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

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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? 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: Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him 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. 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.

Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer? As a “gravedigger of society,” one who “care[s] nothing [for] the future,” Leonard, the sinthomosexual, annuls the temporality of desire, leaving futurity, like the reproductive Couple charged with the responsibility of bearing it, “suspended, interrupted, disrupted,” in the words de Man uses to characterize the impact of irony on narrative. [119] Leaving the “intelligibility of (representational) narrative disrupted at all times,” inducing, as de Man says elsewhere, “unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness,” irony, with its undoing of identity and refusal of historical progression, with its shattering of every totalized form (and of every form as totalization), names the figure as which Leonard’s relation to the terra-cotta figure figures him. [120] The shot of the broken clay figure adduced just after Leonard is shot, substituting the destruction of that object for the shattering of his body at the end of its fall, thus portrays, in the sinthomosexual’s fate, the fatality he would inflict: the dissolution effected by jouissance, before which, as Lacan asserts, “my neighbor’s body breaks into pieces.” The Tarascan figure thus literally embodies—by endowing with the image of a body—the central and structuring emptiness it is intended to contain. And true to the radical groundlessness that irony effects, we can never decide if the pieces of film that emerge when that figures breaks open are the precipitates of its emptiness—images, that is, of this hollowing-out, this vacancy that always inhabits the image as Imaginary lure—or images, instead, of the fantasy precipitated to counter such an emptiness: the fantasy of the image as negating such a vertiginous negativity, as filling the void with the fantasy structure that constitutes desire. For the strips of film, like North by Northwest, image the emptying-out of the image, the escape from its illusory “truth”; at the same time, though, and precisely by imaging the emptying-out of the image, they substantialize it once again, regenerating the Imaginary fantasy of a totalizing form. [121] 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. Fantasy is “the central prop and underlying agency… [that] endows reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seems to guarantee that such reality, the social world in which we take our place, will still survive when we do not.” Identifying with future selves, and then organizing our lives around efforts to become those future selves, we come to take for granted that we are stable, self-directed beings who move through a more-or-less unchanging world towards a chosen destination. We can even imagine, with a sanguine perspective, the persistence of projects like ours in this world after our death, and thus reconcile ourselves to mortality by fantastically identifying with a future in which we no longer exist. Edelman is the author of four books. His first book, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire, is a critique of Hart Crane's poetry. His second book, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, explores the significance of gay literature. His third book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, is a post-Lacanian analysis of queer theory.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. One way to approach the death drive in terms of the economy of this “chain of natural events” thus shaped by linguistic structures—structures that allow us to produce those “events” through the logic of narrative history-is by reading the play and the place of the death drive in relation to a theory of irony, that queerest of rhetorical devices, especially as discussed by Paul de Man. Proposing that “any theory of irony is the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any theory of narrative,” de Man adduces the constant tension between irony as a particular trope and narrative as a representational mode that allegorizes tropes in general. Narrative, that is, undertakes the project of accounting for trope systematically by producing, in de Man’s rehearsal of Schlegel, an “anamorphosis of the tropes, the transformation of the tropes, into the system of tropes, to which the corresponding experience is that of the self standing above its own experiences.” In contrast, as de Man makes clear, “what irony disrupts (according to Friedrich Shlegel) is precisely that dialectic and reflexivity.” The corrosive force of irony thus carries a charge for de Man quite similar to that of the death drive as understood by Lacan. “Words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say,” de Man notes. “There is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness ... which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any narration.” [26] The mindless violence of this textual machine, so arbitrary, so implacable, threatens, like a guillotine, to sever the genealogy that narrative syntax labors to affirm, recasting its narrative “chain of ... events” as a “signifying chain” and inscribing in the realm of signification, along with the prospect of meaning, the meaningless machinery of the signifier, always in the way of what it would signify. Irony, whose effect de Man likens to the syntactical violence of anacoluthon, thus severs the continuity essential to the very logic of making sense. Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928. 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. Unless, of course, such iterations of the same put an end to it instead. And that, according to Baudrillard, is precisely what “sexual liberation” intends:

