The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

(Paperback)

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In this radical, genre-bending narrative, David Caron tells the story of his 2006 HIV diagnosis and its aftermath. The Nearness of Others examines popular culture, politics, literary memoirs, and film to ask deeper philosophical questions about our relationships with others, demonstrating a form of disclosure, sharing, and contact that stand against the forces that work to separate us.

Reviews

"In this extraordinary work of personal and social exploration, David Caron devises a new literary form that enables him to touch the reader with his HIV-positivity as well as a new ethics that explains why that touch is both necessary and desirable. Learned, witty, provocative, moving, edifying, and brilliantly written in a simple, conversational style, The Nearness of Others demonstrates the intellectual advantages of being HIV-positive, which emerges from these pages less as a medical condition than as an epistemic one, a position from which it is possible to know the world and to make us see it differently. This is no longer cultural analysis of HIV, but cultural analysis by HIV. A significant breakthrough."David Halperin, author of How to Be Gay

"Carons powerful and painful reflection on being HIV-positive in a postepidemic era is wrapped within layers of philosophical discourse, political reflections on Muslims becoming the social pariahs that people with AIDS once were, academic analysis of pertinent films and literature, and nostalgia for more permissive, more connected moments in gay culture." Library Journal

"Accessible, sophisticated, and convincing... The Nearness of Others is the most important work ever written in this post-epidemic era because it is primarily a book of hope." Times Literary Supplement

"By invoking Barbara Stanwyck, Nazi Germany and our sense of tactfulness, Caron shows us new ways to think about life with HIV." POZ

Author Bio

David Caron is professor of French and womens studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures and My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community.