KNDI Edelman K

KNDI 2011
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Edelman Kritik
Edelman Kritik............................................................................................................................................................1
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***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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Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize reproductive,
heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to nothing more than meaningless
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acrobatics. This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating

violence against queerness.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,
2004, pp. 11-13)
Charged, after all, with the task of assuring that we being dead yet live, the Child, as if by nature
(more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very
pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the nonreproductive
pleasures of the mind and senses. For the pathetic quality he projectively locates in nongenerative
sexual enjoyment enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive,
pathological exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in
terms of identical to those for which enjoyment without hope of posterity so peremptorily dismissed
legible, that is, as nothing more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins. How
better to characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born
yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of
birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a
sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novels pro-creative ideology: If
there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption. If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no
future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as
inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization,
collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.
Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of mankinds children, succumbs so
completely to the narcissism all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically misrecognized that
animates pronatalism, why should we be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless
future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that sex totally divorced from procreation has to
become almost meaninglessly acrobatic? Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice
will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of
reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual
meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of
meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit
away the naked truth of heterosexual sex impregnating heterosexuality, 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
Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies systemic

violence against queerness and places our species on a trajectory towards omnicide.
Sedwick 1990 (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, Epistemology of the Closet, 1990, pp. 127-130.)
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have
had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both
genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law
of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the
name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there
is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning,
hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing--the array of 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
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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
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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 "decadence,"
to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject. 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
homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist *imaginaire*. In our
culture as in *Billy Bud*, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time *after the
homosexual* is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time *after the human*; in the wake
of the homosexual, the wake incessantly 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 dizzying circulation in our
culture [book published in 1990 -Alec]. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to
ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of
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 pokerface 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 to be noted as a
mere irony, is how evenly our culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for
keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal
testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIVpositive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that
seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the
gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with two-by-fours,
baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid 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, counterintuitive--there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS
generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly *to the degree* that AIDS is a gay
disease, it's a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the
disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced
by direct heterosexual transmission.
Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups [the disabled -Alec],
then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained
as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole
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human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however, be
underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse in entangled with the
modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say, as
a distinct *risk group*, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal.27 As
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gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated
and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more
necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and
universalizing ones by opened and opened and opened?
The sacralization of the Child as an idol of reproductive futurism depends on the sacrifice
of the queer. Privileging large scale impacts over the systemic violence outlined in our
criticism is the kind of bankrupt rationale that legitimizes violence in the first place.
2004, pp. 28-31)
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 rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, Such a caricature has no
future and cannot give future to any society. Queers must respond to the violent force of such
constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social orders prerogatives, not only by
insisting on our equal right to the social orders coherence and integrity, but also 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 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 at the cost of the places
we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that future as there can be no future
for queer, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at all: that the future, as
Annies hymn to the hope of Tomorrow understands, is always / A day / Away. Like the lover son Keats
Grecian urn, forever near the goal of a union theyll never in fact achieve, were held in thrall by a future
continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today are one. That
future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen out the grave that gapes from
within the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those
queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize
the structuring fantasy that so defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irreducibility
of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social organization as such.
Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to say with the
disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John Brenkman's words, as
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"politically self-destructive."33 But politics (as the social elaboration of reality) and the self (as mere
prosthesis maintaining the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure, necessarily
destroys necessarily insofar as this " s e l f " is the agent of reproductive futurism and this "politics"
the means of its promulgation as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's engagement with
Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the
act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life. If the fate of the queer is to figure
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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 prolife. It is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the
words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that m are the advocates of abortion;
that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the
past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an
insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that
pierces the fantasy screen of futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive
force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness
to insist intransitivelyto insist that the future stop here.
Our alternative is queer apocal(o)ptic/ism: this is the relentless problematization of the

Symbolic, and all imagery and idolatry associated with reproductive futurism.
Apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self and branches out to capture the apocalyptic
moments of destruction wherein the underlying structures of heteronormative hegemony
are disrupted.
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 57-58)
What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer's relentless questioning of all categorical
imperatives, including the ontology Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and make
trouble for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus might be superseded or
become defunct as an interpretative tool at some 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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(Freud 2003/1933, 98). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive, driven both towards its own 'death' and by
the knowledge that it will must - end; towards a time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful,
needed, required, or desired (Butler 1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also encapsulates the apocalyptic
moments at which the death drive becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an
imposing illusion produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative hegemony. In this, queer
apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the
constant production of unease at the level of identification - unsettling the very desire for social
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recognition as an identifiable subject in the realisation that 'queer must insist ... on disturbing ... and on
queering ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness can never define an identity;
it can only ever disturb one' (Edelman 2004,17).
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***ESSENTIAL BLOCKS***
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2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause

Heteronormativity is the all-encompassing standard of normalization used to discipline and
punish queer bodies, as such, it is the site of on-going systemic violence against queerness.
Elias et al. 2003 (Karen E. Lovaas PhD, John P. Elia PhD & Gust A. Yep PhD, Professor at San Francisco
University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p.18, 2003)
In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her daily
life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an Other. This process of othering creates
individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less
consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated markers of social formation
such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of
an invisible center (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a center are
attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the process of
constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard
used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant
cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of power in modern
society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically,
and materially violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it,
normalization is the site of violence (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of
normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through heteronormative discourses,
abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created, examined, and disciplined
through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990). Heteronormativity, as the
invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining,
and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others.
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.)
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
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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 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."
Violence against the queer is reproduced based on a fundamental denial of the death drive.
Death Drive and the Human, Published in Queering the Non/Human, 2008, pp 65)
For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents 'an always impossible future' (11), 'a fantasmatic future'
(31) which translates queerness, I think, into heteronormativity's aggressor the Queer - a repository
for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the existence of the death drive within
(Klein 1997/1946,4) and the subject's resultant fear of death (Klein 1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that the
future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive to experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from
the presence of an internal threat (that is, the death drive) is deflected outwards to become the fear of an
external threat (that is, the Queer). This internal object of fear is displaced onto the Queer who then
'becomes the external representative of the death instinct' (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a denial both
of the existence of the death drive and the social's narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish
fulfilment of its desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto the figure of the
Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is considered to be dangerous to the Child and thus
the future. It is my contention that reproductive futurism operates by first denying the presence of the
death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of self-fulfilment at the same time that the anxiety of
heteronormativity's own internal shortcomings and disciplining mechanisms are displaced onto the
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Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69-82). The instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud,
because 'the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion' (69).
10
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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.
Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, 'an ideological limit on political discourse as
such, preserving in die process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable,
by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of
communal relations' (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of
the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig's concept of the straight mind in that 'when thought
of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality' (1992,28). Reproductive futurism is a
more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which
heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate
of effects while reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is
all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but
also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its 'translation into a
narrative', 'its teleological determination' through politics which 'conforms to the temporality of desire',
'the inevitable historicity of desire' (Edelman 2004, 9).
Reproductive futurism is, what I call, 'heterocycloptic', bound up with the desiring gaze and the settingout of a developmental trajectory of 'progress' moving endlessly towards a 'better' future, in the
process imposing a panopticon like self-surveillance: 'It's a machine in which everyone is caught, those
who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised' (Foucault 1980, 156). It is
apocalyptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm
becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power a 'coercive universalization'
(Edelman 2004, 11) operates at the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: 'the Child has come
to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is
held in perpetual trust' (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to
politics, and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance.
Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It
encourages, perhaps contradictorily, the proliferation of desires - a looking-out as opposed to a gazingwithin - in the service of repressing any conscious self-awareness 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 permutation still links to the critique, queer temporality is an ateological alternative
that is by definition hostile to the chronological organization the affirmative hopes to
combine it with.
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/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
In Edelmans critique of culture, queerness occupies a temporality that extends no future. On the
contrary, queer times are firmly stuck in the contemporary, a childless realm that harbors only sterile,
narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible
for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself (Edelman, Future,
13). Detrimental to the futurist regime and its accompanying principle of social structuring,
heteronormativity, the contemporary becomes the quintessential queer temporality, an odd time axis
that opposes chronology and teleology, and that seems to have, says Edelman, no social purpose
whatsoever.
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Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic, the permutation

attempts to tie this difference to its antithesis telos. In other words, the transformative
potential of our kritik is lost when it simply becomes a means to an end.
Runions 2008 (Erin Runions, specialist in Hebrew bible and gender studies, Queering the Beast: The
Antichrists Gay Wedding, 2008, Publishe din Queering the Non/Human, pp 103-104.)
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, 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. 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.
Here Edelman's use of Jacques Lacan to reclaim queerness as the death drive, in No Future, is
instructive. Edelman's project is to use the antisocial impulses of desire to deconstruct the oppressions
made in the name of identity. In his analysis, identity is bound up with teleology, with time and with the
future; it is through hopes for the future that identity is given meaning. Futurity, as he so cuttingly argues, is
tied up with the Child 'as the preeminent emblem of the motivating end' (2004, 13), and therefore with
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heteronormativity. Queer desire disrupts the future-oriented trajectory of identity, and with it, the
social. Queer desire is oppositional, it embodies negativity, it disrupts rather than conjoins. Edelman
wishes to take queer difference seriously, to reclaim the proliferation of queer desires, as a negativity
that can disrupt identity and the social. The point is to disrupt 'normativity's singular truth' (2004, 26).
In his words, 'queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it ... accept [s] its figural status as
resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from
every social structure' (2004, 3). For Edelman, queerness is that difference that has been repressed in
subjects' entry into the heteronormative symbolic order for the sake of unity and coherence, yet
without which difference the subject could not function. Queerness, like raw sex, and bare life, is both
included and excluded from the social order and its exclusion must be mined for its potential to disrupt the
borders of inclusion. Queerness is like the death drive; it is that force emerging from 'the gap or wound of
the Real that inhabits the Symbolic's very core' (2004, 22). It moves backward away from the future.
Queerness, like the death drive, 'refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal'. It denies
teleology and rejects spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism' (2004, 27). It disrupts
the eschatological future that is established by the Child. It is, therefore, what Lee Quinby might call antiapocalyptic.
The figure of political enemy as queer antichrist embodies the queer function of the death drive. Like
queerness, the antichrist is inimical to 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.
The role of the political enemy as queer antichrist ought not to be repudiated. Acceptance and
valorisation of this figure's disruption of national eschatology might assist in what Edelman calls, 'the
impossible project of imagining an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to
reproduce the politics of signification (the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier
itself), which can only return to us, by way of the Child, to the politics of reproduction' (2004, 27). The
antichrist disrupts meaning through the proliferation of uncontainable desires (called perverse), and through
deception. The antichrist demonstrates what post-structuralism has been insisting: meaning may not be what
it seems. The queer antichrist defies certainty.
Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of signification is an act of

domestication that denies queerness its transformative potential.
Huffer, 2010. (Lynne, Prof of Womens Studies at Emory. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of
Queer Theory. Pg.1)
But somehow, over the years, the queer has become a figure who has lost her generative promise. She
turned in on herself and became frozen 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)
Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender.
Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality,
Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the
heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to
be normal, heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle (Leck, 1999, p.
259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer
sexualities as . . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult
educators who share these heterosexual values (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and
sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for
examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Letts & Sears, 1999; Lovaas,
Baroudi, & Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a
heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining . . . the status quo of
our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist,
sexist, and homophobic (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various
forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the
intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g.,
racism, classism, and hetero[sexism]). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode,
the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done
in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It
seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school
culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned
mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation,
states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain
from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a
more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay.
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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.
Many readers have found Edelman's argument to be oppressively nihilistic; however, he does not speak
of self-destruction in the sense of suicide or organic nothingness, but rather as a refusal to submit to
the disciplining of fantasy in the service of reproductive futurism: 'political self-destruction inheres in
the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a
life' (30).10 In response to those who insist that No Future is a stagnant and stagnating force, I offer Jonathan
Dollimore's remark that 'death is not simply the termination of life ... but life's driving force, its
animating, dynamic principle' (1998, 192). Edelman's rejection of 'the future [as] mere repetition and
just as lethal as the past', coupled with his insistence that 'the future stop here' (2004, 31),
demonstrates for me his commitment to the 'queer and now' in his formulation of queerness. This
attendance to the fleetingness of the queer moment without an investment in the future, this acceptance of
the death drive is not a death wish, a desire for annihilation but rather a loosening of futurity's
strangulating grip, an attempt to exercise agency in a world that offers but its spectre. In the words of
Jacques Derrida: 'To learn to live means to learn to die, to take into account, to accept complete
mortality (without salvation, resurrection, or redemption - neither for oneself nor for any other person)'
(2004).
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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.
In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley respond
to what they see as Edelman's setting-up of the Child as 'the anti-queer' with the view that 'queerness inheres
instead in innocence run amok' (2004, xiv). Edelman's treatment of the Child has been denounced by
those who see him as flattening out the category and universalising one such usage of its figural status,
without taking account of the fluctuating contours of that category over time. Edelman's analysis is not a
historical one, but a genealogical meditation on how the Child has come to be signified as natural and
the marker of the future to which everyone must bow, 'the prop of the secular theology on which our
social reality rests' (2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976)
and Judith Butler (1990) in interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become entangled
to such an extent that 'we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than
we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child' (Edelman 2004,11). No Future works
to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in which power works
through technique and normalisation rather than repression or interdiction (1978/76, 89). Edelman
shows that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which 'a notional freedom' stands in
for 'the actuality of freedom' (2004, 11) in the heterocycloptic gaze unblinkingly directed towards the
chimera of the future. Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a
means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through which access to the future can be achieved.
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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.
The sinthomosexual represents, according to Edelman, 'the wholly impossible ethical act' (2004,101) to
which queerness is called forth to occupy, 'the place of meaninglessness ... unregenerate, and
unregenerating, sexuality' (47). A fusion of Jacques Lacan's idea of the sinthome, 'which ... is meant to
take place at the very spot where, say, the trace of the knot goes wrong' (Lacan; quoted in Ettinger 2006, 60)
and the figuration of the Homosexual within heteronormativity, sinthomosexuality represents both the
failure of heteronormativity while also facilitating its continuation - however imperfectly and
incomplete. As Bracha L. Ettinger writes in relation to the sinthdme-. it is 'a kind of trace of a failure in
the knot that holds the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real together' (59). While heteronormativity
claims that queerness is stagnant and useless, I contend it is anything but: queerness is profoundly useful to
heteronormativity because in order to function, heteronormativity needs its Queers to project negativity onto
while relying on its reformed sinthomosexual Other, homonormativity to facilitate its smooth operation.
Edelman's appeal to forgo meaning, to scorn utility and occupy a space of unassimilable jouissancen is,
I maintain, in line with the thinking of Georges Bataille who rejects the notion of transgression because it
often simply reifies the norm against which it acts: 'There exists no prohibition that cannot be
transgressed. Often the transgression is permitted, often it is even prescribed' (1986/1957, 63). Instead,
Bataille locates his analysis at the level of utility and thus productivity, what Shannon Winnubst calls
'this fundamental logic of utility at the heart of sexuality' (2007, 85). Bataille's work concentrates on
the way in which eroticism has been reduced through normalisation to sexualitv in a similar way that
Edelman, I propose, comments on the disciplining of sexuality by turning it into reproductive futurism.
By figuring the death drive, queerness makes visible the uselessness of all sexualities,
lays bare reproductive futurism as fantasy and while embodying the negativity that the
social has conferred on it, refuses to facilitate its continuation. Winnubst writes 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 'anti- Promethean' (108) devoid of the desire for selfactualisation 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.
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 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,
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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 embodyand 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, antiPromethean, 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.
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.
Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington's description of it as 'a critical practice
that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist
discourse' (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves as an uncanny reminder of the
death drive nestling within heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of hermetically sealing
ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q activism has always been posthumanist in
continuously challenging and redefining what the terms 'Human', 'Humanism' and 'Humaneness'
mean, by rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those categories and their discursive effects.
Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis as a strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly antihumanist, one might say posthuman-ous': 'Occurring or continuing after the death of the human'
(Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The desire for the Human therefore signifies an 'archive desire'
(Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire not for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future.
Heteronormativity thus works in the shadow of its own finitude, striving retroactively to
reproduce the present in the future, which is always the past futurally imagined.
'Human beings', The Posthuman Manifesto reminds us, 'only exist as we believe them to exist' (2003, 177).
Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies
through which this category operates within different historical and cultural contexts. It is not about
the desire for 'Human Rights'which would be a humanising of the Queer but rather examines our
desire for the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of such a term conveys.
Judith Butler links 'a liveable life' and 'a grievable death' to the instantiation of what is understood by the
'normatively human' (2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No Future, Lee
Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the Child, that
image which is the personification of compassion's evocation. Queering the Human
demands a withholding of such mechanistic displays of compassion, the empty
compulsions of heteronormativity. Such an act rejects, not the child, but those who
make use of the child for their own ends.
Accession to the negativity projected on the queer has the jarring effect of depriving
heteronormativity of its symbolic opposition, this reveals the incoherence of the system and
problematizes it as a whole.
While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that prompted Gutter Dyke Collective and
Queer Nation by targeting the Child where they attack Men and Straights, No Future advocates neither
collectivism nor acting out. Although Edelman's text also constitutes a polemic, which includes a variety of
statements that have been met both by offence and defensive hostility from readers,13 he professes the
belief that speaking about queerness will not change how the dominant culture views
it. In other words, proliferating discourses of queerness makes no difference as they
will be condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity. An oftquoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered such acerbic commentary in
some quarters: 'Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're 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' (2004, 29). These
remarks have inflamed respondents to ask where the figure of the Child ends and the real child begins. A
significant prefatory comment is often absented from reproductions of the above quotation, that is, Edelman's
observation that no matter what individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by
reproductive futurism will always hear the above proclamations as having been said anyway.
By way of further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that 'It is we who must bury the subject in the
tomb-like hollow of the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we
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speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity's emblem must die' (31).
This of course points to the way in which pro-life movements often link an anti-abortion stance with an
anti-homosexual position. While identity categories - however fluid and contingent - are important
strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation, Edelman argues that those figured
as Queer, harbingers of the death drive, should, instead of wasting their breath in espousing indignant
rebuttals, accede to that position because they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing
pundits, not to mention the fact that the position exercises an enormous power to jam the cogs in the
machinery of heteronormativity should the occupants refuse to play the 'game' of the dominant
culture. Edelman's work is a continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo Bersani
(1995), Michael Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra 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).
Our alternative escapes the oedipal restraints of the 1ac by deregulating desire, queerness
becomes a continual process of opening up a space where sexuality becomes the primary
concern.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May 1995
PMLA, Volume 110, No. 3, pp. 369-381, jstor)
Gay liberation, envisioning a "gender-free communitarian world," did not promote the separation of
which Browning speaks. The explanation for the shift from gay and lesbian studies, based on the category
gender, to queer theory, which fetishizes desire by rendering it autonomous, is not self-evident. It is
commonly assumed that (post)modern queer studies has made a decisive and radical advance over
modernism (and its precursors), which assigned questions of sexuality and desire to secondary social and
intellectual status. Even while giving sexuality and desire central importance in his theory, Freud, as a
modernist thinker still committed to Enlightenment assumptions, stressed that the rational regulation of
sexuality and desire was necessary to civilized life, despite the inevitable "discontents" that accompany
civilization as a result. Against such supposedly outmoded modernist assumptions, ludic (post)modern
theory produces an atmosphere of sexual deregulation. As a-if not the-leading element in this
development, queer theory is seen as opening up a new space for the subject of desire, a space in which
sexuality becomes primary. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of
modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the
degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition"
(Epistemology 1). In this new space, desire is regarded as autonomous- unregulated and unencumbered.
The shift is evident in the contrast between the model of necessary sexual regulation promoted by
Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents and the notion of sexual deregulation proposed by Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari represent the deregulating process-in which desire
becomes a space of "pure intensities" (A Thousand Plateaus 4)-as a breakthrough beyond the Oedipus
complex (that "grotesque triangle" [Anti- Oedipus 171]), which colonizes the subject and restricts desire.
Reading this argument in a debate introduces queered perceptions of reality to local,

