You are on page 1of 68

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Edelman Kritik
Edelman Kritik......................................................................................................... 1
1NC Shell 1/5........................................................................................................... 2
1NC Shell 2/5........................................................................................................... 3
1NC Shell 3/5........................................................................................................... 4
1NC Shell 4/5........................................................................................................... 5
1NC Shell 5/5........................................................................................................... 6
***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***........................................................................................ 7
2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause...........................................................................7
A/T: Permutation.................................................................................................... 11
A/T: Framework...................................................................................................... 14
A/T: Nihilism........................................................................................................... 15
A/T: Essentialism.................................................................................................... 16
***ALTERNATIVE***................................................................................................ 17
Alternative = Sinthomosexuality...........................................................................18
Alternative = Unintelligibility................................................................................. 19
Alt Solvency........................................................................................................... 21
***LINKS***............................................................................................................ 24
Link Generic........................................................................................................ 25
Link Space Exploration........................................................................................ 26
Link Temporality.................................................................................................. 27
Link Identity Categories...................................................................................... 28
Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation.....................................................................29
Link Filling the lack.............................................................................................. 30
Aff: Permutation..................................................................................................... 31
***AFF ANSWERS***.............................................................................................. 34
Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)..........................................................................35
Aff: Pedophilia Turn................................................................................................ 37
Aff: Natality Turn.................................................................................................... 38
Aff: Cede the Political............................................................................................. 39

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

1NC Shell 1/5


Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize
reproductive, heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to
nothing more than meaningless acrobatics. This impregnates
heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating
violence against queerness.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 11-13)
Charged, after all, with the task of assuring that we being dead yet
live, the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural
transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from
which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the
nonreproductive pleasures of the mind and senses. For the
pathetic quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual
enjoyment enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as
empty, substitutive, pathological exposes the fetishistic figurations
of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to
those for which enjoyment without hope of posterity so peremptorily
dismissed legible, that is, as nothing more than pathetic and crumbling
defences shored up against our ruins. How better to characterize the
narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born
yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and
dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr.,
reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence
delicately poised between description and performance of the novels procreative ideology: If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption. If,
however, there is no baby and in consequence, no future, then the
blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments
understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as
responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality,
and, inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of The Children of
Men, like the parents of mankinds children, succumbs so completely
to the narcissism all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically
misrecognized that animates pronatalism, why should we be the
least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless future,
laments, with what we must call as straight face, that sex totally divorced
from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly acrobatic?
Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice will
continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the
specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the
drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual
meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual
procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital
relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away
the naked truth of heterosexual sex impregnating heterosexuality,

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the
cultural burden of signifying futurity figures our identification with
an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat
to the social order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that
commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as meaning,
either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close the gap in
identity, the division incised by the signifier, that meaning, despite itself,
means

Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society;


this amplifies systemic violence against queerness and places our
species on a trajectory towards omnicide.
Sedwick 1990 (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, Epistemology of the
Closet, 1990, pp. 127-130.)

scenarios of same-sex desire


would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in
Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and omnicide . That
sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United
States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the
name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a
double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression,
legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical
and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing--the array of
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray,

sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed
eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority
identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating
gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every
denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late Empire can have been
so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon
and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among
modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never
precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called

Bloodletting
on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay
minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the
mortal illness of decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own
terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic in Western culture
from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory
toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a
broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something approaching
omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of
"decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject.

homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist *imaginaire*. In our

the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a


time *after the homosexual* is finally inseparable from that toward
imagining a time *after the human*; in the wake of the homosexual, the wake incessantly
culture as in *Billy Bud*,

produced since first there *were* homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining
representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time *after the homosexual* are, of course, currently in

One of the many dangerous


ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed
homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of
dizzying circulation in our culture [book published in 1990 -Alec].

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species
is going through) on the enormous scale of whole populations.26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice
behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even
there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still
deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's
way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the
ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that,
to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of
natural selection is being invoked--in the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only
antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible

our culture's phobia about HIV-positive


blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that dangerous blood
in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in
to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly

the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-positive persons.

most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal


bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related
resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence
otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with
two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid
But

contact. It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of
utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy [sic]. Unless one believes, first of all, that samesex object-choice across history and across cultures is *one thing* with *one cause*, and, second, that its
one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive genetic path--which would be, to put it gently,
counter-intuitive--there

is no warrant for imagining that gay populations,


even of men, in post-AIDS generations will be in the slightest degree
diminished. Exactly *to the degree* that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a
tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic
depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many
themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct
heterosexual transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native
Americans, Africans, or other groups [the disabled -Alec], then, gay genocide, the onceand-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and
sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not
possible short of the eradication of the whole human species. The
impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either,
however, be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which
that omnicidal impulse in entangled with the modern problematic of
the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the
homosexual, say, as a distinct *risk group*, and the homosexual as a
potential of representation within the universal.27 As gay community
and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are
being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized
terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that
the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority
potentials and universalizing ones by opened and opened and
opened?

The sacralization of the Child as an idol of reproductive futurism


depends on the sacrifice of the queer. Privileging large scale
impacts over the systemic violence outlined in our criticism is the
kind of bankrupt rationale that legitimizes violence in the first
place.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 28-31)

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority
bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation
giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal
employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that
bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the
marital bond. Society, he opined, has a special interest in the
protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage
remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture,
education and socialization of children, the state has a special
interest in marriage. With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child
that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become , Law lent his voice
to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on
the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such
fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his
failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme,
condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, based on individual egoism

he observed, Such a caricature has


no future and cannot give future to any society. Queers must
respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by
rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation,

insisting on our equal right to the social orders prerogatives, not only by insisting on our equal right to the social orders

by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the
Symbolic order for which they stand here anyway in each and every
expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the
Child in whose name were collectively terrorized; fuck annie ; 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. We might like to believe that with patience, with
coherence and integrity, but also

work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist group so generous doses of legal
savvy and electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for us a place at the political table that wont have to come

there are no queers in that


future as there can be no future for queer, chosen as they are to bear
the bad tidings that there can be no future at all: that the future, as Annies hymn to
at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But

the hope of Tomorrow understands, is always / A day / Away. Like the lover son Keats Grecian urn, forever near the

were held in thrall by a future continually


deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day
when today are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to
screen out the grave that gapes from within the lifeless letter, luring us into,
ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by the social order
that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to
recognize the structuring fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as
goal of a union theyll never in fact achieve,

well to recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social

such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity,


is also to say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's
words, as "politically self-destructive ."33 But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and
the self (as mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness,
again as figure, necessarily destroys necessarily insofar as this " s
e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism and this "politics" the
means of its promulgation as the order of social reality . But perhaps, as Lacan's
engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the
only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the
organization as
which

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
future in the name of having a life. If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread
of futurity, if the jouissance , the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity
annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate
identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual
reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which our
queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the
place of the death drive we're called on to figure and insisting,
against the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that
we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are "not the signifier of what
might become a new form of 'social organisation,' " that we do not
intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these
fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of
the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary
image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective identification
with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in Hocquenghem's words, "is
unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about
'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' . . . [it] knows that civilisation alone is
mortal."34 Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as

It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the


signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned
should we speak them or not: that m are the advocates of abortion;
that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere
repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to
offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an
insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an
insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of
futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always
explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us,
and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitivelyto
insist that the future stop here.
pro-life.

Our alternative is queer apocal(o)ptic/ism: this is the relentless


problematization of the Symbolic, and all imagery and idolatry
associated with reproductive futurism. Apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at
the level of the self and branches out to capture the apocalyptic
moments of destruction wherein the underlying structures of
heteronormative hegemony are disrupted.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 57-58)

What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer's relentless


questioning of all categorical imperatives, including the ontology
Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and make trouble
for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus
might be superseded or become defunct as an interpretative tool at some

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
future date, as well as the dedication to examining the notion of utility itself. It
is queer's commitment to the here and now, the present, not putting
faith in the always postponed future but in making an immediate
intervention. It is the anti-assimilationist bent in queer theory, the
activist strain with its refusal to be defined by or in terms set down
by the dominant culture in any given situation. It points to the fact that
queer is brought into being through acts of resistance, the
recognition of the potential futility of resistance because of the
norm's propensity for cooption and reinvention, but the drive towards
resistance all the same. It is the trace of queer's investments in
deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the refusal to normative coherence as
fantasy and the making visible of the instability that constitutes any one thing.
It characterises queer's dedication to end things and traumatic
events, its commitment to death whether it is the mournful rage of
activists in response to queer deaths arising from suicide, HIV/AIDS or queer
bashings; the theorist's inventiveness to the point of unintelligibility in an
attempt to cast off the psychical death wrought by the identitarian
strai(gh)tjacket (Haver 1997), or the anarchic proclamations of death to the
compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of 'the
death-drive, always present in any vital process'

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

1NC Shell 5/5


(Freud 2003/1933, 98). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive, driven both
towards its own 'death' and by the knowledge that it will must - end;
towards a time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful, needed,
required, or desired (Butler 1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also
encapsulates the apocalyptic moments at which the death drive
becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an
imposing illusion produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative
hegemony. In this, queer apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the
self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the constant
production of unease at the level of identification - unsettling the
very desire for social recognition as an identifiable subject in the
realisation that 'queer must insist ... on disturbing ... and on queering
ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness can
never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one' (Edelman
2004,17).

