Lee Edelman was born in 1953. [1] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University, and he received an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University. 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): 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).

Unfortunately for us, fantasy does not seem to be something that can be generated at will. It requires, as Smith and Berlant insist with different emphases, a certain material basis of physical, psychological and social well-being. In her critique of philosophy as a way of death, however, Arendt argues that the performative power of language can reconnect us in a common imagined future—and, she insists, overcome the traditional separation of philosophy and democracy. This linguistic performance is analyzed in her The Human Condition (1958) as the act of promising, and in her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) as a kind of seduction in which “one can only ‘woo’ and ‘court.’” In other words, to overcome both the absence of futurity and fantasy in our present impasse, and to survive the sterile conflict between philosophy and the political life of democracy, we must think through the particular set of performances by which people promise and seduce each other. We should consider democracy as a kind of love affair, a marriage of present and future. 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)’ 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.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. 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. 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 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. Proust, in a well-known passage from the Recherche, describes a “game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable.” [44] This figure for figure’s ability to conjure a universe out of itself simultaneously bespeaks the disfiguration or undoing of reality so important to de Man:the dissolution of everything we understand as “solid and recognisable” insofar as it proves to be an effect of something (language, for de Man; the sinthome, for Lacan) without intrinsic meaning, like the pieces of paper that originally appeared “without character or form.” If the sinthome thus names the element through which we “take On ... distinctive shape,” and if, like figure, it assures our access to a “recognisable” world by allowing us, as Lacan explains, to “choose something ... instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)” [45] then it is also the case that whatever exposes the sinthome as meaningless knot, denying our blindness to its functioning and destabilizing the ground of our faith in reality, effects a disfiguration with possibly catastrophic consequences—consequences Žižek characterizes as “pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” [46] Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer? 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. 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.

In this Book

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. For Smith and Edelman, philosophy and queerness are essential capacities of human beings as such, but they are only capable of being realized by a minority. In Smith’s account, philosophers possess “great and awful” (that is, unsocial) virtues that alienate them from non-philosophers. Thus, “a philosopher is company to a philosopher only.” In Edelman’s account, the human capacity for queerness is imagined in any particular society as the distinct attribute of some oppressed group. This group might happen to be sexual minorities but could in fact be anything. Edelman insists that the political and social assimilation of sexual minorities is a victory for individuals historically identified as “queer” in the modern West, but it does not represent the abolition of “queerness,” since the burden of representing this capacity will be assigned to some other minority. The parallels to Macbeth are fairly obvious – here we have a king (in a monarchal system not based solely on hereditary privilege) facing his possible succession. So attached is he to his position of power, he counter-logically exterminates his own subjects, thereby killing individuals but also attempting to kill a future in which he is irrelevant. The irony of course is that with every individual subject he offs, he lessens his own power because his kingdom (and its (future) vitality) shrinks, and his political position becomes no more secure. 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 would like to thank the Trustees of Tufts College for funding the sabbatical during which I completed work on this book. I am also grateful to Susan Ernst, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, for providing the necessary funds to obtain the stills that appear in the text.