We’re impact turning Futurity.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen **includes brief descriptions of sexual violence

This figural irrationality of zero points to something in signification that escapes the closure of identity and the determination of being. We can interpret its unthinkability as the “queerness,” the self-negation of being, whose structuring presence in every order gets reduced to the status of nothing. Like the infamous square root of minus one, to which Lacan alludes in his reading of Hamlet (he discusses it more fully in “The Subversion of the Subject”), irrational denotes “what doesn’t correspond to anything that is subject to our intuition, anything real—in the mathematical sense of the term—and yet, it must be conserved, along with its full function.”47 By signaling something “missing in the desired image” wherein a Symbolic subject recognizes itself, the irrational zero, like the square root of minus one, “comes to symbolize the place of jouissance,” the place of what we sacrifice—before “we” exist to possess it—so as to “be” in the order of language.48 As whatever a given order excludes from the frame of intelligibility, as whatever threatens the order of being that such a frame constructs, queerness, too, names a jouissance incapable of positivization; it similarly refers to something radically “unthinkable” about the subject: its inextricability from the “Non-Being” that “makes Being itself languish.”49 Queerness thus figures what disintegrates all integrals from within even as its unthinkability permits the law’s self-assertion as One. In this context, consider one more passage from Lacan’s metaphorical mathematics. Discussing the signifier of the Other’s lack, the signifier of the structural incompleteness that keeps the Other from attaining the totality or stability of a rational number, Lacan, in “The Subversion of the Subject,” denies the possibility of “conferring on [this] signifier . . . the meaning of mana or any such term.” He goes on to explain, “Claude Lévi-Strauss, commenting on [Marcel] Mauss’ work, no doubt wished to see in mana the effect of a zero symbol. But . . . what we are dealing with in our case is . . . the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol.”50 At stake is the absence of a symbol as such, or rather, the insistence of what the Symbolic order necessarily absents: the queerness that refuses the minimal coherence characteristic of an entity and so escapes positivization in any system of exchange. But the order that forecloses that queerness cannot succeed in escaping it any more than producing a zero symbol avoids an encounter with the void. The constitution of the Symbolic archive enabled by the signifying system opens a space construed as beyond it, the “ex nihilo on which it is founded.” It produces not only the archive but also the Derridean mal d’archive, the evil or malady of the death drive bound to the signifier’s archivizing function. It thus produces a selfdivision, an auto-antagonism, implicating life in death and keeping being and not-being from forming a couple divided by the b/order of or. Slavoj Žižek foregrounds this inconsistency while glossing the counterintuitive vitality of the death drive for Lacan: Death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity. What defines death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition of life and death, but the split of life itself into “normal” life and horrifying “undead” life, and the split of the dead into “ordinary” dead and the “undead” machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it possesses life of its own”) and its counterpoint, the “living dead” (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic). This split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive.51 In this sense the pressure of the death drive betrays the excess within the Symbolic congruent with the division constitutive of the Symbolic: an excess consigned to the nothing that only appears as the Symbolic’s beyond. Incapable of capture by a zero symbol, that nothing attests to the lack of a symbol capable of invoking its lack without resorting to the positivization that turns its zero into a one. Returning to Derrida’s account of how the archive’s consignation procures “the One, as self-repetition” in a way that “can only repeat and recall [an] instituting violence,” we can better understand how the archive’s anticipation of “the future to come” commits it instead, as Derrida writes, to an act of “self-repetition, self-confirmation in a yes, yes.”52 Such a “yes” affirms, in the name of the future, an identity, precisely that of the One, that obliges the future to conform to the past, to affirm itself as survival within an economy of reserve. The archive, after all, like the specter, and so like the ghost of the dead King Hamlet, evinces that reserve whose survival produces the future as its own. However much it presents itself as open to the unknown, to the unpredictable otherness of whatever event may come, this future, like the “yes” by which archivization affirms it, performs a compulsory return to the One of the father and the law. Derrida dedicates Archive Fever not only to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose work he directly addresses, but also, as he writes, “to my sons—and even to the memory of my father, who was also called, as is life itself, Hayim.”53 Life, as prolepsis and memory, returns to the father here twice over: it returns both to Derrida’s father and to Derrida as father, and so to his identification, like Hamlet’s, with an archivizing function, with the survival of the name of the father, “Hayim,” which, in Hebrew, signifies “life.” But “life,” as a consequence, suffers what we might call a “dead-ication,” its vitality conflated with a “memory” that comes back like Hamlet’s ghost, which, as Derrida observes, is from the outset not just an apparition but also a “reapparition”: “Here again what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.”54 Whatever comes from the future must, precisely by coming into being, repeat the exclusion of the zero from the reality of what “is,” leaving the death drive alone to preserve the memory of “nothing.” Futurism in this sense emerges as the prolepsis of a (be)hindsight: the father’s penetration from behind, from the back, of what he thereby conceives as the future in an act of self-affirmation by which the child, like Almodóvar’s Ignacio or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, finds itself screwed.55