Formally Hedonist: Sarduy’s Queer Baroque

Abstract: Roland Barthes used the initials S.S. in the margins of A Lover’s Discourse to conjure Severo Sarduy’s queer aesthetics of the Neo-Baroque. This article places the figure of the Cuban exile Severo Sarduy within the history of French theory; his revolutionary hedonism modeled the anamorphic, elliptically shaped thinking that marked not only Barthes’ thought but also Lacan’s, Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s and Gilles Châtelet’s.