Heteronormative structures demand an undifferentiated existence through their desire for the immortality of the child. Calls for progress and innovation assert the lost object as existing in a phantasmic future that is fundamentally antagonistic towards queer life.

The death drive is beyond linguistic expression, it is ‘the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within’ (9). Queerness, for Edelman, is inextricably linked to the death drive. Let me return to the epigraph that frames this chapter in which Edelman proclaims that ‘the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability’ (9). Although queerness is not reducible to homosexuality and in fact ‘could never constitute an authentic or substantive identity’ (24) because it ‘is never a matter of being or becoming’ (25), the Queer as a category configured by homophobic and heterosexist discourses is invariably aligned with same-sex desire (Bersani 1987; Dollimore 1995; Hanson 1991; Coviello 2000). While the Child is understood as the apotheosis of life, the Queer is set up as the epitome of death. Indeed, same-sex desire has become synonymous with death in the homophobic imagination: death understood as the foreclosure of reproduction in sexual acts performed by same-sex couples, the death of civilisation as a consequence of the ‘ills’ of ‘the homosexual lifestyle’, or same-sex desire leading to actual physical death with references to HIV/AIDS as ‘the gay plague’. So while heteronormativity is caught up in a continuous cycle of refusing to acknowledge its own internal lack by forever desiring the ‘realization of the subject’s authentic presence’ (Edelman 2004, 10) through the ‘sacralization of the Child’ (28), the Queer is feared as a threat to the completion of this compulsive practice. Thus, the death drive signifies both the position that is conferred on the Queer by the social as well as the trace of the anxious social’s projections of the death drive and everything it signifies onto the Queer, who becomes a repository of negativity. In a sense, queerness is a creation of the social, its abject Other, a constant reminder of the social’s incompleteness and vulnerability. Reproductive futurism imposes, according to Edelman, ‘an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations’ (2). Reproductive futurism absorbs all challenges and translates them into more of the same. It operates in a similar way to Monique Wittig’s concept of the straight mind in that ‘when thought of by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality’ (1992, 28). Reproductive futurism is a more specific term than heteronormativity in that it describes the process through which heterosexuality becomes heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a term to describe a conglomerate of effects while reproductive futurism signifies the process through which such effects are wrought. It is all-encompassing, operating at the level of ideology so that it sets limits on, not just what we think or do, but also on what and how we desire. Desire itself becomes reproductive futurism in its ‘translation into a narrative’, ‘its teleological determination’ through politics which ‘conforms to the temporality of desire’, ‘the inevitable historicity of desire’ (Edelman 2004, 9). Reproductive futurism is, what I call, ‘heterocycloptic’, bound up with the desiring gaze and the setting-out of a developmental trajectory of ‘progress’ moving endlessly towards a ‘better’ future, in the process imposing a panopticonlike self-surveillance: ‘It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised’ (Foucault 1980, 156). It is apocaloptic in the sense that desire itself becomes a trap, a disciplining device in which the norm becomes inextricable from the natural. This technology of power – a ‘coercive universalization’ (Edelman 2004, 11) – operates at the level of fantasy and through the figure of the Child: ‘the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’ (11). In this, the Child becomes inextricably linked to the future and in turn to politics, and is thus reduced to a trope delimiting what will get to count as the future in advance. Reproductive futurism I believe exercises power contradictorily through a web, a net, a grid. It encourages, perhaps contradictorily, the proliferation of desires – a looking-out as opposed to a gazing-within – in the service of repressing any conscious self-awareness of the death drive. Reproductive futurism is therefore, what I term, ‘hetero-prophetic’ in that it tries to set out programmatically what will transpire in the future; a future ‘endlessly postponed’ (13), thus holding the present to ransom. If it is invested in eschatology, it is only as a veneer to discipline those into enslavement to its ideals. For Edelman, reproductive futurism presents ‘an always impossible future’ (11), ‘a fantasmatic future’ (31) which translates queerness, I think, into heteronormativity’s aggressor – the Queer – a repository for displaced feelings of anxiety. This anxiety arises because of the existence of the death drive within (Klein 1997/1946, 4) and the subject’s resultant fear of death (Klein 1997/1948, 28, 29); the fear that the future will never arrive or that the subject will not be alive to experience in it. Thus anxiety arising from the presence of an internal threat (that is, the death drive) is deflected outwards to become the fear of an external threat (that is, the Queer). This internal object of fear is displaced onto the Queer who then ‘becomes the external representative of the death instinct’ (Klein 1997/1948, 31). Through a denial both of the existence of the death drive and the social’s narcissistic investment in the Child as the wish fulfilment of its desired immortality, heteronormativity projects the death drive onto the figure of the Queer who comes to stand in for everything that is considered to be dangerous to the Child and thus the future. It is my contention that reproductive futurism operates by first denying the presence of the death drive through the inauguration of a fantasy of self-fulfilment at the same time that the anxiety of heteronormativity’s own internal shortcomings and disciplining mechanisms are displaced onto the Queer (A. Freud 2000/1937, 69–82). The instantiation of this fantasy arises, in the words of Anna Freud, because ‘the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion’ (69). idealised, the Queer is marked out as the persecutory Other (Klein 1997/1946, 1–24; Klein 1997/1955, 141–75).6 I argue that this idealisation of the Child is a direct corollary of the fear of the Queer which itself is in response to the outward projection of the death drive. Klein’s thoughts are instructive in this regard: ‘Excessive idealization denotes that persecution is the main driving force … idealization is a corollary of persecutory anxiety – a defence against it – and the ideal breast [that is, the Child] is the counterpart of the devouring breast [that is, the Queer]’ (1997/1957, 193; see also 1997/1960, 273; 1997/1963, 311). Queerness, Edelman insists, pits itself against reproductive futurism in the refusal to deny the presence of the death drive or accede to social respectability by projecting that queerness onto someone else: ‘To figure … the death drive of the dominant order, is neither to be nor to become that drive … Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of the drive’ (2004, 17). This process of projective identification (1997/1959, 252) leaves heteronormativity in a weakened state, dependent for succour on its idealisation of the Child and its demonisation of the Queer (1997/1946, 9). Whole parts of the heteronormative subject are split off and invested in its fantasmatic relationship with its objects (1997/1955, 143). Excessive splitting can, in Klein’s view, conclude in feelings of disintegration and loss (1997/1946, 9–10). In this, heteronormativity needs its abjected queerness because without it there would be nothing against which it could define itself as the normal. Edelman recognises the power in this heteronormative reliance, thus his insistence that queerness must oppose the very ‘logic of opposition’ (2004, 4). In other words, those relegated to the category of the Queer need to cease playing the role of the persecutory Other for heteronormativity by refusing to engage in such heteronormative object relations, the stakes of which are always set out in advance. Edelman’s proposal, far from securing the end of queerness in a nihilistic act of self-destruction, urges queers to stop facilitating the system of heteronormativity and watch it unravel. The death drive is, after all, referred to by Freud as carrying out its business quietly.7