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***

10

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause


Heteronormativity is the all-encompassing standard of
normalization used to discipline and punish queer bodies, as such, it
is the site of on-going systemic violence against queerness.
Elias et al. 2003 (Karen E. Lovaas PhD, John P. Elia PhD & Gust A. Yep PhD, Professor
at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p.18, 2003)

In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of


hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled,
and treated as an Other. This process of othering creates individuals, groups,
and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less
consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated
markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and
nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an invisible
center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of
such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing
circular movement. Normalization is the process of constructing,
establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and allencompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability,
morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural
values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary
instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically,
psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and
control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is the site
of violence (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of
normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through
heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls,
persons, and life forms are created, examined, and disciplined
through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990).
Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock
of society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining, and
perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and
oppression of sexual others.

The affirmatives futuristic focus necessarily isolates conflicts and crises as events,
spatially bounded with beginnings and endings. This myopic focus marginalizes the
individuals who suffer systemic violence every day.
Cuomo 1996 (Chris J. Cuomo 1996, War is not just an event: Reflections on the
significance of everyday violence, 1996, Hypatia, Volume 11, No. 4, pg 1,
proquest.)

11

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
Philosophical attention to war has typically appeared in the form of
justifications for entering into war, and over appropriate activities within war.
The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded
sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity
vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is
appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful
times. Not surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical
dimensions of war discuss war solely as an event--an occurrence, or
collection of occurrences, having clear beginnings and endings that
are typically marked by formal, institutional declarations. As
happenings, wars and military activities can be seen as motivated by
identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and
collective decision-makers and agents of states. But many of the questions
about war that are of interest to feminists---including how large-scale,
state-sponsored violence affects women and members of other
oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced, and
nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such
violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other
oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies--cannot be
adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues are not merely a
matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable decisions.In "Gender and
'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is
currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott
argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well
as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance
of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-based conception of war
inadequate, especially insofar as geer is taken into account. In this essay, I will
expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on
events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist
consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of
war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more
complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence
as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the
constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and
the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary
postmodern or postcolonial circumstances.1Theory that does not
investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot
represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects
of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on
members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are
relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and
institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because
they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities
during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of
making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized
world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections
among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other
closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of

12

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military
solutions for social problems.Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways
in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in
twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and
analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create
alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are
problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained
resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and
oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting
the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the
absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of
war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the
safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities
of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an
ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of
resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar
resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when
the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult
not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities.
Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep
resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence
of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant
military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored
violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated
by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away
from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military
violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly
disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced
theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example,
investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows
consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the
following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and
political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of
soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in
which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes
invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate
interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and
nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent
circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the
relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled
"war."

Violence against the queer is reproduced based on a fundamental


denial of the death drive.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

13

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents 'an always impossible


future' (11), 'a fantasmatic future' (31) which translates queerness, I
think, into heteronormativity's aggressor the Queer - a repository
for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the
existence of the death drive within (Klein 1997/1946,4) and the
subject's resultant fear of death (Klein 1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that
the future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive to
experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from the presence of an internal
threat (that is, the death drive) is deflected outwards to become the
fear of an external threat (that is, the Queer). This internal object of fear
is displaced onto the Queer who then 'becomes the external
representative of the death instinct' (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a
denial both of the existence of the death drive and the social's
narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish fulfilment of its
desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto
the figure of the Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is
considered to be dangerous to the Child and thus the future. It is my
contention that reproductive futurism operates by first denying the
presence of the death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of
self-fulfilment at the same time that the anxiety of
heteronormativity's own internal shortcomings and disciplining
mechanisms are displaced onto the Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69-82).
The instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud, because
'the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence
mechanisms in motion' (69).

14

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

15

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

16

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

A/T: Permutation
The permutation is a coercive universalization that, through
reproductive futurism, places an ideological limit on queerness.
Their intent to set out a teleogical trajectory of progress will
culminate not in the incorporation of our advocacy, but rather in the
eradication of it.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 64)

Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, 'an ideological


limit on political discourse as such, preserving in die process the
absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by
casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance
to this organizing principle of communal relations' (2). Reproductive
futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the
same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig's concept of the straight
mind in that 'when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing
but heterosexuality' (1992,28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific
term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through
which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity
is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while
reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such
effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of
ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on what
and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its
'translation into a narrative', 'its teleological determination' through
politics which 'conforms to the temporality of desire', 'the inevitable
historicity of desire' (Edelman 2004, 9).
Reproductive futurism is, what I call, 'heterocycloptic', bound up with
the desiring gaze and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of
'progress' moving endlessly towards a 'better' future, in the process
imposing a panopticon like self-surveillance: 'It's a machine in which
everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those
over whom it is exercised' (Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocalyptic in the
sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which
the norm becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of
power a 'coercive universalization' (Edelman 2004, 11) operates at the
level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: '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). In this, the
Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics, and is
thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in
advance. Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power

17

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps
contradictorily, the proliferation of desires - a looking-out as opposed
to a gazing-within - in the service of repressing any conscious selfawareness of the death drive. Reproductive futurism is therefore,
what I term, 'hetero-prophetic' in that it tries to set out
programmatically what will transpire in the future; a future 'endlessly
postponed' (13), thus holding the present to ransom. If it is invested
in eschatology, it is only as a veneer to discipline those into
enslavement to its ideals.

The permutation still links to the critique, queer temporality is an


ateological alternative that is by definition hostile to the
chronological organization the affirmative hopes to combine it with.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of
Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis,
November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf)
Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

In Edelmans critique of culture, queerness occupies a temporality that


extends no future. On the contrary, queer times are firmly stuck in the
contemporary, a childless realm that harbors only sterile, narcissistic
enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and
therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization,
collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself (Edelman, Future, 13).
Detrimental to the futurist regime and its accompanying principle of
social structuring, heteronormativity, the contemporary becomes the
quintessential queer temporality, an odd time axis that opposes
chronology and teleology, and that seems to have, says Edelman, no
social purpose whatsoever.

Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic,


the permutation attempts to tie this difference to its antithesis
telos. In other words, the transformative potential of our kritik is
lost when it simply becomes a means to an end.
Runions 2008 (Erin Runions, specialist in Hebrew bible and gender studies, Queering
the Beast: The Antichrists Gay Wedding, 2008, Publishe din Queering the
Non/Human, pp 103-104.)

The apocalyptic logic used to bolster arguments for family values and
to write laws against same-sex marriage is very much like logic that allows for
exception to the law and torture. Within the nation, laws protect the human,

18

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
comprised of those who correctly desire integration into family,
nation and Christian secular humanity. Raw sex or what is perceived
as raw sex - is banished by law. Exceptions to law are made for those who
are outside of this eschatological trajectory, and who therefore must be
associated with the hated (yet desired) raw sex.

All of this is more than a little depressing, given the deep entrenchment of
these views. So, by way of conclusion, I would like to make a final turn, to try
to queer the image of the political enemy as homosexualised antichrist. Like
bare life, and like raw sex, the antichrist is both included and excluded in the
political (and religious) symbolic order. I have shown that this liminal position
can pose physical danger to those who are identified as antichrists; but I would
also like to explore the resistant potential for the danger that the antichrist
poses to the symbolic order.

As I have argued, what has been so potentially threatening about the antichrist
for apocalyptic exegetes through the ages is that he mixes the human and the
inhuman, to the degree that they cannot necessarily be told apart. The
antichrist represents both a perverted sexuality and a desire for one-world
order. In the antichrist's kingdom, presumably, all humans are lumped together
with the inhuman (the demonic), without attention to religion, national
affiliation, gender, or sexuality. Antichristic desire is not confined by borders
(national or otherwise), by categories of difference (human/inhuman). A similar
point about queer desire is made with some urgency by Edelman in his short
essay, 'Unstating Desire', which argues against using the language of family or
political state/affiliation to describe the queer intellectual enterprise. He writes,
'Queer theory might better remind us that we are inhabited always by states of
desire that exceed our capacity to name them. Every name only gives those
desires confiictual, contradictory, inconsistent, undefined a fictive border'
(1994, 345). Antichristic desire confuses identity, transgresses borders and
confounds telos. It is polymorphously perverse.

Moreover, the antichrist is deceptive. This danger is what makes the figure of
the antichrist so powerful: he cannot simply be recuperated as another point of
identity; his deceptiveness threatens every identity. There is no telling who
might be the antichrist, and whether or not there might be more than one. The
antichrist could be anyone (even someone married). The double and separate
identification of the antichrist as political enemy and as gay suggests that
the political enemy might not be outside the nation at all, might not even wield
weapons, but might simply desire wild, non-heteronormative, non-teleological
sex. Indeed the very capitalist mechanisms (for example, marketing) that the
US strives to protect alongside humanity depend on raw sex. Isn't everything
sold through appeal to wildly promiscuous desire, even as the selling
forecloses on desire and attaches it to telos? The uncertainty as to the locus of
antichristic desires (domestic or foreign) works against the claims of empire.

19

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
While the racialised, Muslim (non-national), homosexualised antichrist is
essential to the production of the US's mission to save marriage and humanity,
the inhuman antichrist within the nation troubles the straightforward
assessment of the US's relation to being, having and saving universal
humanity (strangely queer already). The deceptive presence of the antichrist
within - via raw sex troubles the US's suitability to protect heteronormative
sex, and with it the family, the nation, humanity and the very concept of the
human. Of course, this is precisely why efforts are so strong to ban gay
marriage, as an attempt to rid the nation of raw sex and antichristic desire.
The right to protect the future of humanity that is, US hegemony is at
stake. The deceptive presence of the antichrist puts the (heteronormative)
messianic claims of the US into question.

