Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry 9781517907181, 9781517907198

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Why the Politics of Curiosity?
Chapter 1. A Political History of Curiosity
Part I. Episodes from Political Theory
Chapter 2. Friedrich Nietzsche: Curiosity and the Scene of Struggle
Chapter 3. Michel Foucault: Institutionalized Curiosity and Resistance
Chapter 4. Jacques Derrida: Sovereign Curiosity and Deconstruction
Part II. Archives of Political Experience
Chapter 5. Curiosity, Activism, and Political Resistance
Chapter 6. Cripping Curiosity: A Critical Disability Framework
Chapter 7. Trans Curiosity: Beyond the Curio
Unsettling Curiosity
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

CURIOSITY AND POWER

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Curiosity and Power THE POLITICS OF INQUIRY

Perry Zurn

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Portions of chapter 4 were published in “The Curiosity at Work in Deconstruction,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 65–­87. Portions of chapter 5 were published in “Curiosity and Political Resistance,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, ed. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar, 227–­45 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Portions of chapter 7 were published in “Puzzle Pieces: Shapes of Trans Curiosity,” APA Newsletter on LGBTQ Issues in Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2019): 10–­16. Copyright 2021 by Perry Zurn All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0718-1 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0719-8 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058490 Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

UMP BmB 2021

Contents

Preface vii Why the Politics of Curiosity? 1. A Political History of Curiosity

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Part I. Episodes from Political Theory 2. Friedrich Nietzsche: Curiosity and the Scene of Struggle

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3. Michel Foucault: Institutionalized Curiosity and Resistance

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4. Jacques Derrida: Sovereign Curiosity and Deconstruction

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Part II. Archives of Political Experience 5. Curiosity, Activism, and Political Resistance

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6. Cripping Curiosity: A Critical Disability Framework

149

7. Trans Curiosity: Beyond the Curio

173

Unsettling Curiosity

199

Acknowledgments 221 Notes 225 Index 279

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Preface

It is rare to place a scholarly project in personal context. And yet, when it comes to the politics of curiosity, and the politics of my curiosity in particular, it seems incumbent—­for the sake of honesty, as much as accountability—­to do so, if ever so briefly. It is commonplace to think of curiosity as uniquely belonging to childhood. In my case, the expectation was true, although perhaps in unexpected ways. I was homeschooled in the foothills of Central Pennsylvania. The experience was always wholistic, often experimental. Buried in our twenty-two-­volume encyclopedia, surrounded by over a thousand books, I remember imagining knowledge as an endless series of pages, stretching out in every direction. My mother, a creative type, would constantly come up with projects that brought history and science to life. And my siblings and I would sit outside with sketchbooks until the rabbits came to sit side by side. Curiosity was connection. But curiosity can also break connection. Growing up in a conservative religious community, I spent a lot of time sitting in pews. I would get bored. So I started reading the Bible in Latin and doing music theory in the hymn book. I needed more stimulation. By the time I was of college age, I had fallen in love with the theology-­adjacent field of philosophy. People were concerned. After all, did not Saint Paul write, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8)? Through a series of adventures, however, I found myself majoring in philosophy at a small religious college in the Midwest. One day, my history professor called me into

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his office, lifted a large paper calendar from his wall, and revealed a handful or two of student photos underneath. “I pray for their souls,” he said in a doomed tone. My photo was among them. I had, after all, just written a paper on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. I lived for my honors courses. Bobbing and weaving through history, theology, philosophy, art, and science, I could not help but feel at home. In middle school, I had put together a “living” portfolio of mushrooms, everything from gills to mycelium, from ancient medicines to Alice in Wonderland. Now, in my junior year of college, I created a portfolio entitled “The Zeitgeist of Existentialism” (a proud and ponderous title). In it, I explained—­or so I thought—­what psychoanalysis, literary absurdism, and abstract expressionism had to do with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Prisming suits me. Not unrelatedly, I lucked into an invitation to join the Underground Chapel, poetically so named insofar as it met in the basement of the library, in a dark room tucked just behind the main staircase. Inspired by the Emergent Church movement, the group offered a welcome respite from daily chapel services in the mass auditorium, trading the jumbotron for silence, the flashing lights for candles, and conviction for compassion. We explored new ideas, affects, rituals, and traditions; asked the what and the wherefore; and took care of each other. It was a return to something wholistic and experimental. No question was irrelevant. But some questions were becoming unusually relevant. As I came into my queer identity, I also came into a unique visibility and I had trouble making sense of it all. Because the “LGBT lifestyle” was prohibited by the student code of conduct, the college put me on probation my senior year. Regular street harassment started in grad school. Luckily, as I traveled from the cornfields of Ohio to the Philly suburbs, back to the cornfields, and then on to Chicago, I got streetwise. But I wondered why? Why is this configuration of a body uniquely an object of curiosity, a spectacle, an offense? The natural target for hurling words, and bottles, and fists? School gave me partial answers. I first encountered feminism in undergrad: “I call it ‘Women in America,’” my professor proudly announced; she had finally gotten the course approved by applying a patriotic sheen. Deep in her face, I thought I could see a crease for each attempt. I met queer and trans theory in graduate school. But it was still hard to come by. Again, I wondered

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why? Why are these stories, these histories, these concepts less valuable, less scholarly, often hidden, and sometimes lost? Entering my doctoral program, I was eager to find my own voice in a field that had been my friend for so long. During my first year, one of my professors was denied tenure. The reason: her work was not philosophical enough. She was a woman of color, specializing in postcolonial theory. I still remember her eyes. Like someone pulled inside out and told to walk again. I thought back to my own academic probation and wondered: how can one’s muchness count as a lack? By some force of fate, I drew up a dissertation proposal on curiosity. But my advisors were hesitant. Curiosity is not an established philosophical topic, some said. It is not a true philosophical question, another intoned. I wondered: How does that get said? Get thought? Get decided? How does Alison Kafer get told that disability is not an academic topic, or Shay Welch that Native American philosophy is a nonstarter, or Robin Wall Kimmerer that her interest in Indigenous ecologies is not proper to a botanist? By what force and logic does a discipline become threatened by its own questions? And its own questioners? While writing my dissertation, I worked for the McNair Scholars Program, a nationwide initiative to prepare low-­income, first-­generation students for graduate school. The point was to transform the professoriat. In a cement-­block, windowless room, warmed by student photos, study abroad highlights, empowerment notes, and the occasional snack mix, I met student after student—­in art history, chemistry, communications, philosophy, political science, psychology, and more—­changing the questions and shifting the contours of their fields. Insisting that their voices be heard and their communities engaged, they tackled Chicago food deserts, diabetes, Latinx street art, epigenetics, and art therapy for activists. One summer, I returned to the foothills of Central Pennsylvania to help run the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI), a similar program for young philosophers. Without McNair and PIKSI students—­especially Brooklyn, Erica, Eyo, Ife, and Pau—­this book would not have been written. They taught me something timeless about the moment courage and curiosity intertwine. Not long after, I found myself at Hampshire College, in the heart of Western Massachusetts, for my first teaching gig. Hampshire lives by its motto, non satis scire—­to know is not enough. Affect, action,

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interdisciplinarity, and community partnership are its bedrocks. It is not enough to know, one must also feel. It is not enough to discern, one must also engage. It is not enough to collect, one must also create. It is not enough to specialize, one must also bridge. Never have I known a ruddier culture of curiosity. I recall coming to the close of my first scholarly presentation as a grad student. A Northwestern University professor shot up her hand and said, “So what? Why should I care?” At Hampshire, there is no curiosity without care. A care that humility characterize inquiry. That inherited values be second-­guessed. That change-­makers act in community. That social inequity and climate change be tackled head-­on. And that cultures of scarcity be met with abundance. It is an ethos for education and beyond. It is that beyond that got me writing. This book is situated in the messy spot between questions and questioners. I track how institutions and histories have informed who is curious, when, and how. And I track how curiosity, in turn, can consolidate or disrupt those institutions and those histories. I wrote it because I needed to read it. I needed to read a book about the politics of curiosity, in and beyond the discipline of philosophy. In it, I tend toward the experimental and the interdisciplinary. I attend to material-­discursive effects and to voices or histories lost and suppressed. Ultimately, I attempt to change the contours of philosophy—­to establish curiosity as a properly philosophical topic of inquiry, as much as to subject philosophy to the improprieties of a curiosity practiced in its own histories and at its own margins. And I do so by maintaining an accountability in community and aspiring to reroot curiosity in the political praxis of care. Many of my own questions have bubbled up easily from the interstices of reflexivity. But when a series of injuries and illnesses brought me to my knees just as I was graduating with a PhD and the several years thereafter, the vastness of what I had never wondered took my breath away. The words that follow are but steps in a journey to stay alive to the worlds that touch me, and to those they shadow. An apprenticeship in humility.

Why the Politics of Curiosity?

From 1810 to 1815, a Khoikhoi woman, dubbed Sarah Baartman, performed at exhibitions across England and France. She became a sensation as “The Hottentot Venus,” drawing large audiences in the cities of London and Paris, as well as in the countryside. Gaining the attentions of leading French naturalists, including Georges Cuvier, she was extensively examined as a scientific specimen in life and dissected and displayed (skeleton, brain, and genitals) in Paris museums after her death. When her remains were repatriated to South Africa in 2002, after new academic interest in her significance for the history of race and sexuality, her burial site was developed into a tourist stop. More than a century and a half after Baartman, in 1973, a pre-­ Pulitzer Prize–­winning Alice Walker went traipsing through a segregated cemetery of unmarked graves in Fort Pierce, Florida, looking for the interment site of Zora Neale Hurston. Now recognized as the most important Black woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance and the first major Black American folklorist, Hurston died in relative poverty and anonymity. Having located Hurston’s grave in an overgrown field—­“a resting place generally symbolic of the Black writer’s fate in America”1—­Walker purchased a headstone that reads: “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South.” What followed was an “avalanche”2 of scholarly attention and a cottage industry of Hurston studies. These two moments dramatize the force of spectacularization and of investigation, of looking at and looking for, of people curated as specimens and recovered as history. In a word, they dramatize the crosscurrents of curiosity. Baartman was an object of popular and

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medical curiosity, fueled by colonial culture and a specific formation of science. Through relentless scientific and media attention, she was made into a hyperracialized, hypersexualized spectacle, emblazoned in the colonial imaginary and then dismembered and memorialized in Paris museums. Burying her signified respect. For Walker, Hurston was a lost Black woman writer, erased from memory by the forces of white supremacist patriarchy and a specific formation of education. Walker had a desire to know Hurston—­as an element of a lost lineage. Through relentless care and concern, she found her and memorialized her not for what she was but for who she was. Marking Hurston’s resting place signified the importance of Black women writers, their legacies, and their kinships. More than its crosscurrents, these two moments dramatize the politics of curiosity. While curiosity can fetishize and objectify disempowered people, it can also awaken and mobilize. The one curiosity divides and segregates, like cut glass; the other culls and connects, like mycelium threads. Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry argues that the contours of who is curious, when, and how reflect the differential allocation of power. Indeed, the very scaffolding of curiosity in a given society is the product of political architectures. Attending to these architectures and allocations is crucial if we are to better understand—­ and more ethically navigate—­the struggle over inquiry in an unequal world. Across the history of philosophy, curiosity has received precious little sustained attention. Where it has garnered philosophical interest, curiosity has most often been understood as a question of ethics3 or epistemology.4 This emphasis stems directly from the ancient and medieval rejection of curiosity as a vice or moral disease and the modern endorsement of curiosity as the foundation of human learning. Today, some thinkers continue to debate whether curiosity is consistent with religious belief and/or scientific inquiry, while others quarrel over precisely what sort of curiosity is most conducive to childhood learning and development. This latter query takes its cues from the pragmatist philosophical tradition and extends well into the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. Overall, philosophical studies of curiosity have developed primarily in dialogue with the fields of theology, science, and education. While important, this body of scholarship has left curiosity’s role vastly undertheorized at the social and civic levels.



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With the increasingly widespread presumption, moreover, that curiosity is a state or trait common to individual psyches and trainable by standardized curricula, the collective and cultural life of curiosity has gotten lost in the shadows. The politics of curiosity remains unthought. It is critical to ask the question of politics in relation to curiosity and the question of curiosity in relation to politics. Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry takes up curiosity through the lens of political philosophy and the experience of political marginalization. Its thesis is that curiosity is political, deeply implicated in the maintenance of societies, with all their material and discursive systems, as well as in the transformation of those societies. Curiosity therefore works on the side of conquest, sovereignty, patriarchy, and marginalization, as much as it works on the side of dissent, counterinformation, resistance movements, and social justice. As I trace across the history of philosophy, and elucidate through specific episodes in political theory, curiosity is central to the development of social institutions, the legitimation of fields of inquiry, and the establishment of political parties. It also has, conversely, the power to break open new vistas, to deconstruct established patterns of inquiry, and to form new political communities. Contemporary archives of political experience in many ways confirm, challenge, and extend this account. Turning to the history of feminism and civil rights, as well as to queer/trans and disability communities, I track several concrete formations of what I have elsewhere called curiosities at war.5 Here, in the agonism of institutionalization and resistance, across material-­discursive networks, and buried in bodies and informatics, curiosity is differentially deployed and in play. Whether used to spectacularize or to erase marginalized people, curiosity is also a distinguishing mark of resilience and coalition-­building within those same marginalized communities. Heeding and systematizing these accounts for the first time, Curiosity and Power insists that the power of curiosity must be recognized before it can be engaged responsibly. Sarah Baartman

It is with a certain hesitation that I reprise the narrative of Sarah Baartman. For a woman subject to over two hundred years of hypervisibility and whose record includes few, if any, of her own words, there is a keen—­perhaps inescapable—­danger of reinscribing the epistemic

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violences she and her memory have suffered. Nevertheless, it is precisely for these reasons that Baartman the icon—­if not Baartman the person—­serves as a paradigm for not only the potential violence but the inevitable politics of curiosity. She is a pinpoint awash in the institutionalized forces of seeing, wanting, and knowing—­voir, vouloir, savoir—­where the politics of who sees, who wants, and who knows are always in play. A Khoikhoi woman, born in the late 1780s, Sarah Baartman’s Khoisan name remains unknown. She worked on colonial farms and as a domestic servant, until Hendrick Cezar took notice and organized her performance at a local men’s hospital. He then took her to London in 1810 and organized her exhibition at 225 Piccadilly as “The Hottentot Venus,” a performance centered on her nearly naked body. Originally, “Hottentot” signified “stutterers,” belying the colonial assessment of the Khoisan language as incoherent stammering; for Baartman’s exhibition, it signified a certain sensuous primitivism. Her popularity was immediate, enough that abolitionists insisted on a trial in the autumn of 1810 to decide whether she performed of her own free will. Although Baartman had acquired a facility with Dutch, English, and French, she spoke hardly a word during the trial. A new manager, Henry Taylor, took her to Paris in 1814. There, she garnered the attention of anatomists, naturalists, and artists—­including Cuvier, Henri de Blainville, and Geoffroy Saint-­Hilaire—­who conducted a three-­day examination of her body in March 1815. She died in December 1815 of unknown causes. Cuvier requested to retain her body as a scientific specimen. Request granted, he cast and dissected her body, preserving her brain, genitals, and skeleton for display at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, where they were exhibited until 1937. They were then transferred to the Musée de l’Homme and displayed, in case number 33, until 1974. Following renewed academic interest in her memory, and an advocacy effort spearheaded by Nelson Mandela, her remains were repatriated and buried on August 9, 2002, National Women’s Day, in Hankey, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The South African repatriation committee declined to have the remains DNA tested, despite the fact that the French had “lost” them for a period of time. Her grave site, now a tourist attraction, has since been vandalized. Scholarship on Baartman repeatedly bemoans her display as a “cu-



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riosity”6 to “curious crowds.”7 The term curiosity is not anachronistic here but eminently germane to the sociocultural milieu. It is a term effortlessly multiplied across the fairs, freak shows, ethnographic exhibitions, museums, and scientific inquests of the time. Consider, as paradigmatic, the 1814 satirical print entitled “Les Curieux en extase, ou les cordons de souliers” (The curious in ecstasy or shoelaces), which depicts Baartman standing on a raised structure, dressed only in loin tassels, and surrounded by four fully dressed French people overtly enthralled and titillated by her. Made a spectacle in this way, Baartman’s body—­and that of Black women since, Natasha Gordon-­ Chipembere argues—­became “the territory of all those who could see it, access it, and dissect it.”8 That is to say, curiosity reduced Baartman to a what, not a who; a body, not a person. This “objectification”9 and “commodification”10 occurred not only in the entertainment industry but in the scientific community. She became the object of “an almost frenzied scientific endeavor to get to the smallest and most bare unit of observation,”11 to decipher, to anatomize, to dissect, and to taxonomize. After all, subtending European colonial culture, Laura Callahan writes, is a “racist ideology”12 by which a subject is made singular and yet representative in one fell swoop. This same ideology—­and structure of curiosity—­resurfaced in the new academic interest in Baartman led by Sander Gilman and others.13 Much of this work reinscribes Baartman as a dehistoricized icon of sexual and racial difference—­as a unique stand-­in for Black women everywhere. As such, Zine Magubane argues that Baartman “has been constructed” and “made to function” as a theoretical object by contemporary academics even more than by any nineteenth-­century exhibition manager, museum director, or pseudoscientist.14 But scholarship, especially Black feminist scholarship, has also issued a clarion call to a different kind of curiosity, one that would right the wrongs of the specific curiosity-­formations institutionalized in the exhibitions, museums, and scientific discourses of Baartman’s time, as well as the academic treatments of her since. While this different sort of curiosity is described in a variety of ways, it invariably signifies a search for understanding over mastery. Such a curiosity would engage rather than objectify, empathize rather than examine.15 It would love rather than anatomize, and appreciate rather than aestheticize.16 It

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would re-­member what has been dis-­membered, “piecing together the fragments”17 and honoring the “whole”18 as more than the sum of her parts. As such, a curiosity of this sort would, paradoxically, respect Baartman’s privacy and her opacity,19 acknowledging the limits of inquiry and granting her ultimate unknowability.20 It is a curiosity compelled and constrained by an “ethics of care.”21 “Call[ing] for a more personal, indeed subjective, way of knowing,”22 asking between one another rather than about the other, it creates a sense of belonging and relation. This is a curiosity consonant with intimacy. For some, it may be difficult to conceive of such a curiosity in practice. Scholars Gordon-­Chipembere and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu are models in this regard, refracting their own curiosity through affect and personal history. Opening their academic essays on Baartman with the autobiographical, they deconstruct traditional authorial distance and acknowledge their own intimacies, as women of the African Diaspora, with Baartman herself. Gordon-­Chipembere recalls being in Cape Town for the eighth anniversary of Baartman’s burial and then at London’s Piccadilly stop but a month later. Ndlovu recalls, at five, finding women of Baartman’s stature “beautiful,” before being trained to perceive them (and, ultimately, herself) as big and brown.23 Likewise, photographers Carla Williams and Zanele Muholi, in their respective tributes to Baartman, model a different kind of curiosity by exploring its transmogrification through closeness and companionship. In Venus (1994),24 Williams turns the camera’s gaze on herself in a moment of private pleasure, her body bare, her face angled slightly away. In Nomshado (2007),25 Muholi turns the camera’s gaze on Nomshado in a moment of domestic intimacy, sitting in bed behind a beaded partition, her body bare and her back to the shutter. Together, Gordon-­Chipembere and Ndlovu, Williams and Muholi explore another space, beyond the spectacle and its rebuff. This space—­and the re-­formation of curiosity in this space—­reappears in Diana Ferrus’s poem “I’ve Come to Take You Home” (1998), which famously fueled the repatriation of Baartman’s remains. She writes: I have come to wrench you away, Away from the poking eyes of the man-­made monster . . . Who dissects your body bit by bit, . . .  I’ve come to take you home.26



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Across these pieces of prose, poetry, and photography, Black feminist scholars of Baartman’s legacy have reimagined not only the concept of curiosity but its very practice, how it gets put in place and in play. If, within a colonial political frame, spectacularizing curiosity functions, by way of freak shows and anatomic dissections, to extract a body from its relations to others and to itself, the caring curiosity proposed by Black feminist scholars functions to reinsert that body into a poetics of intimate relation. Importantly, in the case of Sarah Baartman, the choice to practice a spectacularizing curiosity or a caring curiosity is not simply an individual choice, subject to epistemological and ethical evaluation. It is not simply that Cezar or Cuvier made a choice they ought not to have made or that Magubane and Muholi, apropos of nothing, pursue a more subjectively robust account. To bring only an individualized ethical or epistemological analysis to the case is to erase the sociohistorical conditions that make it possible. Cezar and Cuvier participated in a set of curiosity-­formations—­topics and methods of inquiry and interest—­that had been institutionalized over hundreds of years, on the backs of slavery, colonialism, and anti-­ Black racism. Magubane and Muholi in turn participate in a set of curiosity-­formations that were centuries in the making, buoyed by Black resistance and feminist coalition. What is staged in the Black feminist recuperation of Sarah Baartman’s legacy is a curiosity not only of a different sort but of a different positionality, a different legacy, a different political force and meaning. The gaze is trained differently, attention and investigation conducted differently, questions borne and bequeathed to different ends. That difference is not forged in a vacuum. Curiosity-­formations are conditioned by political values, political structures, and political histories.

Looking for Zora

If Black feminist scholarship on Sarah Baartman involves learning to remember Baartman differently, in resistance to the spectacularization of the colonial gaze, Alice Walker’s search for Zora Neale Hurston underscores the necessity of learning to forget differently, in resistance to the erasure of a white gaze. In either case, a particular curiosity-­ formation is diagnosed and deconstructed on the sociopolitical stage.

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I begin with a brief digression. In Woman, Native, Other, postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-­ha implicitly critiques the simultaneously spectacularizing and erasing formations of colonial curiosity, which are especially pronounced in anthropology and history. While the former trains curiosity overmuch on the colonized subject, the latter trains curiosity to exclude the colonized subject. The one makes indelible, while the other obscures. For Trinh, colonial anthropology proceeds by way of mummification and memorialization, abstraction and dehistoricization. “Like any common living thing,” she writes, “I fear and reprove classification and the death it entails,” as well as any investigative “progression that systematically proceeds from generalities to specificities.”27 Trinh describes undertaking a different sort of investigation, one that traces and curves in undulating rhythms, driven by a “desire to baffle”—­and perhaps be baffled—­more than to pin and to mount, to collect and to curiotize. “I may stubbornly turn around a foreign thing or turn it around to play with it, but I respect its realms of opaqueness.”28 Conversely for Trinh, colonial history proceeds by way of suppression and silencing, writing over and writing out. According to this logic, history belongs to the victors such that the historian sees only his kind as the significant actors on the world stage. Innumerable people and forces are lost and lopped off as a result. Against the many erasures this gaze effects, Trinh pits the feminist scholarly work of rewriting history. The “buried treasures of women’s unknown heritage  .  .  . do not come as a godsend; they are gained through genuine curiosity, concern, and interest.”29 She then exhorts her readers to take up this work, to refuse to accept the historical contours they have inherited, and to instead seek out other fault lines. Challenging the colonial curiosity at work in both remembering and forgetting, Trinh insists that we must re-­form our curiosity, we must learn to collect and to recollect differently. The story of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker is a paradigm of just such a project. Hurston was a woman of irrepressible curiosity, a fact her commentators repeatedly underscore. Whether qualified as “active,”30 “voracious,”31 or “insatiable,”32 Hurston’s curiosity is a veritable “wanderlust,” a gnawing need to, in every case, “seek out the horizon.”33 Hurston says as much of herself. As a child, she writes, “I was full of curiosity. . . . I got few answers from other people but I kept right on asking,”34 and, as an adult, “Having a mind



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full of curiosity . . . I always listen for fear that I miss something.”35 Over the years, however, Hurston’s general inquisitiveness acquired a remarkable focus. She directed her curiosity toward what went unasked, unexplored, uninvestigated on the American anthropological stage: Black American folklore. This new subject, however, required a new method. “Research is formalized curiosity,”36 Hurston famously writes, and the curiosity-­formations one assumes are determined by the research one undertakes and the political histories in which that research is situated. In her first attempts to collect folktales, she spoke with “carefully accented Barnardese” (hailing from Barnard College) and got nowhere.37 So she changed her practice. She embedded herself in the community, becoming an early proponent of field anthropology’s participant-­observer technique. In step with this shift, Hurston framed her first folktale collection, Mules and Men, more artistically than scientifically, providing ethnographic detail in literary narrative. That same literary sensibility for Black vernacular, ritual, and myth then blossomed into her now famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In a political hegemony of patriarchy and white supremacy, Hurston’s curiosity functioned as a pry bar, teasing open suppressed lines and lineages of inquiry in the company and service of the Black American South. But, in 1960, Hurston died all but forgotten. Enough that Alice Walker grew up with an all-­men Harlem Renaissance pantheon and the supposition that Black writers only have fathers. Walker made it through high school, within an all-­Black community, and never read—­ nor knew of—­Hurston.38 She made it through college, under the tutelage of Muriel Rukeyser, and never read—­nor knew of—­Hurston. She made it through the publication of her first short story, under the guidance of Langston Hughes, and never read—­nor knew of—­Hurston. As the preeminent centers of curiosity, institutions of education nevertheless function to exclude vast tracts of knowledge. Against the odds and in search of her literary ancestry, Alice went looking for Zora in 1973. She called it “the Zora Hurston expedition.”39 Pounding the pavement in Eatonville, Florida, she chatted up new personnel and pillars of the community, by turns, from City Hall to Lee-­Peek Mortuary. Eventually, she found herself in a segregated, unmarked cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. Although officially dubbed the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, it functioned as the Field of the Earthly Forgotten.

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Alice faced an acre thick with weeds, “crackling and hissing” with snakes, sandspurs, active anthills, and “one of the largest bugs I have ever seen.”40 Undeterred, she strode through the field yelling, “Zora!” One, two, three times. Frustrated by Zora’s reticence to reveal herself, Alice fussed and threatened to leave her lonely. Then, “Zo-­ra!” and she stumbled into the sunken earth of Hurston’s resting place. Aggrieved but determined, she returned to the spot with a red flag for the headstone she had just purchased. It reads: “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South, Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist, 1901–­1960.” Rewriting the pantheon, prying open the ivory halls, and rebuilding bonds of kinship between and among Black practitioners of curiosity and imagination, Walker had found family. Hurston is “my aunt,” she writes, “and that of all black people.”41 Inasmuch as Hurston aimed to collect differently, Alice Walker aimed to recollect differently. Rather than curiotize or erase, these women used their curiosity to take Black life seriously and to know it intimately. And that work continues. In 2019, Columbia University students staged a coup at the Butler Library. Above the long row of ancient names etched in stone on the building’s facade—­Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil—­students hung a printed banner with the names of Angelou, Anzaldúa, Chang, Hurston, Morrison, Revathi, Shange, and Silko. Reprising similar student efforts in 1989 and 1994, the project highlighted the exclusion of women, especially women of color, from the halls of learning. Aiming to “invite curiosity” and “inspire inquiry” about the construction of canons, the pillars and peripheries of knowledge, and the foundations of education and their political histories, the banner made palpable a clash of curiosities.42 Where do we get our questions? Where do we direct our questions? What are we looking for and who are we looking with? And how ought we to function within exclusionary institutions of inquiry? Students pushed curiosity into different rivulets, streams, and oceans—­to make it move again, to regain its errancy, to assume appropriate responsibility. Within this context, the choice to remember Zora Neale Hurston—­to take her seriously and to know her intimately—­is not simply another epistemological option, subject to individual choice and ethical evaluation. It is an act of resistance to a Eurocentric, patriarchal politics of curiosity and its long history.



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The Praxis of Inquiry

In this study, I construe politics and curiosity quite broadly. By politics I do not mean whatever intrigues happen to be characterizing the contemporary political scene. Nor do I mean to invoke the ultimately untenable divisions upon which political philosophy traditionally supervenes: divisions between state and society; the political and the personal; human law or convention, on the one hand, and nature, pure and simple, on the other. I mean something much older and more basal. For me, politics is the process by which we come to understand and organize ourselves as social beings, within human and nonhuman environments. As such, it refers to material practices and discourses, architectures and imaginaries, relations and intimacies. Because this process is inherently structured by power relations, politics is inescapably riven with violence and inequities. Attending to the politics of curiosity, therefore, involves attending to the roles curiosity plays in the processes of coming to understand and organize ourselves as social beings in multiple, sometimes competing, ecologies. It also involves attending to the manner in which those roles are constrained by political forces and contribute to political inequities. Finally, it involves attending to how curiosity can incite political change, but also how political movements can themselves change curiosity-­formations. By curiosity, I mean more than the age-­old desire to know or, in contemporary nomenclature, the drive for information. For millennia, curiosity has been characterized predominantly as an individual impetus. Whether it is Augustine’s “lust to experience,”43 John Locke’s “appetite after knowledge,”44 Sigmund Freud’s “scopophilic drive,”45 or Hans-­Georg Voss’s “motivation to explore,”46 philosophers and psychologists of the Western intellectual tradition have largely understood curiosity at the level of the organism, its forces, and its feelings. Within this framework, curiosity is the desire, appetite, impulse, interest, motivation, feeling, or drive state to know X, understand X, find out X, better cognize X, fill an information gap with X, or gain information about X. It is individual and it is acquisitional, rooted in units of knowers and units of knowledge. Even recent efforts to analyze curiosity as an affect—­a feeling or an intensity that disorients us and opens up space and time for questions—­largely retain this emphasis on the individual interior and personal experience. Such characterizations

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are informative and useful for a variety of philosophical and psychological investigations into the nature of human knowledge. They are also, however, limited in their precision, their explanatory power, and their multimodal reach. For, such characterizations typically force curiosity into a single, authoritative definition and divorce curiosity from its material and historical contexts. As such, not only does the multiplicity and sociopolitical character of curiosity go unthought, but the study of both curiosity and politics is impoverished. Departing from this tradition, I define curiosity as a social praxis tuned to specific political formations. Curiosity is a series of investigative practices that are informed by and constructive of political architectures. For me, curiosity is less what one person feels than what one or more persons do, always within existing and shifting sociopolitical contours. Here, I build on the contributions of Marianna Papastephanou, Justin Smith, and Eva-­Maria Swidler, who argue that curiosity becomes “politicized” when it is “entangled”47 in political operations, “contested” by political forces,48 and pressed into the service of specific “social outcomes.”49 I take one step further by arguing not that curiosity becomes political but that curiosity is political. Curiosity is a political practice; and curiosity-­formations are constitutive of politics. Conceptualizing curiosity as a social movement, behavior, or practice gives the lie to the romanticized notion that independent knower Y sets out to know X, to find out X, or to cognize X. Knower(s) and known(s) always exist in a network of relations, such that curiosity is only ever a process of making connections, building constellations, finding links, and following threads. It is collective and interconnective, functioning across intimate webs and (eco)systems. The question is, how ought those networks to be constructed and by what curiosities ought they be traversed? Classic investigative practices such as collecting information, tracking down answers, and imagining new futures50 are inextricably imbricated within specific governmental systems, culture wars, resistance networks, and knowledge paradigms.51 As such, these practices are necessarily embedded in political forces and calibrated to era and geography. For this reason, I attend to the term curiosity genealogically, tracking it across historico-­material settings within which both the concept and practice of curiosity steadily change shape. Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry explores that political frame and the power of that political matrix.



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Inquiries attuned to the politics of curiosity ask a unique set of questions. They ask: How are our questions inherited, trained, and cultivated, and what is the mix of the marinade? How do questions hang between things, between one human and another, between humans and the earth? How do they hit and where do they stick? What are the social conditions and effects of certain questions? That is, from whence do our questions hail and whither do they go? In what material habits and practices, customary proceedings and elocutions have certain curiosity-­formations become sedimented? And what are the reigning curiosity-­formations of our time—­what are the privileged directionalities, architectures, and topologies of inquiry and who are the privileged inquirers? When and how have specific people groups been crafted as knowers to the exclusion of others, and as knowers over others? How has this been ancestralized?52 How has it become ideological, so that it is repeated and reinscribed so often as to go unnoticed? How does one scream into that silence? What kind of genealogical work is undertaken—­and by whom and under what circumstances—­to disrupt that hegemonic rule? Who bears the brunt of turning curiosity’s tide? What are the cultural practices that fuel a different political imagination capable of crafting curiosity-­formations otherwise? And what is the spark that sets off this fire? What are the conditions under which that flame becomes a conflagration? What pushes the transformation of curiosity past the tipping point? And what inequities are in play even there? What ghosting of bodies into shadows, what muffling of voices into murmurs? Insofar as the practices and affects of curiosity are formed in the fires of sociopolitical forces, they must also be subject to political analysis. Practically speaking, such an attunement to the politics of curiosity involves attending to unique loci and legacies. In the cases of Sarah Baartman and Zora Neale Hurston, it means investigating the political structures and curiosity-­formations of the Khoikhoi people and the Black American U.S. South. And it means noting how European colonization and American slavery impinged upon those structures and formations. It means investigating what systems of knowledge recognition subtended the Khoisan language in the nineteenth century, as well as Black American southern dialects in the twentieth. And noting how the repression of those systems disqualified Khoikhoi people and members of the Black American South from the position of

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recognized knowledge-­producers in the West. It means investigating the different cultural and intellectual milieus in which English and French museums—­not to mention scientific communities—­developed in the early nineteenth century, such that the latter were so quick to capture and curiotize Baartman’s remains. It means pitching Columbia’s Butler Library against Howard’s Founders Library or the NYPL’s Schomburg Center to investigate their different knowledge network architectures and curiosity-­ formations. It means appreciating the power of poetry in the hands of Diana Ferrus or Alice Walker. And it means grappling with the weight of neoliberal academic and publishing industries in the cases of Baartman and Hurston studies. Above all, it means refusing a linear account of knowledge and, instead, wrestling with the intricacies of competing political ecologies of knowledge and evaluating one’s place in their shadows. Ultimately, for me, granting the politics of curiosity involves noticing how curiosity’s embeddedness in and effect on power structures informs Curiosity and Power itself. If curiosity is political, and if politics is impure, then accountably theorizing and practicing curiosity in any setting will always already necessitate an ethics of impurity. For my part, as much as this study aims to shift the center weight of philosophical work on curiosity, it will also replicate certain sociopolitical values, practices, and structures, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. This is to say, there is a politics to my own curiosity. As a philosopher, it is important to me that philosophy be recognized as contributing to the study of curiosity and, in fact, that the history of philosophy be seen as always already a story of curiosity. As a theorist at the margins, it is equally important to me that philosophy be challenged, be disrupted by what comes before and after it, by what comes bubbling up within it. As such, I do not mean to suggest that philosophy take ownership of curiosity but that philosophy recognize and be responsive to its existing intimacies with curiosity as practiced in its own histories and at its own margins. In some of this work, I stand to stem the tide; in other moments, I am swept along by it. On some pages, I will fail philosophy, fail curiosity, fail the margins; on others, I will have shown up and come through. And the ethical import of my standing or my being-­swept, and the moral weight of those failures and those true-­blue moments, depends upon my position (and trajectory) within a vast network of relations



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and histories, violences and vigilances, debts and gifts. If anything, this is an injunction to humility. Footpaths

A book is ultimately a map of where one has traveled, a record of what one has loved. However grand a thing it is and however grand a thing it does, it was never meant to be or to do everything. For me, this book tracks an as yet unfinished trajectory and its loves, though they may one day be left, will never grow cold. As such, it invites still other paths to be taken, different apertures and aporias to be brought to light, with and against those herein inscribed. As the first full-­length study of curiosity in political philosophy, Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry argues, quite simply, that, far from a neutral cognitive feature or individual psychic impulse, curiosity is a social force. It is a social force that may, by turns, consolidate and advance institutional power or propel resistance and creative imagination. As such, curiosity is political. An accurate definition and evaluation of curiosity requires an assessment of its role in social structures, then, just as a responsible political theory and practice must account for curiosity’s specific armature in a given context or era. Wherever philosophy has been, wherever it is, and wherever it is going, and whatever course the interdisciplinary study of curiosity is poised to take, this book ventures not only to insist upon but to expect a grappling with the politics of curiosity. Three methodological qualifications are in order here, just at the outset. First, while I lend shape to the project by restricting my archives to philosophy and its peripheries, this work engages vibrant conversations in a variety of fields, including disability studies, environmental humanities, history, literature, political theory, psychology, race theory, social movement theory, and transgender studies. Second, I further circumscribe the project by analyzing elements of those archives that specifically use the word curiosity or its cognates in other languages. I do not begin by abstractly defining curiosity, inferring what practices ought to modify it, and then tracking those, but instead attune myself to the word itself and the practices that accompany it. This method has the benefit of greater linguistic and genealogical precision, not to mention feasibility, but it does ensure that whole swaths of literature that arguably theorize and practice curiosity without using the word,

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especially in histories of marginalization and resistance, remain to be analyzed in future work. Third, I make free use of philosophical distinctions throughout the manuscript and see them as one of its contributions to scholarship. Although some readers might interpret these as attempts to “satisfy” and to “quell” curiosity, at best, or, at worst, to exercise a sovereign mastery over the concept, I offer these distinctions with an open hand. As a scholar, one needs to take a step, even if always ready to suspend it again in the “perhaps,” and to lurch ahead unevenly. The book begins with a political history of curiosity. Refusing the reigning dehistoricized and depoliticized accounts of curiosity so common today, I retell the story of curiosity from ancient to modern philosophy, as always already implicated in and theorized alongside politics. In doing so, I argue that curiosity is defined by and a definer of political power. The remainder of the book is then broken into two parts. Part I, “Episodes from Political Theory,” formalizes, for the first time, nascent political accounts of curiosity in the work of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Part II, “Archives of Political Experience,” turns to test and extend those accounts through recent political activism in general and contemporary disability and transgender community theorizing in particular. The book moves roughly chronologically. It does not move, however, from theory to practice, as a cursory glance at the table of contents might suggest. The entirety of the book is concerned with a praxeological theory of curiosity. As such, I apply the term episodes to Part I to emphasize the historicity and lived materiality of theory, while I apply the term archives to Part II to emphasize the discursivity and lived logics of experience. I recognize that theorists offer praxical resources beyond their ken, just as political movements theorize over and over again. These titles, therefore, create and already blur the boundaries between the book’s two parts. I aim to offer, across both parts, an account of curiosity that is at once material and discursive, historical and phenomenological, one capable of reconceiving and regenerating the very politics of curiosity itself. While the untold political history of curiosity (chapter 1) illuminates its imbrication in social structures and power struggles, the undertheorized political philosophy of curiosity provides an interpretive frame rich enough to account for the modes, tactics, and targets of these



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warring curiosities (chapters 2–­4). In Part I, “Episodes from Political Theory,” I turn to Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida and develop the accounts of curiosity both explicit and implicit in their political theories. As I demonstrate, all three not only grant that curiosity is constitutive of the political relation—­and that political relation is constitutive of curiosity—­but articulate that curiosity functions differently on either side of a power relation. Nietzsche (chapter 2) situates curiosity squarely on the scene of struggle, insisting that curiosity is embedded in the agonism between life-­affirming and life-­negating forces. While the free spirit and the work of liberation are fueled by a curiosity for life, the institutions of civilization and their ever-­massifying knowledge systems are fueled by a curiosity against life. Much like Nietzsche, Foucault (chapter 3) also conceives of two warring curiosities on the political stage. Standing at the crossroads of social tensions, as force and counterforce, curiosity can be institutionalized in sedimented power relations or mobilized through resistance. Derrida (chapter 4) stages a struggle not between a civilized curiosity and a free one, or an institutionalized curiosity and a resistant one, but between a sovereign curiosity and a responsive one. For Derrida, a sovereign curiosity dissects and confines objects of knowledge, while a responsive (and responsible) curiosity not only challenges the illusion of a clean dissection or a safe confinement but also explores the call of unexpected concepts and entangled relations. Together, these political theorists theorize curiosity-­formations at war within unique political architectures. Today, sovereign, institutional, and systemic curiosity-­formations are shot through with patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and cis-­ heteronormativity. As such, feminist, critical race, disability, trans, and queer theorists best illuminate and countermand these phenomena. Building on the present analysis of Baartman and Hurston in Part II, “Archives of Political Experience,” I take up the wisdom of political resistance, disability studies, and transgender theory. These archives challenge and extend Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s accounts in two ways: first, they insist that resistant curiosity is collective, rather than individual, and, second, they assert that a reigning formation of institutional curiosity is that of spectacle-­erasure. I begin by analyzing the role of curiosity in three political resistance movements: the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the Prisons Information Group in the 1970s, and the People in Search of Safe and Accessible

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Restrooms (PISSAR) group in the 2000s (chapter 5). In each case, and on both sides of the power relation, I argue, curiosity is practiced collectively, whether it involves collecting information, (de)constructing institutions, or imagining new futures. I then zero in on disability studies (chapter 6) and transgender theory (chapter 7) to analyze the spectacle-­erasure curiosity-­formation and resistance to it. Individuals in both the disability community and the transgender community have, for centuries, been made a spectacle, the curio to a curious gaze. This same spectacularization has erased the disability and trans communities’ standing as curious knowers themselves. After diagnosing this formation, I ask how disabled people and/or transgender people are the subjects—­rather than the objects—­of curiosity and ask: What methods and modalities of inquiry are discernable in their own practices of curiosity? Here I explore tactics and techniques for curiosity-­ formations that resist ableism and cis-­heteronormativity. While Curiosity and Power is an inquiry enabled and compromised in advance by the institutionalized restraints within which it functions, it is nevertheless an effort of theoretical courage, hope, and political imagination. Culling an account of the politics of curiosity from within the Western intellectual tradition is an important step in appreciating that tradition and holding it accountable to the ethical-­political implications of its own inquiries and theories of inquiry. Nevertheless, I am under no illusions. The Western intellectual tradition always has been—­and always will be—­challenged and transformed from its margins, whether within or outside it. Having opened the book with Black feminist theory, and attended to race, gender, and disability issues and theoretical traditions throughout its pages, I close with a reflection on some of Caribbean, Chicana, and Indigenous philosophies’ contributions to theorizing the politics of curiosity. Weaving additional insights from Baartman and Hurston, alongside those of Édouard Glissant, Gloria Anzaldúa, and several North American Indigenous peoples, I explore how opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy can work together, against the spectacle-­erasure formation, as critical companions to any ethical curiosity.

Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry makes a number of critical contributions to scholarship. First, at a moment when the subject



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of curiosity is gaining new traction in the sciences, this book insists on the importance of philosophy to the study of curiosity. Without philosophical analysis, curiosity studies will be deeply impoverished. Second, at a juncture in which philosophers consider curiosity by and large an ethical or epistemological quandary, this book insists on the importance of a political philosophical analysis. Otherwise, the philosophical study of curiosity itself is shortchanged. Third, in an era in which mainstream political philosophy takes into account neither history nor archives of political experience, this book demonstrates the unparalleled wealth and wisdom of both. Fourth, in a time of galvanized inequity, this book highlights the injustices of curiosity for marginalized people but also the power of curiosity from marginalized people. Fifth and finally, in a contemporary landscape in which curiosity is denuded, dehistoricized, and unthinkingly celebrated, while digitalization and datafication, on the one hand, and partisan polarization and global alienation, on the other, increase exponentially, this book insists that philosophical attention to curiosity—­especially its ethico-­political stakes—­matters perhaps more than any of us can currently fathom. Curiosity is properly not an intellectual vice or a psychic competence of a single individual; it is a shared drive to collect, to track, and to imagine, consistently deployed on both sides of political struggles. Its power to buttress stratifying social institutions must be recognized just as much as its propensity to fuel liberatory revolutions. Once the politics of curiosity is granted, however, a whole series of questions follow. What is the best way to cultivate collective curiosity? And what are the constraints of an ethical imagination? What is the responsibility of an individual to engage in collective curiosity in the service of political resistance? How ought entrenchments of institutionalized curiosity be dispelled and the targeting of marginalized communities frustrated? In a digital age, where the epistemological terrain is being swiftly and fundamentally reprogrammed, the political weight of curiosity is even more foreboding. What must be done when information processing defines surveillance and policing? Or when spectacularized media celebrities take on executive functions in government? Whatever the answers to these questions, ethical and epistemological debates about curiosity can no longer remain depoliticized. Instead, they must engage the undeniably vibrant role curiosity plays on the political stage.

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A Political History of Curiosity

There are many ways to tell the story of curiosity in the history of Western philosophy—­to weave together the classical figures and unexpected cameos, what they said and what they failed to say, all within the changing contours of established philosophical eras. Ilhan Inan, author of The Philosophy of Curiosity, chose to tell the tale as itself one giant question. How is it possible that such a curious discipline, filled with such curious beings,1 has rarely asked the question in any depth: what is curiosity? Inan narrates this history with a growing incredulity, as a series of strange lacunae, tantalizing snippets, and evasion tactics. Even where he most expects a sustained discussion of curiosity—­in Aristotle, Descartes, or Kant, in philosophy of language and cognitive science—­it barely appears, leading him to wonder what could explain this “great resistance to dealing with this notion at the philosophical level.”2 Perhaps, he hazards, it is due to the traditional philosophical preference for knowledge, as the source of epistemic value. Insofar as curiosity does not necessarily lead to knowledge, nor does knowledge necessarily require curiosity, curiosity is of little comparative philosophical interest or significance. And yet, what is philosophy other than a discipline of rich, sometimes irremediable questions? By contrast, Hans Blumenberg, in his classic tome The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, finds a substantive tale to be told here: Western philosophical history is the story of curiosity coming to self-­ consciousness. As Blumenberg tells it, it is curiosity itself—­and not curious human beings—­that is the protagonist of the tale. Redeploying Jürgen Mittelstraß’s distinction between naïve and reflected curiosity,

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Blumenberg first sees a youthful, immediate form of curiosity fueling ancient inquiry, hurtling at every moment toward the discovery of something entirely new. After the severe restriction of curiosity in the Middle Ages, both as a distraction from God and as an interest in things over which only God has purview, curiosity rejects this restriction and sets out to establish its own legitimation in the modern period. As it “organized itself around the recovery of the right to unrestricted expansion,”3 curiosity massified evidence of its usefulness for human life and happiness while also creating a growing topography of its own findings (e.g., Encyclopédie). There is, Blumenberg regrets, then a point in this “progressive consolidation” of curiosity at which “the possibility of the intervention of exogenous, ‘life-­worldly,’ historical motivations narrows and finally disappears.”4 Here, naïve curiosity dies under the crushing weight of the professionalization of science and theoretical inquiry. Ultimately, then, Blumenberg’s history is a tale of curiosity claiming its independence before losing its soul to mechanization. Suspecting that curiosity is neither wholly absent nor all-­defining in the history of Western thought, I choose to focus my attention on where and how it appears, and what appears or disappears with it.5 Here I aim to tell a political history of curiosity. That is, I aim to explicate how curiosity has been theorized with and implicated within politics. I want to tell this particular story because curiosity is largely depoliticized and dehistoricized in contemporary discourse. This sharply diminishes our capacity to address the social function of curiosity, whether its roots in long-­standing sets of values and relational practices or its capacity to uproot those same values and practices. The widespread assumption that curiosity is apolitical and ahistorical leaves us ill-­equipped to draw on historical resources to address how curiosity is theorized with and implicated in politics today. It, furthermore, limits our ability to nourish things—­or dig things up by their roots—­as we richly imagine otherwise. To really guide curiosity in our time and our moment, therefore, we need to think about curiosity as more than an innocuous capacity for innovation, generally had and valued by all. Rather, we must grapple with the whole historico-­ political fabric of curiosity itself. Few philosophers have focused their attention on the politics of curiosity per se. Briefly reflecting on the history of inquiry, Justin



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E. H. Smith argues that the political weight of curiosity “all depends on what social practices are being contested, and by whom.”6 When curiosity itself is a contested social practice, he states, it may be by turns suppressed, as in the case of Socrates, or co-opted and defanged, as in the case of the neoliberal academy (and even Wikipedia). For Marianna Papastephanou, however, the politics of curiosity is wedged deep inside curiosity’s complicity in the genealogies of colonialism and imperialism. To recognize its inherent politicization is to recognize curiosity’s inextricability from the objectification and surveillance perpetuated by systems of oppression such as patriarchy and racism. As such, she insists, curiosity must be paired with—­and sometimes replaced by—­epistemic restraint (or incuriosity).7 And yet, others argue, endorsing epistemic restraint does not relieve us of grappling with politics. It is, after all, a certain incuriosity that marks the oppressor, who refuses to ask or to wonder what life is like in the shadows, leaving the oppressed themselves with the burden of curiosity, of ferreting and figuring out how the shadow is cast and what it means to struggle inside it.8 But, as Eva-­Maria Swidler points out, incuriosity is equally a tactic of political resistance, often deployed by marginalized groups, as a “refusal to be curious” about—­or to waste a ray of one’s precious attention on—­“realms of culture and education [that have] become incorporated as part of ‘The Establishment.’”9 Building upon and beyond these theorists, I argue that there is in fact a curiosity and an incuriosity on both sides of the fence, so to speak: on the part of the powerful and on the part of the disempowered. What is needed, then, is a broader account of the politics of curiosity. By curiosity, I mean a series of investigative practices often coupled with an inquisitive affect. By politics, I mean whatever relates to (eco)collective life, including institutions, social practices, and relations. Though rare, when the story of politics and curiosity is told, it is typically a tale in which political power suppresses curiosity—­think media control, banned books, and persecuted intellectuals. This repressive hypothesis, however, fails to attend to how political power just as often wields curiosity. Consider European imperialism or colonialism, and the requisite curiosity cabinets and freak shows, not to mention the development of scientific racism. In this book, I therefore revisit the relationship between curiosity and politics. I trace how politics informs (and reforms) curiosity and wields it to govern, but also how

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curiosity informs politics and defines (and redefines) its practices. Digging deep into their shared history in this chapter, I argue that curiosity is not simply a tool, wielded or suppressed by political agents, but that curiosity and politics ultimately define the forms and functions of one another. They are mutually coconstituting. Curiosity is a practice often (over)determined by political forces; its very modes and methods reflect political investments. Politics itself—­including the idea of the polis and citizenship—­has long been constructed through the explicit rejection or endorsement of curiosity and curious practices. Far from a merely natural epistemic impulse, curiosity is both defined by and a definer of political power. In my review of ancient, medieval, and modern texts, I trace how curiosity is made political—­that is, how it comes to define and be defined by political formations—­by attending to each era’s own sense of the “political” as well as to a contemporary sense of the political informed by radical struggles for liberation. I therefore flag curiosity’s role in defining assembly, democracy, Christian fellowship, citizenship, and nation-­building, but also its relation to changing constructions of gender, race, class, disability, and the environment. For ancient thinkers, for example, curiosity disorders the self and the polis, while for medieval thinkers, curiosity destroys the soul and the Church. For modern thinkers, however, curiosity is an ordering force, on which individuals and society ought to capitalize. Here we see the coconstitution of curiosity and politics modulating across eras. Within this narrative, I also trace the vicissitudes of certain political inequalities tied up with curiosity’s story. In the ancient period, for example, curiosity condemns one not only to the city but also to the company of women, animals, and slaves. In the medieval period, curiosity is rooted in the pride of Eve, the deformity of the serpent, and the social instability of travel. Finally, in the modern period, curiosity is located squarely in the Western masculine, citizen-­subject, whose curiosity is best distinguished from the “brute” and the “savage” when trained in the presence of nature, in the absence of women, and through the careful observation of “unfortunates,” whether the poor, the sick, or the maimed. As such, my account highlights that, even as a certain curiosity slowly comes to serve politics (and steadily disserve certain political constituents), there remains a curiosity on the margins that has the capacity to unsettle politics itself.



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Before we begin, let me offer a brief note on methodology. In what follows, I trace curiosity’s story by attending primarily to the appearance of the word and its correlates: in Greek, polypragmosunē and periergia; in Latin, curiositas; in French, curiosité; in German, Kuriosität and Neugier; and in English, curiosity. Resisting the urge to locate the politics of curiosity primarily in any one period—­whether the present day, the era of New Imperialism, or, for that matter, the Renaissance—­I trace the interwoven story of curiosity and politics back through ancient, medieval, and modern texts in the Western philosophical canon before zeroing in on nineteenth-­, twentieth-­, and twenty-­first-­century thinkers in later chapters. It is important to note limitations inherent in this methodology. First, although the scope of the present chapter cannot sustain it, a more expansive analysis would track not only the word curiosity but also synonyms for curiosity, as well as the use of interrogative sentences. Second, a more expansive history would extend the investigation beyond the Western philosophical canon. While I chose to confine my analysis to the canon in order to identify the reigning interpretations of curiosity and politics, I acknowledge that this choice limits the diversity of voices and interdisciplinarity represented in the present chapter; I trust that subsequent chapters of this book overcome this limitation, however, in some significant measure. Ancient Philosophy

Today, it is almost axiomatic that curiosity is the wellspring of inquiry. After all, did not Plato say that all philosophy begins in wonder and was it not Aristotle who traced the whole of science back to its root: the desire to know? The ancients, however, are far from the staunch allies of curiosity that they seem. For both Plato and Aristotle, for instance, curiosity, as distinct from wonder and the desire to know, is not a life-­giving sun around which all forms of thought-­life orbit but rather a wandering, sometimes threatening star. Curiosity, in fact, would only become the sun of inquiry in the modern period, when an often spiritually inflected, rational wonder is replaced by a secular, scientific curiosity. How and why that transition occurred—­and why curiosity was suspect in the first place—­is a fascinating tale. We begin by pausing for a moment in the ancient period to suss out the reasons

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for its suspicion of curiosity and the moments in which those reasons crack. Let us start with terminology. The Latin term curiositas, from which curiosity stems, originally functioned as a translation of two Greek terms: polypragmosunē and periergia. Polypragmosunē, a composite of poly and pragmon, refers to an overweening interest in many affairs, especially if those affairs include other people’s business. Periergia, a composite of peri and ergon, refers to the practice of busying oneself with things peripheral to one’s own proper task. While the two function synonymously, the polypragmon is more often a meddler or a busybody, while the periergos is often a sophist or a sycophant. As detailed in Matthew Leigh’s excellent study From Polypragmon to Curiosus, the terms were used to critically describe irreverent investigation into divine mysteries, local politicians and imperial expansion, and excessively ornamental texts or rhetoric.10 The ancients thus generally understood curiosity to be antithetical to an honest concern with truth, the meaning of life, and linguistic sobriety. Moreover, the polypragmon was typically reproached for being drawn to the city, the assembly, and foreign lands, not to mention political intrigue, while the apolypragmon was typically praised for being a nature-­lover, a homebody, who frequents spiritual sanctuaries and practices a certain quietism.11 As a result of the ancient association of curiosity with the appetitive and the aesthetic, moreover, it was often linked with women and the lower classes. As such, any attention to curiosity’s relation to politics in the ancient period must necessarily include attention to social hierarchies and inequality. Plato’s fabled insistence that the philosophical enterprise begins in wonder (thaumazein) appears in the Theaetetus, where the god Thaumas symbolizes wonder and his son Iris symbolizes divine knowledge.12 For Plato, wonder is the precondition of knowledge, the portal to truth. The experience of wonder, however, is not some peaceful reflection on the balance of the universe; instead, it is a vertigo-­inducing madness that leaves one momentarily without a footing, suspended in aporia. Such wonder is far from the curiosity of so-­called philosophers who, as Plato states in The Lovers, are “concern[ed] in the arts or spend [their] life in meddlesome [polypragmosunē] stooping and prying and accumulation of learning.”13 Curiosity, then, is a cheap knockoff of true philosophical wonder; it lacks both the transformative cru-



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cible and the divine payoff. Aristotle makes a similar assessment. As he explains in Metaphysics, the root of philosophy lies in the desire to know (hē orexis eidenai): a desire to see, to see with one’s own eyes, and thereby activate the mind.14 There is no madness, here, but rather a certain measured observation, commensurate with the sciences as a whole. It is serious work. For Aristotle, the desire to know is quite different from periergia, for the latter is fueled by trivial desires and the enjoyment of extravagance. As he states in Generation of Animals, curious men fail to honor the refinement and modesty so evident in nature’s beauty.15 Both Plato and Aristotle are clear: philosophy does not begin in curiosity, nor are all men by nature curious. The root of proper philosophical and scientific investigation must needs lie elsewhere. This position on curiosity has significant political and social implications not only for Plato and Aristotle but for Greek and Roman thought thereafter. To begin with, insofar as curiosity is a derivative, rather than a divinely derived, interest in knowledge beyond one’s present (and perhaps proper) purview, it ought to have no place in politics and to be excised from the political assembly. In Republic, for example, Plato defines political justice (dikaiosyne) as “to do one’s own business [ta auton] and not be a busybody [polypragmon].”16 When a man undertakes more than his own function, Plato continues, this “meddlesomeness [polypragmosunē] is the ruin of the state.”17 An unhealthy polis, in his estimation, is one in which the citizenry follow whimsy rather than duty, dabbling in occupations at random: “citizens are busybodies and jacks-­of-­all-­trades, farmers, financiers, and soldiers all in one.”18 Imagine foot soldiers marching in handstands—­humorous (perhaps), but also dangerous. This principle applies to the soul as much as to the polis. An unhealthy soul is marked by a civil war of its three principles: reason, spirit, and appetite. In such a state of injustice (adikia), there is a “meddlesomeness [polypragmosunē], interference, and revolt one against the other.”19 Imagine that base desire jockeys for judgment, while reason sinks to the level of raw intuition. Curiosity, as a transgressive impetus, compromises the healthy function of both the state and the self by mixing and blurring what ought to be kept separate. Whether exercised at home or in the political assembly, curiosity offends divine law. After all, Plato writes in Laws, men who “enquire concerning the greatest god and about the universe”

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or “busy themselves [polypragmosunē] in searching out causes” are not pious (hosios).20 In sum, the curious polypragmon, for Plato, embodies a fundamentally unjust relation to the gods, to others, and to themselves. Their inquisitive compulsion to transgress boundaries, to intermix essences, and to be distracted is antithetical to a healthy body politic. Aristotle has a similar account of how curiosity compromises political cohesion. In Politics, speaking of organizing magistracies, he laments the ways in which leaders of small states often face a mounting pile of tasks that compound and confound one another ad infinitum. This sentiment surely resonates with those leading today’s mini fiefdoms of family or department. “Every task is better attended to if the attention is directed to one thing only [monopragmosunē] than if it is busy with many [polypragmosunē],” he writes.21 At any given moment, political leaders ought to quell their curiosity so as to focus in on their one main task. Curious people are typically poor leaders in this respect. In Rhetoric, Aristotle further remarks upon the surprising likeableness of incurious people, especially incurious politicians. It is natural, he writes, to like those who are “self-­controlled, because they are not likely to commit injustice [adikia]; and those who are not busybodies [apragmon], for the same reason.”22 Such incurious people, he astutely notes, not only get the job done but also “do not live upon others.”23 They are steely-­eyed and self-­reliant. Again, then, political leaders ought to aspire to suspend their curiosity, so as not to be meddlers or parasites, and instead practice self-­control and a certain contentment, the preconditions of a just life. While this disparagement of curiosity as a meddlesome interest that mixes and muddies what ought to be kept separate—­whether one’s occupation, elements of one’s soul, public/private boundaries, or proper epistemic purviews—­largely reigned in the ancient period, there were some reservations. Is there not some curiosity at work in the pursuit of divine knowledge? And in the cultivation of healthy social relations? Consider Socrates. He is accused of being “a criminal [adikos] and a busybody [periergos],”24 investigating things beneath the earth and in the heavens (all the while failing to believe in the gods of the city) and meddling in other men’s affairs (thereby corrupting the youth). It is this curiosity that lands him in prison and ultimately condemns him to death. During his trial, however, Socrates admits



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to a divinely sanctioned inquisitiveness and a preference for “going about and interfering in people’s private affairs [polypragmosunē]” rather than getting involved in the foolishness of “politics.”25 Socrates is therefore an ancient paragon of divinely inspired, socially engaged curiosity that, while avoiding traditional politics, nevertheless promises to disrupt and refashion it. Much later, Seneca explores a similar possibility. Curiosity—­in particular, the practice of being a “curious spectator [curiosus spectator]” of nature—­is, for Seneca, a means of developing an ethos, a transformative relationship with oneself and the divine, and thereby of becoming free.26 While he still recommends one spurn the affairs of men in order to transcend mortality, he insists it is right and proper for the mind to participate in the divine principle by becoming a curious spectator, one that “separate[s] details and investigate[s] them [excutit singula et quaerit]”—­that is, shakes them apart and perturbs them at the joints, until one sees their essence.27 Such a curiosity involves meddling—­and querying—­meaningfully. Leaving to one side curiosity’s possible (or impossible) access to divine knowledge, other ancient writers willing to entertain a meaningful meddlesomeness explore curiosity’s potential contributions to social relations and belonging. In Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle discusses the perhaps unwelcome possibility that justice might involve traditional politics and that attending to one’s own affairs might also involve attending to those of others. He grants that most people believe “the man who knows and minds his own business is prudent,” whereas all “politicians are busybodies [polypragmones],” certainly imprudent and often impudent.28 As “a matter of fact,” however, it seems that “a man cannot pursue his own welfare without domestic economy and even politics,”29 that is, without also interesting himself in the welfare of others. In this case, Aristotle suggests that a certain interest—­although perhaps not curiosity per se—­in the affairs of other people is requisite for proper care of one’s own affairs. Later, Epictetus insists that, in fact, looking after the affairs of others is a form of looking after oneself and connecting with the divine. It is possible for a man to “put in the same place his interest, sanctity, goodness, and country, and parents, and friends.”30 Anyone who does so is not “overly curious [periergos]” or a “busybody [polypragmon]” but a “participator in the power of Zeus.”31 One can hardly imagine a finer aspiration!

