Ruti’s theory of futurity is flawed, and reproduces understandings of the subject that places the queer as merely an object to continue the project of liberal humanism

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 5, Duke University Press]//owen

Mari Ruti, for example, in maintaining that “the real can alter (rather than merely devastate) the symbolic,” supports her claim by pointing to the creativity with which we “generate fresh forms of signification.”27 On this ground, she declares, “we can participate in an ongoing and endlessly renewed process of becoming. The future, in other words, is never determined but inherently open ended; far from a predetermined fantasy, it is a manner of remaining alive to the utter unpredictability of existence.”28 This notion, however appealing, ignores that “generat[ing] fresh forms of signification” is the Symbolic’s normative function. Moreover, if “becoming” is an “ongoing and endlessly renewed process,” then its insistent productivity is, by definition, “predetermined” (what else could “endlessly renewed” denote?), though its specific forms are not. To that extent, it is far removed from the “unpredictability” that Ruti affirms. The bond between futurism and the order of meaning is procured by the predictable necessity of generating “fresh forms of signification.” Nothing in this process “alter[s]” the Symbolic; it merely enacts its law.29 Pursuing an argument akin to Ruti’s, Coffman also seeks to rebut what she, like Ruti, finds in No Future: an “excessively negative interpretation of Lacan.” Expanding on the notion that “an act in the Real can prompt changes in the symbolic,” Coffman proposes that unlike Edelman’s politics, “[Slavoj] Žižek’s politics of the Real offers queer theory not a release from the symbolic order but rather the possibility of changing its coordinates.”30 Her example of “changing [the Symbolic’s] coordinates”? The wedding scene from In and Out (Frank Oz, 1977, Paramount) where Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) surprises himself and those around him by coming out as gay. Coffman credits Žižek as the source of this example, but even Žižek, when he adduces it, notes that it’s “not quite appropriate” since it fails to demonstrate “the ‘crazy,’ impossible choice of . . . striking at [one]self, at what is most precious to [one]self,” that marks the Lacanian act.31 Coming out can alter many things, but neither in nor out of In and Out is Symbolic law among them. To the contrary, by assimilating the subject to a legible identity in the signifying system, it reaffirms the subject’s defining subjection to the Symbolic law. As for genuine acts, those that “accomplish what, in a given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible,’” Žižek maintains that they “change the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself ” (emphasis mine), not the coordinates of “the symbolic order.”32 Such acts, as discussed in previous chapters, are not expressions of will or desire but rather of the acephalic drive whose relation to enjoyment disturbs the “the political preaching based on the good form of satisfaction” for the sake of which Ruti, Coffman, and Cole require a less “negative” Lacan.33 Ruti frames that politics plainly: “Those of us advancing this newer version of posthumanist theory tend to possess a strong commitment to matters of social survival, justice, and responsibility.”34 Wholly honorable, wholly admirable, such commitments command assent. Refusal to sign on to such a project, in Alenka Zupančič’s phrase, “would be impossible, inhuman.”35 Zupančič, however, introduces this phrase precisely to ventriloquize ideology’s resistance to “the gap opened up by an act.”36 A genuine act, as Zupančič makes clear, never registers as honorable or respectable; far from praise for its “responsibility,” it earns, Lacan tells us, “infamy” for threatening the fundamental fantasy that consolidates a world. Ruti may refer to “posthumanist theory,” but her argument repurposes liberal humanism, vaunting “social survival, justice, and responsibility” without recognizing that the split in the subject, the fracture at the core of posthumanist thought, makes those three things incompatible. How can we be responsible to the subject of desire and the subject of the drive at once? How can we do justice to a divided subject in tension not only with itself but also with the order that produced it? How can we reconcile “social survival” with the assault on the social order that condemns the authentic act to “infamy”? The answer, for Ruti, Coffman, and Cole, is to displace the constitutive division of the subject into external divisions among social subjects, thus allowing for the hope of political repair through an “endlessly renewed process of becoming.” To suggest that this process is endless because the void is incapable of repair would challenge such political hope and provoke a political rebuke. Thus, Cole waves off the Lacanian account of politics as a governing fantasy by associating defense of that argument with a “privileged social position,” and Ruti similarly describes the negativity implicit in endless “becoming”: “The kind of radical negativity and self-dissolution that Edelman (following Žižek) advocates can only be undertaken from a position of relative security,” she writes.37 But Ruti misreads No Future here in a symptomatic way. Though it repeatedly insists on the figural relation between jouissance and those viewed as queer, and though it repeatedly urges such persons to embrace their figural embodiment of the death drive, No Future never “advocates” for psychic “self-dissolution,” as if such a thing were a question of will or could constitute a political program.38 Ruti takes this misreading further: “Deprivileged subjects—some women, racially and ethnically marked individuals, and those who lead economically precarious lives (that is, subjects whose claim to symbolic identity is shaky to begin with)—simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to the jouissance of the death drive in the way that more secure subjects might be tempted (or even compelled) to do.”39 The confusions of psychic and social here are multiple and instructive. No subject, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sex, or sexuality, can “afford to abandon [itself ] to the jouissance of the death drive”—not if “afford” suggests it can do so voluntarily and with impunity. The drive, itself unconscious, pushes toward an emptying of the subject that has nothing to do with “temptation”; it affords that subject nothing more than an opening onto nonbeing (“dèsêtre”) that neither liberates nor redeems it but only subtracts it from sense. Just as claims to Symbolic identity are no less “secure” for “deprivileged subjects” than they are for their privileged counterparts—indeed, the very fixity of those Symbolic identities is what proves destructive to “deprivileged subjects,” making their claims to social viability, not to Symbolic identity, “shak[ier]”—so the insistence of the death drive “compel[s]” those subjects no less than it does any others. Denying those marked by oppression the psychic structures that shape us as subjects may bespeak a political belief that the “deprivileged” simply cannot “afford” them; but it might also reflect, to return to Cole’s phrase, a “privileged social position” that flattens “deprivileged subjects” into empty figures for their lack of privilege, reducing them to the status of furniture—useful objects, perhaps even chattel—in liberal humanism’s performance of its own exemplary moral conscience.