The figure of the queer is fundamentally in opposition to the symbolic order praxis of reproduction and displaced into an excess signifier. The affs embodiment of “queer praxes of futurity” ties the queer body to the death drive and constitutive failure to assimilate within the symbolic.

How should we read this constant disruption of narrative signification, a disruption inextricable from the articulation of narrative as such, but as a version of the death drive, which Barbara Johnson calls, in a different context, "a kind of unthought remainder ... a formal ovecdetermination that is, in Freud's case, going to produce repetition OC, in deconstruction's case, may inhere in linguistic structures that don't correspond to anything eIse"?27 If irony can serve as one of the names for the force of that unthought remainder, might not queerness serve as another? Queer theory, it follows, would constitute the site where the radical threat posed by irony, which heteronormative culture displaces onto the figure of the queer, is uncannily returned by queers who no longer disown but assume their figural identity as embodiments of the figuralization, and hence the disfiguration, of identity itself. Where the political interventions of identitarian minorities-including those who seek to substantialize the identities of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals-may properly take shape as oppositional, affording the dominant order a reassuringly symmetrical, if inverted, depiction of its own ostensibly coherent identity, queer theory'S opposition is precisely to any such logic of opposition, its proper task the ceaseless disappropriation of every propriety. Thus, queerness could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural position determined by the imperative of figuration; for the gap, the non coincidence, that the order of the signifier installs both informs and inhabits queerness as it inhabits reproductive futurism. But it does so with a difference. Where futurism always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will suture identity by closing that gap, queerness undoes the identities through which We experience ourselves as subjects, insist ing on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already foreclosed. Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order. One name for this unnameable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as "enjoyment": a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law. This passage, toward which the pulsion of the drives continuously impels us, may have the effect, insofar as it gets attached to a particular object or end, of congealing identity around the fantasy of satisfaction or fulfillment by means of that object. At the same time, however, this jouissance ' dissolves such fetishistic investments, undoing the consistency of a social reality that relies on Imaginary identifications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paternal metaphor of the name." Hence, for Lacan there is another name that designates the unnameability to which jouissance would give us access: "Behind what is named, there is the unnameable," he writes. "It is in fact because it is unnameable, with all the resonances you can give to this name, that it is akin to the quintessential unnameable, that is to say to death." 29 The death drive, therefore, manifests itself, though in radically different guises, in both versions of jouissance. To the extent that jouissance, as a fantasmatic escape from the alienation intrinsic to meaning, lodges itself in a given object on which identity comes to depend, it produces identity as mortification, reenacting the very constraint of meaning it was intended to help us escape. But to the extent that it tears the fabric of Symbolic reality as we know it, unraveling the solidity of ,very object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, jouissance evokes the death drive that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its fantasy of selfrealization, beyond the pleasure principle. Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the Child, enacting a logic of repetition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order. Bound up with the second is the figure of the queer, embodying that order's traumatic encounter with its own inescapable failure, its encounter with the illusion of the future as suture to bind the constitutive wound of the subject's subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically, both from and into itself. In the preface to Homographesis I wrote that the signifier "gay," understood "as a figure for the textuality, the rhetoricity, of the sexual ... designates the gap or incoherence that evety discourse of 'sexuality' or 'sexual identity' would master." 30 Extending that claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape. As a figure for what it can neither fully articulate nor acknowledge, the queer may provide the Symbolic with a sort of necessary reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real, remains unnameable. But repudiations of that figural identity, reflecting a liberal faith in the abstract universality of the subject, though better enabling the extension of rights to those who are still denied them, must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless coherence of the Symbolic whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive force of queer irony. If the queer's abjectified difference, that is, secures normativity's identity, the� queer's disavowal of that difference affirms normativity's singular truth. For every refusal of the figural status to which queers are distinctively called reproduces the triumph of parrative as the alleaorization of irony, as the logic of a temporality that always serves to "straighten" it out, and thus proclaims the universality of reproductive futurism. Such refusals perform, despite themselves, subservience to the law that etfecotively imposes politics as the only game in town, exacting as the price , of admission the subject's (heteronormalizing, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual practice or sexual "orientation," through compulsory abjuration of the future-negating queer. It may seem, from within this structure, that the Symbolic can only win; but that would ignore the correlative fact that it also can only lose. For the division on which the subject rests can never be spirited away and the signifYing order will always necessitate the production of some figural repository for the excess that precludes its ultimate realization of the political field whose limit and horizon is reproductive futur- I ism, queerness embodies this death drive, this intransigent jouissance, by fignring sexuality's implication in the senseless pulsions of that drive, De-idealizing the metaphorics of meaning on which heteroreproduction takes its stand, queerness exposes sexuality's inevitable coloration by the drive: its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance to determinations of meaning (except insofar this refusal to admit such determinations of meaning, and, above