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

This is a smart, funny, and challenging book. (It does require fluency in theory-speak, largely of the Lacan dialect. So Edelman is writing largely for academics of a certain ilk. Fair enough, but I wonder what these ideas would look like if they were written with a larger public in mind--it seems to me Edelman's challenge to the child-driven purity politics of the US will never reach those who operate most within its languages and symbols.)Edelman makes a compelling case for refusing the "futurity" built into the rhetoric not just of conservative politics but also much of liberal or progressive politics. He acknowledges that in calling for this refusal, he is proposing an "impossible politics," a politics that will sidestep the trap by which one or another group (queers or an equivalent population deemed deviant) has to be sold down the river in order to rally everyone else around future improvement and greater inclusion. This is also an "impossible politics" because it won't suppress the death drive that structures every identity or political vision (this is the Lacanian part of the argument).But once you stipulate that any and every kind of politics (except Edelman's impossible politics) is built on suppressing the death drive, you have painted yourself into a corner--an impossible politics, indeed. Once Edelman has shifted the site of politics to the deep structure of the human psyche in this way, It's hard to see how one could think or act in any purposeful way that might count as political. There is only the act of refusing, but no hope or even historical possibility for imagining social and power arrangements that operate otherwise. In the meantime, political change will happen, for better or worse, and those who refuse have just taken themselves out of the game, and also limited their ability to even diagnose the change that happens.What is missing is any speculation from Edelman about what his politics of refusal would amount to, how it might play out in the world to affirm rather than suppress or deny the death drive. Other theorists have taken up the challenge of thinking about how we might act or at least think politically once we give up the idea of a self-directing political actor and a self-governing political society. But Edelman seems content to plant himself at the paradox of an "impossible politics" and expose the delusions and ill will that suddenly come into view from that standpoint. The book is brave and often brilliant, but I find I want to refuse the impossibility of this picture of impossible politics.

Awesome thoughts from a brilliant mind...but it gets a little repetitive. This really shakes the fabric of social structuring around the our precious constructions of the child.

I read this in two days. I couldn't put it down. Blew my mind and I have been trying to integrate it into my thesis. Amazing.

The writing style is ludicrously academic. Nearly indecipherable.

Author is widely respected though his argument fails to impress. It feels heavily married to Lacanian structures of thought, which have been taken up by an array of authors. He puts significant work into defining "the Child" as a Symbolic projection, yet his strongest cultural examples talk about actual children (not just the idea of the Child).Overall, his argument is a great example of highlighting the limits of Lacanian logic. Beyond that stylistic inquiry, we're left with an unsubstantial exploration of "straight time" vs "queer time" and a polemic reading of American politics.

It might seem harsh to say that the problem with Lee Edelman's account of queer theory is that there's no future in it, but according to its own logic this would be highest praise. Edelman's title says it literally and succinctly: "No Future." And as the back-cover publisher's blurb tells it, queer theory is also "a fairly recent academic discipline." If I read this statement correctly, it means that in addition to having "no future," queer theory also has "no past." Leo Bersani, himself a distinguished academic with a past, a present and a future, writes in his blurb: "The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality." It is true that the ancient Gnostics renounced sexuality as a way to subvert the demiurge ("an artisan-like figure responsible for the fashioning and maintenance of the physical universe") and to guarantee themselves: No Future. Might their "demiurge" equate to the neoliberal proponents of heteronormative pronatalism--child-lovers--so compellingly denounced by Edelman? Fortunately, however, I believe there is at least one kind of future for the most excellent queer theorists, or at least for the radically subversive, pro-unintelligibility (-ist?) Lee Edelman: a tenured position in Gnostic academe.

A supercilious, elitist, pseudo-intellectual with not much to say.