#lee edelman

[mistyheartrbs]

really glad that egg theory was right but we didn't go the pregnancy route. best of both worlds for all that egg theory entails but also not needing to deal with a pregnancy storyline.

queer theorist and famous curmudgeon (remind you of anyone?) lee edelman's most famous work is no future, which tl;dr posits that heterosexual society is built around reproductive futurity, ie babies. specifically a capital-C The Child which they can pin their hopes on and thus avoid death. (it's specifically a white, straight, able-bodied Child, and importantly not a real kid).

queerness, then, represents a "death drive" - it isn't centered around reproduction and thus The Child and thus living forever, so it unbalances and threatens that reproductive futurity equilibrium.

as soon as chekhov's eggs came up in 1x03 i started turning this around in my head mostly because i love queer theory but as the season went on it really started to make sense. because in a way the hive is also treating earth itself as a giant womb - to prepare the next strain of the virus to build another massive antenna, to perpetuate itself beyond the lifespans of these humans (they only have about 10 years to live after all!), ensuring a version of itself lives forever.

carol's resistance to that is, to them, tantamount to suicide (life preserver scene) - the death drive in action, in other words. so they are - without her consent - warping her vision of a future with helen into Their future, into helping Them birth their own version of The Child. birthing her almost, forcibly assimilating her into heterosexual futurity, disregarding her individual contributions to the world (her writing, her genuine concern for others, simply her unique existence) in favor of perpetuating itself. which is just as creepy as an actual pregnancy storyline would be but without shock value cheapening it.

but, notably, edelman isn't the only queer theorist with thoughts on futurity. josé esteban muñoz, a few years later, wrote a refutation of no future that is also a wonderful work in its own right, cruising utopia. muñoz pushes against edelman's cynical view, instead arguing for queer futurity - wherein the future is the domain of queers, because the future is unknown, unpindownable. unpredictable. something the hive is incapable of being! i can't imagine that they're going to put the world back exactly as it was - there's no way to put all that back in a box - but moving to something newer, stranger, beautiful because it is "unknown word or name."

i think it remains to be seen whether pluribus ends up being an edelmanian or muñozian story, or if it goes off that axis completely (wouldn't that be queer!) but boy am i excited

[dreamsrunfaster]

there is something very queer about grace not being willing to give up his existence for reproductive futurity tho. Something about how he isn't willing to die for The Child as concept despite being a teacher.

"Don't pretend this is about your students, it's so insulting". What if it was tho. If you send a man to his death then it isn't a suicide it's a homicide but what grace was implicitly threatening was an allocide. which is to say the death of all futurity, the death of the implicit but illusory future, of all that is not the real and present and beautiful life which is the only one which actually truly currently exists

[1000rh]

It is with this appreciation for the way negativity holds open crip, trauma, and mad time that I find myself unable to part with Edelman, even as I acknowledge the flaws in his thinking. The antisocial thesis allows me to indulge my negativity without demanding justification or immediate political application. Sometimes I just want to be sad! I just want to be mad! I just want to be disappointed. My intention is not to reclaim the antisocial thesis so much as it is to expand it, to turn its negativity back on itself—that is, to add queer theory’s embedded racism and ableism to the list of reasons I’m grieving. In some ways, I am parroting Muñoz’s own methodological reasoning in Cruising Utopia, where he chooses to cite Martin Heidegger, a philosopher with debated Nazi sympathies, over other thinkers who are more frequently cited in queer studies. Muñoz writes, “Although I too have a great disdain for what Heidegger’s writing became, I nonetheless look on it as a failure worth knowing, a potential that faltered but can be nonetheless reworked in the service of a different politics and understanding of the world”. No Future and the antisocial thesis are, for me, failures worth knowing. They offer errors to learn from, certainly, but they also offer a temporal structure in which that learning can occur.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)

[proustiansleep]

