Colin Buist

In his dissertation, Colin writes of how the emergent aesthetic condition of undetectable that figures as the 'end' of the AIDS crisis in 1996 generates among gay men not only new forms of art (like videomaking) and intimacy (like barebacking), but destruction (like addiction) and depression (like suicide). Speculating on the question of how to remember something we did not experience directly (like the crisis—Colin was born in 1997), his dissertation conceptualizes loving dying not as death drive but as will-to-live, as art: a technique of the care of the self (Foucault), and so too of the dead and of the dying in the finite present. This is different from the increasing tendencies within the affective humanities to look at subjects of mass death or death's mass as untouchable victims of unspeakable trauma (like the corpse), or unrepresentable acts from unrepeatable pasts (like genocide), ending up rejecting, or hating, the very teaching of it. By treating the lives of artists-writers as if works of art—such as the art of Roland Barthes's notes, Michel Foucault's lectures, Leo Bersani's sentences, Robert Blanchon's pedagogy, Charles Lum's cocksucking, and Doug Ischar's boys (Ischar is the only still living)—Colin's dissertation ultimately suggests that perhaps the greatest commonality between continental philosophy and queer theory is their post-AIDS disciplinary rejection, or hate, of the art of (dead) white gay men.