 My paper is entitled, Auto-Heterobiography and the Pistolary Game in the Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Kow. In an interview published in 1991, Avatel Ronell was asked, what's wrong with feminism today? It's dependent on what man does, Ronell responded, continuing, feminism today, feminism today has a parasitical secondary territoriality. If you respond to present conditions, you're subject to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings. So the problem is, she continued, how can we free, how do you free yourself? How can you not be reactive to what already exists as powerful and dominating? How can you avoid a recent mental politics? Of course, Avatel Ronell is no one straw woman. And so it is in following the imperative of her work to be relentlessly deconstructive and responsibly responsive that my talk sets out. I take as my starting point Ronell's diagnosis of a contemporary feminism gone awry, a feminism best characterized as Ronell does by the borrowing of a Nietzschean concept, what Nietzsche calls Resentement, denoting a psychological state arising from feelings that cannot be acted upon, often resulting in a form of self-abasement. Wendy Brown, too, has argued that feminism is a politics fundamentally grounded in Resentement or what she calls its wounded attachment to the trauma associated with systems of inequality. Indeed, Brown's notion of wounded attachment finds new inflection in the metaphor of the parasite, for whom it is literally the attachment to the wound that articulates the sight of open contact that makes its relationship to the host most felt. For Brown, feminism's parasitical politics is caught in a trap of having to make central the pain of its marginalization, and doing so, feminism has been unable to liberate itself from its secondary service to the primacy of patriarchy. Ronell observes that we must leave behind what she sees as feminism's recursive choreography, the well-worn track of a codependent feminism that remains tethered to the patriarchal logic of a re, re that signifies the again and the back, again and back, that haunts her diction and suggests that women's politics are fundamentally programmed for return, one suggesting that they are reactive, regressive, resentimental. That's Ronell's plan, Resentement. What we see, so my question is what are we to make of this tension between response and responsibility? Advising feminists as one would a friend trapped in a bad relationship, Ronell asks how do we free ourselves and instead of going back again, how do we move forward? How do feminists recover once and for all and finally get their own place? My analysis will labor under the weight of these questions and in the long shadow cast by the possibility of such a thing as a right feminism, a healthy feminism, a good feminism, one that would be self-sufficient, self-sufficient enough to become paradoxically central to the system from which it must necessarily escape. Borrowing on Michelle Serre's analysis of the parasite as a suggestive theoretical concept for thinking modes of relation and exchange, the formulation of the parasite would seem to be the very antithesis of this model of a progressively inclined self-sufficient feminism, symbolizing instead the looming figure of a bad feminism, a mode of being that instead of looking for a way to get outside of the system seeks further residence in its depths. The parasitical politics of a feminism gone wrong is one that might be said to luxuriate in women's secondary social position, wistfully tracing the curly cues of its recursive dance. This parasitical feminism might also be said to enjoy the spoils of a position that is maintained by the symbiotic primacy of its host and the normative conditions that reproduce those power relations. I want to hold this image of a parasitical feminism as one that might be productive for thinking the politics of a recent trend in contemporary feminist art, and I'll just bracket here that I'm not an art historian, so I'm coming at it from a more like critical theory performance study angle, okay? If as Ronel suggests, feminism must continue to negotiate its own territoriality, what are the ethics of an aesthetic thrall to modes of relationality marked by negativity breakdown and break up? As witnessed by a recent trend in feminist visual culture, is the parasite not merely the organism that feeds on its attachment to the host, but moreover, one that thrives by creating new wounds? How might these new wounds posed by strategic supplementarity of the parasite to the host engage a feminist remapping of the structural dynamics of gendered territoriality? To answer these questions, I'd like to look at the mutually informing relationship between two epistolary art book projects that posit heterosexual romantic rejection packaged as literary performance as an emergent site of feminist potential and queer play in the field of contemporary art. For these artists, certain