LE: In any case, we both see sex as a site for experiencing this intensified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being. And as Lauren and I both want to suggest, that encounter, viewed as traumatic or not, remains bound to the nonfutural insistence in sex of something nonproductive, nonteleological, and divorced from meaning making. In this sense sex without optimism invokes the negativity of sex as a defining and even enabling condition. Gayle Rubin reminds us in “Thinking Sex” that “Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force,” to which we might add: if only sex lived up to such press more often (Rubin 2011, 148)! If only, that is, the Panoptimism that rules us, even (or especially) in our denial of its hold, did not so often lend value to sex through the world-preserving meanings imposed upon it to repudiate its negativity. One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers, in its most intensely felt and therefore least routinized forms, something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value. It takes us instead to a limit, and it is that limit, or the breaking beyond it, toward which sex without optimism points. LB: ...one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, aggression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair ... As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, “When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. —Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex or the Unbearable

[vogueshiki]

Having a child so I can pull from the Gunbuster school of naming conventions and call them Artaud Edelman or some shit

[power-chords]

As soon as the discourse of the campus becomes a libidinally fraught fantasy about children to whom something might happen, we find ourselves on the theoretical terrain mapped by the Lacanian theorist Lee Edelman two decades ago in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). As I have previously argued in this magazine, in the discourse of the campus the student turns out to be a type of the Child—the organizing trope of the heterosexist ideology Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” Reproductive futurism is, among other things, an ideology of security: the sacrosanct Child, “the telos of social order, …the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust,” must be protected at any cost; the naturalness of heterosexuality and the gender binary must never be questioned. Katehi’s narration of the primal fantasy of the campus exhibits reproductive futurism at its most histrionic. In the imagined body of the “very young girl,” collective anxieties about the Child and about social reproduction—always raced; note, again, the specter of miscegenation hanging over the narrative—are given pornographic form.

And then thought stops abruptly: whenever there is a risk that something might happen to the Child, the time for thinking is over. It is time for action, reaction. Time to call the police. That actual UC Davis students, engaged in an act of passive resistance, were hurt as a result of this frenzy to protect the “very young girls” of UC Davis belies the phantasmatic status of the latter.

Viewed through the lens of Edelman’s argument in No Future, the fantasy of the campus appears as an allegory of the nation-state. The future of the nation itself is taken to be at stake in what happens “on campus.” Both nation and campus are supposed to be securely bounded, to keep safe the Child; in both cases, this safety proves impossible to guarantee, and this ineluctable exposure—to violence, to liability, to non-affiliates—spikes the panic. When there is “campus unrest,” panic flares because the campus is supposed to be where unrest does not happen, where the Child is safe from reality. Panic nudges both campus and nation toward ever more extreme, ever more militarized practices, aesthetics finally subordinated to terror. Borders, checkpoints. An especially shrill Columbia Business School professor has taken to demanding, on any media platform he can access, that students who chant “Free Palestine!” should be expelled and banned from the Columbia campus.

The Child must be defended. So, enemies must be banished. So, a camera must be installed. So, a wall must be built. But let it be covered in ivy!

—Samuel P. Catlin, "The Campus Does Not Exist: How campus war is made," Parapraxis Magazine. Emphasis mine.

[unbearableobject]

[hautaaja]

Hamlet will learn that success in the one means failure in the other. In accepting the duty to set time right, he keeps it out of joint, becoming the very prototype of the modern subject as Child. ... Born to shoulder the burden of debt owed by and to the dead, required to assume his father’s cause along with his father’s name, Hamlet, like the modern Child whose reign he effectively anticipates, knows neither success nor succession, certainly none that he, too much the son, could properly claim as his “own.” We might take his words to Polonius as pregnant with meaning regarding his father: “Yourself, sir, should be old as I am—if, like a crab, you could go backward” (2.2.202). His father does, in a sense, go backward by making his son the ghost of his ghost, charged with the task of setting time right by going against time’s tide.

from Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing by Lee Edelman