all, its rejection of spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism. Queerness as name may well reinforce the Symbolic order of naming, but it names what resists, as signifier, absorption into the Imaginary identity of the name. Empty, excessive, and irreducible,) it designates the letter, .. the formal element, the lifeless machinery responsible for animating the "spirit" offuturity. And as such, as a name for the death drive that always informs the Symbolic order, it also names the jouissance forbidden by, but permeating, the Symbolic order itself. By denying our identification with the negativity of this drive, and hence Our disidentification from the promise of futurity, those of us inhabiting the, place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness and enter the properly political sphere, but only by shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of queerness, after all, and the need to fill it remain. By choosing to accept that position, however, by assuming the " truth" of our queer capacity to figure the undoing of the Symbolic, and of the Symbolic subject as well, we might undertake the impossible project of imagining an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce the politics of signifi- , cation (the politics aimed at closing the gap opened up by the signifier ,0 , " itself), which can only return us, by way of the Child, to the politics of reproduction. For the liberal's view of society, which seems to accord the queer a place, endorses no more than the conservative right's the queerness of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the right wing imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the left would eliminate queerness by shining the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive coloring, the determining fantasy formation, by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone, the undoing of the social order and its cynosure, the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the right wing the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification. But this is where reason must fail. Sexuality refuses demystification as the Symbolic refuses the queer; for sexuality and the Symbolic become what they are by virtue of such rejUsals. lronically-but irony, as I've argued, always characterizes queer theory-the demystification of queerness and so, by extension, of sexuality itself, the demystification inherent in the position of liberal rationality, could achieve its realization only by-. traversing the collective fantasy that invests the social order with mealing by way of reproductive futurism. Taken at its word, that is, liberalism's abstract reason, rescuing queerness for sociality, dissolves, like queerness, the very investments on which sociality rests by doing away with its underlying and sustaining libidinal fantasies. Beyond the resonance of fantasy, after all, lies neither law nor reason. In the beyond of demystification, in that neutral, democratic literality that marks the futurism of the left, one could only encounter a queer dismantling of futurism itself as fantasy and a derealization of the order of meaning that futurism reproduces. Intent on the end, not the ends, of the social, queerness insists that the drive toward that end, which liberalism refuses to imagine, can never be excluded from the structuring fantasy of the social order itself The sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer. Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to Same-sex partners of municipal employ ees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. "Society," he opined, "has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of ch.ildren, the state has a special interest in marriage." 31 With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it wiJI justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, "based on individual egoism" rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, "Such a 'caricature' has no future and cannot give future to any society." 32 Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're coJlectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Is and with small; fuck the whole nerwork of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups or generous partiCipation in activist groups or generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication, the future will hold a place for uS-a place at the political table that won't have to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that future as there can be no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at all,: that the future, as Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is "always A day Away." Like the lovers on Keats's Grecian urn, forever "near the goal" of a union they'll never in fact achieve, we're held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of a day when today and tomorrow are one. That future is nothing but kid stuff, reborn each day to screen out the grave thatgap:� from within the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality's gossamer web. Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that sO defines them. But they're positioned as well to recognize the irredudbility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as contingent to the logic of social organization as such. Acceding to this figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be described, in John -, Brenkman's words, as "politically self-destructive." 33 But politics (as the \ social elaboration of reality) and the self (as mere prosthesis maintain- ; ing the future for the figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure, " necessarily destroys -necessarily insofar as this "self" is the agent of reproductive futurism and this "politics" the means of its promulgation ,as the order of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan's engagement with Antigone in Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future , in the name of having a life. If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death drive ' ,we're called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made dear, are "not the signifier of what might become a new form of 'social organisation,' " that we do not " intend a new politics, a better society, tomorrow, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective identification with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in Hocquenghem's words, 14 is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about 'sacrifice now for the sake of future generations' ... [itl knows that civilisation alone is mortal." 34 Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It is we "'ho must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of - the signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we're condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futuriry's emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy Screen offuturity, shattering narrative temporality with irony's always explosive force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively-to insist that the future stop here.