material institutions where change can be reliably facilitated on a micropolitical level.
Morton 1995 (Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May 1995
Queer theory departs from traditional humanist literary and aesthetic studies (and from gay and lesbian
studies) by virtue of its absorption of ludic (post)modern theoretical developments along their two main
axes. Aside from the overtly ludic Derridean-Deleuzean axis, in which "liberated" desire subverts the official
relations of signifieds (conceptuality) and signifiers (textuality), there is the historicist Foucauldian strand,
which insists that outside the text are material institutions, enabled by discourses but not textualist in the
Derridean sense.5 These institutions (as against historical materialism's global account of them) are
disconnected and autonomous, and they can be sites of liberation where marginal groups seize power
(which is voluntarily reversible). For these historicists, social inequality is a measure of the inequality of
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power among groups and is not, as conceived by Marx, produced by exploitation during capitalism's
extraction of surplus value. On the political plane, Foucault's work converges finally with Derrida's and
diverges from Marx's. It is undoubtedly some seeming agreements between Marx and Foucault (for instance,
in the view that desire is not so much repressed as produced) that results in the use of such misledingp
hrasesa s "Foucauldian Marxism" (Kernan 207), an expression that blurs the differences between the forms of
materialism in Marx and Foucault and creates the impression that Foucauldian materialism is a better
(because more upto- date) Marxism. While indeed rejecting Derrida's pantextualism, Foucault's work
nevertheless coincides in crucial ways with ludic theory. The desire or sexuality Foucault writes about in The
History of Sexuality is discursive: sex is "produced" in those interminable discourses early in church
confessionals and later on the psychiatrist's couch. Of course, Foucault extends the notion of materiality
(beyond textualism) by tying the generation of discourses to specific historically developed institutions
such as the church, the prison, and the asylum. But at the same time, he theorizes these institutions as
purely local sites that emerge islandlike on the surface of a culture and, like Lyotard's language games,
have no common measure ("Nietzsche" 148-52). While Foucault's localization of the material has
provided theoretical support for localist political actions, by groups like Act Up and Queer Nation, it
has also blocked the possibility of theorizing, as Marx does, systematic global exploitation in relation to the
mode of production.
Queerness is representative of the death drive, the pulsive force blindly hurtling the
Symbolic through an unthinkable jouissance that would guarantee its collapse. Our
methodology is one that forgoes traditional notions of futurity and instead embraces the
negativity ascribed to queerness as a means of interrogating the very structures that
enforce this negativity.
Freccero 2006(Carla Freccero, Proffessor of Feminist Studies UCSC, Fuck the Future, 2006, A Journal of Gay
and Lesbian Studies, Volume 12, Number 2, pp 332-334, jstor.)
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.
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).
The rhetoric of survival or fighting against the future implicitly valorizes the Child
and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of heteronormative discourse constructs a
temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008 (Leopold, Utopian
Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
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 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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Link Space Exploration

The Affirmative represents an obsession with space exploration which employs myths of
Manifest Destiny and the Final Frontier to fashion America in the mold of reproductive
futurism.
Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna 2008 (Leopold, Utopian
Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @]
othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26_0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
Perpetuating the futurist regime, Star Trek explicitly draws on the vocabulary of American myths.
Myth, Lincoln Geraghty claims in a reading of the legendary qualities of American science fiction,
serves as a mode of national identity-making (192). In his argument, he acknowledges the hegemonic
capital of myth and concludes that [c]ountries thrive on myths to create, substantiate, and preserve
their national identity (192). In the case of Star Trek, most scholars agree that the American myths
evoked most frequently and most notably are the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the idea of the
frontier.22 Both cultural concepts, which I already discussed in greater detail in the first chapter of this
thesis, fashion America as a nation of futurity, and they install an ideological framework that makes
reproductive expansion its central objective. Indeed, each episode of the original series begins with the
assertion that space is the final frontier (qtd. In Alexander, 253), and that the imperative of the starship
Enterprise and its crew is to seek out new life and new civilizations (qtd. In Alexander, 253). The famous
aspiration to boldly go where no man has gone before (qtd. In Alexander, 253), then, locates the series at
the heart of the mythical futurist regime and endows, as Geraghty points out, Star Trek with numerous
inherent culturally sanctioned meanings and ideological interpretations linked to westward expansion (192).
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).
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, reconceptualiz[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 @]
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, hopelessly
lagging behind an aggressive futurism that denies any possibility for queer existence.
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Link Identity Categories

Notions of static identity do not accurately describe queerness. Labels like gay or
lesbian are only useful insofar as they are determined to be ludic signs with no
discernable textual coherence.
Morton 1995(Donald Morton, Professor of English Syracuse University, Birth of the Cyberqueer, May 1995
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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Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation

Notions of queer alliance are nothing more than attempts to incorporate the queer into
an existing social order that will only domesticate difference.
2004, pp. 4-5)
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I
argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some
more perfect social such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just
as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer but rather to refuse the insistence of
hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as
unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the question: If not this,
what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some determinate
stance or position whose determination would thus negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some
stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible
to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of
reproductive futurism I do not intend to propose some good that will thereby be assured. To the
contrary, I mean to insist that nothing and certainly not what we call good, can ever have any assurance at
all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism thats always purchased at our expense,
though bound, as Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolics undoing, to the necessary
contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we might rather, figuratively, cast our
vote for none of the above, for the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic,
which would echo that laws foundational act, its self-constituting negation. The structuring optimism of
politics to which the order of meaning commits us, is installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching
meaning through as it does the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signification, is always, I would
argue a negation of this primal, constitutive, negative act. And the various positivities produced in its wake
by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might
somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its fortunes on a truly hopeless
wager: that taking the Symbolics negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the
persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that turning the force of queerness
against all subjects, however queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and
negates us. Or better: can expose the constancy, the inescapability, of such access to jouissance in the social
order itself, even if that order can access its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that
constancy of access onto the queer.
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Link Filling the lack

Queerness is Lack the queer represents certain particularities of the Real that the limited
vocabulary of the Symbolic order is capable of describing, providing necessary reassurance
to the fixed normative identities existing within the Symbolic. Attempts to paper over this
inherent gap of signification are generated by and generative of structural violence against
queerness.
2004, pp. 25-27)
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_stf1.shtml)
Certain readers might chafe at Edelman's suggestion that Butler's politics is insufficiently radical. After all,
Butler has been criticized, like Edelman, for trafficking in recondite theories and postmodern argot and for
failing to offer a viable model of political agency. To be sure, Butler's post-structuralist and Foucaultian
commitments constrain her ability to posit a stable political agent and to conceive a politics that would
radically oppose, rather than merely reinforce or marginally reinflect, a dominant cultural order. But in her
recent work, perhaps most strikingly in 2004's Undoing Gender, Butler has turned to the "question of
social transformation" (the title of UG's tenth chapter), arguing, quite programmatically, that social
transformation "is a question of developing, within law, within psychiatry, within social and literary
theory, a new legitimating lexicon for the gender complexity that we have always been living" (219).
Lest she be accused of nominalism, Butler stresses the importance of real bodies in forging such a
vocabulary: "the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework
the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation" (217).
While Edelman rejects the future as a site of social reproduction, Butler prizes it as a space of
uncertainty, an ambiguous terrain upon which competing and perhaps unforeseeable claims will be
made and new social orders elaborated.
Butler's model offers queer theory a brighter future than Edelman's, not simply because it confers
agency upon social actors and highlights the social's capacity for transformation, but because it supersedes
the liberal inclusiveness for which Edelman faults it. Butler's queer world is not one in which the
dominant order remains stable as it incorporates, or ingests, peripheral sexualities into its fold. Rather, it is
one in which the periphery remakes the center, rearticulating what it means to be "normal" or
"American" or "queer." Thus, queers do not simply enter society on heterosexuality's terms; they
recast such terms, seizing upon instabilities in signification to elaborate previously unarticulated and
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
We should embrace the Child not as a symbol of our collective future but rather as a
queerable symbol that can be used to further problematize the system. The permutation
solves best.
Queer theorists more politically programmatic than Edelman frequently neglect this point. Michael Warner,
for example, accuses gays and lesbians who aspire to marriage of caving, in assimilationist fashion, to
heterosexual norms perceived as demands. But queers never exist completely outside such normsand
thus cannot, logically, succumb to themand marriage and childrearing might not look the same with
gays on board. After all, gays who have been traumatized by their parents' homophobia and lessons of
compulsory heterosexuality are probably less likely than their heterosexual counterparts to repeat such
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mistakes. Insofar as married gays retain connections to less traditional elements of queer culture, we cannot
assume that they will abandon their fights for sexual freedom, conform entirely to all matrimonial
traditions, or turn their backs upon their promiscuous peers. Some might, but many will not.
Edelman's book works well as an intensely academic polemic but as a political resource it proves
insufficient. If queer theory is to have a social impact, it must interpellate the gay and lesbian audience
to whom, after all, it is primarily addressed. Few of these people, we can safely assume, want to live in a
void or die Antigone's death. Queer culture should keep insisting that we not sacrifice present, pressing
needs to heterosexual fantasies, but to secure its future it must imagine a political order in which the
needs of children are not inimical to the interests of queers, and it must celebrateas Eve Sedgwick
does so passionately in "How to Grow Your Kids Up Gay" that which is most queer, and queer-able, in
children.
What is needed is not a disavowal of the future but rather a conflation of the future and the
present, the permutation solves best.
In an article published in the aforementioned volume, The Futures of American Studies, Jose Munoz argues
for the enactment of what I call, following C. L. R. James, a future in the present (Future, 93).
Acknowledging the teleological futurism of heteronormative America, Munoz asks, [c]an the future
stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction? (Future, 93). He then purports to analyze
performances that contain an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually
existing queer reality, [and] a kernel of political possibility (Future, 93). For Munoz, the
contemporary of performance points towards an other future, a time that neither reproduces
heterosexuality nor justifies itself solely on the grounds of a mythical child. The contemporary, as a
temporality in which utopian contemporaries can thrive, rather, represents a coterminous time where we
witness new formations within the present and the future (Munoz, Future, 100), and where we
jubilantly welcome the discursive multiplication of the social. Through the conflation of the future
and the present, then, I believe that we can approximate the utopian anticipatory illumination that, as
Munoz claims, will provide us with access to a world that should be, that could be, that will be
(Future, 108).
Edelmans argument characterizes lack as the point at which signification fails to describe
the particular jouissance of the queer and thus replicates the violence of the Symbolic. This
interpretation fails to account for the fact that lack can be the opening of political conflict
and change, not an endless replication of the Symbolic order.
Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, 2002, Narrative, Vol. 10, No. 2, p.
191-192)
I stand by my claim that Edelman builds a psychoanalytic theory of the political realm, in the sense that
he gives a psychoanalytic account of what the political realm is. Politics in his account fuses the
Symbolic order to the social order and, in response to the Symbolics inherent failure to symbolize the
Real of the drives that unhinge every human 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
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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 articulation
whether 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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***AFF ANSWERS***
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Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)