modalities of reading and writing come alive as gendered opponents that feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game, positions taken up in a recursive playing field in the high stakes field of meanings. These art projects query the limits of the game, whether the procedures of representation demand maneuvers outside of a given rule book. I submit that these works argue for yet another return, a reconsideration of the feminist potential of the parasitical politics Ronell sounded her warning against more than 15 years ago. A New Zealand expatriate now based in the U.S., Chris Kraus is a filmmaker turned writer. In her most well-known work, I Love Dick, 1997, she chronicled her romantic obsession with Dick, widely identified as British cultural theorist Dick Hubdage, an academic colleague of her husband, celebrated theorist Sylvère Lantrige. After only a single meeting, one that was later described by Dick as genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable, Kraus undertakes to make Dick into a kind of idol, an object of worship, onto which she might confess the damnation of her feminine objection and her intellectual rapacity. In the accumulation of her over 200 confessional letters written to Dick, she manipulates Dick's identity into a faceless patriarchal screen onto which she projects her sexual fantasies, personal anxieties and critical interventions. By Kraus' own hand, by Kraus' own hand, the proper name Dick, capital D, becomes Dick Lowercase D, through a process that Derrida calls E majesculation, his play on emasculation of the majescal, the majescal that is the capital letter. It is in this castrating force of writing, as a kind of mark or cut, reflected in the gesture of the letter that Dick is separated from his personality, leaving only the Dick, the phallus that is the paragon of masculinity and the vulgar slang used to name its most insensitive member. In graphic verbal depiction, Kraus recounts her humiliations, not only Dick's refusal to get romantically involved with her, but also the insults, slights and condescension that she endured as the wife of a successful public figure that is well remunerated and tenured. He gets top billing and she gets on the list as his plus one. The very pride and personification of the white heteropatriarchal institution, her husband Silvair, known for his kinky sexual and critical appetite, plays dominant to her submissive, academic darling to her amateurish supplementarity. The banality of her connected outsider-ness is rendered exceptional by her status as a kind of parasitic hanger-on, right, the plus one, the perpetual plus one. She is the emotive excess that spills over his institutional excuse me, she is the emotive excess that spills over the institutional permissiveness granted to his subversive Ivy League deconstructive critical cache. Kraus swears to her belief in and love for Dick like a little girl does Santa Claus, concluding her daily letters to him with affirmations of her unequivocal faith in his sexual power, critical majesty and patriarchal omnipotence. Kraus signs off in one entry, I keep you in my heart, it keeps me going. And another, no one used like knowing Jesus, there are millions of us and only one of you, so I don't expect to hear from you personally, I don't expect much from you personally, there are no answers to my life, but I'm touched by you and fulfilled just by believing. I expected laugh, but that's okay, okay, yeah, you can laugh. Kraus's love letters to Dick are brutally public practice and forced voyeurism, recalling Jacques Derrida's reflections on the postcard, so this is a different post that I'm working with, the postcard that is an open letter, a mode of intimate exchange that remains unsealed and thus can be read at any moment. The letters taught Dick mocking him for his status as forced exhibition and forced exhibitionist. At one point, even inviting him to write the introduction for their publication, it could read something like this, Sylvère suggests, I believe these letters will interest the reader as a cultural document, obviously they manifest the alienation of the postmodern intellectual in the most diseased form. I really feel sorry for such a parasitical growth that feeds on itself. Kraus's correspondence stock Dick, shock him into stillness, assigning him in the public record of their open book with the post, so Derrida uses the French Le Post, that Derrida reminds us with the French is the sense of a position to be held, the violence of her letter is in the gesture of their binding. Published and publicized as a book, Dick has no choice, but to hold the post, Kraus has given him. Just as Derrida plays with the postcard against literature, Kraus's love letters and diary entries, the fluffy, feminized stuff of adolescent daydreams, make themselves into unlikely weapons and as a result, inadmissible literature for Dick's defense. In this sense, Dick fails to find protection under patriarchy