JZ: Do you perceive excess - defined as ‘this not-not negativity, this multiplicity of the in-between (i.e. the negative ‘between-ness’ of the not and its other). A kind of spiralling (or, anyway, dizzying) interiority which regurgitates right outside the limit, and in that wake, constitutes it: neither/nor’ - as a political category? What forms of politicisation does it allow for?

SG: I think it absolutely could be perceived as a political concept, and I am wondering if it is only a political concept. Which requires one to ask: what is a political concept? In a certain sense one might want to say that all concepts are political, but that rather fudges the issue. More substantially, it seems to me that a political concept is that which involves both power and creativity. It does not necessarily have a beginning or an end, but may just be part of a process. A lot of feminist writing which is interested in autobiographies or journeying, that is the process of something, is very much a part of what underlies it. That kind of politics where something is intermediate is what I often call the deep cut, or the deep slash, or the deep wound. I don’t want to suggest woman is a wound - this irritates me more than anything else. Instead, I want to point out that the shaping of power is dangerous and can wound the very people, or living creatures, that are feeling, moving and creating. Most concepts are like a hegemonic fight as to which one becomes the named embodiment of the thing. In excess the thing that does not fit within the category itself has the advantage to give meaning or uniqueness to the actual thing. This is a kind of peculiar Kantianism, because I don’t want it to be Kantian at the level of the category being reinstated, and I take issue with Kant on that. On the other hand, we have the notion of the sublime as a kind of corruption that is an excess, which you find in Kant and elsewhere, but not in Hegel - with Hegel it is much more around the question of lack and the whole sublime is focused on the concept of the negative that does not quite operate as such. For me the politics of taking this excess, or corruption that does not fit in, that may or may not be a surface, is a political act, and all these acts are in themselves multidimensional. To give an example, let’s say there is somebody who is technically male - male genitals - dressing up as a drag queen, though changing it slightly into a certain kind of lesbian; with the lesbian then shifting an image which was trying to be rather fem, but keeping a butch side to it. As a result, you have a whole series of peculiar broken mirrors that create not a distortion but an imitation, and that excess is what then becomes definitional, but only in the most playful, even though violent, way.

JZ: Masquerade can be political, and it doesn’t have to be just a binary masquerade.