#lee edelman

[power-chords]

As soon as the discourse of the campus becomes a libidinally fraught fantasy about children to whom something might happen, we find ourselves on the theoretical terrain mapped by the Lacanian theorist Lee Edelman two decades ago in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). As I have previously argued in this magazine, in the discourse of the campus the student turns out to be a type of the Child—the organizing trope of the heterosexist ideology Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” Reproductive futurism is, among other things, an ideology of security: the sacrosanct Child, “the telos of social order, …the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust,” must be protected at any cost; the naturalness of heterosexuality and the gender binary must never be questioned. Katehi’s narration of the primal fantasy of the campus exhibits reproductive futurism at its most histrionic. In the imagined body of the “very young girl,” collective anxieties about the Child and about social reproduction—always raced; note, again, the specter of miscegenation hanging over the narrative—are given pornographic form.

And then thought stops abruptly: whenever there is a risk that something might happen to the Child, the time for thinking is over. It is time for action, reaction. Time to call the police. That actual UC Davis students, engaged in an act of passive resistance, were hurt as a result of this frenzy to protect the “very young girls” of UC Davis belies the phantasmatic status of the latter.

Viewed through the lens of Edelman’s argument in No Future, the fantasy of the campus appears as an allegory of the nation-state. The future of the nation itself is taken to be at stake in what happens “on campus.” Both nation and campus are supposed to be securely bounded, to keep safe the Child; in both cases, this safety proves impossible to guarantee, and this ineluctable exposure—to violence, to liability, to non-affiliates—spikes the panic. When there is “campus unrest,” panic flares because the campus is supposed to be where unrest does not happen, where the Child is safe from reality. Panic nudges both campus and nation toward ever more extreme, ever more militarized practices, aesthetics finally subordinated to terror. Borders, checkpoints. An especially shrill Columbia Business School professor has taken to demanding, on any media platform he can access, that students who chant “Free Palestine!” should be expelled and banned from the Columbia campus.

The Child must be defended. So, enemies must be banished. So, a camera must be installed. So, a wall must be built. But let it be covered in ivy!

—Samuel P. Catlin, "The Campus Does Not Exist: How campus war is made," Parapraxis Magazine. Emphasis mine.

[tenderperversion]

lee edelman, no future: queer theory and the death drive

[dykekingofhell]

[yngsuk]

[...] Lacan, toward the end of his career, maintained that by moving beyond, by traversing “the fundamental fantasy,” we confront the meaningless spur or nub of our access to jouissance, the Thing that holds the drive, indecipherably, in a fixed rotation around it. And faced with this sinthome, itself the limit of every analysis and beyond interpretation, the subject, he proposed, must come at last to identify with it. The subject, that is, must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to jouissance, as its “Real identity, connecting it to the Real of its being”, in the words of [Paul] Verhaeghe and [Frédéric] Declercq. This, I suggest, is the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order intent on misrecognizing its own investment in morbidity, fetishization, and repetition: to inhabit the place of meaninglessness associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture—the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary lures—as always already a “culture of death” intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. The death drive as which the queer figures, then, refuses the calcification of form that is reproductive futurism, since the Lacanian death drive, as Žižek observes, “is precisely the ultimate Freudian name for the dimension traditional metaphysics designated as that of immortality—for a drive, a ‘thrust,’ which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of generation and corruption, beyond the ‘way of all flesh.’ In other words, in the death drive, the concept ‘dead’ functions in exactly the same way as ‘heimlich’ in the Freudian unheimlich, as coinciding with its negation: the ‘death drive’ designates the dimension of what horror fiction calls the ‘undead,’ a strange, immortal, indestructible life that persists beyond death.” Such immortality pertains to what the Symbolic constitutively forecloses: not reality, not the subject, not the future, not the Child, but the substance of jouissance itself, the Lacanian lamella, on which the sinthomosexual lives and against which social organization wields the weapon of futurity to keep the place of life empty—merely a hollow, inanimate form—the better to sustain the fantasy of its endurance in time to come. The death drive’s “immortality,” then, refers to a persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future. Instead, it insists both on and as the impossibility of Symbolic closure, the absence of any Other to affirm the Symbolic order’s truth, and hence the illusory status of meaning as defense against the self-negating substance of jouissance.

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

[certainwoman]

“We encounter this image on every side as the lives, the speech, and the freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of deference to imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted to have them except as they consist in the prospect of passing them on to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social disease as which queer sexualities register. Nor should we forget how pervasively AIDS—for which to this day the most effective name associated with the congressional appropriation of funds is that of a child, Ryan White—reinforces an older connection, as old as the antigay reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom’s destruction, between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity.21 This, of course, is the connection on which Anita Bryant played so cannily when she campaigned in Florida against gay civil rights under the banner of “Save Our Children,” and it remains the connection on which the national crusade against gay marriage rests its case.”

Thus, while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to marry, to serve in the military, to adopt and raise children of their own, the political right, refusing to acknowledge these comrades in reproductive futurism, counters their efforts by inviting us to kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might witness lewd or inappropriately intimate behavior; the Child who might find information about dangerous “lifestyles” on the Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in short, who might find an enjoyment that would nullify the figural value, itself imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adult’s adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to image, for the satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary fullness that’s considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing.”

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

[fanboy-feminist]

Classmate: In later chapter, Edelman actually critiques Annie from the play… what’s the name of the play with Annie in it?

Us: . . . “Annie.”

Classmate: . . . Oh.

[billythesquid]

Anyone in the IWTV fandom (or vampire fandoms in general) know if an essay/video essay analysing Claudia from the lens of Edelman’s Child, or more broadly vampires and the idea of reproductive futurism and the queer death drive, exists already? And if not, should I make it?

[personalvirtualmuseum]

Reading No Future is just like "Extending that claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape."

[blackcoffeestudies]

the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.11 In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse—to prescribe what will count as political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix’s iconic image of Liberty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility—her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it’s held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself—to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the “politics” of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the “inspirational” “One Day More”), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.

Lee Edelman, No Future

[simonm223]

The Monster Is Not Nice

Earlier this month Alexander Chee wrote an article for Guernica Magazine about Dracula which proposed that some of the evil of Dracula was the sublimated eroticism that Stoker felt toward Walt Whitman. This article principally focused on the monster as a figure for interrogating evil and, midway through the article Chee recommends that his readers, ” Ask yourself what you might really fear, and…

[power-chords]

Dipped my toes into this Lee Edelman book and it takes no prisoners!

[tenderperversion]

In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse - to prescribe what will count as political discourse - by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never per­mitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix's iconic image of Lib­erty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary possibility - her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to whom it's held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture, affirms the abso­lute logic of reproduction itself - to the revolutionary waif in the logo that miniaturizes the "politics" of Les Mis (summed up in its anthem to futurism, the "inspirational" "One Day More"), we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation's good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to pre­serve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends.

LEE EDELMAN, NO FUTURE: QUEER THEORY AND THE DEATH DRIVE

[sassmar]

wow who was gonna tell me lee edelman apparently got his theories from.... obama ??????

[dykekingofhell]

Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive, 2004

Illustration from The Dark Blue by D. H. Friston, 1872

Rice. The Vampire Lestat, 1985

[yngsuk]

The queerness we propose, in [Guy] Hocquenghem’s words, “is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about ‘sacrifice now for the sake of future generations’ . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is mortal.” Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we’re condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony’s always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to insist that the future stop here.

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

[certainwoman]

“Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. “Society,” he opined, “has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a special interest in marriage.” With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society.” Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.”

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive