So, for example, when P. D. James, in her novel The Children of Men, imagines a future in which the human race has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce, her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century democracies—“Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children,” he declares—but also gives voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity: “Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live,” he later observes, “all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” [12] While this allusion to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” may recall another of its well-known lines, one for which we apparently have Eliot’s Wife, Vivian, to thank—“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”—it also brings out the function of the child as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged, after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when he comes upon it in nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and senses.” For the “pathetic” quality he projectively locates in non-generative sexual enjoyment—enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological—exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical to those for which enjoyment without “hope of posterity” is peremptorily dismissed: legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-procreative ideology: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” [13] If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. In this context, another quotation from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics might be useful: “If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be a thinking against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the ss liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (365). James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition.

If Edelman’s theory is to be believed, our political model is essentially conservative in that it affirms and sustains our current social design, justifying this with the icon of the hypothetical future Child. We can vaguely equate his proposal to dissolve politics with the atheistic imperative to renounce the concept of heaven: afterlife and unborn generations are used in the same way to suppress the exigency, the potential, and the singular reality of life on earth. Both atheism and Edelman’s definition of queerness argue the present life as the only meaningful reality, and propose that any construction of meaning or reality outside of it is intentionally displaced so as to control/limit individual and collective puissance, i.e., to negate revolution or fundamental change. Edelman, Lee (December 2016). "An Ethics of Desubjectivation?". differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 27 (3): 106–118. doi: 10.1215/10407391-3696679. 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: 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?Lee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies. 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]

My debt to Joseph Litvak is in a category of its own and continues, daily, accumulating interest beyond my ability to repay it. His generosity, both emotional and intellectual, makes better everything it touches and I count myself singularly fortunate to be able to owe him so very much. He writes, for example, in Seminar 17: “Ce que la vérité, quand elle surgit, a de résolutif, ça peutêtre de temps en temps heureux—et puis, dansd’autres cas, désastreux. On ne voit pas pourquoi la vérité serait forcément toujours bénéfique.” Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 122. Je dis toujours la vérité: pas toute, parce que toute la dire, on n’y arrive pas. La dire toute, c’est impossible, matériellement: les mots y manquent. C’est même par cet impossible que la vérité tient au réel” Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 9.

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Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,” to what chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. [8]

Edelman, Lee (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822333593. OCLC 54952928. La tesis de No Future es que la homosexualidad (usada como sinécdoque de todas las identidades no cisheterosexuales) no debe ser normalizada como una alternativa de sexualidad entre otras sino preservar su estatus de exceso destructor que amenaza el orden heterosexual reinante. A través de un marco teórico lacaniano, por momentos zizekiano, emplea una serie de nociones (sinthome/sinthomosexuality, pulsión de muerte, Real-simbólico-imaginario) para buscar definir esta potencialidad revolucionaria en-sí de la homosexualidad. Donna Shalala, “Women’s Movement,” 150 th Anniversary of the First Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, 17 July 1998, http://www.hhs.gov/news/speeches/sene.html. Note also the fundraising slogan of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL): “For our daughters, our sisters, and our granddaughters.”

that life, despite Hitler, goes on, there will always be children.... But then, still as an argument for the inclusion of the “Children’s Songs” in the Poems from Exile, something else asserted itself, which Brecht expressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he seldom shows. “In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That is why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the mother’s womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the children.” While he spoke I felt a force acting on me that was equal to that of fascism; I mean a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism. [195]