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Despite these rare and reserved endorsements, curiosity remains largely questionable in the Roman period. This is perhaps most evident in Plutarch’s essay “Peri Polypragmosunē” and Apuleius’s novel Metamorphoses, both of which take as their primary concern the dangers of curiosity. For Plutarch, “curiosity [polypragmosunē]” is “a desire to learn the troubles of others”; it is “a disease [nosos]” and “a malady of the mind.”32 It reflects one’s inability to take oneself seriously as an ethical project, becoming lost in affairs other than one’s own. Ideally, Plutarch recommends that we “rid ourselves of this affliction.”33 If, however, we lack the strength to uproot it, he suggests we redirect our inquisitive energies toward the mysteries of astronomy, the minutiae of biology, or the maggots of history. We ought to refrain from enjoying the bazaar, the marketplace, the theater, the city itself, and turn instead to the countryside, to solitude, and to silence.34 Plutarch laments how easily the curious person, sick as he is, is drawn to the “monster market” and to the slave market,35 how naturally he finds himself “whispering with slaves and women in the streets,”36 peering into women’s litters,37 and gossiping about how so-­and-­so is really a descendent of slaves.38 Implicitly, for Plutarch, curiosity is a practice of the lower classes and social outcasts but also a means of privileged access to those lower classes. Its absence marks the proper polis and its presence reinscribes political hierarchies. A similar social function is traceable in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the first Roman novel to survive in its entirety, credited with popularizing the word curiositas for Latin readers. Its protagonist, Lucius, describes himself early on as “not inquisitive [curiosus]” but merely as someone who “wants to know everything [velim scire cuncta].”39 In the words of a priest who closes the narrative, however, this is a tale of the “slavish pleasures” and “perverse rewards” of Lucius’s “ill-­ starred curiosity [curiositas].”40 Lucius loves a good tale, especially a tale about magic or the dark arts. In his thirst41 for hearing and practicing such things—­which he variously describes as making him “mad [amenti],” “dumbfounded [stupidus],” and “crazy [vesane]”42—­he finds himself unexpectedly transformed into an ass. This transformation (reformatum),43 however, is ultimately a deformation (deformatum),44 leaving him far from his human form, function, and fealty. A young man of good pedigree, Lucius the ass is quickly lost to the company of thieves, traveling slaves, and loose women, whose sexual-



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ity and sinister magic are inseparable; he is incarcerated, repeatedly auctioned off, and ultimately slated for forced conjugal intimacy with a condemned woman. Finally, he is saved by the goddess Iris and returns to human form. Dedicating himself to her service, Lucius practices “care [cura],” “carefulness [sollicitudo],” “attention [intendens, sedulitas],” and “investigation [percontatio]” but not—­indeed never—­ “curiosity [curiositas].”45 Ancient thinkers, on the whole, understand curiosity to be a disordering force, both within the individual and across the social fabric. For them, a regime of health requires the relinquishment of curiosity and, instead, the embrace of a care safeguarded by political and religious order. Excluded from this promise of health and salvation, however, are the women, slaves, and animals who invariably embody the depravity of curiosity. Moreover, just as the general structure of this ancient account will become Christianized in the medieval period, so will the disreputably curious character of women, animals, the poor, and the sick. Nevertheless, what the odd endorsements of curiosity among the ancients suggest is something quite different: that the possibility for change, self-­care, and divine wisdom may lie at the periphery (for example, in a poor, deformed, and ignominious Socrates). And that a socially responsible curiosity might involve caring for and caring with precisely these outcasts and border dwellers. Medieval Philosophy

In the medieval world, the fate of curiosity is inextricably tied to the course of faith and the fellowship of the Church, which together determine the intricate political structure of society. As devotion to a higher being becomes increasingly central to sense-­making and world-­ making, the characteristics that being is thought to lack become the cause of calumny. Insofar as God is omniscient and proper comportment toward God requires trust in that omniscience, curiosity is largely castigated. It is thought to break the bond between devotee and divine, to bring disorder to the spiritual journey, and ultimately to poison the believer and the Church. Through the figures of Eve and the serpent, much of this threat remains rooted in womanhood and animality, and it is often expressed in intellectual and physical rootlessness. It will not be until the Renaissance that a certain humanistic, although still

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largely masculinist, curiosity becomes a celebrated trait of character, a sine qua non of the secular traveler. Although the tale properly begins with Augustine and then Aquinas, two predecessors are worthy of mention here: Philo of Alexandria and Tertullian. Each pinpoints the threat that physical and intellectual curiosity pose to the safety of the soul. In his “On the Migration of Abraham,” Philo characterizes curiosity as posing a danger to the individual spiritual journey. Abraham, despite his migrant status, keeps his soul pure by refusing to heed the call of curiosity (periergia), cloaked as it so often is in mathematics, Chaldean science, magic, and astrology.46 As Philo insists, Abraham’s sojourn for truth and redemption must be an incurious one. Tertullian, in turn, focuses on curiosity’s overt attack on Christian fellowship, especially through heresy. He is concerned, first and foremost, with philosophy, which, as a form of worldly wisdom, produces “endless genealogies,” “profitless questions,” “serpentine words,” and a general malaise of “restlessness” and “disquietude.”47 It is in this context that he castigates curiosity, which busies itself with the constant reconsideration of everything. Famously, Tertullian writes: “After Christ, we have no need of curiosity [curiositas], nor of the search [inquisitio] for Truth”;48 as such, he commends: “Let curiosity [curiositas] yield to faith. . . . Let [it] be quiet [quiescens].”49 The conceptual disquiet of curiosity is directly correlated to social disintegration and disease. “What does the Academy have to do with [the] Church?” he asks.50 Curious inquiry threatens precisely the structure, function, and fabric of the Church. While heresy is still in its infancy, such curiosity leads seekers to follow other seekers, such that “the blind lead the blind.”51 When heresy has matured, its curious proponents poison those around them, producing concentric circles of spiritual corruption. The faithful’s only recourse is to institute separation, banishing weaker brothers from their midst.52 Heretics and philosophers, in the (not unwelcome) company of magicians, jugglers, and astrologers, are “unquestionably given over to restless speculation [curiositas].”53 Instead, Tertullian closes, pursue “gravity,” “diligence,” and “careful attention [cura sollicita].”54 Setting the tone for the medieval period, Augustine names curiosity as a sin, roots it in Eve and the serpent, and expands upon its contributions to heresy and therefore to the destruction of Christian fellowship as the political structure of the times. He begins his most sustained



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treatment of curiosity, in the Confessions,55 with 1 John: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of this world.”56 What is “of the Father” is moderate and purposeful, while what is “of this world” is immoderate in its pleasures and disrespectful of divine purposes. This worldliness manifests itself in three forms. First, the lust of the flesh, which is predicated on the five senses, includes sexual activity outside of marriage (whether to a person or to the Church), eating and drinking without concern for sustenance, reveling in perfumed scents or bright colors, and such an intense enjoyment of musical sounds that one forgets to pay attention to the words.57 Second, the lust of the eyes—­manifest in curiosity—­capitalizes on the intimate link between sight and the mind, such that what seduces the eyes also distracts the mind from godly reflection. In this regard, Augustine mentions mangled corpses,58 dreams, public shows, operations of nature, magical arts, signs and wonders, theater, the transit of the stars, ghosts, sacrilegious rites, idle tales, coursing, hunting, sports, and even a (seemingly innocent) lizard or spider catching flies.59 “Curiosity [curiositas],” he states, “pries into objects,” “not to engage itself in the trouble [molestia] they bring, but merely out of an itch [libido] of gaining the knowledge and experience of them.”60 Driven by a superficial itch to see the world, the curious person is thus immoderate (i.e., bent on experiencing what they care not) and dismissive of divine purpose (i.e., bent on knowing what they ought not). Thirdly, the pride of life is a desire to be loved and to be feared, to be praised and to be esteemed, not in order to bring glory to the Father but only to revel in the pleasures thereof.61 Augustinian curiosity thus marks the essential superficiality of those caught up in “this world.” As the rest of Augustine’s corpus makes clear, not only is curiosity an obstacle to the spiritual journey, but it also tears at the fabric of Christian fellowship. “Curiosity [curiositas],” he writes elsewhere, is “by its very care [cura] an enemy of peace, and in its vanity impotent over truth.”62 It is a “perishing [peritura]” interest in perishable things, which itself sows envy and discord among men.63 If left unchecked, this “impious,” “unlawful,” “sacrilegious,” and “wicked” thing called curiosity develops into the forbidden arts, witchcraft, pagan faith, heresy, and secular philosophy.64 Curiosity is the opposite of a keen and steady application of oneself—­and, indeed, the Church as a whole—­to

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the task of spiritual enlightenment. Rupturing the bonds of fellowship and the bridge of faith, therefore, curiosity is fundamentally inconsistent with the practice of true religion. As such, any vibrant Christian community must have no truck with curiosity. It scatters concentration and community, a free radical in the spiritual organism. Against curiositas and for the good of Christian fellowship, Augustine explicitly recommends studiousness (studiositas)65 and temperance (temperatus).66 Believers ought to steel themselves with a humble sobriety, an unwavering faith in revealed truth, and a commitment to the Church. For Augustine, as for many of his contemporaries and successors, the ultimate figures of curiosity are Eve and the serpent. It all begins, of course, with the serpent. In Against the Manichees, Augustine assigns otherwise innocent creatures to Saint John’s triumvirate of sins: cattle represent the lust of the flesh, birds represent the pride of life, and serpents “blinded by dark curiosity [tenebrosa curiositate obscurati]” represent the lust of the eyes.67 On second thought, he writes, the serpent can also represent all three: with pride traceable to its chest, carnal desire to its belly, and curiosity to its cursed eating of the earth; “for one who eats the earth penetrates things deep and dark, but nonetheless temporal and earthly.”68 The message is clear. Curiosity is a cursed search for intellectual nourishment. It is important not to miss the physicality of this curse: it reduces the human to an unhealthy and humiliated animal, “blind [caecus],”69 bent, “creeping [serpit],”70 and “deformed [deformitatem].”71 Worse, it is contagious. Governed by the triumvirate of sins themselves, the Manichaeans not only incarnate the serpent but, like the serpent, bring others down with them, deceiving brothers weakened by the desires of the flesh, superciliousness, and “curiosity [curiositas].”72 Likewise Eve seduces Adam, just as the heretic in Proverbs, appearing in the guise of a woman, whispers “let him who is foolish turn aside to me.”73 The only anodyne to this disease, this wily feminine interest in forbidden things is this: the rigorous subordination of curiosity to reason, just as the woman must submit to her husband and the serpent to Christ’s heel.74 There are a number of variations to this account located across the medieval period, chief among which is that of Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. In the second volume, he addresses seven primary virtues: faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. And it is within his discussion of temperance (and stabilitas)



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that Aquinas not only praises studiositas but criticizes its opposite: curiositas.75 The term’s location indicates first and foremost that curiosity represents what is excessive, lacking in moderation, and ultimately expressive of human pride (superbia). Like Augustine, Aquinas grants both sensual and intellective registers to curiosity. Unlike Augustine, however, Aquinas does not suspect philosophy itself of curiosity; rather, he insists that properly temperate thinking will produce reasonable arguments and concepts that are in no danger of drawing one away from proper spiritual attunement.76 Again, like Augustine, Aquinas links curiosity to Eve, insisting that just as Eve was the bridge from the serpent to Adam, so curiosity is the bridge from the flesh to the mind. The first temptation “begins with the concupiscence of sin in sensuality, signified by the serpent; extends to the lower reason [ratione inferiori], by pleasure, signified by the woman; and reaches to the higher reason by consent in the sin, signified by the man.”77 The lower, contaminated reason is curiosity. It is, moreover, also a corruptor of concern for others. One should “watch [prospicere]” or “inquire [perquirere]” about one’s neighbors, but only to exhort or encourage them.78 Anything else is but vain curiosity. On the heels of Aquinas, the staunch critique of curiosity continued to slowly soften over the course of the Renaissance. While the likes of Isidore of Seville and Gregory the Great would still characterize curiosity as a vice, specifically the daughter or descendent of sloth,79 curiosity came to acquire, more and more, a connotation of active engagement in the world of things to do and to know. Regretting the increasingly precocious plumbing of the mysteries of divine creation, Erasmus would reminisce nostalgically about the restrained thinkers of yesteryear: They had more reverence than to pry into the secrets of Nature with irreligious curiosity [curiositas]—­to measure the stars, their motions and effects, to seek the causes of mysterious phenomena. . . . As for what is beyond the range of the furthest stars, the madness [dementia] of exploring such things never even entered their minds.80

Just as curiosity began crossing ever broader swaths of scientia, so it began traversing ever larger tracts of the earth itself. Weakened were the restrictions of travel to strict necessity or spiritual pilgrimage.

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Instead, the wandering mind (evagatio mentis) was often expressed in a wandering body (evagatio corporis), linking feats of intellectual acumen with acts of physical exploration. Concerned with the growing practice of merely curious travel, Bernard of Clairvaux insisted that fervent eyes and cocked head be replaced with a “head bent and eyes fixed on the ground,”81 always humbled before God. It is hardly surprising, then, that the newly robust group of secular travelers—­ themselves called curiosi—­were by turns castigated for the social and spiritual instability to which they contributed and celebrated for their newly adventurous spirit and exotic tales.82 The growing pains of this new shift toward an embrace of curiosity are perhaps best illustrated by fourteenth-­century bishop and bibliophile Richard de Bury. Accused of an “excess of curiosity [curiositate superflua]”83 and thereby a fall from grace, de Bury felt compelled to write Philobiblon, a defense of his scholarly curiosity and obsession with books. He admits to being “possessed”84 by the love of books and an “unrelenting curiosity [inconcussa curiositate].”85 There was no amount of money he would not pay, no person to whom he would not speak,86 and no town so obscure he would not visit to acquire more books. In states of incapacitation or undress, when he could not be reading himself, he would have books read to him. Enamored with the smell, the feel, the weight, he sought books from Athens, Rome, Britain, and Bologna, but none more than Paris.87 Such lovestruck curiosity, he insists in Philobiblon, is not peripheral to his spiritual duties but a necessity of all Christian brotherhood. A lover of truth must be a lover of books; for the written word, “by means of the pervious spherules of the eyes, passing through the vestibule of perception and the courts of imagination, enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind.”88 For this reason, it is not de Bury who is at fault but rather the Church itself, whose love of books—­replete with curiosity, “care [cura],”89 and “carefulness [incuriam]”90—­was severely lacking. His brethren would prefer that he waste his time with wine and women, hunting and playing dice,91 he says, but such a choice condemns books to disease and disuse. Rather than see books “bowed down to the earth, [their bellies] cleaving unto the earth,” full of palsy, infection, venom, stink, worms, and plague92—­and rather than see the “purity of [their] race”93 sullied by poor translators, compilers, copyists, and



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clerks “maimed [mutilatus]” and “crippled [mancus]”94 by their inability to write—­de Bury vowed to bequeath a special catalog of his books to Oxford University. On the whole, medieval philosophy finds curiosity destructive of the soul, the Church, and thereby the whole sociopolitical fabric, for it is aimless rather than purposeful, unstable rather than devoted, and corrupt rather than salvific. Its corruption is perhaps best figured through Eve and the serpent, themselves disfigured creatures divorced from righteous manhood, just as curiosity is a disfigured interest divorced from reason. Curiosity ruptures Christian fellowship and opens the floodgates of heresy. It leads devotees to doubt the authority of Christian leadership and to disengage from the sacred scriptures. And it prompts some to travel widely, disrupting the familial and economic networks of the period. Still, Richard de Bury’s insistence that curiosity nourishes the soul and the Church signals a turn toward the modern period, in which curiosity will assume the function of ordering individual and social welfare. Modern Philosophy

If anything marks the rise of modernity, it is a fervor for secular inquiry and discovery. The vastness of space, the minutiae of the human body, and the breadth of the oceans are traversed in a dizzying development of scientific technologies and colonial expansions. With the skyrocketing of resource extraction, furthermore, the Industrial Revolution and urbanization changed the landscape of modern livelihoods and living quarters. Paired with an ever-­increasing information literacy and massifying media, Enlightenment values of individualism and secular humanism reshaped the globe. A different spirit was born. In this context, curiosity gained momentum. Once so lambasted, the business of curiosity was largely redeemed. As Francis Bacon, paragon of the period, puts it, “Curiosity and a desire to know is natural and carrieth a great delight.”95 Not only is its hunt for novelty the germ of scientific advancement, but, as Edmund Burke writes, curiosity is also the foundation of aesthetic appreciation.96 This elevation of curiosity, by which it comes to be associated with the higher classes, is enabled in part by a transferal of its ancient vulgarity to wonder, which comes to mark the lower classes in curiosity’s stead.97 Simultaneously,

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curiosity’s ancient alignment with imperial expansion is resignified as a boon, thereby naturalizing curiosity for the intrepid settler-­colonial explorer.98 No longer conceived of as essentially destructive of self and society, curiosity is instead seen as an empowering force in modernity, crucial to expanding sovereignty, dominating the natural world, and ordering human life. Of course, there were still those who held to the traditional critique of curiosity. More often than not, however, curiosity was countenanced, if not outright endorsed, by modern thinkers, even if certain vestiges of concern for its social implications remained alive and well. Recall Plutarch’s worry—­tempered by Epictetus but reprised by Aquinas—­that curiosity is a nefarious interest in other people’s affairs. Even if curiosity serves the goals of modern science, there remained nevertheless a sense that it dallies in vacuous and at times even pernicious intrigues. Blaise Pascal, one of the modernists who still staunchly rejects “curiosity [curiosité]” as “only vanity,” insists it capitalizes on a base human instinct: “we usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”99 For Pascal, curiosity is a mere mask for gossip. By contrast, Immanuel Kant finds curiosity (Kuriosität)100 largely innocuous; but, while he thinks “this inclination [which] merely plays with ideas and has no further interest in their object . . . is not to be censored,” he grants this dispensation only “[so] long as it does not pry into other people’s private affairs.”101 Curiosity’s meddlesome tendencies must be muted. It is David Hume who perhaps best channels the largess of the Enlightenment when it comes to curiosity. Both our empty interest in other people’s business and our legitimate love of truth, he insists, stem from this common excitation called curiosity.102 Thus, without necessarily repeating the inherent moralization of the classical critique of curiosity, there were, nevertheless, modern thinkers who reprised the classical alignment of curiosity with idle chatter, vacuity, and insignificant activities. Many, however, had no concerns at all, seeing curiosity as part and parcel of scientific advancement and human flourishing. René Descartes insists that wonder—­although not curiosity103—­is a handmaiden of reason and all of reason’s blessings.104 Each in their own way, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau argue the same of curiosity. And yet, in their very endorsements of curiosity, they also dismiss animals, women, and disabled people from the circle of properly curious beings. Hobbes defines curiosity as “the



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hope and expectation of future knowledge,”105 which prompts men to investigate causes and effects. Because this investigation forms the precondition of all ratiocination, Hobbes asserts that “from the degrees of curiosity proceed also the degrees of knowledge amongst men.”106 If curiosity is the fountain of knowledge, for him, it is also the fountain of power: especially in the form of philosophy, politics, and religion. For Hobbes, philosophy refers to the knowledge of causes reasoned back from their effects and effects reasoned forward from their causes.107 Curiosity, as the impetus to investigate all possible relations of cause and effect,108 is fundamental to philosophy. In catapulting cognition into the past and the future, curiosity searches out all the means and ends to be known but also all the means and ends necessary to know in order to consciously construct a better existence. Curiosity is, therefore, not only the genesis of reason but also the generative source of political force. By enabling ratiocination, curiosity equips humans with the capacity to acquire power over themselves, their surroundings, and their destiny. It also leads them to God. Tarrying over curiosity’s “love of the knowledge of causes,”109 Hobbes notes that curiosity must eventually stumble upon the limit of causes: the first cause, or the uncaused cause, otherwise called “God.” The famous frontispiece of Leviathan captures these interrelations, depicting a curious, philosophical investigation into the interwoven secular and religious powers that are poised over humanity’s future. It is a bit of a philosophical pastime to deny some of the best human qualities to animals. Thinkers from Philo to Wittgenstein deny animals hope.110 Hobbes is one in a litany of thinkers—­including Ilhan Inan—­who deny animals curiosity.111 While characterizing curiosity as the “desire to know why, and how,” Hobbes insists that “man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals.”112 The human capacity to investigate the production of things distinguishes man from animal, presuming that the latter simply considers how the thing at hand might or might not meet a present organic need.113 But curiosity distinguishes man from animal in an even more overt fashion; for, as Hobbes insists, “from the passion of admiration and curiosity have arisen . . . not only the supposition of . . . causes” but “the invention of names,” the advantage of which invention “is that we are capable of science, which beasts for want of them are not.”114 Curiosity, then, or that care of knowing

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causes, constitutes the impetus not only for analysis but also for appellation; as such, for Hobbes, curiosity is a distinguishing feature of the human via the faculty of reason and the capacity for language.115 John Locke will similarly plant curiosity squarely in the camp of humanity. Culled from a series of advice letters to a friend, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (a strangely milquetoast title) asserts the naturalness of curiosity, especially in children. It also outlines how this childlike force can contribute to the development of a mature adult, capable of participating rationally and compassionately in the human project. “Curiosity in children,” he writes, “is but an appetite for knowledge, and therefore ought to be encouraged in them, not only as a good sign, but as the great instrument nature has provided to remove that ignorance they were born with, and which, without this busy inquisitiveness, will make them dull and useless creatures.”116 The training of curiosity can go wrong in all kinds of ways, Locke warns. Children’s questions should be countenanced and encouraged. They ought never to be deluded or eluded in their early investigations. Rather, all questions should be answered as befits their level of understanding. It is appropriate, besides, to excite their curiosity by engaging them with various novelties. Finally, knowledge should always be commended, whether in them or in their companions. By these means, education can contribute to the development of a calm, sensible, and industrious citizen of the nation-­state. It is important to note that, for Locke, there are certain effeminate traits that jeopardize proper child development and, in some cases, mask themselves as curiosity. In children, there ought to be no craving, complaining, or crying. Indicators of an “effeminacy of the spirit,”117 such traits “weaken”118 and “soften”119 the mind where strength and “firmness”120 are needed. Of still greater concern are the curiosity lookalikes: chattiness and listlessness. Chattiness, or “pertness” as Locke puts it, signals a “busy inquisitive temper” or an indiscriminate interest in vaguely investigating and vocalizing things.121 Such a temper, Locke warns, “proceeds from a principle that seldom accompanies a strong constitution of body, or ripens into a strong judgment of mind.”122 It is vacuous at best. Listlessness, in turn, or “sauntering” in Locke’s terminology, signals a certain “carelessness, a want of regard to anything, and a sort of trifling, even at their business.”123 Children with this “sauntering humor” are dawdlers, daydreamers, and lolly-



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gaggers (perhaps harbingers of adult snollygosters), besieged by “one of the worst qualities that can appear in a child, as well as one of the hardest to be cured.”124 It ought to be replaced by prompt focus. In all, these feminine qualities of craving, complaining, crying, chattiness, and listlessness are inconsistent with not only curiosity but human maturation proper. By the time we reach the close of the 1700s, we find Jean-­Jacques Rousseau singing the praises of the solitary walker, who, as he “wanders about, passing freely from one object to another, . . . considers each plant in turn with interest and curiosity [curiosité].”125 Curiosity is a natural impetus, often practiced in natural settings and capable of revealing nature’s secrets. For Rousseau, prior to the social contract, the savage man—­a conception often aligned with colonized peoples at the time—­barely thinks as far as his next nap, meal, or sexual encounter, and thus can hardly be said to care about the future. For this reason, the savage “is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to desire to acquire greater knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity [curiosité].”126 However, a child born within the social contract—­which is to say, a civilized (especially European) child—­is fundamentally curious in a sense inextricable from the context and success of that same civilization. Curiosity, as Rousseau defines it, is “the innate desire for well-­being and the impossibility of fully satisfying this desire . . . [which] make[s] [man] constantly seek for new means of contributing to it.”127 As such, Rousseauian curiosity is inherently teleological. It is also developmental. In Émile, Rousseau provides a developmental account of curiosity according to which this natural sentiment must be appropriately controlled in order for it to serve its inherent teleological function: if discipline is maintained, curiosity works as it should—­in tandem with nature—­while if that discipline grows slack, curiosity works as it should not—­in tension with nature. It is only by means of this developmental discipline that the natural sentiment of curiosity may serve its contracted, civilized ends and avoid the flagrant decadence of an unbridled curiosity.128 It is important to appreciate Rousseau’s primary concern in the developmental training of curiosity: civilized, able-­bodied boys who will one day be leaders in society. That is, he is most concerned with Émile’s curiosity rather than his companion Sophie’s. Girls certainly have curiosity—­indeed, “too much curiosity”—­but theirs should not

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be trained on books and intellectual exploration but rather on arithmetic, embroidery, and other tasks necessary for the government of the home.129 Thankfully, a girl needs little more inducement to such tasks than “cherries for her snack.”130 For boys to become governors of the public sphere, their bodies and minds ought to be trained with demanding tasks that produce both strength and agility. All physical and intellectual activities that “effeminate and soften”131 ought to be avoided. Nevertheless, if the boy develops from strength to strength, with little loss, pain, or suffering in his path, he will be ill-­equipped for true leadership, unable “to feel himself in his fellows.”132 So as to temper his development, then, Rousseau recommends exercises in pity. The boy must meet the “poor,” the “sick,” the “lashed,” the “dying,” the “suffering,” the “crying,” the “pained,” the “miserable,” the “anguished,” the “sad,” the “bleeding,” the “fatigued,” the “hungry,” the “dull,” the “gaunt,” the “afflicted,” the “languorous,” the “agonized,” the “imperiled,” the “unfortunate,” the “abased,” and even the “corpse” itself.133 Doing so will develop a staid disposition, keep the boy from becoming too self-­absorbed, and help him avoid the “restless,” “worried,” and over “eager” sort of curiosity that results from too straight a climb.134 The sight of sick bodies effectively restrains an overactive curiosity, keeping mind and body in check, within the bounds of reason. When it comes to citizenship and nation-­building in the modern period, particularly in Western colonial contexts, curiosity is key. While there are exceptions, modern European thinkers on the whole understand curiosity to be an ordering force, both within the individual and across social fabric. It is a natural impetus, consistent with appreciating and dominating the natural environment, as much as foreign territories. A regime of health for the body politic requires curiosity, as a future-­oriented practice of investigation and innovation. And yet, curiosity is only naturalized for some. Still excluded from that dappled future are the women, the animals, the poor, disabled, and colonized peoples who, while they support their Western male, able-­ bodied human counterparts, are nevertheless subordinated by them in the work of discovery and public policy. As such, there is no question that this era reverses curiosity’s ancient relation to politics, but there is equally no question that it does so without significantly shifting curiosity’s relationship to the politically disadvantaged.



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Politics and Curiosity

Although the vicissitudes of this particular tale might suggest any number of insights, at least two things are clear: across Western philosophical history, curiosity has consistently been explicitly thought in relationship to politics and implicitly involved in politics. The contemporary depoliticization and dehistoricization of curiosity should thus ring strangely. In all likelihood (and as the rest of this book will argue), curiosity remains involved in the thought and practice of politics. Depoliticizing and dehistoricizing curiosity today would, therefore, constitute a disavowal in the technical sense of the term. It would reject a perception of reality as inconceivable just because that perception is difficult to grapple with, socially unacceptable, or even traumatic. Disavowal represses what is better acknowledged and worked through. In the case of curiosity, the refusal to come to terms with curiosity’s inextricability from politics leaves us ill-­equipped to excavate the political investments of our own inquiries, identify and evaluate the technologies of curiosity employed by political forces, and account for the political exclusions that are either complicit in or constitutive of those inquiries and forces. While curiosity and politics are consistently intertwined, however, the character of their entwinement changes across history and geography. As I have argued, in relation to political structures of the time, curiosity shifted from a disordering force in the ancient period, to a destructive force in the medieval period, to an ordering and constructive force in the modern period. The question is why. Why this series of changes? And why is curiosity at the helm (or caught in the tiller)? Is it, as Blumenberg asserts, simply a story of curiosity getting free? Is it a story of curiosity caught in the cross fire between religious and secular faiths, as each vies for control over the power of knowledge? Is it a story of capital, setting the stage for the neoliberalization of curiosity in our postmodern era, as Smith intimates? Or is there really no logic to the tale, an absurd story in an absurd world, and we just have to muddle through? In the preceding pages, I have suggested there is still another way to tell this story. The entwinement of curiosity and politics is consistently refashioned to track changing hygienic regimes, which purport to safeguard a healthy self or polis by recommending, by turns, that each eschew, abstain from, or capitalize on curiosity. I

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leave a full defense and fine-­tuning of this hygienic narrative arc for another day. For our purposes, it is less important to understand why than to understand that: that curiosity’s story has changed and always in relationship to political forces and practices. It is equally important to understand what has not changed. While the characterization of curiosity in relationship to politics changes over time, the political exclusions of those characterizations have remained largely the same. When denounced in the ancient and medieval periods, curiosity was condemned to the realm of animals, slaves, and women. Its iconic abjection in the form of Eve and the serpent cannot be overappreciated. When roundly endorsed, in the modern period, especially in European countries oriented toward imperial expansion, curiosity was rooted in the masculine citizen-­subject, who distinguished his curiosity from the “brute” and the “savage” and disciplined it by distancing himself from animality, femininity, and disability. Moreover, as curiosity moves from the ancient city to modern naturescapes, its process of naturalization reinscribes the delegitimization of the unnatural. As such, the nineteenth century—­with its scientific racism, colonial exoticization, and freak shows—­has no corner on the politicization of curiosity. Curiosity has been wrapped up in political exclusions all along. This recognition demands that we ask a series of new questions. To supplement the theorizing of curiosity in general, it is imperative that we ask whose curiosity is under consideration and what practices constitute it in a specific context. Whose questions are being asked? What characterization of curiosity is being posed? And how is the practice of curiosity wrapped up in the privileging of certain bodyminds in political spaces over others? Attending to the politics of curiosity does much to complicate, although not to answer, the age-­old question: Is curiosity even a good thing? Instead of asking whether curiosity is a vice or a virtue in general, the political history of curiosity pushes us to ask: In what social contexts and within what political relations has curiosity counted or functioned as a vice or a virtue? Attunement to these political dimensions, moreover, prompts us to widen the range of philosophical questions we ask about curiosity. To canonical questions regarding the ethics and epistemology of curiosity, we must add sociopolitical questions. In what ways are political relations constructive of curiosity? In what ways are political structures consistent—­or inconsistent—­with



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curiosity? How is curiosity complicit in—­or disruptive of—­political inequality? What sorts of technologies of curiosity support the status quo and which are uniquely tuned to political resistance movements? How have marginalized groups retooled curiosity through the work of their own liberation? And what happens when politicized forces of curiosity clash?

These are some of the questions I take up in what follows. I turn first to late modern and contemporary political philosophy, specifically the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. For these thinkers, curiosity is neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. Instead, they find curiosity on both sides not so much of religious or scientific divides but of political struggles. While Nietzsche locates curiosity on the scene of struggle between civilization and liberation, Foucault locates curiosity in both institutions and resistance. Derrida, in turn, analyzes curiosity through the lens of sovereignty and responsibility. But each in their own way also tackles curiosity alongside issues of ability, animality, gender, race, and sexuality. As such, they provide resources for thinking the politics of curiosity today, deeply indebted to—­but importantly different from—­the history we have just canvassed.

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Part I EPISODES FROM POLITICAL THEORY

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Friedrich Nietzsche CURIOSITY AND THE SCENE OF STRUGGLE

Of all the subjects one might take up in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche, curiosity is perhaps the most apropos. In the first place, Nietzsche is a strange fellow—­a rare bird or an odd duck, as they say; he even has the aquiline qualities to boot: “birdlike freedom, birdlike altitude, birdlike exuberance.”1 As such, he has become something of a cultural, even a scholarly, curiosity. Someone who bent the German language into lyrical French. Someone who walked up to eight hours a day and still wrote voluminously. Someone who vainly proposed to a woman through his best friend. Someone who lost his sanity and yet whose sane years refused a certain rational decorum. A self-­proclaimed prophet and recluse. Long excluded from but now central to the philosophical canon. Someone who believed God dead and yet would believe in a god who could dance. Someone who thought Socrates a monster and yet dreamed of a Socrates winged with music. Someone who wrote aphorisms too long for the genre proper, yet too short for anything else. Someone whose endless posthumous fragments—­including, most famously, “I have forgotten my umbrella”—­remain a scholastic riddle. If ever anyone was, Nietzsche is a curio. Besides being one of the more curious characters in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche is also himself quite curious. A paradigmatic case of the evagatio mentis and evagatio corporis, his mind wanders across history, philology, theology, psychology, and culture as much as his body wanders endlessly around Germany, Switzerland, and the Mediterranean coast. Questions bubble up and cascade over his prose, raucously jockeying for daylight. He asks, with a certain irreverent

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glee: Is the morality we have inherited in fact “the danger of [all] dangers?”2 Indeed, are our habits “the product of innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses or of [our] courage and [our] inventive reason?”3 Will we who are hidden from ourselves “ever find ourselves?”4 And at bottom, how can an honest, vital existence be nurtured under the auspices of dead traditions and unquestioned “truths”? Nietzsche outright describes himself as a man of curiosity. Curiosity, he says, is the root of both Human, All Too Human and On the Genealogy of Morals.5 But he might easily have said the same of all of his writings. His elaborate experimental writing style, alongside his transgressive content, textually embodies curiosity. Armed with a rebellious inquisitiveness, he takes aim at the sacred cows of modern ideologies, one after another: God, morality, education, civilization, etc. Irreligious and recalcitrant to the core, “a curiosity [Neugierde] of my type,” he writes, “remains after all the most agreeable of all vices.”6 Writing retrospectively, in Ecce Homo, he reiterates, “I am too inquisitive [neugierig], too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer.”7 In every inquiry, he prefers the delicate, harrowing thought of curiosity. Although commentators’ knack for casting Nietzsche as a curiosity is breathtaking, they rarely if ever use the word. And to date, choice few have devoted any careful attention to Nietzsche’s own practice or theory of curiosity. Among the exceptions is biographer Rüdiger Safranski, who insists that Nietzsche’s whole project is one of curiosity. Insofar as Nietzsche takes as his task “experimenting with the nuclear fusion of the individual” or its inherent deconstructability, “curiosity and an abundance of thought  .  .  .  , self-­love and self-­loathing” are required.8 Bernard Reginster argues the centrality of curiosity not so much to Nietzsche’s negative project as to his positive project. Nietzschean curiosity, for Reginster, is a disposition or trait essential to the “free spirit,” whose will to knowledge is predicated on a continued practice of honesty rather than on the maintenance of conviction.9 In a subtle counterargument, Mark Alfano argues that Nietzschean curiosity is not merely an aspirational trait but an epistemic virtue; in technical terms, it is a specification of the will to power in the domain of knowledge that is “characterized by an insatiable desire to solve novel, difficult problems and puzzles, and to discover or invent them when none are ready to hand.”10 Such curiosity, Alfano claims,



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paired with honesty and courage, characterizes not only Nietzsche but also the future human to which Nietzsche hopes we will each aspire. While these scholars discuss curiosity in relationship to Nietzsche’s negative and positive projects, as well as his epistemology and ethics, none takes up, as I do here, Nietzschean curiosity’s relation to politics, or to the agonal dynamic between the institution and the individual, between problem makers and problem breakers. Before turning to trace the twine of curiosity and politics across Nietzsche’s corpus, allow me to offer a few methodological notes. First, a Nietzsche scholar must needs be a humble scholar. Nietzsche’s published corpus (not to mention the Nachlass) is particularly unwieldy, his aphorisms perpetually disorganized, his position changeable, and his attitude often as playful as it is evasive, as suggestive as it is aloof. And he takes a certain pleasure in obtuseness. How do you catch such a cloud and pin it down? What I offer here is but one pathway, one sketch of curiosity and politics in Nietzsche’s thought. Here I focus on Nietzsche’s explicit references to curiosity.11 Exhaustively consulting his published work, and broadly consulting the Nachlass, I have tracked Nietzsche’s use of four German words: Kuriosität, Neugier, Wissbegier, and Vorwitz.12 Consider these terms in brief. Kuriosität, a Germanization of the Latin curiositas, refers to curiosity or to curios, in an abstract, nonevaluative sense. More common in the language and always evaluative are the indigenous German words Neugier and Wissbegier. Neugier—­a composite of neu (new) and Gier (greed)—­ refers to an inquisitiveness often rooted in a questionable desire for whatever is novel or strange, while Wissbegier—­a composite of Wiss (knowledge) and Gier (greed)—­refers to an inquisitiveness rooted in a desire for knowledge, a thirst for information or understanding.13 As such, Neugier typically carries a more negative connotation than Wissbegier, but neither is entirely pure of affect or drive. Vorwitz typically refers to pertness or presumptuousness but is also used as a synonym for Neugier. Under Nietzsche’s hand, each term always already means more than one thing; nevertheless, across his usage, I find a logic that places struggle at the heart of curiosity, a certain agonism—­between different configurations of self and society—­in the very gut of inquiry. Nietzsche’s own curiosity deftly unmasks the stiff patterns of habituated questions overdetermining his academic and social worlds and attempts to reignite a fearless, rebel inquisitiveness among his readers.

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For Nietzsche, human consciousness, knowledge, and morality are the product of civilization, with all the dissimulation, repression, and cruelty that presupposes. As I will argue in what follows, there is a kind of civilized and civilizing curiosity that builds these systems of consciousness, schemas of knowledge, and deep evaluative divisions. Such a curiosity contributes to and maintains the distributions and effects of power. This is a “sober, pragmatic curiosity,” as he puts it, that busies itself with the “curious investigation of . . . countless minutiae.”14 But there is another sort of curiosity for Nietzsche, one vibrant enough to undercut civilization and second-­guess what has become so keenly conscious. This curiosity is deeply natural and life-­affirming, suspicious of the illusions that maintain the current system. This is a “fateful curiosity”15 that destroys the status quo through the triumphant assertion of the “free spirit” and “the great liberation.”16 This is the irreverently organic curiosity that Nietzsche himself endorses. As such, Nietzsche’s account of curiosity is always sociopolitical, always predicated on a struggle between formations of power and investments of value, which serve and are served by different configurations of the curious act itself. Before developing these two configurations of curiosity, I offer an account of the agonistic landscape on which they appear. I then close by reflecting on the tensions around femininity and disability that bleed through the politics of Nietzschean curiosity. The Scene of Struggle

In his analysis of Nietzschean curiosity, Alfano distinguishes between Nietzsche’s “positive” and “negative” references to curiosity; that is, he winnows out the moments in which Nietzsche refers to curiosity approvingly, often through self-­attributions, from moments of disparagement or aspersion.17 The former, Alfano stipulates, delineate a virtue, while the latter a vice. In either case, he argues, Nietzsche is demarcating a character trait: curiosity, a complex disposition that someone either has or does not have. There are two distinct limitations to Alfano’s account of Nietzschean curiosity. First, it assumes a largely individualized, psychologized framework; it therefore necessarily fails to account for the sociopolitical role of curiosity, whether in its collective or praxical function. Second, it assumes a bivalent and oppositional framework; it therefore necessarily fails to account for the relation-



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ship between so-­called good and bad curiosities, their interactions and mutual influence. These assumptions, however, are anti-­Nietzschean. For Nietzsche, a unified subject, extracted from sociopolitical forces, is wholly inconceivable. Likewise, curiosity as a mere character trait, extracted from warring psychic drives, is nonsensical. If “all events, all motion, all becoming” can be understood “as a determination of degrees and relations of force, as a struggle,”18 then the very structure of societies and selves is constituted by an agonism of forces, a clash of wills to power and wills to knowledge. Any account of Nietzschean curiosity worth its salt must grapple with the perpetual war or struggle over curiosity—­or, indeed, curiosities—­at both the social and the psychic level. It is this agonistic account I develop here. As a cornerstone of Nietzschean philosophy, agonism has garnered solid scholarly attention. The insight that social structures and values arise from contestation has informed theories of phenomena as distinct as interpersonal relationships and political organization. Appreciating the historical precedent of the ancient Greek agon—­a struggle between two individual parties—­and its effectiveness for large-­scale cultural contestation, Christa Acampora develops a Nietzschean account of agonism as the by turns creative and destructive force behind social investments.19 Socrates’s devaluation of the body as “a form of sickness”20 and Nietzsche’s own revaluation of the earth as the source of “great health” exemplifies precisely this agonism, this contestation capable of effecting the transvaluation of values. Agonism is the instigator of change and the augur of possibility. For this reason, Wendy Brown, William Connolly, and Bonnie Honig, for example, all centralize Nietzschean agonism in the democratic realm, where it protects against “closure,” against “domination by any one idea, truth, essence, individual, or institution.”21 An agonistic political structure, they argue, preserves public debate and civil discourse; it safeguards the frank grappling with differences of opinion and experience in order, ultimately, to make more room for everyone. Not all endorsements of Nietzschean agonism are political in this narrower sense, however. Both Foucault’s genealogies of power as relations of force and Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty as oppositional thinking are rooted in a Nietzschean theory of existence as struggle; agon is fundamental.22 It is within this larger political framework that I locate the warring curiosities in Nietzsche’s corpus.

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Nietzschean agonism is, of course, rooted in his doctrine of the will to power. According to this principle, it is essential to the human, the earth, the world, and being itself to privilege struggle over survival, and wrestling through hard times over happiness.23 Things are driven less by a need for preservation or an absence of pain than by “expansion, incorporation, [and] growth,” a “striving against something that resists.”24 While scholars debate whether the will to power is a first-­ or second-­order drive, and whether its ends are specific or generic,25 there is broad scholarly agreement that the will to power is a will to overcome resistance—­to be met with one’s match but to pull through and become something different on the other side. This is an infinite project, one never finally finished. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra testifies as much when he announces, “Whatever I create and however much I love it—­soon I must oppose it and my love,” for “I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends.”26 Within the framework of the will to power, curiosity cannot ultimately be settled or satisfied, but is instead indefinite and perpetual. Caught in a cycle of investigations aiming either to quell or to commit to the struggle, curiosity ultimately “break[s] egg and eggshell.”27 With “chance at its heart,” as Gilles Deleuze puts it, the force of life will constantly overcome fast-­setting curiosity-­formations in search of new ones.28 Readers of Nietzsche are no strangers to warring factions in his texts. As is so well demonstrated in the figure of the Übermensch, such contestation is not merely oppositional or developmental, but agonal, locked in a continuous creative tension. Indeed, it is precisely because the war between such factions is never won and neither faction is entirely distinct from the other that they prove to be such productive forces. By way of example, consider first the Apollonian and Dionysian, two ancient Greek artistic forces Nietzsche describes as in “tremendous opposition,” “continuous development,” and “perpetual strife.”29 Concretely, the Apollonian produces the exquisite definition of sculpture, while the Dionysian generates the ecstatic energy of music. Fundamentally, these interwoven forces embody the principles of creation and destruction, of appearance and annihilation, of individuation and primordial oneness, respectively. “These two different tendencies run parallel to each other,” he writes, “for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an agonism.”30 Imagine



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the dance of prose and poetry, words and the wordless, sound and silence.31 For Nietzsche, the creative clash of the Apollonian and Dionysian subtends Greek tragedy specifically and sense-­making more generally. In the realm of political unrest and resistance, their tension might be dramatized in the relay between pointed, verbal demands and often silent, embodied demonstrations; while reaching past, or beyond, each other, these elements also work alongside one another. As a second example, consider Nietzsche’s three historiographical models: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.32 As much as human history itself is the story of struggle, there is a continuous struggle over how we tell that story. From Nietzsche’s perspective, there are three types of history-­telling that have the capacity to support human flourishing. Monumental history celebrates monuments—­ that is, great persons and events; as a historiographical method, it commemorates assertive actors. By contrast, antiquarian history resists any focus on greatness and turns instead to record the minute details of the past; as a historiographical method, it channels the human need for reverence and preservation. Critical history refuses either to celebrate or to preserve the past and instead violently breaks from it, channeling humankind’s capacity for judgment and liberatory change. Despite their agonistic relationship to one another, each type of history serves “the ends of life,” Nietzsche argues, and ought to be employed, separately or together, as the needs of different communities dictate.33 There is a sense in which the civil rights movement thrived on all three forms of history: it held white and Black leaders responsible for the course of events, it tirelessly amassed damning details of segregation, and it said “No” to the story as it had been made, told, remade, and retold. It declared a time for change. As a third and final example, consider the three figures that open Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the camel, the lion, and the child. In his first attempt to communicate what a return to the earth and to creaturely politics looks like, Nietzsche, through the mouthpiece of Zarathustra, describes a necessary metamorphosis from acceptance, to refusal, to creation. The reverent spirit, he intones, is like a camel, ready and willing to carry the weight of what has already been created and curated; it responds well to the command “Thou shalt.” Springing out from and against that camel, however, is the irreverent spirit of a lion, bent on overthrowing thousand-­year-­old values and their concomitant

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institutions; the lion channels the “sacred No.” And yet, from behind the lion springs the child, who neither carries nor refuses existing values but playfully creates new ones. As Zarathustra articulates, “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-­propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed.”34 Of course, it is precisely these new values, once sedimented into power relations, to which the camel will bend a knee, and the series of metamorphoses is reinaugurated. Through these figures, Zarathustra calls for the herd of humans before him, so marked by their lethargy, indifference, and desanguinated questions, to pursue their own self-­overcoming. On the contemporary political landscape, the Black Youth Project and the Black Lives Matter movement arguably provide examples of how these transformations can be overlaid. They embody a lionhearted refusal of structural racism in the United States and a creative commitment to Black love and world-­making; they do so by bending the knee to a long tradition of Black organizing informed by the Black radical imagination, while also refusing the patriarchal elements of that history and cultivating a new queer feminist praxis in its wake.35 In all of these Nietzschean cases—­whether the two artistic forces, the three historiographical methods, or the three metamorphoses—­the agonism is clear. In each, their factions are mutually coconstituting and codeconstructing and it is for this reason that, together, they are forces of creative transformation. Nevertheless, Nietzsche clearly favors certain factions over others. Concerned with his legacy in Ecce Homo, he asks, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified.”36 In The Gay Science, he insists, “I wish only to be a Yes-­sayer.”37 And in On the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere, he conducts critical histories, never monumental or antiquarian. On one interpretation, the fact that Nietzsche privileges one side of each contest, one force in each struggle, indicates that he fails to support true agonism. Scholars concerned by this interpretation might insist that Nietzsche only seeks balance. Insofar as the historical forces of Christianity, and even the German culture of his time, privileged one side, he had to champion another. His hands were tied. But this line of reasoning fails to account for Nietzsche’s own personality and passions. There is something precisely more alive, more life-­affirming, for Nietzsche, about the Yes than the No, about the “I will” than the “Thou shalt” or the “I prefer



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not to.”38 Championing a faction, however, does not necessarily entail willing that faction to win and the struggle to end, or even believing this is possible. In fact, struggle is always fundamental for Nietzsche. His pessimism lies in the suspicion that negentropy is a superior force, and therefore he commits to the weaker and yet braver force of disruption, deconstruction, and organic assertion. This dynamic is no less true of the agonism between curiosities across Nietzsche’s corpus. Each fuels and frustrates the other, and Nietzsche typically sides with one over the other. Against the sort of curiosity that populates systems, he pits (and favors) a transgressive curiosity, capable of tearing those systems down. Against the antagonistic curiosities that either curiotize monuments or collect minutiae, he pits (and commends) a curiosity that insinuates itself between and beneath how things are normally thought and done. Against the practice of merely replicating or refusing to replicate inherited curiosities—­ bequeathed by tradition, force, or simple acculturation—­he pits (and practices) a childlike curiosity that generates new modes and fields of inquiry, fearlessly peering beneath hallowed edifices and listening to the fierce fire of the earth. In what follows, I describe this clash of curiosities in greater detail. Curiosity against Life

In the Nietzschean ecology, there are certain forms of life that are nevertheless “antilife.” This seemingly paradoxical claim is, upon closer examination, surprisingly intuitive. After all, death, disease, and enervation are as natural to life as they are inimical to it. The two are locked in agonism. As a paradigmatic case, consider (the naturally occurring) Neoplatonic Christian morality.39 Such morality is, for Nietzsche, antilife. It aims to kill the passions, exterminate desires, extirpate instincts, and suppress the senses. As such, it is hostile to the body, the earth, and indeed the whole material realm. But what is life without a material substrate? It is disease masking as health. Nietzsche therefore vigorously recommends forms of life that are “for life.” He proposes an “antimorality” that would function not on denial but on the force of affirmation, of hearts wide open. It would work with, rather than against, life’s capacity to assert and to expand, to grow and to change, to feel and to invest. For Nietzsche, this life force has

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been so long buried it is in danger of being forgotten. Much the same can be said of curiosity. Just as there is a form of life that is hostile to life, so there is a form of curiosity that is hostile to curiosity; that is to say, there is a form of questioning, inquiry, or investigation that, in its very execution, condemns curiosity, restricts and reduces it, dulls and controls it. It is this sort of curiosity, Nietzsche contends, that characterizes his contemporaries, especially those people and places that most tout a vibrant spirit of inquiry: schools and universities, teachers and scholars, amateurs and connoisseurs. Ironically, it is the system of knowledge production and consumption, with its archipelago of informational institutions, that replicates a deadening rather than life-­ giving curiosity. What are the bastions of curiosity if not educational institutions? Surely, of all the places one would expect to find a vital, organic curiosity, it is there. And yet, echoing current-­day assessments,40 Nietzsche insists that institutions of education are not bastions but rather crypts of curiosity. They deftly suppress the inquisitive impulses of youth and replace them with disciplined, desanguinated habits of investigation. Classical education is, for Nietzsche, particularly offensive given its commitment to bequeath an unusually long tradition of precurated information. Demonstrating an ideological commitment to history over science—­that is, to what is known over the question itself—­ classical education “squanders” “those curious [wissbegierigen], hot and thirsty years” of youth by “forcing” knowledge rather than nourishing a “hunger” for it.41 This is a process he morbidly refers to as a “brain drill.”42 Young people finish school with mounds of information, and correlated evaluation metrics, yet “without a single question, without any curiosity [Neugierde],” especially about the fundamental question—­the real problem—­of human existence: how and what to will.43 Given his devastating assessment of education, he is loath to support the extension of educational opportunities to young women. “For heaven’s sake,” he writes, “don’t let us transmit our grammar-­ school education to girls!”44 Why double the damage? And here he adds something quite striking: education “takes spirited, curious [wissbegierigen], passionate young people and makes them—­images of their teachers!”45 Who are these teachers? And by what alchemy have they come to be killers and crypts of curiosity themselves? As Nietzsche repeatedly indicates across his corpus, they are the foot sol-



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diers of another form of curiosity: a hardened, sedimented, and institutionalized curiosity, one inimical to life. Educated or scholarly curiosity fails, precisely, to live. It collects information without courting transformation. Early in his career, Nietzsche bemoans the “vain scholar” who “chooses curiosities [Kuriositäten] as his field of research and is gratified when he himself is regarded as a curious curiosity [Kuriosität neugierig].”46 We all know the type. He claims a niche so obscure only he can be the expert and then insists on being acknowledged as such. Here, a certain showmanship is lacquered over a vacuity of method, content, and aspiration. Nietzsche points to David Strauss as an example, a man whose “learned curiosity [Neugierde]” is mere “idling.”47 Strauss bedecks (or besmirches) his texts with “curiosities [Kuriositäten] of expression,” but no truly inquisitive spirit undergirds them; as such, he fails to productively challenge the reader—­to draw blood, yes, but also to make blood flow and flourish.48 No discipline is immune to this style of scholarship. A historian, especially of an antiquarian bent, “reduces” his “creative” potential to “an insatiable curiosity [Neubegier],” thereby becoming, as Nietzsche memorably puts it, an indiscriminate eater and dust gobbler.49 Theologians are less concerned with gobbling dust than gulping air; they devote themselves to abstract “curio[s] [Kuriositäte]” such as the second coming, the trinity, or, quite simply, “the salvation of humankind.”50 In their turn, scientists are so busy “popularizing” their work and catering to the “curiosity [Neugier] of the general populace” that they have become lost in the herd—­doubtless more interested in media impact and citation counts than in patient, experimental investigation.51 The real loss here is that the scientific impetus itself has been reduced to a mere condition of “curiosity [Neugierde],” by which a passionless “reading, collecting, arranging, observing, and recounting”52 takes the place of a true love for the scientific endeavor. On the whole, scholarly curiosity proceeds and promotes itself at the expense of its own creative heartbeat. This is true not only of scholars and teachers but also of lay intellectuals, aspiring pundits, and cultural connoisseurs. For Nietzsche, education does not have a corner on desiccated curiosity; culture and media are equally suffused with it. There is, as he puts it, an acquired curiosity that, while it consumes and collects culture, is nevertheless bereft of passionate understanding. Curious characters of this sort

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amass “curiosities [Kuriositäten]” simply for the sake of observation and classification.53 They go to the theater, concerts, and the zoo, pass their time visiting public houses and reading newspapers, and are driven by a “curiosity [Wissbegierde]” as insatiable as it is superficial.54 In today’s parlance, these folks are the rabid strollers and scrollers of Facebook, Twitter, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, their speech saturated with signs of the times, even as the eyes of their souls glaze over. The most irritating, for Nietzsche’s taste, are the connoisseurs of Mozart and Beethoven. They subject their masters, he bemoans, to the “torture-­instruments” of “a thousand impertinent questions,” engulfing them in the “dust of biography” after biography.55 They retire to bed at night buried under the “countless minutiae” they have collected, their “sober, pragmatic curiosity [Neugier]” enervating their will to act, to carve out their own destiny.56 Nietzsche’s own acolytes are no different. Driven by a “vulgar curiosity [Neugierde]” for his personal life, they are “the worst readers.”57 Such “curious [neugierigen] friends” can neither understand what they seek nor who they themselves are.58 And he refuses to countenance or satisfy them.59 People of this sort—­gripped by an overly informed and yet still vacuous interest—­suffer from a personal failing: a refusal to develop their own will to truth, to justice, and to power; indeed, a reticence to grow. In a nineteenth-­century world increasingly tethered to industry, science, mass media, and urbanization, where the controlled curation of information is more important than radical questioning, everyone is curious against—­rather than for—­life. The general public pilts out an everyman, everyday sort of curiosity. It is consumed with inconsequential questions and devoted to piddling details. This curiosity sustains the massification of answers, without ever courting a change of heart. In its grip, the world grows wide without growing deep. It prefers to recline in a bed of distractions rather than grow up and out of its self-­ conceptions. For Nietzsche, this is an eminently human scourge never suffered by pine trees and firs; the evergreens listen and wait, while humans are “devoured by their impatience and curiosity [Neugierde].”60 Resistant to satisfaction, such interest makes a body busy, collecting bits of information just to see rather than to understand; the “handful of curiosities [Kuriositäten]” people bring home every night amounts, at best, to “a pile of daubs.”61 As old and basal as this human ten-



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dency is, it was not always touted so proudly. Indeed “prying curiosity [Neugierde]” was once viperously decried; now, it is omnipresent, he writes, brandished like an opulent coat (or a shiny new app).62 This signals a more generalized degradation of humanity. “The little souls of this vanishing age,” Nietzsche writes, have grown soft and sensitive, “too easily moved, undeveloped, half-­selves, inquisitive [neugierigen], lusting after everything.”63 Much like “inquisitive [neugierig] tourists,” they do more “clambering” than “encountering,” and, while seemingly active, they are merely agitated.64 The problem with the proud modern obsession with “curiosities [Kuriositäten]” is that it sidesteps the real problems.65 “All great problems demand great love,” Nietzsche writes; but “curious [neugierigen] thought” lacks precisely this kind of investment and vulnerability.66 The public would rather hock its pedantry than grapple with the uncertainty necessary for greatness. When it is more important to say something than to say nothing, to demonstrate knowledge rather than discover uncertainty; when social and economic security lies in maintaining institutions rather than reevaluating them, in sustaining habits rather than building new ones; when the centralization of wealth defines the parameters of science and the limits of journalism—­in a world such as this, curiosity will pursue inherited questions, down inherited pathways and by inherited means. It will add book to book, data farm to data farm. So committed to standing on the shoulders of giants, it will never risk standing (or wheeling) on its own. For these and other reasons besides, curiosity will work against life to shore up the institutions of education, culture, media, and science. What is created will be reiterated, what is amassed will be massified. The makers of civilization will be the replicators of civilization. And the curious souls of youth will be submerged in the herd, resurfacing only as the “last man” who, even when mouthing questions as grand as “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” can only blink indifferently.67 For Nietzsche, however, such curiosity does not go unchallenged. Curiosity for Life

A living curiosity is not simply a “good” curiosity in some banal sense. For Nietzsche, it is demanding and it is dangerous. It asks forbidden, uncomfortable questions, questions that bubble up from the gut and

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slowly, sometimes explosively, erode assumptions, practices, and social structures that have long been taken for granted. It does not follow established inquiries and ask, “And then?” but rather, “When and why?” did those investigations begin, on what terms, under what conditions, and then “How else?” might things be thought and done? Such a curiosity lives because it grows, breaking open its seedling surface, the earth around it, and its flowering pod. After blooming, it sloughs off the old growth and cracks open anew, year after year. Only by this curiosity are old ways overcome, old formations of life transformed, old values transvaluated. If curiosity against life is ultimately traceable in every institution, as the product of sedimented structures of power-­ knowledge, curiosity for life is generated by the outlier, the misfit, the child-­prophet—­the one in whom light still burns, despite the waves of normalization aimed to quiet and subdue it. In his depictions of curiosity for life, therefore, Nietzsche does not focus on institutions of education, culture, media, and the church but rather turns to solitary figures such as the adventurer, the free spirit, the philosopher, the psychologist, and, above all, himself. When describing his own inquisitiveness, Nietzsche uses a glut of natural metaphors to convey the organic quality of his curiosity, which functions on the side of life. His preface to On the Genealogy of Morals is a case in point. He recalls, as a boy of thirteen, having an intense “curiosity [Neugierde]” about the origin of good and evil.68 As a child, he laid the responsibility for evil at God’s feet. As his education in history and philology progressed, however, he stopped looking behind the world and looked inside it instead, searching out not the origin of evil but the conditions under which humans evaluated one thing as evil and another as good. With this turn, “there grew,” he writes, “new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities—­until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret garden.”69 No longer caught between the rocky crags of human responsibility and divine foreknowledge, Nietzsche’s curiosity, like mountain moss, slowly produced a patch of soil, a secret garden, and ultimately a whole country of his own: a genealogical inquiry into morality. Nietzsche uses a related pastoral metaphor in Beyond Good and Evil to describe his mature “curiosity [Neugierde]” regarding the structure of morality.70 This time, his fearless explorations do not cultivate a garden but rather constitute a



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“great hunt” whereby he dives into “the history of the soul” to round up his game.71 The sort of curiosity that hunts, courting great ideological danger, but that also gardens, growing whole new queries in its wake, is the curiosity that grips him. And it is in this context that he critically endorses one of Western moral thought’s favorite whipping boys: “A curiosity [Neugierde] of my type,” he writes, “remains, after all, the most agreeable of all vices.”72 Philosophers, Nietzsche insists, have a unique capacity to practice curiosity for life, to lose themselves in the rich hunts and gardens of their own making. Philosophical inquiry is, after all, experimental and existential; rather than mastering systems, it grapples with lived problems and is ever vigilant against arbitrary assumptions and unquestioned premises. Unfortunately, moral philosophers of Nietzsche’s time failed to live up to that promise; insofar as they lacked all “curiosity [Wissbegier] about different peoples, times, and past ages,” they were unable to investigate “the problem of morality itself.”73 Philosophers of Nietzsche’s sort, “new philosophers,” as he calls them, will be “curious [neugierig] to a vice” about all the physical, psychological, and sociocultural factors involved in the development of moral sentiment.74 In these philosophers, such curiosity is as fearless as it is generalized; they will think “with uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible,” and with a taste for adventure.75 Whatever has been made impossible to think, they will think it. And they will think it in a way that opens up new possibilities for life. Nietzsche puts it quite eloquently when he writes, “A philosopher—­is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things  .  .  . a fatal human being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices, and uncanny doings”; and while he is sometimes afraid of his own “storm pregnant with new lightnings,” he is “too inquisitive [neugierig]” not to see where it leads.76 Not only, then, is the philosopher a companion to the wide variety of past and present life-­forms—­especially those eclipsed by Western morality—­he is also accompanied by the rumblings of sky and earth cracking open, rupturing with fissures for new life. Perhaps even more common than his endorsement of philosophical curiosity is Nietzsche’s endorsement—­and, indeed, self-­ascription77—­of psychological curiosity. Psychologists, much like philosophers, have

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a unique capacity to practice curiosity for life. Of course, there are certain psychologists, all too common in his day, who aspire to conduct “impersonal, disinterested, objective” analyses of mind and matter that amount to little more than “naval gazing,” barely scratching the surface of the body, the psyche, or society.78 But there is another kind of “curiosity [Neugierde],” Nietzsche insists, that gladly grapples with the self and the mire of its milieu.79 This psychological curiosity asks bold, sometimes unbearable questions. By what machinations of feeling, deception, and insecurity of soul are moral claims produced? How have those machinations modulated across history and geography? In what ways are common judgments and classical truths the product of weak, incipient, or even dishonest passions? A psychologist of this sort works with an “almost cheerful and inquisitive [neugierigen] coldness,” prepared to uncover the uncomfortable.80 Stoking the embers of his courage, he “takes a host of painful things that lie beneath and behind him and identifies and as it were impales them with the point of a needle,” to such a degree that, as Nietzsche wryly puts it, “blood occasionally flows.”81 Nothing deters the psychologist, his own self-­deceptions and measly qualms least of all. As a person irrecoverably interested in health, he gladly turns his “scientific curiosity [Neugierde]” hither and thither, ready to diagnose whatever illnesses or inklings of strength he himself or those around him may carry.82 Although there are philosophers and psychologists proper, Nietzsche recommends that everyone who sets out on the path of growth and self-­overcoming—­the path of the free spirit—­practice both philosophical and psychological curiosity.83 For, this is the “curiosity [Neugierde]” that is necessary for us to “advance” from one stage of life to another and it is this curiosity that equips us to “become traitors, be unfaithful, again and again abandon our ideals.”84 It is the curiosity that sets us free. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the free spirit is not born free but fights free of its fetters. As a powerful symbol in his corpus, the free spirit embodies organic liberation, or the endless transformation that comes via the cultivation of one’s life force.85 Moreover, precisely because the free spirit embodies growth, it grows into ever new iterations of itself. And curiosity accompanies it each step of the way. Freedom begins with a volatile exploration, a “vehement dangerous curiosity [Neugier] for the undiscovered world [that] flames and flickers in all its senses.”86 It then gains some distance, practicing a “curios-



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ity [Neugierde]” paired with perspective: a “birdlike freedom, birdlike altitude, birdlike exuberance.”87 Finally, a mature free spirit practices curiosity by “liv[ing] experimentally,” in a changeable habitat that reflects its “great health.”88 Wherever it is in its journey, the free spirit is always “full of inquisitiveness [Neugierig]” and driven by “the question mark of a more and more perilous curiosity [Neugier].”89 Always “jubilant,” this curiosity equips one to live in the exuberance of life, as if riding on “mad and fiery horses.”90 It is for this reason, perhaps, that Nietzsche conjoins curiosity with courage, as two twin vices of the unexpectedly virtuous.91 Reprising naturalistic metaphors, Nietzsche describes the curious philosopher, psychologist, and free spirit as an adventurer of, by turns, the nautical and terrestrial sort. Such venturing souls are discomfited by the strict confines of society; they are crushed and encumbered by moral codes, customary politeness, property lines, well-­ivied institutions, and all the grim gridirons of civilization. “We adventurers and birds of passage,” he writes, turn instead to traverse the vast oceanic expanse of experimental thinking and living, island by island, joyfully chirping, beating our wings, and looking about “as sharply and inquisitively [neugierig] as possible.”92 “Dangerously healthy,” he writes again, “we argonauts” are confronted with “an as yet undiscovered country,” a world “so overrich with what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity [Neugierde]” is “beside itself,” and we burn with a “hunger” for the future formations of life and truth.93 We “inquisitive [neugieriger] wanderers,” he writes, yet again, are the investigators, experimenters, discoverers, and seafarers of “an audacious morality.”94 And, while our curiosity condemns us as “evil” in the eyes of some, it ultimately sets us free.95 Relinquishing all relation to accepted norms and intransigent pathways, we reach for the real wilderness, courageously courting the organic flexibility of what can be practiced and perceived. Curiosity for life is inherently anti-­institutional. It is undertaken by individuals—­the philosopher, the psychologist, the free spirit, and the adventurer—­who refuse to succumb to the drag of institutions such as education, culture, media, and the church. While a placid sheen of propriety rests over civilized life, they channel their “fateful curiosity” to peer through the “crack [Spalte]” in consciousness and see the truth: all the world “clinging in dreams to the back of a tiger.”96

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What appears to be well-­founded, a solid place to stand, is only ever a corner, Nietzsche insists, in which one is trapped. This is why his ideal reader—­the one capable of deep philosophical and psychological reflection, the one set on freedom’s journey—­will be a “monster of courage and curiosity.”97 In one instance, Nietzsche makes a bit of fun by calling him “Mr. Rash and Curious [Vorwitz]”—­curious because he practices the “most perilous kind of inquisitiveness [Neugierde]” and rash because he tries desperately to see his way through things, when he should instead be listening, much as the pine trees and the firs.98 In any case, curiosity for life must needs get behind things, things as they appear, as they are made, and as they are made to appear. Ultimately, this is a “curative journey” into strange things, yes, but also into strangeness itself.99 Whose Life, What Life?

