Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Lee Edleman's book poses important questions for all of us about "queerness" and resistance to our presumedly "normal" cultural investments in a redemptive future figured most vividly in the notion of the "child." I admire the work being done here, and in particular the intellectual chutzpah it takes to dismantle this dominant ideological framework while taking on Baudrillard, Butler and other formidable thinkers. It is, however, unfortunate that Edelman seems to have become enchanted as much by his own linguistic cleverness as by the important ideas he sets out to explore.

Thelabor required to make sense of the dense, overwrought and smugly elitist tone of the text detracts from and, I imagine for many readers unfamiliar with the burdensome jargon, simply impedes understanding. This is particularly painful in the chapter on Hitchcock's "The Birds" which seems to be as much a compendium of bad bird puns as it is a serious inquiry into the themes of the book.

That being said, Edelman has made an important, even daring, contribution to queer theory. His readings of texts and films are original and thought-provoking. Furthermore, the ideas Edelman lays out in "No Future" could and should help shape our understanding of the importance of resisting what he calls a "vision of futurity." Sadly, his impenetrable prose limits access to his ideas and keeps the circuit of discourse firmly shut to those most likely to benefit from the ideas he puts forth.

This surely is the death drive. Deathly because it is nowhere near the jouissance of living `queer.' The problem is that Edelman has defined the queer. To Edelman, the Queer disrupts the Symbolic with an anti-politic, anti-oppositional oppositional movement. Because the Queer only disidentifies, the proper queer project now, after Edelman, would be to repudiate the work he set forth, or at least not pay attention to it, the %.1 percent who (can) read it. An interesting and obnoxious book. If you follow the trends that are pioneered in the very fetish-y Duke University Press, pick this one up, now.