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

By Lee Edelman

During this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a notably uncompromising new ethics of queer concept. His major aim is the all-pervasive determine of the kid, which he reads because the linchpin of our common politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the kid, understood as innocence short of security, represents the opportunity of the longer term opposed to which the queer is located because the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, delinquent, and future-negating force. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embody this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to desert the stance of lodging and accede to their prestige as figures for the strength of a negativity that he hyperlinks with irony, jouissance, and, eventually, the dying force itself.

Closely enticing with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge with no Tiny Tim and Silas Marner with no little Eppie. seeking to Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, he embraces of the director’s so much infamous creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by way of Northwest, who steps at the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying name figures of The Birds, with their predilection for kids. Edelman enlarges the succeed in of latest psychoanalytic thought as he brings it to endure not just on works of literature and picture but additionally on such present political flashpoints as homosexual marriage and homosexual parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a keenness bound to spark an both impassioned debate between its readers.

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By Lee Edelman

During this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a notably uncompromising new ethics of queer concept. His major aim is the all-pervasive determine of the kid, which he reads because the linchpin of our common politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the kid, understood as innocence short of security, represents the opportunity of the longer term opposed to which the queer is located because the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, delinquent, and future-negating force. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embody this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to desert the stance of lodging and accede to their prestige as figures for the strength of a negativity that he hyperlinks with irony, jouissance, and, eventually, the dying force itself.

Closely enticing with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge with no Tiny Tim and Silas Marner with no little Eppie. seeking to Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, he embraces of the director’s so much infamous creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by way of Northwest, who steps at the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying name figures of The Birds, with their predilection for kids. Edelman enlarges the succeed in of latest psychoanalytic thought as he brings it to endure not just on works of literature and picture but additionally on such present political flashpoints as homosexual marriage and homosexual parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a keenness bound to spark an both impassioned debate between its readers.

Show description

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

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Is always there/' 3 Is always there. Transformed into setting, hence, literally, mise-en­ scene, the Lacanian subject of fantasy takes the place of place itself, merging so fully with the sense of reality imbuing the imagined scene that even its absence as an actor in that scene portends neither loss of. ". "4 To be there always, though unperceived, l to inhabit the space of perception as such and thus to become the wit- , ness to one's absence, one's d isembodiment: such fantasy presumes a reality guaranteed, not threatened, by time, sustained by the certainty that a "course of events" is bound to continue its cOurse in due course long after we are gone.

Cpgni��ble"__ insofar as.. " If the sinthome thus names the element through which we "take On . . ng . . " S/NTHOMOSEXUALITY 37 , the case that whatever exposes the sinthorne as meaningless knot, deny­ , ing our blindness to its functioning and destabilizing the ground of our i faith in reality, effects a disfignration with possibly catastrophic conse­ quences-consequences Zizek characterizes as "pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe .

In proposing that Scrooge be viewed, instead, as a canonical literary instantiation of sinthomosexuality, I make no pretense of revealing an "identity" encoded in the text. Rather, I want to attend to the potent etrects of the cultural fantasy linking Scrooge to the fate of Tiny Tim as surely as the sinthome is linked to the historical consistency of the subject, or as queer sexuali­ ties are linked to the conceptual coherence of heterosexual desire. Scrooge, after all, as a bachelor in a text that declares "a bachelor .

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