Here Edelman's use of Jacques Lacan to reclaim queerness as the


death drive, in No Future, is instructive. Edelman's project is to use the
antisocial impulses of desire to deconstruct the oppressions made in
the name of identity. In his analysis, identity is bound up with teleology,
with time and with the future; it is through hopes for the future that identity is
given meaning. Futurity, as he so cuttingly argues, is tied up with the
Child 'as the preeminent emblem of the motivating end' (2004, 13), and
therefore with heteronormativity. Queer desire disrupts the futureoriented trajectory of identity, and with it, the social. Queer desire is
oppositional, it embodies negativity, it disrupts rather than conjoins.
Edelman wishes to take queer difference seriously, to reclaim the
proliferation of queer desires, as a negativity that can disrupt identity
and the social. The point is to disrupt 'normativity's singular truth'
(2004, 26). In his words, 'queerness attains its ethical value precisely
insofar as it ... accept [s] its figural status as resistance to the
viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such
resistance from every social structure' (2004, 3). For Edelman,
queerness is that difference that has been repressed in subjects'
entry into the heteronormative symbolic order for the sake of unity
and coherence, yet without which difference the subject could not function.
Queerness, like raw sex, and bare life, is both included and excluded from the
social order and its exclusion must be mined for its potential to disrupt the
borders of inclusion. Queerness is like the death drive; it is that force
emerging from 'the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the
Symbolic's very core' (2004, 22). It moves backward away from the future.
Queerness, like the death drive, 'refuses identity or the absolute
privilege of any goal'. It denies teleology and rejects spiritualization
through marriage to reproductive futurism' (2004, 27). It disrupts the
eschatological future that is established by the Child. It is, therefore, what Lee
Quinby might call anti-apocalyptic.

The figure of political enemy as queer antichrist embodies the queer


function of the death drive. Like queerness, the antichrist is inimical to

20

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
the future and its logic of heteronormativity. Like queerness, the figure of the
political enemy as queer antichrist is necessary to the functioning of
the system; it is that which allows the machine to move into imperialising
place. The queer enemy as antichrist must be recognised in its role in
motivating and enabling the production of US politico-reproductive eschatology
as truth. Yet it stands as a wrench in the system. It threatens to
disrupt the future of the family and with it the future of the nation.
Its desire erupts everywhere, anywhere. It threatens to unsettle
certainty about the human, and therefore also certainty of the US
mission in the world. The importance of this role needs to be
acknowledged and affirmed, if the 'truth' of US sovereignty is to be
contested.

The role of the political enemy as queer antichrist ought not to be


repudiated. Acceptance and valorisation of this figure's disruption of
national eschatology might assist in what Edelman calls, 'the
impossible project of imagining an oppositional political stance
exempt from the imperative to reproduce the politics of signification
(the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier
itself), which can only return to us, by way of the Child, to the politics
of reproduction' (2004, 27). The antichrist disrupts meaning through the
proliferation of uncontainable desires (called perverse), and through deception.
The antichrist demonstrates what post-structuralism has been insisting:
meaning may not be what it seems. The queer antichrist defies certainty.

Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of


signification is an act of domestication that denies queerness its
transformative potential.
Huffer, 2010. (Lynne, Prof of Womens Studies at Emory. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking
the Foundations of Queer Theory. Pg.1)

But somehow, over the years, the queer has become a figure who has
lost her generative promise. She turned in on herself and became fro zen into a new, very American identity. And if the transformation
itself is to be celebrated, the final freezing is not. Getting stuck in
identities that are often politically or medically engineered, the queer
is drained of her transformative, contestatory power. This is where
History of Madness can help us, as the story of a split that produced the queer.
Not only a diagnosis of the great division between reason and unreason,
Madness is also a contestation of that division's despotic "structure of refusal...
on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being a language [and]
as having no rightful place in history. This structure is constitutive of what is
sense and nonsense" (M xxxii).

21

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

A/T: Framework
We should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than
roleplaying as policymakers we should take this chance to challenge
the heteronormative structures that pervade the Academy.
Elias 2003 (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of
Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, 2003)

Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational


system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea
that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality,
Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from
the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and
therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be
normal, heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal
lifestyle (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with
heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as . . .
deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and
adult educators who share these heterosexual values (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55).
Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the
curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels
(for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, & Griffin,
1997; Letts & Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, & Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002).
Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a
heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to
maintaining . . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions,
which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist,
sexist, and homophobic (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been
modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools
(Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the
intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and
dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero[sexism]).
Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the
kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported.
To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the
ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It
seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to
challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based
sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the
business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to
federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality
education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity
until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship
construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality
education will follow later in this essay.

22

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

23

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

A/T: Nihilism
Our argument is not nihilistic, it is apocalyptic. Our embrace of the
death drive is a subversive blow against the system that ruptures
the assumed coherence of reproductive futurism.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

Many readers have found Edelman's argument to be oppressively


nihilistic; however, he does not speak of self-destruction in the sense
of suicide or organic nothingness, but rather as a refusal to submit to
the disciplining of fantasy in the service of reproductive futurism:
'political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one:
the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a
life' (30).10 In response to those who insist that No Future is a stagnant and
stagnating force, I offer Jonathan Dollimore's remark that 'death is not
simply the termination of life ... but life's driving force, its animating,
dynamic principle' (1998, 192). Edelman's rejection of 'the future [as]
mere repetition and just as lethal as the past', coupled with his
insistence that 'the future stop here' (2004, 31), demonstrates for me
his commitment to the 'queer and now' in his formulation of
queerness. This attendance to the fleetingness of the queer moment without
an investment in the future, this acceptance of the death drive is not a
death wish, a desire for annihilation but rather a loosening of futurity's
strangulating grip, an attempt to exercise agency in a world that offers but
its spectre. In the words of Jacques Derrida: 'To learn to live means to learn
to die, to take into account, to accept complete mortality (without
salvation, resurrection, or redemption - neither for oneself nor for any other
person)' (2004).

24

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

A/T: Essentialism
Our analysis is not a universalization but rather a genealogy of how
power has used the Child to valorize reproductive futurity. This kind
of Foucauldian analysis is the only way idols of normalization can be
challenged.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 66)

In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm


and Natasha Hurley respond to what they see as Edelman's setting-up of the
Child as 'the anti-queer' with the view that 'queerness inheres instead in
innocence run amok' (2004, xiv). Edelman's treatment of the Child has
been denounced by those who see him as flattening out the category
and universalising one such usage of its figural status, without taking
account of the fluctuating contours of that category over time. Edelman's
analysis is not a historical one, but a genealogical meditation on how
the Child has come to be signified as natural and the marker of the
future to which everyone must bow, 'the prop of the secular theology
on which our social reality rests' (2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of
others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976) and Judith Butler (1990) in
interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become
entangled to such an extent that 'we are no more able to conceive of
a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive
of a future without the figure of the Child' (Edelman 2004,11). No Future
works to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces
the ways in which power works through technique and normalisation
rather than repression or interdiction (1978/76, 89). Edelman shows
that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which 'a
notional freedom' stands in for 'the actuality of freedom' (2004, 11) in
the heterocycloptic gaze unblinkingly directed towards the chimera of the
future. Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the
Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through
which access to the future can be achieved.

25

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

26

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

***ALTERNATIVE***

27

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Alternative = Sinthomosexuality
Our alternative is sinthomosexuality: This is a coupling of Lacans
notion of the symptom, the small slice of abject failure in the knot
holding the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together, along
with the body of the queer, figured under heteronormativity.
Sinthomosexuality lays bare reproductive futurism through the
continual projection and ascription of the negativity associated with
the queer as the death knell of the future.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)

The sinthomosexual represents, according to Edelman, 'the wholly


impossible ethical act' (2004,101) to which queerness is called forth to
occupy, 'the place of meaninglessness ... unregenerate, and
unregenerating, sexuality' (47). A fusion of Jacques Lacan's idea of the
sinthome, 'which ... is meant to take place at the very spot where, say, the
trace of the knot goes wrong' (Lacan; quoted in Ettinger 2006, 60) and the
figuration of the Homosexual within heteronormativity,
sinthomosexuality represents both the failure of heteronormativity
while also facilitating its continuation - however imperfectly and
incomplete. As Bracha L. Ettinger writes in relation to the sinthdme-. it is 'a
kind of trace of a failure in the knot that holds the Symbolic, the
Imaginary, and the Real together' (59). While heteronormativity claims
that queerness is stagnant and useless, I contend it is anything but: queerness
is profoundly useful to heteronormativity because in order to function,
heteronormativity needs its Queers to project negativity onto while relying on
its reformed sinthomosexual Other, homonormativity to facilitate its smooth
operation.
Edelman's appeal to forgo meaning, to scorn utility and occupy a
space of unassimilable jouissancen is, I maintain, in line with the
thinking of Georges Bataille who rejects the notion of transgression because
it often simply reifies the norm against which it acts: 'There exists no
prohibition that cannot be transgressed. Often the transgression is
permitted, often it is even prescribed' (1986/1957, 63). Instead, Bataille
locates his analysis at the level of utility and thus productivity, what
Shannon Winnubst calls 'this fundamental logic of utility at the heart of
sexuality' (2007, 85). Bataille's work concentrates on the way in which
eroticism has been reduced through normalisation to sexualitv in a
similar way that Edelman, I propose, comments on the disciplining of
sexuality by turning it into reproductive futurism. By figuring the death
drive, queerness makes visible the uselessness of all sexualities, lays bare
reproductive futurism as fantasy and while embodying the negativity that the
social has conferred on it, refuses to facilitate its continuation. Winnubst writes

28

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
of 'the horror of uselessness' which comes to signify what it means to be
'properlv human' (85), setting out how queering should engage in 'activities
that ate. going nowhere', 'acts or pleasures that offer no clear or useful
meaning' (90, 91), in an effort to reconfigure the societal obsession
with teleology. Edelman writes of the 'inhumanity' of the
sinthomosexual (2004, 109) as a way of challenging the normalising
strictures of the Human. Describing the sinthomosexual as 'antiPromethean' (108) devoid of the desire for self-actualisation through
object choice, Edelman offers, I believe, one way in which this 'word without
a future (33) queers the Human. This apocalyptic gesture - read here as a
cathartic letting-go of the rules governing self-actualisation - puts
pressure on the desire for recognition,12 on the very teleology of
desire itself in the acceptance of the fact that recognition depends on
the desire of another, one who in the case of reproductive futurism,
may withhold at any time the 'Humanising' gaze from those marked
out as Queer.

