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

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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]

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 (December 2016). "An Ethics of Desubjectivation?". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 27 (3): 106–118. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3696679. 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.” Narcissism!” the cry will go up. “Who, after all, more self-denying, more willing to sacrifice, than a parent? Who more committed to hours of work without ever getting paid?” Not paid? Consult the ledger book of social approbation. Tax codes, baby registries, the various forms of parental leave: these, of course, all pale before the costs of raising a child. But pro-natalism’s payoff isn’t primarily measured in dollars or sense. It’s registered in the universal confirmation of one’s standing as an adult and in the accrual of social capital that allows one a stake in the only future’s market that ever really counts.

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). 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 Studies 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.

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

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 If Edelman’s theory is to be believed, our political model is essentially conservative in that it affirms and sustains our current social design, justifying this with the icon of the hypothetical future Child. We can vaguely equate his proposal to dissolve politics with the atheistic imperative to renounce the concept of heaven: afterlife and unborn generations are used in the same way to suppress the exigency, the potential, and the singular reality of life on earth. Both atheism and Edelman’s definition of queerness argue the present life as the only meaningful reality, and propose that any construction of meaning or reality outside of it is intentionally displaced so as to control/limit individual and collective puissance, i.e., to negate revolution or fundamental change.

Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling himThe 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.”Whether we decide to follow Edelman’s example of rejecting the future or vehemently react against his polemic, No Future leaves no doubt that we cannot get around thinking critically about the uses and abuses of futurity.“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.” — Jana Funke , thirdspace Sinthomosexuality: consider this neologism, grafting, at an awkward join, the sounds of French and English, to the benefit of neither, like a signifier each prefers to represent as foreign in the hope of thereby keeping it unheard of and unheard. [35] If this word without a future seeks a hearing here, it’s not to play for time or, like Scheherazade, to keep at bay its all too certain doom. It would assert itself instead against futurity, against its propagation, insofar as it would designate an impasse in the passage to the future and, by doing so, would pass beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes. Can that be right, though? How could “saving” name a future that, whatever else it holds in store, is bound to hold our deaths? Just how could time to come, from which, in time, we’re destined all to vanish, give the narcissistic solace that the ego, so conservative, so tethered to Imaginary form, so fixed to fixity, demands? In short: through fantasy. The central prop and underlying agency of futurism, fantasy alone endows reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seem to guarantee that such reality, the social world in which we take our place, will still survive when we do not. It thus compels us to identify ourselves with what’s to come by way of haven or defense against the ego’s certain end. Elias Canetti seems to touch on this when writing about the human subject’s investment in futurity: “[He] not only want[s] to exist for always, but to exist when others are no longer there. He wants to live longer than everyone else, and to know it; and when he is no longer there himself, his name must continue.” [36] His name, that is, his surrogate, must take the subject’s place; it must survive, if only in fantasy, because fantasy names the only place where desiring subjects can live. The sheltering office of fantasy, in concert with desire, absorbs us into scenic space until we seem to become it, until we seem so fully at one with the setting of our fantasy, the frame wherein we get to see what is where we are not, that the subject of fantasy, Lacan asserts, where this fantasy space is concerned, though “frequently unperceived ... is always there.” [37] But the sinthomosexual won't promise any transcendence or grant us a vision of something to come. In breaking our hold on the future, the sinthomosexual, himself neither martyr nor proponent of martyrdom for the sake of the cause, forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms." (101) 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.

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. 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.” The interruption of the patterns of imagined significance through which everyday life had been interpreted is a kind of death—and, for many thinkers, the beginning of serious thinking. In her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) Hannah Arendt argues that nearly the entire philosophical tradition has been “in love with death” in this sense. Since Plato, she claims, philosophers have encouraged us to withdraw from the realm of ordinary preoccupations into a new kind of life that resembles death: a private, un-social way of living founded on an insight into the nullity of common human endeavor. From the perspective of the social world, in which personal projects are oriented towards achieving recognition and participating in a common future, philosophers are ambient corpses. Arendt defines herself in opposition to this tradition. She suggests that philosophy’s orientation to death makes it a danger to politics in general and to democracy in particular. Democracy, she claims, depends on a temporal pact (a social contract for time) by which the past can be remembered in the future, and through which the future remains open to novel, and therefore memorable, collective action. 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.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]