[From the book cover]
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 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.
[Key Concepts]
- Reproductive futurism (3): the function of the child as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and or collective narratives of meaning. (12); pro-procreative ideology (12) heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity (13); impregnating heterosexualuty, as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity (13); The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. (21); Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie [Tomorrow song]; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (29)
- Ethics of queerness: queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. (3); This paradoxical formulation suggests a refusal--the appropriately perverse refusal that characterizes queer theory--of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined, and, by extension, of history as linear narrative (the poor man's teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself--as itself--through time. Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning's eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form. (4) いわばRealとしてのQueer--significationを拒むものとしての。what chafes against "normalization" (6). The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. (6); queer predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic. (17): To inhibit the place of meaningless associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture (48)
- Politics and Imaginary: Politics, to put this another way, names the space in which Imaginary relations, relations that hark back to misrecognition of the self as enjoying some originary access to presence (a presence retroactively posited and therefore lost, one may say, from the start), compete for Symbolic fulfillment, for actualization in the realm of the language to which subjectification subjects us all. (8) Politics names the social enactment of the subject's attempt to establish the conditions for this impossible consolidation by identifying with something outside itself in order to enter the presence, deferred perpetually, of itself. Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject's alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history. (8) これはdomestic literature (19世紀の)とポリティクスの関係を考える上で重要な一節。the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust. (11)
- Death drive and jouissance: to the extent that it tears the fabric of Symbolic reality as we knwo it, unravelling the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, jouissance evokes the death drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its fantasy of self-realization, beyond the pleasure principle. (25)
- Sinthomosexuality: the sinthome--as stupid enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subject's singularity depends--connects us to something Real beyond the "discourse" of the symptom, connects us to the unsymbolizable Thing over which we constantly stanble, and so, in turn, to the death drive. . . (38); a Scrooge, a sinthomosexual, on whom to progect the force of the death drive and the obtrusion of the Real, which can never be acknowledged as the engine driving the reproduction of the social itself. (45); a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire. (46)
- Christmas: stands in the place of the obligatory collective reproduction of the Child, the obligatory investment in the social precisely as the order of the Child, which demands our collective assent to the truth that the Child exists to make flesh. (45)
- Narcissism: 50-52, sinthomosexual's narcissism. Narcissism, then, seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recongize itself. What one loves in one's image isi something more than the image ('in you more than you'). . . . narcissism is always a narcissism of the Other. (51); narcissism bespeaks the ascription to the ego of recognizable and defensible form only insofar as narcissism is invested from the outset, which is to say, primally, in the nondifferentiation of ego and id, in the unsymbolizable Real of the drive that imperils the ego as object. (51) Hence narcissism's paradox: it loves Otherness too well, beyond all reason, beyond all pleasure, even unto death. (52)
[Some thoughts]
- Reproductive futurism and its teleological, linear sense of temporality⇔naturalism's stuckness, or compulsion, or atavism (Fleissner and Seitler): Where futurism always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will suture identity by closing the gap, queerness undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already foreclosed. (25)
- Edna's refusal to "reproduce"--commitment to the ethics of queerness, refusal of politics, nationhood, etc? (As the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that permits us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such--on disturbing, therefore, and on queering outselves and our investment in such organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one. (17))
- そしてそれが読者を怒らせたのはそれが a threat not only to his own well-being, but also to the social order's--a threat to our faith in its consistency and, in consequence, to its survival, for the assurance of which nothing quite does the trick like the image of the innocent Child. (54)
- Scrooge as a sinthomosexual: his refusal to participate in the discourse of reproductive futurism--しかしこれはどのようにScroogeのhoardingと繋がるのか。やっぱり金とsexualityの関係は深いような気がするのだ。例えばMcTeagueやThe Pitの金（普通のreproductionやlaborによらない金）と彼らの奇妙なセクシュアリティはどう関係があるのか。
- Naturalism and death drive?: enactment of something truly inhuman, something meaningless and mechanistic, that replaces volition and agency with subjection to the drive. (56) automatic means of reproduction としてのinvestment--そしてsee also p. 74.
- Compassion's Compulsionのチャプターはsentimental literatureとの相性がよいだろうが、しかしEdelmanに欠けているのはこのaffective qualityのような気がするのだよね。やはりHeather Loveのような生徒を産むEve Sedgwickという人はすごい、と彼女のreviewを読むと思ってしまう。