In the context of Western philosophy, it is important to note two vastly underappreciated facts: that Nietzsche has an account of curiosity and that this account is political to the core. One cannot understand Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the modern world without tracking the symptoms of diseased and healthy curiosity. And one cannot understand curiosity, from Nietzsche’s perspective, without apprehending the social struggle to, by turns, control and free the organic forces of life. There is, moreover, much to recommend Nietzsche’s account, especially in relationship to the history of thought on curiosity. The agonal nature of Nietzsche’s account productively challenges the bivalent, oppositional account of a “good” and “bad” curiosity so common across history. His diagnosis of reigning forms of curiosity as antilife is an insightful reformulation of the “vain” curiosity trope, and particularly prescient in today’s world where the webs of institutionalization and entertainment have exponentially deepened. His choice to root curiosity for life in an embodied, earthly, natural life force, thereby wresting it from the merely rational, abstract, and ahistorical realm, uniquely challenges not only the Platonic tradition but also contemporary dematerialized versions of curiosity. Finally, Nietzsche offers a structurally political account of curiosity that not only informs many theorists to follow—­most importantly, for our purposes, Michel Foucault and



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Jacques Derrida—­but also illuminates contemporary political resistance movements. There are, however, a number of limitations to Nietzsche’s account. Two immediately jump to mind. First, Nietzsche pits institutional curiosity (antilife) against individual curiosity (for life) to great rhetorical effect, but surely one might imagine a collective band of free spirits, a radical association of philosophers or psychologists, that might practice curiosity on the side of life together.100 Second, while Nietzsche cleanly separates a conserving curiosity from an abolitionist one, surely certain nonrupturing forces work on the side of life, building upon and preserving certain radical forms of life. I will address both issues in later chapters. In the space that remains, I want to elucidate the politics of Nietzsche’s own political account. From a meta-­analysis perspective, there are certain histories of inequality threaded throughout his account of curiosity as struggle. If curiosity only ever exists on the scene of struggle, and if that struggle is between forms of life that are antilife and others that are for life, in Nietzsche’s terms, the struggle over curiosity always works for strength, assertiveness, and health and against effeminacy, passivity, and sickness. That is, when Nietzsche conceptualizes life, he conceptualizes it as a particular sort of life: symbolized by the masculine and able bodymind. Much like death is a mode of life, certain forms of living, for Nietzsche, count as dying. A feminine or sick curiosity cannot be for life. Nietzsche’s suspicion of an ailing, feminine curiosity and endorsement of a vigorous, masculine one hardly distinguishes him, of course. In The Birth of Tragedy, he contrasts the Greek myth of Prometheus with the Judeo-­Christian story of Eve (whose name he strangely never mentions). As you will recall, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and was condemned to perpetually have his liver eaten out by birds. Eve, succumbing to the temptations of the serpent, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, seduced Adam into doing so, and thereby condemned all creation, via divine curse, to enmity and sorrow. Nietzsche contrasts the two tales schematically: Prometheus’s active wrongdoing (through theft and self-­assertion) versus Eve’s passive sin (through curiosity and desire). Prometheus is then subjected to suffering: a straightforward punishment, whereas Eve is subjected to sickness: the degeneration of the earth and humankind. In his analysis,

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Nietzsche pushes curiosity to one side: “in the Semitic myth of the Fall, the origin of evil was seen to lie in curiosity [Neugierde], mendacious pretense, openness to seduction, lasciviousness, in short: in a whole series of predominantly feminine attributes.”101 It is possible, however, following Roger Shattuck’s reading of Prometheus and Eve as equally driven by a desire for knowledge,102 to reinterpret the passage such that a Nietzschean curiosity for life and against life are represented by Prometheus and Eve respectively. In Prometheus’s case, curiosity stems from growth instincts and a strong will, trained on the exploration of unknown capacities that only adventure can bring, while in Eve’s case, curiosity stems from twisted instincts and a diseased will, set upon acquiring knowledge already collected and curated by someone else (i.e., God). The latter seeks complete knowledge, conviction, a safe corner, whereas the former seeks transformation and a wide-­open future. Nietzsche’s position on sickness—­and therefore his critique of curiosity against life as sick—­is surprisingly slippery. First, it is imperative to recognize that Nietzsche himself struggled most of his life with various physical and mental illnesses, including chronic headaches and indigestion, visual and mobility impairments, symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, ultimately, “insanity” brought on, in all likelihood, from a retro-­orbital meningioma. Second, it is important to recall that, even while sick, Nietzsche describes himself as “healthy” and on a constant journey toward “great health.”103 Whatever sickness is, for Nietzsche, then, it cannot be the mere presence of physical ailments or psychiatric complaints. When speaking of health, Andrew Huddleston and Charlie Huenemann argue, Nietzsche actually means a spiritual or philosophical health, which can in fact be prompted by loss of physical health.104 Even then, he insists, “there is no health in itself,” only “innumerable healths.”105 There are any number of ways a free spirit might channel their life force. Given this transvaluation of health, scholars such as Peter Sedgwick, Steven Smith, and Susan Stocker see in Nietzsche an unexpected ally for understanding disability itself and the disability rights movement.106 Nevertheless, it is equally true that Nietzsche maintains the evaluative disdain for sickness and capitalizes upon it, thereby reinscribing the superiority of health over sickness. When Nietzsche talks about people with a weak will as “ill-­constituted, sickly, weary, exhausted,”107 and people with a



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curiosity against life as “undeveloped, half-­selves”108 in contrast to the “healthy . . . dangerously healthy,”109 he not only replicates ableism, not to mention other inequalities,110 but he delimits the very purview of the politics of curiosity. Nietzsche’s position on women and femininity—­and therefore his critique of curiosity against life as feminine—­is similarly slippery. Nietzsche’s references to women across his corpus sometimes suggest feminist allyship, but by and large indicate aggressive misogyny. Scholars of his age and ours have long tried to make sense of this Jekyll and Hyde quality.111 Nietzsche was one of the few to vote for what would have been the first female student at the University of Basel, for example, but he also famously bemoans “the eternal tedium of woman” and calls “female self-­determination” “stupid.”112 His relationship to suffrage and women’s liberation appears to have vacillated, over the course of his life, in direct correlation with his own personal romantic hopes. Indeed, most of his positive statements are traceable to a time when he worked intimately with the self-­emancipated Malwida von Meysenbug.113 On the subject of curiosity specifically, Nietzsche grants that women have a natural desire to know, a desire in danger of being squelched by educational institutions and a patriarchal society at large.114 Nevertheless, he also characterizes a curiosity that is antilife as feminine. Whether the inquiries of theologians, the experiments of popular scientists, Eve’s brazen discovery, or the sentimental explorations of the eighteenth century, all are marked by a feminine curiosity.115 In fact, Nietzsche derides feminism for its inherently feminine inquiry—­that is, its refusal to reach beyond its own answers. Before describing his “perfect reader” as a “monster of courage and curiosity,” he writes: “All feminism too—­also in men—­closes the door: it will never permit entrance into this labyrinth of audacious insights.”116 Any inquiry that knows or believes something in advance, but especially an inquiry that believes in advance in the equality of persons, enervates all possibility of the singular and the exceptional.117 Ultimately, Nietzsche is clear. The curiosity he commends is neither feminist nor feminine, even if sometimes he grants women the capacity for it. If Nietzschean curiosity appears only on the scene of struggle—­ and there is much to commend this account—­nevertheless there are landmarks Nietzsche is unwilling to submit to that struggle, a certain diminishment of femininity and sickness among them. In the context

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of the history of philosophy, Nietzsche thereby entrenches a pattern of wresting curiosity from its bad reputation, while maintaining cause for disdain in the same old quarters. Much as it is imperative to understand and appreciate Nietzsche’s account of curiosity as political in his own sense—­i.e., as essentially agonal—­it is equally important to recognize the political stakes of that account, both then and now. In the context of a politics of difference, Nietzschean curiosity may well carry resources for resistance while, simultaneously, smuggling in, Trojan horse style, inherited values that must themselves be resisted or transvaluated. The Question Mark

Lynne Truss describes the late eighth-­century punctus interrogativus—­ or the “interrogative point,” as we used to put it in English—­as “a lightning flash, striking left to right.”118 This seems terribly appropriate. Does not a question, after all, crack through the crust of perception and momentarily illuminate things with fire? Nietzsche will often use the term “question mark [Fragezeichen]” as a means to signify grounds for suspicion, for doubt, for a second look. Sometimes he locates the question mark in things themselves (from Dionysius, to Wagner, to Christianity); at other times, he lodges the question mark against things (from the problem of pity, to penal codes, to the reevaluation of all values). The curious person of Nietzsche’s sort is drawn to the “question-­mark character [Fragezeichen-­Charakter] of things.”119 Like the mythical Zeus, such a person draws down the “lightning-­like question mark [Fragezeichen] beside premature answers.”120 This is the sort of questioning that aims not to produce a new collection of bespoke facts (an omnium-­gatherum, so to speak) but rather to “question further, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than one had questioned heretofore.”121 My primary aim in this chapter has been to appreciate how Nietzsche’s account of curiosity is itself a great question mark. It is a question mark against the presumption that philosophy has no historical accounts of curiosity and that philosophy has no political accounts of curiosity. It is also a question mark against the system of institutionalized inquiry so dominant today and the concomitant presumption of curiosity’s apolitical character. For those interested in reviving a tradi-



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tion of resistant, political curiosity, they have an unlooked-­for ally in Nietzsche and—­perhaps more importantly—­a lineage. My secondary aim has been to pose a question mark to Nietzsche’s account of curiosity. Given its agonal character, Nietzsche’s account is remarkably insensitive to the struggle and agony of feminized, disabled bodies—­like his—­to achieve recognition and a role as theorists and practitioners of curiosity. And, given its attention to life, Nietzsche’s account is remarkably insensitive to the vital struggle of feminized, disabled forms of life—­like his—­to be seen as viable visionaries and harbingers of the future. By putting a question mark to Nietzsche, I want to question further, more deeply, more intently after an endorsement of curiosity that extends, rather than contracts, the parameters of health and of the life worth living, and that expands the purview of curiosity—­even political curiosity—­to those so often left to one side.

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Michel Foucault INSTITUTIONALIZED CURIOSITY AND RESISTANCE

Michel Foucault is an incontrovertibly curious figure: an unabashed disciple to his own intellectual curiosity and a devotee to his own sexual curiosity. Foucault’s commitment to philosophical and personal exploration—­to “straying [far] afield”1 from everything he thought he knew, all that he thought he was and that the world presumes to be—­ remains unquestioned. If anything marks the man, it is his disdain for the straightforward pathways, the “formulas”2 of inquiry and identity, so long domesticated—­as dull as they are, nevertheless, demanding. One might think of his activism, his acid trips, and the baths. Or his adventures in the archives. From Raymond Roussel to The Order of Things to The Care of the Self, Foucault is clearly on a quest to live experimentally, “to think differently”3 than he thought before. His relentless acquisition of new fields (e.g., literature and linguistics, Latin and Greek), his development of new methodologies (e.g., archeology and genealogy), and his creation of new theorizations (e.g., of aesthetics, ethics, and power), indicate a restless desire to know and to know otherwise. The very range of his lecture courses—­encompassing everything from psychosexology and criminal law to Oedipus Rex and neoliberal economics—­reveals his drive to discover, to traverse whole swaths of knowledge, dive into the details, and resurface precisely at the hottest point of friction. His is a compulsion for curiosity. While curiosity is deeply personal for Foucault, it is not merely personal. He not only exercises curiosity but embeds it within his own theorizations of freedom. Particularly late in life, Foucault repeatedly testifies that he is “motivated” by curiosity, “the only kind of

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curiosity [curiosité] that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy,”4 a curiosity that, although “stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science,” for him evokes a “determination” to throw off familiar ways,5 and therefore constitutes one of “the three elements of [his] morals.”6 Building on these and other references, Foucault scholars have developed several interpretive frames through which to understand curiosity not only as Foucault’s own practice of freedom but as a Foucauldian practice of freedom writ large. That is, curiosity is arguably a tool by which one experiments with oneself. Some scholars identify curiosity as a cornerstone of the Foucauldian concepts of experience as experimentation,7 critique,8 self-­care,9 and political spirituality.10 Others focus in on curiosity’s role for Foucault in the parrēsiastic practice of speaking truth to power.11 And still others explore curiosity’s function in Foucault’s transformative work in the archives12 and as a public intellectual.13 From a Foucauldian perspective, however, curiosity cannot function in liberatory ways without also functioning in oppressive ways. In fact, it is precisely because curiosity can function as a technique of resistance that it can also function as a tool of institutionalized power. This should come as no surprise. After all, institutionalized power and resistance, for Foucault, exist in an agonistic relationship. As a multivector set of force relations, power can be sedimented into institutions and structures or it can be stirred up by revolt and revolution. Both possibilities are inherent—­and, indeed, constantly actualized—­in the very nature of power. As Foucault writes, “power” is “the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses [force relations]”14 and that process may involve “points of resistance” and “crystallization[s]” of social hegemonies, by turns.15 Within this framework, if curiosity can stir up, it can also sediment; if it is a technique of freedom, it must also have the capacity to serve as a technique of domination. Paul Rabinow and Corey McCall suggest as much when they characterize curiosity not only as critique but as part and parcel of the institutions within and against which critique functions,16 not only as the will to know otherwise but also as the will to know. In what follows, I systematize and reframe these existing accounts by arguing that Foucault implicitly distinguishes between an insti-



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tutionalized curiosity that deepens the grooves of accepted inquiries and inquirers and a resistant curiosity that crisscrosses, unsettles, and transforms that landscape. This allows me to situate Foucault’s account of curiosity within a Nietzschean lineage of agonistic inquiry, recontextualizing his own practice of curiosity as poised against established modes of inquiry, whether within the walls of the academy or within the vulnerable flesh of the body as lived. I further argue that Foucault’s most insightful contribution to a politics of curiosity is not his insistence that curiosity is institutionalized and can be made resistant but rather that we ask which institutions and which resistance practices are in play. How has curiosity been institutionalized in specific architectures, geographies, and temporal junctions and how has resistance developed in response, through what specific practices and social formations? For Foucault, institutionalized curiosity functions differently across eras and locales, artifacts and mediums, as does resistant curiosity. His account is attuned to the vagaries of matter and history. Foucault insists on contextualizing curiosity in The Order of Things. There, he treats head-­on a moment that historians often dub the Age of Curiosity: the classical period. It is in this era that a “new curiosity [curiosité]” for the science of life is said to have suddenly appeared.17 Foucault is quick to assert, however, that this period does not mark a birth but rather a shift in an already active curiosity. The rise of natural history and the life sciences during the classical period “does not reveal a new curiosity [curiosité] directed towards a secret that no one had the interest or courage to uncover, or the possibility of uncovering, before,” nor does it mark “merely the discovery of a new object of curiosity [curiosité],” nor indeed that “curiosity [curiosité]” for other things “had diminished in the meantime, or that knowledge had regressed.”18 Natural history and life are neither always and already nor suddenly and exclusively an object of curiosity. Rather, the shifts in the exercise and objects of curiosity are subtle and stepwise, belying a fundamental sway in the scaffolding of culture, its epistemological norms and self-­reflective perspectives. During the classical period, naturalists merely turned their already curious gaze upon the elements of natural history and life. Consequently, The Order of Things offers a counterhistoriography that marks not some glowing origin of modern thought but rather the slowly changing relationship between

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words and things—­between curiosities—­from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Curiosity is not born but made and remade. As such, any account of curiosity requires that one analyze the fields and eras in which it functions, as well as the conditions under which and the objects upon which it acts. A full Foucauldian analysis of curiosity in the classical period, for example, would involve an assessment of the political forces and social conflicts that defined it: the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, royal charters, Catholic edicts, the cabinets of curiosities and museums, colonialism and imperialism, wars, contentious scientists, and scientific revolutions. Curiosity does not just appear, suddenly, in the heart of a scientific genius, but is steadily cultivated and pruned, within a culture, through political allocations, machinations, and upheavals. A Foucauldian approach insists upon asking: What is the relationship between curiosity and the institutions in which it is activated? And how does resistant curiosity develop within the confines of specific institutions and in intimate conversation with them? Conscious of this call to contextualize, I explicate Foucault’s nascent political account of curiosity by analyzing three artifacts of institutionalized curiosity (i.e., madness, criminality, and sexuality) and two mediums of resistant curiosity (i.e., the ethical life and the intellectual life). My analysis does not foreclose the possibility of other artifacts or mediums in Foucault’s corpus and beyond, but rather models a Foucauldian analysis of curiosity within and across specific time periods, locations, and architectures. In History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality,19 Foucault elucidates how institutionalized curiosity increasingly isolates, controls, and subjectivizes people, particularly those already marginalized—­and constructed as dangerous—­within a given society. And yet, curiosity is also a political danger all to itself. As indicated by Foucault’s own endorsements of curiosity for the ethical and intellectual life, curiosity can also function as a force of resistance. Curiosity in the hands of the people is an impulse not only to think divergently but to experiment with new, countercultural forms of life. It breaks systems of isolation, control, and subjectification. It is for this reason that Foucault explores curiosity as central to true freedom. Ultimately, for Foucault, curiosity thus appears at the crossroads of social tensions: as force and counterforce. Curiosity is eminently political.



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Curiosity, Institutions, and the Force of Sedimentation

The primary, if underappreciated, way in which Foucault’s work characterizes curiosity is as a technique of institutional power. It is a nimble, operant force to find, focus, and (re)form willful subjects and unwilling flesh. And it works by generating architectures of isolation and apparatuses of control through which it can apply (and massify) disciplines of subjectification. Although this is clear conceptually, Foucault uses the term curiosité in this regard sparingly, though no less significantly. I therefore begin by contextualizing curiosity’s role within Foucault’s theory of power before turning to explore curiosity’s function in the power formations that coalesce around the mad, the criminal, and the sexual subject. Dubbed “the power thinker,”20 Foucault is (in)famous for his incisive theorization of certain recent shifts in power formations. Over the last several hundred years of Western history, he proposes, power relations have crystallized into four primary forms: sovereign power, juridical power, disciplinary power, and biopolitical power. Sovereign power aims to act on the bare body, displaying the dissymmetry between sovereign and subject; it is a blunt power exercised through public punishment, torture, and/or execution. Juridical power aims to assess the truth of the soul; it is an administrative power exercised in courtrooms, where the interrogation of subjects and the invocation of experts holds sway. Disciplinary power aims to break down and reassemble the body and soul as machine, thereby increasing capacity and productivity; it is a calibrating power exercised through the arrangement of space, the organization of time, and the formation of bodily habit. Finally, biopolitical power aims to administer life at the level of the population, by policing reproduction, birth, health, longevity, or mortality; it is a managerial power exercised through bureaucracy. In each case, the institutional formation of curiosity—­i.e., the investigations, investigators, and investigatees, as well as their affects, methods, and locations—­changes, such that the very contours of curiosity—­and who or what becomes a curio—­shift in kind. Speaking quite generally, institutionalized curiosity is a technique that pinpoints, polices, and ultimately (re)produces its subjects, in identifiable locales and through material-­discursive structures. While institutionalized curiosity attends to individuals of all sorts, it especially

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targets those deemed abnormal or peripheral in some way—­e.g., the sick, the mad, the child, the accused, the criminal, or the sexually deviant. It seeks them out for objectification and control typically within spaces expressly arranged for that task. In recent Western history, it is in the hospital, the clinic, the asylum, the classroom, the court, the prison, and the confessional that institutionalized curiosity most does the work of capture and constraint. And that work, in that place and on those objects, is concomitant with the construction of new academic fields, whether medicine or biology, psychology or psychiatry, natural history or education, criminology or sexology. That is, the curiosity that disciplines bodies and psyches produces the embodiments (and sometimes also the crypts) of curiosity that we call intellectual disciplines. It is, then, through shifts in loci, objects, and methods that curiosity formations develop in tandem with power formations. Foucault’s richest accounts of institutionalized curiosity focus on three primary targets: the mad, the criminal, and the sexual subject. Utilizing archaeological and genealogical methods, he problematizes the formation of institutions that take madness, crime, and sex as social problems to be studied and controlled. He explicates how madness becomes an object of medical curiosity, how the accused criminal becomes a subject of juridical curiosity, and how sexual subjects themselves become self-­curious and self-­controlling. In doing so, Foucault highlights the coterminous shifts in institutionalized curiosity formations and power formations. But he also does more. “My role,” Foucault intones, “is to raise questions in an effective, genuine way and to raise them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum of complexity and difficulty.  .  .  . The problems I try to pose—­those tangled things that crime, madness, and sex are . . .—­cannot be easily resolved.”21 Foucault’s analyses invite readers to “question”—­to grapple curiously with—­these problems. As such, they equip readers not only to diagnose the modern condition but to change and refashion it—­that is, to resist it. By tracing curiosity as force, then, Foucault preconditions the practice of curiosity as counterforce. Madness

It cannot be said that madness has always been the object of curiosity, however easy this might be to imagine. It has not always summoned gawking, gaping, and staring from lookers-­on, or the suspicion



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of witchcraft, or the concern of well-­meaning physicians. After all, madness as such—­i.e., under that name and that symptomatological configuration—­has not always existed, nor has curiosity always and in every case set about scientifically confining and assessing it. What Foucault provides in History of Madness is an account of how a newly defined madness becomes the object of a newly defined medical curiosity in Europe during the classical period. That is, he maps out how madness and medical curiosity become institutionalized alongside and through one another, within a distinctly European political context. First, Foucault traces the construction of a specific sort of madness as the object of scientific and therapeutic perception. The tale begins in the Renaissance when the social construction of “unreason” slowly bifurcated. On the one hand, there was “tragic” madness, presiding over “strange alchemies” and the “dark menace of bestiality,” which threatened to destroy both subject and world.22 On the other hand, there was “critical” madness, portrayed as a more ironic force, which highlighted the fault lines of the subject and the duplicity of the world.23 This was not only a division between one sort of madness and another but a transition from a raw madness to a madness born within the bowels of reason, swaddled in the signs of wisdom, and tamed by the restrictions of education. When tragic madness reigned, it was appropriate for cities to support “ships of fools,” in which the mad would freely wander along the European coasts. With the turn to “critical” madness, however, it was important for cities to produce hospitals and asylums, where the mentally ill would be confined and treated in their midst. This is “the Great Confinement” as Foucault terms it, “the movement that displaced unreason, removing it from the landscape where it had been everywhere present, and firmly localized it” in hospitals, asylums, and other institutional houses.24 Madness became analyzable, subject to reason, and, in a sense, more rational. It was “circumscribed in its concrete presence, within the distance necessary for it to become an object of perception,” and in fact an object of “curiosity [curiosité].”25 But History of Madness is not only the story of how madness becomes the object of scientific and therapeutic curiosity. It is also the story of how curiosity becomes scientific and therapeutic at all. In Foucault’s analysis of the Renaissance period, he remarks that “tragic” madness was thought to arouse a “demonic” or transgressive

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curiosity, one that aimed to find out what was forbidden. The period itself therefore retained a medieval link between insanity and unrestrained inquiry, that “insidious vice of curiosity [curiosité].”26 It is no real surprise, then, that the ship of fools, as depicted in Josse Bade’s Stultiferae Naviculae, included a mast representing the forbidden “tree of knowledge,” that fabulous cipher of esoteric curiosity. “Critical” madness, however, is linked to a more disciplined curiosity. Such madness “controls” the “curiosity [curiosité]” of “philosophers and men of science.”27 This more constrained curiosity, aimed at legitimate knowledge, is then naturally channeled into hospitals and clinics, where its increasingly controlled nature can be turned upon an increasingly controlled population of the mad. Over the course of the classical period, then, for Foucault, transgressive curiosity drops off and a disciplined curiosity becomes ever more dominant. The movement by which madness becomes subject to medical curiosity—­in “the first lunatic asylums  .  .  . and the curiosity [curiosité] that was born there”28—­is simultaneously one by which both curiosity and madness are institutionalized. Ultimately, History of Madness depicts the coconstitution and coinstitutionalization of medical curiosity and madness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, general hospitals were populated by doctors with “overly curious [curieux]” sensibilities.29 The mad population itself, as the object of that increasingly disciplined curious gaze, was made into a collection of curiosities through involuntary confinement, often exercised under duress and assuming an absence of agential capacity. That confinement, moreover, facilitated the development of modern medicine, psychology, and psychiatry, whose well-­ disciplined curiosity continues to determine which patients are given or denied self-­determination today. Under changing political conditions, Foucault shows, unreason becomes madness under this curious gaze and the curious gaze itself becomes disciplinary when turned upon madness. Criminality

For Foucault, the genealogy of institutionalized curiosity differs between the history of madness and the story of criminality. Criminality is constituted in another era, one in which power is exercised not so much through the physical confinement of subjects as through the



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psychological assessment and acculturation of suspects. Not only is the figure of the criminal brought from the outskirts of society to its center (via the prison), but criminality itself shifts from an exterior act to a state of the soul (via the criminal mind). A new juridical curiosity is turned upon the criminal figure, bent on asking not what demonic force has arisen or what dark deed has been done but what are the parameters of the accused’s psyche and how might that psyche be used to control its subject? Through disciplinary mechanisms, this attention to the subjectivity of accused persons, moreover, is eventually internalized by the subjects themselves, such that they become self-­policing and ultimately self-­reporting. The criminal becomes the object of both juridical and disciplinary curiosity. Institutionalized curiosity is turned still further inward. Discipline and Punish contextualizes the birth of the modern prison within the shift in power formations from a sovereign model, through a juridical model, to a disciplinary one. For the accused criminal, power’s grip shifts from the body, to the psyche, and then to the soul and that grip is staged first at the public execution, then in the courtroom, and finally in the prison. Through this movement, the accused criminal increasingly becomes the target of institutionalized curiosity, just as institutionalized curiosity is increasingly tuned to penal enforcement. For the sovereign, the point of punishment appears utterly incurious; it aims but to manifest the extreme “dissymmetry between the subject . . . and the all-­powerful sovereign.”30 In juridical settings, however, punishment is adjudicated through assessment, a whole series of investigations aiming to pinpoint the personal and social factors contributing to the crime. “It is no longer simply: ‘Who committed [the crime]?,” Foucault writes, “But: ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced it?’”31 Finally, in the disciplinary apparatus of the prison, punishment shifts from assessment to control. The criminal’s body and soul are broken down and reassembled as a machine. Taught to police themselves, to be motivated by self-­restraint, and to train their bodies by minute techniques, prisoners are governed by a power that takes root inside them. “The formation of a disciplinary society,” Foucault summates, is “this movement that stretches from . . . a sort of social ‘quarantine’ to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism.’”32 It is an endless process of attention and investigation according to which an omniscient gaze is not only centralized in the

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penal system but dispersed into everyday practices of self-­discipline, and suffused across society as a whole. Characteristic of this genealogy is a shifting attunement in both penal and public curiosity. Although one might think of sovereign executions as the least curious of punishments, they do in fact pose a question to the body of the accused. For a long time, it was believed that if one survived the torture and execution process for too long, justice was demonstrably misplaced. “Hence,” Foucault writes, an “insatiable curiosity [curiosité] . . . drove the spectators to the scaffold to witness the spectacle of sufferings truly endured. . . . It was a moment of truth that all the spectators questioned.”33 The danger, of course, was that the crowd, for whom the spectacle was meant as a demonstration of sovereign power, might decide the sovereign had been mistaken.34 As penal power shifts, the metaphysical question posed at the execution becomes a concrete interrogation in the courtroom. The accused is subject to the “ruthless curiosity [curiosité]”35 of the juridical examination process. Simultaneously, however, they become the grist for “almanacs, broadsheets, popular tales” and other adventure stories of great criminals, whereby the public assesses either the justice of justice or the glory of the guilty.36 The public’s “interest of ‘curiosity’ [curiosité],” Foucault writes, is always “a political interest.”37 Finally formalizing this ambiguity between the punished and the punishable, the prison produces not only a community of delinquents but a culture of delinquency. It inaugurates a world of self-­and social-­policing. Passing through the crucible of an increasingly disciplinary curiosity, prisoners are enveloped by and inscribed within a panoptic, panauditory, and pansomatic force.38 These panoptic-­carceral structures, then loosed from the prison confines, extend the curious work of the punitive apparatus far beyond it.39 When it comes to criminality, the conjunction of institutionalized curiosity’s method and object is calibrated to the aim and architecture of specific power formations. As curiosity shifts across multiple objects—­from the traitor, to the offender, the accused criminal, and the delinquent—­it also shifts across methods—­the execution test, the interrogative question, the psychological observation, and ultimately the production of a new criminal subject. In every case, penal power is exercised through the will to know. And in every case, curiosity is irrevocably interwoven with the new discourses of delinquency and



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modern subjectivity that result. As such, criminality itself—­and institutionalized curiosity about it—­moves both deeper into the self and further out into society. Sexuality

If the processes by which madness and criminality become the targets of institutionalized curiosity illuminate patterns of privatization and internalization, Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality illuminates patterns of socialization and externalization. Sex becomes the object of institutional curiosity by becoming something constantly owned, discussed, touted, and assessed. Attending to the shift from a secretive sexual curiosity to a confessional one—­through disciplinary and biopolitical power formations—­Foucault demonstrates how modern sexual subjects—­the normates even before their deviant counterparts—­have come to be not only defined by their sexual practices but compelled to speak endlessly of their sexual identities. The work of normalizing citizens through sexuality, then, involves a kind of curiosity that produces self-­avowals as much as new disciplines. Institutionalized curiosity moves outward. In History of Sexuality, Foucault argues against the reigning story of sexuality’s development: the hypothesis that sexuality was repressed and needed to be liberated is just an insufficient explanatory framework. “It is a ruse,” he states, “to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history” of sexuality.40 Foucault insists instead that, far from successfully repressing sex (and sex talk), bourgeois efforts at prohibition in fact incited the proliferation of sexual experimentation and conversation. While it is true that the pre-­Victorian verbosity of sexuality was funneled within the confines of the matrimonial bedroom walls, that same verbosity was also disseminated into the various disciplinary discourses of medicine, education, politics, economics, and religion. Foucault therefore adds to his admission of “a whole restrictive economy” the observation that “at the level of discourse and their domains . . . there was a steady proliferation of sexual discourse concerned with sex.”41 Moreover, the proliferation of sexual discourse—­ and thus the discursive policing of sexuality—­displays a new form of power: “never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized.”42 Through a decentralized network,

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power now infiltrates sexual taxonomies and administrative manuals, as well as produces self-­attestations of sexual identity. Rather than cultivate curiosity as mere “public interest” or “collective curiosity [curiosité]”43 about titillating sexual perversions or moribund erotic practices, this new disciplinary framework invests in a systematic diffusion of curiosity, by which questions about sexuality increasingly compound interest and control. This cycle between questioner and confessor is marked by “so much curiosity [curiosité], so many confidences”44 that most of its deleterious effects are masked by a “pleasure” feedback loop.45 More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious [curieuses] presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation; it required an exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked.46

In the capillaries of disciplinary and biopolitical power that controlled and cajoled sexual subjects in the modern period, then, curiosity is the blood of it—­the very force of its confessional life. In the midst of this analysis, Foucault compares the institutionalized curiosity that produces a discourse on sex with the literary figure of a sultan, in Denis Diderot’s The Indiscreet Jewels, whose magic ring compels the genitals of his courtesans to tell tales of their sexual exploits.47 The Indiscreet Jewels, an eighteenth-­century tale saturated with the word curiosité, tells the story of Mangogul, a sultan of the Congo, who is deeply bored. His lover Mirzoza, who once dazzled him with tales of the region, has exhausted her treasure trove of secrets and regrets that she has no comparative access to intrigues at court. She therefore suggests they consult the genie Cucufa, who bequeaths to Mangogul a magic ring that, when directed toward women’s genitals, constrains those genitals to tell tales. Insofar as the story considers sexual practice to be the object of solicitation and not repression and considers sexual discourse to be the subject of constraint and not liberation, the novel forms a perfect inspiration for Foucault’s genealogy of the proliferation of sexualities and the incitation to discuss them. It captures how curiosity, as a technique of power, can produce identities, discourses, and practices. Indeed, much like “the curious [curieux]



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Sultan,”48 Foucault states, we have fallen “under the spell of an immense curiosity [curiosité] about sex, bent on questioning it, with an insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about.”49 In the contributions of History of Sexuality to a political account of curiosity, Foucault develops his analysis of the modern subject. Curiosity is not merely instrumental in creating the psychiatric unit and pathologized psyche, or the judicial unit and criminal subject. It is an inextricable component of the confessional system that produces the modern desiring subject. The ability to say “I,” to claim one identity or another, to select characteristics A–­Z as defining components of one’s personality or chosen lifestyle, these are all products of and pander to an increasingly curious social structure that extracts various forms of confession. Curiosity does not just create subjects or attend to different objects. It produces speech and even the hierarchization of different forms of speech. Through Diderot’s work, we can understand how this curiosity generates words, stories, and discourses and that the status and form of discourse it creates reflects its relationship to institutionalized power. Curiosity may begin by producing something as simple as gossip and end by constructing academic sexology. Indeed, the sexual curiosity so widely professed today cannot be understood apart from the institutionalized curiosities that produced it.50 Although Foucault does not elaborate upon the structure of institutionalized curiosity with his stereotypical rigor—­which is to say, he does not take curiosity itself as an object of study like madness, criminality, or sexuality—­nevertheless, it is possible to identify four essential characteristics. First, curiosity is a constitutive element of power formations. That is, curiosity is always already active in society, at the institutional level. What changes from era to era and from location to location is merely who deploys it, where and how it is deployed, and upon what it is deployed. Second, the means and objects of curiosity’s deployment are coconstitutive. This means that the way curiosity is institutionally exercised affects the objects upon which it is exercised, and vice versa. In fact, curiosity’s methods and materials transform together both within a given milieu and between one milieu and the next. It is not simply that how we study things changes across history; the things we study also change in their turn. Third, curiosity works to isolate, control, and subjectivize persons and objects in the world. As a way of mastering unwilling flesh and rebellious spirit, institutional

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curiosity is an effective and efficient tactic. Finally, curiosity is often deployed against what is considered dangerous. In directing curiosity toward the aberrant as threats to the status quo, institutions surreptitiously prepare and extend their control to the populace. But curiosity is also a danger all its own. It is capable of transgressing fundamental assumptions about what is, what should be, and how we know. It is this recognition that inspires Foucault’s explorations of curiosity not merely as a technique of power but as a technique of ethical and intellectual freedom. Curiosity, Resistance, and the Force of Innovation

Foucault’s most extended and direct discussions of curiosity develop it as a practice of freedom or, more specifically, as a technique in what he calls the care of the self. Thus, although Foucault is aware of curiosity as one of the immensely productive tactics of the modern regime, he insists that it also offers us the resources to resist objectification and subjectification. The three most familiar passages in which Foucault makes this testament, late in life, appear in an interview entitled “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual” (1980), an interview entitled “The Masked Philosopher” (1981), and the preface to The Use of Pleasure (1984). While I will return to the third passage in my concluding reflections, here I will take up the first two to demonstrate the centrality of curiosity to Foucault’s conception of freedom in the ethical and the intellectual life. Rather than simply explicating these almost too-­familiar passages, I put them into fresh dialogue with Foucault’s late lectures at the Collège de France. These courses allow for a richer understanding of Foucauldian curiosity as an ethico-­political practice of resistance. Curiosity, Ethics, and the Practice of Freedom

Foucault offers a unique approach to the moral life. According to his account in The Use of Pleasure, there are at least three elements in any moral system: a moral code, typically composed of prescriptions and prohibitions; moral behavior, which indicates the quality of a subject’s relation to the moral code; and ethics or, as he puts it, the self’s “relationships with the self.”51 This tripartite structure allows Foucault to analyze systems that might well share the bulk of their



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moral codes and moral behaviors but differ significantly in their ethics or self-­relations.52 Foucault investigates these self-­relations primarily in dialogue with Greek and Roman antiquity.53 The ancients emphasized not moral codes but “knowledge of oneself, care of oneself, and one’s style of life”; insofar as curiosity failed in this self-­care, for the ancients, it also failed as a moral practice.54 For them, practices of self-­ formation were spiritual exercises, which drew one to invest in oneself as much as to be dispossessed of one’s current self, to interiorize and to exteriorize.55 This permitted ancient ethics to exist in the absence of any transcendent nature, reason, origin, tradition, or constraint.56 For Foucault, who draws great inspiration from this tradition, curiosity becomes an ethical practice; it is no longer vapid inquiry but rich experimentation. Moreover, insofar as modern disciplinary power targets self-­formation so heavily, practices of self-­transformation—­such as a dedisciplined curiosity—­are essentially acts of political resistance. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault unpacks these ancient tactics of self-­care, highlighting the relationship between curiosity and ethical self-­transformation. He turns to Plutarch57 and Seneca. As we saw in chapter 1, for Plutarch curiosity occupies the busybody, whose interest in other people’s business is a “disease” of the mind that slowly kills the intellect by causing it to overlook itself and instead look at others.58 In place of this necrophilic interest, which compromises the health of the polis, Plutarch recommends that people turn their curiosity—­transformed into staid attention—­inward, learn from their own calamities, identify their own personal limitations, and test their intellectual and spiritual capacities. “Block up the windows and the side-­doors of your curiosity that open on your neighbors’ property,” he writes, “and open up others leading to your own.”59 Building on Plutarch’s call to turn inward, Seneca recommends a coterminous turn outward. In Natural Questions, Seneca insists, one is never too old to seek freedom, and the truest freedom is freedom from that “continuous and ineluctable” slavery to oneself, which “press[es] constantly [upon us] day and night without pause, without interruption.”60 To be free of oneself, he proceeds to argue, one must become a “curious spectator” of nature.61 Inquiry into the natural world affords one an emancipatory perspective not only on the temporal extension of the human condition but on existence itself. For Foucault, Plutarch and Seneca propose a curious study of the natural world as one means by which

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to nourish one’s way of life, developing self-­knowledge and cultivating change. This is their ethos and their contribution to a stronger polis. In “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” Foucault identifies curiosity as central not just to Plutarch or Seneca’s morality but to his own. In context, he is not speaking about ancient practices of self-­care but clarifying the role of the public intellectual. Against the supposition that such public figures should take a leading role not only in criticizing corrupt governments but also in bettering them, Foucault insists it is not the public intellectual’s job to dictate what is good for government, whether that be the moral government of the self or the political government of others. Their calling is rather to enable or equip people to conduct the sort of critical analysis of power that produces the grounds for resistance. If one of “the tasks of human existence” is to preserve and enhance “freedom,”62 or possibilities of self-­care, then it is their job ultimately to facilitate the project of thinking the human otherwise. For Foucault, the public intellectual facilitates societal resistance by upholding certain moral values, of which he identifies three: refusal, curiosity, and innovation. In context, Foucault characterizes power as an immobilizing force and resistance, conversely, as a force of mobility.63 “Power,” he observes, “is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.”64 Power may exist where one party constrains the behavior of another party or where that constraint has been sedimented or “crystallized.” In the latter case, “a specific type of power relation . . . has been institutionalized, frozen,65 to the profit of some and the detriment of others.”66 However violent a form power takes, its effect is always to make torpid or inert. By contrast, the work of resistance to power cultivates movement. Resistance unfixes what is fixed, melts what is frozen, and makes what is immobile move again. Curiosity is one way to enhance the work of freedom. For, curiosity drives us “never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.”67 As a practice of resistance, it capitalizes on the world’s inherent instability. It also, and perhaps fundamentally, begins with the self. Practicing curiosity, one rejects all creeds, tirelessly evaluates the systems in which one finds oneself, and experiments with new ways of relating to oneself and one’s world. For Foucault, this is the mark of a moral life and a mobile life, a practice of ethics and of political



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resistance. Thus, when he asserts, “I am a moralist,” even if “I don’t want to tell people what they should do,”68 he intimates that curiosity is not morally codified but a dynamic ethical practice for self and social transformation. It is worth revisiting the full passage in “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual.” Here, Foucault identifies those three crucial moral values—­refusal, curiosity, and innovation—­as his own ethical techniques for resisting sedimented power structures—­and their transitive immobility. [I do not] mean that one must live in an indefinite discontinuity. But what I mean is that one must consider all the points of fixity, of immobilization, as elements in a tactics, in a strategy—­as part of an effort to bring things back into their original mobility, their openness to change. I was telling you earlier about the three elements in my morals. They are (1) the refusal to accept as self-­evident the things that are proposed to us; (2) the need to analyze and to know, since we can accomplish nothing without reflection and understanding—­thus, the principle of curiosity [curiosité]; and (3) the principle of innovation: to seek out in our reflection those things that have never been thought or imagined. Thus: refusal, curiosity [curiosité], innovation. . . . Listen, listen . . . How difficult it is! I’m not a prophet; I’m not an organizer; I don’t want to tell people what they should do. I’m not going to tell them, “This is good for you, this is bad for you!” I try to analyze a real situation in its various complexities, with the goal of allowing refusal, and curiosity [curiosité], and innovation.69

The moral life begins with a refusal to unconsciously grant to propositions or material realities any unearned validity. It ends with a commitment to innovate entirely new propositions and material realities. Between the refusal to accept and the commitment to create, there is curiosity. Curiosity is a “need,” a gnawing demand to understand the conditions under which propositions are made and might be remade. Thus, the productive instability of desire is basic to any individual growth or institutional change. In summary, Foucault builds upon ancient practices of self-­care to develop his theory of ethics. Much like the role curiosity took in certain ancient texts, Foucauldian curiosity tests and transforms the self.

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For Foucault, however, it does so as a specific act of resistance embedded within an individual’s effort to make and remake meaning. His account of ethical curiosity is, therefore, inextricable from his account of political power. Not only do political forces overdetermine moral codes and behaviors, but ancient ethical practices of “self-­care” are capable of catalyzing a political counterforce. Curiosity, in this context, mobilizes against ideational and material sedimentation and supports self-­transformation. Curiosity and the Intellectual Life

Just as Foucault extracts the moral life from abstract codes and embeds it in contingent modes of life, so he tears the intellectual life away from universalizing theory and sinks it deep into political engagement. He deinstitutionalizes both. Consistent with his overarching critiques of the metaphysics of essentialism and the epistemology of representation, Foucault insists that the intellectual ought not to be conceived of as an arbiter of the former nor a mouthpiece for the latter. He rejects this “general” intellectual, who develops abstract theory that can be applied universally. Instead, he endorses the “specific” intellectual, who is already embedded in immediate, concrete, material, and local struggles and whose “theoretical action” unblocks the restrictions of conduct and imagination produced by institutionalized forms of power and discourse.70 Foucault embodied the specific intellectual throughout his life,71 each time aiming in these activist moments not to get on top of “what is happening right now”72 but to participate in it and understand it from within. By and large these episodes have been interpreted as instances in which Foucault embraced the ancient practice of parrēsia. For the ancients, parrēsia involved speaking truth at great personal risk. One might speak truth to power for the sake of the community or speak truth to oneself for the sake of self-­ transformation. Through his activism, Foucault spoke out, he spoke with, and he spoke against; he spoke into the silence and amplified others’ whispers into sirens. He did so in ways that threatened to sully his own image, as well as to productively compromise his own being and mind. It is this politically engaged intellectual who, for Foucault, is driven by curiosity. In The Courage of Truth, Foucault develops an account of ancient



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parrēsia or truth-­speaking as critical to the moral as well as the public intellectual life. Philosophical parrēsia, also termed ethical parrēsia, is an act of self-­care that engages practices of self-­knowledge intimately tied to self-­formation.73 It is a truth-­speaking directed toward oneself, with the aim of knowing and crafting one’s mode of life. “This mode of self-­knowledge takes [the form] of the test, of examination, and also of exercise concerning the way in which one conducts oneself,” he writes, “and it gives rise to a mode of truth-­telling . . . whose role and end is to give some kind of form to this bios (this life, this existence).”74 This philosophical parrēsia differs from traditional philosophical discourse. In contrast to the latter’s aim of acquiring pure truth and constructing a metaphysics of the soul, the former aims to participate in the struggle for truth and, thereby, care for and transform the self. Philosophical parrēsia, moreover, is propelled by a “will to truth in its different forms, which may be those of curiosity [curiosité], battle, courage, resolution, and endurance.”75 This curiosity is not an “incuriosité” regarding either styles of life or domains of knowledge but rather an “attitude of examination” exercised in both directions.76 Political parrēsia turns this examination of practice and discourse toward the realm of juridical policies and acts. For Foucault, Socrates is the exemplar of philosophical and political parrēsia. Between the Apology and Laches, he practices frank-­ speaking with himself, important personages, and the jury at his trial. He does so not only to know and to challenge himself but also to facilitate critical self-­knowledge among the Athenian leaders. This is precisely what makes Socrates the ideal educator. He is not, like Stesilaus, a teacher of this or that technique for armed combat. Rather, he trains young people in a holistic practice of self-­care, which elevates them both as selves and as citizens. Parrēsiastic curiosity is not the vapid interest of a busybody or the omphaloskepsis of a solipsist. It is, instead, a critical interest in oneself and one’s other as members of a larger body.77 This individual curiosity, then, plays out on the social stage. Four years prior to The Courage of Truth, Foucault gave an interview to Le Monde in which he casts curiosity as central to publicly engaged thought. The interview belonged to a longer series (1979–­1984) devoted to various French thinkers’ assessments of contemporary philosophy. While the interview does not take parrēsia as its subject,

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Foucault behaves as a parrēsiastes. According to his diagnosis, most “philosophizing” in France has failed because it occurs exclusively under the auspices of so-­ called intellectuals, for whom it is more important to tout individual theories than to engage critically and creatively with the world. Foucault opens the conversation by setting up a basic contrast between a thinking ruled by intellectual leaders or famous faces and one moved by irreverent critique. This irreverent critique requires and is fueled by a deluge of inquiry, innovation, and information. Such a deluge would vastly reconfigure both the realms of communication and the ranks of the academy. Foucault claims that “the problem” is not only to demythologize knowledge but also to multiply it, “to multiply the channels, the bridges, the means of information, the radio and television networks, the newspapers” and the books.78 In this way, the tyranny of figures can be exchanged for the proliferation of flights. Such a decentralization of information, moreover, enables the fecund permutation of thought. In the context of changing communications and the academy, Foucault explores several techniques that promise to enhance the new world he envisions, and one of them is curiosity. Curiosity fuels the critical work of philosophy. As such, it instigates the proliferation of communication, the deinstitutionalization of the academy, and ultimately the reimagination of the public intellectual. Driven by curiosity, the intellectual works to shift what can be spoken, written, thought, and lived. Thus, Foucault states: Curiosity [curiosité] is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science.79 Curiosity [curiosité] is seen as futile. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes the “care” one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity [curiosité]. We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the



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people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” Rather, we must increase the possibility for movement backward and forward. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks.80

As a condition for philosophy, curiosity manifests a person’s “care” of “what exists and what might exist,” or a person’s intimate drive to enter the arena of all cognitive and creative realities and their possibilities. And as a companion of critique, curiosity involves a “sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it.” This critical, philosophical practice of curiosity resists the institutionalization of knowledge by inciting the massification and diversification of information. While Foucault’s lectures certainly develop his account of the public intellectual in dialogue with the ancient figure of the parrēsiastes, his interviews contemporize the parrēsiastes’ work in a new era of the university and mass media. There, Foucault explores the potential for a resistant ethical life within the contemporary confines of publicity and information. This sphere of information or infopolitics81—­and its concomitant curiosity—­may well be harnessed by institutions and subtend dominant power formations, but it can also provide the fodder for intellectual revolt and political dissent. This work doubtless requires courage, but that courage also necessarily involves curiosity—­an irreverent curiosity willing to sink into the fray and emerge with radical, as yet unthinkable, social arrangements. Recall that Foucault’s analysis of madness, criminality, and sexuality demonstrated that curiosity functions at the institutional level, re-­forms depending on its means and objects, works to isolate and control, and targets aberrant lives so as to effect social order. What do Foucault’s reflections on the ethical and intellectual life add to this political schema of curiosity? That is, how does Foucault’s account of resistant curiosity complement his account of institutionalized curiosity? First, Foucault’s late work confirms that, whatever new

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architectures and discourses it produces, institutionalized curiosity consistently moves to entrap, to encircle, and to pin down. Resistant or transformative curiosity, however, works to rupture those strictures, breaking through isolation and desubjectivizing modern subjectivities. Second, it confirms the coconstitutive nature of curiosity’s means and objects. Practicing resistant curiosity requires that one not only take up different objects of curiosity but take them up in new ways. Fresh methods and focal points are necessary. Third, if institutionalized curiosity targets the marginalized as a means of generalized social control, resistant curiosity lives and breathes among the marginalized in service to a generalized social struggle. Although Foucault’s own work does not analyze marginalized practices of curiosity or curiosity’s role in political resistance movements at great length, his analysis is a clarion call to attention in this area. Fourth and finally, Foucault’s focus on resistant curiosity as an ethical practice with political potential places its locus in the individual while suggesting it may also function at the collective level. Foucault therefore leaves open the question of a collective curiosity turned against institutionalized curiosity, as well as an individual curiosity set at odds with resistance efforts. A Curious Life

Foucault was always more than a scholar; he was also a lover and one who was loved. His curious life was tangled up in the academy, its walls and wainscots, but also in the vulnerable flesh of the body as lived. At 1:15 p.m. on June 25, 1984, Foucault passed away in the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris, where he had sought treatment for symptoms of septicemia, a complication of AIDS, on June 9. On June 29, a crowd of several hundred people gathered at what was to be a private removal of the coffin from the morgue. Some recall it was a “sunny” if silent morning,82 where they stood in “the white shadows of a world drained of color.”83 From their midst, the grief-­stricken voice of Gilles Deleuze cut the silence as he read from Foucault’s preface to The Use of Pleasure: As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity [curiosité]—­the only kind of curiosity [curiosité], in any



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case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity [curiosité] that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge [l’acharnement du savoir] if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. . . . But, then, what is philosophy today—­philosophical activity, I mean—­if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? . . . The “essay”—­which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes . . .—­is the living substance of philosophy.84

In context, Foucault takes a moment to reflect on his life’s work, from his early work on epistemology and politics to his late work on ethics. While naysayers might accuse him of being too changeable, he insists there was a consistent motivation behind his work: curiosity. It is a consistency that permits inconstancy, a stalwart passion that demands frequent changes of direction. When Deleuze read out this self-­testament to curiosity as a eulogy, he testified not only that curiosity was the glue of Foucault’s project and the glare of its distinctiveness but that curiosity was what made Foucault Foucault. This passage itself is not just inspirational or retrospective. The lived act of thinking, for Foucault, begins with this need, this drive, this desire to know. Curiosity is not the desire to be knowledgeable; it is the “acharnement du savoir,”85 the dogged and determined, relentless and tenacious need to press beyond the bounds of what one already knows. And it is curiosity that then drives the work of philosophy and preconditions its manifestation in the essay. The essay, for Foucault, is no mere academic exercise; it is the lifeblood of transformation, whether of ideas, expression, behavior, or social relation. For Montaigne, the essay is simultaneously an act of self-­description and

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one of self-­creation, “a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes of my subjects.”86 Foucault approached his writing and his life in precisely this spirit. For him, to work at all is “to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt [essayer]”87 to fundamentally diverge from one’s milieu, as much as from oneself, at the level of thinking and living. This is what it means to be motivated by curiosity. The results of this commitment on the part of Foucault need hardly be enumerated. He deeply challenged the limits of traditional disciplines (e.g., philosophy, history, political theory) and the power of social norms (re: madness, criminality, and sexuality). His work contributed to the establishment of new disciplines (e.g., queer theory, disability studies, critical prison studies) and models of behavior and thought (e.g., the activist, the intellectual, and the homosexual). One of the reasons for this legacy was Foucault’s own practice of working across disciplinary archives, which, in turn, resulted in an unparalleled interdisciplinary impact. He was also keenly innovative within the political resistance movements in which he played a part. For all of these reasons, Foucault is an emblem of assessing institutional power, refusing its immobilizing tendencies, and developing new modes of resistance, new movements. It is in this way that, as a living thinker, Foucault remains an exemplar of curiosity. There is not only an aptness, however, to Deleuze’s reading selection here; there is also an excruciating poetry. Dying of AIDS complications, Foucault’s own death intimately implicates the infamous medical refusal to study—­or get curious about—­the “Gay Cancer.” And it is a cruel irony that this refusal of curiosity on behalf of the gay community was coupled with an unmatched media curiosity for gay stories. Throughout his life, Foucault was no stranger to compulsory heterosexuality or the correlative compulsion to speak one’s sexual identity. But Foucault repeatedly resisted the forcible framing of his sexuality, as well as the silencing of marginalized communities, their liminal desires, and their creaturely needs. Perhaps this is why he explored sex with such urgency. Knowing its possibilities for self-­transformation and freedom, he sought out spaces in which “all the interest and curiosity” of the sexual encounter could take root in “laboratories of sexual experimentation.”88 The point, for him, was



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not to “discover” but to “invent,” not to expose but to experiment, to develop new affective and relational intensities that drew diagonal lines across the social fabric.89 This personal interest was always also political. In his activist and scholarly work, Foucault collected and publicized queer stories that would have otherwise been lost or erased. He agitated for H.M., a young gay man who died by suicide after being placed in solitary confinement for homosexual behavior.90 He reissued the memoir and dossier of Herculine Barbin, an intersex youth whose own naturally developing “urge to know” was snuffed out by the medical and legal treatment of them as a “curiosity.”91 And he had the gumption to compose a four-­volume History of Sexuality, from the ancients to the present. Foucault’s was, indeed, a curious life, one pitched against the institutionalized architectures of curiosity (and incuriosity) of his time. He pitted intimacy against isolation, creativity against discipline, and relation against sedimentation. Putting his body alongside others in protest, and in love, Foucault joined in the call for another world.

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Jacques Derrida SOVEREIGN CURIOSITY AND DECONSTRUCTION

In The Honor of Thinking, Rodolphe Gasché argues that Jacques Derrida thinks “without wonder.”1 By this he means that Derrida’s thought has no proper (and certainly no Platonic) philosophical beginning. Derrida’s method of deconstruction is always already underway within the text and overtaken by its structural forces. There is no singular philosopher beholding and analyzing an object of his choice. But if deconstruction does not start with wonder, then what? Where does Derrida begin? How does he begin in the face of his notorious resistance to beginnings? Donna Haraway suggests that deconstruction begins with curiosity. Derrida, she writes, is “the most curious of men,” because he spots and responds to what interrupts and entangles us.2 Hélène Cixous affirms that deconstruction is indeed driven by “a curiosity for [textual] sighs and hesitations,” but she goes further. She attests to sharing with Derrida a special curiosity: “a curiosity for the signifier, a greediness for tastetexts.”3 Without composing a foundation or origin, does deconstruction nevertheless begin here, with curiosity? And what would that mean for philosophy, especially a Western philosophy that finds its principal origin in Plato? Is this even a legitimate source for philosophy or does Derrida’s work stray from philosophy proper precisely because it is too curious, wallowing in a distracted “freeplay” and lost in labyrinthine wanderings, as his detractors suggest?4 And what is the political import of such a debate? What political power might a deconstructive curiosity wield? Although Derrida substantively analyzes curiosity as early as 1991, in his unpublished Répondre du secret lectures, and returns to it in

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1997, via The Animal That Therefore I Am, it is in volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, Session 11, that he provides his most robust accounting of curiosity, which inevitably involves bringing it to account.5 “It’s a fine word,” Derrida writes, “a very fine verbal animal, curiositas.”6 The Latin curiositas is composed, as he points out, of two heads or two senses. On the one hand, and following the valence of curio, curiositas indicates an interrogating gaze set on an object. On the other hand, following cura, curiositas indicates the act of caring for someone or something. Each sense involves a particular treatment [traitement], in the double sense it has in French: curiositas may be expressed in the careless, detached handling of an object or it may generate the regulated care of therapy. These two modes of curiosity, Derrida suggests, are fruitfully illustrated through two moments in French history, occurring just after the peak of France’s first colonial empire: the 1681 autopsic dissection of an elephant in the court of Louis XIV and, less than a century later, the therapeutic confinement of animals and humans in zoological gardens and asylums. I will call these two modes of curiosity autopsic and therapeutic, or dissecting and confining, respectively. While distinguishable, these two curiosities are, as Derrida demonstrates, modalities of a sovereign style of curiosity. As he theorizes it, sovereignty is an illusion upon which, nevertheless, reason, knowledge, and power are built; in deciding “on what is [qu’est-­ce que],”7 the sovereign claims sovereignty by circumscribing—­or asserting the limits—­ of words, beings, and states. It is for this reason, Derrida writes, that sovereignty’s “essence is always colonial,”8 a reduction of the irreducible. Insofar as the autopsic and therapeutic modalities of curiosity negate the inherent instability of objects, divisions, walls, and procedures, they shore up the illusion of sovereignty, whether in the political or philosophical arena. Autopsic curiosity is a drive to dissect an object in the service of knowledge, cleanly separating one thing from another. Therapeutic curiosity is a drive to confine an object in the service of care, definitively isolating one thing from another. These modalities of curiosity, therefore, function within regimes of knowledge and treatment that capitalize on illusions of mastery. Derrida thus provides a damning critique of curiosity, leaving open the question of whether there are other echoes in curiositas that might harbor a curiosity less bound by traditional and often violent illusions;



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a curiosity more responsive to difference and reconciled with finitude; a style of curiosity he himself might endorse or at least welcome as an attribution. In what follows, I first explore the contentious attribution of curiosity to Derrida and deconstruction, before I turn to establish his critique of curiosity. I then argue there is a deconstructive style of curiosity that inhabits, resists, and disorganizes the sovereign style of curiosity in both its autopsic and therapeutic modalities. Because this account is only implicit within volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, I turn to Derrida’s earlier work on curiosity, in The Animal That Therefore I Am and Répondre du secret, to illustrate how curiosity can function deconstructively within texts and taxonomies. I demonstrate that deconstructive curiosity textually resists the autopsic by not allowing a clean dissection of terms and resists the therapeutic by compromising the clean confinement of terms. In doing so, it ruptures taxonomical distinctions between the human, animal, and plant. I conclude that if curiosity is not governed by some final teleology, nor does it end in certainty, but rather, in an exemplary comportment of exploration, it tracks, probes, and suspends itself, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge, then it must be traceable across species lines, well beyond the bounds of the human, which turns out to be just another sovereign illusion. Indeed, this suggests that Derrida’s practice of a deconstructive curiosity takes up a third, buried9 sense of curiositas, which precisely undergirds the other two: a clever, fanciful attention to the seemingly trivial, which has, nevertheless, been made secret or of little import. Finally, I develop the implications of the deconstructive style of curiosity for the discipline of philosophy and the practice of politics. Revisiting an exchange between Derrida and Sarah Kofman, I argue that deconstructive curiosity combats the illusions of pure revelation, whether through politics, science, scripture, or art, and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, that undergirds those illusions. In each case, deconstructive curiosity proliferates uneasiness and destabilizes sovereign impetus. While Derrida’s critique of curiosity impinges on history and science, aesthetics and phenomenology, his ultimate target is, as I will show in closing, the sovereign practices and inherent politics of traditional philosophy. The Platonic paradigm of Western philosophy sets out to understand

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the essence of things by way of diaeresis and epimeleia heautou, dissection and self-­care. And it is these practices that prepare the philosopher for political participation. Against this tradition, Derrida weaves a deconstructive curiosity that bedevils ahistorical concepts, displaces the centrality of the human in philosophy, and calls attention to the exclusions constitutive of Western politics. The deconstruction of curiosity here becomes the deconstruction of philosophy and the sleights of reason by which philosophy becomes enshrined as pure, abstract, and glorified. But it also becomes the deconstruction of politics, reconfiguring self-­development in light of especially non-­Western and anticolonial political relations. The curious work of deconstruction, then, is not only a functional abolition of Western philosophy and politics but their reconceptualization as a responsibility to what is always irreducible and multiple, one fueled by an exuberant, though no less hesitant, curiosity. “The Most Curious of Men”

In Infinitely Demanding, Simon Critchley argues that philosophy does not begin in wonder at the things that exist but rather in a disappointment that things are not what they might be.10 He is not the only one to suspect that truly reflective thinking is anything but wonderful. For Gasché, it is the honor of thinking to challenge the limits and the foundations of critique, theory, and philosophy. Gasché specifically addresses wonder. While philosophy is said to begin in wonder, thinking, real thinking—­this is also, for him, deconstructive thinking—­ thinks without wonder. For Gasché, to think without wonder is to think without several basic assumptions that undergird the experience of wonder as traditionally conceived from Plato to Heidegger: that truth is universally accessible, by a unified subject, through fundamental philosophy.11 We have, in wonder, “a metaphysics of the subject,” an “anthropology,” and “features of humanism.”12 It is quite worrisome for Gasché that wonder presumes a gulf between subject and object, knower and known, the one who wonders and the wonderful. We can presume, Gasché argues, despite Derrida’s relative silence on the matter,13 that deconstruction necessarily does not begin in wonder and is not reducible to wonder because deconstruction functions on



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precisely the deterioration of these gulfs. This is but one of the reasons deconstruction signals the end of “philosophy” as such and the beginning of new political relations. In one sense, Haraway begins When Species Meet where Gasché finished. Without addressing deconstruction’s turgid relationship to wonder, Haraway states straightaway: “Derrida is the most curious of men, among the most committed and able of philosophers to spot what arrests curiosity, instead nurturing an entanglement and a generative interruption called response.”14 For Haraway, deconstruction begins not with what arrests us, or stops us short, like wonder, but rather in what increasingly entangles and disrupts us, what draws us irrevocably into intimacy—­ something she calls “curiosity.” Deconstruction in this sense has a genesis, but that genesis is an irreducibly enmeshed beginning where, as she states, “to be one is always to become with many.”15 Before Haraway goes on to develop a robust cyborgism, focusing on the imbrication of the natural and artificial, she locates Derrida’s perhaps most enmeshed curiosity in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In his analysis of his cat staring up at his naked body, Derrida deftly disrupts the binaries between human and animal, organism and machine around the question of responsivity (and responsibility). While indebted to his analysis in important ways, Haraway nevertheless faults Derrida for not being curious enough about the curious cat to ask, “Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered?”16 Can the centrality of the human be displaced, scattered? While I take Haraway’s point that Derrida incuriously abandons the cat—­and many still wish Derrida had written a treatise on cats—­it would be incurious itself to assume all curiosity is absent in the remainder of The Animal That Therefore I Am. Indeed, the curiosity at work in deconstruction is always already activated at the textual level. Writing as a philosopher (against philosophy), Derrida here works within and at the limits of several material and theoretical texts, including previous Cerisy conferences, Derrida’s own oeuvre, Genesis 1–­3, and Alice in Wonderland. Deconstruction begins where it is, already inside a text, already in relationship to another, not over and against an object. To return to Gasché, deconstructive thinking

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is curiously compelled by the multivalent resources of any given text. In turn, it sets out to compel every dominant discourse with the resistant resources within that discourse itself. If there is any wonder—­or curiosity—­at the outset of deconstruction, then, it is “nothing less than an awareness of being overtaken” by language and a corresponding impetus “to catch unawares and overtake” through the instability of discursive words themselves.17 Curiosity in deconstruction works with/in the text. It is Cixous, Derrida’s intimate interlocutor, who offers the most robust account of this curiosity, so fundamental to Derrida and deconstruction.18 In Rootprints, she defines “curiosity [curiosité]” as “this urgency, this need to decipher what cannot be said, what is expressed otherwise than in verbal speech which nonetheless arouses the desire for words.”19 This curiosity for what is before language, which nevertheless exists in language, is something that Cixous and Derrida share. They do so differently, however, given their respective homes in literature and philosophy. Derrida’s curiosity aims at the “primitive scenes,” she says, whereas her own focuses on “the phenomenon of an instant.”20 Hers is a work of symptomatology, his of etiology; hers is an instinct for “spotting,” his for exhuming.21 For both, however, this is a “vital curiosity [curiosité],” not only for those immaterial forces present in living beings, whether up close or from a distance, but also from those very forces. It is a curiosity that breathes and that writes. It is a curiosity that breathes writing and that writes out of breath.22 In Insister of Jacques Derrida, she offers concrete features of this vital, textual curiosity. It is an urgent need for the richness of language. It is the desire to trace the excesses of words, which escape even as they appear. It is an electric attraction to colloquialisms, to etymologies, and to wordplays. When Derrida and Cixous write to one another or for one another, they write between philosophy and literature, as if in a dream space.23 In this dreamlike writing of these dream-­texts, curiosity plays a central role: A curiosity [curiosité] for the signifier, a greediness for tastetexts, an inclination to jokes, Witz, witticisms, all those verbal penchants that lead us toward every kind of language activity or sport. With a curiosity [curiosité] for sighs and hesitations. And a curiosity [curiosité] for the abundantly stocked idiomatic storehouse of



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French of which in any and every context we exchange a few specimens that the worms had not gotten into.24

The style of deconstructive curiosity mourned by Haraway is here seen and celebrated by Cixous. It is a curiosity for what is beyond language, for what exists in language, but particularly for what of the beyond exists in language such that language is overtaken by itself, destabilized by itself, entangled by itself. It is a curiosity for the reservoirs and the intimacies of signification. It is first and foremost within language, then, that Derrida locates the unsettling power of deconstructive curiosity. What is made strict and solid can be made to move again, to break against the very mysteries of things seen and said. Such a description of deconstructive curiosity sounds dangerously close, if not identical, to a common mischaracterization of Derrida by some of his critics. As Jonathan Kendall famously claims in his obituary for Derrida, deconstruction is mere language play, the indulgence of a few private curiosities repeated ad infinitum across innumerable, though hardly illuminated, texts. Deconstruction is “slippery,” “murky,” and “contortionist,” proceeding by way of “puns, rhymes, and enigmatic pronouncements.”25 Such a misconstrual, Nicole Anderson notes, has been given academic pedigree by the likes of John Searle and Richard Rorty.26 In his review of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, Searle describes the outcome of deconstruction in the following way: “What we think of as meaningful language is just a free play of signifiers or an endless process of grafting texts onto texts.”27 For Searle, this makes deconstruction not only a failed literary theory but a failed philosophy, as if Derrida’s textual curiosity excludes him from the realm of the truly philosophical. For Rorty, Derrida does indeed “giv[e] free rein” to his “fantasies” and “trains of association,” but this is in fact the requirement of liberal ironism.28 Where metaphysics has died, the only robust response is self-­creation through contingent theorization. Derrida’s sympathizers, however, argue that his plays with words, genres, concepts, and arguments have more philosophical—­and, indeed, political—­weight and rigor than Searle or Rorty would ever allow. Richard Klein, for instance, in his introduction to Derrida’s interview entitled “Positions,” suggests that Derrida’s performance of différance—­by which meaning is endlessly differed and deferred—­is

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no mere amusement. Rather, it is a means by which Derrida launches a substantial critique of philosophy and of politics. Klein argues that Derrida does so by inviting, upsetting, and then refashioning our curiosity. First, différance “invites the intrusion of our eager curiosity.”29 What will Derrida write? Will he once and for all illuminate a recalcitrant mystery? Then, it upsets our curiosity, so that “our curiosity—­ its misery or authenticity, its vulgarity or validity—­ . . . [is itself] put into question”; “we find our own impulses, ourselves, unaccountably on stage.”30 In doing so, Derrida confounds our illusions of access, whether peddled by metaphysics, idealism, teleology, spiritualism, logocentrism, essentialism, or history. Finally, différance highlights this curiosity—­about the limits of curiosity and the illusion of the secret—­ which we might call deconstructive curiosity. Klein characterizes it as a Nietzschean, “vulgar curiosity” to see beneath the philosopher’s discourse, call forth what has been repressed, and honor a basic materialism.31 Derrida thus curiously celebrates the play of language in order to critique the insistent sovereignty at the foundations of Western curiosity. There is a political agenda in the war over words. In sum, scholars testify that Derrida is indeed driven by curiosity, harbors a deconstructive curiosity, and critically interrogates traditional formations of Western curiosity. And that he does so in order to coax a new philosophy and a new politics back from the ashes. As it happens, Derrida himself bears witness to these claims. We begin here with his diagnosis, in The Beast and the Sovereign, of the sovereign curiosity subtending Western philosophy and its politics, so well crystallized in Western colonialism. The Phantasm of Sovereign Curiosity

The Beast and the Sovereign was Derrida’s final seminar at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. As such, it rather appropriately offers a rumination on finitude, solitude, and the limits of human existence—­ whether in plants or animals, despots or figureheads. Beasts and sovereigns come to a head in Session 11, where Derrida undertakes a critique of curiosity as it has been traditionally theorized and practiced: a curiosity applied by the sovereign subject to or upon a creaturely object. Although he opens with a promise to address not “this or that curiosity [curiosité]” but “just curiosity [curiosité],” as



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if it were some simple, unified thing, he closes with a reflection on this curiosity’s inherent duplicity. Such curiosity aims to observe and it tries to cure. It is at once autopsic and therapeutic, dissecting and confining. The culture of curiosity [curiosité] thus organizes the showing of curiosities [curiosités] for curious [curieuses] crowds, but the same culture of curiosity [curiosité] also had ambitions to treat, to care for, if not to cure. Or even to liberate by locking up differently. The cura of this curious curiosity [curieuse curiosité] always hesitated between two forms or two aims of what is always a treatment [traitement].32

