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

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La tesis de No Future es que la homosexualidad (usada como sinécdoque de todas las identidades no cisheterosexuales) no debe ser normalizada como una alternativa de sexualidad entre otras sino preservar su estatus de exceso destructor que amenaza el orden heterosexual reinante. A través de un marco teórico lacaniano, por momentos zizekiano, emplea una serie de nociones (sinthome/sinthomosexuality, pulsión de muerte, Real-simbólico-imaginario) para buscar definir esta potencialidad revolucionaria en-sí de la homosexualidad. Edelman, Lee (1994). Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415902588. OCLC 28634490. El principal planteo del libro es el rechazo a la figura del Niño (Child) como un significante que estructura en torno a sí una futurización que se constituye como reproducción del orden social existente. Sin embargo, para Edelman toda política es en sí misma futurización. En consecuencia, el rechazo es a la política (aunque no a lo político). Pero ¿cómo se expresa esa existencia puramente antagónica que la homosexualidad debe tomar para sí? Proust, in a well-known passage from the Recherche, describes a “game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable.” [44] This figure for figure’s ability to conjure a universe out of itself simultaneously bespeaks the disfiguration or undoing of reality so important to de Man:the dissolution of everything we understand as “solid and recognisable” insofar as it proves to be an effect of something (language, for de Man; the sinthome, for Lacan) without intrinsic meaning, like the pieces of paper that originally appeared “without character or form.” If the sinthome thus names the element through which we “take On ... distinctive shape,” and if, like figure, it assures our access to a “recognisable” world by allowing us, as Lacan explains, to “choose something ... instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)” [45] then it is also the case that whatever exposes the sinthome as meaningless knot, denying our blindness to its functioning and destabilizing the ground of our faith in reality, effects a disfiguration with possibly catastrophic consequences—consequences Žižek characterizes as “pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” [46]

Donald Wildmon, “Hope ’97 Tour to Counter Pro-Homosexual Philosophy in American Culture,” American Family Association Action Alert, 25 February 1997, http://www.cfinwed.com/HEADLINE.H 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. Like Smith’s philosophy, Edelman’s queerness begins with a bodily-cum-psychic experience of failure and rupture. Using Lacan, Edelman distinguishes between desire , which is attached to the temporality and sociality of fantasy, and the drive , the bio-psychological urges for pleasure that are experienced by subjects as both “alien and internal,” disrupting our coherent image of ourselves. The drive gives us jouissance , which refers both to orgasm and to that “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within.” While desire allows the self to cohere around the imagined scenario of a future happiness, the drive annihilates these fantasies, returning us to a disorienting encounter with “the real.” But note in this a paradox: this emptiness internal to the figure, and into which it breaks, suspending by means of irony all totality and coherence, expresses the presence of jouissance, the insistence of the drive, and the access, therefore, to the perverse satisfaction of which the drive is assured, while desire as enabled by fantasy, though aiming to fill that emptiness by according it a substance and a form, only substitutes absence for presence, endless pursuit for satisfaction, the deferral that conjures futurity for the stuff of jouissance. This, one might say, is the irony of irony’s relation to desire. For just as compassion allows no rhetorical ground outside its logic, no place to stand beyond its enforced Imaginary identifications—by virtue of which, whatever its object or the political ends it serves, compassion is always conservative, always intent on preserving the image in which the ego sees itself—so irony’s negativity calls forth compassion to negate it and thereby marks compassion and all the components of desire, its defining identifications as well as the fantasies that sustain them, with the negativity of the very drive against which they claim to defend. [122] 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):

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For Smith and Edelman, philosophy and queerness are essential capacities of human beings as such, but they are only capable of being realized by a minority. In Smith’s account, philosophers possess “great and awful” (that is, unsocial) virtues that alienate them from non-philosophers. Thus, “a philosopher is company to a philosopher only.” In Edelman’s account, the human capacity for queerness is imagined in any particular society as the distinct attribute of some oppressed group. This group might happen to be sexual minorities but could in fact be anything. Edelman insists that the political and social assimilation of sexual minorities is a victory for individuals historically identified as “queer” in the modern West, but it does not represent the abolition of “queerness,” since the burden of representing this capacity will be assigned to some other minority. But Cruel Optimism ends on an unexpectedly up-beat note. Drawing on thinkers like David Graeber and Jacques Rancière, Berlant argues that the “experience of democracy” is that of “being in the middle of the bedlam of world-making… a dense sensual activity of performative belonging.” But she notes that this “hope” for getting out of “the impasse of the present” depends on our generating new fantasies about the future to replace the “good-life fantasies” that are breaking down. We need “optimistic projections of a world that is worth our attachment to it.”