or what literally is the law of the father. As Kraus's feminine subterfuge brilliantly turns Dick's own logic against him. Significantly, Kraus undertakes to pervert the meaning of the letter typically thought to record the material bond between two subjects in exchange. Instead the letters in I Love Dick are serialized and bound for their diaristic quality and Dick is rendered impotent. Not only by the manic intensity of their proliferation as a joke turned conceptual art project, but also finally by the force of their very serious circulation as a published book. Despite the links Kraus goes to perform the wretchedness of her own less than flattering self, female self-portrait, the joke seems always to be on Dick. And the letters mound, a conceptual chorus seems to sing louder and louder, and this is my homage to Carly Simon and Eve Sedgwick. Dick, you're so vain, I bet you think this book is actually about you. It turns out that Dick has little point. As the letter as diary signifies only the relationship of Kraus to Dick as that of subject to object. Indeed Dick's value is mostly as a token in exchange between Kraus and the reader as the book serves as a guarantor that letters made to his address are always already intercepted by the reader. As Dear Dick replaces Dear Diary, the form of the letter becomes a means of transforming Dick from subject to object, from writer to reader, from critic to critique. This time it is the Dick who finds himself on the receiving end of things. Kraus' project finds ample critical resonance in the work of French artist Sophie Cowell. A conceptual inheritance acknowledged throughout the pages of I Love Dick and perhaps predated, this is something that I've noticed and maybe this has been written about, but this is a connection I'm sort of wanting to make, and perhaps predated by a 1991 project undertaken by Joseph Grigly entitled Post Cards to Sophie Cowell. What he dubs his monospondence, Grigly writes 32 unsolicited postcards to Cowell offering obsessive critical feedback to her exhibition at the Lurig Augustine Gallery in New York melding the critical writing of high art with the low form of the love letter. Grigly romances Cowell with his discomforting insistence on responding to her work with a forced intimacy of the first person, first name, affective register. Dear Sophie, he writes, I am, how shall I say it, entranced. No other word will do. Yours, Joseph. It is Cowell, of course, who is popularly credited with having set the gold standard in the genre of breakup art, having masterminded such works as her film, No Sex Last Night, which is also known as Double Blind, and I have a couple of different dates that I've seen 2000, sorry, 1996 and 1992, and later, her work Exquisite Pain from 2004, among other projects that centralized kind of girlish thematics such as infatuation, pursuit, unrequited and unrequited heterosexual love and loss. I was happy with my animated text there. Ten years after the publication of Chris Krause's I Love Dick, Cowell has again raised the stakes of a career made on the conceptual politics of romantic art practices, heterosexual romantic art practices as one way investigatory performances in forensic autobiographical aesthetics with her much praised Venice Biennale Exhibition and subsequent book project entitled Take Care of Yourself from 2007. This latest book visualizes the abundance of Cowell's return on her missive to 107 women professionals to read and analyze a breakup email she received according to their occupational skill set. Krause writes of the project, I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words, take care of yourself, and so I did. Grand and size and ambition, take care of yourself, is a massive effort to boldly, that boldly echoes Krause's turn to multiplication, the operation of scale to quantify the infinitely subjective stakes of heartbreak. Given the calculated, this idea of calculation is something I want to play with, given the calculated quality of these highly conceptual projects, perhaps it is no coincidence, our visual encounter with her ex, this idea of an ex is something else I'd like to play with here, is signified by the very sign of multiplication. In the place of its absent reference, so in the place of the signature and take care of yourself, in the place of this absent reference is ex, so ex is what's marking his name in the email. So it's signed by ex. I am most interested in reading this art book as a product of skilled and networked creative mass production, as a book, a volume, in every sense of the word, that literally is one part of a greater haul. The book was time to coincide with the exhibition. But also as voluminous, right? It's 424 pages. It's a 424 page art book with, it's really exceptional for its sheer volume. It's form, it's voluminous, it's massive, it's protuberant. Perhaps it is Krause and Cal's shared interest in the aesthetic of overwhelm that explains why the dicks, so I'm