As I marked above, traitement has a duplicity that is analogous to that of sovereign curiosity, referring to careful treatment but also to coarse handling. The Latin cura, likewise, has two sides. Sometimes it is used to mark attentive inquiry. At other times, it means administrative oversight. Derrida argues here that pre-­and postrevolutionary France, just after the peak of its first colonial empire, offer a perfect demonstration of curiosity’s duplicity, ranging from animal autopsy under Louis XIV to the zoological gardens and insane asylums of the classical period. In 1662, Louis XIV established the Menagerie of Versailles, where, under the auspices of the Académie des sciences, a variety of creatures were collected, studied, and dissected.33 In doing so, the king organized one of the greatest shows of imperial reach and royal knowledge ever achieved. The material and epistemic wealth garnered through colonial theft could hardly be more pronounced. Perhaps the most spectacular of these dissections occurred in 1681, when an elephant was carved up before the court and Louis XIV himself.34 The kingly body of the elephant was laid low and towered over by the unusually diminutive form of the king himself. It was a show of sovereignty. An insistence on political efficacy. An assertion of knowledge. This first, autopsic curiosity is “a seeing, a theatrical theorein, a gaze cast onto a visible ob-­ject, a primarily optical experience that aims to touch with the eyes what falls under the hand, under the scalpel.”35 Like the pure theorein of the eidos of Western philosophy, this modality of curiosity aims to reveal what is hidden through the exercise of a tactile sight that is at once disciplined and discursive. Skin is peeled from muscle, ligature, and bone. Joints are separated. Each cut unveils the nerves,

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arteries, and veins below. With this curiosity, things are best seen when they are least alive. The French Revolution deemed the Menagerie of Versailles a spectacular waste of human wealth and animal life. Such collections, however, were not entirely obliterated. They survived in the form of nineteenth-­century zoos and asylums.36 It is important, à la Foucault, to understand this shift as a change in power formations; although sovereignty is centralized in the former case and decentralized (and institutionalized) in the latter, control of subjugated subjects is distinctive of both forms. Both moments, moreover, give rise to corresponding curiosity formations. Here, a second modality of curiosity appeared: the therapeutic. This curiosity had “the ambition or the pretension to treat, to care for, to take great care (cura) of what it was enclosing and objectifying and cultivating.”37 There was, correspondingly, a presumed improvement in living conditions for beasts, as well as “madmen,” alongside a corresponding inattention to new forms of suffering. Such care aimed not to identify some hidden truth but rather to manage behavior. It confined rather than dissected. Humans and nonhuman animals were restricted, constrained, and placed in cell-­like structures. Some were strapped to beds or locked in pens. Floors were padded or covered in hay. With this curiosity, things are best treated when they are least free. For Derrida, pre-­and post-­Revolution imperial France have a culture of curiosity that shifts its practices from dissection to asylum or from the autopsic gaze to the therapeutic hand. Nevertheless, what remains consistent, he suggests, is this culture of curiosity’s intimate relationship to sovereignty.38 Whether curiosity constrains or confines, it does so to death. Autopsic curiosity is a matter of the “objectifying to death of the object.”39 Therapeutic curiosity, however, “consists in enclosing, depriving of freedom of movement and, hence, of freedom itself, hence of power, or power to see, to know, to have beyond certain limits, and hence of sovereignty.”40 Sovereign subjects exercise autopsic and therapeutic curiosities in such a way that they deprive their creaturely objects of self-­sovereignty. Whether the curious gaze alienates beasts and “madmen” from itself or gathers them together, it dominates and subjectivizes them, denying them their sovereignty, their humanity, and even their animality. Derrida briefly asserts that the elephant’s dissection under Louis XIV



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must be read within the larger context of medical history, depictions of anatomy, and Cartesian thought. He specifically states that Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which depicts the dissection of an executed criminal, must be taken into account. What Derrida does not mention here, however, is that this painting formed the subject of his tribute to feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman. Kofman wrote a brief, posthumously published essay entitled “Conjuring Death: Remarks on The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp.”41 Derrida’s memorial essay for Kofman, simply titled (or not titled) “. . . . . . . . ,”42 takes Rembrandt’s painting and Kofman’s commentary as its central texts. All three works—­ Rembrandt’s, Kofman’s, and Derrida’s—­offer a specific analysis of dissection, which then extends to a broader reflection on curiosity itself. Kofman in fact wrote a second, complementary essay on curiosity, entitled “The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.”43 In this instance, Kofman is concerned not with the cut of a scalpel but with a painting that captures—­indeed, confines—­Dorian. By examining both of Kofman’s texts, through Derrida’s memorial essay, I offer a deeper analysis of the sovereign style of curiosity, its nature, and Derrida’s critique thereof. Rembrandt’s commissioned piece depicts the annual public dissection, sponsored by Amsterdam’s Guild of Surgeons and undertaken by Dr. Tulp, the guild’s praelector anatomiae.44 The event took place on January 31, 1632, in Amsterdam’s Anatomy Theatre, typically housed above a meat market in the convent chapel of St. Margriet, patron saint of pregnant and laboring women.45 The subject of dissection was a recently hanged recidivist thief, by turns referred to as Adrian Adriaenz or Aris Kindt, who was given a Christian burial as recompense for his posthumous service to God and country. Besides the guild members, the remaining guests were all notable persons, capable of paying a handsome price for their seat, a collection from which no doubt some of Dr. Tulp’s own remuneration was taken. The anatomy demonstration was, thus, at least as much an indication of wealth as it was a display of knowledge. In “Conjuring Death,” Kofman develops her own critique of curiosity. She begins by identifying the supposed lesson of The Anatomy Lesson. Dr. Tulp is surrounded by seven doctors; together, they compose the perfect body or corporation (font corps) of knowledge production

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and dissemination.46 This medical body, however, is entirely disembodied: almost everything beneath the white ruff at the doctors’ necks is shrouded in black. What is eminently visible is the cadaver. Lying nearly naked on a wooden table, with the vascular and skeletal structure of its left hand and forearm delicately splayed open, the hidden body appears doubly unveiled. This is Dr. Tulp’s lesson: the secret of the human body revealed. Kofman suggests, however, that the lesson is not successful. Although the cadaver is twice bared for all to see, every eye, without exception, is trained either on the anatomy book at its feet or on the audience. No one is looking at the object of dissection. The object of dissection not only goes unnoticed, it also goes unnamed, lying there “in absolute anonymity.”47 The book, representing natural and spiritual revelation, is much like the cadaver, in that it goes unnamed and only the tip of its left page is displayed. In this multilayered scene of visibility, then, Kofman traces what such visibility makes invisible. The role of the book in The Anatomy Lesson, at least from Kofman’s perspective, cannot be fully appreciated without reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s novel is a devastating tale. It begins with Dorian becoming bewitched by Lord Henry’s hedonism. Such an intense desire to experience the limits of sensual pleasure leads Dorian to sever his young beautiful body from his aging, slowly corrupting soul. The latter is caught—­or confined—­in his friend Basil Hallward’s painting of him. As Dorian goes about his life, he obsessively returns to the painting, which lies upstairs, in a locked room, behind a thick curtain. He returns “more and more curious.”48 On Kofman’s reading, Dorian’s behavior can be explained as his futile attempt to conjure up, within his own face, an image of his mother’s beauty and thereby conjure away the truth not only that she is dead but that she has been decomposing now for some time. The Picture of Dorian Gray is therefore the story of a curious melancholy, a failure to mourn that inspires an obsessive, curious return.49 The conjuration at work here functions not through dissection this time but through confinement, a confinement whereby Dorian saves, cares for, preserves, and protects his own visage. While that visage was extracted by a rift between body and soul, a cut, a “knife thrust,”50 it is now preserved, sealed off through enclosure—­much like Dr. Tulp’s book. Throughout her ruminations on The Anatomy Lesson and The Pic-



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ture of Dorian Gray, Kofman demonstrates not only that a certain curiosity naturally saps life and freedom but that it structurally covers over what it investigates. Kofman theorizes this duplicity in two ways. First, curiosity dissimulates in the very act of disclosure. In their “intense curiosity” for the “secret,” both the doctors and Dorian conceal the body they unveil. Second, curiosity represses in the very act of calling forth. “The fascination is displaced,” Kofman states, “from the sight of the cadaver to that of the book,”51 or from the body to the mirror. Sovereign curiosity—­whether autopsic or therapeutic, dissecting or confining—­ultimately is such that it bears on a split, a cut, a severance, and produces two costly confinements: one of pure illusion and one of decontextualized matter. In either case, curiosity functions on devastating, deadening, and debilitating illusions. For Kofman, this is the double face of sovereign curiosity. In his tribute to Kofman, Derrida is quick to grant her critique of curiosity. The doctors—­and, by extension, Rembrandt and their various audiences—­“triumph over death,” as he explains, by “trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death.”52 He then pauses over Kofman’s term of choice here: conjuration. “To ‘conjure death,’” Derrida writes, “implies both to conjure it up and conjure it away . . . and thus to pursue the other as the other dead.”53 Such conjuration, in its very denial of death through curiosity, nevertheless “pursues the other as the other dead”—­whether dead on a slab (like Adriaenz or the elephant), dead in an anatomy book, dead in a painting (be it Rembrandt’s or Basil Hallward’s), or dead in a majestic floor-­length mirror. It is reminiscent of the Eucharistic displacement and disavowal of the body into something else. Both autopsic and therapeutic curiosities, dissecting and confining curiosities, save their objects by conjuring them away and replacing them with an illusion, a phantasm. He writes: “This is my body,” “keep it in memory of me,” and so, “replace it, in memory of me, with a book or discourse to be bound in hide or put into digital memory. Transfigure me into a corpus. So that there will no longer be any difference between the place of real presence or of the Eucharist and the great computerized library of knowledge.”54

Derrida’s alignment of conjuration with the Eucharistic paradigm elucidates the curiosity we see across Rembrandt and Kofman, Christ’s

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body and the medical textbook. The practice of sovereign curiosity attempts to save, preserve, and know its objects by “bloodless abstraction”55 so that what feels alive—­whether knowledge, beauty, or truth—­is always already dead. This is the unique work of sovereign curiosity that Kofman uncovers and Derrida emphatically confirms and critiques. A Deconstructive Practice of Curiosity

How might curiosity be practiced otherwise, against the sovereign illusion of mastery, of clean dissections or of safe confinements? How might curiosity challenge, rather than capitalize on, the subject/object distinction or the human/animal divide, whether at the level of texts or lived taxonomies? What are or might be the elements of a deconstructive practice of curiosity? And in what sense does such a practice reprise certain resources hidden within curiositas that subtend the two classical senses of inquiry and care, autopsy and therapy? As I will argue, by developing the implicit descriptions of a deconstructive style of curiosity in The Beast and the Sovereign through The Animal That Therefore I Am and Répondre du secret, deconstructive curiosity is marked by hesitation and attention, playfulness and exploration not as distinct modalities but as swiftly proliferating modes of investigation. Because such modes belie the sometimes brazen sometimes whimsical meddlesomeness of a curiositas beyond its station, they immediately unsettle the too-­easy alignment of curiosity with the human. Indeed, Derrida provides clues to a deconstructive style of curiosity precisely by reflecting on curious practices at the level of the animal, the vegetal, and the divine. I cull these clues before turning to illuminate their philosophico-­political implications in the final section. Derrida opens volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, Session 11, with a somewhat cryptic remark that curiosity is a “fine word,” a “very fine verbal animal.” In contrast to his use of the neologism animot,56 by which he marks that animality is a linguistic construct, Derrida’s characterization of curiosité as an animal, even a verbal animal, suggests that language itself is somehow nonhuman. What might this mean? This animal of a word, which Derrida uses throughout this session of The Beast and the Sovereign to mark sovereign power, is itself not sovereign. It is more creaturely than colonial, more elephantine



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than imperial. It moves from one meaning to another, from one practice to another, across shifts and slips of sense. Curiosité is overtaken by the inner resources of curiositas, which surprise and scatter it. And, in doing so, this verbal animal “curiosity” can refer to a style of curiosity beyond the sovereign and beyond the human. Across philosophical history, curiosity is often characterized as properly human, not animal. Exemplary in this regard is Thomas Hobbes’s argument that curiosity is essentially a rational faculty, an interested inquiry into causation, that separates humans from animals.57 Resisting this basic opposition, Derrida troubles the alignment of curiosity with humans and, in fact, multiplies its alignments first of all with nonhuman animals. Before demonstrating this through The Beast and the Sovereign and The Animal That Therefore I Am, it is helpful to briefly review the scholarship on Derrida’s deconstruction of animality and humanity, especially with regard to curious questioning. In This Is Not Sufficient, Leonard Lawlor remarks on how Western thought has typically denied nonhuman animals the ability to question and to think, to answer and to name, but it has granted those abilities to humans.58 We have and they have not.59 Following Derrida, however, Lawlor insists that humans cannot ask a question either. True questions, questions worthy of the name, are unconditional questions, questions that are completely unreserved and open to what might come unannounced and unexpected. Irrespective of our personal limitations and investments, such questions are structurally impossible. We humans, then, like nonhuman animals, fail to question.60 This does not mean that there is no difference between a human and a nonhuman animal, but rather that both share a structural failure. The response to this failure ought to be, as Penelope Deutscher puts it, an “ethics of negotiation,” one that aims to cultivate “a patient, attentive, negotiating relationship to the ways in which we fail the other.”61 Such an ethics, or a “deconstructive responsibility,”62 should not be undertaken, as one might more easily believe, by mimicking animal vulnerability in our writing and thinking,63 but rather by attending to that very same vulnerability shared between texts and creatures, thoughts and beasts. After all, as Cixous says, “There is animal trace, animals write.”64 What does this attentiveness look like? Lawlor thinks of it as writing like a cat: “when [Derrida] is writing aporias, he most resembles a cat pacing back and forth before a door, waiting to be let

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out or to be let in.”65 David Farrell Krell, by contrast, imagines writing like a Bernese mountain dog (or a Berner Sennenhund). Referring to the German root verb sinnen, meaning to thoughtfully meditate, Krell remarks that such work “meditates by sniffing, pursuing a scent, following a trace left in the ice of high mountains.”66 For Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Marta Segarra, it means to write as if scratching out or grafting new meanings “by nails or claws.”67 Whatever animal or animal activity it resembles, Lawlor insists that this writing uses the techniques of waiting, following, carrying, and “not-­thinking.”68 Together, such writing practices allow the development of what he calls “weak thought”—­the sort that negotiates with its own vulnerability. It is the sort of thinking that misses, redraws, and fires again. It slips and it slips up. In volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, alongside his critique of sovereign curiosity, Derrida provides an implicit account of a deconstructive curiosity that is marked not by the illusion of absolute mastery but by a praxis of hesitation, humbly placing one foot in front of the other. Imagining a form of knowing inconsistent with the project of sovereign knowledge, Derrida speaks of “precisely the pas, the movement of a pas that consists in suspending with a ‘who knows’ and with so many ‘perhaps’s,’ [suspending] the order and the authority of a sure knowledge, precisely, a knowledge sure of itself.”69 In French, pas is a homonym, meaning both “not” and “step.” This sort of knowing lifts its foot or its paw and suspends itself on a regular basis so as to negate any final achievement or command of the truth. If, following Erwin Straus, we understand walking as an act of “continuously arrested falling,” and as “motion on credit,”70 such a pedetic pursuit of knowledge precisely cannot be fueled by autopsic or therapeutic curiosity, since it does not intrepidly divide or confine. Instead, it tries and tests; it slips and stretches. As such, it is impelled by a curiosity of a “perhaps,” a “perhaps” that “abandons the shield of safety provided by power, presence, principle, and predictability,” as John D. Caputo argues, and “follow[s] the tracks of a more radical possibilizing.”71 It is a deconstructive curiosity that moves with exuberant hesitation. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida refuses to begin from the sovereign position of knower and maker. Rather, Derrida suggests he will respond and he will follow: je suis. As if precisely asserting being-­in-­relation, Derrida suggests, “I am insofar as I follow.” This



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style of inquiry involves not only lifting one’s paw—­or paws—­but doing so repeatedly in order “to track, to sniff, to trail, and to follow”72 whatever has been denied voice, reason, or the honor of a question. It pitches its attention precisely against the grain of established hierarchies of value. Such an investigative mode, for Derrida, resembles the movement of an animal who, “finding its way on the basis of scent or a noise, goes back more than once over the same path to pick up the traces” or “pick up the scent.”73 Writing and thinking in a way that honors the “perhaps” and the “who knows” is not just pedetic but olfactory and auditory; it is marked not simply by hesitation and the pause of a paw but by an attention to the trace of an-­other. For Michael Naas, this explains Derrida’s flair, his nose for the work and play of words. It is “a flair for language, true, but also for argument, and for the ways in which philosophical argument must always be tracked through the thickets of language; and claims . . . must always be followed, ferreted out, and picked apart.”74 Derrida has a nose to the ground, ferreting out the concepts, arguments, and systems that unsettle texts and taxonomies.75 He attends not to the new but to the already that disrupts what is. A deconstructive style of curiosity is traceable not only in Derrida’s cat, in the angle of a gait and the waft of a scent, but also far beyond the animal kingdom, in moments of divine playfulness and vegetal exploration. In their own way, each of these traces is a mode of inquiry inimical to sovereignty. In the Judeo-­Christian tradition, God is precisely not curious because he is all knowing.76 Derrida, however, attributes curiosity—­and therefore a certain ignorance—­to this God. Returning to Genesis in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida notes that God brings the animals before Adam “in order to see” what he would call them.77 “This ‘in order to see,’” Derrida writes, “marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all-­powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language.”78 At this moment of radical divine vulnerability, God waits “with a mixture of curiosity and authority,”79 wanting playfully “to abandon himself to his curiosity.”80 It is a dizzying thought. While Adam’s curiosity is both autopsic and therapeutic, aiming to mark each animal by its own name and to confine animals to their own proper groups, God’s curiosity waits to be surprised by an-­other’s retooling of sense and sociality, language and the fabric of

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materiality. Deconstructive curiosity flourishes precisely in this infinite play between words, between things, or between words and things. Finally, in Répondre du secret, Derrida describes a “curiosity” of “vegetal being,” by which he means the “exploratory comportment” of flowers or trees, plants or roots.81 “Curiosity,” he writes, is typically defined as “the movement, the drive, or the desire to know”82; if, however, it is broadened to mean “an exceptionally exploratory comportment of exploration,” then “one is completely right to attribute some curiosity not only to humans and to animals, but also to living beings that do not belong to the animal realm: e.g., flowers and trees.”83 For Derrida, Avital Ronell comments, “there are acts of questioning which do not necessarily take recourse to discursivity  .  .  . [and] are not necessarily uniquely human. Plants may be questioning, too. . . . Vegetal beings show curiosity: a plant or a root probes.”84 Indeed, plant exploration might extend to the dissemination of its seeds or the breaking open of its flowers.85 This vegetal mode of curiosity opposes specific illusions of sovereignty, such as absolute knowledge and independence, pure reason and teleological inquiry. Simultaneously, a vegetal mode of curiosity suggests an essayistic, vertiginous, and nondiscursive praxis of inquiry. Such a praxis unsteadies the mythos that knowledge is inherently human, but also that knowledge is sure and steady, that it is based on staking claims more than stages of attention, and that it is more somber and serious than it is playful or breathless. Deconstruction begins (and it is always just beginning) with a curiosity at the limit of language, text, and taxonomy. Derrida takes his argumentative cues from the fault lines of French and dares to probe their vulnerability. It is in this sense that Derrida actually does ask and develop an answer to: what is a cat’s curiosity? It is not a sovereign curiosity (like the autopsic or the therapeutic) but a deconstructive curiosity, one that tracks the scent of words and suspends its paw. It is a curiosity that, rather than opposing sovereign curiosity, slips through its clutches. This third curiosity not only challenges the illusion of a clean dissection or safe confinement, the definitiveness of a position or the stability of an opposition, but it also explores new, untested concepts and comportments. Fundamentally, such curiosity is a technique of deconstruction. It interrogates the limits of concepts, positional oppositions, and systemic structures. It highlights the inherent instability of these critical elements and negotiates with that vulnerability. It



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bristles under the foot of sovereign systems and insists upon the power of the margins to break in, break through. It is this criticality—­and its political force—­to which I now turn in closing. Philosophy and Politics after Wonder

To really understand how deconstructive curiosity disrupts sovereign curiosity at the level of philosophy and politics, we must return to Kofman and to Derrida’s reading of Kofman. There, we can trace a reimagination of philosophy, contra philosophy, as well as a new political vision.86 Following on the heels of a fundamental critique of Western thought, and its phantasm of sovereignty, one can track rich theoretical pathways—­otherwise obscured—­toward a feminist, anticolonial politics of curiosity. Kofman certainly “points a finger” at the doctors, “protests” the conjuring movement, and “denounc[es] them to some extent.”87 While Derrida joins in the protest, he is interested in identifying the limits of Kofman’s denunciation. While at one level, he argues, Kofman critiques curiosity, at another, deeper level, she practices and therefore affirms it. Kofman has written an essay. Like the doctors of Amsterdam, she too has displaced the body with the book. She, too, has swapped one corpus for another. In fact, upon her death, she left a large body of work. Derrida takes a moment to reflect on Kofman’s corpus, pinpointing her texts on Nietzsche and Freud as exemplary. He remarks how Kofman displaces the body on the very same three registers of her critique: Dr. Tulp, Rembrandt, and the public. First, as if inspired by scientific curiosity, Kofman writes analytically. She analyzes books like Dr. Tulp dissects bodies, reading them “inside and out,” as if her interpretations were “operations, experiences or experiments.”88 Second, as if driven by artistic curiosity, Kofman writes revealingly. She interrogates philosophical questions like Rembrandt paints a figure, turning her lucidity, her “ray of living light,” on a variety of issues, including death, melancholia, and sexuality.89 Third, in step with a long tradition of observations, interpretations, and commentaries, she has written speculatively or even scopophilically. Like the auditing public, Kofman summons Nietzsche and Freud “to appear and [to] speak.”90 In these ways, Kofman offers a bookish replacement for the real cadaver, the real painting, even the real audience. What does it mean

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that “Conjuring Death” itself conjures death? What does it mean for Kofman to perform the very curiosity she critiques? What really is her position on curiosity?91 Kofman performs her curiosity through the medium of philosophical reading and writing. Through a particular style of philosophy, Kofman constructs other bodies, another form of a corpus. In doing so, Derrida argues, she not only critiques the movement whereby the body is displaced but also affirms the movement of a multiplicitous philosophical curiosity and the multiple knowledges it produces. She ends up affirming the triumph of life . . . not through the relinquishing of a knowledge of death, but, on the contrary, through an active interpretation that renounces neither knowledge nor the knowledge of knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge of the role that occultation or repression might still play in certain forms of knowledge. Whence the deployment of so many types of knowledge, the rigorous analysis of an intersemiotic and intertextual imbrication of speech, writing, and the silence of the body, of the sacred book and the book of science, book and painting, in more than one corpus.92

As Derrida observes, Kofman illuminates the dance whereby many, many forms of bodies (textual and otherwise) are placing and displacing one another on the scene of life. To participate in this dance is as much an affirmation of life as it is a triumph over death. This affirmation, however, must be qualified. It is “without resurrection or redemption, without any glorious body.”93 Kofman does not participate in the Eucharistic movement whereby the body’s displacement is erased through its glorification. Hers is a nonsalvific philosophical method that precisely calls attention to the conjuring trick rather than trying to pass it off as real. And, in calling attention to this trick, Kofman repeatedly highlights the material—­and the feminine—­remnant, and thereby resists the constitutive exclusions of phallogocentric reductions. Derrida’s reading of Kofman demonstrates his sense that there is a deconstructive form of curiosity that is not only eminently textual (bedeviling any separability of concept and argument) and taxonomical (belying any clear-­cut distinction between the species) but expressive of a philosophy against philosophy, understood in its best, most



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critical sense. Such curiosity looks behind the curtain, calling awkward and often highly disruptive attention to the mechanics whereby illusions are made and sustained. If, in any of its guises, sovereign curiosity feigns interest in the other but ultimately refuses to face that other, this deconstructive style of curiosity opens onto the other. It is responsive. It refuses to function within the economy of repression. And it invites the ambivalences proliferated by ambiguities across difference. For this reason, it is deeply affirmative and relational. Of course, the risk of uncovering the conjuration of death and affirming the instabilities of life is that both death and life newly demand our committed and constant negotiation. What is philosophy, and what is politics, if it is not this work? Derrida might answer that neither traditional philosophy nor politics has in fact grappled with the realities of life, death, and their intimacies, but has rather surreptitiously denied them. For Plato, and for much of Western philosophy after him, philosophy begins in wonder: “this wondering . . . is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.”94 Such wonder is injected with vertigo in the face of aporia and perhaps with pain at the hands of a sharp question. Thereafter, philosophy proceeds through dissection, or diaeresis, and ultimately develops into a form of self-­care, or epimeleia heautou. It is self-­care, moreover, that preconditions healthy participation in the polis. Diaeresis is a particular form of philosophical dissection, where a definition is developed through extended bipartite analysis. Plato defines both the sophist and the statesman in this manner, in his eponymously titled dialogues. This process involves repeatedly cutting in two, grabbing hold of what falls to the right of the incision, and cutting again.95 This is how true essence is revealed. Epimeleia heautou is the therapeutic application of this scientific dissection to a philosophical life. As we see so well in the Apology, relentless inquiry forms the backbone of self-­care. The one who heeds the Delphic Oracle and cultivates themself through an examined life—­only this one is qualified to care for the city and lead it into its future.96 For Plato, there is an organic progression from wonder-­inducing questions, through the self-­examination of dissection, to a politically viable life of care. Insofar as autopsic curiosity is related to diaeresis and therapeutic curiosity to epimeleia heautou, the reading of Derrida’s analysis undertaken so far would indicate that wonder—­properly philosophical

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wonder, Platonic wonder—­is intimately related to sovereignty. Such an indication supports Gasché’s argument. If Derrida resists sovereign curiosity, it is only a matter of consistency to resist wonder as well. But philosophy, especially for Plato, does not only proceed by way of wonder, dissection, and self-­care. It also proceeds, however inadvertently or tortuously, through semiotic language. Despite Plato’s vituperous rejection of rhetoric in Ion and Republic, we see that his dialogues follow not merely reason but shifts and slips of sense, not only assertion but also humor and, overall, a real stylistic craft.97 Derrida seems to begin in this margin, this elsewhere, this space in which words overtake and carry you along into recesses that rupture any stable sense of meaning or practice of inquiry. In fact, just as Derrida’s critique of sovereignty supports his overall rejection of metaphysics, his critique of autopsic and therapeutic curiosity involves a reimagination of philosophy. He demands that philosophy be done in another way and by other means. This demand also, necessarily, involves preconditioning a different politics, one committed to justice as “responsibility,” specifically a responsiveness to what “secretly unhinges” the living present, whether that be the remainder that troubles what exists or l’avenir of what is to come.98 One technique Derrida recommends for doing philosophy and politics differently is, as I have argued, the practice of a deconstructive curiosity. I began by analyzing Derrida’s commentators who suggest that there is a distinctly deconstructive curiosity at work in Derrida’s person, as much as in his texts. I turned to Derrida’s treatment of autopsy and therapy, menageries and asylums in volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, to elucidate this curiosity as expressly in contrast to sovereign curiosity. One cannot help but hear echoes of a Foucauldian suspicion of institutionalized curiosity here, in favor of a curiosity more akin to a Nietzschean organic force or the Kristevan semiotic. Finally, I returned to Derrida’s commentary on Kofman, through which he suggests that deconstructive curiosity may be expressed as a style of curiosity that affirms the vagaries and instabilities of life, while unmasking the conjuration of death. I concluded by placing this deconstructive style of curiosity within the context of the Platonic tradition. The former, fueled by what could be called, counterintuitively, a “rhetorical question,” literally asks for something other than to be answered. It asks to be destabilized, to be surprised, and to ask



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again. It asks to invite opacities, ambiguities, and intimacies. This re-­ formation of philosophy involves likewise a re-­formation of politics not as something governed by sovereigns and systematized by institutions or logics of language but rather opened up to the destabilization, surprise, and return of the other. Curiosity herein must function differently, not to stab and secure but to venture together into what is yet unknown. Practicing philosophy in the style of a deconstructive curiosity is a multimodal enterprise. This is a kind of curiosity that uses language hesitantly, remaining particularly attentive to the work and play of words while exploring what always somehow escapes words. It is a curiosity that refuses to keep the steady beat of knowledge and, in fact, mischievously renounces whatever access power and position are supposed to afford. It is a curiosity that sinks deep into the materiality of the earth in order to tentatively reach for resources and sow belonging. A curiosity that is not only far from human but that also deconstructs the very taxonomies whereby the human is made superior to and separate from other living things. A deconstructively curious philosophy blithely fails to uphold illusions of mastery. It breaks metaphysical mirrors. And it refuses to construct any glorious body by investigating the other as a bloodless abstraction. It is a philosophy predicated on entanglement with whomever and wherever one finds oneself, and proceeds via a responsiveness to that entanglement. It engages in an attentiveness to an-­other or others discursively and/or materially denied voice, to textual elements that have been subordinated, and to histories that have been hidden or silenced. And its philosophical mindfulness is playful, open to surprise, and humble before what ultimately cannot be controlled or claimed: the proliferation of difference in language and among the living. It is the sort of philosophy that puts down roots less to secure and to establish than to build shared resources and community. Such a philosophy trails, and it wanders. Practicing politics in the style of deconstructive curiosity is likewise a plurivocal task. Speaking at a 1992 conference organized by Édouard Glissant under the sign of “Echoes from Elsewhere,” Derrida ruminates on his “disconcertingly intimate” relationship to the French language and French philosophy as a Franco-­Maghrebian Jew.99 Living in Algeria, forbidden to learn Arabic or Berber, and involuntarily given and denied French citizenship, by turns, Derrida inherited a history

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of assimilation and amnesia, racism and xenophobia, capitalism and genocide. “I have only one language,” he repeatedly writes, “and it is not mine.” One written language, one philosophical language. Such a “hegemony of the homogenous” is, consistently, an indication of colonial sovereignty and, indeed, of a “sovereignty whose essence is always colonial.”100 It aims to care for the subjects of empire by locking up differently, confining the French language (and French philosophy) as something cleanly separate from Arabic, Berber, or Hebrew. Nevertheless, these are but phantasms. No language, no philosophy, no political belonging is pure, simple, or unitary. Indeed, “non-­mastery” marks the colonized and the colonizer equally.101 Language, philosophy, political belonging—­these are always already “dismembering” and “disseminating” themselves, splitting and scattering.102 Each is riven with intimacies and entanglements.103 This is why, Derrida argues, the poetics of relation for Glissant is always already a paraphilosophy and a politics of relation.104 To be “harpooned” by the French language, French philosophy, and French citizenship as a Franco-­Maghrebian Jew is to “love [these things] by setting [them] on fire.”105 It is to settle into the “disconcerting intimacy”106 of word, thought, and being. To ask hard questions and to practice belonging from this space of humility and of difference is fundamentally “unsettling.”107 What are the implications of a Derridean account of curiosity? At the outset, Derrida’s work aids us in understanding curiosity not as monolithically good or bad but rather as a triumvirate of practices implicated in a series of hierarchies and responsibilities. By situating these various forms of curiosity in the history of science and colonization, Derrida pushes us to reevaluate the progress of knowledge and to critique the phantasms of possession that haunt it. Moreover, by unmooring curiosity—­setting it adrift among plants, animals, humans, and beyond—­Derrida implies that the ecological turn in philosophy will need to account for curiosity and work in tandem with revolutions in theology. Ultimately, however, a Derridean account of curiosity requires that we reconfigure philosophy and politics. What would it mean if philosophy were driven by wonder no longer but by this deconstructive curiosity? Or perhaps it already begins in such curiosity, with the inquisitive modes of hesitation and attention, playfulness and exploration, intimacy and entanglement. If so, what would it mean to recognize that fact? To whom and for what would it matter?



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And what illusions of colonial sovereignty would disintegrate in the wake of such recognition? There is certainly a humility required here, at the level of texts and lived taxonomies, but also the honor of thinking with a radical vulnerability, one conditioned by a recognition of entangled intimacies, permeable borders, and irrepressible reservoirs of significance and signification.

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Part II ARCHIVES OF POLITICAL EXPERIENCE

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5

Curiosity, Activism, and Political Resistance

Curiosity manifests itself in multiple guises. Of particular concern to philosophers (especially the ancients and the existentialists) is a sort of frivolous curiosity that asks vacuous questions, questions of little—­ and certainly no lasting—­import to anyone. This curiosity vainly pursues rapidly changing lines of inquiry, sometimes out of boredom and other times out of sheer pleasure in the minute, the contingent, or the ephemeral. It is excessive, without root in existential need, social utility, or rational armature. It produces, by turns, a dizzying array of details and a banal buzzing to blanket the otherwise jagged architecture of daily life. Whether embodied in the singular busybody or the herd, such curiosity pants for the picayune. Of equal interest is an eminently serious curiosity, the sort promulgated by somber-­lipped academics, corporate investigators, or criminal courts. It is controlled, it is disciplined. It works within institutional constraints and moves at a swift clip down well-­trimmed pathways. It builds an ever more intricate system of knowledge, whether through an expanding scaffold of classifications or a network of correlates. This curiosity is patient, hard-­nosed, and exacting. Whether figured in the hunter or enshrined in the civilizing impulse more generally, such curiosity mechanically amasses info-­bits. But there is a third sort of curiosity that is neither terribly serious nor entirely unserious.1 This particular configuration of the curious impulse begins by fidgeting with the fissures of social mores and political strata, poking and prying in search of a new space to stand tall. It bravely barrels into the darkest recesses of suffering and pain, steels

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itself, and lays bare the true face of social inequality and social death. And it raises its head to the sky, stubbornly imagining as yet inconceivable worlds of justice and of peace, still so easily dismissed as feverish fantasies or illogical hopes. This curiosity is politically resistant. This curiosity is from and for the margins. This curiosity takes wild leaps of imagination in its search for the reorder of things. If the first sort of curiosity often flourishes in media and technology, and the second often settles into museums and bureaucracy, the last often comes alive in the streets and poetry, in shared meals and political protests. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “Curiosity . . . is insubordination in its purest form.”2 Although not every form of curiosity is aptly characterized thus, curiosity’s insubordinate potential has rarely received the attention it deserves. It is this curiosity that forms the focus of the present chapter. In what follows, the resistant potential of curiosity is first framed by political philosophy writ large and then explicated through three case studies of political resistance. I revisit the political theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida who, while they argue that curiosity appears in moments of struggle and on both sides of a power relation, also imply that institutional curiosity is social while resistant curiosity is individual. I test this framework by analyzing the role of resistant curiosity in three political resistance movements: the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the Prisons Information Group in the 1970s, and the People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR) initiative in the early 2000s. Here, I identify three vectors of resistant curiosity: collecting information about unjust conditions, problematizing an oppressive institution (e.g., race, prisons, restrooms), and imagining a future of greater justice and peace. Drawing resources from the frivolous, serious, and transgressive modes of curiosity, political resistance movements mobilize curiosity’s multifaceted capacities in the service of change. While these archives bear out the truth that curiosity is elemental to political struggle and extends to both poles of a power relation, they also insist that, far from a largely solitary practice, resistant curiosity is necessarily collective and eminently communal. I close, then, by reflecting on the contours of collective curiosity.



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Theories of Political Curiosity

The history of philosophy has, by and large, undertheorized curiosity. As we have seen, curiosity is the subject of certain sentences, passages, sections, and even chapters of key philosophical texts across the Western canon, but only recently has it become the primary focus of philosophical books. Within that speckled history, the philosophy of curiosity has, nevertheless, been understood as an important question of ethics and epistemology. As a philosopher, taking the politics of curiosity seriously involves tracing the politics implicit in theories of curiosity, as well as tracing the curiosity implicit in political theories. It also involves, however, measuring those theorizations against theorizations on the ground, theorizations of curiosity within political movements and political communities. In this chapter, I begin that project. As we have seen, there are untapped resources within the history of philosophy from which we can draw a theory of political—­ and especially politically resistant—­ curiosity. Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida offer accounts of political struggle that include implicit characterizations of both institutional and insubordinate curiosity. Whether working against the structures of civilization and consciousness, sedimented power relations, or sovereignty, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida describe a curiosity capable of an irreverent refusal and creative reconfiguration of the political landscape. After reviewing these theories together, I will turn to test them against the dynamics of political curiosity at play. For Nietzsche, just as consciousness and reason are the product of civilization, so truth is necessarily the product of dissimulation and repression. Knowledge of every sort is born and bred in a scene of struggle over human forms and human futures. It is upon a landscape ravaged by this struggle that curiosity appears. Nietzsche grants two basic forms of curiosity. The first, curiosity against life, busies itself in buttressing existing bulwarks: systems of consciousness, civilized societies, schemas of knowledge, and evaluative divisions. Such a curiosity suppresses the vibrant variability of organic investigatory forces and instead entrenches the existing distributions and effects of power. He dubs this sort the “curiosity” of the general populace,3 a “sober, pragmatic curiosity” that busies itself with the “curious investigation of  .  .  . countless minutiae.”4 But there is a second sort of curiosity,

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curiosity for life, which haunts what has become so keenly conscious with whispers of the elsewhere and the otherwise. This curiosity is riotously unbridled and dangerous in its daring. It roots out the illusions that maintain the current system, highlighting the greed and hatred that fuels them. It is a “fateful curiosity”5 that spells the demise of the status quo, comfort, and present forms of existence. Nietzsche attributes this curiosity to the “free spirit” and “the great liberation.”6 This is the sort of curiosity Nietzsche himself endorses. Much like Nietzsche, Foucault also conceives of two warring curiosities in the political sphere. Across his work, curiosity features first as an arm of institutions that identify, catalog, control, and deploy persons and objects in the world. From History of Madness to History of Sexuality, one can trace the role of curiosity in the development of psychology and education, penal theory and punishment, sexuality studies and the various professions of desire that mark the modern, liberal subject. Although Foucault uses the term curiosity in this regard sparingly, his appreciation of the singular force of institutionalized curiosity is undeniable. Far more voluble are Foucault’s direct endorsements of resistant curiosity as a practice of freedom, a tool by which people can resist objectification and subjectification. Curiosity, he says, refuses to be “immobilized” by current realities and is determined “to throw off familiar ways of thought.”7 Curiosity resists the sedimentation of knowledge and power in particular institutions, working instead to make things “mobile” and “fluid.”8 He specifically explores this curiosity as a tactic of self-­transformation,9 as a characteristic of the parrēsiastes who speaks truth to power,10 and as an impetus to critical and genealogical scholarship.11 In each case, resistant curiosity relentlessly breaks up whatever is well-­governed and allows people to think, imagine, and behave in counterdisciplinary ways. For Derrida, there are at least two different sorts of institutionalized curiosity against which resistant curiosity works. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida explores the culture of curiosity as exemplified in pre-­and postrevolutionary imperial France. On the one hand, there is an autopsic curiosity that dissects an object in the service of knowledge, cleanly separating one thing from another. This curiosity fueled, for example, animal and human autopsies. On the other, there is a therapeutic curiosity that confines an object in the service of care, definitively isolating one thing from another. This curiosity undergirds



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the menageries and asylums, which aimed “to treat, to care for . . . , to liberate by locking up differently.”12 Derrida argues that both are interconnected expressions of sovereignty. That is, they attempt to sovereignly control and deny the inherent instability of objects, divisions, walls, and procedures. And yet, for Derrida, there is a third kind of curiosity that capitalizes on precisely that instability. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, he explores a deconstructive curiosity that resists the sovereign impetus. Such a curiosity not only challenges the illusion of a clean dissection or safe confinement, the definitiveness of a position or the stability of an opposition, but also explores new, untested concepts and lines of argumentation. This curiosity is not invested in securing phallogocentric fantasies, but aims “to track, to sniff, to trail, and to follow” what is as yet unrecognized.13 Inherent in the plurivocity of language, as much as in creaturely “exploration,”14 this curiosity welcomes l’avenir. A brief comparison of these accounts throws into relief the basic contours of politically resistant curiosity. For Nietzsche, resistant curiosity is eminently suspicious of civilization and rooted in the jubilant force of nature. It is fundamentally naturalistic. For Foucault, resistant curiosity is a counterforce to disciplinary isolation and biopolitical management, nurturing instead vibrant self-­transformation and social activism. It is essentially historicized, insofar as it develops as a counterpoint to contemporary configurations of power. For Derrida, resistant curiosity, regardless of time or place, attacks the illusion of sovereignty, with its absolute unities and divisions, and instead celebrates différance. It is constitutive of symbolic systems. Thus, against civilization, discipline, and sovereignty, resistant curiosity is irreverent and courageous, experimental and tactical, responsive and integral. In many cases, it comes from the bottom, from the marginalized, and from the constitutively excluded. It is disruptive. It is insubordinate. It is this curiosity that each theorist endorses, in his own way, as a marker of his philosophical activity. Such an endorsement, however, belies the fundamental fact that, for each thinker, resistant curiosity is implicitly a mark of the individual. Although Nietzsche places curiosity squarely in the midst of political struggle, his privileged figures of curiosity are himself,15 his ideal reader—­that “monster of courage and curiosity”16—­and the free spirit of the future.17 The dramatic solitude of Zarathustra, even after his descent into the valley, speaks

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to the Nietzschean alignment of disruptive curiosity with a singular individual. Likewise, although Foucault describes a battle between institutionalized curiosity and resistant curiosity, his best known paradigms of resistant curiosity are singular: himself, the parrēsiastes, and the intellectual.18 For Foucault, the parrēsiastes is, much like Socrates or Diogenes, a single, if socially networked, man, who is unafraid to speak in an inquisitive and courageous way so as to unmask power. Again, for Derrida, forms of curiosity by turns buoy and belie sovereign displays of power. He locates a curiosity coincident with deconstruction in himself and his cat (who remains unnamed), in Lewis Carroll’s Alice and even Melville’s narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener”19 (whose curiosity settles on Bartleby, as a swirling pool of affects that trouble and even defeat the clean functioning of the juridico-­capitalist machine). In each case, an account of resistant curiosity practiced collectively is lacking. This chapter aims to develop a theoretically and practically informed account of politically resistant curiosity. Having reviewed some of the philosophical contributions to such an account, I turn in the following sections to three case studies of political activism, which contribute different insights into the structure of insubordinate curiosity. These cases are the civil rights movement’s nonviolent direct action, the Prisons Information Group’s prison activism, and PISSAR’s work for safe and accessible restrooms. In each case, activists deployed curiosity along several key tracks, asking: What is going on? What do we need? And what better future can we imagine? These cases of resistant curiosity are partially elucidated by Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s theories, but they also expand beyond those accounts. Ultimately, an analysis of resistant curiosity in these specific, localized instances of political action emphasizes the otherwise underthought sociality of curiosity. From the subsequent structure of resistant curiosity, then, can be drawn an imperative of its communal praxis. The Civil Rights Movement and Nonviolent Action

An acknowledged leader in the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. grappled, by his own admission, with “the question” of man, of segregation, of self-­defense, of the choice between violence and nonviolence, and, ultimately, of civil disobedience.20 “The basic question



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which confronts the world’s oppressed,” he writes, “is: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged?”21 Writing from jail during the Birmingham campaign in 1963, King asserts that nonviolent action involves four basic steps: the collection of facts, negotiation, self-­purification, and direct action.22 Step one and step four, bookending nonviolent action, constitute two distinct deployments of curiosity.23 There is the curiosity it takes to gather relevant information: the brutal record of injustice. This curiosity pits itself against forces of media and government that refuse to tell these stories or collect this data. And then there is the curiosity that fuels protest. Activists wonder whether or not this will finally be enough to change hearts and minds. More than this, activists engage protests as a tool to grip public attention, throw the status quo into question, and generate public recognition that segregation is indeed a problem. Curiosity is therefore integral to pursuing an informed, creative reenvisioning of a desegregated culture of equals. King describes the first step of nonviolent action as the “collection of facts to determine whether injustices are alive.”24 This is not the later work of promulgating a nonviolent philosophy, expanding the existing network of activists, tracking the boycotts, sit-­ins, and protests, or tabulating arrests. Instead, this is the sort of information gathering that gets the movement started, ignites it with the force of an unjust world that must be changed. The civil rights movement, in King’s estimation, begins by collecting facts that indicate the absence of civil rights, the reality of discrimination and segregation, and the brute force of violence against Black Americans. This is a commitment to curiosity, a desire to know the extent of pain and suffering, the effects of hatred and systemic injustice. Participants collected data on the beatings, the sexual assaults, the lynchings, the burning and/or bombing of Black American homes and churches, as well as other activities of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council. They collected data and statistics on police killings, unjust trials, voter registration restrictions and voter intimidation, housing discrimination, school segregation rates, unemployment, and restricted employment. They mapped segregated spaces in downtown cities and identified the merchants specifically responsible for them. They researched and evaluated current laws and policies, at once looking for legal resources to support their cause and lacunae where new legislation was needed. This is an

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agonizing curiosity, stemming from pain and met with greater pain at witnessing rampant inequality. But it is necessary. It comes first. Following steps two and three, negotiation and self-­purification, the fourth and final step of direct action—­whether it involves protests, demonstrations, marches, sit-­ ins, or boycotts—­ also catalyzes curiosity. This is not the superficial curiosity of depoliticized young folk who join their friends at the picket lines on a whim and may or may not contract any real commitment.25 It is instead a curiosity that generates—­and is generated—­by crisis. King states that the power of direct action lies in its ability to build a state of creative tension that breaks one’s bondage to myth and prejudice, pushes one to rethink what is taken for granted, and fuels subsequent efforts at understanding.26 King reminds his readers of Socrates, the nonviolent gadfly who aimed “to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-­truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.”27 Being a gadfly, for Socrates, involved a meddlesome inquisitiveness directed at people of good standing28 and about things one ought not to question.29 It was Socrates’s commitment to questions outside the confines of religion, politics, or established values that rattled the Athenian populace, opening up the possibility of radical intellectual and social change. Following King’s line of comparison, then, the civil rights protests were arguably Socratic catalysts for public curiosity. In The Psychology of Nonviolence,30 Leroy H. Pelton argues that the power of nonviolent protest, particularly that employed by the civil rights movement, lies in its ability to ignite curiosity in the general public around heretofore unrecognized injustices. Pelton relies heavily on Daniel E. Berlyne’s classic study, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity. Berlyne argues that conceptual conflict—­or ideational incongruity—­is the primary impetus to epistemic curiosity, which he defines as “the brand of arousal that motivates the quest for knowledge and is relieved when knowledge is procured.”31 For Pelton, the protest form naturally creates conceptual conflict for the general public, which is presented with a manifestation of social and ideological discord. In order for that protest to best promote curiosity, and in turn facilitate attitudinal change, it needs to strike a careful balance. Its message must be complex enough to attract attention but simple enough to defray natural resistance.32 It must be novel enough to generate interest but repeated



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often enough to increase the pleasure of familiarity.33 While psychologists continue to debate the nature and causes of curiosity,34 current theorists remain indebted to Berlyne’s framework. Todd Kashdan, for example, reinforces curiosity’s attraction to novelty and complexity, as well as its willingness to endure the anxiety of conflict or uncertainty.35 While these elements may not be sufficient for curiosity in the final analysis, their importance underscores the continued relevance of Pelton’s account of the efficacy of political protest. The civil rights movement, then, utilized curiosity as a fundamental tactic of political resistance from the earliest stages of nonviolent action to full-­blown protests and decisive acts of noncooperation. Over time, however, the memory of the civil rights movement was solidified in the public imaginary as a definitive, rather than inquisitive, revolution. In like manner, its quintessential Black leaders—­especially Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—­were cast and commemorated as authoritative rather than experimental figures. As Erica R. Edwards argues in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, however, post–­civil rights Black fiction and film developed as a counterpoint to this simplification, refusing the erasure of curiosity from Black political history. Films such as Barbershop and Barbershop 2 and novels such as The White Boy Shuffle, Edwards argues, reignite a fundamental inquisitiveness within the Black community about its own rhizomatic history. As Edwards defines it, “curiosity [is] a politics and aesthetics of serious interrogation, playful questioning, thoughtful puzzling, and/or fantastic reinvention.”36 “Curiosity,” she continues, “names an aesthetics and a politics of endless asking that maintains a suspicion toward any authority figure offering final solutions.”37 Targeting classic events and personas of the 1960s, post–­civil rights Black aesthetic productions redeploy a playful, dynamic inquisitiveness toward and within the civil rights movement. Such a curiosity carries more than an intramovement significance, however. Recall that W. E. B. Du Bois opens The Souls of Black Folk with the remark that “between me and the other world there is always an unasked question . . . How does it feel to be a problem?”38 How does it feel to be Black in a white world, or rather to be Black in the long and violently enforced illusion of a white world? But this question is not asked honestly. As Frantz Fanon later puts it, in Black Skin, White Masks, the white man affords his Black counterpart “nothing but indifference,

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or a paternalistic curiosity.”39 For a group or an individual that is consistently the object of a gloating, a punishing, or a half-­hearted question, it is immeasurably powerful to become the subject of questions, the source-­point of curiosity. Part of the power of the civil rights movement lies in the way Black Americans took ownership of their own curiosity and demanded public recognition of it. They identified what institutions needed to be questioned, what information needed to be gathered, and what future needed to be imagined. The movement then worked to educate the curiosity, concern, and creativity of the public. Today, the work of Black liberation continues to function under the cipher of curiosity. This can be tracked at the individual and collective levels. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, in How to Be an Antiracist, attests to the crucial role inquisitiveness played in expanding his sense of the Black liberation project; he recalls his own “curiosity about Black feminism and queer theory itself, a curiosity that transformed into a desire to be a gender antiracist, to be a queer antiracist, to not fail Black people—­all Black people.”40 Cofounder of the Postloudness podcast collective James T. Green similarly highlights the critical role Black queer curiosity plays in Black liberation more generally, both as a mark of beauty and as a force of growth: [Postloudness] is kind of like entertainment through curiosity. Every single show has their rabbit holes that they dig into. . . . You’re listening to people really drill down about what they’re passionate about talking about, whether it’s robots or AI, or a television show, or whether it’s unlearning social narratives of Blackness and womanhood. They do it in such an entertainingly curious way and then, at the end, you’re scratching your head either having an answer to something you’re thinking about or looking at something differently. Which I think is beautiful. We’re queer brown folk, but also we have a passionate curiosity about certain things.41

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Black Lives Matter movement itself motivates and embeds curiosity in its activist strategies. Not only does BLM collect the names of Black people killed by police (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd), track the hashtag #SayHerName, and cover protests such as those in Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, and Minneapolis, but it also envisions a world without state-­



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sanctioned violence against Black people and expressly includes queer, trans, and disabled Black people in that vision. In these and other ways, Black scholarship, arts, and movement-­building today renew the civil rights movement’s legacy of deploying inquiry and imagination—­ deploying curiosity—­as a tactic of political resistance. The Prisons Information Group and Prison Resistance Networks

It is a little-­known fact that perhaps the most foundational text in critical prison studies, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, was the product of three intense years of prison activism.42 Foucault founded and led a movement called Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group, or the GIP).43 A vibrant coalition of prisoners, ex-­prisoners, their families, doctors, lawyers, academics, and other professionals, this prison activist group worked to collect and share information about the prison gathered from prisoners themselves. Established in the wake of May 1968, the GIP disbanded in 1973 in favor of the Comité d’action des prisonniers (the Prisoners Action Committee, or the CAP), a group led by ex-­prisoners and focused on prison reform and abolition. The GIP deployed its resistance effort on multiple levels, not least of which was curiosity. For the GIP, the prison must be made into a question.44 And it is prisoners—­not the penitentiary administration—­who should be asked about it. Prison resistance in early 1970s France, then, was marked by a distinct war over curiosity. The GIP’s first act was to generate a questionnaire for dissemination among prisoners. Organizers were keen to insist, in the accompanying leaflet, “this is not a sociological inquiry, a curiosity-­inquiry, it is an intolerance-­inquiry).”45 What is the distinction here? In a similar statement published shortly thereafter, Foucault again characterizes the questionnaire as an “intolerance-­inquiry”; he explains, “We do not make our inquiry in order to accumulate knowledge, but to heighten our intolerance and make it an active intolerance.”46 The enterprise of gathering information from prisoners was not an academic one. It did not seek the acquisition of information for information’s sake. Nor was the enterprise curious in a banal sense, attracted to the spectacle of the prison fetish. Instead, it was an act of intolerance. As Daniel Defert would put it two months later, distributing the questionnaires

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was “not sociological work” but “a political act.”47 It was the work of people with intimate ties to the prison and a staunch conviction of its intolerability. And it aimed to incite the public to recognize and treat the prison as “intolerable.”48 One might then say it was driven not by a banal but by an intolerant, already politicized curiosity. Fundamental to the GIP initiative was the practice of asking prisoners themselves to describe prison conditions, assess the penal system, and formulate necessary reforms. As the group would say over and over again, it worked “à donner la parole” or “to give the floor” to prisoners.49 From the outset of its manifesto, the GIP insisted that, while there were official penitentiary reports, the prison remained a “black box,”50 about which little if any truth was known. To rectify this situation, the GIP developed an investigative process through which “questions were really addressed by detainees to detainees.”51 This means that the center of curiosity shifted. Through the questionnaire, ex-­prisoners asked current prisoners to report basic facts about their food, work, mail, medical care, visiting rights, and prison discipline.52 But they also asked open-­ended, evaluative questions: “Do you have any comments about the [prison] rules?”53 “What comments do you have about this investigation or questionnaire?”54 Furthermore, they asked politicized questions: “What is intolerable?,”55 “What is unbearable?,”56 and “What are the most scandalous aspects of penitentiary life you want people to focus on chiefly and immediately in the struggle?”57 The breadth of these questions positioned prisoners as the chief source of objective details and reflective assessments of the penitentiary system. For three years, the GIP published pamphlet after pamphlet, disseminating the material gathered from prisoners to the wider world.58 In doing so, it aspired not only to enhance societal awareness of the prison but to force the public to recognize the prison as a problem and therefore take it as a question. According to Foucault’s retrospective assessment, the GIP posed “the problem not of the political regime in prisons, but of the prison regime itself. . . . The problem was this: what is prison?”59 This meant that the GIP laid bare the intolerable nature of incarceration not in order to instigate reform but rather to cast doubt on the entire institution. It asked why punish by confinement? Why exercise social control in this manner? For the GIP, “the existence of prisons posed problems, just as much as what happened there”; members therefore resisted making any proposals for reform, saying



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they “wanted no prescription, no recipe, and no prophecy.”60 The GIP problematized the prison. This is not yet the rich sense of problematization Foucault would later develop in his reflections on genealogy, but it does require the same “curiosity and scrutiny.”61 It does hang the same giant question mark over an accepted social institution. The political project of making the prison a question and centering prisoners’ voices on that question was not a project of resolution. It was an enterprise to shift the center weight and the contours of curiosity. While the GIP originally collaborated primarily with Marxist agitators, it increasingly joined forces with the women’s movement and the gay liberation movement, as well as with immigrant, Black, and mental health activists.62 As such, it shifted the center weight of curiosity not only to prisoners but also to the marginalized populations so often targeted for criminalization and incarceration. Building on a broad-­ based acknowledgment of prison race wars as a tool of administrative control, the GIP’s third booklet, The Assassination of George Jackson, interrogated the racism that contributed to and covered up anti-­ Black violence in the United States. Its fourth booklet, Prison Suicides, scrupulously posed the problem of mental health in prison, an issue heavily underscored by the Toul prison revolt. The high rates of suicidality among the prison population were especially marked among incarcerated immigrants. As indicated in the letters of H.M., collected in Prison Suicides, however, that suicidality was also tied up with a hyperpolicing and pathologization of homosexuality in prisons. H.M. hung himself after being placed in solitary confinement for homoerotic activity. The Nancy prison revolt, another revolt heavily mediatized by the GIP, was led by immigrant and nonimmigrant people born into poverty, theft, and petty crime. As such, the GIP queried the very nexus of marginalization and amplified the insistence of the marginalized that the status quo no longer go unquestioned. The GIP’s effort met with significant resistance from various quarters, perhaps chief among which were the police and the media.63 According to organizers, the French police were already part and parcel of the prison problem.64 They targeted the poor, tortured ethnically or racially marginalized people, beat detainees, killed protestors, and consistently used a heavy hand for slight infractions.65 Throughout the GIP’s activities, however, the police made a special effort to combat its attempted shift in curiosity, breaking up groups of visitors, families,

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organizers, and protestors as they congregated outside prison doors.66 They were also quick to confiscate lists of demands that prisoners hurled over the walls and to arrest anyone caught collecting them.67 In its turn, the media launched smear campaigns, taking swipes at GIP leaders and accusing them of self-­aggrandizement.68 It also levied accusations of deception and drunkenness against the many prisoners involved in the GIP’s various information campaigns.69 And the media refused to publish journalistic submissions from prisoners themselves. As Foucault would remark with some exasperation, “When detainees speak, it poses such a problem.”70 The police and the media together, therefore, worked to exclude prisons as well as prisoners from the realm of inquiry, from the purview of political curiosity. For Foucault, the GIP not only practiced a politicized curiosity directed at prisoners in order to refocus public curiosity on prisons, it also redirected his own intellectual curiosity toward the practice of incarceration. In his lectures at the Collège de France during this time, he explored themes of penal repression and investigation, confinement and sequestration, delinquency and discipline.71 This research coalesced into Discipline and Punish in 1975, a book that explores the rise of incarceration as the primary means of punishment in the West, contextualizing that shift in a broader transformation of power from brute force to ever more intricate systems of cultivation and control. Much later, Foucault would identify curiosity as the fundamental motivation of his research across his career.72 Here in the early 1970s, it was the GIP that pushed that curiosity down new pathways. His experiences with the GIP forced him to take the prison as a problem in that rich sense of problematization that aims to show not only “that the present is constructed” but “how the present has been contingently constructed.”73 As a result, one of the outcomes of the GIP’s “intolerance-­inquiry” was Foucault’s own genealogy of the prison. The GIP provides a rich case study of the role of curiosity in the 1970s French prison resistance movement. For its members, the prison must be a question and it is prisoners who must be asked about it. The GIP’s work cast a staple institution into doubt and recast the field of appropriate informants. It fought to make known what was hidden, to make heard those who were silenced. It cultivated in the French public a new, robust, and ethically informed desire to know what about the penal system remained unknown.



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PISSAR and Queer/Crip Coalition

In the United States, bathrooms have always been a political space. As a historical centerpiece of segregation and unequal accommodation, bathrooms have been, by turns, targeted as a feminist issue, a race issue, a disability issue, and a transgender issue. Getting “ladies” rooms in the first place took political organizing, and today many demand better provisions for menstruation and lactation. After the racial desegregation of restrooms, there remain significantly fewer public restrooms in low-­income communities of color. ADA standards, while hard won, are unreliably met across U.S. accommodations. Transgender people consistently face the threat of discrimination and violence in whichever restroom they choose to use.74 Moreover, the inaccessibility of public restrooms for homeless people, low-­income people, and street-­ based workers has been a sustained national problem. Given these various forms of inequality, scattered across multiple axes of oppression, the bathroom has been an inescapable source of agitation, locus of activism, and object of political resistance movements. As readers may have already come to expect, curiosity has been a driving force of and key tactic in these efforts. Organizers on the whole have utilized curiosity to collect necessary information, to make restrooms a question, and to shift the locus of inquiry in bathroom politics. To begin with a perhaps paradigmatic example, students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst established and ran the Restroom Revolution group from 2001 to 2002. This group specifically aimed to accommodate the needs of transgender students. After their first meeting, the students’ needs and solutions were already quite clear; organizers demanded that the administration institute gender-­neutral public restrooms across campus. As a supplement to this demand, they proposed to offer didactic support, committing to provide informational trainings to residence hall staff, students, and visitors, as well as the administration.75 Organized into four committees concerned with publicity, protest, legal issues, and higher education precedents,76 the Restroom Revolution group announced itself with a flyer that read, “Do you know that you are sitting in a seat of privilege?”77 The question aimed to highlight the fact that bathrooms were not accessible to some demographics of students at the University of Massachusetts. This point served to throw bathrooms themselves, as much as bathroom

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culture, into uneasy relief. Unsurprisingly, conservative media outlets deployed questions differently. As if posing rhetorical questions, but really triggering an ideological reaction, they asked: You really want to “challenge the existence of male versus female?”78 “As a female, could you ever be comfortable” in a unisex bathroom?79 “Can you imagine” the sexual harassment and assault?80 Ultimately, the Restroom Revolution succeeded in acquiring only two new single-­occupancy, gender-­ neutral bathrooms on a campus of over twenty thousand students.81 Curiosity was far more significant for a group called PISSAR (People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms), active at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2003 to 2004.82 For Restroom Revolution, gender-­segregated restrooms were prima facie an obstacle to transgender students; no inquiry or investigation was necessary in order to establish this fact. For PISSAR, by contrast, which was a coalition between disabled, trans, and genderqueer students, as well as those with menstruation and childcare needs, the structure of fully accessible public accommodations was unclear and was therefore open for debate. This made the entire nexus of existing campus bathrooms a locus of politicized curiosity.83 Bathrooms had to become an issue in campus culture, while current bathrooms had to be mapped, evaluated, and ultimately changed.84 PISSAR members—­including undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and community members—­started by posing questions to the student body: What do we need from bathrooms? What elements are necessary to make a bathroom functional for everyone? To make it safe? To make it a private and respectful space? Whose bodies are excluded from the typical restroom? More important, what kind of bodies are assumed in the design of these bathrooms? Who has the privilege (we call it pee-­privilege) of never needing to think about these issues, of always knowing that any given bathroom will meet one’s needs?85

By piquing public curiosity, PISSAR problematized the otherwise everyday institution of the bathroom. The media campaign was only the first step. The second involved the aptly named “PISSAR patrols,”86 which were groups of three people, ideally of varying genders, canvassing campus to catalog and as-



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sess its bathrooms. All PISSAR patrols were equipped with team shirts, gloves, measuring tape, clipboards, and a checklist. Folks on PISSAR patrol were invited to be scientists, to be investigators and explorers, anthropologists and geographers. They recorded, in meticulous detail, the location, signage, urinal and stall measurements, latches, knobs, grab bars, flush levers, dispensers (for toilet seat covers, tampons, soap, paper towels), and changing tables of each restroom. Members retroactively characterized the four-­page checklist as “a manifesto of sorts,” because it modeled “queer coalition-­building by incorporating disability, genderqueer, childcare, and menstruation issues into one document, refusing single-­issue analysis.”87 Results from the patrols were collated into an authoritative map, which helped students locate more accessible restrooms on campus. The map was also, however, a “consciousness-­raising tool” for those “who have never had to think about bathrooms.”88 PISSAR’s cartographic effort was ultimately an advocacy effort. Not only did the patrols cultivate members’ own “imagination” about the future of accessible restrooms,89 but they also got chancellors curious enough to ask, “What kind of bodies are we talking about here?,”90 which eventually led to renewed university commitments to accessibility. A similar mobilization occurred at Hampshire College between 2010 and 2011. Variously self-­ described as #OccupyBathroom or #DecolonizeBathroom, this iterative and experimental movement focused on bathroom signage itself as a place of curious contestation.91 Building on years of guerrilla activism whereby students simply removed binary-­gendered restroom signs across campus, tossing them in the trash or keeping them as trophies, this iteration involved physically occupying a restroom of one’s choice and thereby putting into question the coloniality of the binary-­gendered system.92 The administration responded by affixing the new labels “Self-­Identified Women” and “Self-­Identified Men” and including a plaque beneath them that stated Hampshire’s commitment to “create a world where gender is not a cause of discrimination or violence.” Dissatisfied with the modifier “self-­identified,” which for many trans people erases the “realness” of their gender, and with the maintenance of the gender binary, students removed the gender markers and the “s” so that the signs read “elf-­ identified.” The administration responded again by affixing new signs:

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“Bathrooms with Urinals” and “Bathrooms without Urinals.” While largely successful, to this day these signs remain mildly contested (and sometimes removed) because the stable signifier reinscribes the centrality of cis male embodiment norms. Today, the unexpected absence of a bathroom sign at Hampshire poses the question yet again and leaves the user curious as to what sort of fixtured room one is entering. This curious uncertainty is not unlike that of a gender journey itself. Activism around restroom access is not alone in its deployment of curiosity. In fact, the culture of segregation and discrimination targeting variously gendered, raced, and abled bodies results repeatedly in the conversion of public accommodations into sharply guarded territories, policed with quick and cutting interrogations, in which accusatory questions are wielded as instruments of control and exclusion. The Restroom Revolution student group fought for gender-­neutral bathrooms to alleviate “severe discomfort, verbal and physical harassment, and a general fear of who we will encounter and what they will say or do based on their assumption of our identities.”93 One of the many ways people police restrooms is by inquisition: “Are you lost? Are you a . . . what the fuck are you? Where’s your ID? What kind of plumbing you got, huh? What’s in those pants!”94 Sheila Cavanagh calls it “gender-­based interrogation.”95 The Free to Pee group, started at George Brown College in 2012 and self-­described as a PISSAR spin-­ off, highlights the complexity of this moment: “Discrimination comes in many forms, and it is not always easy to know why someone is asking you questions or telling you to leave the restroom.”96 Some may kindly pretend not to notice, while others may call security or attack you physically (sometimes with a weapon). And they may do so out of culturally, religiously, or ideologically bred devotion to this particular sanctuary of the gender binary. Curious stares and accusatory questions serve this end. Restroom resistance movements have, by and large, worked against this use of the question to target, ostracize, and exclude, to rip away welcome and destroy belonging. Instead, they have deployed curiosity to ask honestly about the pain and institutional failure experienced so heavily by marginalized people. And they have also relied on curiosity to reignite and to reorganize their own political imagination.



