No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Series Q)

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Lee Edelman's oft-cited No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) is a scholarly polemic that attempts to confront the prevalence of "the Child" in American politics. Edelman employs a long tradition of psychoanalytic and literary analysis to assert how the future is merely an aspirational--that is, a conservative--politic that knows in advance what the future holds: heterosexual reproduction. Specifically, Edelman argues that both the Right and the Left seek a "safe" and "agreeable" time/place in which "the Child" (an amorphous figure that embodies the life and death of the human or, using psychoanalytic terms, human attempts to employ the Symbolic to approach the Real) inevitably emerges regardless of which side you take in democracy. Like Faron, the narrator of The Children of Men, for whom sex in a world without procreation—without “the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves”—becomes “almost meaninglessly acrobatic,” Baudrillard recoils in horror before this “useless” sexuality. And a “useless function” for Baudrillard, as his use of the same phrase elsewhere suggests, means one that refuses meaning: “At the extreme limit of computation and the coding and cloning of human thought (artificial intelligence), language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes a definitively useless function. For the first time in history we face the possibility of a Perfect Crime against language, an aphanisis of the symbolic function.” [86] Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones introduced to identify the anxiety-inducing prospect of the disappearance of desire, refers in the passage from Baudrillard to the fading or, more ominously, to what he describes as the “global extermination of meaning” (70), the unraveling of the braid in which reproductive futurism twines meaning, desire, and the fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport. At the same time, though, it also evokes the subsequent use of the word by Lacan, for whom it refers instead to the fading or disappearance of the subject, whose division the signifier effects in such a way that “there is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject.” Lacan will then go on to add, “There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious.” [87] Meaning, that is, against whose aphani sis Baudrillard’s jeremiad is launched, always already entails, for Lacan, the aphanisis of the unconscious: “When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance” (218). Appalled by the imminence of a “final solution,” the liberation from sexual difference intended by the force of “perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same,” Baudrillard holds fast to the meaning whose “global extermination” sinthomosexuality is always imagined to effect and whose Symbolic exchange jouissance would reduce to a “definitively useless function.” [88] And he does so in the hope of perpetuating the temporal movements of desire, of shielding himself from the unconscious and the iterations of the drive, and securing, through futurity, through the victory of narrative duration over irony’s explosive negativity, a ground on which to stand: “The stakes,” he warns, “are no longer only that ‘history’ is slipping into the ‘posthistorical,’ but that the human race is slipping into the void” (19)’ But how could these lovebirds, whose very name weds them not just to each other but also, and in the process, to the naturalization of heterosexual love, anticipate the rapacious violence with which their fine feathered friends will divorce themselves—unexpectedly, out of the blue—from the nature they’re made ideologically, and so unnaturally, to mean? How else but with the eruption, or, as I’ve called it, the coming out, of something contra naturam always implicit in them from the start, something we might catch sight of, for instance, in the question that Cathy blurts out (one camouflaged only in part by its calculated alibi of cuteness), which demands that the lovebirds speak their compulsory meaning louder still: “Is there a man and a woman? I can’t tell which is which.” [178] Melanie, to whom she directs this question, deflects it with an uncomfortable laugh and a dismissive, “Well, I suppose.” But what if her supposition were wrong? Or what if, more disturbing still, her answer were literally true: what if the structuring\principle, the worldmaking logic of heterosexual meaningfulness were merely a supposition, merely a positing, as de Man would say, and not, therefore, imbued with the referential necessity of a “meaning”? After all, as de Man reminds us, “language posits and language means ... but language cannot posit meaning.” [179]

Edelman, Lee (December 2016). "An Ethics of Desubjectivation?". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 27 (3): 106–118. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3696679.

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In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the “grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,” the queerness of which I speak would deliberately. ever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our “good.” [4] Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call “better,” though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls “truth,” where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good. [5] Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and “tend[ing] toward the real.” [6] Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny. An intellectually thrilling book." - Diana Fuss Al fin y al cabo, el problema de Edelman es el mismo de muchos otros: prescribe y describe a la vez. Si la homosexualidad fuera efectivamente pura negatividad, no habría falta insistir en que debe serlo. Su negativa a la normalización es, por un lado, políticamente peligrosa: como señala Zizek en Menos que nada, se articula con la postura homofóbica de que no debe permitirse adoptar a las parejas homosexuales. Y, en términos más generales, no queda claro cómo se expresa materialmente la filosofía política manifestada en No Future. Falta de materialismo, ahí el problema. A special word of thanks must go to Alan, Erica, Larry, Joni, Leah, Avi, Sam, Greg, Doug, Brian, and Ben. However much they might wish it otherwise, they are part of this book as well.