29

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Alternative = Unintelligibility
Our alternative is queer unintelligibility: This is an enforced
invisibility that resists the catachresis of the Symbolic that imposes
identity on lack in a neurotic attempt to map out the blind spots in
the social order.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 106-109)

And since nothing is ever less "aberrant, [or] unprecedented" than the
"future," which functions as the literal end toward which Antigone's Claim
proceeds, we should not be surprised that the phrase itself reiterates, rather
than rearticulates, an earlier use of the term. In the course of responding to
Lacan's account of Antigone's "death-driven movement" across the barrier of
the Symbolic, Butler identifies exactly what the "duty imposed by the symbolic
is," and she does so by quoting Lacan: " 'to transmit the chain of discourse in
aberrant form to someone else'" (52). With this Antigone's "aberrant... future"
proves orthodox after all. Undermining its claim to be aberrant and
unprecedented at once, it transmits, in the requisite aberrant form, as futurity
always demandsin the form, that is, whose aberrant quality is therefore
anything but and whose future repeats its precedents precisely by virtue of
being "unprecedented" the Symbolic chain of discourse, in which, as
everyone knows (and this, of course, is precisely what everyone
knows), intelligibility must always take place.

But what if it didn't? What if Antigone, along with all those doomed to
ontological suspension on account of their unrecognizable and, in
consequence, "unlivable" loves, declined intelligibility, declined to
bring herself, catachrestically, into the ambit of future meaningor
declined, more exactly, to cast off the meaning that clings to those
social identities that intelligibility abjects: their meaning as names for
the meaning-lessness the Symbolic order requires as a result of the catachresis
that posits meaning to begin with. Those figures, sinthomosexuals, could
not bring the Symbolic order to crisis since they only emerge, in
abjection, to support the emergence of Symbolic form, to
metaphorize and enact the traumatic violence of signification whose
meaning-effacing energies , released by the cut that articulates
meaning, the Symbolic order constantly must exert itself to bind.
Unlike Butler's Anti gone, though, suck sinthomosexuals would insist on
the unintelligible's unintelligibility, on the internal limit to
signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful
profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder the inescapable Real
of the drive. As embodiments of unintelligibility, of course, they must
veil what they expose, becoming, as figures for it, the means of its

30

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler's Antigone conduces to
futurism's logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen the reach of
what it allows us to grasp, where she moves, by way of the future, toward the
ongoing legitimation of social form through the recognition that is said to
afford "ontological certainty and durability," sinthomosexuality, though
destined, of course, to be claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that
makes it a figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it
embraces de-meaning as the endless insistence of the Real that the
Symbolic can never master for meaning now or in the "future."

That "never," Butler would argue, performs the law's instantiation, which
always attempts to impose, as she puts it, "a limit to the social, the
subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling
to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power" (21).
Committed as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of social justice,
Butler would affirm "our own power" to rearticulate, by means of
catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly calls our
"moralized sexual horror" (71). Such a rearticulation, she claims, would
proceed through "the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless
makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are
meant to enforce its silence" (78). This, of course, assumes that "the
unspeakable" intends, above all else, to speak, whereas Lacan maintains, as
Copjec reminds us, something radically different: that sex, as "the structural
incompleteness of language" is "that which does not communicate itself, that
which marks the subject as unknowable."53 No doubt, as Butler helps us to
see, the norms of the social order do, in fact, change through
catachresis, and those who once were persecuted as figures of
"moralized sexual horror" may trade their chill and silent tombs for a
place on the public stage. But that redistribution of social roles
doesn't stop the cultural production of figures, sinthomosexuals all,
to bear the burden of embodying such a "moralized sexual horror."
For that horror itself survives the fungible figures that flesh it out
insofar as it responds to something in sex that's inherently
unspeakable: the Real of sexual difference, the lack that launches the
living being into the empty arms of futurity. This, to quote from Copjec
again, "is the meaning, when all is said and done, of Lacan's notorious
assertion that 'there is no sexual relation': sex, in opposing itself to sense, is
also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication."54 From that limit
of intelligibility, from that lack in communication, there flows, like blood
from an open wound, a steady stream of figures that mean to embody
and thus to fillthat lack, that would stanch intelligibility's wound,
like the clotting factor in blood, by binding it to, encrusting it in, Imaginary
form. Though bound therefore to be, on the model of Whitman, the binder of
wounds, the sinthomosexual, anti-Promethean, unbound, unbinds us all. Or
rather, persists as the figure for such a generalized unbinding by which the
death drive expresses at once the impossible excess and the absolute limit
both of and within the Symbolic.

31

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

On the face of Mount Rushmore, as he faces the void to which he himself offers
a face, Leonard gestures toward such an unbinding by committing himself to
the sinthomosexuaPs impossible ethical act: by standing resolutely at, and on,
and/or that absolute limit. Alenka Zupancic, in Ethics of the Real, notes that
what Kant called the ethical act "is denounced as 'radically evil' in
every ideology," and then describes how ideology typically manages to
defend against it: "The gap opened by an act (i.e., the unfamiliar, 'out-of-place'
effect of an act) is immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image.
As a rule this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public
alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question already
implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this!"55
The image of suffering adduced here is always the threatened
suffering of an image: an image onto which the face of the human has
coercively been projected such that we, by virtue of losing it, must
also lose the face by which we (think we) know ourselves. For "we are,
in effect," as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding of the
self, "at one with everything that depends on the image of the other
as our fellow man, on the similarity we have to our ego and to
everything that situates us in the imaginary register."56 To be
anything elseto refuse the constraint, the inertia, of the ego as form
would be, as Zupancic rightly says, "impossible, inhuman." As impossible and
inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him or fuck him; as
impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to Thornhill by crushing his
hand; as impossible and inhuman as the sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure
of the future and, for refusing the call to compassion, finally merits none
himself. To embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomosexual:
that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out. Leonard
affords us no lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond
desire, to a sinthomosexuality of our ownone we assume at the price of the
very identity named by "our own." To those on whom his ethical stance, his
act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the irony of trying to read him as
an allegory, as one from whom we could learn how to act and in whom we
could find the sinthomosexual's essential concretization: the formalization of a
resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the substantialization of a
negativity that dismantles every substance. He leaves us, in short, the
impossible task of trying to fill his shoes shoes that were empty of anything
human even while he was wearing them, but that lead us, against our own
self-interest and in spite of our own desire, toward a jouissance from which
everything "human," to have one, must turn its face.

32

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Alt Solvency
Apocal(o)ptic/ism posthuman-ously dissolves the violence of the
past and present so as to obliterate the social orders vision of the
future.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 73)

Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington's


description of it as 'a critical practice that occurs inside humanism,
consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist
discourse' (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves
as an uncanny reminder of the death drive nestling within
heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of hermetically sealing
ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q activism has
always been posthumanist in continuously challenging and redefining
what the terms 'Human', 'Humanism' and 'Humaneness' mean, by
rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those categories and
their discursive effects. Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis
as a strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly anti-humanist,
one might say posthuman-ous': 'Occurring or continuing after the
death of the human' (Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The desire for the
Human therefore signifies an 'archive desire' (Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire
not for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future.
Heteronormativity thus works in the shadow of its own finitude, striving
retroactively to reproduce the present in the future, which is always the past
futurally imagined.
'Human beings', The Posthuman Manifesto reminds us, 'only exist as we
believe them to exist' (2003, 177). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves
suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies
through which this category operates within different historical and
cultural contexts. It is not about the desire for 'Human Rights'which
would be a humanising of the Queer but rather examines our desire for
the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of
such a term conveys. Judith Butler links 'a liveable life' and 'a grievable
death' to the instantiation of what is understood by the 'normatively human'
(2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No Future,
Lee Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the
Child, that image which is the personification of compassion's evocation.
Queering the Human demands a withholding of such mechanistic displays of
compassion, the empty compulsions of heteronormativity. Such an act rejects,
not the child, but those who make use of the child for their own ends.