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Collective Curiosity

These three cases—­the civil rights movement, the Prisons Information Group, and PISSAR—­provide material from which to deduce the structure of politically resistant curiosity. As Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s accounts suggest, curiosity in these cases is always a force on both sides of political struggle. Curiosity is not essentially insubordinate. Sometimes, and perhaps more often than not, it works in the service of established institutions, which predefine appropriate objects, subjects, and avenues of inquiry. Questions may be used to further this inquiry or to protect it from the threat of other knowledge formations. When curiosity’s insubordinate potential is tapped, however, it investigates the suffering of the marginalized, it casts radical doubt on the status quo, and it fearlessly imagines new and better futures. Insubordinate curiosity also shifts who is consulted, who gets asked for their political wisdom. More than fleshing out the structure of resistant curiosity, these case studies launch a specific challenge to the accounts of canonical philosophers. Dispensing with any illusion of independent—­let alone solitary—­curiosity, political resistance movements illuminate the undertheorized sociality of curiosity. Curiosity is not, in these cases, the isolated characteristic of a genius or a rebel. It is collective and it is communal. What the structure of resistant curiosity produces, then, is a depiction of collective curiosity. Curiosity in political resistance movements is first of all deployed against already established configurations of knowledge and inquiry. In the civil rights movement, the stories and data of segregation were not being generated through official channels and needed, instead, to be built by the Black community. Perhaps one of the most powerful exemplars of this work is the “Evidence” chapter in We Charge Genocide (1951), which insists that “this widespread failure to record crimes against the Negro people is in itself an index to genocide.”97 But conversely, conservative white media deployed questions in order to resist desegregation by fanning the flames of racism and red fear.98 Likewise, for the GIP, official prison reports failed to represent prisoners’ voices and the media refused to incorporate them. But when Dr. Édith Rose, a prison psychiatrist, wrote a damning report of the Toul prison in 1971, the penitentiary administration dismissed it with a question: Did you see all of this with your own eyes?99 Restroom

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organizing, too, has developed hand in hand with data collection, from PISSAR’s rudimentary map to extensive academic reports.100 But questions about a user’s gender are also repeatedly utilized to police nonnormative bodies in restrooms.101 It is not, therefore, the case that curiosity is absent from the status quo but rather that it is governed and deployed in the service of maintaining current political structures. Against this established schematic of inquiry, resistance movements utilize curiosity insubordinately in at least four specific ways. First, they investigate the state of affairs for disempowered groups. What are the elements and effects of segregation, intolerable prison conditions, or inaccessible restrooms? An investigation of this sort asks targeted questions about marginalized experiences. These questions gather the information necessary to inform later strategies of struggle and reimaginations of the political landscape. Second, these resistance movements shifted not only the topic of inquiry but also the people being asked. The civil rights movement asked the Black community about segregation; the GIP asked prisoners about prison conditions; and PISSAR asked genderqueer and disabled students about inaccessible bathrooms. In changing the directionality of curiosity, these movements changed who could speak and who could be heard. Insubordinate curiosity transforms the politics of voice and ear. Third, these movements launched major efforts to change what got recognized as a question or a problem. Targeting the government, the administration, and the public, they used questions not only to destabilize the unquestioned character of race, prisons, and restrooms but to make these constructs questionable in their own right. While the formal effect of this effort was external consciousness raising, it also reconfigured the terrain of officially endorsed sites of inquiry. Fourth, they asked, “What do we need? What would a new future of care look like? And how can questions help us dream?” It is the courage to throw off familiar ways, to radically shift perspective, to believe change is possible, and to populate collective visions with the still unthinkable—­it is this courage that fuels such movements. This is the structure of politically resistant curiosity. The challenge that these cases pose to traditional philosophical accounts of political curiosity is their inescapable qualification of curiosity as communal. If political theory is to adequately engage with resistance movements, it is critical that collective curiosity be theorized philosophically. As previously established, the accounts of Nietzsche,



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Foucault, and Derrida do privilege, if only implicitly, the solitary figure as bearer of resistant curiosity. That is, while their accounts of curiosity are explicitly sociopolitical, their characterizations of resistant curiosity in particular are implicitly individualistic. Nevertheless, there remain extraneous references, throughout their work, that might provide resources for an account of collectively resistant curiosity. Nietzsche, for example, sometimes characterizes curiosity as shared among, for instance, “birds of passage” or “we Europeans of the day after tomorrow.”102 These references must be theorized. Likewise, there are passing moments where Foucault himself wrests his “practices of freedom” from the frameworks of solitary askesis and centers them in intimate relations or in communities of resistance. Properly contextualized within his own activist trajectory—­from Tunis and Vincennes to the GIP, the GIS, and the Jaubert affair, to name a few—­he states, in a late interview, that “what is good is something that comes through innovation. . . . The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work.”103 Finally, while Derrida implicitly locates deconstructive curiosity in individual people or animals, he does explore its presence in plants, flowers, trees, and root systems.104 Relocating curiosity from the solitary philosopher to the community, from the lone intrepid animal to the pack and the herds, from a single plant to the network of organic life—­that is what must be done. Collective curiosity—­and the curiosity within different collectives—­is what we must now think. To think curiosity collectively also means to investigate how curiosity changes as it shifts registers.105 In one sense, collective curiosity is simply an expansion and intensification of individual curiosity on a mass social scale. In another sense, collective curiosity is not only quantitatively but qualitatively different from individual curiosity. Across affect and function, each feels and acts differently than the other. What might be the specific features curiosity gains (or loses) as it travels across scales? And how might collective curiosities differ from each other, between social centers and social margins, for example, or between resistant and institutionalized contexts? If curiosity swarms, how does it swarm? If it cross-­pollinates or cogerminates, migrates or rhizomatically replicates, by what force does it do so? As I have shown, many of the architectures of individual curiosity are traceable on the collective scale—­e.g., collecting information, problematizing,

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and imagining something new. But just as discrete instances of curiosity may illuminate interconnected instances, so the interconnected illuminate the discrete. Group curiosity highlights the impossibility of disambiguating what is me from what is before me, after me, through me, already constraining and disrupting and therefore entangling “my curiosity.” Individual curiosity is always already multiple—­such that “my curiosity” is never fully or finally “mine.” But of course, trajectories of individual curiosity can certainly be changed by collective curiosity and vice versa. There is a felt difference, however, between collective curiosity in movement building, with its press toward the impossible, and collective curiosity in corporate growth, with its pursuit of concrete expansion. The swarm of affective intensities are palpable in the former, where they are often all but imperceptible in the latter. What is at stake in this split, its visibilizations and obscurations? Whatever the answers to these haunting questions, the archives of political resistance analyzed in this chapter confirm that curiosity is political—­that is, it plays a distinctive role in the ways social structures are built and understood, rebuilt and resignified. They also clearly situate curiosity on the scene of struggle, between warring forces that practice curiosity by different means and toward different ends. As a collective endeavor, moreover, political activism underscores the vibrant viability of communal curiosity, or curiosity practiced in common rather than simply by discrete individuals. These political resistance movements, furthermore, underscore the insight and wisdom of curiosity practiced at the social margins, not merely the structural margins. Each movement in its own way turns toward marginalized communities themselves and asks what theorizations and practices of resistant curiosity are therein exemplified and explored. Finally, they prompt renewed attention toward specific curiosity formations for specific communities. That is, they attend not to resistant curiosity writ large but rather to the unique characteristics of local struggles over curiosity, exploring the variety of epistemic forms of oppression and resistance therein.106 I turn now to the disability community and the transgender community to refract the politics of curiosity not only through the spectacle-­erasure formation so common in these contexts but also through the consistent and creative re-­formations of curiosity undertaken by disability and transgender communities, at the individual and collective levels.

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Cripping Curiosity A CRITICAL DISABILITY FRAMEWORK

It need hardly be said that disabled people have been and continue to be the object, if not the brunt-­bearers, of curiosity. This observation comes as something of a reprise in disability studies literature. As Colin Cameron states, most disabled people experience an “objectifying” curiosity.1 Whether it was the “morbid curiosity” drawn to feral children after the Industrial Revolution,2 or the “intrusive curiosity” directed at wheelchair users,3 or the “inappropriate” and “pestering” curiosity about prosthetic limbs today,4 such an objectifying curiosity seems to be a historical constant for nonnormative bodyminds. In Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, Dan Goodley characterizes curiosity as an “‘othering’ response” that replaces everyday scripts of engagement with an engaged nonengagement.5 As such, curiosity is one in a series of what we might call discriminatory affects. Goodley writes: “Disabled people have been hated, made exotic, pitied, patronized, and ignored. Disability also evokes admiration, curiosity, fascination, and sympathy.”6 Whatever its affective counterparts, Goodley adds, the “cultural curiosity” directed at disabled people constitutes them as “dustbins of disavowal.”7 This is another way of formulating curiosity as a discriminatory affect: such curiosity is an interest without interest, a recognition that preconditions erasure. Such curiosity deeply informs the social construction of disability—­perhaps especially in the case of supercrip narratives—­as well as its analysis. With supercrip narratives, certain people with disabilities are singled out as exemplars of resilience, while disability itself is reinscribed as something to be overcome. Disability is therefore a paradigm of the

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spectacle-­erasure curiosity formation according to which hypervisibility preconditions constitutive exclusion. Thus, curiosity is not a new term for disability studies. It is used repeatedly to capture the objectification and enfreakment8 of people with disabilities. The history of disabled people’s use as sources of entertainment and medical interest, in service to ableist curiosity, is structurally connected, via the spectacle-­erasure formation, to the long history of abandonment, confinement, and elimination suffered by disabled people.9 As a source of entertainment, disabled people have been made into curious spectacles in royal courts and zoos, in freak shows and television series. In the mid-­nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum, perhaps the most memorable of freak show managers, said he aimed to create “a sensation among the lovers of the curious”10 and thereby contribute to “this curious world’s curious economy.”11 Such displays purportedly provided audiences with a distraction from life as lived, all the while insinuating that monstrosity is quotidian, that terror lies close to home.12 As a source of medical interest, people with disabilities have been displayed as novelties in hospitals, surgical theaters, medical journals, and other research institutions. At Bethlem Hospital, in the seventeenth century, lay and scientific visitors alike repeatedly referred to patients as “curiosities.”13 Today, gratuitous public exams and black-­bar anonymizing practices, whereby patients’ bodies are displayed for multiple interested observers, sustain the objectification of disabled bodies in medical settings and publications.14 These uses of disabled people as objects of entertainment and knowledge converge, according to Mat Fraser, in the museum,15 where disabled people are typically reduced to their bodies, to their body parts, and to their disabilities, emptied of their affective, intellectual, and social lives. They are simultaneously spectacularized and erased. Despite curiosity’s historical complicity in this objectification, alongside its structural modality of engaged nonengagement, some scholars suggest that curiosity itself is not the problem. For example, Lerita Coleman Brown asserts, in reference to disability, that curiosity is harmless, natural, and childlike, while fear and stigma are something else, something learned, something violent.16 Licia Carlson in fact identifies the wellspring of her book The Faces of Intellectual Disability as her own, presumably viable, curiosity about the subject.17 Lauren Guilmette goes as far as to suggest that curiosity is in fact a



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necessary, ethical response to disability. Able-­bodied people, she insists, need to practice “curiosity-­as-­care,” an affective attentiveness toward disabled people.18 Guilmette’s account, however, fails to acknowledge that this move from a violent to a caring interest is precisely the ideology used to justify the era of care institutions (e.g., asylums, reformatories, etc.), so heavily critiqued in disability studies. Endorsements of curiosity in relation to disability on the whole, moreover, typically fail to sufficiently disentangle curiosity from its violent history and problematically recenter able-­bodied people and their interest. When Anarella Cellitti and Rascheel Hastings, for example, address the often violent questions that able-­bodied students direct toward disabled students, they suggest that the former must learn to ask better questions, to practice a kinder curiosity toward the latter.19 Never once do Cellitti and Hastings—­or Guilmette, for that matter—­grant that disabled people may be curious themselves. Within scholarly literature, not to mention mainstream media, people with disabilities are typically not conceived of as practitioners of curiosity. In fact, most educational or developmental literature granting a modicum of curiosity to disabled children emphasizes their comparative lack of curiosity, the weakness and lethargy of their exploratory behaviors. As a paradigmatic instance, consider Ana Carolina de Campos et al.’s study of children with Down syndrome. Noting the slower exploratory patterns in children with Down syndrome, the authors suggest that this lagging curiosity compounds developmental delays.20 Were scholarship to depart from this tradition of presuming lethargy and lack, it would need to both recognize curiosity in disabled people and amplify disabled people’s own claims to curiosity. As an exemplary instance of recognition, Kristina Johnson offers a strengths-­ based framework for scientifically measuring curiosity in autistic and otherwise neurodiverse individuals, insisting that studies stop focusing on “typical development” and instead account for the variety of ways “all individuals” show curiosity.21 As a complementary instance of amplification, Barbara Noel Dowds and Cynthia Stellos Phelan, upon interviewing fifteen young adults with learning disabilities about conditions for academic success,22 note the students’ indication that curiosity is key. Whether taking a difficult chemistry class or building “this big incredible building” out of “little pieces of scraps of paper and cardboard,”23 students identify curiosity as crucial to their success.

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Clearly, the relationship between curiosity and disability deserves more attention and demands greater analytic precision. Within this conversation, disability studies is shortchanged when disabled bodyminds are primarily considered to be the objects of curiosity. Likewise, curiosity studies is shortchanged when curiosity is predominantly understood as an able-­bodied and sane-­minded gaze. In what follows, I turn to the disability community itself, focusing on disabled people as the subjects—­rather than merely the objects—­of curiosity. The politics of curiosity is a two-­way street. What happens when disabled people’s own curiosity takes center stage? What questions are asked, what methods of inquiry are employed, and what modalities of curiosity are discernable? What flourishes in the shadows of the spectacle-­erasure formation? In the first section, I set the stage by diving back into the annals of Western thought and highlighting the vastly underappreciated history of conceptualizing curiosity as a disability. I argue that disabled bodyminds become objects of curiosity, in a modern sense, through the normalizing of curiosity—­that is, through the purification of curiosity from all taint of deformation and difference. In the second section, I argue that recovering a sense of disabled people as subjects of curiosity must involve a reclamation of curiosity by and for the disability community that is simultaneously a cripping of curiosity itself. Here, I theorize several features of crip curiosity in conversation with Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson, Mia Mingus, and Jessa Sturgeon. Finally, in the third section, I take, as a case study, Eli Clare’s reclamation of the question as a cipher of curiosity. I mark that this reclamation is not without difference. Clare’s is not a claim to an ableist curiosity, but a claim to curiosity of another sort. After elucidating Clare’s own crip curiosity, I close with a consideration of curiosity’s role in feminist, queer, crip futures. The Ableist History of Modern Curiosity

The relationship between disability and curiosity is as complex as it is ancient. Long before disabled people took the stage at freak shows or attracted the attention of modern medicine—­that is, long before curiosity was inextricably linked to the able-­ bodied, sane-­ minded gaze—­curiosity was itself considered a disease that compromised mental health and physical function. And long before curiosity was pre-



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scribed as an antidote to modern anxiety, curiosity and anxiety were deeply enmeshed in ancient and medieval minds. Here, revisiting and expanding upon historical insights offered in chapter 1, I tell the story of the modernization of curiosity as the ableization of curiosity. Curiosity’s purification from all taint of disease and deformity—­traceable in microcosm in its steady disaggregation from anxiety—­suggests that a critical reclamation of curiosity by and for the disability community requires recognizing and amplifying curiosity in nonnormative bodyminds. It involves insisting that curiosity not be characterized as essentially rational and responsible, healthy and whole, sane and able, but rather as copacetic with worry and distraction, unsteadiness and unreliability, mental and physical “de-­formations”. A reclaimed curiosity must counter, must crip the ableist construction of modern curiosity; it must not only be consistent with but flourishing within the vast variability of human bodyminds themselves. Permit me here to revisit, string together, and deepen several moments from chapter 1 in which the political history of curiosity intersects with disability. In the ancient period, curiosity is repeatedly characterized as a mental affliction, a psychic disorder or a psychological disease. As noted in earlier chapters, the term curiosity stems from the Latin curiositas, which is a translation of two Greek terms: polypragmosunē and periergia, both of which refer to being distracted from one’s proper task and engaging in extraneous affairs.24 Plato and Plutarch provide representative accounts of the period. For Plato, curiosity is a disorder of the psyche that, left unchecked, produces social and ultimately political disorder. Etiologically, this disorder manifests itself as an imbalance in the three parts of the psyche: reason, spirit, and appetite. In The Republic, Plato defines injustice (adikia) as a civil war of the three principles, the “meddlesomeness [polypragmosunē], interference, and revolt one against the other,”25 which ultimately produces “the ruin of the state.”26 Centuries later, Plutarch maintains that curiosity is not merely a disorder but a disease of the mind. In his classic essay, “On Being a Busybody,” he writes, “Such a malady of the mind is curiosity [polypragmosunē], which is a desire to learn the troubles of others, a disease [nosos] which is thought to be free from neither envy nor malice.”27 The Greek term nosos here has a range of meanings, including sickness and disease, suffering and misery, madness, social disorder, and plagues.28 While Plutarch grants the socially

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disordering effects of curiosity, he focuses on the way it assaults the mind of its practitioner. When curiosity becomes habitual, he says, it metastasizes, “advancing,” “little by little,” until it consumes its host.29 As we saw, this ancient framework deepens in the medieval period, where curiosity is aligned with madness proper. Pliny states it is “madness [furor] to harass the mind with attempts to measure the world,” “it is madness [furor], perfect madness, to go out of this world and to search for what is beyond it.”30 The Latin verb furo means “to rage,” “to rave,” “to be out of one’s mind,” “to be mad.” It is thought to stem from Proto-­Indo-­European dewh, meaning “smoke,” “fumes,” and other “vapors.” Curiosity, which attempts to measure the world and search beyond it, is pure madness, replacing the solid work of reason with a gaseous enterprise. As if in step, Erasmus, more than a millennium later, would speak longingly of “the golden age” before this dangerous, debilitating curiosity: They had more reverence than to pry into the secrets of Nature with irreligious curiosity [curiositas]—­to measure the stars, their motions and effects, to seek the causes of mysterious phenomena—­ for they considered it unlawful for mortals to seek knowledge beyond the limits of their lot. As for what is beyond the range of the furthest stars, the madness [dementia] of exploring such things never even entered their minds.31

The Latin dementia stems from the prefix de-­, indicating “detraction,” and the noun mens, meaning “mind”; as such, the term refers to being out of one’s mind, mad, raving, or insane. To want to know the measure of the world and beyond it, the secrets of nature and the stars, is a transgression not only of law and lot but of nature, faith, and function. For the mind, curiosity here harbors something twisted, something terrible. Remember, however, that curiosity does not simply afflict the mind; it also afflicts the body. Whether in the ancient or medieval period, the twisting of the mind is irrevocably linked to the twisting of the body, just as much as the evagatio mentis is bound to the evagatio corporis. In The Lovers, Plato insists that philosophy has to be more than the curious or “meddlesome stooping [polypragmon kuptazonta] and prying” involved in the accumulation of knowledge.32 Saint Augustine similarly correlates curiosity with a body bent toward the earth. Hav-



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ing elsewhere characterized curiosity as a “disease [morbo]”33 and a “poison [venenum],”34 in On Genesis against the Manichees, Augustine locates curiosity in the serpent, who is not only condemned to “creep [repes]” on its chest and belly, having no means by which to stand upright,35 but who is also “blinded by dark curiosity [tenebrosa curiositate obscurati].”36 Like the serpent, he who yields to “curiosity” is condemned to eat the earth37; for the one “who eats the earth penetrates things deep and dark [profunda et tenebrosa], but nonetheless temporal and earthly.”38 As such, curiosity marks not only a mind bent toward earthly things, or a body tangled up in the temporal, it represents a “blinding” of the soul that ensures the veritable “deformity [deformitatem]” thereof.39 Throughout the medieval period, the mind and body infected with curiositas are then thought to produce physical wandering.40 Secular travelers and vagabonds were called curiosi. While people were drawn to secular travel for a variety of reasons, vagabondage itself was rarely voluntary, as mentally and physically disabled people knew all too well. If they were not imprisoned, most were “driven from cities into rural areas to fend for themselves,”41 where they were then criminalized by vagrancy laws.42 As such, disabled people not only represented a disproportionate number of the curiosi, but, in doing so, they embodied the “deforming” power of curiositas to remake minds, bodies, and the social landscape. Across the ancient and medieval periods, then, curiosity is primarily understood as an affliction of the mind and the body, a form of disease and deformity. Paradigmatic of this historical framework is, you may recall, Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, in which the insatiably curious protagonist Lucius is described as having a mind maddened by magic and a body distorted into an ass. As the story unfolds, his curiosity directly threatens not only his individual health but also that of the body politic. Given this long-­standing conceptualization of curiosity as an infection, an imbalance, an affliction, and a deformity of the mind, with direct effects on the body and its position in space as much as in society, it is a wonder that curiosity has come to mean anything else—­let alone something as simplistically positive, especially for able-­ bodied and sane-­minded people, as it does today. For such a change to occur, I argue, curiosity had to be purified of its unseemly elements. It had to be made innocent in order for John Locke to consider it “an appetite for knowledge” that “should be as carefully cherished

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in children as other appetites suppressed.”43 It had to be naturalized for Jean-­Jacques Rousseau to refer to curiosity as “a principle natural to the human heart.”44 It had to be made organic for John Dewey to muse, “The curious mind is constantly alert and exploring, seeking material for thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on the qui vive for nutriment.”45 The disease and vice of curiosity was made into a natural epistemic capacity and a virtue of citizens. In the very act of its modernization, curiosity was made able and sane. The arc of this purification process can be traced in microcosm in the case of anxiety, which displays in stark relief some of the basic mechanisms by which ancient and medieval conceptions of curiosity became decontaminated from the taints of disease and deformity. While anxiety and curiosity have, historically, been densely intertwined—­as already signaled in the Latin sense of cura as meticulous, painstaking, even obsessive care—­they have since become polarized. Writing in the second century BC, Titus Plautus, in Aulularia, jokes of a careworn lamb, who is a curio for wasting away with cura; so anxious “it’s pellucid,” he writes, “all skin and bones.”46 Seneca, in De Brevitate Vitae, describes, with some disdain, the anxious preparations for a dinner party, which requires diligence (diligens), nervousness (sollicitudo), and care (curiose).47 In the late second century AD, Apuleius again, in the Metamorphoses, characterizes the protagonist, Lucius, not only as curious but as “anxious [anxius],” “overeager [nimis cupidus],” and “on tenterhooks [suspensus]” to learn and “meticulously to ask about everything.”48 After his curiosity underwrites the farce of his conversion from man to ass, Lucius continues to refer to himself as “innately curious and thoroughly anxious [curiositate attonitus et satis anxius].”49 In fact, he has the sort of “anxious mind [anxium animum]” only a priest can alleviate.50 This alignment reoccurs in the medieval period when Aquinas characterizes curiosity as an “inordinate desire [inordinate appetere]” for knowledge and a “busy inquiry [diligens inquisitio]” into tales and intrigues.51 In the modern period, curiosity continues to be aligned with anxiety, but without any longer implying a commensurate lack of physical or spiritual health. For Thomas Hobbes, for example, the twin efforts of anxiety and curiosity are simply a mark of evolutionary superiority. While curiosity makes men trace effects back to their causes, “anxiety for the future time” makes them order the present in such a way as



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to secure the best possible effects.52 Together, curiosity and anxiety undergird the development of civilization, which itself entails both a Promethean obsession with fire and a gnawing at one’s liver.53 In turn, Edmund Burke identifies curiosity as the root of perhaps the highest act of civilization: aesthetic appreciation. Such curiosity, however, “has always an appearance of  .  .  . anxiety,” for it “changes its object perpetually,” having “an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied.”54 No real friend of the civilizing impulse, Sigmund Freud suggests not only that sexual curiosity and epistemic curiosity develop in tandem55 but that the latter is suffused with “the pleasure and anxiety [Angst] that belong to sexual processes proper.”56 And, as one might expect, Simone de Beauvoir grants Freud’s enmeshment of curiosity and anxiety,57 in both epistemic and sexual enterprises, but underscores a gendered disparity in their ratios. For women, “anxiety [angoisse]”58 is enhanced, while “curiosity [curiosité]” is suppressed, dampening her “freedom to understand, grasp, and discover the world around her.”59 Here, one finds the inklings of the modern construction of anxiety as a distinctly feminized mental disorder, alongside its slow separation from the masculinized impulse of curiosity.60 In psychology today, anxiety and curiosity are deeply at odds. After all, curiosity seems to require a kind of openness to experience that anxiety occludes. In his classic study Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (1960), Daniel Berlyne constructs anxiety as both necessary to and inconsistent with curiosity. He prefers to “interpret anxiety widely as arousal rather than as something invariably linked with psychosexual problems and physical dangers.”61 From this vantage point, anxiety—­as a function of arousal62 and a by-product of ambiguity and complexity63—­prompts curiosity. Curiosity is then activated to alleviate or neutralize anxiety, reducing arousal and dispelling ambiguity or complexity. By the 1970s, it was fairly well-­established, however, that there are two motivational systems: approach and avoidance, the curiosity drive and the anxiety drive.64 Ruth Peters, for example, demonstrates that a heightening of anxiety by perceived instructor threat lowers students’ curiosity.65 By the 1980s, researchers had developed a state-­trait model for anxiety, from which they derived an opposing state-­trait model of curiosity.66 In 1994, Charles D. Spielberger and Laura M. Starr published a hallmark study, arguing that optimal arousal requires a “near asymptotic level” of curiosity, paired with a

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low level of anxiety.67 More recently, Todd Kashdan insists that while anxiety and curiosity coexist, the two function separately. For him, “curiosity [is] an anxiety antidote”;68 where anxiety is intolerant of uncertainty, curiosity embraces it.69 This story of curiosity’s purification from anxiety mirrors the larger story of curiosity’s decontamination from disability more broadly. Where all but the most minimal level of anxiety is sidelined as pathological, curiosity emerges as a confident, well-­adjusted, risk-­taking interest in the world and an openness to new experiences. Where mental instability and all its effects on body and space have been sidelined, curiosity sallies forth as an eminently natural and organic impetus to explore. In other words, curiosity has been normalized and mainstreamed, it has been made able and sane. When disability becomes the object of modern curiosity, it is only after curiosity has been wrested from its originary status as illness, disease, injury, and uncontrolled movement. In this context, curiosity simply must be engaged critically. Any self-­consistent reclamation of curiosity by and for the disability community, in particular, must grapple with this history. It must reclaim curiosity, but with a difference. It must refuse the univocal conscription of curiosity into the service of ableism and instead reframe curiosity within the plurivocity of material stratums, the diversity, disease, and de-­formation—­the brilliant imperfection—­that so marks disability communities and life itself. This is the work of cripping curiosity. Cripping Curiosity

Decades of analysis in disability studies have established the compulsory nature of ability and sanity. As typically theorized, “compulsory able-­bodiedness”70 and “compulsory able-­mindedness”71 demarcate the force with which normative physical and mental function is paradigmatic of the human. Here, as well as throughout this chapter, I use the composite term bodymind to signal, following Margaret Price, “the imbrication (not just the combination)”72 of bodies and minds, physical states and mental states. Able-­bodymindedness, then, is compulsory if and when it is not only universalized and naturalized but simultaneously policed and enforced. It is enforced precisely because it is not natural or universal; diversity of form and function is a naturally occurring phenomenon. And yet it can be enforced only by pre-



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suming it is natural and universal, or that nature ought to be this way. Through the privileging of a specific type of body, or assemblage of capacities, possibilities for both abled and disabled people—­and their curiosities—­are constrained. The history of modern curiosity is precisely the story of the becoming-­compulsory of able-­bodyminded curiosity. It is also the story of the becoming-­spectacle and becoming-­ erased of the curiosity at work in disabled bodyminds. Today, compulsory able-­bodymindedness is not only the logic by which people with disabilities become the object of prurient, indifferent, or dominating stares but also the reason curiosity gets scientifically recognized primarily in raising a hand, voicing a question, maintaining eye contact, or manually manipulating something. The exuberance of bodily variation and the diversity of curious expressions are thereby obscured and curtailed. As developed within disability communities, and across disability activism and scholarship, cripping resists the compulsion of able-­ bodymindedness. It is an insistent refusal to comply. Working to unsettle compulsory able-­bodymindedness at every turn, crip work asserts, as Richard Godden and Jonathan Hsy succinctly put it, “the potential for radical transformation of so-­called normative social scripts, desires, and ways of life.”73 It celebrates the “unnatural” bodymind and disrupts the repeated enforcement of its normate counterpart. And it does so across multiple temporal vectors. Oriented toward the past, cripping disturbs the history of compulsory able-­bodymindedness in order to retrieve other modes of being.74 Equally oriented toward the present and the future, it “spins mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-­bodied assumptions and exclusionary affects,”75 and “twist[s] our expectations of [the known], defamiliarize[s] it, and render[s] it anew in ways that open up new kinds of possibility.”76 As such, the crip project asks: How and when have nonnormative bodies been thought otherwise? With whom and by what mechanisms is able-­bodymindedness always already being deconstructed? And what wisdom and creativity has already been generated in disability communities for another world? To crip curiosity is to trouble the normative scripts around curiosity in a variety of ways. Compulsory able-­bodymindedness both empowers the objectifying curiosity of able-­bodyminded people and disempowers the curiosity of disabled people. Under its regime, curiosity

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necessarily separates and segregates, spectacularizes and erases. To crip curiosity, then, is to assert the potential for nonnormative curiosity—­ that is, a curiosity not only housed within but fundamentally haunted by nonnormative bodyminds. It is to materialize a curiosity that deconstructs and connects, that remembers and builds relation. A crip curiosity may be a defiant curiosity pitched against ableism and ableist stares or an intimate curiosity within and between differently disabled embodiments. Compulsory able-­bodymindedness overdetermines not only who is counted as curious but also how they are curious. According to its logic, curiosity is not merely located in able-­bodyminds but is itself defined by able-­bodymindedness—­it is rational, it is healthy, it is self-­composed, it is individual and independent. To crip curiosity, then, means more than to disrupt the subject-­object divide, whereby disabled people are properly objects, not subjects, of curiosity. It also means to redefine curiosity outside of an Enlightenment framework, resituating it instead within the vibrant spectrum of gross and fine motor skills, verbal and nonverbal communication, and emotional intelligence. Crossing the gamut of neuroatypicality and impairment, cripping curiosity means rediscovering curiosity in moments of anxiety and trauma, in assistive devices and autistic affinities. And it means centering crip curiosity in the projects of cripistemology and crip politics. Cripping curiosity is a massive, multidimensional project. It begins, first, by interrogating where and when the ableist construction of curiosity is reinforced, whether in the disability community or among able-­ bodyminded people. How do social structures and discourses replicate and reinscribe a sanitized curiosity? Where are disabled people exceptionally represented as subjects of curiosity—­in what fields, on what topics, in what settings, and with which disabilities—­and how is the process of sanitation evident even here? Second, cripping curiosity involves investigating how the reign of ableist curiosity—­or the process of sanitizing curiosity in the modern period—­has ultimately failed. To riff on Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, the closeting of crip curiosity can never be complete.77 What forms of curiosity, then, are dismissed as “distracted,” “idle,” or “self-­interested” or delegitimized as “crazy” or “weird”? What forms of curiosity are presumed to be “unhealthy” and sometimes punished? And how should breezy associations of curiosity with ADHD be critically consumed?78 Third



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and finally, cripping curiosity involves reimagining a curiosity whose strength and power lies not in its sanitation but in its multiplicity. While we have yet to fully appreciate the radicality of this project, the work of cripping curiosity is already underway. Through disability studies’ historical emphasis on physical disabilities and visible impairments, the critique of objectifying curiosity is widely known. Less theoretical attention, however, has been paid to how (and how beautifully) impaired or disabled bodies manifest curiosity differently. One might think here of the constant experimentation and innovation required of the raw act of navigating an ableist world. Or one might think of Danielle Peers’s choreographical work,79 which showcases crip dance as a medium of curious exploration and critique, embedding the question in the body itself. With the development of mad studies, moreover, an even more nuanced disability critique of curiosity is possible, one that foregrounds not only how curious minds are constrained by ableism but also how neuroatypical or otherwise nonnormative minds manifest curiosity in a plethora of vibrant ways. Lydia X.  Z. Brown’s collaborative anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism is exemplary in this regard, depicting the many ways a question can sit, slide, tumble, or flap in the mind rather than march meticulously toward the tongue. Before turning to the case study of Eli Clare’s curiosity, I pause here to sketch Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson’s, Mia Mingus’s, and Jessa Sturgeon’s implicit contributions to the project of cripping curiosity. I do so both to spotlight what has been done and to crystallize where we might go. In her landmark study Staring, Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson interrogates the ethics of the curious gaze. After canvassing classic accounts of curiosity as the fundamental impetus in the search for knowledge, Garland-­Thomson illuminates its dangers of presumptive overreach.80 Staring, which she characterizes as “curiosity’s vehicle,”81 has an equal potential, she argues, to be objectifying (or invasive) and transformative (or instructive). In its objectifying mode, which supervenes on an ableist attitude, staring is a gawking fueled by stereotypes; it demonstrates an unwillingness to really engage with what is seen. But staring also has a “generative potential.”82 In its transformative mode, which disrupts an ableist attitude, staring is a beholding fueled by openness; it manifests a commitment to change and be changed by the encounter. Beholding, for Garland-­Thomson, involves both a “holding [of] the

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being of another” in recognition and a “beholdenness” to that being, equal parts “generosity” toward another and welcoming a “besiegement” of oneself.83 Insofar as it resists and transforms gawking—­that hallmark of ableist curiosity—­beholding, I would argue, is a form of crip curiosity. As harnessed and demanded by disabled people, beholding reshapes the very structure of curiosity, insistently embedding it between two or more radically vulnerable, differently embodied, and differently minded people. And in doing so it invites participants to learn important lessons about beauty and pleasure, solidarity and interdependence. If Garland-­Thomson focuses on the ocular vector of curiosity, Mia Mingus elucidates its unseen dimensions. Reflecting on her own experiences as a “queer physically disabled woman of color adoptee,”84 Mingus distinguishes between forced intimacy and access intimacy. Forced intimacy, she writes, is an everyday feature of her life. It raises its head every time she is required to divulge personal information or receive physical touch from a stranger in the process of getting “basic access.”85 Besides the invasive questions and invasive touch, “I am always expected to open myself up,” she testifies, “for others’ benefit, education, curiosity, or benevolent oppression.”86 Access intimacy, by contrast, is rare but precious. It occurs when someone “gets it.” Access intimacy thrives on a shared, deeply felt, and deeply lived reckoning with an inaccessible world. You do not have to justify or explain anything.87 And yet, access intimacy is also curious. While in some cases someone will already know Mingus’s access needs and know how to advocate for or meet them, in many cases there is a mutual listening, a mutual strategizing, a mutual imagining. What are your/my/our needs and how might they be met? It is in this sense, I argue, that access intimacy crips curiosity.88 It turns a system of invasive questions and invasive touch into a relationship of caring curiosity and hope. It embeds the query in an exploratory attunement to one another in an inaccessible world. For this reason, access intimacy is a “lighthouse.”89 While Garland-­Thomson’s and Mingus’s analyses foreground experiences of physical disability, Jessa Sturgeon’s reflections on her experience as an autistic college student carve out a space for neuroatypical curiosity. In her contribution to All the Weight of Our Dreams, Sturgeon, a mixed-­race Korean American, contrasts mainstream academic curiosity with her own autistic curiosity. In the white, settler-­



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colonial, and therefore ableist university, curiosity is expected to be thesis-­and argument-­driven. Paradigmatic of this investigation is Descartes’s Meditations, in which he famously asserts, “I think, therefore I am.” For herself, Sturgeon prefers to ask: “Do I think?” and “Am I?”90 Her curiosity works by concept shuffling and question following. “I understand questions,” she writes, “more than statements usually.”91 Thinking in more exploratory patterns, Sturgeon rearranges words and word groups over and over again to identify the gaps in sentences and conceptual arguments. Pausing for a moment, she asks the profound question, “What’s the difference between rearranging words and novel thought? Is there even one?”92 Whatever the answer, I would argue that Sturgeon’s testament to her own atypical attunement to questions and her own atypical method of attending to questions crips curiosity. It insists upon a neurodiverse curiosity that typically goes unrecognized, unappreciated, and unencouraged in educational settings. And it highlights the centrality of people on the spectrum—­ and their atypical affinities—­to the crip curiosity project.93 The project of cripping curiosity is full of possibilities. While it necessarily involves reimagining curiosity and disability out from under the spectacle-­erasure formations that have overdetermined each of them separately and in conjunction with one another, it might also grow in unexpected ways. It might, for example, involve investigating how the differential distributions of debility and capacity across populations affects both what gets recognized as curiosity and who gets recognized as curious.94 Or how the imbrication of inanimacy and incuriosity in the Western imaginary restricts who can be seen as animated (or even inanimated) by curiosity and how.95 Whatever its futures, crip curiosity has a rich legacy of practitioners, whether intentional or inadvertent. As disabled people in an ableist world, and, more fundamentally, as those whose very existence insists upon the multiplicity of human experience, people with disabilities are actively recrafting the very meaning and morphology of curiosity in real time and space. One consummate practitioner among them is Eli Clare. Clare’s Questions: Sutures and Pry Bars

If there are trickles of crip curiosity theorizing across disability studies, Eli Clare offers a river. In Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection,

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he conducts an exemplary, if unintended, reclamation of curiosity by and for the disability community.96 Diagnosed with cerebral palsy and gender dysphoria, and identifying as white, queer, crip, and transgender, Clare offers a stinging critique of the violent curiosity so often directed at disabled people quite broadly and at himself specifically. The subtlety and acumen of this critique is matched only by his own powerful, if often indirect, claims to curiosity as a disabled person. Laying explicit and implicit claim to his own curiosity, Clare provides a model for thinking curiosity otherwise, out from under the shadows. In what follows, I canvas Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection first to identify his direct critiques and endorsements of the word curiosity and then to explore his use of questions. I take the interrogative sentence to be the most recognizable and definable indicator of curiosity within his written texts beyond the word curiosity itself.97 My aim is to trace the shape of Clare’s curiosity. What are the questions he asks, the methods and modes of his inquiry, the timbre of his investigations? From these I sketch the outlines of his own crip curiosity. Clare is quick to establish disabled bodyminds as, first, the objects of an ableist curiosity. “We’re treated as curious, exotic, unbelievable, deceptive, sick, threatening,”98 he writes. Such “prurient curiosity” is interwoven with “violence”99 and replaces “courtesy, respect, [and] connection.”100 As such, prurient curiosity ruptures disabled people’s experiences of social belonging, personhood, and affective ties. For Clare, such ruptures are both historically and personally palpable. Freak shows displayed disabled people (among others) as “extraordinary creatures, not entirely human,”101 as “curious, odd, surprising, horrifying, wondrous,”102 and, again, as “savage, curious.”103 Ota Benga, for instance, a short-­statured Mbuti man displayed in zoos in the early twentieth century, became “nothing but a curiosity, a specimen, a monkey”104—­excised from society, reduced to an object. Clare himself also deals with the violence of “random curiosity.”105 He is the object of “curious, puzzled, anxious” stares106 and of intrusive questions: “Are you a boy or a girl?”107 “What’s your defect?”108 The questions are “endless” and the curiosity “exhausting.”109 There are days, he says, when it is all “just too much.”110 Once, while pedaling up Mount Adams, Clare’s partner was mercilessly peppered with questions about him. Clare comes undone, asking his partner, “Do I bring you anything but grief?” and sobbing, “What is wrong with me?



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Wrong with me. Wrong.”111 In this moment, curiosity ruptures Clare’s most intimate of ties and his very grasp of words unravels. Although most of the passages in which Clare uses the term curiosity critique its violence—­i.e., its rupture of social belonging, personhood, and affective ties—­there are a few exceptions. In several grand gestures, for example, he frames his life and his books with the word curiosity. Beginning with his youth, he recalls being “curious” about Betsy Hammond, a new cartoon portrait artist in town, who took him, quite straightforwardly, to be a boy.112 Was this who he really was? Or who he would become? Later, envisioning his future, Clare expresses a will to embrace it “knowing that the muscled grip of desire is a wild, half-­grown horse, ready to bolt but too curious to stay away.”113 As it turns out, the cartoon figuration of himself as a boy did prefigure his own desire for gender transition later in life, the one curiosity growing into another. Moreover, this general curiosity that Clare takes in daily interactions and as yet unimagined futures also propels his writing. In his preface to Exile and Pride, he traces the project back to the writings of Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill, which prompted his “initial questioning and curiosity about bodily difference as political.”114 Almost a decade later, toward the end of Brilliant Imperfection, he returns to his overarching critique of the language of “cure” and writes: “But I’m curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?”115 One might say that Clare’s own curious investigations have consistently centered on exploring the politics of bodily difference as brokenness. Despite his critique of prurient curiosity, then, there is another sort to which he attributes the vicissitudes of his life and work, one that affirms his sense of self and belonging. While Clare’s use of the term curiosity provides a clear critique of curiosity as a violent investigative attention, it provides barely a sketch of his own curiosity, as a different sort of investigative attentiveness that honors the complexities of gendered experience, future becomings, bodily difference, and brokenness. Luckily, Clare’s use of interrogative sentences fleshes out the latter account. Throughout Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection, one finds a surprisingly high number of questions, averaging about one per page.116 Although these questions work in many ways, here I distill four primary functions:117 to reverse the gaze, to build community, to highlight complexity, and to explore the unknown. Clare’s interrogative sentences, then, directly

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combat prurient curiosity—­with its spectacular erasures—­by asserting the personhood and sociality of people with disabilities, while also undermining ableist frameworks and reconstructing the world anew. While serving these distinct functions (among others), Clare’s questions arguably work, in his own words, as a “pry bar.”118 At one moment, they tease open, by weakening the sutures; at another, they rip apart, so as to globally deconstruct. Knowing their power, Clare is generous with them, turning his questions—­his curiosity—­on his readers and on himself, on queer, crip, and environmental communities, and on the past, the present, and the future. First, Clare challenges his readers by turning their questions around, reflecting their curiosity back at them. Reversing an intrusive gaze is a classic resistance tactic often used by marginalized people to reclaim their sense of dignity. While this may involve staring back,119 it may also involve asking back. Exploring the production of violent curiosity in freak shows, Clare reflects on Hiram and Barney Davis, short-­ statured brothers who performed in Barnum’s exhibitions. “Hiram,” Clare asks, “did you ever stop mid-­performance, stop up there on your dime museum platform and stare back, turning your mild and direct gaze back on the rubes, gawking at the gawkers, entertained by your own audience?”120 Clare is curious to know whether Hiram and Barney, two of Barnum’s best “curiosities,” redirected that curiosity back at the audience. For his own part, Clare certainly does. When people ask him, “What’s wrong with you?” “What happened to you?” and “What’s your defect?” he usually answers, “Cerebral palsy.” “Curiosity satiated,” he says, “they move on.”121 But he considers handling it differently. He would first elaborate that, in 1966, professionals said “mental retardation,” while in 1976, they said “cerebral palsy,” and then ask, “What more do you know about me now that you have two diagnoses?”122 This question about the efficacy of diagnosis, cross-­ correlated with the effect of normalized curiosity, is one that Clare returns to throughout his work. “Diagnosis is useful, but for whom and to what ends?”123 he asks; “which realities are defined as trouble by whom and for whose benefit?”124 By turning the inquirers—­whether laypeople or medical experts—­into the subject of inquiry, putting them in question, Clare employs the tried and true method of reversing the directionality of curiosity as one tactic for the resistant reclamation of personhood.



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Second, Clare builds community with other disabled people, especially those who have passed on, by asking questions of them. Through this curiosity, Clare asks after their perspective, granting their inner world and capacity for self-­determination, while also highlighting the lack of historical curiosity expended to preserve these folks as more than objects of pity or prompts to surprise. “What did the people who worked as freaks think of their jobs, their lives?”125 He asks Ann Thompson, born without arms, how she learned to knit.126 He asks Charles Stratton, who toured as “Tom Thumb,” if his stunts embarrassed or outraged him.127 He asks William Johnson, exhibited as the “What-­Is-­It,” if he laughed breathless backstage.128 He asks the “Ubangi Savages” if they hated their manager.129 He asks Ota Benga and Dohong if they shared the affinity foisted upon them.130 He asks Christopher Reeves whether pity ever exhausted him.131 He asks Molly Daly, consigned to Oregon Fairview Home in 1957 when she was just three years old, “Where did you stash your sorrow and rage? What small pleasures did you steal?”132 He asks Carrie Buck, who underwent forced sterilization for being “feeble-­minded,” “did your bruises ever heal” from the “unyielding torrent” of “history slammed into your body-­mind”?133 While Clare sometimes asks indirect questions about the inner worlds of disabled people,134 for the most part he uses direct questions, speaking to them as if they were in the room, calling them into conversation. He does this, repeatedly, as if to build the affective connection that prurient curiosity breaks, to offer a recognition of their personhood and to restore a sense of social belonging. Third, beyond asserting personhood and building community, Clare uses questions to unravel the ableist frameworks that deny the personhood and sociality of disabled people in the first place. He does so by highlighting the suppressed complexity of his subject matter, whether political accountability, personal experience, or language. While his penchant for complexity leads him to “messier” things and “messier” stories,135 the answers he seeks are both “simpler” than the ableist contortions that excise disability from the picture and “not as simple” as the dominant schemas those contortions underwrite.136 Consider, for example, the resistant reclamation of words hurled as insults. Clare reflects on his own embrace of queer but not pervert, crip but not freak, and weighs the implications of disability137 and fixed.138 Curious about his own justifications, he asks, “What bitterness, what

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pain, does [freak] hold that cripple, with its connotations of pitiful, broken bodies, and queer, with its sweeping definitions of normality and abnormality, do not?”139 Clare also grapples with the complexity of his own personal experience. Having survived physical and sexual abuse, and continuing to survive in a transphobic, ableist world, Clare repeatedly asks how to represent himself as a survivor, without being reduced to a victim. “How do I write not about the stones, but the heat itself?”140 he asks, about the heat suffusing a body whose porosity is precisely the precondition of both violence and coalition.141 In still another way, Clare uses questions to stage the complexity of political accountability. He accentuates the intertwining categories of the natural and the abnormal in disabled bodies and modern cityscapes,142 in medicalized bodies and restored prairies.143 He asks, “What becomes natural and normal?”144—­as if to say, they have not always been so and environmental and disability justice will indeed require things to be otherwise. Fourth, once personhood and sociality are reclaimed and oppressive frameworks are pried apart, there is room for radical political imagination. There is room to ask the sort of questions that have been prohibited, that seem impossible, that are unimaginable. Ultimately, Clare utilizes interrogative sentences in precisely this manner. Early in Exile and Pride, he finds himself asking forbidden questions. When it comes to the environment, most people are taught not to wonder in certain directions; they are “taught not to question.”145 “Do we know the true cost of a sheet of paper?” “How many of us know where [our lumber] came from?”146 Clare stubbornly turns his questions against that ideological grain. He also asks impossible questions, prompted by a set of conditions that resist illumination. He signals these afterward by saying, “I have no idea,”147 “I can’t separate the two,”148 or “I ask because I don’t understand,”149 “I ask because I don’t know the answers,”150 “I ask knowing that neither you nor history will answer my questions,”151 “I ask this question rather than answer it, because any list [of answers] I create will be incomplete.”152 Finally, Clare asks imaginative questions, using them to envision possibilities well beyond his reality. He asks questions, the answers to which he still has no inkling. Once fatphobia, ableism, sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and all the rigid constraints placed on



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bodymind variation are dismantled, what will we desire? This question overwhelms me. It requires an impossible flight of imagination.153

Whether forbidden, impossible, or imaginative, Clare’s questions in this genre function to dismantle the boundaries of thought and creativity, prying open what is in favor of what might be. Eli Clare’s work provides one model of reclaiming curiosity by and for the disability community, rupturing the tradition of conceptualizing disabled people as merely the objects of curiosity, by turns spectacularized and erased. The four functions of his interrogative statements, alongside his explicit endorsements of “curiosity,” work together to refashion curiosity—­ generating a new curiosity formation—­ from within a disability critique. The first act of resistance to a curious, objectifying gaze is to reverse that gaze, to put into question the able-­ bodied gawkers. The second act is to reclaim the curiosity directed at people with disabilities, replacing prurient curiosity with a respectful, courteous, and connected curiosity that invites, rather than suppresses, the affective and social depths of disability narratives. Once a defiant curiosity is turned against inquirers and a loving curiosity is turned toward other disabled people, the third act is to unpack the complexity of a world overdetermined by ableist schemas and in which disabled people are often complicit. The fourth and final act is to press beyond the given explanatory frameworks determining curiosity today. It involves asking the forbidden, the impossible, the utterly imaginative questions. Although an undeniable critic of prurient curiosity, Clare is also clearly a proponent of curiosity of another sort, one that might arguably be called crip curiosity. Feminist, Queer, Crip Futures

In the project of holding an ableist history of curiosity accountable and acknowledging the present practice of curiosity practiced within disability communities, crip curiosity is necessary. But crip curiosity is also necessary to crip futures. As Alison Kafer argues so powerfully in Feminist, Queer, Crip, people with disabilities are doubly denied their own futures, first by being assigned a “grim future” in advance and, second, by being told that future is really “no future” at all.154 Crip

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futures, then, are shut down or foreclosed, painted as bare, isolated, and full of pain, and as hardly worth welcoming. One ought only to practice acceptance and resignation. Curiosity about what those futures could look like, and the opportunities they might hold, is all but forbidden. Kafer recalls her doctor responding to her plans for graduate school by insisting that she stay home for a few years and heal. Hers was to be a life of care workers, rehabilitation, and psychotherapy, not of intellectual inquiry or scholarly creativity. But Kafer had other futures and yet similar denials were in store. Once I made it to graduate school, I had a professor reject a paper proposal about cultural approaches to disability; she cast the topic as inappropriate because insufficiently academic. As I prepared to leave her office, she patted me on the arm and urged me to “heal,” suggesting that my desire to study disability resulted not from intellectual curiosity but from a displaced need for therapy and recovery.155

Both Kafer’s doctor and her professor misrecognize her curiosity—­ about disability and about her future with disability—­as an act of desperate denial, a refusal of the future they have assigned her. Kafer herself, however, ultimately insists upon her own curiosity and her own future as a disability theorist. Curiosity is not only central to Kafer’s own future, however; it is also central to the future of disability studies. Kafer deconstructs the medical and social models of disability in favor of a political one, arguing that disability is neither a physical pathology nor an effect of social structures, but a product of histories, discourses, and material practices. As such, it is susceptible to constant renegotiation, resistance, and radical transformation. That is, disability is not just there, as a trait or an attribute, but is lived and, as such, it is made and remade. “To say that something is ‘political,’” she writes, “means that it is implicated in relations of power and that those relations, their assumptions, and their effects are contested and contestable, open to dissent and debate.”156 This contestability applies not only to the category of disability but also to feminist, queer, crip futures themselves. Here, “questions take center stage.”157 What are our imaginings and our political visions, our “questions” and our “dreams?”158 And how can these be kept open, be pushed elsewhere and elsewhen? “Ques-



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tions keep me focused,” she attests, “on the inconclusiveness of my conclusion, on the desire to think otherwise.”159 Her commitment to the political, then, is a commitment to the question, to the unquestioned, and to the unanswerable questions. It is a commitment to pry things open and perpetually revisit them. And to suture together what ableist curiosity has held apart, in stubborn isolation. It is a commitment, one might say, to crip curiosity. Reimagining the future, however, cannot be undertaken without a contiguous reimagination of the past and the present. Indeed, if disability is political—­that is, if disability is the product of force relations, as Kafer suggests, in a Foucauldian sense—­then the work of disability liberation involves disrupting the present arrangement of power relations that constructs disabled people as “unfortunate, broken, and burdensome,”160 the focus of spectacularized pity, on the one hand, and the locus of erased voices and experiences, on the other. It also involves disrupting the history of that arrangement of power relations, denaturalizing the construction of people with disabilities as objects rather than subjects, and tracking the vibrant ways in which disabled people practice curiosity. And it involves disrupting the future of that arrangement of power relations, reimagining what is expected and what is possible, thereby eliciting new possibilities. This work of disruption and denaturalization is the work of crip curiosity. In this chapter, I undertook a genealogical denaturalization of the historical formations that produced modern curiosity as sane and able; I then harnessed the work of imagination to pose the project of crip curiosity, before turning to several rich testaments to crip curiosity produced within disability communities. In doing so, I aimed to contribute to a political analysis of curiosity in relation to disability. Such an analysis extends far beyond a critique of ableist objectification practices, whether solidified into the spectacle-­erasure formation or not. It requires an attentive investigation into the policing of curiosity through the policing of disability and vice versa. It requires acknowledging, supporting, and celebrating the many varieties of curiosity coming from disabled bodyminds and nurtured within disability communities. And it requires interrogating the ableism that structures discussions of curiosity today and reimagining the possibilities for a world yet to come.

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Trans Curiosity BEYOND THE CURIO

Ryka Aoki, in Seasonal Velocities, writes, “To be transgender means never quite knowing which reaction you’re going to get, where, or from whom. You can be a sister one moment, then have a security guard stop you in the bathroom the next. In one store, the salesperson will smile and say welcome. In another, you’ll get ugly stares and giggles.”1 It would be one thing if it were everyone, every time. But it is anyone, any time. The monadic lottery of it all is almost cruel. And when you are stopped or stared at, it is with some version of the question, What are you? Never who. Later in the book, Aoki continues: “I don’t want to have to worry about the closet, or being erased, or never accepted. I really would rather wonder which friends will I grow old with, comfortable with? Who will I watch old TV shows with? Who will be with me at 2031 Pride? Who will bring the dog? Who has the program, and hey, did anyone remember a pen?”2 Here, Aoki deftly shifts from being a what to being a who, from shadow to substance. She wants the freedom to wonder, to ask, and to be curious, rather than to be marked as the object of another person’s curiosity, stared at and erased. Instead of wondering, as any trans person must, when the next inquisition or the next rejection will strike, she wants to wonder about the people and the dogs, the Prides and the programs that will lend shape to her life. Wondering about the mundanities of a stylus is the privilege of a who, a who in this case with a special affinity for pens. What Aoki captures so well on an individual level, transgender studies analyzes on a structural level. In framing trans studies, scholars

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often combat reductive cultural representations of transgender people with rich, complicated depictions and histories that are true to trans realities. Against, as Sandy Stone puts it, the “relentless totalization” of trans experience, which reduces trans people to “homogenized, totalized objects,”3 trans studies scholars aim to explore the divergent experiences of trans subjectivities in community. Scholars undertake this work along a number of vectors. Where contemporary cultural productions repeatedly represent trans people as singular, voiceless, nonagential individuals, who appear on the scene as ever new and strange, simultaneously spectacularized and erased, trans studies scholars underscore the multiplicity of trans experience, the voices and activism of trans people, and the long history and divergent geographies of trans communities. That is, they insistently demonstrate that trans people are not objects but subjects, not whats but whos. Sandy Stone, after insisting that trans people have typically had “no voice”4 in discussions about them, calls for trans people “to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse.”5 As if in answer, Susan Stryker wrote Transgender History, which counters the “exploitative or sensationalistic mass media representations”6 of transgender experience with a “collective political history of transgender social change activism in the United States.”7 Against the reduction of trans experience to a single empty signifier, therefore, trans studies undertakes a historico-­ geographical, as much as phenomenological, counteroffensive. Whether in journalism, medicine, education,8 law,9 or television,10 trans writers and trans studies scholars consistently develop this critique of the representational totalization of trans people, whereby they are (and have been) made whats, not whos; objects, not subjects; voiceless, not vocal; passive, not active; dehistoricized, not historical; shallow, not substantial; and single, not multiple. They have been made something and nothing at once. In what follows, I aim to supplement this critique by attending to the role of curiosity both as a technique of (trans) objectification and as a practice of (trans) freedom, on both the individual and the social levels. That is, I trace how curiosity—­through the monadic and collective acts of gazing, inquiring, investigating, and imagining—­functions as part of the project of the representational totalization of trans people but also as part of trans people’s own praxis of resistant detotalization. Through these analyses, I argue that curiosity is more than an in-



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dividual, innate capacity; it is also a series of social practices that must be ethically and politically evaluated as such. My goal, throughout this inquiry, is not only to contribute an account of trans curiosity to the nascent political philosophy of curiosity but also to advance independent conversations in both curiosity studies and trans studies. Within curiosity studies, there is an account of bi-­gendered curiosities (e.g., masculine and feminine); here, I extend that account to trans-­gender curiosity. Also within curiosity studies, there is an account of curiosity as oppressive and liberating, as objectifying and humanizing;11 here, I extend that account to trans objectification and trans liberation. Trans studies, in turn, has long diagnosed an objectifying curiosity; here, I insist upon the rarely remarked or theorized fact that curiosity is practiced within trans communities—­in rich, multivariant, and perhaps unexpected ways—­in the shadows of spectacular erasure. In order to highlight these broader contributions, I bookend my account of trans curiosity with an exploration of how trans-­gender curiosity has and might change the conceptual landscape of curiosity studies and the purview of transgender studies. Gender and Curiosity Studies

Despite the current firewall between transgender studies and curiosity studies, gender is never more than a stone’s throw—­or an echo—­ away from curiosity. “Gender borders,” as Barbara Benedict puts it, “many of the central issues surrounding curiosity.”12 Whether analyzing ancient and medieval myths, fables, and theological treatises, or the rise of early modern science and journalism, or the structure of the modern novel, curiosity scholars repeatedly bump up against the gendered structures of inquiry and the gendered structuration of inquisitiveness. Within the history of Western intellectual culture, gender and curiosity are repeatedly used to constrain—­and police—­one another. Of course, attention to gender in curiosity studies has been, unsurprisingly, restricted to that Western intellectual history and its simplistic cisgender binary between “men” and “women,” “masculine” curiosity and “feminine” curiosity. Little to no attempt has been made to track transgender people across the gendered history of curiosity, to expand that curiosity beyond (white) Western theory, or to theorize what transgender studies might contribute to nascent articulations of

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feminist curiosity. Here, before offering my account of trans curiosity, I sketch out curiosity studies’ engagement with gender to date and indicate the necessity of extending that engagement to transgender people and trans studies. Although curiosity has not necessarily, or consistently, been the privileged purview of either sex, women have traditionally figured a special sort of curiosity across ancient and medieval Western literatures. As a counterpart to Prometheus’s focused ambition for fire and its concomitant innovations, Pandora embodies a vain, indiscriminate, and ultimately disastrous interest in secrets. It is her curiosity that releases all the evils of the world and yet forecloses hope. As a foil to Cupid’s obedience and ardor, Psyche must needs know what is hidden from her: Cupid’s glory and Venus’s box. For this knowledge, she condemns herself to endless wanderings, trials, and ultimately a stygian sleep. And, in contrast to Adam’s responsible cataloging and caring for all God’s creatures, Eve demonstrates a selfish, irreverent need to know a subset of knowledge that God has forbidden: the knowledge of good and evil. It is her curiosity that condemns all of humankind—­ and nature itself—­to a world of sin. Certainly a damning optical curiosity has been attributed to Orpheus and Oedipus, as much as to Lamia and Lot’s wife, but the curiosity attributed to Pandora, Psyche, Eve, and Dinah, for that matter, is traceable to their inherent weakness as women and their commensurate capacity to weaken men.13 Their curiosity signals their gender, as well as the way in which their sexuality tethers them to the earth, to matters of ill repute and unreason, and to suffering. The majority of scholarship in curiosity studies concerned with issues of gender focuses on Western Europe in the early modern period, spanning roughly from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.14 In this era and locale, curiosity was primarily understood as part of a narrative arc, or a system of cause and effect, “always coming from somewhere and going somewhere else.”15 It is the insistence of early modern scientists and philosophers on curiosity’s value for individual and social progress, in fact, that enables it to rise from the ashes of its degradation in the ancient and medieval periods. In this era of its recuperation, however, curiosity is also split down the middle, with its worst (often traditional) qualities attributed to women and its best (often newly contemporary) to men. As Neil Kenny says of the time,



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“Curiosity was rarely—­if ever—­neutral in terms of sex and gender. It was almost always—­perhaps always—­tacitly or explicitly described as male or female, as masculine or feminine.”16 Modern curiosity is forged in the fires of gender. While a certain rational, empirical, and scientific—­eminently productive—­curiosity becomes the virtue of men, a sensual, gossipy, and illicit—­essentially unproductive—­curiosity becomes the “fault of the fair sex.”17 Moreover, because gender is inextricable from other axes of social identity, curiosity is dismissed as feminine when it is practiced by the inferior and the ignoble,18 the sick and contagious,19 or by effeminate men.20 It is even dismissed as feminine when it is practiced badly by healthy, well-­to-­do men. Women’s curiosity and feminine curiosity are to be eschewed with a vengeance! The strategies by which this stratification is achieved in early modern Europe are instructive. Just as empirical inquiry and experimentation are institutionalized, Barbara Benedict notes, “illicit inquiry and collection” are relegated to the realm of women.21 It is women who while away their time consuming curios or beguiling themselves and others with “subversive publications, collections of scandal tales, and secret histories.”22 Women’s curiosity and feminine curiosity, thus, come to play a crucial role in the controversial rise of modern journalism and the novel. Because women were thought to be essentially incapable of masculine curiosity, a woman with moral qualms would need “to aspire to the feminine virtue of ‘discretion’, which involved renouncing curiosity,”23 alongside art and artifice, gossip and wild imagination, willfulness and incorrigibility, disobedience and weak reason, and, of course, the love of reading. A man with moral qualms, likewise, would need to renounce feminine curiosity (and women’s knowledge altogether), while remaining free to direct his curiosity toward women as objects.24 Although this schema functions, in many ways, to trivialize women (and, indeed, as Neil Kenny states, to “humble” women25) and to dismiss unorthodox inquiries, it also allocates to women the powers of subversion, destruction, and transgression. The “prominence of feminized inquiry” at the time “reflects the new prominence of women and their threat to established social conventions and hierarchies.”26 What is unregulated can throw traditional schematics of regulation themselves into question. Alongside punishment, then, the curious woman also brings promise. In a sense, this recognition of the power implicit in early modern

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European women’s prying and exploration preconditions an account of (white) Western feminist curiosity. It is the opening suspicion of such an account that wherever women appear to be the greatest dupes of a patriarchal system, spinning their webs of ostensibly superficial curiosity, it is precisely there that women are, in fact, relying on their curiosity to radically reconfigure the terrain. Laura Mulvey rereads the myth of Pandora from this perspective. Reinterpreting the jar or the box to symbolize womanhood itself—­as culturally defined by interiority and mystery—­Mulvey argues that in turning her curiosity toward it, Pandora turns her curiosity on herself, on the mystery of her condition as woman. Transgressing the patriarchal insistence on silence and the status quo, Pandora exercises a “transgressive” curiosity upon “the enigma of femininity itself.”27 A similarly feminist curiosity is central to the realist novel. In Hilary M. Schor’s masterful study, Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism, she argues that, far from resolving the mundanities of life into marriage, the realist novel “brought the modern [white European] feminist subject into being.”28 By staging a narrative in which the curious heroine “escapes” the curio cabinet in order to live a life of choice “in a world that is structured to allow them one and only one choice: that of a husband,”29 the modern realist novel crafts a woman who takes questions to be her own, whether questions of law or contract, romance or happiness, testimony or statistics. She marries, yes, but more fundamentally, she ventures. She queries. She tries and tests. She weighs and wagers. It is Simone de Beauvoir who places a reclamation of women’s curiosity—­and a recommendation of feminine curiosity—­at the heart of the (white) Western feminist project. For Beauvoir, curiosity is an eminently human capacity to passionately catapult oneself into an investigative project. Presuming oneself a subject, one dares to adventure and to explore. Within a patriarchal society, however, a woman’s “freedom to understand, grasp, and discover the world around her”30 is consistently discouraged throughout her youth. She is taught to be an object for others, rather than a subject for herself.31 A man’s curiosity, however, is trained and accentuated from youth. He is incited to seek but also to master, to discover as much as to dominate.32 In the mismanaged moment of impending maturation, a woman develops, in place of curiosity, a certain “receptivity” and “openness,”33 whereby “the least vibration of the air and every fleeting autumnal tint” moves



