Reading the Impossible : Sexual Difference, Critique, and the Stamp of History

Reading the impossible has never seemed less possible.A few decades ago, critical readings could view the collapse of foundationalism optimistically.With meaning no longer soldered onto being, there was hope for all those beings whose meaning had been forever ordained by Nature or the Divine.Critical reading thus became a way of exploring the devious workings of knowledge and power.But as non-foundational systems of meaning have proven to be so perfectly suited to the transactional logics of the market, reading for the impasses of meaning has come to be seen as quixotic, impractical, and dated.To concur with that view, Elizabeth Weed argues, is to embrace the fantasy told by the neoliberal order.To read the impossible is to disrupt that fantasy, with its return to stable categories of marketable identity, in order to contest the inexorable workings of misogyny and racism.This book seeks to disturb the positivity of identity in the hope of retrieving the impossibility of sexual differen