Discourse about Queerness are forms of assimilation to the conduct of heteronormativity because they access some form of reproducing the “human beings”. However, Queer serves as an uncanny reminder of the inability to seal the ontology of the human and therefore means that any form of “the Child” is an artificial entity that reproduces the apparatus of heteronormativity.

While Edelman taps into the same feelings of indignation that prompted Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation by targeting the Child where they attack Men and Straights, No Future advocates neither collectivism nor acting out. Although Edelman’s text also constitutes a polemic, which includes a variety of statements that have been met both by offence and defensive hostility from readers,13 he professes the belief that speaking about queerness will not change how the dominant culture views it. In other words, proliferating discourses of queerness makes no difference as they will be condensed into a limited repertoire of statements by heteronormativity. An oft-quoted passage from No Future shows the reason why the book has garnered such acerbic commentary in some quarters: ‘Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop’ (2004, 29). These remarks have inflamed respondents to ask where the figure of the Child ends and the real child begins. A significant prefatory comment is often absented from reproductions of the above quotation, that is, Edelman’s observation that no matter what individuals or groups marked out as Queer say, those driven by reproductive futurism will always hear the above proclamations as having been said anyway. By way of further illustration, Edelman writes elsewhere that ‘It is we who 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 futurity’s emblem must die’ (31). This of course points to the way in which pro-life movements often link an anti-abortion stance with an anti-homosexual position. While identity categories – however fluid and contingent – are important strategies of resistance for Gutter Dyke Collective and Queer Nation, Edelman argues that those figured as Queer, harbingers of the death drive, should, instead of wasting their breath in espousing indignant rebuttals, accede to that position because they will continue to be flung back there by right-wing pundits, not to mention the fact that the position exercises an enormous power to jam the cogs in the machinery of heteronormativity should the occupants refuse to play the ‘game’ of the dominant culture. Edelman’s work is a continuation of that carried out by other scholar-activists, such as Leo Bersani (1995), Michael Warner (1999), Lisa Duggan (2003) and Alexandra Chasin (2000), all of whom have anatomised a growing homonormativity invested in neoliberalism, consumerism and assimilation through being seen as ‘normal’ by heteronormativity. In this, while Queer Nation berates lesbians and gays for not fighting back while queer bashings go on around them (1997/1990, 778), Edelman criticises lesbians and gays, ‘these comrades in reproductive futurism’ who seek to make reforms to the system while in the process becoming assimilated and put to work in it by being turned into sinthomosexuals (2004, 19). In their introduction to Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley respond to what they see as Edelman’s setting-up of the Child as ‘the anti-queer’ with the view that ‘queerness inheres instead in innocence run amok’ (2004, xiv). Edelman’s treatment of the Child has been denounced by those who see him as flattening out the category and universalising one such usage of its figural status, without taking account of the fluctuating contours of that category over time. Edelman’s analysis is not a historical one, but a genealogical meditation on how the Child has come to be signified as natural and the marker of the future to which everyone must bow, ‘the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests’ (2004, 12). Edelman follows the lead of others such as Michel Foucault (1978/1976) and Judith Butler (1990) in interrogating how the Child, politics and the future have become entangled to such an extent that ‘we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (Edelman 2004, 11). No Future works to denaturalise this myth. In his work on sexuality, Foucault traces the ways in which power works through technique and normalisation rather than repression or interdiction (1978/76, 89). Edelman shows that a similar thing is in place with respect to the future in which ‘a notional freedom’ stands in for ‘the actuality of freedom’ (2004, 11) in the heterocycloptic gaze unblinkingly directed towards the chimera of the future. Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through which access to the future can be achieved. Among the many definitions for posthumanism is Neil Badmington’s description of it as ‘a critical practice that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist discourse’ (2003, 22; see also Badmington 2000). The Queer thus serves as an uncanny reminder of the death drive nestling within heteronormativity, the trace of the impossibility of hermetically sealing ontological categories such as the Human. In this, LGBT/Q. activism has always been posthumanist in continuously challenging and redefining what the terms ‘Human’, ‘Humanism’ and ‘Humaneness’ mean, by rejecting the heteronormativity that pervades those categories and their discursive effects. Edelman goes further by rejecting catachresis as a strategy of resistance. His project is decidedly anti-humanist, one might say ‘post·hum·an·ous’: ‘Occurring or continuing after the death of the human’ (Smith, Klock and Gallardo-C. 2004). The desire for the Human therefore signifies an ‘archive desire’ (Derrida 1996/1995, 19), a desire not for the archivisation of the past but for the inscription of the future. Heteronormativity thus works in the shadow of its own finitude, striving retroactively to reproduce the present in the future, which is always the past futurally imagined. ‘Human beings’, The Posthuman Manifesto reminds us, ‘only exist as we believe them to exist’ (2003, 177). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism involves suspending this belief in favour of tracing the normative technologies through which this category operates within different historical and cultural contexts. It is not about the desire for ‘Human Rights’ – which would be a humanising of the Queer – but rather examines our desire for the Human, for the social and political recognition that the figuration of such a term conveys. Judith Butler links ‘a liveable life’ and ‘a grievable death’ to the instantiation of what is understood by the ‘normatively human’ (2004, xv). That is, the ability to invoke feelings of compassion. In No Future, Lee Edelman queers the Human by cutting into its very heart, the figure of the Child, that image which is the personification of compassion’s evocation. Queering the Human demands a withholding of such mechanistic displays of compassion, the empty compulsions of heteronormativity. Such an act rejects, not the child, but those who make use of the child for their own ends.