No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Series Q)
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No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Series Q) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
does politics need futurity?
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This is a smart, funny, and challenging book. (It does require fluency in theory-speak, largely of the Lacan dialect. So Edelman is writing largely for academics of a certain ilk. Fair enough, but I wonder what these ideas would look like if they were written with a larger public in mind--it seems to me Edelman's challenge to the child-driven purity politics of the US will never reach those who operate most within its languages and symbols.)
Edelman makes a compelling case for refusing the "futurity" built into the rhetoric not just of conservative politics but also much of liberal or progressive politics. He acknowledges that in calling for this refusal, he is proposing an "impossible politics," a politics that will sidestep the trap by which one or another group (queers or an equivalent population deemed deviant) has to be sold down the river in order to rally everyone else around future improvement and greater inclusion. This is also an "impossible politics" because it won't suppress the death drive that structures every identity or political vision (this is the Lacanian part of the argument).
But once you stipulate that any and every kind of politics (except Edelman's impossible politics) is built on suppressing the death drive, you have painted yourself into a corner--an impossible politics, indeed. Once Edelman has shifted the site of politics to the deep structure of the human psyche in this way, It's hard to see how one could think or act in any purposeful way that might count as political. There is only the act of refusing, but no hope or even historical possibility for imagining social and power arrangements that operate otherwise. In the meantime, political change will happen, for better or worse, and those who refuse have just taken themselves out of the game, and also limited their ability to even diagnose the change that happens.
What is missing is any speculation from Edelman about what his politics of refusal would amount to, how it might play out in the world to affirm rather than suppress or deny the death drive. Other theorists have taken up the challenge of thinking about how we might act or at least think politically once we give up the idea of a self-directing political actor and a self-governing political society. But Edelman seems content to plant himself at the paradox of an "impossible politics" and expose the delusions and ill will that suddenly come into view from that standpoint. The book is brave and often brilliant, but I find I want to refuse the impossibility of this picture of impossible politics. |
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