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

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Edelman, Lee (1987). Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804714136. OCLC 16095217. 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. 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:

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. 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, Lee (2023). Bad Education. Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9781478018629 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. In this context, another quotation from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics might be useful: “If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the ss liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (365). Like Faron, the narrator of The Children of Men, for whom sex in a world without procreation—without “the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves”—becomes “almost meaninglessly acrobatic,” Baudrillard recoils in horror before this “useless” sexuality. And a “useless function” for Baudrillard, as his use of the same phrase elsewhere suggests, means one that refuses meaning: “At the extreme limit of computation and the coding and cloning of human thought (artificial intelligence), language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes a definitively useless function. For the first time in history we face the possibility of a Perfect Crime against language, an aphanisis of the symbolic function.” [86] Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones introduced to identify the anxiety-inducing prospect of the disappearance of desire, refers in the passage from Baudrillard to the fading or, more ominously, to what he describes as the “global extermination of meaning” (70), the unraveling of the braid in which reproductive futurism twines meaning, desire, and the fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport. At the same time, though, it also evokes the subsequent use of the word by Lacan, for whom it refers instead to the fading or disappearance of the subject, whose division the signifier effects in such a way that “there is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject.” Lacan will then go on to add, “There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconscious.” [87] Meaning, that is, against whose aphani sis Baudrillard’s jeremiad is launched, always already entails, for Lacan, the aphanisis of the unconscious: “When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance” (218). Appalled by the imminence of a “final solution,” the liberation from sexual difference intended by the force of “perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same,” Baudrillard holds fast to the meaning whose “global extermination” sinthomosexuality is always imagined to effect and whose Symbolic exchange jouissance would reduce to a “definitively useless function.” [88] And he does so in the hope of perpetuating the temporal movements of desire, of shielding himself from the unconscious and the iterations of the drive, and securing, through futurity, through the victory of narrative duration over irony’s explosive negativity, a ground on which to stand: “The stakes,” he warns, “are no longer only that ‘history’ is slipping into the ‘posthistorical,’ but that the human race is slipping into the void” (19)’

Like Smith’s philosophy, Edelman’s queerness begins with a bodily-cum-psychic experience of failure and rupture. Using Lacan, Edelman distinguishes between desire , which is attached to the temporality and sociality of fantasy, and the drive , the bio-psychological urges for pleasure that are experienced by subjects as both “alien and internal,” disrupting our coherent image of ourselves. The drive gives us jouissance , which refers both to orgasm and to that “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within.” While desire allows the self to cohere around the imagined scenario of a future happiness, the drive annihilates these fantasies, returning us to a disorienting encounter with “the real.” Edelman 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. 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] 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.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

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. 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. He writes, for example, in Seminar 17: “Ce que la vérité, quand elle surgit, a de résolutif, ça peutêtre de temps en temps heureux—et puis, dansd’autres cas, désastreux. On ne voit pas pourquoi la vérité serait forcément toujours bénéfique.” Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 122.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.

Simply put, by creating the conditions that allow parents to cherish their children, we will ensure our collective future. [148] If Arendt is right, then being depressed about Covid is both an invitation to the philosophical life as traditionally understood and a threat to our democracy. This suggestion can be enriched from two streams of thought that are rarely put into dialogue: contemporary queer and affect theory, on the one hand, and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, on the other. Both approaches make the case for what we might call after Arendt, philosophy as a way of death . The philosophical ‘death-style’, in each account, is explicitly apolitical or anti-political; it is founded on a rejection of the future-oriented fantasies of the multitude. I will conclude by returning to Arendt’s idea of a democratic future founded on “promise” and her own promise that a democratic theory of judgment can overcome the division between philosophy and politics. 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. 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. But how could these lovebirds, whose very name weds them not just to each other but also, and in the process, to the naturalization of heterosexual love, anticipate the rapacious violence with which their fine feathered friends will divorce themselves—unexpectedly, out of the blue—from the nature they’re made ideologically, and so unnaturally, to mean? How else but with the eruption, or, as I’ve called it, the coming out, of something contra naturam always implicit in them from the start, something we might catch sight of, for instance, in the question that Cathy blurts out (one camouflaged only in part by its calculated alibi of cuteness), which demands that the lovebirds speak their compulsory meaning louder still: “Is there a man and a woman? I can’t tell which is which.” [178] Melanie, to whom she directs this question, deflects it with an uncomfortable laugh and a dismissive, “Well, I suppose.” But what if her supposition were wrong? Or what if, more disturbing still, her answer were literally true: what if the structuring\principle, the worldmaking logic of heterosexual meaningfulness were merely a supposition, merely a positing, as de Man would say, and not, therefore, imbued with the referential necessity of a “meaning”? After all, as de Man reminds us, “language posits and language means ... but language cannot posit meaning.” [179]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.” 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). 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.