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

Product Information

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 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.

Far from speaking, with the sinthomosexual, for the death drive and its disarticulation of forms, Baudrillard remains an advocate here of reproductive futurism, explicitly enlisting this notion of death, this resistance to immortality, against the force of the death drive, which he assimilates to, and disavows as, the paradigm of sameness: “The death drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one another” (6). He may trumpet what he calls here the “fight for death” in thus opposing himself to the death drive, disparaged as eternal pursuit of the Same and hence as immortality, but opprobrium, in Baudrillard’s argument, still attaches to the death drive only insofar as it constitutes a mortal threat to the survival of the human—insofar, that is, as its sameness might make human difference different. The immortality for which he reproves it, then, threatens the human precisely with a death he would have us fight against. It names the endless negation of form, and so of what, for Baudrillard, defines the value of “difference”: that is, our distinctly human identity. To “know the world’s the same”: through purporting to be wed to the value of difference in heterosexual combination and exchange futurism merely perpetuates Lammeter’s tenacious will to sameness by endlessly turning the Other into the image of itself, endlessly protecting the fantasy space in which it is always there. Narcissism, on the other hand, construed in terms of sterility and a nonproductive sameness, takes in and takes on, perhaps too well, the Other it loves to death, pushing beyond and against its own pleasure, driving instead toward the end of forms through the formalism of the drive. Freud, as the century just ended began, already advised us that parental love demands to be viewed as “nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again.” [80] But the ostensible self-evidence, throughout our culture, of the difference between narcissism, on the one hand, and the selflessness we associate with the care and nurturing of children, on the other, between the figures of sinthomosexuality and the sinthomatic drive to produce and abject them, makes clear, as the twenty-first century starts, that what’s finally at issue in the production of the Child and the future it serves to figure, for Silas Marner, for Scrooge, and for all who must live under futurism’s gun, is the style by which a culture enacts its sinthome while disavowing it. 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. Edelman, Lee (1987). Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804714136. OCLC 16095217.

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.” 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. 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] 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

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. In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe that was published to coincide with Mother’s Day in 1998, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West announced their campaign for what they called a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a series of proposals designed, in their words, to “strengthen marriage and give greater electoral clout to mothers and fathers.” To achieve such an end—an end both self-serving (though never permitted to appear so) and redundant (what “greater electoral clout” could mothers and fathers have?)—the essay sounded a rallying cry that performed, in the process, and with a heartfelt sincerity untouched by ironic self-consciousness, the authors’ mandatory profession of faith in the gospel of sentimental futurism: 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. In a testy footnote, Edelman attempts to refute, but ultimately confirms, charges against him by more politically-committed (i.e., left-wing) queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, who argue that Edelman’s ideas amount to an “apolitical” quietism. He performs contempt for his critics’ references to “the bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or most tellingly, ‘gay male’) by which some will allege that my argument is determined.” But indeed, Edelman’s critique of politics and personal identity as self-destructive-but-socially-necessary fantasies clearly has as its consequence that we (that is, some happy few) ought, to the extent possible, escape into an alternative kind of life. 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.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. Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928.

The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior. James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition. Fantasy is “the central prop and underlying agency… [that] endows reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seems to guarantee that such reality, the social world in which we take our place, will still survive when we do not.” Identifying with future selves, and then organizing our lives around efforts to become those future selves, we come to take for granted that we are stable, self-directed beings who move through a more-or-less unchanging world towards a chosen destination. We can even imagine, with a sanguine perspective, the persistence of projects like ours in this world after our death, and thus reconcile ourselves to mortality by fantastically identifying with a future in which we no longer exist.

Queer Theory and the Death Drive

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.” Donald Wildmon, “Hope ’97 Tour to Counter Pro-Homosexual Philosophy in American Culture,” American Family Association Action Alert, 25 February 1997, http://www.cfinwed.com/HEADLINE.H It is true that the ranks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered parents grow larger every day, and that nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic. Neither, indeed, is there any ground we could stand on outside that logic. In urging an alternative to the party line, which every party endorses, in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its end, I am not for a moment assuming that queers—by which I mean all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism. [18] But politics, construed as oppositional or not, never rests on essential identities. It centers, instead, on the figurality that is always essential to identity, and thus on the figural relations in which social identities are always inscribed. 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: