THE UNPREDICTABLE FUTURE OF FANTASY'S TRAVERSAL

Abstract

This essay seeks to go beyond the arguments of Lee Edelman's 2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman's book uses Jacques Lacan's theory of the sinthome to critique the homophobic ideology of reproductive futurism, which seeks to guarantee the future in the name of the child. Edelman uses Lacan to argue that queer theory should forgo any engagement with a politics of the future, and that queers should instead embrace the position of the reviled sinthomosexual, whose embrace of jouissance in the Real undercuts reprofuturity. By contrast, this essay offers an alternative interpretation of Lacan's theory of the sinthome that sustains several productive accounts of a future that could lie beyond the fantasy of reproductive futurism – options that are far more promising for queer theory than Edelman's refusal of all politics and signification.

Keywords:

•  psychoanalysis
• queer theory
• sinthome
• temporality
• Edelman
• Lee
• Lacan
• Jacques

Notes

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer from Angelaki for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1 Fink and Shepherdson both observe that there are two senses of the “Real” in Lacan. The first, “presymbolic” sense of the term can be thought of either as “mythical “ (Shepherdson 47) or as a “hypothesis” (Fink 27) produced from within the terms of the symbolic, whereas the second, “postsymbolic” sense of the Real “is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among the elements of the symbolic order itself” (Shepherdson 27; Fink 27).

2 For examples of contemporary Lacanians' insistence on the foundational role of “sexual difference,” see Copjec (“The Fable of the Stork” and Read my Desire) and Žižek (contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality and The Ticklish Subject). These two theorists have been involved in an extended dispute with Judith Butler over the status of “sexual difference,” which Butler views as symbolic and available for resignification and which Copjec and Žižek instead view as Real and intractable. Yet as I argue in “Queering Žižek,” by targeting both orders “traversing the fantasy” of (hetero)sexual difference would obviate this disagreement.

3 See, for instance, Butler's Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Undoing Gender. While it is easy to find support in Seminar III for her reading of the symbolic order as heteronormative – Lacan's discourse is at its most homophobic in that seminar, invoking phrases such as “sexual normalization” – he moves away from these concepts in his subsequent work (189). As Roudinesco demonstrates, Lacan went on to critique the normalizing practices of ego psychology (Jacques Lacan 250–52; Jacques Lacan & Co. 270–76). Moreover, he eventually revised his early account of signification, as Pluth shows. Žižek's reactions to Butler have only further polarized this debate, as he relies heavily on Lacan's account of “sexual difference” from Seminar XX without discussing the implications of the psychoanalyst's move away from terms such as “the symbolic” in this phase of his work. For Žižek's responses to Butler, see The Ticklish Subject and their dialogue with one another and Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. For her replies to Žižek, see Bodies That Matter and her contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

4 See my essay entitled “The Sinthomosexual's Failed Challenge to (Hetero)sexual Difference” for an extended discussion and critique of this aspect of No Future.

5 Approaching an earlier version of Edelman's argument from the perspective of political theory, Brenkman similarly asserts that “Queerness is not outside sociality; it is an innovation in sociality” (“Queer Post-Politics” 180). Though Brenkman's follow-up piece, “Politics, Mortal and Natal,” is salutary for its insistence on the way in which neither the social nor the political field are as totalizing as Edelman's reading of the Lacanian symbolic assumes, the former nonetheless does not fully answer Edelman's insistence upon the figurality of his call for queers to embrace the death drive. By contrast, Dean's and de Lauretis's subsequent psychoanalytic interventions push the discussion toward a more precise assessment of No Future's inscription of the drive.

6 It is also important to note that in “The Antisocial Homosexual” Dean hints at a moderation of the Lacanian orthodoxies of Beyond Sexuality by insisting that “The symbolic law of reproductive futurism is not as encompassing or determinative as Lacanians like Edelman seem to think” (827). This expansion of Dean's theoretical framework continues in “An Impossible Embrace.”

7 As I argue in “Queering Žižek,” this aspect of Žižek's work offers queer theory an alternative to “sexual difference” and reproductive futurism, though this is a future that he persistently denies.

8 It must be noted, however, that Žižek resists the idea that “sexual difference” could be anything other than a fundamental antagonism. See my article entitled “Queering Žižek” for a reading of and response to this resistance.

9 See especially Pluth 130–32 for a discussion of the theory of traversing the fantasy that Lacan offers in Seminar XI.

10 See Pluth 107–14 for an extended discussion of Lacan's analysis of puns.

11 Given Verhaeghe and Declercq's recognition of the contingency of the Name-of-the-Father, it is unfortunate that they conclude what is otherwise a forward-thinking article by reiterating Lacan's arguments in Seminar XX: Encore about the respective positions taken by “[t]he man” and “Woman” (76). What seems to me remarkable about Seminar XXIII is the way in which the theory of the sinthome, though clearly connected to Lacan's view of the impossibility of sexual relationship, divorces it from the conceptions of masculinity and femininity from Seminar XX that continue to dominate much Lacanian scholarship.

12 See especially Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” and The Exile of James Joyce, and Kristeva, Desire in Language and Revolution in Poetic Language.

13 Though Ruti's and my responses to No Future share the view that Edelman's relentless negativity obscures the cause that Lacan's theory of the sinthome gives for optimism, the difference between our approaches lies in my stronger interest in Lacan's implications for politics and her greater interest in using Lacan's theory of embracing the sinthome to ground what she calls a “posthumanist” account of the self-identical subject (“Why there is Always a Future” 114). This agenda manifests most explicitly when she claims that moments of subjective “dissolution” nonetheless “make us feel [ … ] well [ … ] immediately real. They may in fact be the closest we ever get to feeling fully present to ourselves” (122). Ruti's deliberately hesitant diction – her ellipses, her concession that the moment of subjective dispossession is not complete self-presence but merely “the closest we ever get to” it – simultaneously props up and self-reflexively distances Lacan's insistence that the belief in total self-presence is an imaginary and symbolic illusion. This rhetorical strategy is one way of figuring the “post-humanist” reading of Lacan that her review of Edelman promotes, an interpretation of which I am not fully persuaded. I am nonetheless struck by her repeated emphasis on the immediacy of “feeling” as the guarantor of this post-humanist, post-Real reality. This focus on feeling recalls Snediker's case for the importance of attending to the immanence of affect, yet Ruti importantly reclaims the productive potential of the “negative” experience of self-shattering that his theory rejects.

14 Pluth's criticism of Žižek glosses over the different stages of his thought and overlooks the point at which he theorizes traversal of the fantasy as holding the potential to rearticulate the terms of the symbolic via an act of the Real. For a discussion of these points in Žižek's work, see my essay entitled “Queering Žižek.”

15 De Lauretis's argument in Freud's Drive is less persuasive on the subject of Lacan: she concedes too quickly to Laplanche's view of Lacan as placing, through an “accent” on “the signifier, nothing more than a new accentuation of the death drive” (LaPlanche qtd in de Lauretis, Freud's Drive 83). This runs parallel to the excessively negative reading of Lacan that I critique earlier in Edelman's No Future and in Pluth's reading of Žižek.

16 See “Withholding the Letter: Sex as State Property,” chapter 7 of Salamon's Assuming a Body.