Queer and Death

“In a political field whose limit and horizon is reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this death drive, this intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexuality’s implication in the senseless pulsion of that drive” (Edelman 2004, 27). The full title of Edelman’s is No Future – Queer Theory and the Death Drive and the thematic of the death drive and death is one of the crucial connotations of “queer”. It might, however, be somewhat puzzling at first that this connotation is not linked to the AIDS crisis. In fact, in the entire book AIDS is mentioned only twice and is never really analysed. In his first book Homographesis (1994), Edelman presented a very interesting analysis of “AIDS” as a category that produces a surplus of meaning and he also

refers there to the emergence of “queer” as a political concept although he did not develop this idea any further. Only a decade later in No Future Edelman formulated the concept of “queer”

as a comprehensive term rooted in psychoanalytical jargon.

Edelman’s conceptualization of “queer” and of “politics” carries traces of his earlier work where he uses literary theory in order to analyse “politics”, “AIDS” and “race” among other issues, as tropes that are part of their own specific field of reference, discourse and fantasy. However, what is striking in No Future is the lack of almost any reference to activism and the practice of politics. Instead, Edelman constructs “queer” as a negative trope that is situated in opposition to “politics”.

In Homographesis Edelman explores the construction of the discourse that grew around AIDS. He discusses the narratives and symbolic forms of this discourse and its politics but when it comes to the term “queer”, Edelman merely acknowledges this term as an interesting concept. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning what Edelman wrote in 1994 about “queer” as it carries a political message. It is a concept that he sees as part of a movement that aims at reinventing politics and agency by attention to the fluidity and shiftiness of sexuality. Edelman notices a potential in the concept of “queer” but also a risk. He writes:

Though “queer” as the endlessly mutating token of non-assimilation (and hence as the utopian badge of a would-be “authentic” position of resistance) may reflect a certain bourgeois aspiration to be always au courant, its vigorous and unmethodical dislocation of “identity” create, at the risk, to be sure, of producing a version of identity politics as postmodern commodity fetishism, a zone of possibilities in which the embodiment of the subject might be experienced otherwise. (Edelman 1994, 114)

Whenever “queer” appeared in Edelman’s first book it was always in the context of AIDS and activism. Clearly in that book Edelman is searching for other ways of thinking about politics but also for other forms of politics. He aims to tackle “the instability of the ground on which it (politics) rests” (Edelman 1994, 112). Interestingly, all this is done in the name of the “efficacy of intervention” (Edelman 1994,112) of politics.

The quote from No Future that opens this section has no intention of making a political intervention. In 2004 “queer” in Edelman’s work has no connection to activism and “politics”

seems to be a much more abstract term. Edelman does not mention anywhere the political intervention that his project should be able to make. It seems that in 2004 he found this alternative politics or an alternative to politics that he was searching for in Homographesis.

This alternative is radical negativity and its main figure is “death”. There is no attempt to offer any social transformation.

What is interesting in Edelman’s thinking is the criticism towards the very basic notion of “politics”. In the quote that opens this subchapter, “queer” functions in opposition to

“politics” and the figure that represents “politics” is the future. Consequently, the figure that stands for “queer” is the negation of the future – death. Edelman approaches “politics” as a limited field of tropes with references set in advance. Following this, the construction of

“queer” is based on being in radical opposition to politics and this negation of the political is the first reference to “queer”.

“Death”, in this context, does not mean biological death, for instance there is no connection to people dying of AIDS in the 1980s and afterwards. Death is a figure of structural negation that resists any positive connotation and can only be seen in relation to politics as its opposition. Therefore all the main terms that Edelman uses such as “queer”, “politics”, “death”

or “child” should be seen in their figurality as tropes that among themselves create a specific field of reference.

The identification “queer” – “death”, on one level, is anti-utopian. There is no “zone of possibilities” that was mentioned in the passage from 1994. As far as every possibility can only arrive within the existing field of politics and therefore it is a part of reproductive futurism,

“queer” does not represent any possibility or promise. Together with the utopian dimension, the risk that Edelman saw in the concept of “queer” in 1994 also disappeared. No Future is a confident statement of queer negativity. Edelman resigns here from any ambiguity and constructs a very one-dimensional concept of “queer”. It looks radical and flashy. “Queer” is identified with “death” as a final limit of reference, as an end of meaning, the end of the fields of politics and semantics, but perhaps precisely here “queer” reflects this “bourgeois aspiration to be always au courant”.

De Lauretis writes about the death drive in a similar manner. She writes that it “conveys the sense of and the force of something in human reality that resists discursive articulation as well as political diplomacy, an otherness that haunts the dream of a common world” (de Lauretis 2008, 9). Both these authors, but in particular Edelman, relate the death drive to the concept of “queer”. Therefore “queer” does not function politically as a sign of a new community or a new name for old sexual minority communities. It is rather anti-communitarian. Politically, it works as a critique of communities as collective formations that are based on positive principles of identity formation.

The literary figures through which Edelman illustrates his connection between “queer”

and “death” come from film and literature, such as Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of Lambs, Leonard from North by Northwest or Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. There is only one

movie analysed in No Future that relates to the AIDS crisis in the US, namely Philadelphia directed by Jonathan Demme. Most of the materials analysed by Edelman are not explicitly political and Edelman’s interpretation does not aim at revealing some hidden political potential in them. Nevertheless, in No Future Edelman is very interested in politics, therefore, the issue arises: what does he mean by politics and what is the relationship between “queer” and

“politics”?