Although orgasm and illness are hardly identical, both Smith and Edelman thus see such ‘limit experiences’ as revealing a strange connection between moments in which we are most insistently our own bodies (in pleasure or displeasure) and a capacity for negative, abstract, critical thinking that frees us from social conventions. The alternative way of life that philosophy or queerness names is at once radically private and corporeal. It is located in the specificity of a body reduced to itself and unable to perform its social functions by a dearth or excess of vital energies, and, at the same time, soaringly universal, appealing to an abstract reason that calls every aspect of collective life into question. 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. Je dis toujours la vérité: pas toute, parce que toute la dire, on n’y arrive pas. La dire toute, c’est impossible, matériellement: les mots y manquent. C’est même par cet impossible que la vérité tient au réel” Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 9. 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)’

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. Simply put, by creating the conditions that allow parents to cherish their children, we will ensure our collective future. [148] 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. See Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184–199.

To make such a claim I examine in this book the pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value and propose against it the impossible project of a queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition. This paradoxical formulation suggests a refusal—the appropriately perverse refusal that characterizes queer theory—of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined, [3] and, by extension, of history as linear narrative (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as itself—through time. Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. 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.

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.A special word of thanks must go to Alan, Erica, Larry, Joni, Leah, Avi, Sam, Greg, Doug, Brian, and Ben. However much they might wish it otherwise, they are part of this book as well. Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,” to what chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. [8] 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. 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.

La tesis de No Future es que la homosexualidad (usada como sinécdoque de todas las identidades no cisheterosexuales) no debe ser normalizada como una alternativa de sexualidad entre otras sino preservar su estatus de exceso destructor que amenaza el orden heterosexual reinante. A través de un marco teórico lacaniano, por momentos zizekiano, emplea una serie de nociones (sinthome/sinthomosexuality, pulsión de muerte, Real-simbólico-imaginario) para buscar definir esta potencialidad revolucionaria en-sí de la homosexualidad. 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. 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.

Table of Contents

James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition. 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? 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: 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.

We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws—even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being. [7] 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]

At the library

Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him 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.