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

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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.

In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the “grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,” the queerness of which I speak would deliberately. ever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our “good.” [4] Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call “better,” though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls “truth,” where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good. [5] Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and “tend[ing] toward the real.” [6] Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: 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. Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him 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). Al fin y al cabo, el problema de Edelman es el mismo de muchos otros: prescribe y describe a la vez. Si la homosexualidad fuera efectivamente pura negatividad, no habría falta insistir en que debe serlo. Su negativa a la normalización es, por un lado, políticamente peligrosa: como señala Zizek en Menos que nada, se articula con la postura homofóbica de que no debe permitirse adoptar a las parejas homosexuales. Y, en términos más generales, no queda claro cómo se expresa materialmente la filosofía política manifestada en No Future. Falta de materialismo, ahí el problema.A radical argument against fantasy, the future, and (democratic) politics emerges from what may seem to be an unlikely pairing of texts: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). In spite of their otherwise unrelated aims and horizons, both provide accounts of human nature in which a faculty of imagination plays an important (but problematic) role in the constitution of subjectivities and societies. Both suggest that human nature includes possibilities for an alternative and superior way of living that is, however, only actualized by a minority, whose members are called “philosophers” or “queers.” 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? 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. 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) 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):

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 StudiesEdelman 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. Edelman is married to critic and fellow English professor Joseph Litvak. [ citation needed] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] 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 and Smith argue that our faculty of identifying with imagined selves in illusory states of affairs, however necessary it might be for collective life, makes us personally miserable. However, they offer good news for some, claiming that a minority of people can pry themselves loose from fantasy. For Smith, this is what “reason and philosophy” allow “philosophers” to do, as I have shown elsewhere. For Edelman, we can abandon our “faith in the consistent reality of the social—and by extension of the social subject” by turning to “queerness.”