El principal planteo del libro es el rechazo a la figura del Niño (Child) como un significante que estructura en torno a sí una futurización que se constituye como reproducción del orden social existente. Sin embargo, para Edelman toda política es en sí misma futurización. En consecuencia, el rechazo es a la política (aunque no a lo político). Pero ¿cómo se expresa esa existencia puramente antagónica que la homosexualidad debe tomar para sí? James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition. So figured, Antigone makes her claim on behalf of all whom the laws of kinship consign to what Butler, after Orlando Patterson, describes as “social death” (73):

In this context, another quotation from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics might be useful: “If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the ss liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (365). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 326.

Table of Contents

Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.

Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928.

Although orgasm and illness are hardly identical, both Smith and Edelman thus see such ‘limit experiences’ as revealing a strange connection between moments in which we are most insistently our own bodies (in pleasure or displeasure) and a capacity for negative, abstract, critical thinking that frees us from social conventions. The alternative way of life that philosophy or queerness names is at once radically private and corporeal. It is located in the specificity of a body reduced to itself and unable to perform its social functions by a dearth or excess of vital energies, and, at the same time, soaringly universal, appealing to an abstract reason that calls every aspect of collective life into question.

If Arendt is right, then being depressed about Covid is both an invitation to the philosophical life as traditionally understood and a threat to our democracy. This suggestion can be enriched from two streams of thought that are rarely put into dialogue: contemporary queer and affect theory, on the one hand, and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, on the other. Both approaches make the case for what we might call after Arendt, philosophy as a way of death . The philosophical ‘death-style’, in each account, is explicitly apolitical or anti-political; it is founded on a rejection of the future-oriented fantasies of the multitude. I will conclude by returning to Arendt’s idea of a democratic future founded on “promise” and her own promise that a democratic theory of judgment can overcome the division between philosophy and politics. Edelman is married to critic and fellow English professor Joseph Litvak. [ citation needed] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ]

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

Aquello que en una sociedad existe como pura negatividad queda, finalmente, fuera de la vida. Por eso Edelman llama a identificarse con la pulsión de muerte. No sorprende que el libro sea de 2004: la crisis del SIDA es lo suficientemente cercana y lo suficuentemente lejana. Y, en un punto, ¿no expresa ella el Acontecimiento edelmaniano por antonomasia: la homosexualidad convertida en masas de cadáveres demostrando la imposibilidad de la Sociedad como todo articulado, sin resto?