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her deeply.34 Feminist curiosity begins with a woman turning that attentiveness toward herself and taking herself as her own adventure project. Beauvoir is paradigmatic in this regard. She finds herself generating a “certain curiosity vis-­à-­vis myself,”35 by which she is “curious to see how I build,” how “I will take myself as an end,”36 and how the world might change as a result. Cynthia Enloe, in The Curious Feminist, extends Beauvoir’s legacy by defining feminist curiosity as “taking women’s lives seriously”37—­alongside everything that is or has been “infantilized, ignored, trivialized.”38 This is a “seriousness” that involves listening, attending, digging deep, and preparing to be surprised. Here, feminist curiosity turns the early modern European concern with feminine curiosity on its head, insisting upon attention to womanly mundanities, community stories, and transgressive possibilities. Across this landscape of Western intellectual history, it is clear that traditional conceptions of curiosity and gender have been deployed to police one another. Women are cast as unreliable precisely because of their curiosity. Just as their curiosity is cast as dangerous precisely because of its femininity. But where there is force, there is counterforce. Women have consistently used their curiosity to agitate at the borders of womanhood, to blur the boxes into which they have been put, and to reach out—­whether brazenly or ever so secretly—­for other self-­ configurations. As such, one can also trace across this history—­and, in particular, with the rise of (white) Western feminism proper—­a certain expansion of curiosity through gender, and of gender through curiosity. Feminist curiosity arises from women grappling with womanhood itself, its contingent confines and strictures. But of course, not all people are women or men, nor are all women or men cisgender. What does the fact of transgender people, and the function of transgender curiosity, contribute to this narrative? In what ways have curiosity and gender transgressions come to define and police one another? And in what ways have they also come to expand one another? Method and Theoretical Framework

In order to answer such questions, one first needs an account of trans curiosity. Before I embark upon that project, let me offer a few quick notes on method. Consistent with my commitment to honoring trans

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meaning-­making and knowledge-­building practices, I explore curiosity as a technique of trans objectification (especially in the spectacle-­ erasure formation) and a practice of trans freedom through the terms and discourses of trans people themselves. As such, I consult primarily a substantive selection of trans memoirs and autobiographical writings, which I consider to be representative of the genre, including work by Ryka Aoki, Jennifer Boylan, Lady Chablis, Ma-­Nee Chacaby, Lovemme Corazón, Ivan Coyote, Jamison Green, Nick Krieger, Sarah McBride, Deirdre McCloskey, Lei Ming, Janet Mock, Rae Spoon, Rizi Xavier Timane, and Max Valerio. While my choice of memoirists skews contemporary (thereby precluding any aspirations to a richly historical account of trans curiosity), it has the benefit of representing the wide range of trans experiences across gender (e.g., genderqueer, nonbinary, trans femme, trans masc, trans man, trans woman, and two spirit), as well as race and ethnicity (e.g., Asian American, Black, Chinese, Indigenous [Blackfoot, Hawai’ian, Ojibwa-­ Cree], Latinx, Nigerian, and white), available in recent archives. My reliance on trans memoir should not signal a reduction of trans people to their experiences—­as if they are only capable of feeling and not thinking—­but rather a recognition that, in the very negotiation of experience, trans people are always already theorizing.39 Furthermore, within these texts, I trace the word curiosity, related words or phrases (such as question, inquiry, and the desire to know), and interrogative sentences themselves. While I make no claim to an exhaustive analysis of curiosity’s role in trans autobiographical literature and scholarship, I trust that I offer a representative sampling of contemporary trans perspectives on curiosity, as well as a preliminary analysis thereof. In an effort to account for trans curiosity, it is necessary to ask, what precisely is curiosity, such that it can make (trans) objects and (re)claim (trans) subjects? Allow me to briefly revisit signal moments in the account of curiosity I have developed thus far. Recall that according to Enlightenment thinkers, curiosity is a natural, organic impulse that contributes to science, industry, and, therefore, the prosperity of humankind. This curiosity is innate and individual, rational and useful. As noted in chapter 1, for example, John Locke defines curiosity as an “appetite for knowledge,” which ought to be “as carefully cherished in children as other appetites suppressed.”40 Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, in turn, characterizes curiosity as “a principle natural to



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the human heart,” which must be scrupulously trained if the young person is to become an ideal citizen.41 Understood as a natural capacity, curiosity is itself neutral and is either badly or bravely applied by individuals based on their character and education. But of course, Locke and Rousseau were theorizing in the grip of colonialism, such that one must ask: if curiosity is natural, to whom is it natural? And if it is prosperous, for whom is it prosperous? These are crucial questions for late modern and postmodern thinkers, who argue that it is impossible to understand curiosity—­even if it is an embodied desire—­ apart from its function in a political context. Curiosity, here, is expressed through material and discursive practices within social and institutional frameworks. As noted in chapter 2, Friedrich Nietzsche theorizes one sort of curiosity that is “sober, pragmatic,” busying itself with the “countless minutiae” that buoy civilization;42 whereas there is another, “fateful curiosity”43 that has the capacity to deconstruct everything. And, as noted in chapter 3, Michel Foucault likewise theorizes an institutional curiosity that categorizes and taxonomizes according to inherited frameworks,44 while there is another, resistant curiosity that “throw[s] off familiar ways of thought.”45 Rather than indicative of moral or immoral character, expressions of curiosity can be radical or repressive depending on whether they sustain or disrupt oppressive systems of power. The historical debate between curiosity as a naturalized capacity and curiosity as a political technique remains prescient. Curiosity today is largely understood as a natural desire to know. From the dominant psychological perspective, this desire to know is generated by novel stimuli; curiosity is the biological drive to fill a newly perceived information gap. If trans people deviate from a natural gender binary, for example, it would stand to reason that they constitute novel stimuli and, as such, become natural objects of curiosity. While illuminative of the symbiosis between novelty and curiosity, this perspective is dissatisfying insofar as it fails to account for the sociohistorical contexts that determine the expression of biological impulses. Trans people are made novel through the naturalization of cisgender categories; proper gender signifiers are constructed in advance. It is more accurate to say, then, that there are collections of individuals whose innate desiring machines are honed in such a way as to take trans people as objects. Curiosity here remains an individual, embodied desire, which is

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nevertheless cultivated, disciplined, and directed by specific social forces and investments. On this model, curiosity is a trained affect, embedded in a habitus and appearing on individual and collective registers. Curiosity is something one or more persons feel and what one or more persons do. As such, curiosity might be defined as a material and discursive multivariant praxis of inquiry, coupled with certain affects and neurological signatures, that is not only traceable in individuals and groups but refracted through social context and identity.46 Thus, in the following analysis of curiosity’s role in trans objectification and especially in trans freedom, the question is bipartite: how does curiosity feel and how does it function? How are the practices of gazing, querying, investigating, experimenting, and world-­traveling lived and deployed? Trans People as the Objects of Curiosity

Many trans people today consistently experience themselves as the object of other people’s curiosity. It is an interest without interest, a spectacularization that preconditions erasure. Whether that be the long looks, unabashed stares, or outright gawking from people on the street (Are you male or female? Boy or girl?), the well-­meaning, but often invasive, questions of friends and family (How do you know? Will you have the surgery? What about hormones?), the battery of questionnaires and exams conducted by medical professionals (including general practitioners, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.), or the spectacularizing attention afforded trans icons across various social media platforms (from Christine Jorgensen to Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and Caitlyn Jenner), this experience is a bit like living under an “orange alert,” to use Coyote’s phrase.47 As the object of curiosity at every turn, trans people are forced to live defensively, constantly parrying unwanted attention, often in a vain attempt to guard not only their privacy but their legitimacy. After all, to be steadily questioned here is to be fundamentally put in question, to be made an object of suspicion. As such, trans people regularly experience themselves as a socioepistemological problem. The barrage of questions constitutes them as outliers, as nodes in a network that denies them, as puzzle pieces picked up, pressed unforgivingly, and then put to one side. Prior to the popularization of the term transgender in the 1990s, lit-



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erature addressing trans experience focused on transsexuals and transvestites. Within this literature, especially as preserved in the Digital Transgender Archive,48 one finds a repeated defense against “curiosity seekers.” According to trans magazines and newsletters in the 1960s and 1970s, curiosity seekers sought out trans people in voyeuristic contexts, whether “freak shows,” parades, or clubs.49 For the club Chez Moune, an early haven of the Parisian trans community, things were quite clear: “curiosity seekers are discouraged.”50 Perhaps the organizers of a 1980s trans directory put it best: Membership [in the North American TV-­TS Contact Service] has been and always will be free to all transvestites and transsexuals who are interested in meeting serious admirers and to couples and female admirers who want to meet transvestites and transsexuals. Any transsexual who tries to obviate the rules implicit in being a member in good standing is dropped from the organization. Also, we realize that most male admirers are not true admirers, but curiosity seekers, so we are especially careful about male admirers. We just want to assure people that we are very careful.51

Here, curiosity seekers are attributed a trivial, false interest that falls short of the serious and true admiration trans people want and deserve. Such a failure of admiration, moreover, is particularly attributed to “males,” suggesting that curiosity seeking is a markedly masculine enterprise. Given that cross-dressing was by turns illegal, socially reprehensible, and morally reprobate, protection against curiosity seekers was a matter of physical and psychological safety, as much as trans pride. Beginning in the 1990s, transgender literature and scholarship identify five primary sources of objectifying curiosity: the public, friends and family, the media, medicine, and academia. Green speaks for many when he recalls the curious “stares”52 of strangers who, particularly when he was more androgynous, “gawked” at him and “scrutinized” him for “signs of any gender.”53 Whether on the street or the subway,54 in a restaurant55 or a bathroom,56 relentless public attention can signal anything from mild “indifference or mere curiosity” to “loathing,” “anger,” and impending “violence.”57 For many trans people subject to public gawking, there is no respite at home, only fewer stares and more questions. Friends and family typically think their position of relative

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intimacy with a trans person gives them the right to full disclosure, warranting any demand for information they can muster, whether regarding names or pronouns, hormones or surgery, sexual practices or dysphoria. Boylan recalls being asked, “How did you know, when you were a child?”58 And Coyote: “I was just wondering if you always knew?”59 Often, according to Green, these questions are less than innocent, masking the real query: “How could you do this to me? How could you be so selfish? How could you? How could you?”60 In media circuits and medical settings, trans people face a particularly potent curiosity, often targeting the status of their bodies and sexual morphology. As Carol Riddell states, “We have some curiosity value to the media as freaks.”61 Reporters are particularly keen to ask if so-­and-­so has had “the surgery.”62 This is a “genital-­curiosity,” as S. Orchard calls it, from which medical and social service professionals are far from immune.63 Wherever it appears, this objectifying curiosity involves practices of staring, gawking, and scrutinizing,64 as well as asking either seemingly innocent65 or overtly abrasive, passive-­aggressive questions.66 Questions that simultaneously spotlight and blot out. Academia is a realm in which the curious objectification of trans people is especially entrenched. While this gaze is sometimes located in classmates67 and students,68 its real bastion lies in theory and scholarship. As Talia Mae Bettcher says of academic discourse, “trans people have long been curious objects, puzzles, tropes, and discursive levers on the way to somebody else’s agenda.”69 Amy Marvin argues that such objecthood is the result of a process of “curiotization” that abstracts and dehistoricizes trans people, turning them into curios.70 The effect of this curiosity is detrimental to trans people insofar as it produces conceptual distinctions that underscore the artifice of trans identity, as well as stereotypical narratives that deny the gnarled complexity of trans experience.71 Sandy Stone attributes a fundamental coloniality to the academic’s spectacular “fascination” with and “denial of subjectivity” to trans people, erasing vast swaths of “emergent polyvocalities of lived experience” across the globe in favor of a single, (white) Western medical diagnostic category.72 Viviane Namaste, in turn, critiques the specific coloniality of Anglo-­American feminist theory, for which the “Transgender Question” is predicated upon the “erasure” of the lived specificities (e.g., gender and racial identification, cultural context, labor practices, and community theorizing) of transgender



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people, especially transgender women of color.73 Namaste insists that theory be “undone” through the decolonial practice of empirically rich, collaborative research marked by trans communities’ leadership of the inquiry and ownership of the results.74 This is more than a shift in citational practices, C. Jacob Hale insists; it requires a real “humility” and willingness to travel in trans worlds.75 Ultimately, whether it appears in academia—­or in public, among friends and family, in the media, or in medicine—­the curious objectification of trans people is practiced and felt on an individual as well as a social register. Trans People as the Subjects of Curiosity

Curiosity is not only present in trans people’s accounts of their own experiences with others, however; it also functions as a tool of resistance by which trans people foster the rich personal and social life typically denied them by institutionalized manifestations of curiosity, especially the spectacle-­erasure formation. Rather than merely objects of curiosity, trans people are practitioners of curiosity—­whether in their early explorations of themselves, their cisgender counterparts, or their queer family, their choice of name, their clothes, their self-­ advocacy within the medical industry, as lovers and sexual partners, or in their reimagination of masculinity and femininity. To be trans, authors consistently emphasize, is a journey, a discovery, a quest, an exploration, an evolution. It involves experimentation, observation, imagination, and so, so many questions. It is a vortex of curiosity in another key, a different geological formation. The early development of trans identity, especially in cisnormative patriarchal contexts, involves a long series of trial and error experiments, forming an eminently curious investigation of gender itself, as well as gender for oneself. Mock captures this moment well when, rejecting the “born this way” narrative, she admits, “I grew to be certain about who I was, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I was learning the world, unsure, unstable, wobbly, living somewhere between confusion, discovery, and conviction.”76 That journey always exists in dynamic interplay with trans people’s multiple worlds and experiences. Mock’s own exploration, for example, was deeply interwoven with her experience as a Black Hawai’ian girl finding a curious family among trans women of color sex workers on the island. Many

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trans narratives attest that the process often begins with the “laundry hamper.”77 What would it be like to wear these clothes, to be treated like the majority estrogen-­or testosterone-­based organism expected to wear these clothes? What would it be like to be that organism? Kiki calls it “the curiosity factor.”78 “It was a curiosity about being,” McCloskey confirms.79 What is it like to want to play with these toys, to be allowed to play with these toys? What is it like to enjoy that hairstyle, to desire that kiss? Why am I not like other boys, other girls? Sometimes this exploration manifests itself as “a fascination with . . . otherness” in beings who are supposedly self-­same,80 at other times as a “searching for clues” about who it is one might become,81 and at still other times it signals, according to Coyote, a special “kind of lonel[iness].”82 Trans people’s developmental curiosity, however, is not limited to the cisheteronormative world. It invariably includes other trans and genderqueer people, fictive or real, present-­day or long ago. Trans community and culture becomes and often remains a lodestone of trans people’s own curiosity. Krieger, who describes himself as a “Curious George,”83 recalls being “driven by [his] own personal curiosity,” devouring “everything written about trans lives and experiences: narrative nonfiction books, reportage, journalism, legal documents, health and medical studies, memoirs, diaries, and zines.”84 Depending on era, geography, and socioeconomic status, the availability of these resources differs. Spoon recalls sneaking peaks at lesbian magazines in a store downtown.85 McCloskey reminisces about her first drag show as a mature adult.86 And Valerio tells the humorous, yet painful story of seeing Leslie Lothstein’s 1983 book, Female-­to-­Male Transsexualism, in a bookstore window, feeling queasy, walking away, turning around, and telling himself to forget it, before finally buying the book and running home to hide it.87 Corazón states simply, “The internet fed my curiosity”;88 Timane singles out Google and YouTube.89 Sometimes trans people ping each other, as a way to help situate themselves;90 at other times, their interest is even keener. Lady Chablis admits to being “more than mildly curious” about “some fine-­ass titties” her friends had acquired,91 while McCloskey recalls peppering other trans women with questions, “gathering data like some sort of anthropologist.”92 Likewise, Valerio describes his trans male friendships as “a gender think tank, an unfunded, underground research project driven



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by an obsessive sense of exploration and ceaseless investigation.”93 Whether tentative or brazen, occasional or committed, secretive or proud, curiosity about trans experiences and communities is a necessary component of trans people’s development and survival. Navigating between the cisnormative world and trans communities, trans people have to ask themselves what gender norms they will replicate or reimagine. This often begins with naming, whether naming ourselves, our identities, and our experiences, or renaming our body parts. “Naming” oneself, as Green writes, is part of “a gender quest.”94 It is as much a sacred act as an awkward experiment and a legal banality. Trying on names for size before finally filing the paperwork can take months, sometimes years. More generally, building a language in and for trans worlds, Halberstam suggests, is an act of almost classical curiosity—­of cataloging and christening.95 Trans people also have to decide (and sometimes continue deciding) what sorts of transition to pursue: e.g., clothing, shoes, gait, hygiene, vocal patterns, social roles, sex roles, common haunts and activities, bathrooms, ID cards, and, yes, hormones and surgeries. They have to ask: what is involved, what are the consequences, and what incongruities will remain?96 Finally, trans people adjudicate their own combination of femininity and masculinity. Given that cisnormative expectations and expressions of femininity and masculinity presume able-­bodymindedness and modulate across class, race, and ethnicity, trans people’s reconfiguration of gender is always in conversation with local and global community standards. Early on, Green, who passes as a cis white man, recalls asking: “What responsibility would I have for maintaining or deconstructing traditional gender roles once I transitioned?”97 Ideally, this remains a constant question, one never quite settled. Learning to belong to one’s new gender also involves transforming that gender itself. Beyond deconstructing cisheteronormativity and exploring trans communities, trans people also report a generalized curiosity, as if being trans itself requires an ethos of curiosity. Overwhelmingly, trans people talk about their transition and trans life as a journey, a quest. Transition is not the solution to a problem. “Rather than fix a problem,” Krieger states, transition involved “my experimentation and uncertainty, my quest to reinvent my body.”98 Similarly, Valerio writes: “My transition felt like more than simply a medical solution to a personal problem; it soon expanded into an exploration, an

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erotically charged boundary-­crossing, and a risk-­filled journey.”99 As not a solution to a problem but a journey, transition involves “exploring,”100 “experimenting,”101 “introspecting,”102 “investigating,”103 and “adventuring.”104 In fact, “a gender quest,” as Green muses, “is a kind of spiritual question. It is our willful destiny to find that balance, that strength, that peace and logic of the soul. . . . Each step along the way brought me closer to my own center; each candle I lit in the cave of my own fear brought me clarity and stability.”105 Underscoring the way in which this journey beyond the self is precisely a movement of returning to the self, Mock describes transition as “a complicated journey of self-­discovery that goes way beyond gender and genitalia. My passage was an evolution from me to closer-­to-­me-­ness. It’s a journey of self-­revelation.”106 The character of this quest or journey is precisely a long process of “self-­discovery,”107 “evolution,”108 “migration,”109 and “invention.”110 It involves decades, Ming confirms, of “questioning everything,” even in a country like China where such questioning is forbidden.111 Given the endless practice of curiosity implicit in the “trans journey,” Aoki muses that trans is the perfect word: “the great traveler of the Latinate prefixes, the great explorer and pioneer.”112 These many testaments to trans curiosity leave no doubt: curiosity functions on both the individual and social levels. It is a drive to know—­to know physically, intellectually, and experientially—­but always within a social milieu and therefore in dialogue with inherited value structures, theoretical frameworks, cultures, and a complex habitus. Trans authors describe this dynamic in microcosm with respect to their childhoods. Lady Chablis, for example, who grew up among the big magnolias and oaks of Quincy, Florida, recalls the vibrancy of her personal “curiosity,” which led her as a child, day after day, to sketch her name into the leaves, drop them in a stream behind her house, and travel with them “to other worlds within my ‘magination.”113 Some trans curiosity goes socially unrecognized precisely because its contours or complexion fall outside of certain norms. Chacaby, for instance, a two-­spirit Ojibwa-­Cree elder, only came to recognize her own curiosity through her grandmother. “When other people called me weird or poisonous,” she writes, “[my grandmother] would tell me that I was curious and smart in ways that some people did not understand.”114 When neither left to flourish nor lost to social recognition,



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trans curiosity can be purposefully suppressed. For Corazón, her trans femme Latinx childhood is the graveyard of her curiosity, a time when her curiosity was stolen through sexual assault and transphobia. It is only now, as an adult, that she “crave[s] the curiosity of a child”115 and vows to live not only her gender journey but her struggle for abolitionist and decolonial liberation in a way that honors that lost possibility. Because curiosity is expressed across the fabric of self and society, it can be nurtured or occluded, championed or stolen. And because trans people (and particularly trans youth) fall between the cracks of social values, their curiosity is more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of custom and policy, not to mention the whims of individual actors, for better and for worse.116 As it appears in trans memoirs, however, trans curiosity is not simply an affect or a feeling, caught in the nexus of norm enforcement, on the one hand, and creative resilience, on the other. Trans curiosity is also a practice that stretches beyond states of consciousness and into objects, architectures, and organized matter: the very stuff of the universe. When trans people change their clothing, it is not simply that curiosity takes them to the laundry hamper, to the secondhand shop, or to the department store. Curiosity is the act of standing in front of a mirror eyeing oneself, sometimes gingerly at first and then with pride. It is marking how and where the clothes hit, that first day one wears a new piece. When trans people change their name, it is not simply that curiosity suggests perhaps one might go by something else. Curiosity is telling one’s confidants, hearing one’s new name as friend and stranger all in one, standing awkwardly before a judge. When trans people search for their people and their history, it is not simply that curiosity suggests one read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues or Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness. Curiosity is holding the book in one’s hands, keeping it in one’s pillowcase, buying a copy for one’s parent. When trans people seek out medical interventions, it is not simply that curiosity leads one to the pharmacy, the operating table, or the underground economy. Curiosity is tracking with a mixture of wonder, fear, and hope the minute changes in one’s body schema. And all of this happens within a political framework of inherited, often competing gender norms, histories of trans resistance to those norms, and as yet unimagined possibilities. The practice of trans curiosity is not a momentary, spontaneously generated question, nor

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is it an innate force untouched by social context; rather, it is a series of material, intergenerational, and transhuman acts of exploration. In sum, if trans autobiographical writings suggest anything for the political philosophy of curiosity, it is this: Where an objectifying curiosity denies trans people the complexity and mobility of human subjects, freezing them in a state of whatness, a liberatory curiosity opens up the possibility of nuance, change, and transformation coincident with their who-ness. The spectacle-­erasure formation is shattered/ scattered. Given this complexity, it is not enough simply to denigrate or to celebrate curiosity. Before following Timane’s recommendation that we add another letter to the LGBTQQIA moniker—­a “C” for “curious”117—­a sustained examination of the styles and stakes of curiosity, including trans curiosity, is necessary. Curiosity as an often affective set of practices, at once individual and collective, has to be subject to ethico-­political evaluation in social context. Trans Curiosity as Praxis

The rich record of trans curiosity has been almost completely occluded, experientially and theoretically, by the objectifying curiosity to which trans people are subjected. As trans people, sometimes the burn of the gaze and the sting of the question is so sharp as to make one forget that one, too, looks and queries, beckons and explores. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the trans studies discourse surrounding curiosity remains a critique of objectifying curiosity, with little attempt to reclaim curiosity, as such, for trans people.118 Given its capacity to turn something into a spectacle, to freeze and immobilize it for the purposes of the inquirer, thereby dehistoricizing, decontextualizing, and dehumanizing it, curiosity plays a clear role in the representational totalization of trans people, their reduction to whats (and to specific body parts, or lack thereof), and their erasure. But, given its corollary capacity to open perspective and possibility, curiosity also plays an undeniably integral role in trans people’s resistant detotalization, their claim to who-­ness, to wholeness, to community, and to history, cultivating in the shadows a whole garden of question marks in wild profusion. Trans memoirs demonstrate that both potentialities of curiosity are traceable in often affective practices, at individual and social levels.



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Trans people—­and trans writers and scholars in particular—­have already gone to great lengths to diagnose the objectifying curiosity to which they are subject, as well as recommend strategies for change within cisheteronormative worlds. What I offer here is but a gesture. The analysis above might prompt individuals to reflect phenomenologically on whether they take trans people as objects of their own curiosity. Do they reduce trans people to their genital status or story? Do they imagine trans people as strange, washed-­out aliens in an otherwise rich, familiar landscape? It might also prompt individuals to reflect genealogically on why and how they find trans people curious. What political values and investments, local idiosyncrasies and global trends, have trained their affects in this way? It might push people to hold themselves accountable for their objectifying curiosity. How, for example, would their immediate reactions to genderqueer kids change if they recognized how much these kids are already overburdened with the stares of strangers, pestering questions, and reductive jokes? How might their tactics for self-­education around trans issues change if they acknowledged that trans people have a long and rich history, replete with changing subcultures? How would their appreciation for trans reconfigurations of gender change were they to recognize the delicate dance each undertakes to negotiate the gendered constraints of their race, ethnicity, class, religion, or disability? Finally, it might also push people to collectively reevaluate how these affects, habits, investments, and practices are embedded in material and discursive structures. That is, how is trans-­objectifying curiosity institutionalized in the media, medicine, and education, as well as in public and private spaces? And how might the very function of internet clickbait, digital databases, IRB standards, and airport surveillance, for example, become trans-­ affirming, even trans-­humanizing? And yet, as I have argued, trans people are not only the objects but the subjects of curiosity, not merely the brunt-­bearers but practitioners of curiosity. What further lessons are to be learned here? Insofar as trans people are curious, trans objecthood is untenable. That is, if curiosity is a capacity of a human subject,119 then trans curiosity defeats—­or gives the lie to—­trans objecthood. As a tactic for repositioning trans people in the realm of human subjectivity, then, reclaiming trans curiosity is valuable. Unfortunately, such a tactic does nothing to change existing structures of value and privilege predicated upon said human

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subjectivity, including those tied to the notions of Enlightenment rationality, individualism, and anthropocentrism. Nevertheless, while it will ultimately be important to recognize other grounds for trans liberation, still more can be drawn from reflections on trans personhood. Indeed, insofar as trans people in general are curious, individual trans people are curious, often in unique, idiosyncratic ways. How might trans curiosity modulate by geography and era, social group and social standing, or along the axes of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or socioeconomic status? How might attention to the racialization of curiosity, for example, demand the very reconceptualization of the subject/object divide? In what ways could all of these differences be better recognized, and in some cases celebrated, in and beyond the trans community? And how might attending to this variability necessarily demand posthuman or transhuman coalitions? But the praxis of trans curiosity, with all its material and discursive effects, promises more than a subsumption of thing into human. It provides new ways of thinking about cultures of curiosity and their liberatory potential. Consider the political function of the practices, forms, and configurations of curiosity generated in trans communities in resistance to the spectacle-­erasure formation. By engaging curiosity as a practice of political imagination, the kinesthetic signatures of trans curiosity pose an implicit challenge to the common paradigms of curiosity today. Consider, first, the trans practice of second-­ guessing cisheteronormative expectations of clothing, play, roles, and desires. This constitutes, at least, a strand of curiosity that makes the familiar strange. Second, the practice of finding trans places, people, culture, and community signals, again at least, the sort of curiosity that seeks out subjugated knowledges and embodiments, or even subjugated knowledges as embodiments. Third, the practice of taking a gender journey—­including questing, exploring, introspecting, investigating, and experimenting—­is a style of curiosity that self-­creates. It innovates between the possibilities and impossibilities provided by one’s sociocultural matrix. What if these sorts, strands, and styles of curiosity—­ this family of curious practices—­ were the paradigmatic acts of curiosity? That is, what if the word curiosity signaled not a violent inquisition, an objectifying gaze, or an inane question? What if it called to mind something other than depoliticized science, media obsession, or useless trivia? Indeed, what if curiosity signaled, instead,



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this trio of habits: making the familiar strange, searching out subjugated knowledges, and cultivating a life of purposeful experimentation and authentic engagement in the project of self-­creation in community? This honest, harrowing, exuberant quest. What if these were the practices given preference in the thought of curiosity? Trans curiosity does just this. Attending to curiosity as a praxis, or a set of practices that are each subject to ethico-­political evaluation, is a necessary supplement to the classical interpretation of curiosity as an innate human capacity to desire knowledge. It is certainly important for individual differences in the expressions of curiosity to be recognized and for individual people to be accountable for their own expressions. But that is not enough. Insofar as curiosity as a praxis can belong to human collectives, networks of human and nonhuman things, as well as nondesiring materials, this supplemental model helps to explain how trans-­objectifying curiosity is embedded in architectures and institutions, in multimedia and digital platforms. From this perspective, curiosity is an inquisitive movement within an ecological fabric. But what are the grounds for choosing some curious practices over others? The practices of defamiliarization, desubjugation, and self-­creation in community are good insofar as they are practiced by trans subjects, by marginalized subjects, or by resistant subjects in order to fashion space for life under exclusionary conditions. Thus, rather than demanding a whyless treatment or laying claim to the human condition, I suggest that trans curiosity opens up a space through which to think curiosity as a practice of political resistance. It provides a model of curiosity that at once combats and deploys transhuman assemblages and creatively breaks and rebuilds transhuman embodiments. More fundamentally, trans curiosity theorizes, in its very resistant praxis, new styles and frameworks for the study of curiosity itself. It poses new curiosity formations. Trans-­Gendering Curiosity Studies

In Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, Laura Erickson-­Schroth, Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, and T. Evan Smith state, “Trans people are people who can imagine different possibilities, who can question the things that others simply accept as being unquestionably true, and who have the strength of character to act on their convictions even without support

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from other people.”120 What has this explicitly trans capacity for curiosity, and its wisdom, meant, and what could it mean, for the intersection between transgender studies and curiosity studies? While it would behoove curiosity studies to expand to include an account of trans curiosity derived from contemporary memoirs, an account much like the one I have offered here, more historical, transcultural, and feminist work needs to be done. After all, transgressions of the gender binary are nothing new. Where in the early modern European bifurcation of curiosity are the trans people, where is the trans story? What other histories of curiosity—­and other feminist lineages—­might provide a different set of insights into the relationship between curiosity and gender? And how has (white) Western feminism in some ways succeeded and in other ways precisely failed in the project of feminist curiosity, particularly with regard to transgender people? That is, in how many ways might a trans(feminist) curiosity be thought otherwise? First, scholars might work to recover the lost history of trans or otherwise gender-­ transgressive people both within the purview of Western history and well beyond it. Beginning with Western history in the ancient and medieval periods, this might require greater attention to the figures of the hermaphrodite and the cross-­dresser, the trickster and the shapeshifter in the construction of wonder, especially across the developing genre of travel narratives.121 In the modern period in Europe, this might require locating trans people precisely where the split between male and female, masculine and feminine curiosity becomes most pronounced. One might think, for example, of the Public Universal Friend, of Chevalier d’Eon, and of James Barry, or of Fanny Park and Stella Boulton.122 Barbara Benedict intimates that, where (cisgender) women were the sexualized curios of the period, “transsexuals,” “crossdressers,” and otherwise gender-­ fluid beings (such as Mademoiselle Lefort) were the subject of circus wonder and scientific interest.123 Much like cis women of the time, however, they also signified a kind of sexual curiosity that served as the “emblem of monstrous cultural corruption.”124 It is herein that their capacity to denaturalize the colonial modern gender system, with its binaristic masculinities and femininities, lay. Such individuals, however, were also characterized as having an unusually keen curiosity, and their normatively gendered curiosities functioned to legitimize their non-



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normative genders. Consider John Theodora de Verdion, otherwise known as Dr. V, who, wearing “male” attire, taught and sold books in the streets of London.125 Or James Allen, a horse groom, who touted “exclusive knowledge” of equestrian medicinals.126 Or Harry Stokes, a bricklayer, who was recognized as exceedingly “clever in the erection of tall chimneys.”127 While pigeonholed as curios, and feared for the ontological fluidity their transgressive curiosity proved, trans people also seized upon curiosity as a technique of self-­fashioning and gender legitimation. Disrupting the hegemony of (white) Western histories of curiosity also requires cultivating other Western and non-­Western genealogies, especially of Indigenous, colonized, enslaved, and fugitive genders and curiosities. One might ask, for example, what role curiosity plays in the transitivity and transversality of Blackness and transness for C. Riley Snorton in Black on Both Sides.128 How does curiosity mark the space, and indeed the flesh, of possibility presided over by Blackness and transness; how is it appositional to the “true leap” of “inventing strategies for inhabiting unlivable worlds”?129 One might also ask what role curiosity plays in the politics of decolonial imagination as practiced by two-­spirit Cherokee people for Qwo-­Li Driskill in Asegi Stories.130 How is curiosity kept alive in the third space of possibility, between the double-­weave of colonial/colonized genders and histories that erase asegi (i.e., strange, queer) stories? These and so many other histories belong to the story of curiosity. By retelling and “reweaving” these worlds, curiosity, gender, and their interrelation will necessarily become otherwise.131 Second, aside from locating actual trans people in the story of curiosity, and their actual curiosity in the history of gender, scholars might also explore the possibilities for trans curiosity—­that is, a sort of curiosity that in some way crosses—­or even crosses out—­stereotypical masculine and feminine curiosities. Or perhaps doubles—­or even doubles over—­stereotypical masculine and feminine curiosities. Does such a curiosity blend feminine and masculine curiosities into a new configuration? Does it insist that neither feminine nor masculine curiosity properly belongs to any particular body? Does it reimagine feminine and/or masculine curiosity in ways that resist the violence that has been done in their names? Or does it refuse the feminine and masculine bifurcation of curiosity altogether? And what arises in its place?

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What other constellations of gender, lived and nourished outside the colonial modern gender system, might offer additional possibilities for curiosity in general and trans curiosity in particular? And what method—­what methodos, or pathway—­is needed to reckon with that palimpsest? If feminist curiosity is attuned to the infantilized, ignored, and trivialized, a trans curiosity is especially attuned to the haptic. In Shimmering Images, Eliza Steinbock “resituates curiosity as a critical affective mode of bodies in transition.”132 For Steinbock, drawing expressly upon Laura U. Marks,133 trans curiosity is neither optical nor aural but haptic—­that is, trans curiosity is less related to sight and to sound than it is to touch. “Haptic knowledge,” they write, is “generated by a grasping, groping subject.”134 Such a subject is driven by a haptic curiosity that “wishes to touch back in order to connect and produce sensate meaning.”135 Steinbock’s emphasis on the material, embodied character of trans curiosity, and its consequent insistence on intimacy—­between bodies, selves, objects, and images—­complements my own characterization of trans curiosity as material, praxiological, and transhuman. Curiosity is a doing; it is felt work, moving and matting. In doing the work of defamiliarization, desubjugation, and self-­creation in community, trans curiosity resists mere scientific or media interest and instead signifies an uneasy movement within and against institutional strictures, whether gender roles, nation-­states, or things in between. I have aimed, in this chapter, to explore the theoretical import—­ and, indeed, the challenging supplement—­of trans curiosity. Drawing on trans autobiographies, trans theory, and curiosity studies, I have argued that a trans praxis of curiosity not only illuminates the socioepistemological character of political power and resistance but also proffers a unique critique of the subject/object distinction, exploring multiple, intradependent selves developing in dialogical relation and through material-­discursive praxis. I have marked the spectacle-­ erasure formation by which trans people are so often targeted and I have described some of the ways in which trans communities themselves have generated new curiosity formations. These arguments carry important implications for trans theory and curiosity studies. On the one hand, they challenge trans theory’s almost exclusive concern with the curiotization—­and the Frankensteinian spectacle—­of trans people.



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On the other hand, they challenge curiosity studies’ long-­standing distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine curiosity. A transfeminist perspective would suggest that, following in the footsteps of feminist curiosity, trans curiosity is the sort of investigative praxis that takes trans people seriously, turns an attentiveness and willingness to be surprised toward the traces of trans life, and radically recasts the gendered practice of curiosity in the process. Any account of trans curiosity worth its salt must also necessarily expand beyond its inherited histories and set about the massive (and massively important) task of recovering and multiplying the genealogies and geographies of trans curiosity itself.

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Unsettling Curiosity

Curiosity is a thought of paths, of footpaths, pathways, and footways, tracks trodden and trails traced along lines of desire and discovery. And yet, the inherent nomadism of curiosity—­its pedetic ethics1—­ often settles into place, acquiring a sedimented and secured power. One way to understand the curiosity-­ formations that settle in sovereign systems and institutions is as structures that deny opacity, disavow ambiguity, and foreclose intimacy. The sort of curiosity that subtends sovereignty refuses to acknowledge what cannot be mastered, what cannot be dissected, and what cannot be confined, the opacities and intimacies of term and creature. Likewise, the sort of curiosity that subtends traditional systems of knowledge production ultimately refuses what cannot be isolated, what cannot be separated out, and what cannot be made unambiguous. Disciplinary and biopolitical institutions, moreover, are buoyed by a sort of curiosity that ultimately refuses the legitimacy and legibility of affective relations that cut diagonally across the social fabric. Each of these curiosity-­ formations functions by way of reductive totalization. Each of these curiosity-­ formations also typically targets nonnormative bodies—­ especially nonnormatively raced, gendered, or disabled bodies—­for ancillary reduction, whether via spectacularization, erasure, or some other oppressive structure, topology, or architecture of curiosity. To be made a thing or to be made no-­thing is to be made transparent and isolable, to be settled. One pathway of resistance, one way by which to refuse these refusals, is to insist upon opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy.

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Such an insistence upon what cannot be subsumed within or separated without is nothing new. There have been centuries—­even millennia—­of practicing curiosity in another world, and for another world. In closing, I turn to Caribbean, Chicana, and Indigenous philosophy to outline a few singular contributions to theorizing the politics of curiosity.2 Reprising the records of Sarah Baartman and Zora Neale Hurston from the book’s beginnings, and weaving them alongside the insights of Édouard Glissant, Gloria Anzaldúa, and several North American Indigenous peoples, I explore how opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy are not only necessary, but also necessary companions in the struggle against the spectacle-­erasure formation so common to Western, especially colonial, curiosity. In doing so, I trace a different set of paths forward and trails through the sovereign, institutional, crypt-­like configurations of curiosity addressed in the preceding pages. In Caribbean, Chicana, and Indigenous philosophies, I find other lineages and other futures for resistance. These resistant lineages and futures, moreover, are rooted less in human will, the power of language, or affective practice than in the spaces/places in which practitioners find themselves—­the archipelago, the borderlands, and the Earth as a whole. As such, they not only proffer opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy as companions to any ethical curiosity, but they also insist that this companionship preconditions a more-­than-­human politics of curiosity. Fundamental to Caribbean, Chicana, and North American Indigenous philosophies is a critique of the epistemologies and ontologies that subtend Western colonialism. The system of knowledge production in the West rests on rationality and objectivity; as such, its questions proceed by way of analytic dissection: splitting things apart, holding them up to the light, and demanding their transparency. This system is also fundamentally anthropocentric; as such, its questions, formulated expressly for human flourishing, are posed across a subject-­object, self-­other divide. This system is violently incommensurate, however, not only with colonized peoples and the lands to which they belong but with the Earth as a whole. Turning to the Caribbean archipelago, Glissant theorizes opacity as necessary to relational knowing and the diversity of things. Turning to the U.S.–­Mexico borderlands, Anzaldúa explores ambiguity as inherent to multiplicitous knowing and the enmeshment of things. Finally, turning to the land, North American Indigenous theorists elucidate intimacy as basic to heart-­knowing and



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the interdependence of things. In step with the rhizomes underground and the wind overhead, these thinkers reroot us in an unrooted, uprooting thinking, one that celebrates rather than erases local, anticolonial ways of thinking, yes, but also of querying. They invite us to practice a curiosity that scatters, that cracks open, and that weaves into webs. It is a curiosity that honors the interrelatedness and the mystery of all things. For Opacity

Opacity is unsettling. What is opaque exists in a shadow state. It parries the onslaught of alien light with density and darkness. Functionally impenetrable, it refuses to transmit foreign rays or serve as their passageway. Opacity exists between organisms, entities, languages, and worlds. “Human opacity [Unklarheit],” Nietzsche writes, will always “slacken the bow of all-­too-­taut thinking.”3 It permits of no bull’s-­eye to be struck, no pinpoint secured. Nor is opacity itself ever singular or isolable. Opacities multiply in a weave and texture of their own relation. Slipping and surfacing alongside one another, opacities appear in at least three ways: as a reality, a resistance, and a recognition. A reality of irreducibility, a resistance to the demand for transparency, and a recognition of the complexity of knowledge produced in and at the margins. Opacity has a certain spinosity. It is situated between—­or perhaps beyond—­the obscure and the cryptic. As such, opacity impinges on specific ways of knowing and coming to know, and it prompts others. It is a hinge between competing formations of curiosity. If Sarah Baartman’s story is anything, it is a nineteenth-­century tale of opacity. The more “The Hottentot Venus” was made knowable by curious crowds and Cuvier’s scalpel, the more Baartman herself became unknowable. Indeed, the belligerence of the colonial knowledge-­system was betrayed by the “opaqueness”4 of Baartman’s body. A remnant always remained, refusing to be reduced. Baartman’s opacity, however, was also her choice. At the legal examination that was to determine whether she performed of her own free will or no, she refused to speak more than a few sentences—­perhaps thirty-­five words in three hours. She did complain of the cold, asking to perform in warmer clothes. In doing so, Baartman pitted her own creaturely

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concerns against a growing Enlightenment paranoia about property. In step and as tribute, Black feminist scholars of Baartman’s legacy have embraced a similar set of opacities. Pursuing “a more subjective way of knowing,” one “that respects the ‘opaqueness’ of the body” and “that is comfortable with the unknown, the forgotten, and the silenced,”5 they practice a certain faithfulness to what cannot be subtended, subsumed, or subordinated. For them, opacity is an intimate stance. But Baartman is not alone. In her introduction to Mules and Men, African American novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston explores folktales and folksongs as a space of tactical opacity in the early twentieth-­century American South. She narrates different strategies Black and Indigenous people take to safeguard their stories, their sayings, and their songs, from white curiosity. Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-­privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-­faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-­bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laugher and pleasantries. The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.”6

While the opacity of the stone and the feather—­of silence and of laughter—­may differ in kind, they are similar in function. They refuse to be made transparent and answerable to a white gaze. Hurston’s own work was committed to “digging in” to the community,7 wait-



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ing patiently beside opacities of fact and tactic, listening, and, ultimately, championing what would otherwise have been lost. Although dying in relative anonymity, Hurston was rediscovered by the likes of Alice Walker not only for this faithfulness but also by this faithfulness. Walker waded knee-­deep into waiting—­and listening—­for Hurston. Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant is a thinker, as well as a practitioner, of opacity. In Poetics of Relation, he theorizes opacity as, most fundamentally, “that which cannot be reduced.”8 The Western, colonial framework requires transparency. Only by flattening and freezing, reducing and rendering open, can the Western knower know the Other. Importing foreign scales and taxonomies, and measuring accordingly, the Western knower finally pronounces, “I admit you to existence within my systems.”9 Such knowledge proceeds via “grasping [com-­prendre]” rather than “giving [donner-­avec].” It is driven by greed and mastery rather than generosity and mutuality. Those subject to colonization, however, know by other means. Commenting on Glissant, John Drabinski writes that the Caribbean imaginary involves “an unrooted Chaos of knowing,” a “knowing, that is, which is never fixed and never a struggle for domination, but rather a constant figuration, mise en question, and refiguration—­a knowledge that becomes in the fullest sense.”10 Inverting the Western framework, the Caribbean imaginary does not question in order to know, but practices knowing as questioning. For Glissant, this is perhaps most clearly exemplified in language. When the French language is subject to creolization and poeticization, its linearity and logic is destabilized. What emerges is a language that breathes being-­in-­Relation rather than being-­as-­Being. On this model, he writes, “opacities must be preserved,” “an appetite for opportune obscurity” created, and “falsely convenient vehicular sabirs must be relentlessly refuted.”11 Opacities, then, are found but also made; they are factual and political, they are material and linguistic. Christina León proposes Glissant’s notion of opacity as a necessary supplement to any ethical curiosity.12 With a respect for opacity, she argues, curiosity can retain a certain humility; it can remain open and engaged. Without it, curiosity becomes a violent, hubristic force that “deaden[s] alterity.”13 Opacity, she writes, is therefore ideally “an attendant term” for curiosity, “one that hastens us to be humble in

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the pursuits of knowledge, to keep relation and reading open, and to infuse our imaginaries with the unknown—­not to domesticate or to know, but to keep learning.”14 For León, opacity’s importance for an ethical curiosity is of special relevance in the case of Latinx aesthetics. So often encountered through a “salacious tour that rims the fringes of the US literary canon,”15 Latinx aesthetic production is most truly—­ and transformatively—­engaged when one sits with what resists easy capture: the insistent incommensurability of multiple worlds. León turns to tarry with Ana Mendieta, a Cuban American artist who repeatedly photographs her own face pressed against a pane of glass, deftly capturing the indelible marks of displacement and alienation. With ever-­changing contortions of sense—­spread lip, squished eye, pinched nose, fluid face—­Mendieta makes palpable the blunt force of transparency. “Demands for transparency,” León hauntingly writes, “reduce and deaden.”16 By contrast, a commitment to opacity on the “terrain of curiosity” entails a readiness to “stumble”17—­to stumble over, to stumble with, and to stumble for. Perhaps even to stumble through the perhaps of poetry.18 Glissant himself rarely uses the term curiosité. Yet he is certainly a critic of the Western knowledge-­formations that, in the seventeenth century, turned a “riveted, anxious, obsessive” “curiosity [curiosité]” on the Antilles19 and that, still today, turn an “indifferent curiosity” upon the “hermetically-­sealed world” of Martinique.20 In spectacularizing and erasing the Caribbean, by turns, such curiosity fails to do justice to the complexity of this place, in and on its own terms. But Glissant also practices curiosity of another sort. Edwy Plenel memorializes Glissant as a “whole world poet,” whose “always curious” poetics upends politics.21 Alain Baudot and Marianne R. Holder attribute to him a “stubborn curiosity,”22 while François Noudelmann roots his “curiosity [curiosité]” in philosophical “wonder [émerveillement]” and the inexhaustible “anxiety [inquiétude] of thought.”23 Glissant arguably terms this second order curiosity “errancy [errance].” As he defines it, errancy is “the will, the desire, the passion to know the totality” of things.24 While it may sound like a limitless curiosity, Glissant characterizes errancy as precisely not a colonial “exploration” but rather an anticolonial “investigation” that abandons systems-­thinking for trace-­thinking.25 It is more invested in following than in building fundaments. The errant one “strives to know the totality of the



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world” but “renounces any claims to sum it up or to possess it.”26 In classical philosophical terms, those who practice errancy do not master the knowledge of Being but rather remain attuned to Relation. Refusing to imperially decide and settle questions of essence or of territory, the errant one wanders, stumbling over irreducible nodes and the network between them. For Glissant, errancy is a kind of shoreline thinking.27 Like waves crashing against the Caribbean’s rocky coasts, errancy knows in the very moment it explodes.28 It is in this sense that a certain Glissantean curiosity throws off the trappings of transparency and instead welcomes the companionship of opacity. The facticity and the materiality of errancy—­and opacity, for that matter—­is rooted in the archipelago. In crafting an account of Caribbean thought, Glissant thinks from the very geography and culture of the Caribbean. Just as its land is fissured by folds and punctuated by seas, so its “history is fissured by histories.”29 The islands and their stories are a series of scattered fragments; they exist in relation to one another but also at a distance. They are not one continent; they do not speak one language; they have not one root. The soil and symbol of the Caribbean archipelago is always already multiple and diverse, multiplying and diversifying. To think the Caribbean and to think with the Caribbean, for Glissant, then, is to think “an archipelagic thought [une pensée archipélique].”30 Archipelagic thought is “the thought of the ambiguous [ambigu].”31 It “explores the unexpected [l’imprevu],”32 precisely as the unforeseeable, the unpredictable, the incalculable, the unmeasurable, and even the undecidable. Archipelagic thought is “more intuitive, more fragile” than “continental thought [pensée continentale],” which builds brittle borders and stalwart fundaments.33 While both kinds of thought are “structured by the conquests of the human and social sciences,” the archipelagic is “diverted [dérivée] into a poetic and imaginary vision of the world.”34 Despite continental airs, the archipelagic is the truer force behind and beneath things. Just as continents involuntarily “archipelagize [s’archipélisent]” themselves, so continental thoughts self-­splinter, scattering in the wind.35 One need only wait patiently, and attend closely, to witness the archipelagic force at work in the well-­bounded and well-­bordered. Insofar as archipelagic thought is errant, it is essentially curious. It pursues knowing as questioning. As such, archipelagic thought entails archipelagic curiosity. How does such a curiosity move and by what

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is it driven? What is the logic of its politics, the shape of its pedetic ethics? This is the cipher of errancy in another key. In considering a curiosity that archipelagizes, one might recall Nietzsche’s contrast between philosophical imagination and calculative reason. While the latter “lumbers” behind, the former “leaps ahead on tiny toeholds,” crossing a wild mountain stream “lightfootedly . . . , using the rocks to cross, even though behind and beneath him they hurtle into the depths.”36 In Glissant’s terms, an archipelagic curiosity scatters. It moves lightly between ever more diversifying and diffracting relations. Refusing to be confined by classical categories, it “gathers [rassemble]” and “scatters [éparpille]” them.37 It pits the power of dissemination against the traditional ti esti question.38 More poetically, it moves as a dérive from earthquakes to beetroot.39 Leaving “songs like rivers,” “poems like so many endless forests.”40 In its wake, “cracks emerge that are thresholds of explosion.”41 Archipelagic questions not only scatter themselves and their subjects, however; they also gestate in the space of scattering itself. They arise from, and range within, a “network [reseau]” of relations. Perhaps they sniff, trail, and follow. Perhaps they are born in the hyphen or sparked by the lightning crack of a question mark (an ero/erran-­teme). In any case, archipelagic questions begin in the space and place of unknowing, with what invites and rebuffs the light. For opacity, then. Insofar as opacity insists upon a space for curiosity, marked not by clarity but complexity, not distance but density; insofar as opacity exists right where systems touch, where histories break, and where incommensurability cracks open; insofar as opacity invites humility in, through, and beyond the moment of inquiry; opacity is necessary to curiosity. Opacity unsettles a curiosity that has become sedimented into sovereign or institutionalized forms of knowing; it resists dissection and confinement, freezing and flattening. Opacity insists that curiosity move, that the unknown proliferate. Opacity demands that curiosity reform and transform in real time, face to face with the living demands of things. Opacity is curiosity’s growth principle. And insofar as opacity is faithful to the weakness of the curiosity project, opacity is both curiosity’s true north and its ideal companion in shipwreck. But also for ambiguity.



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For Ambiguity

Ambiguity is unsettling. What is ambiguous exists in a space of hybridity. Against the carving of chasms between things, it builds belonging in the gully. Or braids a rope bridge overhead to sway easily in the wind. Functionally slippery, it refuses the significance of sides, choosing instead to encircle without and oscillate within. Ambiguity muddies water and muddies words. “Poetry is the home,” Billy Collins writes, “of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty.”42 In the perhaps of poetry, the precision of terms lies in the specific tenor and tether of their hesitancy, the purview of their plurivocity. Ambiguities are easily missed, falling through the cracks of neatly curated graphs and grids. But they also escape capture, natural fugitives from confinements of category. Like opacity, ambiguity is a fact of the matter. But it can also be an act of rebellion or a practice of respect. Working against systematization and in solidarity with system refuse, ambiguity politicizes the work of wavering. As such, ambiguity threatens not only binary ways of knowing but binaristic conceptions of knowers and knowns. And it insists on alternative ontologies (and epistemologies) of relation. In ambiguity, curiosity is beautifully entangled. Clear testaments to opacity, the records of Sarah Baartman and Zora Neale Hurston are also reservoirs of ambiguity. Most pressing, perhaps, in considerations of Baartman’s legacy are “the ambiguities of survival” under oppressive conditions.43 In scholarly attempts to determine the role of volition in her conscripted performances, Baartman’s own “ambiguous ways” of responding to questions about her freedom do little to clarify the case.44 Leaning into this uncertainty, Black feminist theorists focus their energies on “uncover[ing] something about human complexity and ambiguity beyond the all-­determining influences of social structure and relations of domination.”45 Given the undecidability of Baartman’s legacy and her own deployment of undecidability as a tactic, scholars refuse to settle the question of Sarah Baartman and instead settle into the space for continued questioning. Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy is similarly rife with ambiguity. As she herself puts it, “pigeon-­holes” are always disturbing; “flocks of pigeons” crowding and defacing sanctified statuary, however, now that is exciting.46 In her development of the “participant-­observer technique,” Hurston embraced the ambiguity that results from studying

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and participating in performance events among Black American communities in the U.S. South.47 Living with a community is the only way of learning about that community with integrity. Hurston also made the controversial decision in Mules and Men to represent her research results in a more literary style, slashing “classifications, index numbers, and informant data” for “figuration, dialect, [and] punning.”48 Insofar as an honest life is an ambiguous one, so is honest research. Both are full of pigeons. In their tribute to opacity, Aída Hurtado and Cynthia Paccacerqua turn to Gloria Anzaldúa as their paradigm for ambiguity.49 For Hurtado and Paccacerqua, opacity is not a lazy lack of clarity (so often assumed of marginalized theorists) or a refusal to make knowledge accessible (so often practiced by hegemonic theorists).50 Instead, opacity is a feminist tactic, an especially Latina and Chicana one that honors the fact of difference and different forms of knowing. As such, opacity is “a door to differential thinking as critical engagement.”51 Working within a relational epistemology, Hurtado and Paccacerqua insist that self-­reflexivity, situated conditions, and ethico-­political responsibility necessitate grappling with multiple opacities and their coincident ambiguities. Refusing the clarity that results from being admitted to existence within a Eurocentric system, á la Glissant, ambiguities pop up repeatedly in Latina and Chicana feminist processes of sense-­making and inquiry. Anzaldúa’s work is exemplary in this regard. Her own poetic ambiguity generates sense at the intimate interstices of multiple languages, genres, traditions, and histories. The “strategic estrangement” produced by this mélange, Hurtado and Paccacerqua insist, prompts questioning—­ indeed, prompts curiosity—­ as a practice of liberation.52 A seventh-­generation American and migrant worker, Anzaldúa was irrepressibly drawn to the power of the pen. The first in her family to attend college, she left the PhD program at University of Texas at Austin out of deep frustration with the structural disincentives to center Chicana feminism in her doctoral work. Born with a “wild tongue,”53 Anzaldúa leaned into the curiosity it cultivated. Writing across and through multiple languages (Tejano/Pachuco, Spanish, English) and genres (theory, history, autobiography, fiction, poetry), she culled and carried the questions that surface at their interstices.54



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By her own estimation, Anzaldúa was an immensely curious youth, marked by an insatiable hunger and the heart of a rebel. “I was criticized for being too curious,”55 she recalls. Growing up “hungry for more and more words,”56 she maintained as an adult “an incredible hunger to experience the world.”57 That hunger, however, was always paired with an unwillingness to accept what she was being fed. She was innately rebellious, she says, always “repeler”—­or, as she translates, “questioning”—­what she was told.58 This instinct stemmed from her “Shadow-­Beast,” who refused whatever was peddled or policed as “unquestionable”: the dualistic paradigms of patriarchy, white supremacy, monoculturalism, ableism, and homophobia.59 Read as part of her masculinity and her queerness, Anzaldúa’s “questioning” refused the way the world was carved up, especially where it made her illegible and unacceptable.60 Her questions signaled her mixing, her mestizaje. Her curiosity insisted upon her liminality. Throughout her work, Anzaldúa heralds the “new mestiza” and the “nepantlera,” figures born and bred in the ambiguities of the borderlands.61 With a cultivated “tolerance for contradictions” and “ambiguities,” such persons engage deeply with the multiplicities within themselves and those around them.62 For Anzaldúa, the term mestizaje signifies the fact of porosity in borders and boundaries, as well as the creative force that porosity portends. In turn, the Nahuatl concept of nepantla signifies the in-­between space as a threshold of transformation, a passageway to otherwise mixed and ambivalent possibilities.63 Coming to mestiza consciousness or becoming nepantlera, then, is not simply a work of critique but one of humility and imagination.64 She marks out three stages in this journey: inventory, rupture, and reinterpretation.65 At each stage, one must ask a qualitatively different question: What have I inherited? With what will I break? And what will I create?66 Commenting on this process of transformation, Chela Sandoval notes two basic requirements: “a lack of loyalty to dominant ideological signification” and “the intellectual curiosity that demands an explosion of meaning.”67 Harbingers of this explosive creativity, the new mestizas and nepantleras are, for Anzaldúa, the hope of the future. “Let’s look toward [them],” she writes, and their “tolerance for ambiguities,” for new images and imaginations of what is to come.68

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The terms mestiza and mestizaje stem from the rich Latin root of miscere, meaning to mix, mingle, or engage; to share in; to be changed into; or to throw into confusion, disturb, confound, or scatter.69 Insufferable to the West, such mixing offends its demands for rationality and duality,70 and frustrates its curiosity-­formations. Western culture aspires to a certain mechanistic “objectivity,” Anzaldúa explains, by making “‘objects’ of things,”71 compulsively “splitting”72 things apart and “chopping” them up into “little fragments.”73 These dualities and dichotomies, splits and cuts, she writes, are “the root of all violence.”74 For Anzaldúa, nowhere is this violence—­and mestiza resistance to it—­ more palpable than at the U.S.–­Mexico border and among borderland people. The border births but cannot brook the borderlands. The border splits, where the borderlands mix. The border walls off, where the borderlands bridge.75 Border questions separate and settle, where borderland questions “gather up [recojo]”76 and “scatter,”77 hazard and disturb. Borderland questions are necessitated by life in liminality, they surge up through the fissures between genders, races, cultures, geographies, abilities, and spiritualities. And they are always propelled by an admixture of reason and emotion, thought and imagination, critique and faith. Suffocated at the border, these questions and their ambiguities breathe freely and deeply in the borderlands. It is for this reason that borderland thinking—­and borderland curiosity—­functions in a space of opacity. Refusing the demands for transparency, borderland thinking holds together what is distinguishable but not isolable, different but not independent. Borderland curiosity asks not “What are you?”78 but “How [do] we relate to” and “engage with” the fabric between us and the fissures among us?79 When Anzaldúa writes in a now famous passage, “Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, a uniting, and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings,”80 she attests not only to the lived and practiced ambiguity of mestizaje but also to the deployment of that ambiguity in the field of curiosity, breathing new life into differently mixed and kneaded questions. Critical to borderland curiosity are the “cracks [rendijas].”81 The borderlands: an expanse of cracked ground under the thunder of a cracking sky; green shoots cracking the rocks to make room, along the



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crack of the Rio Grande. Pristine border walls creaking and cracking under the stress of ancient multiplicities. “Cracks ricocheting, bisecting, crisscrossing.”82 For Anzaldúa, mestiza consciousness begins with a fearless embrace of those cracks, whether they be within consciousness,83 across systems and assumptions, or between genders, races, cultures, and geographies. She invites her readers to welcome the cracks, rush up through the cracks, but also to “span the cracks.”84 This is mestizaje in life/writing. And it all begins with the lightning crack of borderland questions. What one wonders when one peers out through the cracks, when one has fallen between the cracks, or when one hides out in the cracks is what cannot otherwise be asked. What lies otherwise opaque, walled off by the illusions of simple, yet devastating determinations of kind and category, signification and citizenry. Questions that crack and that develop inside cracks are attendants to the wisdom of ambiguity. For ambiguity, then. Insofar as ambiguity invites complexity and honors multiplicity; insofar as ambiguity insists upon the muchness of things, the bothness and the betweenness of knowers and knowns; and insofar as ambiguity holds open the space of the question itself, suspending any simple directionality and subtending an ambient wonder, ambiguity is necessary to curiosity. Ambiguity not only precedes but accompanies curiosity, such that curiosity dies when ambiguity subsides. Escaping from sovereign systems and institutional sedimentations, ambiguities track the incommensurabilities between material architectures and discursive frames. They witness the irreverent configurations of life at the margins and living in the cracks. Like roots breaking sidewalks and winds bending telephone poles, ambiguities do the slow work of challenging what we think we know and who we think we are. Ambiguity stretches curiosity. And, insofar as ambiguity is faithful to the confounding character of the curiosity project, ambiguity is curiosity’s wizened elder, beckoning it down an uneven path toward an uncertain future. But also for intimacy. For Intimacy

Intimacy is unsettling. What is intimate exists in a network of fluid dynamics. Against forces of confinement and individuation, it parries

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connection and interaction. Functionally sticky, it refuses to let distance stand or distinctness divide. It is closeness without enclosure, nearness without negation, and entanglement without erasure. “All intimacy,” Gaston Bachelard writes, “hides from view.”85 Intimacy is never transparent, nor subject to mastery. It always escapes our grasp and resists being plumbed or pierced. Like opacity and ambiguity, intimacy is a fact and a resistance tactic, one that bears out a certain faithfulness. It surfaces between organisms, entities, and languages as a fundamental interconnectedness. Refusing the collapse of space, intimacy embraces the Other in relation, a strangeness up close. It marks a being-­and-­thinking-­in-­relation, a mesh network.86 As such, intimacy impinges on alienated ways of knowing and invites other pathways. It welcomes inquiries that stretch and bend between things. Intimacy is curiosity-­with. If the legacies of Sarah Baartman and Zora Neale Hurston are legacies of alienation and loss, they are equally ones of intimacy and belonging. Black feminist scholars such as Gabeba Baderoon and Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere return to Baartman again and again with an insistence on answering the historical harms of (especially colonial and anti-­Black) objectification with present-­day practices of “intimacy.”87 Artists Carla Williams, Zanele Muholi, and Diane Ferrus, likewise, focus their aesthetic tributes to Baartman on bringing home what has been estranged, holding close what has been held at arm’s length, and re-­membering what has been dis-­membered. A century after Sarah Baartman’s death, Zora Neale Hurston assumed the mantle of anthropologist only to turn it inside out. Dispensing with traditional standards of objectivity, Hurston instead rooted herself in the community, so that she might properly attest to the wealth of Black American wisdom and creativity in situ. According to her niece, Lucy Ann Hurston, Hurston’s anthropological methodology mimics the “intimate”88 structure of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. This is a tale told between friends, not for “mere curiosity[’s]” sake, but out of a longing for “close[ness]”;89 it is a tale that begins via the “intimate gate” rather than the front door.90 Assuming Hurston’s mantle in turn, Alice Walker embarked upon her “Zora Hurston expedition,” an intimate journey of rediscovery, of situating herself within a lost lineage and network of relations by finding and marking the



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grave of a loved one who lives on in the hearts and minds of Black women writers today. Indigenous philosophy theorizes intimacy in relationship to curiosity—­ intimacies between humans, the earth, and ecologies of knowledge. By insisting upon the relatedness of all things, Indigenous thinkers countermand the Western, settler-­colonial drive to reduce, isolate, and hierarchize. Dylan Robinson of the Stó:lō nation helpfully elucidates the Halq’eméylem word for settler: xwelítem, meaning “starving.” For the Stó:lō people, the settler is “so overcome with hunger” as to “lose the sense of relationality and reflexivity in the drive to satisfy that hunger.”91 This disregard for relationality is manifest in the excessive accumulation of physical and cultural territory, but also in an excessive reduction of the same. Settlers ravenously consume what is made forcibly “digestible.”92 As a hunger to know, settler-­colonial curiosity seeks to master unknown conceptual territory by making it separable, fixed, and thereby easily controlled, extracted from the vagaries of intimacy. Historical genocide, forced migration, destruction of records, erasure of lineages, and suppression of languages are all manifestations, then, of settler hunger, or the making-­digestible of Indigenous life (often via death). The contemporary segregation and confinement of Indigenous peoples on reservations and in museums extends this trajectory. In these spaces, Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway writes, “white eyes pour over the bones like bleach.”93 While crafted to satisfy settler curiosity, these confinements also curtail and even foreclose curiosity of another sort: an Indigenous curiosity, intimately enmeshed in Indigenous lands and histories. Resisting these confinements, Nehiyaw activist and educator Erica Violet Lee proposes “Indigenous curiosity” as “radical vulnerability, memory, and futurism,” a means to “reclaim our homes in the world.”94 Indigenous curiosity harbors a heightened sense of the relational networks within which curiosity functions. Métis educator Doug Anderson indicates as much in his contributions to Natural Curiosity, an environmental science primer revised to represent Indigenous philosophies in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. “Where modern conceptions of ecosystems suggest that nature consists of things” apart from humans, Anderson writes, “the Indigenous perspective” conceives of humans as only ever in “an

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intimate relationship with a living universe.”95 Key to an Indigenous “notion of inquiry,” then, “is relationship,”96 the relationships within which, through which, and for which inquiry functions. Indigenous notions of intimacy extend both outward and inward; they encompass ecosystems as well as human-­to-­human connections. In Indigenous practice, place-­based, experiential learning is necessarily paired with heart-­based learning and community engagement. “Heart-­based learning” (Anishinaabemowin, Debwewin)97 involves honoring a person’s sacred light or inner spark. Far from a mechanistic process of knowledge acquisition, heart-­based learning is an ongoing journey of “coming to know,”98 a journey through which one is engaged and changed in intimate relation with everything around them. This is a passional process, but it is also an inescapably communal one. Learning is not the purview of atomized persons, but an engagement undertaken in common. Critical to community knowledge-­building (and healing) are traditional assemblies, talking circles, and storytelling. Indigenous curiosity, then, is practiced in deep relationship with the land, the heart, and companion beings. For Shay Welch, of Oklahoma Cherokee heritage, Indigenous knowing is rooted in wonder. Noting the power of wonder in Native American narrative culture, Welch helpfully parses its multiple functions. Wonder equips one to suspend judgment, to legitimize the story by entering into it imaginatively, to empathize rather than exoticize, and to collectively explore paths of coexistence.99 Wonder, for Welch, is an embodied form of listening that rewires “the vitality-­affect contours” of the listener to follow and flow with the singer, the dancer, or the storyteller.100 Intimacy with oneself and others, therefore, transforms the inquisitive moment into something vibrantly relational. A wondrous, relational curiosity is a listening one. It listens not by itself or for itself but always already within a dense web of interconnections. Reflecting on the dangers of antirelational listening, Shawnee scholar Thomas M. Norton-­Smith retells a Menominee story that critiques self-­interested curiosity: Once an Indian had a revelation from the head of all the frogs and toads. In the early spring, when all the frogs and toads thaw out, they sing and shout more noisily than at any other time of the year.



