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

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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. 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. 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.

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] James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition. Edelman se encuentra firmemente dentro de una perspectiva postestructuralista, cercana a la deconstrucción, por lo tanto antiesencialista. El rechazo de la sutura biologicista de las identidades, por ejemplo, es explícito. Sin embargo, el concepto mismo de la homosexualidad qua pulsión de muerte está marcadamente infrateorizado y sus consecuencias, tanto ontológicas como ético-políticas, son consideradas muy pobremente.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. 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 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. 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 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]

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. 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.” 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.

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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.” Simply put, by creating the conditions that allow parents to cherish their children, we will ensure our collective future. [148] 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? 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] Edelman, Lee (1987). Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804714136. OCLC 16095217.

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 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) 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. 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. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: Norton, 1992), 24.

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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. 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.” — Carolyn Denver , Victorian Studies