Post-Partum

In "Queer Post-Politics," his generous and appealingly reasonable response to my essay, "The Future is Kid Stuff," John Brenkman repeats symptomatically the logic of futurism against which I wrote. In doing so, I'd like to suggest, he makes my point by missing it—and missing it not by reason of ignorance, hostility, or haste, but rather by virtue, in large part, of his essay's own virtue: its commitment to reason. Consider how he sets out to make his case by setting up mine from the start: "The horizon of my commentary," he declares, "will be to question whether psychoanalytic concepts can provide the building blocks of political theory, whether they can sustain a viable theory or analysis of the body politic" (174). And then, in order to define his difference from my position, he asserts: "The view that they can is central to Edelman" (174). But what could be further from the point of my essay than the hope of providing such "building blocks"? What except for an interest in sustaining, of all things, "viability," whether of theories and analyses or of "the body politic" itself? Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim, instead, to the space that "politics" makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which "politics" appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the "body politic" must survive. My turn to psychoanalysis, far from seeking to afford us building blocks for a viable political future, aims rather to show how the queer comes to figure resistance to such viability and why, instead of rejecting, as does liberal discourse, the negativity of such a figural determination, we might consider the alternative possibility of accepting and even embracing it.

But "figure" is the pivotal term here, though it's quickly glossed over in Brenkman's response. When he questions, in his essay's last section, whether "queer sexualities can be said to enact or embody or afford the experience of the underlying mechanism of the subject and the signifier, jouissance and the death drive, in the psychoanalytic sense" (179), or "whether any sexual practice can be equated with the logic of the signifier" (179), he seriously misreads the passage against which these objections are being posed. That passage, like the essay in which it is embedded, nowhere proclaims the intrinsic identity of any sexuality or sexual practice with, to borrow Brenkman's phrase, "the 'structure' or 'logic' or 'mechanism' of the psyche" (180). It argues, instead, that the queer, within a politics bounded by the ideology of futurism that serves as its limit and horizon, comes to figure, for the regime of heteronormative sociality, the disarticulating force associated at once with the death drive and jouissance: to figure, therefore, as I wrote in my essay, "the figuralization of identity itself" and, in consequence, the cataclysmic "undoing of the symbolic and the subject of the symbolic," the intolerable obtrusion of the Real (27). No doubt, as Brenkman writes, as if in objection to such a claim, "this jouissance and death drive are surely at work in all sexualities" (180); wasn't that, after all, implicit when I wrote that "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" (28)? It's because "this jouissance and the death drive are . . . at work in all sexualities" that the queer must be conjured and singled out precisely in order to figure it—to figure, through singularity, sexuality as such: sexuality as sexuality, as the violent access to jouissance;sexuality not transformed into meaning, except insofar as it means as this refusal to accept transformation into meaning, this refusal of its spiritualization through marriage to reproduction and futurity.

Queerness, as Brenkman quite properly notes, "is not outside sociality"; but neither is it, as he goes on to write, "an innovation in sociality" (180). Not a lifestyle, not a viable identity, queerness offers no way of being...