The use of language is not neutral but rather reflects a desire for the future that ossifies our existing symbolic order that leads to the endless reproduction of violence

[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

What should we make in this context of Derrida’s explicit affirmation of the future? He writes: The affirmation of the future to come: this is not a positive thesis. It is nothing other than the affirmation itself, the “yes,” insofar as it is the condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening toward the future, whatever it may be, for science or for religion. I am prepared to subscribe without reserve to this reaffirmation made by Yerushalmi. With a speck of anxiety, in the back of my mind, a single speck of anxiety about a solitary point. . . . This unique point can be reduced, indeed, to the Unique, to the unity of the One and of the Unique.56 Rejecting here Yerushalmi’s claim for the absolute and exemplary uniqueness of what Derrida describes as the “link between Jewishness, if not Judaism, and hope in the future,” rejecting, that is, the identitarian claims of a Jewish responsibility to futurity, Derrida declares himself prepared, nonetheless, “to subscribe without reserve” to the “yes, yes” of the “reaffirmation” that bespeaks his “hope in the future.”57 Such a hope, of course, remains fixed to the framework—historical, cultural, political—from which it springs, imprisoning the future it imagines (even if the a-venir must remain unknown) in an Imaginary form that mirrors that of the Symbolic subject who forms it. This future takes the form of form itself; as the condition of “all awaiting,” it anticipates something coming into being by coming into form. Insofar as that hope, like Derrida’s investment in “messianicity without messianism,” identifies justice as the making of space for the arrival of the radically unknown, it presupposes the possibility of welcoming into the archive of living being the anarchivic death drive that undoes what (we think) we are.58 If this future is to be something more than repetition of the same, then it must assume that nonbeing as such can somehow present itself to being, that the system of signification can incorporate its own beyond, and that Symbolic subjects can simultaneously be and exceed themselves, can know the zero as zero and not just as another “one.” This fantasmatic future, even when seen as impossible, reflects the rigor mortis of our Symbolic order in which, whatever the father’s name, the name of the father is “life.” In Apprendre à vivre enfin, Derrida makes his position perfectly clear: “I don’t want to give free rein to an interpretation according to which survival is on the side of death, of the past, rather than of life and the future. Everything I say . . . about survival as a complication of the life/ death opposition proceeds, where I am concerned, from an unconditional affirmation of life. . . . The view I hold isn’t mortifying, but, to the contrary, it’s the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and, therefore, surviving to death.”59 Though he accepts its “complication,” Derrida refuses to permit the division between life and death to vanish; unwilling to acknowledge (except by negation) that his “affirmation of life” might be “mortifying,” he aligns himself “unconditional[ly]” with the survival of survival, preserving the “life/death opposition” that puts survival “on the side . . . of life.” But such a survival, preserving the archival trace of the past into the future, enacts a resistance to the a-venir, to the evental aspect of the future as encounter with the Real. As an eruption of the zero, of the empty set internal to the order of the world, could such an event take place in the world to which it puts an end? And could such an event take place for us when it revokes the signifying framework that alone sustains our being? As the other beyond the realm of what is, the event must bring what is to an end, inaugurating (the) nothing that would arrive ex nihilo to abrogate the order of survival. The Derrida who can qualify as “unconditional” his “affirmation of life” and accede to Yerushalmi’s “reaffirmation” of the future “without reserve” is the Derrida who fully understands that “to ask me to renounce what has formed me, what I have loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die.” It is the Derrida who can go on to add, “In that fidelity there is a sort of instinct of conservation.”60 That instinct evinces the mortification that Derrida wants to deny: the mortification by which the Symbolic “colonizes the living entity,” in Žižek’s phrase, precisely to make it an entity, a “One” whose preservation in the order of life coincides with our notion of “the good.” When push comes to shove, that good, however, even for someone like Derrida, committed to a “complication of the life/death opposition,” compels the choice of life over death, of a conservative rhetoric of futurism over the radical event of the Real. We see that choice in Derrida’s account of the terror he calls “bin Ladenism”: