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

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Edelman, Lee (May 2017). "Learning Nothing: Bad Education". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 28 (1): 124–173. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3821724. Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer? So, for example, when P. D. James, in her novel The Children of Men, imagines a future in which the human race has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce, her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century democracies—“Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children,” he declares—but also gives voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity: “Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live,” he later observes, “all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” [12] While this allusion to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” may recall another of its well-known lines, one for which we apparently have Eliot’s Wife, Vivian, to thank—“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”—it also brings out the function of the child as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged, after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when he comes upon it in nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and senses.” For the “pathetic” quality he projectively locates in non-generative sexual enjoyment—enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological—exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical to those for which enjoyment without “hope of posterity” is peremptorily dismissed: legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-procreative ideology: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” [13] If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.

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. 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): 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.

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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.

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. 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).

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. 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