33

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

Accession to the negativity projected on the queer has the jarring


effect of depriving heteronormativity of its symbolic opposition, this
reveals the incoherence of the system and problematizes it as a
whole.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 66)

While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that


prompted Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation by targeting the Child
where they attack Men and Straights, No Future advocates neither collectivism
nor acting out. Although Edelman's text also constitutes a polemic, which
includes a variety of statements that have been met both by offence and
defensive hostility from readers,13 he professes the belief that speaking about
queerness will not change how the dominant culture views it. In other words,
proliferating discourses of queerness makes no difference as they will be
condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity. An oftquoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered
such acerbic commentary in some quarters: 'Fuck the social order and the
Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; 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' (2004, 29). These remarks have inflamed
respondents to ask where the figure of the Child ends and the real child
begins. A significant prefatory comment is often absented from reproductions
of the above quotation, that is, Edelman's observation that no matter what
individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by
reproductive futurism will always hear the above proclamations as
having been said anyway.
By way of further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that 'It is we who
must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier,
pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak
them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's
emblem must die' (31). This of course points to the way in which pro-life
movements often link an anti-abortion stance with an antihomosexual position. While identity categories - however fluid and
contingent - are important strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective
and Queer Nation, Edelman argues that those figured as Queer,
harbingers of the death drive, should, instead of wasting their breath
in espousing indignant rebuttals, accede to that position because
they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing pundits, not to
mention the fact that the position exercises an enormous power to
jam the cogs in the machinery of heteronormativity should the
occupants refuse to play the 'game' of the dominant culture. Edelman's
work is a continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo
Bersani (1995), Michael Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra

34

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
Chasin (2000), all of whom have anatomised a growing homonormativity
invested in neoliberalism, consumerism and assimilation through being seen
as 'normal' by heteronormativity. In this, while Queer Nation berates lesbians
and gays for not fighting back while queer bashings go on around them
(1997/1990, 778), Edelman criticises lesbians and gays, 'these
comrades in reproductive futurism' who seek to make reforms to the
system while in the process becoming assimilated and put to work in
it by being turned into sinthomsexuals (2004,19).

Our alternative escapes the oedipal restraints of the 1ac by


deregulating desire, queerness
becomes a continual process of opening up a space where sexuality
becomes the primary concern.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the
Cyberqueer, May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

Gay liberation, envisioning a "gender-free communitarian world," did


not promote the separation of which Browning speaks. The explanation for
the shift from gay and lesbian studies, based on the category gender, to
queer theory, which fetishizes desire by rendering it autonomous, is
not self-evident. It is commonly assumed that (post)modern queer studies
has made a decisive and radical advance over modernism (and its precursors),
which assigned questions of sexuality and desire to secondary social and
intellectual status. Even while giving sexuality and desire central importance in
his theory, Freud, as a modernist thinker still committed to Enlightenment
assumptions, stressed that the rational regulation of sexuality and desire was
necessary to civilized life, despite the inevitable "discontents" that accompany
civilization as a result. Against such supposedly outmoded modernist
assumptions, ludic (post)modern theory produces an atmosphere of
sexual deregulation. As a-if not the-leading element in this
development, queer theory is seen as opening up a new space for the
subject of desire, a space in which sexuality becomes primary. As Eve
Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern
Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its
central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical
analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (Epistemology 1). In
this new space, desire is regarded as autonomous- unregulated and
unencumbered. The shift is evident in the contrast between the
model of necessary sexual regulation promoted by Freud in Civilization
and Its Discontents and the notion of sexual deregulation proposed by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari represent the
deregulating process-in which desire becomes a space of "pure
intensities" (A Thousand Plateaus 4)-as a breakthrough beyond the
Oedipus complex (that "grotesque triangle" [Anti- Oedipus 171]), which
colonizes the subject and restricts desire.

35

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Reading this argument in a debate introduces queered perceptions


of reality to local, material institutions where change can be reliably
facilitated on a micropolitical level.
Morton 1995 (Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the
Cyberqueer, May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

Queer theory departs from traditional humanist literary and aesthetic


studies (and from gay and lesbian studies) by virtue of its absorption of
ludic (post)modern theoretical developments along their two main
axes. Aside from the overtly ludic Derridean-Deleuzean axis, in which
"liberated" desire subverts the official relations of signifieds (conceptuality)
and signifiers (textuality), there is the historicist Foucauldian strand,
which insists that outside the text are material institutions, enabled by
discourses but not textualist in the Derridean sense.5 These institutions (as
against historical materialism's global account of them) are
disconnected and autonomous, and they can be sites of liberation
where marginal groups seize power (which is voluntarily reversible).
For these historicists, social inequality is a measure of the inequality of
power among groups and is not, as conceived by Marx, produced by
exploitation during capitalism's extraction of surplus value. On the political
plane, Foucault's work converges finally with Derrida's and diverges from
Marx's. It is undoubtedly some seeming agreements between Marx and
Foucault (for instance, in the view that desire is not so much repressed as
produced) that results in the use of such misledingp hrasesa s "Foucauldian
Marxism" (Kernan 207), an expression that blurs the differences between the
forms of materialism in Marx and Foucault and creates the impression that
Foucauldian materialism is a better (because more upto- date) Marxism. While
indeed rejecting Derrida's pantextualism, Foucault's work nevertheless
coincides in crucial ways with ludic theory. The desire or sexuality Foucault
writes about in The History of Sexuality is discursive: sex is "produced" in
those interminable discourses early in church confessionals and later on the
psychiatrist's couch. Of course, Foucault extends the notion of materiality
(beyond textualism) by tying the generation of discourses to specific
historically developed institutions such as the church, the prison, and
the asylum. But at the same time, he theorizes these institutions as
purely local sites that emerge islandlike on the surface of a culture
and, like Lyotard's language games, have no common measure ("Nietzsche"
148-52). While Foucault's localization of the material has provided
theoretical support for localist political actions, by groups like Act Up
and Queer Nation, it has also blocked the possibility of theorizing, as Marx
does, systematic global exploitation in relation to the mode of production.

Queerness is representative of the death drive, the pulsive force


blindly hurtling the Symbolic through an unthinkable jouissance that

36

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

would guarantee its collapse. Our methodology is one that forgoes


traditional notions of futurity and instead embraces the negativity
ascribed to queerness as a means of interrogating the very
structures that enforce this negativity.
Freccero 2006(Carla Freccero, Proffessor of Feminist Studies UCSC, Fuck the Future,
2006, A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, pp 332-334,
jstor.)

Edelman wants to argue that in our social order and the question of
whose social order and which figural child inevitably poses itself
homosexuality comes to stand in for the antisocial force of the
(death) drive that threatens the fantasy of futurity and
meaningfulness, figuring, as he puts it, the availability of an
unthinkable jouissance that would put an end to fantasy and, with
it, to futurity by reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasys
promise of continuity to the meaningless circulations and repetitions
of the drive (39). Thus sinthomosexuality is the cultural fantasy that puts
the homosexual in the place of the sinthome. I did wonder, reading this, how
something as singular and specific to a given subject as the sinthome could
take the form of a collective cultural fantasy. It would thus be interesting to put
Edelmans argument in dialogue with Teresa de Lauretiss work on cultural
representations of the death drive or, in another vein, with David Marriotts
work allocating sinthomatic status to blackness (not his terms) in the cultural
fantasies of racialist social orders. But Edelmans readings, which include film
(Hitchcock), political speeches, advertisements, news stories, literary texts
(Dickens and Eliot), and even musicals (Annie, Les Miz), produce concrete and
imaginative examples of the cultural fantasy of futurity located in the figure of
the child and the threat to that fantasy figured by a homosexuality that is
imagined to represent death. The observation that in a homophobic culture,
homosexuality or queerness, as Edelman says it should more appropriately
be named (39) is made to stand in for the antisocial, for death, for a
refusal of productive futurism, is not new. But what distinguishes
Edelmans analysis from other similar diagnostics is his recommendations
for the ways queers and queer politics ought to respond, that is, not
only by claiming for ourselves competing reproductive futurisms,
holding the very same child up in our two-mommy, two-daddy arms as
we proudly declaim its rightful inheritance of future benefits, but also
by taking on and taking up the accusation that we represent the end
of the future as we (they?) know it, by refusing liberal politics and saying
explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which
they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of
queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name were
collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; 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)

37

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

38

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

***LINKS***

39

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Generic
Their idolization of a future necessarily dependent on heterogenital
reproduction reproduces fascism through the sacralization of the
Child.
Giffney 2008 (Noreen Giffney, Proffessor at University College Dublin Ireland, Queer
Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the
Non/Human, 2008, pp 60)

The Child is, in Edelman's view, the ultimate symbol of what it means to
be Human so his extricating of himself from 'our current captivity to
futurism's logic' (153) through his insistence that 'the future stop here'
(31) also entails a rejection of the Child. The face, the identifier of the
physicality of the Human (MacNeill 1998), comes in for criticism from
Edelman who argues that it is through 'the fascism of the baby's face'
that politics always the manifestation of reproductive futurism in
his estimation - submits us to heteronormativity's 'sovereign authority'
(2004, 151). The maltreatment of children, especially by clerical members of
homophobic organisations such as the Catholic Church, illustrates the fact that
the figure of the Child is more often than not employed as a cynical
strategy a shifting homophobic signifier to give the orator a 'moral'
advantage in condemnations of homosexuality. Like Wittig's formulation of the
straight mind, reproductive futurism cannot 'conceive of a culture, a society
where heterosexuality would not order not only all human relationships but
also its very production of concepts and all the processes which escape
consciousness ... "you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be"' (Wittig 1992, 28).
Edelman's response is to refuse to play the game of the dominant
culture by championing 'the impossible project of a queer
oppositionality' that 'would oppose itself to the logic of opposition'
itself (2004, 4).

