Toward the end of his short career, José Esteban Muñoz turned to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to theorize what he termed as the sense of brown. In his theoretical move from feeling to sense, Muñoz accounts for the onto-poetics of latinidad, what he called brownness. For Muñoz, if queerness is always on the horizon and not-yet-here, brownness is situated in the here-and-now as the materiality of everyday life. While others have taken up the coda of Cruising Utopia as a call to take ecstasy with the utopian thinker, this article begins with the ends and fringes of Muñoz’s unfinished project. It foregrounds the brownness that structures the queer in order to take seriously the political potential of the comedown from the ecstatic. Accounting for the mundane and quotidian life moments of living in and through the loss of Muñoz, Guzmán argues that brownness is about living in and being with the thick haze of everyday life, where the comedown structures the dissolving materiality left over from the failed promise of the “high.”