Embracing queerness as the death drive is not an effective means of challenging futurity; in
fact the drive depends on the deferral of futurity, locking their resistance into a repetitive
cycle of symbolic opposition.
Snediker 2006 (Michael Snediker, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Literature at Mount Holyoke
College, 2006, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3)
The thrill of the death drive, thus instantiated, is less in knowing one's relation to a funnel of semen
than in not knowing. The death drive, for all its externally imposed Tarantino-esque luridness, depends
on the contingencies of knowing, themselves dependent on a horizon in which contingencies might
themselves come to fruition (or to recall Edelman's reading of The Birds, come to roost). The death drive,
then, doesn't oppose futurity so much as depend on the deferral of futurity so as to extend as long as
possible the Jamesian project of waiting. The death drive, even in its cathexis to deferring, is futurally
organized. The death drive may be impulsive (the manner of drives), but maximization of its
concomitant pleasures requires patience, in requiring and being ravished by the tick of minutes, hours,
days, in between the fever-dream of possibility and its coming or not coming (as it were) to pass.
Edelmans argument fails to provide a pragmatic solution for how the queer should go
about embodying difference, this is a massive solvency deficit for the alternative.
But his book falters as it comes increasingly to rely upon arcane appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis
(conspicuously absent from this book is a single reference to Foucault). Edelman's argument runs
something like this: a stubborn kernel of non-meaning resides at the core of language, forcing each signifier
to find its meaning in the next ad infinitum, thus preventing signification from ever completing itself or
establishing meaning once and for all. This internal limit subtends and makes possible all meaning-making
while simultaneously disrupting it. An unbridgeable gap, it marks the place of a recalcitrant, functionless, and
socially corrosive jouissancean excessive enjoyment over which language, society, and the future stumble.
Heterosexual culture, anxious to name and contain this minatory abyss, casts homosexuals as it and into it.
They are "the violent 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.
Edelman effaces the difference between democracy and totalitarianism, casting democracy
as a fascist, dominant system. This misconception anchors the call to action he argues as
alternative and eliminates the chance for embracing the innovation that democracy
provides.
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189)
In my view, Edelman effaces this difference between democracy and totalitarianism. He attributes to
democracy the workings of totalitarianism: he makes no distinction between civil society and the state,
equates the social order with politics as such, and equates both with the symbolic order. This
misconception of democratic politics is what anchors his call for a true oppositional politics whose
meaning-dissolving, identity-dissolving ironies would come from the space outside the frame within which
politics appears (Post-Partum 181). The democratic state, as opposed to the totalitarian, does not
rule civil society but secures its possibility and flourishing; conversely, civil society is the nonpolitical
realm from which emerge those initiatives that transform, moderately or radically, the political realm
of laws and rights. For that very reason, the political frame of laws and rights, and of debate and
decision, is intrinsically inadequate to the plurality of projects and the social divisions within society
there 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.
Queer temporalities invite violence, and negativity into society, poisoning any possibility of
a future. Rather than being rigorously negative we should instead embrace the
indeterminacy of queer temporalities but as a means of creating a better, more utopian
future.
Halfway through this chapter, an intellectual endeavor to theorize utopian contemporaries, I have
introduced the contemporary as a critical temporality that resists reproductive time lines and that,
revealing its amorphous indeterminacy, actively queers the dramatic futurism which constitutes the
American imagined community. According to the antisocial thesis, however, the contemporary is not at all
utopian: on the contrary, it is invested with the dystopian powers to undo identities, to destroy the
social, and to tirelessly poison any future with negativity. This ingenious correlation between the
contemporary and queer negativity leads me to further interrogation, invoking the following
questions: May not the contemporary, despite the queer demand that the future stop here, also
function as a critical temporal domain to originate new, other futures? Is not the contemporary,
precisely because of its queer indeterminacy, an ideal testing ground for alternative futurities, or for a
reconfiguration of temporality on the whole? And might not a queer social that prefers the
contemporary to the future child be a truly utopian prospect? In the remainder of this chapter, I want to
investigate these issues and try to answer the above questions in the affirmative. It is my ambitious aim to
illustrate that, following David Roman, the power of the contemporary [lies] precisely in its nowness
(America, 15), and that its indecisive temporal existence furthers the profuse origination of other, and better
futures. As this study will show, the contemporary is not necessarily socially negative: it may also extend
the buoyant positivity of utopia.
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Aff: Pedophilia Turn

