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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
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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
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
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
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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
the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-positive persons.
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
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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
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
the hope of Tomorrow understands, is always / A day / Away. Like the lover son Keats Grecian urn, forever near the
well to recognize the irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social
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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
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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'
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***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***
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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.)
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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
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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."
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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)
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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 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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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).
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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)
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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)
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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)
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***ALTERNATIVE***
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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)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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).
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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)
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***LINKS***
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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).
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
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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,
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hopelessly lagging behind an aggressive futurism that denies any
possibility for queer existence.
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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).
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constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that constancy
of access onto the queer.
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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.
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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)
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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necessarily socially negative: it may also extend the buoyant positivity of
utopia.
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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
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erroneous as trying to find any practical (or convincing) "moral" in
Edelman.
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