The rhetoric of survival or fighting against the future implicitly


valorizes the Child and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of
heteronormative discourse constructs a temporal operation to which
queerness is inherently antagonistic.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis,
November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf)
Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Edelman opens his book with what he modestly terms a simple provocation
(Future, 3), and what encapsulates the futility of an affirmative and
assimilationist queer politics. He argues that queerness names [...] the

40

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute
value of reproductive futurism (Future, 3), and reveals the implicitly
homophobic discourse of all the Obamas and OSullivans who are
fighting for the future of our children and our grandchildren. The
futurist bias towards heteronormativity has been fueled, as Judith
Butler points out, by fears about reproductive relations (Kinship,
21), by uncanny anxieties over the prospect that queer citizenship may
interfere with a nation imagined for fetuses and children (Berlant,
Queen, 1), and by the fundamental antithesis that the queer and the child
embody. The principal concern of futurist America, then, is the fate of
its offspring, expressed in a fearful inquiry: What happens to the child,
the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged
social progressivism? (Butler, Kinship, 21). Edelman recognizes that the
mythical child as the epitome of a heteronormative future-oriented
social can only be saved by a marriage of identity to futurity in
order to realize the social subject (Future, 14), which leads him to the
ensuing claim that only the linear temporal process of ever aftering (After,
476, emphasis in the original) can keep society alive (After, 476).
Heteronormative America, accordingly, is constituted through its own
posterity, through a temporal operation to which queerness is
inherently antagonistic. In an imagined community that relies on
futurism as its life-giving engine, then, the queer comes to figure
the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the
social, to every social structure or form (Edelman, Future, 4).

41

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

42

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Space Exploration


The Affirmative represents an obsession with space exploration
which employs myths of Manifest Destiny and the Final Frontier to
fashion America in the mold of reproductive futurism.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis,
November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf)
Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Perpetuating the futurist regime, Star Trek explicitly draws on the


vocabulary of American myths. Myth, Lincoln Geraghty claims in a
reading of the legendary qualities of American science fiction, serves as a
mode of national identity-making (192). In his argument, he
acknowledges the hegemonic capital of myth and concludes that
[c]ountries thrive on myths to create, substantiate, and preserve
their national identity (192). In the case of Star Trek, most scholars
agree that the American myths evoked most frequently and most
notably are the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the idea of the
frontier.22 Both cultural concepts, which I already discussed in greater
detail in the first chapter of this thesis, fashion America as a nation of
futurity, and they install an ideological framework that makes
reproductive expansion its central objective. Indeed, each episode of the
original series begins with the assertion that space is the final frontier (qtd.
In Alexander, 253), and that the imperative of the starship Enterprise and its
crew is to seek out new life and new civilizations (qtd. In Alexander, 253).
The famous aspiration to boldly go where no man has gone before (qtd. In
Alexander, 253), then, locates the series at the heart of the mythical futurist
regime and endows, as Geraghty points out, Star Trek with numerous
inherent culturally sanctioned meanings and ideological interpretations linked
to westward expansion (192).

The Enterprise itself, Daniel Bernardi maintains, is drawn from and extends
the history of the American wagon train (77). In the futurist recapitulation of
the expansionist settler spirit, the Enterprise becomes the paramount vessel of
the reproductive venture into the unknown. Reifying the bold claims of
Manifest Destiny, both the wagon train and the Enterprise enable, as
Bernardi argues, their occupants to dominate and domesticate the frontier
(77). Both serve as vehicles that expand a particularly American
vision of communal relations, on the one hand, and of specific temporal
formations, on the other, as both secure, in the form of the future, as
Edelman would put it, the order of the same (Future, 151).

43

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
Star Treks original outlook is also heavily indebted to John F. Kennedys
idea of the New Frontier, a rhetorical amalgamation that includes
activist foreign policy aimed at challenging Communism in the Third World,
and [...] a massive effort to advance national prestige through the
manned space program (Worland, 20). A virtual reincarnation of Jack
Kennedy, Jim Kirk capitalizes on the 1960s obsession with the
technological exploration of outer space which at the same represented
a violent compulsion to contain the influence of the Soviet Union and
positions his crew at the center of the American futurist project. Just
like John F. Kennedy, Star Trek displayed great expertise in, as Rick Worland
argues, re-conceptualiz[ing] traditional frontier symbolism in ways meaningful
to modern people (22). In Star Trek, the New Frontier and the Final
Frontier coincide: the common project they engage in is reproductive
futurism.

44

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Temporality
Notions of temporality, and the finitude of existence, like birth,
marriage, the necessity to reproduce and death all clash with
queered understandings of the passage of time. Normative
temporalities that privilege futurism implicitly deny the possibility
for queer existence.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of
Vienna 2008 Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America,
thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-1126_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

I will return to the negativist and antagonistic claims that No Future makes,
but, having described the contemporary an eponymous notion of this thesis
as queer temporality, I find it indispensable to survey recent intellectual
debates on this issue. Over the last five years, queer temporality has gained
enormous academic currency. Despite heated arguments over its exact
typology, queer temporality seems to be set apart by its repudiation
of straight linear, sequential, and reproductive time frames and its
resistance to teleological cultural narratives. Elizabeth Freeman, for
instance, suggests that the sensation of asynchrony (Introduction, 159)
may be reminiscent of queer time, while Carla Freccero creates an alternative
temporal model (489), which she outlines as [q]ueer spectrality ghostly
returns suffused with affective materiality (489). For Nguyen Tan Hoang, a
sense of belatedness (Dinshaw et al., 183) is a crucial attribute of queer
temporality, while Kate Thomas finds her sociotemporal solution in the
prepositional quality of queer (619, emphasis in the original), which is, as
she reminds us, relational rather than teleological (619). Tom Boellstorff, in
his analysis of the United States, where millenarianism has a particular
historical and contemporary reference (228), postulates that queer
temporality is coincidental, a time in which time falls rather than
passes, a queer meantime that embraces contamination and
imbrication (228). Judith Halberstam, in a more political argument that
will be prominent later in this thesis, claims that queer subcultures
produce alternative temporalities [...] that lie outside of those
paradigmatic markers of life experience namely birth, marriage,
reproduction, and death (2) and finds queer temporality in opposition
to these temporal paradigms, in what she calls a stretched-out
adolescence (153). Elizabeth Freeman, in yet another article, strikes a
similar chord. She also analyzes the normative powers of everyday
temporal organization and argues that [n]eoliberalism describes the
needs of everyone else, everyone it exploits, as simply, generically,
deferred (Binds, 58). Queer temporality, all these theoreticians
assert, resists a dramatic conception of time. Instead, it is
contemporary: coincidental, asynchronous, belated, or deferred,

45

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
hopelessly lagging behind an aggressive futurism that denies any
possibility for queer existence.

46

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

47

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Identity Categories


Notions of static identity do not accurately describe queerness.
Labels like gay or lesbian are only useful insofar as they are
determined to be ludic signs with no discernable textual coherence.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the
Cyberqueer, May 1995 PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)

The queer subject is deprived of the possibility not only of speaking for
(others or even itself) but also of speaking in the name of: it cannot speak in
the name of any principle, such as social justice (an up-to-date position
articulated in Stanley Fish's declaration "I don't have any principles" [298]). As
a social construct that can only act self reflexively, by deconstructing
itself, the (post)- modern subject can only perform, not practice. In the terms
made familiar by Judith Butler, whose work deconstructs the notion of
(gender) identity, the subject's actions are "not expressive but
performative" (Gender Trouble 141). In other words, they do not express
the subject's inner essence (soul, spirit, psyche, etc.), as the modernist
tradition proposes, or even some constructed and existing identity, as the
(post)modernist position might imply. Just as Baudrillard understands the
simulacrum to be a copy that has no original and that renders all
representations copy effects (see Simulations), Butler understands gender as a
gender effect, a simulation or mimicry of nothing that is prior to it, a
nonreferential repetition." There is," Butler argues, "no gender identity
behind expressions of gender; that identity is performatively
constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results"
(Gender Trouble 25). The subject becomes what Deleuze and Guattari call an
"asignifying particle" (A Thousand Plateaus 4). Such a position leads Butler
to declare that although she will use "the sign of lesbian," she will do
so only on condition that it is "permanently unclear what precisely
that sign signifies"( "Imitation"1 4). To be gay is to have a mere identity; to
be queer is to enter and celebrate the ludic space of textual
indeterminacy. As Gregory Bredbeck declares in the queer mode,
"Homosexuality is textuality in its most potent and postmodern form" (255).

48

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

49

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation


Notions of queer alliance are nothing more than attempts to
incorporate the queer into an existing social order that will only
domesticate difference.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 4-5)

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity


to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and
even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect
social such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate
of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the
queer but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation,
which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as
unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation?
Always the question: If not this, what? Always the demand to translate the
insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some determinate stance or
position whose determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to
immure it in some stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we
might do well to attempt what is surely impossible to withdraw our
allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi
scheme of reproductive futurism I do not intend to propose some good
that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing and
certainly not what we call good, can ever have any assurance at all in the
order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism thats always
purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects
consigned to figure the Symbolics undoing, to the necessary
contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we
might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for none of the above, for
the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic,
which would echo that laws foundational act, its self-constituting negation.
The structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us,
is installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through as it
does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I
would argue a negation of this primal, constitutive, negative act. And the
various positivities produced in its wake by the logic of political hope
depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might
somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus
stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolics
negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the
persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that
turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer,
can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and
negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such
access to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access its

50

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy
of access onto the queer.