just playing with the fact that they both have dicks, ostensibly at the core of their projects begin to look so insignificant under the protuberances that hold Krause's proliferating sentiments in Cal's outsourced analyses. Initially taking him up as an idol, Krause's words ultimately picked Dick apart as Cal's triangulated dissections undo ex, making both men into details that just can't quite be recalled within the vast expanse of the project's larger and far more striking political field, I argue. It is, if to overwhelm means to suffocate or drown, as the dictionary tells me, to bury beneath a huge mass, the memetic crime committed by these acts of creative repetition is indeed a kind of representational murder. Krause pleads guilty writing during her early collaboration on the project with Silver, quote, at first they just share the letters with each other, but as the pile grows to 50, then 80, then 180 pages, they begin discussing some kind of Sophie Cal-like art piece in which they would present the manuscript to Dick. Dear Dick, she writes at one point, I guess in a sense I've killed you, you've become Dear Diary, end quote. In an interview, Cal concurs admitting that what began as a form of personal therapy developed into art. After one month I felt better, there was no suffering, it worked. The project had replaced the man, but before my reading threatens to sound like a Valerie Solanas kind of feminism, let me be clear, Krause and Cal don't kill Dick. They kill the idea that Dick is autonomous and unaffected by his relation to the world, that they can't affect Dick. They've killed that idea, I think. This time it is another kind of letter that is centralized. The letter X comes to represent both the presence and absence of Cal's conceptual ex, ex-boyfriend, whose decidedly smarmy email to the artist serves as an invitation for an extended reading that he unwittingly agrees to host. Dick naively initiates his role as the project's host when he invites Krause and her husband to spend an evening at his remote cabin in the Antelope Valley of Southern California. Still his service to the project quickly gets re-territorialized as the occupation of the host becomes more manifest by the parasitical rigor for which he accommodates around him and, indeed, Dick supplies the very structure that threatens him, feeding its discourse and growing its project until it has emptied its host, almost entirely of its substance, as Dick and X get emptied out of their meaning as individuals. The X for Cal signifies a kind of landmark for something that has crossed her and in turn has been crossed and crossed out. It is a symbol of what must be searched for and what has been buried. Maybe it represents the presence that has been barred or kept out or could, in fact, the X represent the variable that stands for the many possibilities that always coexist and among them, the possibility that X marks not only the thing that one must get away from but X marks the spot where one must bury even deeper. In closing, I want to consider a figure who perhaps, I want to consider a figure who perhaps as well as anyone has proven the productive value of the return. That is, the return and turn deeper into something that might otherwise be left behind. With his famous return to Freud, it was another Jacques Lacan who noted the parasitic resemblance of the child in the mother-child, in the mother-infant or child relationship. If, as it is for Naomi Shore, the parasitical detail is always already linked to the unruly feminine that interrupts the aesthetic masculine ideal. What are we to make of this slippage between the feminine and the childlike? What are we to think of this adolescent self-image Krauss offers of a grown woman who holds out her hand to accept her husband's money only to fund an art project that depicts him like an impotent old cauldron who just doesn't get it? What are we to make of a grown woman artist who cannot stop writing unrequited love letters in the diaristic register of the first person confessional? The famous conceptual artist who asks 107 of her closest girlfriends for their aesthetic takes on her latest breakup, only to publish their reactions in a book covered in hot pink foil. The woman who must be reminded by her paternalistic now ex-lover to take care of herself? How might we think the performative politics of girlish regression offered in the art of Krauss and Cal? The child adolescent would seem to hold rich potential, rich political potential for the project of feminism insofar as it, like the parasite, is a model that threatens to violate established systems of exchange by taking and not giving back. How might this refusal of return, this kind of different way of thinking of the refusal of return, make new forms of relationality possible? Might in fact, the literalized performance of these regressive posterings as Ronell called them, offer if not a way to be free, then maybe a way to move forward. Thank you.