So if we think of the history of letters as also an implicit history of publics, of the animation (re-animation, after Frankenstein) of a public, can’t we also think of love letters as a history of counterpublics? As the epistolary form is historically a feminized genre and the letter is often a queer form in a social structure whose discursive production values more rational, impersonal forms of communication, how can we think about the erotics and politics of the letter form, a form of taking the world personally, and then making that personal feeling, public? What’s most radical about Frank Ocean’s love letter is that it was a love letter. A thank you letter, that was also a love letter, that was also a love story, that was also a history of love, that was also a counterhistory. Is gratitude, grace, a form of love, or is love a form of gratitude, grace? They inform each other. How the letter began: “WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHEREVER YOU ARE..I’M STARTING TO THINK WE’RE A LOT ALIKE.” We’re brought into a past, and a past love, that isn’t ours, but that we share, that he allows us to share, because he wrote it, and published it, and made a public of it. So that emotionally, affectively, we all become historicized, interdependently, with each other, which is how we should be historicized anyway: with each other. Whoever you are, wherever you are. The letter makes a counterpublic out of everyone who reads it and feels it. As bell hooks writes in “Love as the Practice of Freedom: “”A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture.”
Read More | "Scattered Notes On Love, Counterpublics, Queer Time, The Care Industry & Frank Ocean’s 'Thinkin Bout You'" | ?Pank Magazine