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In his most recent book, Calvin Thomas examines the relationship between abjection and masculinity first explored in his 1996 book, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line. Whereas that book devoted a considerable degree of attention to fluidic abjection (piss and Hegel, semen and the pornographic money-shot), this book maintains a “tighter focus” on the anus and “whatever figuratively falls in and out of it” (p. xiv). Similarly, while Male Matters investigated a variety of “theorists of difference,” here the author concentrates primarily on developing lively dialogues with the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan and “the thoughts on abjection that fall in and out of his writing” (p. xv).
The book contains six main essays, along with an introduction and a substantial section of notes that is worthy of a close read. As a collection of essays, rather than a work of developmental chapters, the pieces do not build toward proving a temporally situated cultural argument as such. Rather, as Thomas indicates in the opening pages, the essays are, foremost, discrete “adventures in abjection” (p. xi). True to this spirit, while all the entries share a concern for abjection in theory and representational practice, they shamelessly flit across theoretical and disciplinary boundaries, beginning with a review of the author's prior research and appropriately skidding to a halt with an interpretation of the death drive.
In the introduction, Thomas outlines his working definition of abjection as “a problem of writing, as a disturbance in the relation between identity and its representation” (p. xvi). The tensions implied by this understanding are subjected to scrutiny in the six chapters that follow. In “Beginning with a Bit of (Be)Hindsight…” Thomas looks back to his earlier work, while rehearsing the recent contributions of Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Slavoj Žižek (among others) to the overlapping discourses of psychoanalysis and sexuality. He does