The Future is Kid’s Stuff — Lee Edelman
Noah Terrell
20 April, 2017
The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and The Death Drive, Lee Edelman
Analysis
In The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and The Death Drive, Lee Edelman carefully picks apart the political futurity through which society is built on; namely through an analysis of the child in contrast to the figure of the queer. He is particularly fascinated by the politics of deference as interlocked within the development of the innocent child. In opposition to the structure of the child as the one who performs the cultural labor of ensuring futurity, Edelman posits the queer as the embodiment of the lack that the child functions to defer. The queer then is an obtrusive figure, one who embodies the instability of social fabrics, one who is unsymbolizable. Counter to liberal readings of this that would veer toward an argument of deferral from the queer body and a homogenizing inclusivity, Edelman argues it is productive to view the conservative anxieties as correct, in that the queer body does have the power to reassert the remainder of the real that destabilizes the social fabric intended to conceal them. He methodologically assesses this possibility through a discussion of the child and the radical possibilities the queer contains in their willingness to live intransitively.
The child takes the place of an eternal continuity of the same, by way of an imaginary past that is assured through the future yet to come. In doing so, the child is situated as the ‘prop’ by which the teleological symbolic fabric of politics can rest upon, in assuring sameness, heterosexuality, and a deferral of the inherent lack in the signifier. In essence, the child ultimately serves to secure the fantasy of a symbolic closure in which identity and futurity ensure the continued reproduction of subjects. It further ensures the compulsory heterosexuality that is threatened by the homosexual subject who disrupts the narrative of futurity which the child legitimizes as being what is at stake in reproductivity of relationships.
Counter to this is the figure of the queer, which Edelman contends to exist as a figure of pure negativity, and that the queer ought to endorse and embody this lack. He argues that the queer as a figure of Lacanian Jouissance has two options: to displace the rupture of the symbolic fabric, or embody the remainder of the real produced by what the signifying chain is barred from articulating. He insists on the latter of the two options in an opposition to the politics of opposition; in order to disrupt the injunction the repetitive politics of the signifier puts on closing the very gap it opens thereby ensuring the continuation of a politic of reproduction formative of the cult of the child that continually postpones encountering the gap it produces. Therefore in saying no to the future, in endorsing living intransitively one recognizes the toxicity the future contains destabilizing the narrative existing social fabrics endorse and opening queer possibilities. Edelman argues this for the adults that the country is intended for, for the potential of a queer moment now.