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. 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.Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer? Pero, por otro lado, yo sostendría que esta negativa es ontológicamente errada. Nada puede escapar a la normalización. Lo simbólico penetra constantemente lo Real tanto como lo Real resiste constantemente su subsunción en lo simbólico. Toda la filosofía posestructuralista (Kristeva, Castoriadis, Derrida, incluso Deleuze) dan cuenta de ello. Es imposible persistir como pura negatividad. Tan imposible como negar totalmente la negatividad y arribar a un Todo positivo. Edelman draws from Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics to argue that all signs create a rift between subject and self, and this ensures that there is always an excess which is both necessary to sustain the sign, but also threatens it (call this the "death drive"). He argues that this death drive is what "queer" has been identified with traditionally by conservatives. Even if the people who occupy the space of "queer" right now were to be displaced so that they could be assimilated into the public sphere, the space of queerness will still exist. So instead of the usual liberal route to "progress", Edelman suggests a new queer ethics wherein queers embrace their queerness as queerness.

In a testy footnote, Edelman attempts to refute, but ultimately confirms, charges against him by more politically-committed (i.e., left-wing) queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, who argue that Edelman’s ideas amount to an “apolitical” quietism. He performs contempt for his critics’ references to “the bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or most tellingly, ‘gay male’) by which some will allege that my argument is determined.” But indeed, Edelman’s critique of politics and personal identity as self-destructive-but-socially-necessary fantasies clearly has as its consequence that we (that is, some happy few) ought, to the extent possible, escape into an alternative kind of life. The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the political’s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.”Whether we decide to follow Edelman’s example of rejecting the future or vehemently react against his polemic, No Future leaves no doubt that we cannot get around thinking critically about the uses and abuses of futurity.“The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the political’s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.” — Jana Funke , thirdspace The parallels to Macbeth are fairly obvious – here we have a king (in a monarchal system not based solely on hereditary privilege) facing his possible succession. So attached is he to his position of power, he counter-logically exterminates his own subjects, thereby killing individuals but also attempting to kill a future in which he is irrelevant. The irony of course is that with every individual subject he offs, he lessens his own power because his kingdom (and its (future) vitality) shrinks, and his political position becomes no more secure.One of the great virtues of Edelman's thesis is that it restores the distinction between queerness and homosexuality per se. Edelman goes some way to returning the uncanniness attached to queerness which has been dispelled by the very signifier 'gay' and the cosy, Kylie-loving, unthreatening cheeriness with which it has become associated." — K-Punk 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.

Walter Wangerin Jr., “O Brave New World, That Has No People In’t! The Children of Men,” New York Times Book Review, 28 March 1993, 23. Edelman likewise argues that what we experience as “social reality” is dependent on fantasies by which our personal desires contribute to the reproduction of social structures. He posits that individuals are compelled to imagine themselves as potentially happy in some future situation—that is, in some situation they do not in fact occupy. Our life projects are always “operating in the name and in the direction of a constantly anticipated future reality.” That is to say, in Smith’s terms, that we are constantly sympathizing with visions of ourselves. This is not simply an idle exercise of day-dreaming. It is the psychological operation by which we constitute ourselves as subjects who seem to persist over time and as participants in a society that we assume will endure after us. As those faces of Eppie and Tiny Tim turn their eyes to us once more, soliciting the compassion that always compels us to want to keep them safe (in the faith that they will confer on us the future’s saving grace), let me end with a reference to the “Fourteen Words,” attributed to David Lane, by which members of various white separatist organizations throughout the United States affirm their collective commitment to the common cause of racial hatred: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” [91] So long as “white” is the only word that makes this credo appalling, so long as figural children continue to “secure [our] existence” through the fantasy that we survive in them, so long as the queer refutes that fantasy, effecting its derealization as surely as an encounter with the Real, for just so long must sinthomosexuality have a future after all. For what keeps it alive, paradoxically, is the futurism desperate to negate it, obedient in that to the force of a drive that is futurism’s sinthome. Suzanne Barnard, “The Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 173. A review of: Huffer, Lynne (2013). Are the lips a grave? A queer feminist on the ethics of sex. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231164177.Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 326. 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: See Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184–199. The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior. that life, despite Hitler, goes on, there will always be children.... But then, still as an argument for the inclusion of the “Children’s Songs” in the Poems from Exile, something else asserted itself, which Brecht expressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he seldom shows. “In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That is why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the mother’s womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the children.” While he spoke I felt a force acting on me that was equal to that of fascism; I mean a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism. [195]