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Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.x+ 191 pp.
Lee Edelman's latest work continues the project began in Homographesis (1994) of tracing the confounding way that queerness is figured in representation as a structuring absence and arriving, even more pointedly this time, at the conclusion that "queerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural position determined by the imperative of figuration" (24). Edelman's contribution with No Future to this deconstructive thread of queer theory-a terrain shared by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, and Diana Fuss among others-is a frank, unflinching, and sustained assessment of the problematic politics (or not) that such a theory figures or, perhaps more appropriately, the impossible politics that such a queer figure would theorize. In the form of a bracing polemic, he argues, in short, that queer theory stands fundamentally opposed to politics, all politics. Queerness, as it is figured in cultural representation, effectively constitutes the limit of politics, by virtue of the fact that it becomes visible only when posed in opposition to the social fantasy of a reproductive future that provides the foundation to all political visions, regardless of the particular moral values of their divergent programs. Thus, Edelman insists that just as "queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one," so too queer theory can only disrupt politics not produce them (17). In the place of politics, Edelman offers a discourse of ethics, calling upon queer theory to resist all attempts to sanitize or valorize sexuality but insist instead on its complete, and profoundly disruptive, unintelligibility.
In No Future, Edelman gives us a highly nuanced and culturally specific account of how and why the disruptive negativity inherent in sexuality is figured onto the queer, ultimately naming "reproductive futurism"-rather than a vague idea of identity itself-as antithetical to the queer. Though at times it seems that he also naturalizes the association of the death drive with homosexuality, in his most lucid moments he returns to the heart of his argument: that it is in the figure of the queer that we find the trace of the death drive but that this figuration is always projected from elsewhere in a futile attempt to quarantine and suppress...