So figured, Antigone makes her claim on behalf of all whom the laws of kinship consign to what Butler, after Orlando Patterson, describes as “social death” (73): Although orgasm and illness are hardly identical, both Smith and Edelman thus see such ‘limit experiences’ as revealing a strange connection between moments in which we are most insistently our own bodies (in pleasure or displeasure) and a capacity for negative, abstract, critical thinking that frees us from social conventions. The alternative way of life that philosophy or queerness names is at once radically private and corporeal. It is located in the specificity of a body reduced to itself and unable to perform its social functions by a dearth or excess of vital energies, and, at the same time, soaringly universal, appealing to an abstract reason that calls every aspect of collective life into question. Donna Shalala, “Women’s Movement,” 150 th Anniversary of the First Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, 17 July 1998, http://www.hhs.gov/news/speeches/sene.html. Note also the fundraising slogan of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL): “For our daughters, our sisters, and our granddaughters.” Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him No Future is a nuanced polemic, both ringingly clear in its aesthetic and theoretical explications and simply thrilling to read. I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.” — Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

My debt to Joseph Litvak is in a category of its own and continues, daily, accumulating interest beyond my ability to repay it. His generosity, both emotional and intellectual, makes better everything it touches and I count myself singularly fortunate to be able to owe him so very much. Leo Bersani wrote of his most recent book, No Future, "In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies. Chapter 1 was published, in an earlier version, as “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” in Narrative (January 1998). Before following Berlant to ask how—or whether—democracy can overcome the present crisis by generating new fantasies of the future, it seems critical to look fantasy over with a more skeptical eye. Berlant suggests that our trouble with fantasy comes from there being, sometimes, a mismatch between the particular fantasies that give coherence, meaning and direction to our lives, and the real conditions necessary for our flourishing. However, it might be the case that fantasy as such is “cruel,” and that the real “good life” is one lived in detachment from, or opposition to, the circuits of fantasy that constitute democracy. Lee Edelman was born in 1953. [1] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University, and he received an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University.

Narcissism!” the cry will go up. “Who, after all, more self-denying, more willing to sacrifice, than a parent? Who more committed to hours of work without ever getting paid?” Not paid? Consult the ledger book of social approbation. Tax codes, baby registries, the various forms of parental leave: these, of course, all pale before the costs of raising a child. But pro-natalism’s payoff isn’t primarily measured in dollars or sense. It’s registered in the universal confirmation of one’s standing as an adult and in the accrual of social capital that allows one a stake in the only future’s market that ever really counts. In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe that was published to coincide with Mother’s Day in 1998, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West announced their campaign for what they called a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a series of proposals designed, in their words, to “strengthen marriage and give greater electoral clout to mothers and fathers.” To achieve such an end—an end both self-serving (though never permitted to appear so) and redundant (what “greater electoral clout” could mothers and fathers have?)—the essay sounded a rallying cry that performed, in the process, and with a heartfelt sincerity untouched by ironic self-consciousness, the authors’ mandatory profession of faith in the gospel of sentimental futurism: Edelman is married to critic and fellow English professor Joseph Litvak. [ citation needed] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become active in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and has served as the Chair of the English Department. [ citation needed] He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.Edelman, Lee (1987). Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804714136. OCLC 16095217. Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928. I would like to thank the Trustees of Tufts College for funding the sabbatical during which I completed work on this book. I am also grateful to Susan Ernst, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, for providing the necessary funds to obtain the stills that appear in the text.

It is true that the ranks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered parents grow larger every day, and that nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic. Neither, indeed, is there any ground we could stand on outside that logic. In urging an alternative to the party line, which every party endorses, in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its end, I am not for a moment assuming that queers—by which I mean all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism. [18] But politics, construed as oppositional or not, never rests on essential identities. It centers, instead, on the figurality that is always essential to identity, and thus on the figural relations in which social identities are always inscribed.To make such a claim I examine in this book the pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value and propose against it the impossible project of a queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition. This paradoxical formulation suggests a refusal—the appropriately perverse refusal that characterizes queer theory—of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined, [3] and, by extension, of history as linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as itself—through time. Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. For the politics of reproductive futurism, the only politics we’re permitted to know, organizes and administers an apparently self-regulating economy of sentimentality in which futurity comes to signify access to the realization of meaning both promised and prohibited by the fact of our formation as subjects of the signifier. As a figure for the supplementarity, the logic of restitution or compensation, that sustains our investment in the deferrals demanded by the signifying chain, the future holds out the hope of a final undoing of the initiating fracture, the constitutive moment of division, by means of which the signifier is able to pronounce us into subjectivity. And it offers that hope by mobilizing a fantasy of temporal reversal, as if the future were pledged to make good the loss it can only ever repeat. Taking our cue from de Man’s account of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” we might note that the future can engage temporality only in the mode of figuration because futurity stands in the place of a linguistic, rather than a temporal, destiny: “The dimension of futurity,” according to de Man, “is not temporal but is the correlative of the figural pattern and the disjunctive power which Benjamin locates in the structure of language.” That structure, as de Man interprets it, requires the perpetual motion of what he calls “a wandering, an errance,” and “this motion, this errancy of language which never reaches the mark,” is nothing else, for Benjamin, than history itself, generating, in the words of de Man, “this illusion of a life that is only an afterlife.” [174] Confusing linguistic with phenomenal reality, that illusion, which calls forth history from the gap of the “disjunctive power” internal to the very “structure of language,” names the fantasy of a social reality to which reproductive futurism pledges us all.