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This Indian made it a practice to listen to the frogs every spring when they first began, as he admired their songs, and wanted to learn something from them. He would stand near the puddles, marshes, and lakes to hear them better, and once, when night came, he lay right down to hear them. In the morning, when he woke up, the frogs spoke to him, saying: “We are not all happy, but in very deep sadness. You seem to like our crying, but this is our reason for weeping. In early spring, when we first thaw out and revive, we wail for our dead, for lots of us don’t wake up from our winter sleep. Now you will cry in your turn as we did!” Sure enough, the next spring the Indian’s wife and children all died, and the Indian died likewise, to pay for his curiosity to hear the multitude of frogs. So, this Indian was taught what has been known ever since by all Indians that they must not go on purpose to listen to the cries of frogs in the early spring.101

In his treatment of this complex tale, Norton-­Smith emphasizes the rich web of interrelations between beings, which necessarily forestalls and forbids any “puerile curiosity,”102 any simple desire to learn and the pleasure derived from it. Instead, all learning is reframed in relation and all curiosity in respect. Both demand another kind of listening. Menominee wisdom, moreover, highlights that if and when the radical vulnerability of the world’s interrelatedness is ignored, that essential connectedness will return with a vengeance. In contrast to hungry listening (which, while quintessentially settler, is a positionality that can be assumed within and across a spate of identities), Dylan Robinson posits critical listening or “listening-­in-­ relation.”103 Such listening recasts curiosity from greedy accumulation to generous attention. Robinson situates critical listening at the crossroads of the Stó:lō and Haudenosaunee or Anishinaabe listening practices of “witness attention” and “thanksgiving.” It begins by gathering up and scattering presence, attending to the listener and the space in which one listens but also to the communal, ecological, and ultimately cosmological participants in the encounter. Witnessing the “multiple contexts and complicated networks that precede, surround, and are brought into being by a song,” a dance, or a story, such listening embeds listeners in a web far beyond their own weaving.104 Through it,

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listeners experience “new temporalities of wonder,”105 as they “oscillate” between layers of sense and sentience.106 Inescapable, however, is the indigestible, the unaccumulable. Critical listening, for Robinson, reckons with “incommensurability,”107 and attends humbly to “deliberate opacity.”108 Not all that is witnessed can be understood. Not all gratefulness can be grasped. Given the breadth of the encounter, critical listening is a full-­bodied activity, employing “the fullest range of sensory experience.”109 It is haptic at best, because the “intimacy” of the encounter “attunes us to touch.”110 But it also displaces the listener. Robinson enjoins us “to understand listening as an ecology in which we are not only listening but listened to.”111 The land also listens.112 Critical listening thus entails an “apposite method” of listening “alongside.”113 Listening in this deeply unsettling, broadly affective way is inescapably transformative. A testament to the teachings of the earth, Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work explores the power of “listening” to transform disciplinary categories and confines.114 In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer tells the story of her choice to study botany. Arriving at SUNY College, she told her advisor she wanted to major in botany in order to determine “why asters and golden rods looked so beautiful together.”115 He instantly—­and dismissively—­told her that such an inquiry was not science at all but poetry. By a circuitous path, however, Kimmerer found her way into a “heart-­driven science”116 that seeks to understand the relationships among plants, the threads between things, and the architectures of their reciprocity. She discovered that bees perceive “drifts of golden yellow and pools of deepest purple”117 as intensifiers, much like we do, and therefore naturally cross-­pollinate. The two plants thus grow better together than they do apart. This is the case for Solidago canadensis and Aster novae-­angliae, she writes, but also for Western science and traditional knowledge, for botany and poetry. Precisely because “we are all related” (Lakota, Mitakuye Oyasin), such that “all things . . . are connected at every level to everything,”118 from ecosystems to synapses, subject areas and methods of knowledge are also interconnected. Disciplines cannot be, in the final analysis, cleanly separated. Science and art, biology and literature are “intimately intertwined.”119 They weave together in elegant undulations, with or without our permission.120



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At the heart of Indigenous wisdom is a holism that seeks to lovingly investigate the webs of life and knowledge alongside one another. It is a curiosity untrammeled by disciplinary purity. The web is an image of “kinship modality” itself, Brian Burkhart, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, writes; as such, it “imbues all things with sacredness.”121 It includes not only the infinite networks in a more-­than-­human world (interlocked branches above, rhizomatic roots below, heart strings between) but also overlaid temporalities, webs of history and ancestry. These “complex webs of genealogical connections,”122 Maori Carl Mika writes, deepen our enmeshments and invite richer practices of attention. Indeed, the radical extent of intimacy in the Indigenous worldview explodes curiosity. How might we conceive of questions created in a web, yes, but also questions that contribute to a web, that weave it? What are the markers of questions that admit to their entangled and entangling character? And what of the webs of questions themselves, their architectures and kinesthetic signatures? Such questions are only ever inside intimate relation, and they recognize the incalculability—­even the undecidability—­of those relations. Webbed questions are never asked by one to another, but rather stretched between beings. They are not posed prior to listening but expressed as an act of listening itself. This is a curiosity that shuttles between, that stretches and that sticks. And it listens for the questions extended from other corners. If glaciers listen, what do they ask? Ask of us, ask with us?123 For intimacy, then. Insofar as intimacy refuses the isolates of knower and known, curiosity seeker and curio; insofar as intimacy pulls curiosity between and beneath things, stretching it along axes and shuttling it through rhizomes; and insofar as intimacy insists upon the extent of curiosity’s debts and the reach of its gifts, intimacy is necessary to curiosity. Intimacy is the air it breathes, the water in which it swims, the aster to its goldenrod. Intimacy unsettles a curiosity that has become settled and sedimented over time into institutionalized knowledge-­formations. Whatever has been dried out by the sovereign sun is made malleable again by the lunar tide. Whatever has been calcified by pressure and exposure, refusing to support life, intimacy breaks down like moss, turning it into soil. Intimacy alone has the capacity to start new forests of inquiry. And insofar as intimacy is faithful to the

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dependencies of the curiosity project, intimacy is curiosity’s kith and kin, its queer companion across (in)animate terrains. And for opacity. And ambiguity.

I do not propose that opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy are fail-­safes or godsends. I am under no illusions that any savoir can be a savior. Given the contributions of political philosophy to an account of curiosity, it seems prudent to assume that certain formations of opacity, of ambiguity, and, yes, even of intimacy—­much like certain formations of curiosity—­can function on the side of sovereign institutions just as much as on the side of marginalized resistance. Where there are warring curiosities, there are likely also warring opacities, warring ambiguities, warring intimacies. Nevertheless, there is something here in the Black feminist, Caribbean, Chicana, and North American Indigenous traditions that breathes new political life into the practice of curiosity. Appearing within, after, and before the philosophical canon—­and Western intellectual history more generally—­these bodies of work offer not only sustained insights into today’s reigning political structures but also a plurality of resistance strategies. The notions of opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy illuminate the trouble with curiosity and set about transforming it. Whatever future lies in store for thinking the politics of curiosity, it would do well to think curiosity beyond the individual and the spectacle-­erasure formation; that is, it would do well to think curiosity collectively and to unsettle its surety, appreciating the multiple resistances and relations in that venture. In their nascent contributions to a politics of curiosity, political theorists of the Western intellectual tradition certainly admit of such resistances and relations. In the work of freedom, there are moments when consciousness must crack and the sedimentations of identity, the strictures of rationality, and the confines of morality must break. In those deeply unsettling moments, more than one thing is true, more than one thing is right. Systems clash and reality is rife with uncertainty. Only through careful attention to the ambiguity of things can a new gathering be created and a previously prohibited assemblage arise. But attending to that ambiguity is difficult. What cannot be mastered by existing measurements frustrates the tools and frameworks one has inherited. The irreducibility of things rebuffs subsumption into



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category. Opacity bucks sovereignty, and sense scatters in its wake. But normalized networks of symbol and sociality are not the only possible, or indeed present, arrangements. Other webs of relations flourish behind, beneath, and to the side. Other bonds of belonging are always already being built. As effectively as institutions might control affect and practice, the heat of other intimacies can melt what has been frozen, can make what is fixed move again. As much as this cycle of social change might attend any moment of social transformation, some political theorists—­whether officious or inadvertent—­locate it specifically in the dynamic of oppression and marginalization. There is an instability at the margins of social discourse and structures that uniquely incites the struggle over formations and de-­ formations of curiosity. Histories of activism and community-­ building in the shadows of cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and classism repeatedly cultivate those forces of epistemic disruption at the margins. The work we have traced in the civil rights and prison resistance movements, as well as within disability and trans communities, is traceable still in other contexts, geographies, and histories. It is there that systems fail and concepts break, against the vibrant multiplicity of the body as lived. And it is there that community counterconducts are nourished, reconfiguring curiosity within unexpected and occluded relations. From this vantage point, opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy deeply unsettle oppressive hierarchies and thereby serve to enhance social and epistemic justice in the project of practicing curiosity otherwise. Different social positions, moreover, prompt different re-­ formations. In contrast to canonical contributions to the politics of curiosity, and some political resistance traditions, Édouard Glissant, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the aforementioned North American Indigenous theorists insist that the war over curiosity be expressly tethered to coloniality and rooted in geography. That is to say, each locates the dangers of curiosity in the abuses of Western colonial ontologies and epistemologies. And each roots the anticolonial promise of curiosity in specific geographical regions—­the Caribbean, the U.S.–­Mexico border, and the Earth itself. In doing so, they demonstrate an accountability to these unique genealogies and geographies of curiosity. Their testaments invite political philosophers and theorists of curiosity—­not to mention political activists—­to cultivate an anticolonial curiosity and

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to grapple with the ways in which imperialism, colonialism, and multiple racial projects have structured the discourse of politics and curiosity from the beginning. More fundamentally, they invite curiosity practitioners to critically interrogate the soil in which their inherited curiosity formations grew, and the soil in which they choose to root their resistance. More than this, however, Glissant, Anzaldúa, and these North American Indigenous theorists also insist that an anticolonial practice of curiosity must disrupt anthropocentrism and embrace a more-­ than-­human ecology. While Glissant’s own sense of ecological interconnectedness is indebted in part to Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Walt Whitman,124 he credits something more ancient. It was the pre-­Socratics, he writes, who first thought being-­in-­relation, such that “If you kill the river, the tree, the sky, the earth, you kill the human.”125 Writing with her creaturely companions—­the snake and the eagle, the wind and the mesquite—­Anzaldúa, by contrast, draws on Central American Indigenous philosophies.126 These wisdom traditions teach her that “every person, animal, plant, stone is interconnected,”127 and “we live in each other’s pockets.”128 For her, the work of “bringing it all back together,”129 the bridge-­work across chasms, is one of faithfulness to the opacities, the ambiguities, and the intimacies within and across all things. As Brian Burkhart insists, however, this cannot be an indifferent globalization, as if all lands were identical and all ecological systems the same. Resistance to coloniality, for him, necessitates “locality.”130 Against the economic extractions and epistemic abstractions that “float free from the land,” locality insists upon a return to the land where one is and the landed beings with whom one lives.131 Which rivers, which trees, which skies, and which peoples surround us? And what is it to query with them? Together these thinkers propose the still unthought or even unthinkable: a more-­than-­human politics of curiosity. Of the many paths my own curiosity might take, I hope for a curiosity alive to the things I do not know and perhaps cannot know. A curiosity attuned to the oscillations within and between things. And a curiosity conscious of its own stickiness, its embedded presence.

Acknowledgments

Insofar as curiosity is a connector, this project sits in a vast web of connections without which it could not have come into being. It is a pleasure—­and an impossibility—­to take stock of that web. By offering these acknowledgments, I do not mean to simply thank, but to manifest a grateful knowing. In this spirit, I want to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional territories I conducted this work: the Anishinaabe, the Nonotuck, the Lenni-­Lenape, and the Piscataway. I also want to acknowledge the many peoples whose curiosities have been suppressed, lost, frustrated, and denied but whose curiosity has nevertheless said, “I rise.” To my feminist, queer, and trans ancestors, in particular, my thanks for your tenacious and creative curiosity and for making a space for me in the academy—­and on the street—­long before I arrived on the scene. Thanks to my undergraduate philosophy instructors, David Mills and Amy Dyson, who helped a lost kid find home. Thanks to my dissertation committee—­Tina Chanter, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and Kevin Thompson—­who, despite hesitation, supported this project in its earliest forms. Thanks to the rich community of curiosity-­thinkers at Hampshire College, University of Pennsylvania, the Center for Curiosity, and American University. Thanks to the Curiosity, Mindfulness, and Education Group, especially Lynn Borton. Thanks also to the students in “The Ethics of Curiosity” course at Hampshire College (Spring 2016), as well as “The Philosophy of Curiosity” and “Curiosity, Politics, and

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the Public Realm” courses at American University (Spring 2018 and Fall 2019), for getting curious about curiosity in a more expansive sense than I could ever have imagined. And thanks to my research assistants, especially Matthew Ferguson, Stephen Masson, and Leslie Moorman. It was a pleasure to query with you. An unspeakable thanks to my colleagues and students in the McNair Scholars Program and the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI), as well as to the members of the various diversity teams on which I have worked over the years. Your flinty courage, irrepressible imagination, and companionship in the present and the impossible are things I now carry within me. Thanks to generous audience members who have helpfully engaged my curiosity-­related work, including attendees at the American Educational Research Association, American Philosophical Association, Critical Genealogies Workshop, Derrida Today, Diverse Lineages of Existentialism, philoSOPHIA, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and the Trans Philosophy Project conferences, as well as audiences at Academic Programs International, Adelphi University, American University, Appalachian State University, Brooklyn Public Philosophers, Choose to Be Curious, DePaul University, DePauw University, Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, Hampshire College, Haverford College, MIT Media Lab, the University of Colorado Denver, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Imagination Institute, the Penn Network Visualization Program, Lea Elementary, Open Connections, Villanova University, and Westtown School. A huge thanks to the Center for Curiosity, whose financial support provided much of the time and space for this work. Thanks to Dani Kasprzak, who acquired the book at the University of Minnesota Press, and to Pieter Martin for shepherding it through to publication. Thanks also to my anonymous reviewers, whose incisive comments repeatedly shone a light on nearby footholds I could not quite make out. Thanks to Talia Bettcher, Jeremy Bell, Stephanie Jenkins, Christina León, and Andrea Pitts for their invaluable feedback on individual chapters; I owe a huge debt to the wells of knowledge they brought to this project. And to Kris, who read every word with the truest ear, the fiercest mind, and the biggest heart. Thanks to the families to which I have been lucky enough to be-

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long: to Jeremy Bell, Andrew Dilts, Marie Draz, Azadeh Erfani, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, O’Donavan Johnson, Sina Kramer, Jana McAuliffe, and Jeff Pardikes; to Javiera Benavente and Teal Van Dyck; to Talia Bettcher, Loren Cannon, Grayson Hunt, Tamsin Kimoto, Andrea Pitts, and Yannik Thiem. You are beautiful. A special thanks to Andrew Dilts and Andrea Pitts, who have seen me and seen me through. I owe an unusual debt also to my mother, my father, and my grandmother, for modeling the self-­reflective, disciplined, and raucous character of curiosity for me from a young age. To my twin, Dani, for her matchless companionship in curiosity from the beginning, to my sister Kris for her fearless wonder, and to the delightfully curious crew who are my siblings. Y’all have my heart. A deep thanks to those who have loved me through this project (and despite this project). Especially the one who walks with me. It would not be as honest and exuberant of a work as it is without you. It is my hope that this book is made of the stuff of the world. Because of you, that might just be true.

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Notes

Why the Politics of Curiosity? 1. Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora” (1975), in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Publishers, 1983), 93. 2. Gloria L. Cronin, “Introduction: Going to the Far Horizon,” in Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 10. 3. E.g., Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit, eds., The Moral Psychology of Curiosity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). 4. E.g., Ilhan Inan, The Philosophy of Curiosity (New York: Routledge, 2017). 5. Perry Zurn, “Curiosities at War: The Police and Prison Resistance after May ’68,” Modern and Contemporary France 26, no. 2 (2018): 179–­91. 6. See, for example, Pumla Dineo Gquola, “(Not) Representing Sarah Bartmann,” in What is Slavery to Me? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81; Natasha Gordon-­ Chipembere, “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, A Legacy to Grasp,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3, 7; Sheila Smith McKoy, “Placing and Replacing ‘The Venus Hottentot’: An Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85, 88. 7. Laura Callahan, “De-­aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” in Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-­ Victorian English Prose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 144. 8. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere, “Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama in the Twenty-­First Century,” in Representation

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and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­ Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171. 9. Callahan, “De-­Aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” 142. 10. McKoy, “Placing and Replacing ‘The Venus Hottentot,’” 96. 11. Callahan, “De-­aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” 152. 12. Callahan, 142. 13. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-­Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 223–­61. 14. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Post-­Structuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” in Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Debora Willis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 59–­60. 15. Callahan, “De-­aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” 142. 16. Callahan, 155. 17. Helen Davies, “Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman,” in Neo-­Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 24. 18. Callahan, “De-­aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” 156. 19. Jennifer Nash, “Archives of Pain: Reading the Black Feminist Theoretical Archive,” in The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 52; Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, “‘Body’ of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23; Gabeba Baderoon, “Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure That Has Been Looked at Too Much?,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 65–­ 83; Callahan, “De-­ aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” 154. 20. Gquola, “(Not) Representing Sarah Bartmann,” 127. 21. Gquola, 142. 22. Ndlovu, “‘Body’ of Evidence,” 27. 23. Ndlovu, 17–­18. 24. Nash, “Archives of Pain,” 52–­54. 25. Baderoon, “Baartman and the Private,” 77–­83. 26. Diana Ferrus, “I’ve Come to Take You Home,” in I’ve Come to Take You Home (Kuils River, South Africa: Xlibris Publishing, 2011), 15. 27. Trinh T. Minh-­ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 48.



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28. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 48. 29. Trinh, 84. Thanks to Elizabeth Paquette for this reference. 30. Maya Angelou, preface to Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, by Zora Neale Hurston (1942; New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), viii. 31. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 115–­16. 32. Lucy Anne Hurston, “Zora Neale Hurston: Pioneering Social Scientist,” in “The Inside Light”: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Deborah G. Plant (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010), 18. 33. Lovalerie King, “Zora Neale Hurston,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, ed. Timothy Parrish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 150. 34. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 26. 35. Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Random House, 1996), 564. 36. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 143. 37. Hurston, 144. 38. “Alice Walker (2003): ‘Journey to Zora Neale Hurston,’” Barnard Center for Research on Women, July 7, 2014, YouTube video, 12:57, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSzzeleeMuI. 39. Walker, “Looking for Zora,” 94. 40. Walker, 104–­5. 41. Walker, 102. 42. Elizabeth Wolfe and Brian Ries, “Columbia’s Library Building Features the Names of Only Male Authors. After 3 Decades of Trying, These Students Have Fixed That,” CNN.com, October 7, 2019, https://www.cnn .com/2019/10/04/us/columbia-library-authors-banner-trnd/index.html. 43. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Carolyn J.  B. Hammond (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2014). 44. John Locke, Some Thoughts on Education, ed. John William Adamson (1693; New York: Dover, 2007). 45. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 46. Hans-­Georg Voss and Heidi Keller, Curiosity and Exploration: Theories and Results (New York: Academic Press, 1983). 47. Marianna Papastephanou, “The ‘Lifeblood’ of Science and Its Politics: Interrogating Epistemic Curiosity as an Educational Aim,” Education Sciences 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–­16. 48. Justin E. H. Smith, “Curiosity,” in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (New York: Cabinet Books, 2012).

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49. Eva-­Maria Swidler, “Curiosity Is Political: We Must Nurture It If We Hope to Change the World,” Truthout, September 16, 2018, https://truthout .org/articles/curiosity-is-political-we-must-nurture-it-if-we-hope-to-change -the-world/. 50. Perry Zurn, “Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity,” in Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Marianna Papastefanou (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 26–­49. 51. Zurn, “Curiosities at War;” Perry Zurn, “Curiosity and Political Resistance,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, eds. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 227–­45. 52. Questions are like comets in a way; they shine a bright light ahead while trailing a tail.

1. A Political History of Curiosity 1. See Justin E. H. Smith, “The Curiosa,” in The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 21–­53. 2. Ilhan Inan, The Philosophy of Curiosity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 8. 3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (1966; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 238. 4. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 238–­39. 5. As Michel Foucault writes, “[The] importance [of institutional formations] does not lie essentially in what they make it possible to see, but in what they hide and in what, by this process of obliteration, they allow to emerge”; see The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 2014), 137. 6. Justin E. H. Smith, “Curiosity,” in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (New York: Cabinet Books, 2012), 482. 7. Marianna Papastephanou, “The ‘Lifeblood’ of Science and Its Politics: Interrogating Epistemic Curiosity as an Educational Aim,” Education Sciences 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–­16; see also Papastephanou, “Interrogating the Unqualified Valorization of Curiosity,” in Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 2–­25. 8. Corey McCall, “Imperious Curiosity,” in Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 105–­27.



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9. Eva-­Maria Swidler, “Curiosity Is Political: We Must Nurture It If We Hope to Change the World,” Truthout, September 16, 2018, https://truthout .org/articles/curiosity-is-political-we-must-nurture-it-if-we-hope-to-change -the-world/. 10. Matthew Leigh, From Polypragmon to Curiosus: Ancient Concepts of Curious and Meddlesome Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11. Victor Ehrenberg, “Polypragmosyne: A Study of Greek Politics,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 67 (1947): 46–­67. 12. Plato, Theaetetus, in Theaetetus and Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1952), 155c–­d. 13. Plato, The Lovers, in Charmides, Alcibiades 1 & 2, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 137b (note: while attributed to Plato, debate exists as to The Lovers’ authenticity). Cf. Plato’s stranger admits the conversation has been long but, he insists, it has not been “irrelevant [periergia]”; see Statesman, in Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. Harold North Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 286c. 14. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I-­ IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1933), 980a. 15. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1942), 739b19–­20 and 744a36–­38. 16. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 4.433a. 17. Plato, Republic, 4.434b. 18. Plato, 8.551e–­552a. 19. Plato, 4.444b. 20. Plato, Laws, Books 7–­12, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1926), 7.821a. 21. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 4.12.4.1299b. 22. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1926), 2.6.11–­12.1381a. 23. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.6.11–­12.1381a. 24. Plato, Apology, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Phaedrus (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1904), 19b. 25. Plato, Apology, 31c. 26. Seneca, preface to Naturales Questiones (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1972), I.12. 27. Seneca, preface, I.12. 28. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1934), 6.1142a.1–­2.

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29. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 6.1142a.7–­10. 30. Epictetus, “On Friendship,” in Discourses, trans. George Long (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904), 2.22. 31. Epictetus, “On Cynicism,” in Discourses, trans. George Long (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904), 3.22.97. 32. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” in Moralia VI (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2005), 515d. 33. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” 520d. 34. Plutarch, 519a, 521d–­e. 35. Plutarch, 520c. 36. Plutarch, 519f. 37. Plutarch, 522b. 38. Plutarch, 516b. 39. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, trans. J. Arthur Hanson (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1989), 1.2. 40. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 11.15. 41. Apuleius, 1.2. 42. Apuleius, 2.6, 3.22, 2.2, 1.18. 43. Apuleius, 2.5, 3.19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 11.13, 16, 27; cp. mutatam, 3.9, 11.6; renatus, 11.16. 44. Apuleius, 1.6, 1.9, 11.13. 45. Apuleius, 11.25, 11.5, 11.21, 11.19, 11.22, 23. 46. Philo, “On the Migration of Abraham,” in Volume IV (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1935), 184–­89. 47. Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics, trans. T. Herbert Bindley (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1914), bk. 7, 8, and 14. 48. Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics, bk. 7. 49. Tertullian, bk. 14. 50. Tertullian, bk. 7. 51. Tertullian, bk. 14; cp. Matthew 15:14. 52. Tertullian, bk. 30. 53. Tertullian, bk. 43. 54. Tertullian, bk. 43. 55. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Carolyn J.  B. Hammond (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2014), 22.6 and 5.3. For a full treatment of curiosity in Augustine, see Joseph Torchia, Restless Mind: Curiositas and the Scope of Inquiry in St. Augustine’s Psychology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2013). 56. 1 John 2:16 (King James Version). 57. Augustine, Confessions, 10.30–­34.



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58. Cp. Plato, The Republic, Book 1-­5, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1930), 4.440a. 59. Augustine, Confessions, 10.35. 60. Augustine, 10.35. 61. Augustine, 10.36–­40. 62. Augustine, De Musica, Liber Sextus, 13.39; On Music, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro (Rhode Island, 1947), 364. 63. Augustine, De Vera Religione, Liber Unus, 29.52, 52.101. Commentator Boniface Ramsey, in The City of God: A Translation for the 21st Century (New York: New City Press, 2012), describes it as “an overweening interest in something inconsequential or even bad” (77n24). Likewise, in The Path of St. Augustine (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), William Banner calls it, “an appetite for knowledge of things, the satisfaction of which appetite informs but also distracts and corrupts” (36). 64. Augustine, City of God, vols. 2 and 7, trans. William M. Green (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1963 and 1972), 4.34, 5.21, 7.34–­35, 10.9, and 21; cp. Acts 19:18–­20 (King James Version). 65. Augustine, “De Utilitate Credendi,” in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953). 66. Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, 1.21.38. 67. Augustine, “Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees,” in On Genesis, trans. Roland J. Teske (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 1991), 1.23.40. 68. Augustine, “Two Books on Genesis,” 1.18.27. 69. Augustine, 1.23.87, 2.25.135. 70. Augustine, 2.17.122, 2.26.136. 71. Augustine, 2.26.136. 72. Augustine, 2.26.136–­37. 73. Augustine, 2.27.138. 74. Augustine, 2.18 and 2.19. 75. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1274; New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947–­1948), 2.2.166–­67. 76. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pt. III, chap. 6. 77. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2.165.2. 78. Aquinas, 2.2.167.2. 79. Isidore, “De Summo Bono” (1499), ii, 37; Gregory, Moralia (London: Oxford, 1844), xxxi, 45. 80. Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence Miller (1511; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 51. 81. Saint Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, trans. Abbot Gasquet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909), 34.

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82. Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 83. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon: A Treatise on the Love of Books, Latin/ English edition, trans. John B. Inglis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1861), 185. 84. De Bury, Philobiblon, 143. 85. De Bury, 147. 86. De Bury, 125. 87. De Bury, 117. 88. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon: A Treatise on the Love of Books, trans. E. C. Thomas (1907), 6. 89. De Bury, Philobiblon, trans. John B. Inglis, 93, 147. 90. De Bury, 68. 91. De Bury, 189. 92. De Bury, 77. 93. De Bury, 81. 94. De Bury, 99 and 171. 95. Francis Bacon, “Of Tribute” (1595), in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31. 96. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 79–­80. 97. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–­1750 (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2001). 98. David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–­1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 99. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (1670; New York: Penguin Books, 1995), §152. 100. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1785; The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), Immanuel Kant defines curiosity as “the tendency to acquire knowledge merely for the sake of its novelty, rarity and secrecy” (§25b). 101. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §25b. 102. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.3.10. 103. René Descartes, “The Search for Truth” (1941), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 402. 104. E.g., René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul (1649), in The Philo-



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sophical Writings of Descartes I, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 350. Cp. Pascal, “I believe that with his curiosity changing into wonder he will be more disposed to contemplate them [i.e., the abysses of infinity and nothingness] in silence than investigate them in presumption” (Pensées, §72). 105. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature (1650), in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 4, ed. Sir William Molesworth (Darmstadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1966), 9.18. 106. Hobbes, Human Nature, 9.18. 107. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico (1655), trans. J.  C.  A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford 1994), 1.2. 108. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1994), 3.5. 109. Hobbes, Leviathan, 11.25. 110. Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 53. The irony of this claim today should not be lost. 111. Hobbes, Human Nature, 9.18; cp. Leviathan, 6.35. 112. Hobbes, Leviathan, 6.35. 113. Hobbes, 3.5. 114. Hobbes, Human Nature, 9.18, 5.4. 115. In a moment of unusual humility for a philosopher, Hobbes grants that, while curiosity elevates humans over animals, it also catapults them into the realm of error, falsehoods, and misconceptions, from which animals remain untainted. See Human Nature, 5.13; Leviathan, 8.25. 116. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John William Adamson (1693; New York: Dover, 2007), §118. 117. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §113.2, 89. 118. Locke, §109.2, 86. 119. Locke, §113.2, 89. 120. Locke, §115, 90. 121. Locke, §122, 96. 122. Locke, §122, 96. 123. Locke, §123, 97. 124. Locke, §123, 97. 125. Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782; New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 116. 126. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (1755; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 143.

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127. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (1762; New York: Basic Books: 1979), 167. 128. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Émile, 227–­33. 129. Rousseau, 368. 130. Rousseau, 368. 131. Rousseau, 199. 132. Rousseau, 222. 133. Rousseau, 224–­27. 134. Rousseau, 227–­29.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), preface 1, §4. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), preface §6, 20. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §308, 246. 4. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, preface §1, 15. 5. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface 2, §1, 210; Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, preface §3, 16. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), §45. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), “Why I Am So Clever” §1. 8. Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 26. 9. Bernard Reginster, “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 3 (2013): 457n28. 10. Mark Alfano, “The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue Epistemologist,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 31, no. 4 (2013): 779–­80; cp. Olli-­Pekka Vainio, Virtue: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2016), 62. 11. Other possible strategies for this inquiry might include: tracking Nietzsche’s use of interrogative sentences; tracking his use of the terms question, questioning, and question mark; and tracking his use of synonyms or synonymous phrases for curiosity, including wonder, inquiry, exploration, and desire to know. Moreover, while I will structure my inquiry topically, those who prefer a chronological treatment will be interested to note that



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the struggle I trace, between a curiosity for and against life, is evident across Nietzsche’s early, middle, and late works. 12. For a wonderful discussion of the development of these German words for curiosity, see Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe Word Histories (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1998), esp. 93–­105. 13. James Mark Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Macmillan Company, 1901). “Curiosity: Ger. Neugier, Wissbegier; Fr. curiosité; Ital. curiosità. The disposition to give attention, so far as it has for its motive the mere increase of knowledge, apart from practical interest. The two cases often distinguished (as in the German terms) are those respectively of curiosity and interest in novelty (Neugier), and the disposition to learn or to know for the sake of information (Wissbegier; cf. Groos, Die Spiele d. Menschen), the latter being, however, usually motivated by the somewhat trivial reason which characterizes curiosity in general” (249). 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §6. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral Sense” (1873), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §1. 16. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface 1, §4 and §3. 17. Alfano’s dataset is limited to the sixty-­eight passages (or seventy total references) to Neugier and its cognates, as well as the seven passages (and seven total references) to Wissbegier and its cognates, in the published works. His analysis therefore excludes references to Neugier and Wissbegier in the Nachlass, as well as references to Kuriosität and Vorwitz in the published work as well as in the Nachlass. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.  J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §552 (Spring–­Fall 1887), 299. 19. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 44. 21. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 116; see also Wendy Brown, “Nietzsche for Politics,” in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan D. Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 205–­23; William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

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22. See Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995). 23. Nietzsche, Will to Power, §1067, 550. 24. Nietzsche, §704, 374. 25. E.g., Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1978), 115. Cf. George Bernard Shaw’s sentiment, “Satisfaction is death” (Overruled [1912; HardPress, 2006]). 27. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 116. 28. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (1962; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 53. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 33. 30. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 33. 31. Cf. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); The Sense and Non-­sense of Revolt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 32. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages.” 33. Nietzsche, §10, 122; cp. Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche, 38–­43. 34. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 27. 35. See Charlene A. Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 36. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” §9. 37. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §276, 223. 38. See Reginster, Affirmation of Life. 39. Nietzsche, “Morality as Anti-­nature,” in Twilight of the Idols, 52–­57. 40. See Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §195, 115. 42. Nietzsche, Will to Power, §916, 483. 43. Nietzsche, §916, 483. 44. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §409, 153. 45. Nietzsche, §409, 153. 46. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente Sommer-­Herbst 1973 29[13], www.nietzschesource.org.



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47. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-­Christ, trans. H.  L. Mencken (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1999), §28, 45–­46. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §11, 52. 49. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” §3, 74–­75. 50. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” §1. 51. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” §7, 100. 52. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §123. 53. Nietzsche, “Davis Strauss,” §1, 6. 54. Nietzsche, §4, 18. 55. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” §6, 97. 56. Nietzsche, §6, 97. 57. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, part 2, §129, 243. 58. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 346, 285. 59. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 31. 60. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, part 2, §176, 352. 61. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 81–­82. 62. Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Untimely Meditations, §6, 219–­20. 63. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §172, 105. 64. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” §2, 67–­68. 65. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, third essay, §27, 159–­60. 66. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §345, 283–­84. 67. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 17. 68. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, preface §3, 16. 69. Nietzsche, 17. 70. Nietzsche, §45, 59. 71. Nietzsche, §45, 59. 72. Nietzsche, §45, 59. 73. Nietzsche, §186, 97–­98. 74. Nietzsche, §44, 55–­56. 75. Nietzsche, §44, 55–­56. 76. Nietzsche, §292, 230. 77. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever,” §6, 250. 78. Nietzsche, Will to Power, §426, 230. 79. Nietzsche, §426, 230. 80. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface 2, §1, 210. 81. Nietzsche, preface 2, §1, 210. 82. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §2, 34.

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83. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). 84. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, part 1, §629, 198. 85. See Rebecca Bamford, ed., Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 86. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface 1, §3. 87. Nietzsche, preface 1, §4. 88. Nietzsche, preface 1, §4. 89. Nietzsche, preface 1, §3. 90. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §375. 91. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §227. 92. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §314, 157–­58. 93. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §382, 346–­47. 94. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §432, 185. 95. Nietzsche, §432, 185. 96. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” 142–­43. 97. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” §3. 98. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 1, §14. 99. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface 2, §5. 100. Although Nietzsche plays with the idea of a “monastery for free spirits,” particularly in his middle period, he appears to mean a certain companionship in exceptionalism rather than a true, active collectivity. 101. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 49–­50. 102. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: A Landmark Exploration of the Dark Side of Human Ingenuity and Imagination (New York: Harvest Book, 1996). 103. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” §2, 224. 104. Andrew Huddleston, “Nietzsche on the Health of the Soul,” Inquiry 60, no. 1–­2 (2017): 135–­64; Charlie Huenemann, “Nietzsche’s Illness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–­80. 105. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §120. 106. Peter R. Sedgwick, “Nietzsche, Illness and the Body’s Quest for Narrative,” Health Care Analysis 21 (2013): 306–­22; Steven R. Smith, “Equality, Identity, and the Disability Rights Movement: From Policy to Practice and from Kant to Nietzsche in More Than One Uneasy Move,” Critical Social Policy 25, no. 4 (2005): 554–­76; Susan S. Stocker, “Facing Disability with Resources from Aristotle and Nietzsche,” Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 5 (2002): 137–­46. 107. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 1, §11, 43. 108. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §172, 174.



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109. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §382, 346–­47. 110. For discussion of Nietzsche’s assessment of sickness in relation to the racial politics of his time, see Sander L. Gilman, “Nietzsche, Bizet, and Wagner: Illness, Health, and Race in the Nineteenth Century,” Opera Quarterly 23, no. 2–­3 (2007): 247–­64. 111. E.g., Debra B. Bergoffen, “Nietzsche’s Women,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 12 (1996): 19–­26; Katrin Froese, “Woman’s Eclipse: The Silenced Feminine in Nietzsche and Heidegger,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, no. 2 (2005): 165–­84; Barbara Helm, “Combating Misogyny? Responses to Nietzsche by Turn-­of-­the-­Century German Feminists,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27 (2004): 64–­84. 112. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §232, §239. 113. Julian Young, “Nietzsche and Women,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46–­62; see also Ruth Abbey, “Beyond Misogyny and Metaphor: Women in Nietzsche’s Middle Period,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 2 (1996): 233–­56. 114. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §71; Human, All Too Human, §409. 115. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” §4, 80; “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” §7; Birth of Tragedy, 49–­50; Will to Power, §95, 59–­60. 116. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” §3, 264. 117. For Nietzsche, all forms of democratization stem from the Christian doctrine of equality before God, which structurally forecloses the possibility for the exceptional individual, the free spirit. 118. Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (New York: Gotham Books, 2004), 139. 119. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §375, 337. 120. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, §3, 189. 121. Nietzsche, Gay Science, preface to the second edition, §3, 36.

3. Michel Foucault 1. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (1984; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 8. 2. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 137. 3. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8. 4. Foucault, 8. In this chapter, I track the word curiosité in Foucault’s corpus. Future work might extend this attention to enquête, épreuve, expérience, etc.

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5. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), in Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 325. 6. Michel Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” History of the Present 4 (1988): 1. 7. Brad Stone, “The Praise and Critique of Experience in Dewey and Foucault” (presentation at the American Philosophical Association Conference, Pacific Division, San Francisco, April 2010). 8. John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 140–­42. 9. Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xii. 10. Kevin Thompson, “To Judge the Intolerable,” Philosophy Today 54 (2010): 169–­76, esp. 174–­75. 11. Ed Cohen, “The Courage of Curiosity, or The Heart of Truth (A Mash-­Up),” Criticism 52, no. 2 (2010): 201–­7; Torben Bech Dyrberg, Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), e.g., 35–­36, 57–­58; Nancy Luxon, “Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-­ Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (2008): 377–­402; Nancy Luxon, The Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-­Telling in Freud and Foucault (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 188–­91. 12. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 118, 228, 248, 275, and 277. 13. Charles Scott, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 141–­43. 14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 92. 15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95, 92. 16. Paul Rabinow, “Modern and Counter-­Modern: Ethos and Epoch in Heidegger and Foucault,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197–­214; Corey McCall, “Some Philosophical Ambiguities of Curiosity in the Work of Heidegger, Foucault, and Gadamer,” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 42, no. 2 (2011): 176–­93. 17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 126. 18. Foucault, Order of Things, 138, 158, 137, cp. 72, 131, 157. 19. In this work, I am interested in the theoretical, rather than purely historical, contributions of Foucault’s genealogies. 20. Colin Koopman, “The Power Thinker,” Aeon, March 15, 2017.



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21. Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” by D. Trombadori, in Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 288. 22. Michel Foucault, History of Madness (1961; New York: Routledge, 2006), 26. 23. Foucault, History of Madness, 42–­43. 24. Foucault, 102. 25. Foucault, 394. 26. Foucault, 19. 27. Foucault, 22. 28. Foucault, 394. 29. Foucault, 51 and 513. 30. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975; New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 49. 31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 19. 32. Foucault, 216. 33. Foucault, 46. 34. Foucault, 63. 35. Foucault, 227. 36. Foucault, 112. The reigning paradigm in the nineteenth century was established by Benjamin Appert’s Bagnes, prisons et criminels and Pierre-­ François Lacenaire’s Mémoires, révélations et poésies, both published in 1836. These texts depict the prisoner as a self-­identified solitary and unthinking exemplar of criminality, a singular criminal adventurer in the throes of chance. Compare “Lives of Infamous Men” (1977), in Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 157–­75; “Luttes autour des prisons” (1979), in Dits et Écrits II, 1976–­1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 273; and Foucault’s preface to Serge Livrozet’s De la prison à la révolte (1973; Paris: L’Esprit Frappeur, 1999). 37. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 68. 38. For panauditory surveillance, see Lauri Siisiäinen, The Politics of Hearing (New York: Routledge, 2012). Of course, surveillance is also incredibly bodily. The strip search is but one example. 39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202–­3. Cp. Jeremy Bentham, “Letter VI,” in The Panopticon Writings (London: Verso, 1995), 47. For a classic text connecting the asylum to the menagerie, see Henri F. Ellenberger, “The Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden,” in Animals and Man in Historical Perspective, ed. Joseph Klaits and Barrie Klaits (1965; New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 59–­92. For an analysis of the menagerie in conjunction with surveillance, see Peter Sahlins, “The Royal Menageries of Louis XIV and the Civilizing Process Revisited,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 2 (2012): 237–­67. 40. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 12.

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41. Foucault, 18. 42. Foucault, 49. 43. Foucault, 23. 44. Foucault, 71. 45. Foucault, 44. 46. Foucault, 44. 47. For a discussion of The Indiscreet Jewels as a reflection of Diderot’s corpus, see Steven Werner’s “Diderot’s First Anti-­novel: ‘Les Bijoux Indiscrets,’” Diderot Studies 26 (1995): 215–­28, and Aram Vartanian’s introduction to Diderot’s The Indiscreet Jewels (New York: Marsilio, 1993). 48. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 79. 49. Foucault, 77. 50. See also Foucault’s references to curiosity in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–­1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), esp. 243, 247, 249, 267, 279. 51. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 29. 52. See commentary by Arnold Davidson, “Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 230–­31, and Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 157–­59. 53. It is important to grant that Foucault draws most heavily from the imperial period, when the care of the self became a way of life rather than being tied down to discrete educational or political ends. For another lineage, tracing Foucault’s ethics through Nietzschean recoil, see Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 86–­93. 54. Arnold Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143. 55. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 211. 56. Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and His Ethics” (1986), in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 230. This absence of transcendence provides the backdrop for Charles Scott’s interpretation of Foucauldian curiosity in On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 142. 57. Although Foucault characterizes Plutarch’s essay “On Being a Busybody” as a “rather banal” piece that “doesn’t get very far” in questions of self-­care (Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France,



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1981–­1982, trans. Graham Burchell [New York: Picador, 2005], 219), I contend it does more than he realizes with respect to curiosity. 58. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” in Moralia VI (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 515d. 59. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” 515e. 60. Seneca, Naturales Questiones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), III.pf16. 61. Seneca, Naturales Questiones, I.pf12. 62. Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” 1. 63. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (1982), in Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), esp. 340–­41; History of Sexuality, 92–­96. 64. Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” 1. 65. In this regard, one cannot help but hear Foucault’s characterization of the state as “le plus froid de tous les monstres froids.” See “La technologie politique des individus” (1982), in Dits et Ecrits II, no. 364, 1646. 66. Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” 11 (emphasis added). 67. Foucault, 1. 68. Foucault, 1, 13. Cp. “Interview with Michel Foucault” (1978), in Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000): “I have . . . no desire to play the role of a prescriber of solutions. . . . The intellectual today is not to ordain, to recommend solutions, to prophesy” (288). 69. Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” 1, 13. 70. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power” (1972), in Language, Counter-­Memory, and Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 207–­8; Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1977), in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–­1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 126. 71. Foucault engaged in significant activism with the Prisons Information Group, Solidarity in Poland, during the Iranian Revolution, and in support of the Vietnamese boat people. See Todd May, “Coda: Foucault’s Own Straying Afield,” in The Philosophy of Foucault (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2006), 126–­31. There were of course several other minor intrigues. 72. Michel Foucault, “The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt” (1978), in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 220. We can interpret this as a more militant version of writing a “history of the present” (Discipline and Punish, 31).

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73. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (1983; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 20–­24. 74. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–­1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2011), 160. 75. Foucault, Courage of Truth, 125. 76. Foucault, 189n*. 77. Foucault, 312. See Foucault’s comparison here between the parrēsiastic Cynic and Plutarch’s busybody. 78. Foucault, “Masked Philosopher,” 325. 79. On the topic of Foucauldian curiosity and its relationship to “some science,” it would be instructive to consider Foucault’s connection between Nietzsche’s limit-­experiences and Canguilhem’s life sciences (“Interview with Michel Foucault,” 252–­56). 80. Foucault, “Masked Philosopher,” 325. 81. Colin Koopman, “The Age of Infopolitics,” New York Times, January 26, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/the-age-of-infopolitics/ ?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed July 10, 2014). 82. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 35. 83. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 472, attributed to Claude Mauriac. 84. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8. 85. Foucault, 8. This word translated as “passion” (acharnement) has a colorful and yet instructive history, originally referring to the crazed intensity of hounds after being given the scent of flesh (chair). 86. Montaigne, “On Repenting,” in Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 908; See also Darryl M. De Marzio, “The Pedagogy of Self-­Fashioning: A Foucauldian Study of Montaigne’s ‘On Educating Children,’” Studies in Philosophy & Education 31 (2012): 389. 87. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 7. 88. Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–­1984, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 298. 89. Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life.” 90. Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, eds., Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group 1970–­1980, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). 91. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 8, 87–­88. See also Lauren Guilmette’s commentary on this case in “The Violence of Curiosity: Butler’s Foucault, Foucault’s Herculine, and the



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Will-­to-­Know,” philoSOPHIA 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–­22. While Guilmette herein usefully applies the trope of violent curiosity, already well established in both Foucault studies and scholarship on curiosity, to the case, she does not consider Herculine’s own characterizations of herself as a practitioner of a different sort of curiosity.

4. Jacques Derrida 1. Rodolphe Gasché, “Thinking, without Wonder,” in The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, and Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 348–­63. Thanks to Peggy Kamuf for this reference. 2. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 20. 3. Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (New York: Routledge, 1997), 137. 4. Michael Naas would call this mere “lexical play.” See Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), xxvi. 5. Jacques Derrida, Répondre du secret (1991–­1992), University of California, Irvine, Special Collections, MS-­C01, box 21, folder 4–­9; Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-­Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 6. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 276. 7. Jacques Derrida, Death Penalty I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 222. 8. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (1996; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40. 9. This third sense is rooted in the ancient Greek polypragmosūne and periergia’s connotations of linguistic excess. 10. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York: Verso, 2008). 11. Gasché, “Thinking, without Wonder,” 348, 353, and 356. 12. Gasché, 354. 13. Gasché, 353. 14. Haraway, When Species Meet, 20. Gayatri Spivak seconds this attribution. As she writes in “Class Individual: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Jacques Derrida” (Artforum International 43, no. 7 [2005]), “Derrida’s insatiable curiosity about grasping it all kept him on the question of sexual

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difference. Curiously enough, Freud seemed not to have been his sourcebook for answers on this topic” (52). Then again, in “Notes toward a Tribute to Jacques Derrida” (Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 [2005]), Spivak interprets Glas as an expression of Derrida’s curiosity. There, as she says, he is “curious to see how much control he had over the name, not as mark but as sign” (103). Even Simon Critchley, in “Derrida: The Reader” (in Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone [New York: Routledge, 2008]), remarks, “Derrida’s work is possessed of a curious restlessness, one might even say an anxiety” (10). 15. Haraway, When Species Meet, 4. 16. Haraway, 22. 17. Gasché, “Thinking, without Wonder,” 362. 18. See Cixous, Rootprints, 55 (definition of curiosity), 88, and 90, as well as Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 14, 137, 141, and 177. 19. Cixous, Rootprints, 56. 20. Cixous, 90. 21. Cixous, 88. 22. Cixous, 88. Cp. Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, 14. 23. Cp. Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): “How can we finish a book, a dream” (98). Hélène Cixous, “Difficult Joys,” in The Body and the Text (New York: Macmillan, 1991): “We should write as we dream” (22). 24. Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, 137. 25. Jonathan Kendall, “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74,” New York Times, October 10, 2004. 26. Nicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 7. 27. John Searle, “The World Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books 30, no. 16 (1983): 74–­79. 28. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125. While Rorty does claim that curiosity is a characteristic of the liberal ironist, he does not align curiosity with linguistic freeplay. 29. Richard Klein, “Prolegomenon to Derrida,” Diacritics 2, no. 4 (1972): 29. This serves as Klein’s introduction to Derrida’s interview entitled, “Positions,” published in Diacritics 2, no. 4 (1972): 35–­43. 30. Klein, “Prolegomenon to Derrida,” 29. 31. Klein, 30. 32. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 299. 33. Derrida refers throughout to Gustave Loisel’s Histoire des ménageries de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Doin et fils, 1912) and Henri Ellenberger’s



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“The Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden,” in Animals and Man in Historical Context (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 59–­92. 34. In “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death” (Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 [2012]: 74–­94), Kelly Oliver enriches our understanding of this scene by analyzing a similar display of human sovereignty: the execution of animals. For the long and sordid history of such a practice, see Edward Payson Evan’s The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906). 35. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 277. 36. Derrida, 297. 37. Derrida, 300. 38. Grégoire Chamayou, in Les corps vils (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), argues that a sovereign autopsic curiosity remains alive well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the form of experimentation on criminals and the criminalized. 39. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 274n30. 40. Derrida, 300. 41. Sarah Kofman, “Conjuring Death: Remarks on The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp” (1995), in Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Albrecht, Georgia Albert, and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 237–­44. 42. Jacques Derrida, “. . . . . . . .” (1997), in The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 165–­88. Although Derrida is clearly responding to Kofman’s 1995 essay, Kofman may well be indirectly responding to Derrida’s comments on curiosity, the secret, and conjuration in The Gift of Death (1992; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and The Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; New York: Routledge, 2006). 43. Sarah Kofman, “The Imposture of Beauty: The Uncanniness of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 25–­48. For a comparative reading between “Conjuring Death” and “The Imposture of Beauty,” see Pleshette DeArmitt’s “Conjuring Bodies: Kofman’s Lesson on Death,” Parallax 17, no. 1 (2011): 4–­17. 44. See William Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp (New York: New York University Press, 1958). 45. Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 191n129. 46. Kofman, “Conjuring Death,” 237. 47. Kofman, 238. 48. Kofman, “Imposture of Beauty,” 34.

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49. Kofman, 47. 50. Kofman, 30. 51. Kofman, 238. 52. Derrida, “. . .  . . . . . ,” 176. 53. Derrida, 171. 54. Derrida, 169. 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (1881; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), §105. 56. Animot is a homonym of animaux and conjoins the French animal and mot (meaning “word”). 57. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1994), 6.35. 58. Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 9. 59. Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 67. 60. Lawlor, 77. 61. Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 64 and 82. 62. Deutscher, How to Read Derrida, 84. 63. Kelly Oliver’s argument for animal pedagogy—­or “the ways in which animals . . . teach us how to be human”—­resembles this approach. See Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5. 64. Hélène Cixous, “Jacques Derrida: Co-­responding Voix You,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 43. As quoted in Anne Emmanuelle Berger and Marta Segarra, “Thoughtprints,” in Demenageries: Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida (New York: Rodopi, 2011), 4. 65. Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 78. 66. David Farrell Krell, Derrida and Our Animal Others (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 164. 67. Berger and Segarra, “Thoughtprints,” 10. Berger and Segarra are drawing on Derrida’s play with the coupe de greffe and coup de griffe in Monolingualism of the Other. Another essay of interest in this collection is Marie-­Dominique Garnier, “Animal Writes: Derrida’s Que Donc and Other Tails” (23–­40). Garnier argues that Derrida’s heavy reliance on “k” sounds throughout The Animal That Therefore I Am relies on the common French association of this sound with what is foreign, uncouth, imperfectly naturalized, and animal; this would arguably include curiosité. 68. Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, 79–­96. 69. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 278.



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70. Erwin Straus, “Upright Posture” (1952), in Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 148. 71. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 6. 72. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 33. 73. Derrida, 55. 74. Michael Naas, “Derrida’s Flair,” Research in Phenomenology 40, no. 2 (2010): 219. 75. Grégoire Chamayou would caution us here by marking that sovereign power has always and still expresses itself through hunts, especially the manhunt. See Les Chasses à l’homme (Paris: La Fabrique, 2010). 76. This understanding, of course, has created innumerable problems for philosophers of religion who attempt to safeguard human freedom in the face of divine omniscience. See, for example, Keith Yandell’s Philosophy of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), chap. 14. 77. Genesis 2:19–­20. 78. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 17. 79. Derrida, 16. 80. Derrida, 17. 81. Derrida, 17. 82. Derrida, Répondre du secret, December 11, 1991, manuscript pg. 12 (my translation). 83. Derrida, 9 (my translation). 84. Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 3–­4. 85. See Elaine Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), and Michael Marder, Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 86. For both Kofman and Derrida, this reimagination of philosophy occurs in conjunction with the endorsement of psychoanalytic practice. Philosophy, in this sense, can be thought as a kind of therapy, a sort of therapy inconsistent with therapeutic confinement described above. See Mary Beth Mader, “Suffering Contradiction: Kofman on Nietzsche’s Critique of Logic,” in Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, ed. Penelope Deutscher and Kelly Oliver (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 87–­96. 87. Derrida, “. . . . . . . . ,” 180 and 169. 88. Derrida, 173. 89. Derrida, 173. Rembrandt, of course, is known for his use of light and shadow. 90. Derrida, 173.

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91. Kofman is certainly indebted to Freud for her sense of curiosity’s involvement in philosophy, art, and sex. Kofman begins Camera Obscura (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999) with a rumination on Nietzsche and Leonardo da Vinci on curiosity (0, 29–­34). She also addresses Freud’s reading of curiosity and Leonardo in The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 166. Kofman speaks of an expressly sexual curiosity in a scene of her mother’s nakedness in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 55. This could be compared to her discussion of sexual curiosity in The Enigma of Woman (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 9, 40, and 197. For her reading of Socrates as curious, see Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 63, cp. 152. 92. Derrida, “. . . . . . . . ,” 181. 93. Derrida, 181. 94. Plato, Theatetus, in Theatetus and Sophist (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1952), 155d. 95. Plato, Sophist, 264e; cp. 253d–­e. The subject of the Statesman is identified in the same manner; see 258b–­266e in Plato, Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. Harold North Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925). 96. Plato, Apology, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1914), 36c; cp. Alcibiades I 124b and 129a. 97. Plato, Republic I and II (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2013), 398; cp. Ion, 535. 98. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (1994; New York: Verso, 2005), 306; Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; New York: Routledge, 2006), xviii. 99. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 65. 100. Derrida, 40. 101. Derrida, 23. 102. Derrida, 22. 103. Derrida, 4. 104. Derrida, 18. 105. Derrida, 50. 106. Derrida, 51, 65. 107. Derrida, 62.



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5. Curiosity, Activism, and Political Resistance 1. For a more nuanced treatment of this typology, see Perry Zurn, “Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity,” in Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 26–­49. 2. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947; New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 46. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §7. 4. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” §6. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral Sense” (1873), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §1. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), preface §4 and §3. 7. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 325. 8. Michel Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” History of the Present 4 (1988): 1, 13; L’origine de l’herméneutique de soi: Conférences prononcées à Dartmouth College, 1980 (Paris: Vrin, 2013), 144, 154. 9. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–­1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 260, 279; cp. Seneca, preface to Naturales Questiones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1.12. 10. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–­1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2011), 125. 11. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 8. 12. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-­Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 299. 13. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 33. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Séance 4,” Répondre du secret (December 11, 1991), University of California Irvine Archives, MS-­C001, box 21, folder 5, 8–­9.

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15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1886; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), §45; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (1887; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), preface §3. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1908; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), §3. 17. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface §3. 18. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8; Foucault, Courage of Truth, 125; Foucault, “Masked Philosopher,” 325. 19. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 3, 4, 7; Jacques Derrida, “Séance 1,” Répondre du secret (November 13, 1991), University of California Irvine Archives, MS-­C001, box 21, folder 4. 20. Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1986), 36, 48, 57, 69, 78. 21. King, Testament of Hope, 7. 22. King, 290. 23. For the purposes of the present inquiry, I set aside steps two and three, negotiation and self-­purification. Upon further reflection, however, these steps may also, arguably, involve practices of curiosity in their own right. 24. King, 290. 25. In Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Dennis Chong writes: “The first foray may occur almost accidentally or be the result of mild social pressure; one might attend a rally out of curiosity, or a demonstration at the urging of a close friend one does not wish to offend or disappoint” (71). 26. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1986), 291. 27. King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 291. 28. Plato, The Apology, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1914), 31c. Here, Plato uses one of the Greek cognates for the Latin curiositas: polypragmosune. 29. Plato, Apology, 19b. Here, Plato uses the other cognate: periergon. 30. Leroy H. Pelton, The Psychology of Nonviolence (New York: Pergamon Press, 1974). 31. Daniel Berlyne, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), 274. 32. Pelton, Psychology of Nonviolence, 117. 33. Pelton, 119.



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34. George Lowenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 1 (1994): 75–­98. 35. Todd B. Kashdan et al., “The Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-­II: Development, Factor Structure, and Psychometrics,” Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 987–­98; Todd B. Kashdan et al., “The Five-­Dimensional Curiosity Scale: Capturing the Bandwidth of Curiosity and Identifying Four Unique Subgroups of Curious People,” Journal of Research in Personality 73 (2018): 130–­49. 36. Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 136. 37. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, 136. 38. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Radford, Va.: Wilder Publications, 2008), 5. 39. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; New York: Grove Press, 1967), 221. 40. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Random House, 2019), 200. 41. Liz Baudler, “Black Queer Curiosity: Collective Postloudness Takes on Humanity,” Windy City Times, November 9, 2016, http://www.windycity mediagroup.com/lgbt/PODCASTS-Black-queer-curiosity-Collective-Postloud ness-takes-on-humanity/57089.html. 42. Michel Foucault, “Toujours les prisons,” in Dits et Écrits II (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 282, 916. 43. See Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, eds., Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, eds, Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970–­1980, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). 44. Louis Appert (Michel Foucault), François Colcombert, and Antoine Lazarus, “Luttes autour des prisons” (November 1979), in Dits et Écrits II, no. 273: “The problem was not to say: such and such a thing is wrong and thus here are some conditions that might be right; it was simply to say: there is a problem here, there is something here people didn’t tolerate and is not tolerable” (813). 45. GIP, “Enquête Intolérance” (March 1971), in Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970–­1972, ed. Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-­Fournel (Paris: IMEC, 2003), 53. Hereafter Archives d’une lutte. 46. Michel Foucault, “Le GIP vient de lancer sa première enquête” (March 15, 1971), in Archives d’une lutte, 52.

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47. Daniel Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte” (May 25, 1971), in Archives d’une lutte, 72–­73. 48. Foucault, “Le GIP vient de lancer sa première enquête,” 52. 49. E.g., Daniel Defert, “Sur quoi repose le système pénitentiare?” (November 11, 1971), in Archives d’une lutte, 129. 50. GIP, “Nul de nous d’est sûr d’échapper à la prison” (February 8, 1971), in Archives d’une lutte, 43. 51. Daniel Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte” (May 25, 1971), in Archives d’une lutte, 69. 52. GIP, “Intolérable 1: Enquête dans vingt prisons,” in Intolérable (Paris: Verticale, 2013), 21–­80. 53. GIP, “Intolerable 1: Investigation in 20 Prisons,” in Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power, by Marcelo Hoffman (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 160 (translation modified). 54. GIP, “Intolerable 1,” 166 (translation modified). 55. GIP, 174–­75. 56. GIP, 181. 57. GIP, 166 (translation modified); cp. “What hazing do you stand ready to denounce?” (165). 58. For a lengthier treatment of the GIP’s use of publicity as a tactic of resistance, see Perry Zurn, “Publicity and Politics: Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Press,” Radical Philosophy Review 17, no. 2 (2014): 403–­20. 59. Appert (Foucault), Colcombert, and Lazarus, “Luttes autour des prisons,” 808. 60. Appert (Foucault), Colcombert, and Lazarus, 813. 61. Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 143. 62. Daniel Defert, “L’Emergence d’un nouveau front: les prisons” (2003), in Archives d’une lutte, 323. 63. Perry Zurn, “Curiosities at War: The Police and the Prison after May ’68,” Modern and Contemporary France 26, no. 2 (2018): 65–­87. 64. For them, the penal system involved the police, the courts, and the prison. See Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte,” 73. 65. Michel Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près . . .” (January 17, 1972), in Archives d’une lutte, 195; Michel Foucault, “Le Discours de Toul” (January 5, 1972), in Dits et Écrits I, no. 99, 1105; Defert, “Sur quoi repose le système pénitentiare?,” 131; Michel Foucault and Pierre Vidal-­Naquet, “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence” (March 18, 1971), in Dits et Écrits I, no. 88, 1050.



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66. Defert, “Quand information est une lutte,” 69, 72–­73; Appert (Foucault), Colcombert, and Lazarus, “Luttes autour des prisons,” 816. 67. Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près . . . ,” 198. 68. Appert (Foucault), Colcombert, and Lazarus, “Luttes autour des prisons,” 812; Michel Foucault and Paul Thibaud, “Toujours les prisons,” in Dits et Écrits II, no. 282, 915–­17. 69. Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près . . . ,” 195–­96. 70. Michel Foucault, “Le grand enfermement” (March 25, 1972), in Dits et Écrits I, no. 105, 1170. 71. Michel Foucault, Théories et Institutions Pénales, Cours au Collège de France 1971–­1972, ed. Bernard Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard, 2015); The Punitive Society, Cours au Collège de France 1972–­1973, ed. Bernard Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 72. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8. 73. Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 140. 74. For a comparative analysis of violence against trans people in prisons and public restrooms, see Perry Zurn, “Waste Culture and Isolation: Prisons, Toilets, and Gender Segregation,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2019): 668–­89. 75. Olga Gershenson, “The Restroom Revolution: Unisex Toilets and Campus Politics,” in Toilets: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, ed. Harvey Molotch and Laura Noren (New York: New York University, 2010), 195. 76. Morris Singer, “Restroom Revolution Gathers at Stonewall,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, October 3, 2002, 1. 77. Gershenson, “Restroom Revolution,” 197. Students also circulated a zine with “lavatory change” and “transgender?” splashed across its front page (198). 78. Gershenson, 202. 79. Gershenson, 203. 80. Gershenson, 203. 81. Gershenson, 206. Beginning in 2010, the university committed to include a single-­ stall, gender-­ inclusive bathroom in all major renovations and new facilities. There are currently more than 150 gender-­inclusive restrooms in academic buildings; all are single-­user (“Campus Gender-­Inclusive Restrooms,” The Stonewall Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://www.umass.edu/stonewall/campus-restrooms). It is possible to understand this failure to reform multistall restrooms as a failure of curiosity. A 2016 student “shit in” makes much the same point; see David Moye, “UMass Students’ Hold ‘S**t In’ Demanding Gender Neutral Bathrooms,”

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Huffington Post, November 17, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/umass -shit-in-gender-neutral_n_582df2cae4b099512f816aef. 82. Simone Chess, Alison Kafer, Jessi Quizar, and Mattie Udora Richardson, “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!,” in That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004), 216–­36. See also Isaac West’s commentary in “PISSAR’s Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 156–­75. 83. Of course, if the Restroom Revolution group were to address the needs of transgender and genderqueer students fully, they would need to similarly press inside the restroom and take account of location, functioning door locks, menstruation apparatuses, and accessibility standards. 84. Chess et al., “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!,” 217. 85. Chess et al., 216–­17. 86. The choice of patrol is perhaps more apt than members knew. It stems from the sixteenth-­century French patrouiller, meaning to paddle or puddle in the mud. To patrol, then, is literally to muck about. 87. Chess et al., “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!,” 225. In this way, it modeled “theory” in action (226). Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), urges subsequent coalitions to move their bathroom politics beyond architecture by integrating work for accessible catheters and diapers (154–­57). Shane Stringfellow, 2012 founder of PISSAR’s sequel at UCSB, the Society for Accessible and Safe Spaces, suggests an accessibility movement rooted in but much larger than the restroom, one that sees accessibility “through a spatial and temporal framework that acknowledges accessibility as contextual and constantly changing.” See “A Re-­ working of Safe & Accessible,” S.A.S.S., 190 Activisms, https://190activisms .wordpress.com/s-a-s-s/. 88. Chess et al., “Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!,” 219. 89. Chess et al., 227. 90. Chess et al., 228. 91. Jaclyn I. Pryor, “Teaching Time,” in Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 125–­45. 92. María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender” (2008), in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, ed. Wendy Harcourt (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 13–­33. 93. Gershenson, “Restroom Revolution,” 195. 94. For a rich treatment of interviews on the topic, see Sheila Cavanagh, Queering Restrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), chap. 2.



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95. Cavanagh, Queering Restrooms, 22. 96. “Victories,” Free to Pee @ GBC, https://freetopeegbc.com/victories-2/. 97. William L. Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide (Detroit: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 57–­192 (esp. 57). 98. See, for example, the John Birch Society flyer, “What’s Wrong with Civil Rights?” Palm Beach Post, October 31, 1965, https://birchwatcher.files .wordpress.com/2015/03/whats_wrong_with_civil_rights.png. 99. Michel Foucault, “Le Discours de Toul” (January 9, 1972), in Dits et Écrits I, no. 99, 1106. 100. E.g., Jody Herman, “Gendered Restrooms and Minority Stress: The Public Regulation of Gender and Its Impact on Transgender People’s Lives,” Journal of Public Management & Social Policy 19 (2013): 65–­80. 101. Herman, “Gendered Restrooms and Minority Stress,” 72. 102. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §314, 157–­58; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), §214. Recall that Nietzsche’s fascination, during his middle period, with a “monastery of free spirits” still emphasizes exceptionalism even within a collectivity of sorts. 103. Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” 13. 104. Derrida, “Séance 4,” Répondre du secret, 9. 105. Thank you to Tyson E. Lewis for insisting on this point. 106. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

6. Cripping Curiosity 1. Colin Cameron, “Identity,” in Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, ed. Colin Cameron (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publishing, 2013), 73. 2. Trevor R. Parmenter, “Intellectual Disabilities—­Quo Vadis?,” in Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Gary Albrecht, Katharine Seelman, and Michael Bury (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001), 271. 3. Carol J. Gill, “Divided Understandings: The Social Experience of Disability,” in Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Gary Albrecht, Katharine Seelman, and Michael Bury (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001), 360. 4. Colin Cameron, “Humour,” in Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, ed. Colin Cameron (Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publishing, 2013), 69. 5. Dan Goodley, Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publishing, 2011), 90.

