Lee Edelman

thorny (lacan). but provocative and good. could have done w/o the onslaught of bird puns in the final section

I have to say, I've had this book talked up to me so much by various people that the actual reading was rather disappointing. I mean, the concept of "queer antifuturism" was probably explained to me for the first time in a couple of sentences about a year ago. Having spent an hour and a half to actually read the book, I don't feel like it's particularly given me all that much that those sentences hadn't already. And honestly, it's a lot more interesting listening to, say, Alexis Lothian show more relate it to the Cylons in the new Battlestar Galactica than to read fifty pages on Hitchcock which really only serve to belabor the point.

I know many people feel frustrated or angry by the book, and I don't quite get that. I think partly my straight privilege insulates me; after all, Edelman isn't screwing around with my identity--although I'm not sure if I would be upset if he were. (Which is easy to say when he isn't.) As a straight white college-educated middle-class American Christian male, I have privilege on pretty much every axis you can imagine--I suppose the closest analogy would be if he had posited geeks as the group exemplifying the unravelling of societal fabric. And indeed, Edelman does seem to go beyond even queer as a destabilizing identity so that what he ends up with is a psychoanalytic anti/category about which I am sometimes left wondering what exactly it has to do with actual LGBTQ people who exist in the world. He has absolutely nothing to say about how the death drive relates to the lived experience of any actual queer people, to the point that the link he makes seems rather arbitrary. Why not geeks? Or atheists? Or people who wear white after Labor Day?

I mean, I read God and the State in high school and complained that Bakunin wasn't anarchist enough because he still believed in natural law. (I also wrote IDIOT in big letters over a picture of Kant in high school, of course, and went on to recant that position even the picture still hangs on my wall.) I'm sympathetic to the claims about the existence of the underlying social and psychological order and the need to transgress it. It's not that I particularly think that Edelman is wrong about anything, or that I disagree with him. I just find very little of what he has to say, as correct as it may be, to be all that interesting at the end of the day. show less

Edelman is evidently an important name in academic queer and critical theory, but I found this unreadably dense.

In No Future (2004), Lee Edelman argues that the dominant political discourse is one of "reproductive futurism," which takes the child and heteronormativity as its commonplaces. Queerness figures outside this political regime, "the place of . . . abjection expressed in the stigma" (3). The social is defined and limited by "the image of the Child" (not real, living children) by structuring our political discourse (11). Threats to the reproductive order are seen as threats to the social order show more (11). He argues that "queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, excepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure" (3). He makes an ethical claim about what queers should do: queers should be inimical to the social by rejecting the current social order and proclaiming violently, "fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that it serves to prop" (29). He claims that it is only by renouncing anti-sociality that queers can be accepted into the social order (47), and asks why we don't just idenfity with what we're blamed for (49). show less