The Other F Word

Proposition
The word, “fuck,” has an intimate relationship with another F word, “fail.” Fucking and failure find their philosophical matching with freedom and finitude. This foursome characterizes life more than any other quadruple alliterative lexical constellation…Fuck…Fail…Free…Finite…

Example
Writing in a style that resists the unconditional endorsement of identitarian politics as it deconstructs such politics within and for the threshold critical-psychic-affective space between feminist theory and queer theory (alternatively, feminist studies and queer studies), Robyn Wiegman models a compelling beginning (actually an ending of the typical academic-minus-the personal argumentative form) in which one’s failures during the movement of dwelling-as-thinking become one’s means of transportation from perspective to perspective, position to position:

“I’ve had a difficult time settling on a way to begin this article, which is perhaps a polite way of warning you now that what follows is something of a failure. I do not say this to marshal your sympathy so that you might have sympathy for what I am about to say. Failure is the means by which I arrived at my own thinking, and there is no other way to explain what I mean than to drag you through failure too. So let me start at the very beginning” (Robyn Wiegman, “Heteronormativity and the Desire for Gender”).