51

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Link Filling the lack


Queerness is Lack the queer represents certain particularities of
the Real that the limited vocabulary of the Symbolic order is
capable of describing, providing necessary reassurance to the fixed
normative identities existing within the Symbolic. Attempts to paper
over this inherent gap of signification are generated by and
generative of structural violence against queerness.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 25-27)

Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the Child,
enacting a logic of repetition that fixes identity through identification
with the future of the social order. Bound up with the second is the
figure of the queer, embodying that orders traumatic encounter with
its own inescapable failure, its encounter with the illusion of the
future as suture to bind the constitutive wound of the subjects
subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically, both from
and into itself. In the preface to Homgraphesis I wrote that the signifier
gay, understood as a figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of the
sexual designates the gap or incoherence that every discourse of
sexuality or sexual identity would master. Extending that claim, I now
suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the
subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic
confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the
place of a jouissance from which it can never escape. As a figure for
what It can neither fully articulate nor acknowledge, the queer may provide
the Symbolic with a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name
to what, as Real, remains unnamable. But repudiations of that figural identity,
reflecting a liberal faith in the abstract universality of the subject, though
better enabling the extension of rights to those who are still denied them,
must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless coherence of the Symbolic
whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive force of queer
irony. If the queers abjectified difference, that is, secures normativitys
identity, the queers disavowal of that difference affirms normativitys singular
truth. For every refusal of the figural status to which queers are
distinctively called reproduces the triumph of narrative as the
allegorization of irony as the logic of a temporality that always serves
to straighten it out, and thus proclaims the universality of
reproductive futurism. Such refusal perform, despite themselves,
subservience to the law that effectively imposes politics as the only
game in town, exacting as the price of admission the subjects
(hetero)normalization, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual
practice or sexual orientation, through compulsory abjuration of
the future-negating queer.

52

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

53

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

54

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Aff: Permutation
The permutation is a means of recognizing the transformative
potential of the future as an untouched ground for social change,
queerness needs to draw strength from its own aggressive
confrontation with heterosexuality, rather than accept the
negativity projected onto it by heterosexuality.
Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University
of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online:
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf
1.shtml)

Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's politics is


insufficiently radical. After all, Butler has been criticized, like Edelman, for
trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern argot and for failing to offer a
viable model of political agency. To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and
Foucaultian commitments constrain her ability to posit a stable political agent
and to conceive a politics that would radically oppose, rather than merely
reinforce or marginally reinflect, a dominant cultural order. But in her recent
work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has turned
to the "question of social transformation" (the title of UG's tenth
chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social transformation "is
a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and
literary theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity
that we have always been living" (219). Lest she be accused of
nominalism, Butler stresses the importance of real bodies in forging such a
vocabulary: "the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad
ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to
which we thought we were confined as open to transformation" (217).
While Edelman rejects the future as a site of social reproduction,
Butler prizes it as a space of uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon
which competing and perhaps unforeseeable claims will be made and
new social orders elaborated.

Butler's model offers queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's,


not simply because it confers agency upon social actors and highlights the
social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes the liberal
inclusiveness for which Edelman faults it. Butler's queer world is not
one in which the dominant order remains stable as it incorporates, or ingests,
peripheral sexualities into its fold. Rather, it is one in which the periphery
remakes the center, rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or
"American" or "queer." Thus, queers do not simply enter society on
heterosexuality's terms; they recast such terms, seizing upon
instabilities in signification to elaborate previously unarticulated and

55

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
perhaps unanticipatable ways of life. Edelman's point that 'queer' names
"the resistance of the social to itself" (2002) combats the very anti-futurism he
endorses; in this formulation, queerness functions as the force that prevents a
particular social order from coinciding with itself, from congealing into a
futureless nightmare. Queer, then, might denote the instability of all norms
and social orders, their intrinsic capacity for change

We should embrace the Child not as a symbol of our collective


future but rather as a queerable symbol that can be used to further
problematize the system. The permutation solves best.
Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University
of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online:
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf
1.shtml)

Queer theorists more politically programmatic than Edelman frequently


neglect this point. Michael Warner, for example, accuses gays and lesbians
who aspire to marriage of caving, in assimilationist fashion, to heterosexual
norms perceived as demands. But queers never exist completely outside
such normsand thus cannot, logically, succumb to themand
marriage and childrearing might not look the same with gays on
board. After all, gays who have been traumatized by their parents'
homophobia and lessons of compulsory heterosexuality are probably less likely
than their heterosexual counterparts to repeat such mistakes. Insofar as
married gays retain connections to less traditional elements of queer culture,
we cannot assume that they will abandon their fights for sexual
freedom, conform entirely to all matrimonial traditions, or turn their
backs upon their promiscuous peers. Some might, but many will not.

Edelman's book works well as an intensely academic polemic but as a


political resource it proves insufficient. If queer theory is to have a
social impact, it must interpellate the gay and lesbian audience to
whom, after all, it is primarily addressed. Few of these people, we can
safely assume, want to live in a void or die Antigone's death. Queer
culture should keep insisting that we not sacrifice present, pressing
needs to heterosexual fantasies, but to secure its future it must
imagine a political order in which the needs of children are not
inimical to the interests of queers, and it must celebrateas Eve
Sedgwick does so passionately in "How to Grow Your Kids Up Gay" that
which is most queer, and queer-able, in children.

56

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

What is needed is not a disavowal of the future but rather a


conflation of the future and the present, the permutation solves
best.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of
Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis,
November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf)
Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

In an article published in the aforementioned volume, The Futures of American


Studies, Jose Munoz argues for the enactment of what I call, following C. L.
R. James, a future in the present (Future, 93). Acknowledging the
teleological futurism of heteronormative America, Munoz asks, [c]an
the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction?
(Future, 93). He then purports to analyze performances that contain an
anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually
existing queer reality, [and] a kernel of political possibility (Future,
93). For Munoz, the contemporary of performance points towards an
other future, a time that neither reproduces heterosexuality nor
justifies itself solely on the grounds of a mythical child. The
contemporary, as a temporality in which utopian contemporaries can thrive,
rather, represents a coterminous time where we witness new
formations within the present and the future (Munoz, Future, 100),
and where we jubilantly welcome the discursive multiplication of the
social. Through the conflation of the future and the present, then, I
believe that we can approximate the utopian anticipatory
illumination that, as Munoz claims, will provide us with access to a
world that should be, that could be, that will be (Future, 108).

Edelmans argument characterizes lack as the point at which


signification fails to describe the particular jouissance of the queer
and thus replicates the violence of the Symbolic. This interpretation
fails to account for the fact that lack can be the opening of political
conflict and change, not an endless replication of the Symbolic
order.
Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 191-192)
I stand by my claim that Edelman builds a psychoanalytic theory of the
political realm, in the sense that he gives a psychoanalytic account of
what the political realm is. Politics in his account fuses the Symbolic
order to the social order and, in response to the Symbolics inherent
failure to symbolize the Real of the drives that unhinge every human

57

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
beings integration into the social-symbolic order, generates a
subtending futurist-nostalgic fantasy of sexuality as reproduction.
Because the fantasy too is everywhere exceeded by reality, this mechanism in
turn produces the homophobic figuration Edelman has described in The
Future is Kid Stuff: the order of social reality demands some figural
repository for what the logic of its articulation is destined to foreclose, for the
fracture that persistently haunts it as the death within itself (Future is Kid
Stuff 28). I cited Claude Lefort at some length because he visits the same
precincts of the psychoanalytic theory of discourse in order to
formulate the discursive dynamic of democracy. But rather than
conceptualizing the entire social-political order as a psychic
apparatus as Edelman does, Lefort draws on Lacans notion of the
inherent gap between symbolization and the real to formulate the
modern states representation of the real of the social. Since the
democratic state limits its own powers and thus delimits civil society as the
nonpolitical space it impossibly must represent, the gap between symbolic
and real is the opening of political conflict and change, not an endless
replication or reaffirmation of the social order. Every ideological or
political articulationwhether the particular discourses of power (law,
economics, aesthetics, etc.) or the institution of the state itselfholds a
potentiality for change because of, not in spite of the fact that its
representation of the real fails. Therein lies the crux of the difference
between Edelmans position and my own.

58

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

***AFF ANSWERS***

59

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)


Embracing queerness as the death drive is not an effective means of
challenging futurity; in fact the drive depends on the deferral of
futurity, locking their resistance into a repetitive cycle of symbolic
opposition.
Snediker 2006 (Michael Snediker, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Literature
at Mount Holyoke College, 2006, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3)

The thrill of the death drive, thus instantiated, is less in knowing


one's relation to a funnel of semen than in not knowing. The death
drive, for all its externally imposed Tarantino-esque luridness, depends
on the contingencies of knowing, themselves dependent on a horizon in which
contingencies might themselves come to fruition (or to recall Edelman's
reading of The Birds, come to roost). The death drive, then, doesn't
oppose futurity so much as depend on the deferral of futurity so as to
extend as long as possible the Jamesian project of waiting. The death
drive, even in its cathexis to deferring, is futurally organized. The
death drive may be impulsive (the manner of drives), but maximization
of its concomitant pleasures requires patience, in requiring and being
ravished by the tick of minutes, hours, days, in between the feverdream of possibility and its coming or not coming (as it were) to pass.

Edelmans argument fails to provide a pragmatic solution for how


the queer should go about embodying difference, this is a massive
solvency deficit for the alternative.
Bateman 2006 (R Benjamin Bateman, doctoral candidate in English at the University
of Virginia, Spring 2006, The Minnesota Review, online:
http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns6566/bateman_r_benjamin_ns6566_stf
1.shtml)

But his book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane


appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis (conspicuously absent from this
book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs
something like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at the core of
language, forcing each signifier to find its meaning in the next ad infinitum,
thus preventing signification from ever completing itself or establishing
meaning once and for all. This internal limit subtends and makes possible all
meaning-making while simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it
marks the place of a recalcitrant, functionless, and socially corrosive
jouissancean excessive enjoyment over which language, society, and the
future stumble. Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this
minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it. They are "the violent

60

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the unnatural access
to jouissance"(132).

