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

Lee Edelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0822333694 | ISBN-13: 978-0822333692

In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.

Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Queer theory, a fairly recent academic discipline, has been commonly used as an analytic tool to deconstruct literature, film and art, although writers such as Judith Butler and Michael Warner have also applied it to philosophy and sociology to subvert accepted concepts of the "normal." Edelman’s slim volume takes this idea further than anyone else to date. Arguing that the traditional Western concept of politics is predicated on making the future a better place and that the accepted—literal as well as symbolic—image of the future is the child, he states that "queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children.’ " Edelman argues that homosexuality’s perceived social threat has to do with its separation from the act of reproduction, yet, he says, this non-reproductive capacity must be embraced as a social good. He illustrates his provocative stance by analyzing numerous cultural artifacts—Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (why do the birds keep attacking children?); A Christmas Carol (he favors Scrooge over Tiny Tim); the musical Annie (with its hit song "Tomorrow")—and by discussing the theories of post-modern writers such as Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizak, Jean Baudrillard and Barbara Johnson. While Edelman also focuses on recent events—the murder of Matthew Shepard, the bombing of abortion clinics, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal—most of his book is densely written and theoretical. This is a notable contribution to post-modern theory, but Edelman’s knotted, often muddled writing will limit his readership to hard-core academics and students of post-modern thought.
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Review

“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.”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

"One of the great virtues of Edelman's thesis is that it restores the distinction between queerness and homosexuality per se. Edelman goes some way to returning the uncanniness attached to queerness which has been dispelled by the very signifier 'gay' and the cosy, Kylie-loving, unthreatening cheeriness with which it has become associated." - K-Punk

"This is a book, I confess, that I would love to have written. Angry, eloquent, precise, beautifully composed, funny, over the top, and very smart, the four chapters . . . articulate a controversial and disturbingly persuasive figural and rhetorical diagnostic of a moment in U.S. political life." - Carla Freccero, GLQ

“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

“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.” - Carolyn Denver, Victorian Studies

“No Future is a nuanced polemic, both ringingly clear in its aesthetic and theoretical explications and simply thrilling to read. I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship

“In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of ‘reproductive futurism,’ homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. 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. Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument.”—Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption, Homos, and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets

“No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny. An intellectually thrilling book.”—Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822333694
• ISBN-13: 978-0822333692
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #379,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #58 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Literary Criticism
  • #99 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Philosophy

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars does politics need futurity? November 16, 2007

By Seaboard Lit Prof

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

17 of 31 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars No Future July 21, 2008

By T. Bickle

Format:Paperback

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.