Edelman prioritizes the aesthetic over the political, in doing so he blurs the lines between
denouncement of the Child and destruction of the Child. This strengthens
heteronormativity by associating queerness with pedophilia, depleting the ethical value of
Edelmans argument.
Hardie 2006 (Melissa Hardie, Professor of English University of Sydney, Lee Edelmans No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive, September 3rd 2006,
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/theorycluster/2006/09/lee_edelmans_no_future_queer_t.html)
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 erroneous as
trying to find any practical (or convincing) "moral" in Edelman.
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Aff: Natality Turn

Edelmans failure to delineate between the democratic and totalitarian state is a
fundamental misconception at the crux of his argument. In describing the democratic state
as if it were totalitarian their argument limits out natality and to an extent, reproductivity
as politically subversive instruments.
191-192)
The political realm is ungrounded. It can never find a place to stand in the real, and yet it has no other
place to stand. Edelman interprets this ungroundedness as the death that ever haunts the body politic
and that it must perpetually expel in the figure of an anathema it then threatens with violence; he
arrives at this interpretation, I have suggested, because he describes the democratic state as though it
were a totalitarian state. It follows from that that all political participation reiterates the reproductive
anathematizing- sacrificial logic of the whole mechanism. My strong objection to this conclusion is the
source of what Edelman calls my reasonableness; he is right, except 190 John Brenkman that what I find
unreasonable in his formulation is its rationality, the all-embracing logic to which it subjects the uncertainties
and possibilities of politics. The ungroundedness of the political realm preoccupied Hannah Arendt in
her many reflections on the ancient heritage of Greek democracy. She had a strong sense that
democracy is far more fragile and fleeting than modern liberal thought supposes. At the same time she
linked the fragility of the body politic to its very sources of inauguration and innovation. Human mortality
is a condition of action, but since action is a capacity for beginnings, inauguration, newness, it also
evinces what she called human natality. We mortals come into the world newcomers and beginners
by virtue of birth. This natality makes politics a realm of innovation and fragility, of the one because of
the other:
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Aff: Cede the Political

Divorcing the struggle against reproductive futurism from the political sphere makes a
fatal mistake and in doing so nullifies the advancements of many queer activists. Edelmans
argument assumes that the idol of the Child is the foundational discourse from which the
political is founded upon.
190-191)
I have not tried to offer a more optimistic (or futurist) assessment of the gay struggle than Edelman, though
he has construed my remarks in that way; his essay very pointedly conveyed a sense of the ongoing ordeal of
gays in American society and a pessimism regarding inaction on the AIDS crisis, domestic partner rights, and
anti-gay violence and the persistence of repressive restrictions on sexual freedom. I have also not challenged
his criticism of the figure of the child as futurity, because I find it is very persuasive. So, too, Edelman offers
a compelling interpretation of homophobia in his delineation of how this discourse figures the child as
future in order to make the queer the figure of the death and jouissance, of the negativity, that haunts
all (normalizing) fantasies of the sexual relation and sexual identity. What I have challenged is the
claim that this discourse defines, or even dominates, the political realm as such. It is the discourse of
conservative Catholicism and Christian fundamentalism, and even though it resonates in strands of
liberal discourse, it represents an intense reaction, backlash, against changes that have already taken
place in American the gay and lesbian movement. society, many of them as the direct result of
feminism and the gay and lesbian movement. It is indeed important not to underestimate the depth
and danger of this reaction, but it is a reactionary, not a foundational, discourse. The uncoupling of
sexuality and reproduction is ubiquitous in American culture today as a result of multiple
developments beyond the expansion of gay rights and the right to abortion, including birth control,
divorce, and changing patterns of family life, as well as consumerism and mass culture; it may well be that
the sheer scope, and irreversibility, all of these developments also intensifies the targeting of gays by
conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalist movements. But that is all the more reason to
recognize that the deconstruction of the phobic figuration of the queer is a struggle to be pursued
inside as well as outside politics.
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1NC Shell 1/5

acrobatics. This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating

Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies systemic

1NC Shell 2/5

1NC Shell 3/5

1NC Shell 4/5

Our alternative is queer apocal(o)ptic/ism: this is the relentless problematization of the

1NC Shell 5/5

2NC Impact Framing / Root Cause

Queerness is the fundamental difference repressed by the Symbolic, the permutation

Incorporation of queerness into prescribed economies of signification is an act of

Reading this argument in a debate introduces queered perceptions of reality to local,

Link Space Exploration

Link Identity Categories

Link Queer Alliance / Incorporation

Link Filling the lack

Aff: Alt Solvency (or lack thereof)

Brenkman 2002 (John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative

Aff: Pedophilia Turn

Aff: Natality Turn

Aff: Cede the Political

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