One might fault Edelman, as John Brenkman has, for transposing a rule
of language onto the order of being. But even if one takes his
equation seriously, one must ask what is gained by actively occupying
a structurally necessary role. In other words, if the Real must exist for
the Symbolic to function, then the abyss will remain whether
homosexuals agree to inhabit it or not. Edelman acknowledges this
reality but argues that if homosexuals exit the abyss a new subaltern will
be compelled to enter it. Better, then, to remain inside and mirror back
to heterosexuality what troubles it mostmeaninglessness, death
and antisocial desire. Unfortunately, Edelman provides few details as to
how we might accomplish this task, and his insistence elsewhere that
the powers-that-be will clamp down with unmitigated force to repress
and disavow the encroaching Real renders such a strategy less than
appealing. At one point he encourages queers to pursue a more traditional
politics alongside his radical recommendation (29), but he fails to acknowledge
that if the former succeedsand the dominant culture brings queers and/or
their practices into its foldthen the latter's intended audience will no longer
be listening.

Edelman effaces the difference between democracy and


totalitarianism, casting democracy as a fascist, dominant system.
This misconception anchors the call to action he argues as
alternative and eliminates the chance for embracing the innovation
that democracy provides.
Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 189)
In my view, Edelman effaces this difference between democracy and
totalitarianism. He attributes to democracy the workings of
totalitarianism: he makes no distinction between civil society and the
state, equates the social order with politics as such, and equates
both with the symbolic order. This misconception of democratic
politics is what anchors his call for a true oppositional politics
whose meaning-dissolving, identity-dissolving ironies would come from the
space outside the frame within which politics appears (Post-Partum 181).
The democratic state, as opposed to the totalitarian, does not rule
civil society but secures its possibility and flourishing; conversely,
civil society is the nonpolitical realm from which emerge those
initiatives that transform, moderately or radically, the political realm
of laws and rights. For that very reason, the political frame of laws and

61

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
rights, and of debate and decision, is intrinsically inadequate to the
plurality of projects and the social divisions within societythere is
always a gap in its political representation of the real of the socialand for
that very reason the political realm itself is open to change and
innovation. Innovation is a crucial concept for understanding the gay
and lesbian movement, which emerged from within civil society as
citizens who were stigmatized and often criminalized for their sexual
lives created new forms of association, transformed their own lifeworld,
and organized a political offensive on behalf of political and social reforms.
There was an innovation of rights and freedoms, and what I have
called innovations in sociality.

Queer temporalities invite violence, and negativity into society,


poisoning any possibility of a future. Rather than being rigorously
negative we should instead embrace the indeterminacy of queer
temporalities but as a means of creating a better, more utopian
future.
Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of
Vienna 2008
(Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis,
November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf)
Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs

Halfway through this chapter, an intellectual endeavor to theorize utopian


contemporaries, I have introduced the contemporary as a critical
temporality that resists reproductive time lines and that, revealing its
amorphous indeterminacy, actively queers the dramatic futurism which
constitutes the American imagined community. According to the antisocial
thesis, however, the contemporary is not at all utopian: on the contrary,
it is invested with the dystopian powers to undo identities, to destroy
the social, and to tirelessly poison any future with negativity. This
ingenious correlation between the contemporary and queer negativity
leads me to further interrogation, invoking the following questions:
May not the contemporary, despite the queer demand that the future
stop here, also function as a critical temporal domain to originate
new, other futures? Is not the contemporary, precisely because of its
queer indeterminacy, an ideal testing ground for alternative
futurities, or for a reconfiguration of temporality on the whole? And
might not a queer social that prefers the contemporary to the future
child be a truly utopian prospect? In the remainder of this chapter, I want
to investigate these issues and try to answer the above questions in the
affirmative. It is my ambitious aim to illustrate that, following David Roman,
the power of the contemporary [lies] precisely in its nowness (America, 15),
and that its indecisive temporal existence furthers the profuse origination of
other, and better futures. As this study will show, the contemporary is not

62

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
necessarily socially negative: it may also extend the buoyant positivity of
utopia.

63

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Aff: Pedophilia Turn


Edelman prioritizes the aesthetic over the political, in doing so he
blurs the lines between denouncement of the Child and destruction
of the Child. This strengthens heteronormativity by associating
queerness with pedophilia, depleting the ethical value of Edelmans
argument.
Hardie 2006 (Melissa Hardie, Professor of English University of Sydney, Lee
Edelmans No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, September 3 rd 2006,
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/theorycluster/2006/09/lee_edelmans_no_future_queer_t.ht
ml)

Many queer people want to breed and this isn't simply because of their
indoctrination into an existing political order. In fact, I would say that queer
men have a particular proclivity to parenthood, just because they
often (though by no means always) possess certain effeminate traits
which enable those maternal qualities which, in the heterosexual
world are often (though by no means always) stronger, or at least more
primal, than paternal ones. This explains why an inordinate number of
queer men end up in positions such as teaching, nursing etc. However, leaving
aside the personal/political problem, and addressing Edelman's text on a
purely political level (or, alternatively, his central connection between
queer people and anti-reproductivity as a purely figurative image),
problems remain. There is a fine line between renouncing children and
destroying children and Edelman chooses texts which blur this line,
most notably Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Read in the wrong way or even
read in a manner slightly different from that which Edelman has
intended (in a word, read with the same provisional disregard for established
authorial intention that he shows for the texts he critiques) Edelman
figuratively equates queerness with the destruction of children. This
is extremely unfortunate, given the popular equation of queerness
and paedophilia. It seems to me that Edelman's use of his queerness to
articulate a space diametrically opposed to the current political
status quo is mirrored, fictionally, in the novels of Dennis Cooper and
I wouldn't want Cooper's novels invested with the same political momentum
or at least the same queer-oriented political momentum as Edelman's theory.
The comparison is doubly instructive because I feel that, in both cases,
political subversiveness (ironically) doesn't spring from any
convincingly articulated political statement, but from an inordinate
prioritisation of the aesthetic above the political (which I take as a
cipher for the ethical, the philosophical etc). I am aware that Cooper's
dead teenagers are often connected, figuratively, to the marketed,
mannequinised postmodern bodies we are all trying to escape.
However, I feel that trying to find a "moral" per se in Cooper is just as
erroneous as trying to find a "moral" in de Sade and perhaps just as

64

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab
Adam Pease
erroneous as trying to find any practical (or convincing) "moral" in
Edelman.

65

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Aff: Natality Turn


Edelmans failure to delineate between the democratic and
totalitarian state is a fundamental misconception at the crux of his
argument. In describing the democratic state as if it were
totalitarian their argument limits out natality and to an extent,
reproductivity as politically subversive instruments.
Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 191-192)
The political realm is ungrounded. It can never find a place to stand in
the real, and yet it has no other place to stand. Edelman interprets this
ungroundedness as the death that ever haunts the body politic and
that it must perpetually expel in the figure of an anathema it then
threatens with violence; he arrives at this interpretation, I have
suggested, because he describes the democratic state as though it
were a totalitarian state. It follows from that that all political
participation reiterates the reproductive anathematizing- sacrificial
logic of the whole mechanism. My strong objection to this conclusion is the
source of what Edelman calls my reasonableness; he is right, except 190 John
Brenkman that what I find unreasonable in his formulation is its rationality, the
all-embracing logic to which it subjects the uncertainties and possibilities of
politics. The ungroundedness of the political realm preoccupied Hannah
Arendt in her many reflections on the ancient heritage of Greek
democracy. She had a strong sense that democracy is far more fragile
and fleeting than modern liberal thought supposes. At the same time
she linked the fragility of the body politic to its very sources of inauguration
and innovation. Human mortality is a condition of action, but since
action is a capacity for beginnings, inauguration, newness, it also
evinces what she called human natality. We mortals come into the
world newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth. This natality
makes politics a realm of innovation and fragility, of the one because of
the other:

66

KNDI 2011

Edelman Kritik

K Lab

Adam Pease

Aff: Cede the Political


Divorcing the struggle against reproductive futurism from the
political sphere makes a fatal mistake and in doing so nullifies the
advancements of many queer activists. Edelmans argument
assumes that the idol of the Child is the foundational discourse from
which the political is founded upon.
Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 190-191)
I have not tried to offer a more optimistic (or futurist) assessment of the gay
struggle than Edelman, though he has construed my remarks in that way; his
essay very pointedly conveyed a sense of the ongoing ordeal of gays in
American society and a pessimism regarding inaction on the AIDS crisis,
domestic partner rights, and anti-gay violence and the persistence of
repressive restrictions on sexual freedom. I have also not challenged his
criticism of the figure of the child as futurity, because I find it is very
persuasive. So, too, Edelman offers a compelling interpretation of
homophobia in his delineation of how this discourse figures the child
as future in order to make the queer the figure of the death and
jouissance, of the negativity, that haunts all (normalizing) fantasies of
the sexual relation and sexual identity. What I have challenged is the
claim that this discourse defines, or even dominates, the political realm
as such. It is the discourse of conservative Catholicism and Christian
fundamentalism, and even though it resonates in strands of liberal
discourse, it represents an intense reaction, backlash, against
changes that have already taken place in American the gay and
lesbian movement. society, many of them as the direct result of
feminism and the gay and lesbian movement. It is indeed important
not to underestimate the depth and danger of this reaction, but it is a
reactionary, not a foundational, discourse. The uncoupling of sexuality and
reproduction is ubiquitous in American culture today as a result of
multiple developments beyond the expansion of gay rights and the
right to abortion, including birth control, divorce, and changing patterns of
family life, as well as consumerism and mass culture; it may well be that the
sheer scope, and irreversibility, all of these developments also intensifies
the targeting of gays by conservative ideology and Christian
fundamentalist movements. But that is all the more reason to recognize
that the deconstruction of the phobic figuration of the queer is a
struggle to be pursued inside as well as outside politics.

67

KNDI 2011
K Lab

Edelman Kritik
Adam Pease

68

You might also like