and kinship defined by a continuum or simultaneity of sociality, anti-sociality, and asociality, named a_sociality. My thesis is that in avowing the ambiguity of a_sociality it becomes possible to move towards forms of cohabitation under conditions of social and global heterogeneity. However, a_sociality is defined not only by ambiguity but also by ambivalence. It is from this proximate though distinct relation that politics evolve. What Judith Butler (2020) discusses as an ethical attitude of ‘aggressive nonviolence’ turns out to be an ambiguous term that fosters decisions that simultaneously acknowledge and overcome ambivalence.