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6. Goodley, Disability Studies, xi. He later adds, “We know that disability evokes fascination, fear, anxiety, hatred, paternalism, and curiosity” (94). 7. Dan Goodley, “The DisHuman Child,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37, no. 5 (2016): 771. 8. I take the term enfreakment from Rosemarie Garland-­ Thomson, “Introduction: From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1–­22. 9. Susan Baglieri and Arthur Shapiro, eds., Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom: Critical Practices for Creating Least Restrictive Attitudes (New York: Routledge, 2012), chap. 4, esp. 62–­65. 10. Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Life of P.  T. Barnum (Sampson Low, 1855), 154. 11. Terence Whalen, introduction to The Life of P.  T. Barnum (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), xxii. 12. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 286, 290. 13. Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington, “Visiting,” in The History of Bethlem (New York: Routledge, 1997), 187. 14. Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 103–­4, 127. 15. Mat Fraser, “Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability Was Kept in a Box,” Museums Association Conference and Exhibition (2014), https://www .museumsassociation.org/video/29102014-cabinet-of-curiosities-how-disabil ity-was-kept-in-a-box-mat-fraser. 16. Lerita Coleman Brown, “Stigma Demystified,” in Disability Studies Reader, ed. Leonard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 151, 155. 17. Licia Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1. Carlson identifies as nondisabled on page 2. 18. Lauren Guilmette, “Curiosity-­as-­Care: Feminist Philosophies of Disability, Foucault, and the Ethics of Curiosity,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter: Philosophy and Medicine 16, no. 1 (2016): 46–­50. 19. Anarella Cellitti and Rascheel Hastings, “I Just Want to Know: Helping Children Express Their Curiosity about Others with Disabilities,” Dimensions of Early Childhood 43, no. 3 (2015): 11–­16. 20. Ana Carolina de Campos et al., “Infants with Down Syndrome and Their Interactions with Objects: Development of Exploratory Actions after Reaching Onset,” Research in Developmental Disabilities 34 (2013): 1906–­16.



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21. Kristina T. Johnson, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Curiosity,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, ed. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 129–­46. 22. Barbara Noel Dowds and Cynthia Stellos Phelan, “Perceptions of Success: Individuals with Learning Disabilities Identify Factors that Contributed to Their Academic Accomplishments,” Proceedings of the 14th World Congress on Learning Disabilities (2006): 149–­57. 23. Dowds and Phelan, “Perceptions of Success,” 152–­53. 24. For a thorough treatment of this etymology, see Matthew Leigh, From Polypragmon to Curiosus: Ancient Concepts of Curious and Meddlesome Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25. Plato, The Republic, trans. G.  M.  A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 4.444b. 26. Plato, Republic, 4.434b. 27. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” in Moralia VI, trans. W. C. Helmbold (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2005), 515d. 28. See H. G. Lidell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–­English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 535. 29. Plutarch, “On Being a Busybody,” 520d. 30. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, trans. and ed. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1856), 2.1. 31. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (1511; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 51. 32. Plato, The Lovers (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 137b. 33. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. William Watts (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 2000), 10.35. 34. Augustine, Confessions, 13.21. 35. Saint Augustine, Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, trans. Roland J. Teske (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 2.18.27, 122; cp. 136–­37. 36. Augustine, Two Books on Genesis, 1.23.40, 86–­87. 37. Christian Zacher, in Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-­Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), attributes a “feverish curiosity” to Richard de Bury (85), whose bibliomania is expressed by the summons to “eat books” (69–­70). 38. Augustine, Two Books on Genesis, 2.18.27, 122; cp. 136–­37. 39. Augustine, 2.26.39, 135–­36. 40. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, 32. 41. Baglieri and Shapiro, Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom, 63. 42. Baglieri and Shapiro, 66–­67.

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43. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John William Adamson (1693; New York: Dover, 2007), §119 and §108. 44. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (1762; New York: Basic Books: 1979), 167. 45. John Dewey, How We Think (New York: Dover, 1997), 31. 46. As quoted and translated by Leigh, From Polypragmon to Curiosus, 66. 47. Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae, in Minor Dialogues, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: George Bell & Sons, 1900), 10.12.5, 305. 48. Apuleius, The Metamorphoses, trans. William Adlington (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1924), 2.1, 48–­49. Translation by Matthew Leigh. 49. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 9.12, 418–­19. 50. Apuleius, 11.21, 574–­75. 51. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1274; New York: Beniger Borthers, Inc., 1947–­1948), 2.2.167. 52. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (1651; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 1.11.24–­25. 53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.12.5. 54. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; New York: Penguin, 2004), 79. 55. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (1905; New York: Basic Books, 2000), 60–­63. 56. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey (1910; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 27–­30. 57. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­Chevallier (1949; New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 404. 58. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 315, 329, etc. 59. Beauvoir, 295, cp. 283. 60. For more on the feminization of pathologized curiosity, see Hilary Schor, Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Line Cottegnies, Sandrine Parageau, and John J. Thompson, eds., Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France (Boston: Brill, 2016). 61. Daniel Berlyne, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1960), 190. 62. Berlyne, Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity, 217, 185. 63. Berlyne, 215. 64. Paul A. Russell, “Relationships between Exploratory Behavior and Fear: A Review,” British Journal of Psychology 64 (1973): 417–­33; Hans-­Georg



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Voss and Heidi Keller, “Anxiety and Exploration,” in Curiosity and Exploration: Theories and Results (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 139–­48. 65. Ruth Peters, “Effects of Anxiety, Curiosity, and Perceived Instructor Threat on Student Verbal Behavior in the College Classroom,” Journal of Educational Psychology 70, no. 3 (1978): 388–­96. For Peters, the effective reduction of curiosity occurs in “males”; “females” already have a low expression of curiosity. 66. Gregory J. Boyle, “Critical Review of State-­Trait Curiosity Test Development,” Motivation and Emotion 7, no. 4 (1983): 377–­97; Gregory J. Boyle, “Breadth-­Depth or State-­Trait Curiosity? A Factor Analysis of State-­Trait Curiosity and State Anxiety Scales,” Personality and Individual Differences 10 (1989): 175–­83. Scholars continued to observe higher levels of trait-­anxiety in “females” and state-­curiosity in “males.” See Hasida Ben-­Zur and Moshe Zeidner, “Sex Differences in Anxiety, Curiosity, and Anger: A Cross-­Cultural Study,” Sex Roles 19, no. 5/6 (1988): 335–­47. 67. Charles D. Spielberger and Laura M. Starr, “Curiosity and Exploratory Behavior,” in Motivation: Theory and Research, ed. Harold F. O’Neil Jr. and Michael Drillings (1994; New York: Routledge, 2009), 231. See Mario Livio, Why? What Makes Us Curious (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 80. 68. Todd Kashdan, Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (New York: William Morrow, 2009), 170. See also Ian Leslie, Curious (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 40. 69. Todd Kashdan et al., “Curiosity and Exploration Inventory II: Development, Factor Structure, and Psychometrics,” Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 987–­98. 70. Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-­Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), 88–­99. 71. Alison Kafer, “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-­Bodiedness,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (2003): 77–­89. 72. Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015): 270. 73. Richard Godden and Jonathan Hsy, “Analytic Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages,” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 318. 74. Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-­Bodiedness,” in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 62. 75. Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?:

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Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1–­2 (2003): 37. 76. Ann Fox, “How to Crip the Undergraduate Classroom: Lessons from Performance, Pedagogy, and Possibility,” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability 23 (2010): 39. 77. Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies: Introduction,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 128. 78. E.g., Livio, Why?, 33–­35. 79. Danielle Peers, “Filmography,” http://www.daniellepeers.com/art.html. 80. Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47–­49, 63–­65. 81. Garland-­Thomson, Staring, 65. 82. Garland-­Thomson, 10. 83. Garland-­Thomson, 194. 84. Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link,” Leaving Evidence (blog), May 5, 2011, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access -intimacy-the-missing-link/. 85. Mia Mingus, “Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm,” Leaving Evidence (blog), August 6, 2017, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/ forced-intimacy-an-ableist-norm/. 86. Mingus, “Forced Intimacy.” 87. Mingus, “Access Intimacy.” 88. Thanks to Stephanie Jenkins for suggesting this interpretation. 89. Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy, Interdependence, and Disability Justice,” Leaving Evidence (blog), April 12, 2017, https://leavingevidence.wordpress .com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/. 90. Jessa Sturgeon, “Sometimes I Wonder If I’m Being Masochistic,” in All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, ed. Lydia X. Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morenike Giwa Onaiwu (Lincoln, Neb.: DragonBee Press, 2017), 75. 91. Sturgeon, “Sometimes I Wonder If I’m Being Masochistic,” 75. 92. Sturgeon, 75. 93. Johnson, “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Curiosity,” 131, citing Corinne Hutt, “Exploration, Arousal, and Autism,” Psychologische Forschung 33, no. 1 (1969): 1–­8. 94. See Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). 95. See Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 96. Extending this exploration to The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion



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(Ypsilanti, Mich.: Homofactus, 2007) would require skills in poetic analysis beyond the author’s own. 97. Although I restrict myself to these two datasets, there are no doubt other means by which to track Clare’s practice of curiosity in these texts (e.g., in moments of political imagination, of research, of genre-­bending) or in his life (his travels, his walking, his academic and activist histories, etc.). 98. Eli Clare, “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, eds. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 265. Such an experience of curiosity is not unique to ableism. He also aligns prurient curiosity with “covert racism,” “suspicion, stereotyping, and disrespectful humor” (Exile and Pride, 34). 99. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 164. 100. Clare, 151, 175. 101. Clare, Exile and Pride, 97. 102. Clare, 98. 103. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 7. 104. Clare, 117. 105. Clare, 139. 106. Clare, Exile and Pride, 110. 107. Eli Clare, “Gawking, Gaping, Staring,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1–­2 (2003): 260. Cp. “Transsexual people” are made into “sexual curiosities and freaks” (Exile and Pride, 126). 108. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 40, see also 25. 109. Clare, 151. 110. Clare, 91. 111. Clare, 165. 112. Clare, Exile and Pride, 146. 113. Clare, 159. 114. Clare, xxiii–­xxiv. 115. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 160. 116. By my count, there are 188 questions peppered across the 160 pages of Exile and Pride and 114 questions across the 190 pages of Brilliant Imperfection, producing 302 questions across 350 pages altogether. 117. An exhaustive analysis of questions in Clare’s writing would require its own study, grappling with the interrogative form itself. 118. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 113–­14. 119. Garland-­Thomson, Staring, 79–­94. 120. Clare, Exile and Pride, 97 (in italics in the original). 121. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 41.

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122. Clare, 41. 123. Clare, 48 (in italics in the original). 124. Clare, 72. 125. Clare, Exile and Pride, 93. 126. Clare, 89. 127. Clare, 90. 128. Clare, 92. 129. Clare, 93. 130. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 117–­18. 131. Clare, 11. 132. Clare, 46. 133. Clare, 109. 134. See Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 8, 27–­28, 29, and 113. 135. Clare, Exile and Pride, 35; Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 175. 136. Clare, Exile and Pride, 11, 56, 151; Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 187. 137. Clare, Exile and Pride, 82. 138. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 162. 139. Clare, Exile and Pride, 85; cp. 103, 109, 115–­17. 140. Clare, 143, 145, 146, 149, 152, 153. 141. Clare, 11. 142. Clare, 53. 143. Clare, 17. 144. Clare, 55. 145. Clare, 23. 146. Clare, 23, 62. 147. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 40. 148. Clare, Exile and Pride, 42. 149. Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 53. 150. Clare, 87. 151. Clare, 117–­18. 152. Clare, 23. 153. Clare, 183. 154. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 2–­3. 155. Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 2. In the academy, a bastion of intellectual curiosity, disabled scholars have a particularly difficult time being recognized as practitioners of curiosity. 156. Kafer, 9. 157. Kafer, 18. 158. Kafer, 169. 159. Kafer, 169.



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160. Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (New York: The New Press, 2017), 8.

7. Trans Curiosity 1. Ryka Aoki, Seasonal Velocities (Los Angeles: TransGenre Press, 2012), 57. 2. Aoki, Seasonal Velocities, 124. 3. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1987), in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 232. 4. Stone, “Empire Strikes Back,” 229. 5. Stone, 230. 6. Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, Calif.: Seal Press, 2008), 1. 7. Stryker, Transgender History, 2. 8. Erich Pitcher, Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of US Trans* Academics (New York: Peter Lang, 2017). 9. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Stephen Whittle, Respect and Equality: Transsexual and Transgender Rights (London: Cavendish, 2002). 10. Reina Gossett and Eric Stanley, eds., Trap Door: Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Boston: MIT Press, 2017). 11. See, for example, Perry Zurn, “Curiosities at War: The Police and Prison Resistance After May ’68,” Modern and Contemporary France 26, no. 2 (2018): 179–­91. 12. Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 119. 13. For more on all of these characters, see Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New York: Harcourt, 1996). 14. See Line Cottegnies, Sandrine Parageau, and John J. Thompson, eds., Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016). 15. Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 380. 16. Kenny, Uses of Curiosity, 310. 17. Jean de La Fontaine, “Psyché,” in Oeuvres de Monsieur de la Fontaine, new edition (Jacob and Henry Sauvage, 1726), vol. 3, 93.

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18. Kenny, Uses of Curiosity, 338, 344; cp. references to lower-­ class women: 419 and 422. As Kenny insists, “Any grand narratives of the early modern legitimation of curiosity . . . can only be told by occluding sex and class as well as economics” (327). 19. Kenny, 322, 332. 20. Kenny, 387. 21. Benedict, Curiosity, 134. 22. Benedict, 121. 23. Kenny, Uses of Curiosity, 388. 24. Kenny, 327, 393. 25. Kenny, 384, 424. 26. Benedict, Curiosity, 154. 27. Laura Mulvey, “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,” in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 61. 28. Hilary M. Schor, Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 29. Schor, Curious Subjects, 5. 30. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-­Chevallier (1949; New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 295. 31. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 740. 32. Simone de Beauvoir, “Problems for Women’s Literature,” in Feminist Writings (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 24; see also Beauvoir, Second Sex, 294. 33. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 373. 34. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoires of a Dutiful Daughter (New York: HarperPerennial, 2005), 134. 35. Simone de Beauvoir, Diaries of a Philosophy Student, 1926–­1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 183. 36. Beauvoir, Diaries of a Philosophy Student, 262. 37. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3. 38. Enloe, Curious Feminist, 5. 39. Cp. Viviane Namaste, “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-­American Feminist Theory,” Hypatia 24, no. 3 (2009): 11–­32; Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 40. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John William Adamson (1693; New York: Dover, 2007), §118. 41. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (1762; New York: Basic Books: 1979), 167.



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42. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), §6. 43. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral Sense” (1873), in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §1. 44. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970). 45. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 325. 46. See Perry Zurn, “Busybody, Hunter, Dancer: Three Historical Models of Curiosity,” in Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019), 26–­49. 47. Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote, Gender Failure (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014), 110. 48. Digital Transgender Archive, https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive .net/. 49. Anonymous, “Drag Queens Picket Broadway,” Drag Queens: A Magazine about the Transvestite 1, no. 1 (1971): 39. 50. Patricia Ann Morgan, “Torrid Three from Gay Paree,” Female Mimics 1, no. 3 (1963): 62. 51. Ina Rubin and Philip Salem, “Dear Editor,” Tapestry: The Journal for Persons Interested in Crossdressing and Transsexualism 46 (1985): 15–­16. 52. Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 35. 53. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 182. 54. Green, 21. 55. Green, 17. 56. Ivan Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016), 132. 57. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 37. 58. Jennifer Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), 22. 59. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide, 109. 60. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 207–­8. 61. Carol Riddell, “Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 145.

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62. Spoon and Coyote, Gender Failure, 223. 63. S. Orchard, “Questions,” DUDE Magazine 1 (2011): 26; Lei Ming, Life beyond My Body (Oakland, Calif.: Transgress Press, 2016), 145–­46. 64. See also Lovemme Corazón, Trauma Queen (Toronto: Biyuti, 2013), 177–­78; The Lady Chablis, Hiding My Candy (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 102; Sarah McBride, Tomorrow Will Be Different (New York: Crown, 2018), 53, 178; Ming, Life beyond My Body, 62–­63. 65. Corazón, Trauma Queen, 128–­29. 66. See also McBride, Tomorrow Will Be Different, 26–­30; Janet Mock, Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 135–­36. 67. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 181; Rob Pusch, “Objects of Curiosity: Transgender College Students’ Perceptions of the Reactions of Others,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 3, no. 1 (2015): 45–­61. 68. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 10; Deirdre McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 100, 134. 69. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Response to Hypatia Controversy over ‘In Defense of Transracialism,’” Learning Trans (blog), May 6, 2017, https://learning trans.org/2017/05/06/talia-bettcher-response-to-hypatia-coontroversy-over-in -defense-of-transracialism/. 70. Amy Marvin, “Transsexuality, the Curio, and the Transgender Tipping Point,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, ed. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 188–­206. 71. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 191–­92. 72. Stone, “Empire Strikes Back,” 229. 73. Namaste, “Undoing Theory,” 29. 74. Namaste, “Undoing Theory.” 75. C. Jacob Hale, “Suggested Rules for Non-­transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans__,” Sandy Stone (website), accessed December 26, 2017, https://sandystone.com/hale.rules.html. 76. Mock, Redefining Realness, 16. 77. Vicki, “Dear Kim,” FMI: Female Mimics International 21, no. 5 (1992): 15. 78. Kiki, “Dressing-­Up According to Kiki,” Chi Chanter Tribune 37, no. 6 (June 1998): 2. 79. McCloskey, Crossing, 6. 80. Max Valerio, The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male (Berkeley, Calif.: Seal Press, 2006), 43. 81. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide, 103.



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82. Coyote, 33. 83. Nick Krieger, Nina Here Nor There (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 28, cp. 29, 61, 69. 84. Nick Krieger, “Writing Trans,” in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, ed. Laura Erickson-­Schroth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 583. 85. Spoon, in Spoon and Coyote, Gender Failure, 48. 86. McCloskey, Crossing, 9. 87. Valerio, Testosterone Files, 77–­78. 88. Corazón, Trauma Queen, 32. 89. Rizi Xavier Timane, An UnSpoken Compromise (Createspace Independent Publishing, 2013), 55. 90. Valerio, Testosterone Files, 109. 91. Chablis, Hiding My Candy, 87. 92. McCloskey, Crossing, 31. 93. Valerio, Testosterone Files, 181. 94. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 215. 95. See Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 10–­11, 18. 96. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 114. 97. Green, 23; Valerio, Testosterone Files, 23–­24. 98. Krieger, “Writing Trans,” 583. 99. Valerio, Testosterone Files, 10. Cp. Lucas Crawford, “Transgender without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-­affective Theory of Gender,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3–­4 (2008): 139. 100. Corazón, Trauma Queen, 85; Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 90; Mock, Redefining Realness, 23; Ming, Life beyond My Body, 89; Timane, An UnSpoken Compromise, 78; Valerio, Testosterone Files, 10. 101. Corazón, Trauma Queen, 204; Krieger, “Writing Trans,” 583; Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 216; Mock, Redefining Realness, 23; Valerio, Testosterone Files, 193. 102. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 216. 103. Valerio, Testosterone Files, 10. 104. Ming, Life beyond My Body, 41, 146; Valerio, Testosterone Files, 10. 105. Green, Becoming a Visible Man, 215. 106. Mock, Redefining Realness, 227. 107. Talia Mae Bettcher, “The Phenomenology of Empersonation: What Transphobia Shows about Transition” (keynote address, Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, June 9, 2017); Mock, Redefining Realness, 16, 50, 227; Ming, Life beyond My Body, 1. 108. Mock, Redefining Realness, 227, 258.

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109. Mock, 258. 110. Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide, 133, 171; cp. Krieger, “Writing Trans,” 583. 111. Ming, Life beyond My Body, 16; cp. Timane, An UnSpoken Compromise, 55, 57. 112. Aoki, Seasonal Velocities, 54. 113. Chablis, Hiding My Candy, 41. 114. Ma-­Nee Chacaby, A Two-­Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-­Cree Elder (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016), 19; cp. Ming, Life beyond My Body, 63. 115. Corazón, Trauma Queen, 202. 116. For a powerful account of the radical suppression of one trans child’s curiosity, see Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 117. Timane, An UnSpoken Compromise, 143. 118. The notable exception to this rule is Eliza Steinbock’s Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019) and “Groping Theory: Haptic Cinema and Trans-­Curiosity in Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 101–­18. 119. For resources for thinking curiosity beyond the human, see Heather Anne Swanson, “Curious Ecologies of Knowledge: More-­Than-­Human Anthropology,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, ed. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 15–­36. 120. Laura Erickson-­Schroth, Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, and T. Evan Smith, “Sex and Gender Development,” Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community, ed. Laura Erickson-­Schroth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81. 121. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Parker, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–­1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 34. 122. Paul Moyer, The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015); Ardel Haefele-­Thomas, “Introduction: Trans Victorians,” Victorian Review 44, no. 1 (2018): 31–­36; Simon Joyce, “Two Women Walk into a Theatre Bathroom: The Fanny and Stella Trials as Trans Narrative,” Victorian Review 44, no. 1 (2018): 83–­98. 123. Benedict, Curiosity, 150. 124. Benedict, 119. 125. Benedict, 151.



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126. Lisa Hager, “A Case for a Trans Studies Turn in Victorian Studies: ‘Female Husbands’ of the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Review 44, no. 1 (2018): 44, 47; see also Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 127. Hager, “Case for a Trans Studies Turn,” 45, 48, 51. 128. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 129. Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 7. 130. Qwo-­Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-­Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 131. Driskill, Asegi Stories, 170. 132. Steinbock, Shimmering Images, 1–­25. 133. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 134. Steinbock, “Groping Theory,” 111. 135. Steinbock, 110.

Unsettling Curiosity This chapter owes a great debt to conversations with Christina León, Andrea J. Pitts, and Erica Violet Lee. 1. I use the term pedetic here and elsewhere to refer to a specific mode of movement. The word stems from the Latin ped-­ meaning “of or related to the foot” and the Greek pedesis meaning “leaping, beating, or throbbing, especially of the heart.” The pedetic, for me, is a movement of footfalls that, while rooted in the body, is inseparable from thought; as such it is tethered to the passional work of walking, path-­making, and traversal. 2. While I treat Caribbean, Chicana, and North American Indigenous philosophical traditions as largely separate in this chapter, it is important to recognize the inherent intimacies in their theoretical lineages and ethno-­racial histories. The Caribbean, the U.S.–­ Mexico border, and Indigenous North America more generally are regions affected by some of the most debasing aspects of colonialism, including extractive curiosity. While their anticolonial stances are different, their theories of resistance are necessarily imbricated. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), §265, 162. 4. Laura Callahan, “De-­ aestheticizing Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n),” in Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-­Victorian English Prose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 154; cp. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, “‘Body’ of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah

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Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23. 5. Ndlovu, “‘Body of Evidence,” 27–­28. 6. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 2–­3. 7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 152. 8. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191. 9. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190 (emphasis added). 10. John Drabinksi, “Ethics of Entanglement,” in Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 152. 11. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 120. 12. Christina León, “Curious Entanglements: Opacity and Ethical Relation in Latina/o Aesthetics,” in Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, ed. Perry Zurn and Arjun Shankar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 167–­87. 13. León, “Curious Entanglements,” 176. 14. León, 182. 15. León, 167. 16. León, 171. 17. León, 172. 18. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Session 11,” in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Paul Celan, The Meridian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). 19. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 67. 20. J. Michael Dash, Édouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21. 21. Edwy Plenel, “Homage to Édouard Glissant, Martinique’s Whole World Poet,” Mediapart (February 19, 2011), https://www.mediapart.fr/ journal/france/180211/homage-edouard-glissant-martiniques-whole-world -poet?onglet=full. 22. Alain Baudot and Marianne R. Holder, “Édouard Glissant: A Poet in Search of His Landscape (‘For What the Tree Tells’),” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 587. 23. François Noudelmann, “Glissant le déchiffreur,” Littérature 154 (2009): 42. 24. Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 130 (my translation).



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25. Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 130 (my translation). 26. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 20–­21. 27. Cp. John Drabinki’s helpful elucidation of Glissant’s shoreline thinking in Glissant and the Middle Passage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 28. Recall Michel Foucault’s characterization of a curiosity-­driven critique as that which would “catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it” (“The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth [New York: The New Press, 1997], 325). 29. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottsville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 10, 230. 30. Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 43 (my translation). On the archipelagic intellectual, see Drabinski, Glissant and the Middle Passage, 205–­12. 31. Glissant, 89. 32. Glissant, 44. 33. Glissant, 43. 34. Glissant, 43. 35. Glissant, 137. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1962), 40. 37. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 94–­95. 38. Glissant, 186. 39. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 243–­44. 40. Glissant, 243. 41. Glissant, 246. 42. Billy Collins, “On Life, Death, and Poetry,” Washington Post, October 3, 2014. 43. Gabeba Baderoon, “Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure That Has Been Looked at Too Much?,” in Representation and Black Womanhood, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 69. 44. Ndlovu, “‘Body’ of Evidence,” 22. 45. Desiree Lewis, “Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth,” in Representation and Black Womanhood, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 102. 46. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 25–­26. 47. Lucy Anne Hurston, “Zora Neale Hurston: Pioneering Social Scientist,” in “The Inside Light”: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Deborah G. Plant (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010), 18. 48. Gloria L. Cronin, “Introduction: Going to the Far Horizon,” in Critical

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Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 1–­29. 49. Trinh T. Minh-­ha likewise suggests a certain poetic playfulness as necessary to “respect [a thing’s] realms of opaqueness” (Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989], 48). 50. Aída Hurtado and Cynthia M. Paccacerqua, “Not All Clarities Are Created Equal: The Politics of ‘Opaqueness,’” Hypatia 30, no. 3 (2015): 621. 51. Hurtado and Paccacerqua, “Not All Clarities Are Created Equal,” 623. 52. Hurtado and Paccacerqua, 624. 53. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987), 75. 54. See Andrea J. Pitts, “Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Autohistoria-­teoría as an Epistemology of Self-­Knowledge/Ignorance,” Hypatia 31, no. 2 (2016): 352–­69. 55. Gloria Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 252. 56. Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981; New York: SUNY Press, 2015), 202. 57. Gloria Anzaldúa, interview with Karen Ikas, in Borderlands/La Frontera, 235. 58. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 37 and 76; cp. Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, and Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 2, 7, 71, 82, 84, 119, 165–­67, 235. 59. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 38. 60. Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” 199. 61. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 49. 62. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 101. 63. AnaLouise Keating, “From Borderlands and New Mestizas to Nepantlas and Nepantleras: Anzaldúan Theories for Social Change,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-­Knowledge 4, no. 3 (2006): 5–­16. 64. Mestiza consciousness involves not simply “shouting questions,” but giving things “new meaning” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 100 and 103). 65. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 104. 66. Given Anzaldúa’s acknowledged debt to Nietzsche, it is difficult not to hear echoes here of his three metamorphoses: the camel, the lion, and the child.



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275

67. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 180. 68. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 94. 69. Charlton T. Lewis, “Misceō,” in An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 508–­9. 70. Amala Levine, “Champion of the Spirit: Anzaldua’s Critique of Rationalist Epistemology,” in Entre Mundos/Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 171–­84. 71. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 59. 72. Anzaldúa, 24, 49, 59, 67, 88, 90, 100, 102, 108. 73. Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” 205. 74. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 59. 75. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Counsels from the Firing . . . Past, Present, Future,” in This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981; New York: SUNY Press, 2015), 264. 76. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 37. 77. Anzaldúa, 95. 78. Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” 205. 79. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 16. Exemplary of the distinction between kinds of curiosity, note that while straight readers have a “curiosity” for her queer writing as unfamiliar and strange (Gloria Anzaldúa, “To(o) Queer the Writer,” in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009], 170–­71), Anzaldúa herself has a “enormous curiosity” for how readers will take up her writing differently (AnaLouise Keating, “Risking the Vision, Transforming the Divides: Nepantlera Perspectives on Academic Boundaries, Identities, and Lives,” in Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own, ed. AnaLouise Keating and Gloria Gonzalez-­Lopez [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011], 142). 80. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 81. 81. Anzaldúa, 63, 71, 73, 104, 193; Anzaldúa, interview with Karen Ikas, 236–­37, 240; Anzaldúa, “Counsels,” 262, 264; Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 16, 20, 45, 56, 66, 71–­74, 81–­86, 93, 108, 122, 125, 132, 137, 141, 144, 148. Most often, the crack refers to a crack in worlds; sometimes, it refers to the Rio Grande, thunder, shells, or tender shoots. 82. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 63. 83. Again, one might hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous lines: “Woe to that fateful curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through a crack [Spalte] in the chamber of consciousness, and discover that man, indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the pitiless, the greedy,

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the insatiable, the murderous, and, as it were, hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger” (“On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 142–­43). 84. Anzaldúa, “Counsels,” 264; cp. “breaking down” and “straddling” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 102). 85. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 88. 86. Perry Zurn, “Intimate Strategies: Morton, Foucault, and The Poetics of Space,” Zetesis: Research Generated by Curiosity 1, no. 1 (2013): 94–­105. 87. Baderoon, “Baartman and the Private,” 72; cp. Natasha Gordon-­ Chipembere, “Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, A Legacy to Grasp,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-­Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14. 88. L. A. Hurston, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 19. 89. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 7. 90. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 4. 91. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 53. 92. Robinson, Hungry Listening, 49. 93. Gwen Benaway, “Curiosities,” in Holy Wild (Toronto: Bookhug Press, 2018), 29. 94. Erica Violet Lee, “‘Be Safe, Nicimos’: Indigenous Freedom and Curiosity in the Wastelands” (keynote at Carleton University, May 9, 2017), https:// carleton.ca/circle/wp-content/uploads/CIRCLE-Conference-Keynote-Bio.pdf. 95. Doug Anderson, “Breathing the World,” in Natural Curiosity: The Importance of Indigenous Perspectives in Children’s Environmental Inquiry, 2nd ed., ed. Doug Anderson, Julie Comay, and Lorraine Chiarotto (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 2018), 135; cp. 136. 96. Anderson, “Sending Out Roots,” in Natural Curiosity, 84. 97. Anderson, “Lighting the Fire,” in Natural Curiosity, 62. 98. Anderson, “Lighting the Fire,” 59, and Anderson, “The Flow of Knowledge,” in Natural Curiosity, 104; cp. Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 2, 6, 13, 42, 65, 69, 80-­81, 110, 264, 265, 267. 99. Shay Welch, The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing with Native American Epistemology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 80–­83, cp. 183–­85. 100. Welch, Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System, 114. 101. Thomas M. Norton-­ Smith, The Dance of Person and Place: One



NOTES TO “UNSE T TLING CURIOSIT Y ”

277

Interpretation of American Indian Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 58–­59, citing Alanson Skinner and John Satterlee, Folklore of the Menomini Indians (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1915), 470. 102. Norton-­Smith, Dance of Person and Place, 59. 103. Robinson, Hungry Listening, 51. 104. Robinson, 59, citing Martin Daughtry, “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening,” Music and Politics 7, no. 1 (2013): 22. 105. Robinson, 53. 106. Robinson, 60. 107. Robinson, 60. 108. Robinson, 102. 109. Robinson, 72. 110. Robinson, 92–­96. 111. Robinson, 98. 112. Robinson, 96. 113. Robinson, 81. Such apposite methods are, moreover, fundamentally “intimate” (83). 114. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 276; Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 77. 115. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 39. 116. Kimmerer, 42. 117. Kimmerer, 40. 118. Anderson, “Sending Out Roots,” in Natural Curiosity, 82. 119. Anderson, “The Flow of Knowledge,” in Natural Curiosity, 104. 120. Gregory Cajete, Igniting the Sparkle: An Indigenous Science of Education Model (Kivaki Press, 1999), 47. 121. Brian Burkhart, Indigenous Philosophy through Land (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019), 194, 292. 122. Carl Mika, Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2017), 41. Here, Mika is discussing Dolores Calderon’s “Indigenous Metaphysics: Challenging Western Knowledge Organization in Social Studies Curriculum” (PhD diss., University of California, 2008). 123. See Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 124. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11, 34; cp. Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (New York: Continuum, 2008). 125. Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 30 (my translation).

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126. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 100. 127. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Acts of Healing,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981; New York: SUNY Press, 2015), xxviii. 128. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 186. 129. Anzaldúa, 41. 130. Burkhart, Indigenous Philosophy through Land, xii. 131. Burkhart, xii.

Index

able-­bodiedness, 158 able-­bodymindedness, 158–­59 ableist history of curiosity, 152–­58; ancient period in, 153–­54; and curiosity as disease, 152–­53; medieval period in, 154–­55; modernization and, 156–­58 able-­mindedness, 158 academia: and objectification of trans people, 184–­85 Acampora, Christa, 53 Adam: curiosity of, 115–­16; qualities attributed to, 176 Adriaenz, Adrian, 109 Against the Manichees (Augustine), 34 Age of Curiosity: classical period, 75–­76 agonism: Nietzschean, 53–­57, 66 Alfano, Mark, 50–­53, 235n17 Alice in Wonderland, 103 Allen, James, 195 All the Weight of Our Dreams, 161–­63 ambiguity, 207–­11; Anzaldúa on necessity of, 200; Baartman and, 207; Hurston and, 207; sovereign curiosity’s denial of, 199; and spectacle-­erasure formation, 200

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, 141 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Rembrandt), 109–­11 ancient philosophy, 25–­31; Greek, 26–­29; Roman, 30–­31 Anderson, Doug, 213 Anderson, Nicole, 105 animality: Derrida on, 113 animals: curiosity and, 39 Animal That Therefore I Am, The (Derrida), 100, 103, 112–­15, 131 Anishinaabe peoples, 215 anxiety, 156–­57 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 18, 200, 219–­20; background of, 208–­9; new mestiza and nepantlera figures of, 209 Aoki, Ryka, 173–­74, 180 Apology (Socrates), 91, 119 Apuleius, 30–­31, 155 Aquinas, 31, 38, 156 archipelagic thought, 205–­6 Aristotle, 28, 29 Asegi Stories, 195 Assassination of George Jackson, The (GIP), 139 Augustine, 11, 31, 32–­34, 154–­55 Aulularia (Titus Plautus), 156

280 I N D E X autopsic curiosity, 100; Adam and, 115; deconstructive curiosity and, 114; Derrida and, 119–­20, 130–­31; sovereign subjects and, 108, 111; subjugated subjects and, 107–­9 Baartman, Sarah, 3–­7, 200; abolitionist response to, 3–­4; ambiguity and, 207; background of, 3–­4; exhibition and objectification of, 1; loci and legacies of, 13; and loss of intimacy and belonging, 212; as scientific specimen, 4; as tale of opacity, 201–­2; tributes to, 6–­7 Bachelard, Gaston, 212 Bacon, Francis, 37 Bade, Josse, 80 Baderoon, Gabeba, 212 Barbershop/Barbershop 2, 135 Barbin, Herculine, 97 Barnum, P. T., 150, 166 Barry, James, 194 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville), 132 bathroom politics, 141–­44, 255n81 Beast and the Sovereign, The (Derrida), 100, 106–­15, 130–­31 Beauvoir, Simone de, 157, 178–­79 Benaway, Gwen, 213 Benedict, Barbara, 175, 177, 194 Benga, Ota, 164, 167 Berger, Anne Emmanuelle, 114 Berlyne, Daniel E., 134, 157 Bernard of Clairvaux, 36 Bethlem Hospital, 150 Bettcher, Talia Mae, 184 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 62–­63 biopolitical power, 77 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 67 Black American folklore, 9

Black Americans: and civil rights movement, 136 Black American U.S. South: curiosity-­ formations of, 13 Black feminism, 5–­7; Baartman and, 6–­7, 202, 207, 212; queer theory and, 136; resistance strategies and, 218 Black liberation, 136–­37 Black Lives Matter movement: curiosity in strategies of, 136–­37; Nietzschean transformations and, 56 Black on Both Sides (Snorton), 195 Black queer curiosity, 136 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 135–­36 Black Youth Project, 56 Blainville, Henri de, 4 Blumenberg, Hans, 21–­22 bodymind, 158 borderlands, 210–­11 Boulton, Stella, 194 Boylan, Jennifer, 180 Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), ix, 216 Brilliant Imperfection (Clare), 163–­65. See also Clare, Eli Brown, Lerita Coleman, 150 Brown, Lydia X. Z., 161 Brown, Michael, 136 Brown, Wendy, 53 Buck, Carrie, 167 Burke, Edmund, 37, 157 Burkhart, Brian, 217, 220 Callahan, Laura, 4 Caputo, John D., 114 Care of the Self, The (Foucault), 73 Caribbean thought, 204–­6, 271n2; vs. Western knowledge production, 200 caring curiosity: Baartman and, 6–­7 Carlson, Licia, 150

INDE X 281

Carroll, Lewis, 132 Cavanagh, Sheila, 144 Cellitti, Anarella, 151 Central American Indigenous philosophies, 220 Cezar, Hendrick, 4 Chacaby, Ma-­Nee, 180, 188 Chamayou, Grégoire, 247n38, 249n75 Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Edwards), 135 Cherokee people: two-­spirit, 195 Chez Moune, 183 Chicana feminism, 208 Chicana philosophies, 271n2; vs. Western knowledge production, 200 Chong, Dennis, 252n25 Christian fellowship, 33–­34 Christian morality: Neoplatonic, 57 Church: curiosity as threat to, 32–­35; and lack of curiosity, 36–­37 cisheteronormative expectation, 192 cisnormative world, 187 citizenship, 42 civil rights movement, 17, 128, 132–­37, 145; and Black leadership, 136; and curiosity as tactic of resistance, 135; and Nietzschean historiographical models, 55 Cixous, Hélène, 99, 113; on deconstructive curiosity, 104–­5 Clare, Eli, 152, 161, 163–­69, 263nn97–­98; and use of questions, 164–­69; and violence of curiosity, 164, 165 collective curiosity: cultivating, 19; Foucault and, 147; vs. individual curiosity, 147–­48; resistance movements and, 145–­48 colonial anthropology, 8 colonial culture, 5 colonial curiosity: and modern philosophy, 42; resistance to,

200–­201, 271n2; and simultaneous spectacularizing and erasure, 8; sovereignty of, 100, 107, 122 colonial history, 8 coloniality: ableist pedagogy and, 163; Anglo-­American feminist theory and, 184–­85; gender binary and, 143, 194 Confessions (Augustine), 33 Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity (Berlyne), 134, 157 “Conjuring Death” (Kofman), 109–­10 Connolly, William, 53 Corazón, Lovemme, 180, 186, 189 Courage of Truth, The (Foucault), 90–­91 Cox, Laverne, 182 Coyote, Ivan, 180, 182, 184, 186 criminality: Foucault and, 80–­83. See also Prisons Information Group (GIP) crip curiosity, 149–­71; vs. ableist history of curiosity, 152–­58; crip futures and, 169–­70; multidimensional nature of, 160–­61; and objectification of disabled people, 149–­50; possibilities seen by, 159; power issues and, 159–­60; resistance of, 159 Critchley, Simon, 102 Culler, Jonathan, 105 Cupid: vs. Psyche, 176 curiositas: Latin usage and, 26; two senses of, 100 curiosity, 11–­12; ableist history of, 152–­58; anticolonial, 219–­20; collective vs. individual, 17; depoliticization of, 43; Derrida and, 17; evolution of attitudes toward, 43–­44; exclusions from, 42; feminist, 178–­79; Foucault on, 17,

282 I N D E X 92–­93; frivolous, 127; genealogy of, 12; of general populace, 129; German words for, 51, 235n12, 235n13; historical debates over, 2–­3; as insubordination, 128, 145; intellectual life and, 90–­94; intimacy and, 6; Latin words for, 26; as moral value, 89; as naturalized capacity vs. sociopolitical technique, 181–­82; as natural vs. problematic, 150–­51; Nietzsche and, 17; and Nietzschean free spirit, 64–­65; political exclusions of, 44–­45; political history of (see political history of curiosity); politicization of, 12; politics and, 43–­45; responsible engagement of, 3; role at social and civic levels, 2–­3; serious, 127–­28; in service of established institutions, 145; trans perspectives on, 180; two-­sided impacts of, 3; of vegetal being, 116; in Western tradition, 11–­12; word origins, 26. See also specific types of curiosity Curiosity and Power: contributions to scholarship, 18–­19; methodological qualifications and, 15; political focus of, 2–­3; politics of curiosity and, 15 curiosity-­formations: in Baartman’s era, 5–­7; and Derrida, 108; factors in conditioning of, 7; and Foucault, 78; and Hurston, 9; inherited, 5, 13, 220; and political activism, 148; posing new, 13, 193, 196; reductive, 199, 210; and sovereignty, 17 curiosity genealogies, 195 curiosity studies: gender barrier in, 175–­78; trans-­gendering, 193–­97 Curious Feminist, The (Enloe), 179 Curious Subjects (Schor), 178 Cuvier, Georges, 1, 4, 201

Daley, Molly, 167 Davis, Barney, 166 Davis, Hiram, 166 De Brevitate Vitae (Seneca), 156 de Bury, Richard, 36–­37 de Campos, Ana Carolina, 151 DecolonizeBathroom, 143–­44 deconstruction: Cixous and, 99; Haraway and, 99; origins of, 102–­4 deconstructive curiosity, 106, 131; in The Animal That Therefore I Am, 112–­15; in Beast and the Sovereign, 112–­15; implications of, 101–­2, 122–­23; in Platonic context, 120–­21; political practice and, 121; practice of, 112–­17; and praxis of hesitation, 114–­15; vs. sovereign curiosity, 114, 120. See also Derrida, Jacques Defert, Daniel, 137–­38 Deleuze, Gilles, 94–­96, 220 d’Eon, Chevalier, 194 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 17, 99–­123, 245n14, 249n86; accounts of curiosity, 99–­100; and autopsic vs. sovereign curiosity, 100; and autopsic vs. therapeutic curiosity, 130–­31; Cixous and, 104–­5; critics of, 105; on curiosity’s duplicity, 107; deconstruction method of, 99; on deconstruction of sovereignty, 53; and deconstructive practice of curiosity, 112–­17; Gasché and, 102–­4; and institutional vs. resistant curiosity, 128; Nietzschean influence on, 67; and phantasm of sovereign curiosity, 106–­12; resistant curiosity and, 129, 130–­31, 147; supporters of, 105–­6; works emphasizing curiosity, 100. See also deconstructive curiosity Descartes, René, 38

INDE X 283

Deutscher, Penelope, 113 Dewey, John, 156 diagnosis, 166 Diderot, Denis, 84–­85 digital age, 19 Digital Transgender Archive, 183 Diogenes: as parrēsiastes, 132 disability: curiosity decontamination from, 158 disability studies, 18 Disability Studies (Goodley), 149 disabled bodyminds, 164 disabled people: enfreakment of, 150; medical interest in, 150; and nonnormatively manifested curiosity, 161–­62; objectification of, 149–­50; power relations and, 171; as subjects of curiosity, 152 disciplinary power: Foucault’s concept of, 77 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 76, 80–­83, 137, 140 Dohong, 167 Dowds, Barbara Noel, 151 Down syndrome, 151 Drabinski, John, 203 Driskill, Qwo-­Li, 195 Du Bois, W. E. B., 135–­36 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 50, 56 “Echoes from Elsewhere” (Glissant), 121 Edwards, Erica R., 135 Émile (Rousseau), 41 Enlightenment period, 180–­81 Enlightenment values, 37 Enloe, Cynthia, 179 Epictetus, 29, 38 Erasmus, 35 erasure: ableist, 149; of Black political history, 135; colonial anthropology/ curiosity and, 8; curiosity and, 3;

of Hurston, 2; settler-­colonial, 213; transphobic, 182, 184; white gaze and, 7–­8. See also spectacle-­erasure formation Erickson-­Schroth, Laura, 193–­94 errancy: Glissant and, 204–­5 ethnicity: trans experience and, 180 Eve: curiosity and, 31–­32, 34–­35, 37, 44; Nietzschean perspective on, 67–­69; qualities attributed to, 176 Exile and Pride (Clare), 163–­65, 168. See also Clare, Eli Faces of Intellectual Disability, The (Carlson), 150 Fanon, Frantz, 135–­36 Female-­to-­Male Transsexualism (Lothstein), 186 feminine curiosity: in curiosity studies, 175, 177–­79; Nietzsche and, 67–­68 feminism: Anglo-­American, 184–­85; Chicana, 208; Latina, 208; opacity as tactic of, 208; transgender people and, 194. See also Black feminism Feminist, Queer, Crip (Kafer), 169–­71 feminist curiosity, 178–­79 Ferrus, Diana, 6, 212 Floyd, George, 136 folklore: Black American, 9; safeguarding of, 202 Foucault, Michel, 16, 17, 73–­97, 181, 228n5, 242n53, 243n71; and Age of Curiosity, 75–­76; and care of self, 86–­88; contributions of, 96; on curiosity, 45; and curiosity as practice of freedom, 73–­74, 76; curious life of, 94–­97; death of, 94–­96; and Discipline and Punish, 80–­83; and elements of moral system, 86–­90; and genealogies of power, 53; and genealogy of sexuality, 83–­86; GIP and, 137;

284 I N D E X and History of Madness, 78–­80; and institutionalized vs. resistant curiosity, 74–­75, 128; intellectual life and, 90–­94; Nietzschean influence on, 66–­67; power theory of, 77–­80; quests of, 73–­74; resistant curiosity and, 129–­30, 147; as “specific” intellectual, 90; on stigmatization of curiosity, 92–­93 Fraser, Mat, 150 freak shows, 5, 7, 13, 44, 150, 164, 166, 183 freedom: curiosity, ethics and, 86–­90; curiosity as practice of, 73–­74, 76, 86, 130 free spirit: Nietzschean, 64–­65, 130 Free to Pee group, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 117, 157 From Polypragmon to Curiosus (Leigh), 26 Garden of the Heavenly Rest: Hurston and, 9–­10 Garland-­Thomson, Rosemarie, 152, 161–­62 Gasché, Rudolphe, 99, 102–­4, 120 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 56 gender and curiosity studies, 175–­79; Western European focus of, 176–­77 gender journeys, 192 genital-­curiosity, 184 George Brown College: restroom activism and, 144 Gilbert, Miqqi Alicia, 193–­94 Gilman, Sandra, 5 Glissant, Édouard, 18, 121, 200, 219–­20; errancy and, 204; opacity and, 203–­4 Goodley, Dan, 149 Gordon-­Chipembere, Natasha, 5, 6, 212 Greek philosophy, 26–­29

Green, James T., 136 Green, Jamison, 180, 187–­88 Gregory the Great, 35 Guattari, Félix, 220 Guilmette, Lauren, 150–­51, 244n91 Halberstam, Jack, 187 Hale, C. Jacob, 185 Hammond, Betsy, 165 Hampshire College: curiosity and, ix–­x; restroom activism and, 143–­44 Haraway, Donna, 99, 103, 105 Harlem Renaissance: male dominance in, 9 Hastings, Rascheel, 151 Haudenosaunee peoples: listening practices of, 215 Hemphill, Essex, 165 heresy: lead-­in to, 37 Hermeneutics of the Subject, The (Foucault), 87–­88 hesitation: praxis of, 112, 114–­15, 122 History of Madness (Foucault), 76, 130 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 76, 83–­85, 97, 130 Hobbes, Thomas, 38–­39, 113, 156–­57 homosexuality: prison oppression and, 97, 139 Honig, Bonnie, 53 Honor of Thinking, The (Gasché), 99 Hottentot Venus. See Baartman, Sarah How to Be an Antiracist (Kendi), 136 Huddleston, Andrew, 68 Huenemann, Charlie, 68 Hughes, Langston, 9 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), 50 humanity: Derrida’s deconstruction of, 113 humankind: in medieval philosophy, 34

INDE X 285

Hume, David, 38 Hurston, Lucy Ann, 212 Hurston, Zora Neale, 7–­10, 200; ambiguity and, 207; anonymity and death of, 1; anthropological methodology of, 212–­13; curiosity of, 8–­9; erasure of, 2; loci and legacies of, 13–­14; and loss of intimacy and belonging, 212; and remembering as act of resistance, 10; and resistance to erasure of, 7–­8; and tactical opacity, 202–­3; Walker and, 1, 8–­10, 203, 210 Hurtado, Aída: ambiguity and, 208; opacity and, 208 Inan, Ilhan, 21, 39 incarceration: rise of, 140. See also Prisons Information Group Indigenous philosophies, 271n2; Central American, 220; intimacy in, 213–­18; North American, 200, 219; and notion of inquiry, 214 Indiscreet Jewels, The (Diderot), 84–­85 individualism: rise of, 37 Industrial Revolution, 37 Infinitely Demanding (Critchley), 102 innovation: as moral value, 89 inquiry: Indigenous notion of, 214; into language and knowledge systems, 13–­15; praxis of, 11–­15. See also questions Insister of Jacques Derrida (Cixous), 104–­5 institutionalized curiosity, 17; criminality and, 80–­83; defining, 77–­78; madness and, 78–­80; vs. resistant curiosity, 74–­75, 93–­94; sexuality and, 83–­86; spectacle-­ erasure of, 17 institutionalized power, 77–­78

insults: and reclamation of terminology, 167–­68 intellectual life, 90–­94 intimacy: curiosity consonant with, 6; in Indigenous philosophy, 213–­18; North American Indigenous theorists and, 200–­201; sovereign curiosity’s denial of, 199; in struggle against spectacle-­erasure formation, 200; as unsettling, 211–­18 intolerance-­inquiry, 137–­38. See also Prisons Information Group intrusive gaze, 166, 169 Isidore of Seville, 35 “I’ve Come to Take You Home” (Ferrus), 6–­7 Jenner, Caitlyn, 182 Johnson, Kristina, 151 Johnson, Merri Lisa, 160 Johnson, William, 167 Jorgensen, Christine, 182 juridical power, 77 Kafer, Alison, ix, 169–­71 Kant, Immanuel, 38, 232n100 Kashdan, Todd, 135, 158 Kendall, Jonathan, 105 Kendi, Ibram X., 136 Kenny, Neil, 176–­77 Khoikhoi people, 13 Kiki, 186 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, ix, 216 Kindt, Aris, 109 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 132–­34, 135 Klein, Richard, 105–­6 knowledge, 130 knowledge systems, 13–­15 Kofman, Sarah, 101, 109–­11, 117–­19, 249n86, 250n91 Krell, David Farrell, 114 Krieger, Nick, 180, 186, 187–­88

286 I N D E X Laches (Socrates), 91 Lady Chablis, 180, 186, 188 language, 13–­15 Latina feminism, 208 Lawlor, Leonard, 113–­14 Lee, Erica Violet, 213 Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg), 21–­22 Leigh, Matthew, 26 León, Christina, 203–­4 Leviathan (Hobbes), 39–­40 listening: crip curiosity and, 162; hungry, 215; Indigenous cultures and, 214–­17; trans curiosity and, 179 Locke, John, 38, 40–­41, 155–­56, 180–­81 Lorde, Audre, 165 Lothstein, Leslie, 186 Louis XIV, 107–­9 Lovers, The (Plato), 26, 154 madness: Foucault and social construction of, 78–­80 Magubane, Zine, 5 Malcolm X, 135 Mandela, Nelson: and repatriation of Baartman’s remains, 4 Manichaeans, 34 marginalized people: curiosity genealogies of, 195; GIP and, 139; and institutionalized vs. resistant curiosity, 94; spectacularization/ erasure of, 3 Marks, Laura U., 196 Martin, Trayvon, 136 Marvin, Amy, 184 “Masked Philosopher, The” (Foucault), 86 McBride, Sarah, 180 McCall, Corey, 74

McCloskey, Deirdre, 180, 186 McRuer, Robert, 160 medieval philosophy, 31–­37; Aquinas, 34–­35; Augustine, 32–­34; and curiosity as threat to Church, 32–­35; de Bury, 36–­37; divine omniscience and, 31–­32; Erasmus, 35; Philo of Alexandria, 32; Tertullian, 32; and transition to Renaissance, 35–­36 Meditations (Descartes), 163 Melville, Herman, 132 Menagerie of Versailles, 107–­9 Mendieta, Ana, 204 Menominee people, 214–­15 mestiza, 210 mestiza consciousness, 211 mestizaje, 209–­10 Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 30–­31, 155, 156 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 27 Middle Ages, 22 Mika, Carl, 217 Ming, Lei, 180 Mingus, Mia, 152, 161–­62 Minh-­ha, Trinh T., 8 Mittelstraß, Jürgen, 21–­22 Mock, Janet, 180, 182, 188, 189 modern philosophy: and elevation of curiosity, 37–­38; Hobbes, 38–­39, 113, 156–­59; Locke, 38, 40–­41, 155–­56, 180–­81; Rousseau, 38, 41–­42, 156, 180–­81 moral values: critical, 89 Muholi, Zanele, 6, 212 Mules and Men (Hurston), 9; ambiguity in, 208; opacity and, 202–­3 Mulvey, Laura, 178 Naas, Michael, 115 Nabokov, Vladimir, 128

INDE X 287

Namaste, Viviane, 184 naming: as gender quest, 187; Hobbes and, 39–­40 Nancy prison revolt, 139 nation-­building: curiosity and, 42 Natural Curiosity, 213 Natural Questions (Seneca), 87 Ndlovu, Siphiwe Gloria, 6 Neoplatonic Christian morality, 57 nepantla, 209 neurodiverse individuals: strengths-­ based approach to, 151; unrecognized curiosity of, 163 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 17, 49–­71, 117, 181, 206, 234n11, 238n100, 239n117, 275n83; agonism of, 53–­57, 66; Apollonian, Dionysian forces and, 54–­55; on curiosity, 45; and curiosity against life, 57–­61, 129; and curiosity for life, 61–­66, 130; on educational institutions, culture, media, 58–­61; fateful curiosity of, 52, 181; on feminine curiosity, 67–­68; on his inquisitiveness, 62–­63; historiographical models of, 55; and institutional vs. resistant curiosity, 128; limitations of positions of, 67–­70; as man of curiosity, 50; on philosophical curiosity, 63; and positive vs. negative curiosity references, 52–­53; on psychological curiosity, 63–­64; resistant curiosity and, 129, 146; and scene of struggle, 52–­57; on sickness, 68–­69; and struggle-­ curiosity relationship, 51–­57; and theory of curiosity, 50–­51; and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 55–­56; and will to power, 54; and work as question mark, 70–­71

Nomshado (Muholi), 6 nonviolent action: power of, 134–­35; steps in, 133–­34. See also civil rights movement North American Indigenous philosophies, 220; vs. Western knowledge production, 200, 219. See also specific Indigenous groups Norton-­Smith, Thomas M., 214 OccupyBathroom, 143–­44 Oliver, Kelly, 247n34, 248n63, 248n67 On Deconstruction (Culler), 105 On Genesis against the Manichees (Augustine), 155 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 50, 56, 62 opacity: Baartman and, 201–­2; in Caribbean imaginary, 203–­4; Glissant on necessity of, 200; and resistance to dissection and confinement, 206; sovereign curiosity’s denial of, 199; in struggle against spectacle-­erasure formation, 200; tactical, 202–­3; unsettling with, 201–­6 Orchard, S., 184 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 73, 75–­76 “othering” response, 149 Paccacerqua, Cynthia: ambiguity and, 208; opacity and, 208 Pandora: qualities embodied by, 176; reinterpretation of, 178 Papastephanou, Marianna, 12 Park, Fanny, 194 parrēsia: Foucault’s embrace of, 90–­91 parrēsiastes: in ancient and modern eras, 93; curiosity and, 130; Foucault and, 92, 132

288 I N D E X Pascal, Blaise, 38 pedetic ethics, 199, 271n1 Peers, Danielle, 161 Pelton, Leroy H., 134–­35 People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR), 18, 128, 141–­44 “Peri Polypragmosunē” (Plutarch), 30 Peters, Ruth, 157 Phelan, Cynthia Stellos, 151 Philo, 39 Philobiblon (de Bury), 36 Philo of Alexandria, 32 philosophy: and histories of curiosity, 14; wonder as beginning of, 102, 119 Philosophy of Curiosity, The (Inan), 21 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 109–­11 PISSAR, 141–­44, 145 Plato, 26–­28; on curiosity, 153, 154; and origins of Western philosophy, 99; and wonder as beginning of philosophy, 119–­20 Pliny, 154 Plutarch, 30, 38; on curiosity, 153–­54; and tactics of self-­care, 87–­88 police: French prison system and, 139–­40 political activism: civil rights movement/nonviolent action, 132–­37; PISSAR, 141–­44, 145. See also civil rights movement; nonviolent action; Prisons Information Group political change, 11 political curiosity, 129–­32 political history of curiosity, 21–­45; ancient period, 25–­31; and curiosity defined, 23; medieval period, 31–­37; modern period, 37–­42; and modulation across eras, 24–­25;

and politics defined, 23; social function and, 22. See also medieval philosophy; modern philosophy political marginalization, 3 political movements, 11 political power, 16 political resistance movements, 128 political suppression, 23–­24 politics, 11; curiosity and, 43–­45 Politics (Aristotle), 28 politics of curiosity: Baartman and Hurston and, 2; across history, 44; loci and legacies of, 13–­14; questions asked of, 13 Postloudness podcast collective, 136 power: criminality and, 80–­83; disabled people’s loss of, 159–­60; as immobilizing force, 88; madness and, 78–­80; sedimentation of, 130; speaking truth to, 92, 93, 130 “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual” (Foucault), 86, 89 power formations, 85–­86 power relations: disabled people and, 171; Foucault’s theory of, 77–­80; institutionalized, 88; and Nietzsche’s curiosity of general populace, 129 praxis of hesitation, 114–­15 Price, Margaret, 158 primary virtues: Aquinas and, 34–­35 Prisoners Action Committee (CAP), 137 prison resistance movement: in France, 140. See also Prisons Information Group prison revolts, 139 Prisons Information Group (GIP), 17, 128, 137–­40, 145 Prison Suicides (GIP), 139 prison system: Foucault and, 81–­83 Prometheus: Nietzschean perspective on, 67–­68; vs. Pandora, 176 Psyche, 176

INDE X 289

Psychology of Nonviolence, The (Pelton), 134–­35 public restrooms: and ADA standards, 141; inaccessibility of, 141 Public Universal Friend, 194 question mark: Nietzsche’s conception of, 70 questions: Clare’s use of, 164–­69; forbidden and imaginative, 168–­69; and political account of disability, 170–­71 Rabinow, Paul, 74 race: trans experience and, 180 Raymond Roussel (Foucault), 73 Redefining Realness (Mock), 189 Reeves, Christopher, 167 refusal, 89 Reginster, Bernard, 50 Renaissance: and social construction of madness, 79–­80; transition to, 35 Répondre du secret (Derrida), 99–­100, 116 Republic (Plato), 27, 153 resistance: and curiosity of trans people, 185–­90; as mobilizing force, 88–­89; moral values and, 88–­89; remembering as act of, 10; by reversing intrusive gaze, 166, 169 resistance movements, 146 resistant curiosity, 127–­28; collective nature of, 132, 145–­48; Derrida and, 130–­31; disability community and, 166; Foucault and, 130; as individual trait, 131; vs. institutionalized curiosity, 74–­75; Nietzsche’s paradigms of, 132; trans practice and, 193; as unsettling, 199, 201, 212, 213, 218; use in resistance movements, 146; vectors of, 128. See also political activism

Restroom Revolution group, 141–­42, 144, 256n83 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 28 Riddell, Carol, 184 Robinson, Dylan, 213, 215–­16 Roman philosophy, 30–­31 Ronell, Avital, 116 Rootprints (Cixous), 104 Rorty, Richard, 105, 246n28 Rose, Édith, 145 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 38, 41–­42, 156, 180–­81 Rukeyser, Muriel, 9 Safranski, Rüdiger, 50 Saint-­Hilaire, Geoffroy, 4 Sandoval, Chela, 209 SayHerName, 136 Schor, Hilary M., 178 science: heart-­driven, 216 Searle, John, 105 Seasonal Velocities (Aoki), 173–­74 Sedgwick, Peter, 68 sedimentation: of curiosity-­formations, 13, 199; factors countering, 89, 90, 97; of knowledge and power, 130; unsettled, 206, 211, 217 Segarra, Marta, 114 self-­care: Foucault and ancient tactics of, 86–­90 self-­transformation, 130 Seneca, 87–­88 settler: Halq’eméylem word for, 213 settler-­colonialism: and disregard for relationality, 213 sexuality: Foucault’s genealogy of, 83–­86 Shattuck, Roger, 68 Shimmering Images (Steinbock), 196 ship of fools, 79–­80 sickness: Nietzschean perspective on, 68–­69

290 I N D E X Smith, Steven, 68 Smith, T. Evan, 193–­94 Snorton, C. Riley, 195 Society for Accessible and Safe Spaces, 256n87 Socrates, 28–­29; and devaluation of body, 53; as exemplar of parrēsia, 91; King and, 134; as parrēsiastes, 132 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 40 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 135 sovereign curiosity, 17; characteristics of, 199; deconstructive curiosity vs., 114, 120; unsettled, 199 sovereign power, 77 speaking truth to power, 92, 93, 130 spectacle-­erasure formation: Baartman and, 1–­2, 4–­7; in Caribbean philosophy, 204; Hurston and, 7–­10; opacity, ambiguity, intimacy in countering, 200; supercrip narratives and, 149, 150; trans people and, 180, 190 spectacularization: of Baartman, 1–­2, 4–­7; colonial anthropology/curiosity and, 8; curiosity and, 3; and disability community, 18, 150, 152, 159, 163; and trans community, 18, 182, 185, 190, 196 Spielberger, Charles D., 157–­58 Spoon, Rae, 180, 186 Staring (Garland-­Thomson), 161–­62 Starr, Laura M., 157–­58 Steinbock, Eliza, 196 Stocker, Susan, 68 Stokes, Harry, 195 Stó:lō nation, 213; listening practices of, 215 Stone, Sandy, 174, 184 Stratton, Charles (“Tom Thumb”), 167 Straus, Erwin, 114

strengths-­based approach: to neurodiverse individuals, 151 Stryker, Susan, 174 Stultiferae Naviculae (Bade), 80 Sturgeon, Jessa, 152, 161–­63 suicidality: in prisons, 139 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 34–­35 supercrip narratives, 149, 150 Swidler, Eva-­Maria, 12 systemic curiosity, 17 Taylor, Henry, 4 Tertullian, 32 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 9, 212–­13 therapeutic curiosity, 100, 130–­31; Adam and, 115; animals and, 100; Derrida and, 107–­8, 119–­20, 130; Kofman and, 111; madness and, 79; and shift from autopsic gaze, 108–­9 This Is Not Sufficient (Lawlor), 113 Thompson, Ann, 167 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 54, 55–­56 Timane, Rizi Xavier, 180, 186, 190 Titus Plautus, 156 Toul prison revolt, 139, 145–­46 Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, 193–­94 trans curiosity, 173–­97; and challenge to binary curiosity studies, 197; factors affecting modulations of, 192–­93; and gender and curiosity studies, 175–­79; gender journeys and, 192; haptic nature of, 196; method and theoretical framework, 179–­82; objectification and, 182–­85; possibilities for, 195–­96; as practice of freedom, 174; as praxis, 190–­93; as social practice, 175; and sociopolitical resistance, 193; sources on, 196–­97; transformative habits and, 193; and trans-­gendering

INDE X 291

curiosity studies, 193–­97; and trans people as subjects of curiosity, 185–­90 trans experience, 180 transgender: popularization of term, 182–­83 Transgender History (Stryker), 174 transgender people: curiosity as objectification and practice of freedom, 174; divergent experiences of, 174; in media and medical settings, 184; public restrooms and, 141–­42 transgender theory, 18 transparency: demands for, 204 trans people: academia and, 184–­85; and envisioning different possibilities, 193–­94; family assumptions about, 183–­84; in media and medical settings, 184; objectifying curiosity and, 190–­91; violence against, 255n74 trans studies, 175, 183–­85 travel: weakened restrictions on, 35–­36 Truss, Lynne, 70 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 213 Truth-­speaking: Foucault and, 90–­92 two-­spirit people, 188–­89, 195 Übermensch, 54 University of California, Santa Barbara: restroom activism and, 142–­43 University of Massachusetts, Amherst: restroom activism and, 141–­43 unsettling curiosity, 199–­220; for ambiguity, 207–­11; for intimacy, 211–­18; for opacity, 201–­6. See also intimacy Use of Pleasure, The (Foucault), 86, 94–­95

Valerio, Max, 180, 186–­87 vegetal being, 116 Venus (Williams), 6 Verdion, John Theodora de, 195 von Meysenbug, Malwida, 69 Voss, Hans-­Georg, 11 Walker, Alice: Hurston and, 1, 8–­10, 203, 212 We Charge Genocide, 145 Welch, Shay, ix, 214 Western philosophic tradition: vs. deconstructive curiosity, 101–­2 When Species Meet (Haraway), 103 White Boy Shuffle, The, 135 Whitman, Walt, 220 Wilde, Oscar, 109 Williams, Carla, 6, 212 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39 Woman, Native, Other (Minh-­ha), 8 women: ancient and medieval characterizations of, 176; curiosity associated with, 26, 31, 35, 41–­42; curiosity profile of, 177–­79; Eve as archetype of, 31–­32, 34–­35, 37; Nietzschean perspective on, 67–­69 women of color: exclusion from halls of learning, 10. See also Anzaldúa, Gloria; Baartman, Sarah; Black feminism; Hurston, Zora Neale wonder: in ancient philosophy, 25–­27; as beginning of philosophy, 102, 119; Derrida and, 119–­20; Descartes and, 38; Gasché and, 102–­4; in Indigenous philosophy, 214; philosophy and politics after, 117–­23; Plato and, 26 Zarathustra, 131–­32

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PERRY ZURN is assistant professor of philosophy at American

University, coeditor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, Carceral Notebooks 12, and Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (Minnesota, 2020), and coeditor and cotranslator of Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970–­ 1980 (Minnesota, 2021).