This document discusses José Esteban Muñoz's perspective on mourning and queerness. It contains several quotes from Muñoz discussing how writing comes from a place of love, how queerness is an ideal that has not fully arrived, and how survival requires constant mourning. The final quote advocates for preferring life and affirming survival.

1. THE INEXHAUSTIBLE
WORK OF MOURNING
JOSÉ ESTEBAN MUÑOZ
Stephen Abblitt | La Trobe University | S.Abblitt@latrobe.edu.au

2. “Epistolary fictions multiply when there
arrives a new crisis of destination.”

3. “I write for, I write from, I start writing
from: Love. I write out of love. Writing,
loving: inseparable. Writing is a gesture
of love.”

4. “I am wounded, and I find that the
wound itself testifies to the fact that I am
… given over to the Other in ways that I
cannot fully predict or control.”

6. “For the queer utopian, the ideal
world cannot be reached through the
here and now; it must be conjured by
crazy, risky, wild leaps into the void.”

7. “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is
an ideality. Put another way, we are not
yet queer.”

8. “…no more than a fragment, little
bits, morsels, bites…

9. “Surviving—that is the other name of a
mourning whose possibility is never to be
awaited. For one does not survive
without mourning.”

10. “Always prefer life and constantly
affirm survival.”