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

Product Information

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. 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]

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. Edelman, Lee (1994). Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415902588. OCLC 28634490.

Table of Contents

The interruption of the patterns of imagined significance through which everyday life had been interpreted is a kind of death—and, for many thinkers, the beginning of serious thinking. In her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) Hannah Arendt argues that nearly the entire philosophical tradition has been “in love with death” in this sense. Since Plato, she claims, philosophers have encouraged us to withdraw from the realm of ordinary preoccupations into a new kind of life that resembles death: a private, un-social way of living founded on an insight into the nullity of common human endeavor. From the perspective of the social world, in which personal projects are oriented towards achieving recognition and participating in a common future, philosophers are ambient corpses. Arendt defines herself in opposition to this tradition. She suggests that philosophy’s orientation to death makes it a danger to politics in general and to democracy in particular. Democracy, she claims, depends on a temporal pact (a social contract for time) by which the past can be remembered in the future, and through which the future remains open to novel, and therefore memorable, collective action. 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): 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. 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 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:

Edelman successfully avoids using the future tense for the rest of this paragraph, but the omission is painfully present and, by implication, deliberate. The transition to living under the principle of sinthomosexuality, as a theoretical remedy to the figurative Child's oppression, must not only be planned out, transitioned to, or executed, but it also carries with it a series of rules that must be doled out conditionally, as in, having a relationship with what will or won't be done in the future. The tension between the pragmatics of sinthomosexuality as an ethical decision is contradicted by a disavowal of the figurative Future wholesale. As a side note, I emphasized "himself" here because Edelman's used queerness as a surrogate for gay men, ostensibly. The most egregious omission here is a demonstrable case of bi erasure, probably because its execution and its existing queerness don't fit the model of an outright rejection of "reproductive futurism" as part of his manifesto of how queers ought to behave in a sinthomosexual fashion. In a weird way by virtue of omission, bisexuality is erased from Edelman's newfound ethics of the queer. So are lesbians who deserve some lip service as womb-bearers who can more outrightly reject the act of birthing as being the owners of the goddamned equipment.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. 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.

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 StudiesAs 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.

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. 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. 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. Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him 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.Aquello que en una sociedad existe como pura negatividad queda, finalmente, fuera de la vida. Por eso Edelman llama a identificarse con la pulsión de muerte. No sorprende que el libro sea de 2004: la crisis del SIDA es lo suficientemente cercana y lo suficuentemente lejana. Y, en un punto, ¿no expresa ella el Acontecimiento edelmaniano por antonomasia: la homosexualidad convertida en masas de cadáveres demostrando la imposibilidad de la Sociedad como todo articulado, sin resto?