Edelman, Lee (May 2017). "Learning Nothing: Bad Education". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 28 (1): 124–173. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3821724. Qué quiere decir que la (sint)homosexualidad debe rechazar estructurarse en torno a las categorías simbólicas del mundo heterosexual? En términos específicos, ¿qué hacer?

In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the “grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,” the queerness of which I speak would deliberately. ever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our “good.” [4] Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call “better,” though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls “truth,” where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good. [5] Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and “tend[ing] toward the real.” [6] Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth: Lee Edelman's oft-cited No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) is a scholarly polemic that attempts to confront the prevalence of "the Child" in American politics. Edelman employs a long tradition of psychoanalytic and literary analysis to assert how the future is merely an aspirational--that is, a conservative--politic that knows in advance what the future holds: heterosexual reproduction. Specifically, Edelman argues that both the Right and the Left seek a "safe" and "agreeable" time/place in which "the Child" (an amorphous figure that embodies the life and death of the human or, using psychoanalytic terms, human attempts to employ the Symbolic to approach the Real) inevitably emerges regardless of which side you take in democracy.In a testy footnote, Edelman attempts to refute, but ultimately confirms, charges against him by more politically-committed (i.e., left-wing) queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, who argue that Edelman’s ideas amount to an “apolitical” quietism. He performs contempt for his critics’ references to “the bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or most tellingly, ‘gay male’) by which some will allege that my argument is determined.” But indeed, Edelman’s critique of politics and personal identity as self-destructive-but-socially-necessary fantasies clearly has as its consequence that we (that is, some happy few) ought, to the extent possible, escape into an alternative kind of life.

Lee Edelman (born 1953) is an American literary critic and academic. He is a professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author of four books. Al fin y al cabo, el problema de Edelman es el mismo de muchos otros: prescribe y describe a la vez. Si la homosexualidad fuera efectivamente pura negatividad, no habría falta insistir en que debe serlo. Su negativa a la normalización es, por un lado, políticamente peligrosa: como señala Zizek en Menos que nada, se articula con la postura homofóbica de que no debe permitirse adoptar a las parejas homosexuales. Y, en términos más generales, no queda claro cómo se expresa materialmente la filosofía política manifestada en No Future. Falta de materialismo, ahí el problema. El principal planteo del libro es el rechazo a la figura del Niño (Child) como un significante que estructura en torno a sí una futurización que se constituye como reproducción del orden social existente. Sin embargo, para Edelman toda política es en sí misma futurización. En consecuencia, el rechazo es a la política (aunque no a lo político). Pero ¿cómo se expresa esa existencia puramente antagónica que la homosexualidad debe tomar para sí?Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928. Edelman successfully avoids using the future tense for the rest of this paragraph, but the omission is painfully present and, by implication, deliberate. The transition to living under the principle of sinthomosexuality, as a theoretical remedy to the figurative Child's oppression, must not only be planned out, transitioned to, or executed, but it also carries with it a series of rules that must be doled out conditionally, as in, having a relationship with what will or won't be done in the future. The tension between the pragmatics of sinthomosexuality as an ethical decision is contradicted by a disavowal of the figurative Future wholesale. As a side note, I emphasized "himself" here because Edelman's used queerness as a surrogate for gay men, ostensibly. The most egregious omission here is a demonstrable case of bi erasure, probably because its execution and its existing queerness don't fit the model of an outright rejection of "reproductive futurism" as part of his manifesto of how queers ought to behave in a sinthomosexual fashion. In a weird way by virtue of omission, bisexuality is erased from Edelman's newfound ethics of the queer. So are lesbians who deserve some lip service as womb-bearers who can more outrightly reject the act of birthing as being the owners of the goddamned equipment. Unfortunately for us, fantasy does not seem to be something that can be generated at will. It requires, as Smith and Berlant insist with different emphases, a certain material basis of physical, psychological and social well-being. In her critique of philosophy as a way of death, however, Arendt argues that the performative power of language can reconnect us in a common imagined future—and, she insists, overcome the traditional separation of philosophy and democracy. This linguistic performance is analyzed in her The Human Condition (1958) as the act of promising, and in her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) as a kind of seduction in which “one can only ‘woo’ and ‘court.’” In other words, to overcome both the absence of futurity and fantasy in our present impasse, and to survive the sterile conflict between philosophy and the political life of democracy, we must think through the particular set of performances by which people promise and seduce each other. We should consider democracy as a kind of love affair, a marriage of present and future. Aquello que en una sociedad existe como pura negatividad queda, finalmente, fuera de la vida. Por eso Edelman llama a identificarse con la pulsión de muerte. No sorprende que el libro sea de 2004: la crisis del SIDA es lo suficientemente cercana y lo suficuentemente lejana. Y, en un punto, ¿no expresa ella el Acontecimiento edelmaniano por antonomasia: la homosexualidad convertida en masas de cadáveres demostrando la imposibilidad de la Sociedad como todo articulado, sin resto? Proust, in a well-known passage from the Recherche, describes a “game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable.” [44] This figure for figure’s ability to conjure a universe out of itself simultaneously bespeaks the disfiguration or undoing of reality so important to de Man:the dissolution of everything we understand as “solid and recognisable” insofar as it proves to be an effect of something (language, for de Man; the sinthome, for Lacan) without intrinsic meaning, like the pieces of paper that originally appeared “without character or form.” If the sinthome thus names the element through which we “take On ... distinctive shape,” and if, like figure, it assures our access to a “recognisable” world by allowing us, as Lacan explains, to “choose something ... instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)” [45] then it is also the case that whatever exposes the sinthome as meaningless knot, denying our blindness to its functioning and destabilizing the ground of our faith in reality, effects a disfiguration with possibly catastrophic consequences—consequences Žižek characterizes as “pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” [46]