Whitman’s Homotextuality, Homopolitics, and Homonationalism 435 In contrast, Frank sees the stranger cruising as a form of what he calls “promiscuous citizenship” (though “promiscuous” means not just “erotic attachment to nonintimates” but “undiscriminating” and “mixed” sociality [2011: 158]). Following Kateb to the full, Frank affirms this form of citizenship as significantly rid of such “partial attachments” (175) as either the “identarian forms” (157) of politics as nationalism or the “personal and partial relations of intimacy” (175), such as the committed mode of comrade love.39 That is why he insists on what he calls “eroticized impersonality,” because it is “the love that can exist between strangers as strangers, a love and attachment that does not try to convert the stranger into an intimate, but retains a distance, perhaps ‘a pathos of distance.’” Taking his cue from this, James R. Martel groups Whitman with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Leo Bersani as belonging to the “politics of indifference” (2010: 626), which he describes as a “sub-current” in Western political thoughts that regards erotic connection as a “source of dependence” and thus seeks to overcome it by switching to “a kind of public eros,” which, for Whitman and Bersani, takes the form of “indifferent public cruising.”40 However, as I tried to point out in a previous article (Chu, 2019: 198), this form of “antirelationlity” (Bersani, 1995: 164), radical as it may seem, in effect fits perfectly with the modern civil society which is said to base its operative relationality on exactly such indifference to is public by definition, since for him sociality—other-directedness—has as its foundation an erotic tie” (2005: 155). 39 This characterization of Frank’s bears a striking resemblance to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s exemplification of Whitman—in Commonwealth, the concluding volume of their Empire trilogy on globalization—for their resistant “politics of love” (2009: xi-xii). See my (Chu, 2019: 187-198) theoretical articulation of this preposition of Hardt and Negri’s with Bersani’s antisocial theorization of cruising that informs the following discussion. 40 Although this is a rather accurate analysis of Bersani’s concerned theorization of antirelationality in Homos (1995: 113-151), I do not think it applies equally well to Whitman for reasons that will be clear in a moment. Nevertheless, it is still useful for highlighting certain polemical aspects of Whitman’s homopolitics.
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