Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Happy Futures, Perhaps

Happy Futures, Perhaps Sara Ahmed The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present’s afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. —Émile Durkheim To pin hopes on the future is to imagine happiness as what lies ahead of us. For Durkheim, an attachment to the future would mean to be missing something, unable to experience the past or the present as something other than hasty, as something we have to get through, rush through, in order to be somewhere else. When happiness is before us, we might even be stopped in our tracks. It does not follow that we can simply collapse happiness with the future or into the future. The future, after all, can be imagined in ways that are far from happy: if we feel we have lost the possibility of happiness, if we feel we have lost hope that we might find happiness somewhere along the way, then the future will embody that loss of possibility. So too, happiness can be imagined as past, as being what we once had, as being what we have 159 160 SARA AHMED lost in arriving somewhere, or even what we have given up so others can get somewhere. Nostalgic and promissory forms of happiness belong under the same horizon, insofar as they can imagine happiness as being somewhere other than where we are in the present. And when happiness is present, it can recede, becoming anxious, becoming the thing that we could lose in the unfolding of time. When happiness is present, we can become defensive, such that we retreat with fear from anything or anyone that threatens to take our happiness away. But can we simply give up our attachment to thinking about happier futures or the future of happiness? Queer theorists have been the most vocal in refusing to affirm the future, refusing to embrace the future in a politics of affirmation. Lee Edelman in his provocatively entitled book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive argues that “[r]ather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to 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 order—such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any order would equally occasion the negativity of queer—but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always an affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (4). For Edelman, queer theory must be hopeless, must have “no future,” which means saying “no” to the future.1 To affirm an order might be to define and regulate what is thinkable in advance of thought. And yet, Edelman is still affirming something in the act of refusing affirmation. I find something rather optimistic and hopeful about Edelman’s polemic, where hope rests on the possibility opened up by inhabiting the negative. Michael Snediker has suggested the queer embrace of negativity might be “optimistically motivated” (15). Snediker argues for a “queer optimism ,” which would not be an optimism of an ordinary sort. For Snediker, “queer optimism cannot guarantee what such a happiness would look like, how such happiness would feel. And while it does not promise a road to an Emerald City, Queer Optimism avails a new terrain of critical enquiry, which seems a felicity in its own right” (30). Snediker argues that rather than presuming the normativity of happiness, we could imagine happiness as “theoretically mobilizable, as conceptually difficult.” He asks, “what if happiness weren’t merely, self-reflexively happy, but interesting?” (30). I agree: happiness is interesting. We can still ask whose happiness is interesting and in what way. Perhaps queer pessimism is directed toward some kinds of happiness more than others. We can recognize the significance of [3.139.240.142] Project...