ians such as Ernestine Rose, head of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library from 1920 to 1942, have sometimes inspired an un- realistic faith in what literacy can do but have also produced signiicant results, such as pro- moting integration or preserving the African American artifacts collected by the bibliophile Arthur Schomburg. Library history can be an integral component of a broader cultural his- tory, as it is in work by Roger Chartier, homas Augst, Christine Pawley, Janice Radway, David M. Stewart, and others. New digital tools—such as the online database What Middletown Read, which contains a decade of circulation records for one American public librar y in Muncie, Indiana—have made archives accessible for re- search into the reading habits of many people who did not write about their reading. The micro histories of libraries and book collections can help us understand what reading has meant not only to successful writers but also to the broader, increasingly digitalized population. It is too early for eulogies of the library. Barbara Hochman Ben- Gurion University Foucault and Queer (Un)Historicism To the Editor: It is likely that as a result of her critique of queer unhistoricism in “The New Unhistori- cism in Queer Studies” (128.1 [2013]: 21–39), Valerie Traub will soon ind Empiricist! embla- zoned across her theoretical chest. When people express the fear that queer studies is dead, per- haps they mean that it is locked in disciplinary repetitions that those of us who lived through the 1980s and 1990s recall all too well. One of the unanticipated consequences of the so- called linguistic turn was that it allowed some in En- glish studies on the one hand to invent a straw historian blind to any critique of history as tele- ology and on the other to claim that their own eforts to write history are at the vanguard. he queer- unhistoricist debate repeats these disci- plinary conceits. Mea nwhi le historia ns t hemselves have been engaged in a protracted attempt to grapple with the perils of their discipline. As Jonathan Goldberg and Mad hav i Menon’s manifesto “Queering History” (PMLA 120.5 [2005]: 1608– 17; print) suggested, the genealogical roots of queer unhistoricism go back at least to Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism [1978]). White’s predecessors include Nietz sche, in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” and in the late 1980s and 1990s White’s work was followed, for example, by Ranajit Guha, in Dominance without Hege- mony: History and Power in Colonial India, and Joan Scott, in Gender and the Politics of History. What is new in the queer- historicism de- bate is the assertion that, in an oft- cited pas- sage, Foucault posits a inal diference between the sodomite and the modern homosexual: The homosexual of the nineteenth century became a personage: a past, a history, and a childhood; a character; a form of life; a mor- pholog y, too. .  .  . We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, and medical category of homosexuality constituted itself from the moment it was characterized . . . by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain manner of inverting in one’s self the mascu- line and feminine. (La volonté de savoir [Gallimard, 1976; print; vol. 1 of Histoire de la sexualité] 59; my trans.) Given t hat Foucau lt never denied t hat homo sex existed before the nineteenth cen- tu r y, why do t hose who seek to queer t he Renaissance return again and again to this passage (Goldberg a nd Menon 1611; Ga r y Ferguson, Queer (Re) Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture [Ashgate, 2008; print] 1)? If we wish to explore, in periods like the Renaissance, what came to be—not by predestination or intelligent de- sign—the historicodiscursive preconditions of 1 2 8 . 4 ] Forum 1005 © 2013 John Champagne PMLA 128.4 (2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America the homosexual (who, however haphazardly or contradictorily constituted, is a discursive formation whose presence can be located in the archive), nothing in this passage forecloses this efort. he term queer was, at least initially, reinvented to refer to a subject other than the nineteenth- century homosexual. Note that, contra his unhistoricist critics, Foucault does not employ the term identity to deine a personage. Rather, he uses diference to do so—the diference between a juridical sub- ject and a disciplinary one, between a subject constituted by religious prohibitions and the subject of the science of sexuality. For some reason Robert Hurley, in his translation of the same passage, placed a comma rather than a co- lon ater personage (History of Sexuality: An In- troduction [Vintage, 1990; print] 43). his is not a minor alteration. Personage here is shorthand for the new kind of subject Foucault is strug- gling to deine. One of the basic tenets of structural lin- guistics is that language is a system of difer- ences with no positive terms. Homosexual inds one of its conditions of meaning in its diference from sodomite. he fact that both words exist— and circulate in diferent discursive contexts— suggests their diference from each other. Finally, in this passage Foucault is not in- terested in the disappearance of the sodomite— something he never says occurred—nor does he imply that the sodomite and homosexual have no relation to each other. He is, rather, interested in the historical emergence of the homosexual as a discursive category. he con- temporary Christian invocation to “hate the sin and not the sinner” is discursive evidence of the sodomite and his continuing life in the present. he endless return to this passage in Foucault suggests queer studies’ investment, for all its claims to the contrary, in identity politics, an in- vestment that is one of the ield’s historical con- ditions of possibility as an academic discipline. Unfortunately, the unhistoricist empha- sis on homo as sameness threatens to replicate the fantasy that desire is about the securing of “real” bodies and relations. There is nothing intrinsically homo about the homosexual, and queer is oten deployed as a nagging reminder of this. For those of us queers whose subjec- tivities were structured, long before we were capable of any kind of unconscious embracing of epithets, by insults like fag, fairy, homo, and bull dyke, our homo desire is inextricably wed- ded to our gender dysfunction and our inability to igure out if our sexual partners are in fact same, other, or something else. Given the hard- fought years of learning to love the (wo)man in me, I am not yet willing to give up the admit- tedly fatiguing project of attempting to think difference in nonhierarchical terms, perhaps even the nonbinary terms that Robyn Wiegman calls “triangular” in “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies beside Itself ” (Reading Eve Sedgwick: A Collection of Essays, ed. Michael O’Rourke [Pal- grave, forthcoming]). My (always provisional) knowledge of history, however, and of the ways in which male privilege has sometimes been un- derwritten by fantastic identiications with the feminine, troubles my own attempts to inish even these brief comments. John Champagne Penn State University, Erie- Behrend Jonathan Safran Foer and the Impossible Book To the Editor: In “Combining Close and Distant Read- ing: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness” (128.1 [2013]: 226–31), N. Katherine Hayles bookends some (useful!) Morettian word counting with a close examination of Foer’s die- cut book as one of a number that “are fighting back ” against “the epochal shift from print to digital texts,” in- sisting that the “bodies” of printed books of- fer something mere information cannot (226). 1006 Forum [ P M L A © 2013 Paul Ardoin PMLA 128.4 (2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America