To be completely honest, I don't have a lot of patience for scholars who use words like verisimilitude. When you throw in so many bizarre and confusing words, in really weird ways, you alienate a whole audience of people who would otherwise have been interested in your ideas (aka people who don't have ph.d's). If you are specifically writing to scholars within your field, or just people who know the general lingo and enjoy figuring out literary puzzles, I get it. But for me, it was just frustrating. I'm at the end of my undergraduate degree, I've taken political theory classes before, and I consider myself to be generally well-read - but this was hard for me to read. However, that could just be me, and others could have found this an easier read. But what helped him most in these public appeals on behalf of America’s children was the social consensus that such an appeal is impossible to refuse. Indeed, though these public service announcements concluded with the sort of rhetorical flourish associated with hard-fought political campaigns (“We’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?”), that rhetoric was intended to avow that this issue, like an ideological Möbius strip, only permitted one side. Such “self-evident” one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations. A controversial part of the queer theory canon, Edelman's No Future is both polemical (self-described) and playful (ascribed by me) in its critique of what Edelman describes as both "reproductive futurism" (2) and "the fascism of the baby's face" (151). Edelman's main theoretical argument here consists of two key components. First, that the figure of the Child structures politics, what is considered "the political," and what is considered "the human/the inhuman" by reinforcing a mode of futurity that ensures reproduction of itself; and second, that the inescapable death drive is figured through, ascribed to, and becomes symbolized by the sinthomosexual. Though, as Edelman argues, "all sexuality is sinthomosexuality" (73), sinthomosexuality is ascribed to queer subjectivities, and as such, queer sexualities symbolize a challenge to, or the end of, reproductive futurity--something that Edelman argues must be taken up by queer subjectivies (or those "queered") as a mode of resisting reproductive futurism.Both Smith and Edelman accept that the way of life they seek to promote (philosophy or queerness) can only ever be lived out by a minority (who are, implicitly, ethically superior). The majority of people, each seem to assume, will go along unthinkingly attached to the fantasies that lead them to reproduce social structures that make them miserable. The majority, it seems, is unable to recognize the value of a lifestyle that renounces or at least reigns in the imagination. From the perspective of the philosopher or queer, the work of reproducing the present into the future is always being done by someone else. People have children, enforce social norms, identify with future selves and collective values—all quite automatically—driven by the force of fantasy. That a handful of enlightened individuals choose to opt out of this process in no way threatens its functioning, although queers and philosophers, of course, sometimes do find themselves persecuted. Nevertheless, they neither can, nor would, choose to extend to everyone else the liberation from socially-necessary fictions that is their personal distinction. The first phase of sexual liberation involves the dissociation of sexual activity from procreation through the pill and other contraceptive devices—a transformation with enormous consequences. The second phase, which we are beginning to enter now, is the dissociation of reproduction from sex. First, sex was liberated from reproduction; today it is reproduction that is liberated from sex, through asexual, biotechnological modes of reproduction such as artificial insemination or full body cloning. This is also a liberation, though antithetical to the first. We’ve been sexually liberated, and now we find ourselves liberated from sex—that is, virtually relieved of the sexual function. Among the clones (and among human beings soon enough), sex, as a result of this automatic means of reproduction, becomes extraneous, a useless function. (10)

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.

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North by Northwest will appear, then, to have taken its hero on a journey, to have moved him by teaching him how to b e moved, to have brought him, as Raymond Bellour suggests, “from an ignorance to a knowledge,” recalling in this the narrative logic of temporal succession whereby allegory sorts out and distributes sequentially, in an effort to make intelligible, the incompatible pressures that irony condenses in every instant. [140] The film’s last shot would seem to confirm such a triumph of allegorization by flattering the “knowingness” of an audience always happy to give a hand—as much to itself as to the film—when the phallic symbol it failed to see coming comes handed to it like a gift. Lee Edelman (born 1953) is an American literary critic and academic. He is a professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author of four books. Edelman has certainly articulated a new direction for queer theory, making No Future required reading both within the field and beyond.” — Andrea Fontenot , Modern Fiction Studies I found this to be an intellectually stimulating if not pretty difficult read. Basic understanding of Lacanian jargon is essential I think. My reading is temporary and provisional but as of right now it is: 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.