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

Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His searing polemic takes aim at the figure of the child, whom he contends is the lynchpin of an entire rhetoric and politics of "reproductive futurity." Edelman argues that in the popular imaginary, the child--innocent, angelic, and imperiled--represents the possibility of the future and the queer is constructed as its radical negation, as the embodiment of morbidity, corruption, and stasis. He insists that in such a thoroughly heteronormative culture, the efficacy of queerness lies in its resistance to the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon accommodation and embrace their status as figures beyond the consensus of those always "fighting for the children." Looking to literature and film, No Future offers several models of queer characters who take a perverse pleasure in repudiating the cult of the child. Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Charles Dickens's Ebeneezer Scrooge without Tiny Tim and George Eliot's Silas Marner without little Eppie.Looking to Alfred Hitchcock's films North by Northwest and The Birds, he embraces two of the director's most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard stepping on the hand that holds the heterosexual couple above the abyss and the birds themselves, predators attacking couples and children. Edelman breathes new life into psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not just upon film and literature but also upon current political issues such as gay marriage and gay parenting. A call to arms for a queer theory too often banalized, No Future is sure to incite passionate debate.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix 1. The Future Is Kid Stuff 1 2. Sinthomosexuality 33 3. Compassion’s Compulsion 67 4. No Future 111 Notes 155 Index 183

About the Author :
Lee Edelman is Professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author of Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory and Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire.

Review :
"No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? What if queers were to choose not to resist their cultural encoding as the greatest threat to the future but to embrace it? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny...an intellectually thrilling book." Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them "No Future is a highly imaginative, terrifically suggestive, and altogether powerful book. The question at its political heart is an arresting one, not least because it appears so counterintuitive: Must every political vision be a vision of the future? This is the first study I know that submits the rhetoric of futurity itself to close scrutiny. An intellectually thrilling book."--Diana Fuss, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them "In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of 'reproductive futurism,' homosexuality has been assigned--and should deliberately and defiantly take on--the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality. Edelman's extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument."--Leo Bersani, author of The Culture of Redemption, Homos, and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets "No Future is a nuanced polemic, both ringingly clear in its aesthetic and theoretical explications and simply thrilling to read. I learn so much from the way Lee Edelman grounds a queer ethics and politics outside kinship and reproductive circuits, those spaces of assimilation that use the bribe of futurity to distract us from the ongoing work of social violence and death."--Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship