Reproductive Futurism is just a fantasy against the death drive. It stimulates the desire for progress but inevitably neutralizes resistance since it permits all social, political, and cultural struggles that exist in a homophobic imagination entrenching Queerness as the epitome of death.

A drive, as described by Freud, ‘differs from a stimulus in that it originates from sources of stimulation within the body, acts as a constant force, and the individual can’t flee from it in the way that he can from an external stimulus’ (2003/1933, 88). For him, drives ‘represent the physical demands of the psyche’ (2003/1940, 178). Drives signify ‘need’ and thus crave satisfaction which leads Freud to formulate the pleasure-unpleasure principle (2005/1915, 15). The pleasure-ego strives for wish-fulfilment, ‘to pursue pleasure and avoid unpleasure’. The reality-ego, on the other hand, strives for what is ‘useful’ while protecting itself from harm. The reality-ego safeguards the individual from the overweening demands of the pleasure-ego but protects rather than opposes it, in a sense ‘safeguarding it, not deposing it’ (2005/1911, 6). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle however, Freud, a self-confessed rigorous revisionist, conceded that ‘the pleasure principle exists as a strong tendency within the psyche, but is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot possibly always accord with the said tendency in favour of pleasure’ (2003/1920, 47). Through observing patients undergoing psychoanalysis, Freud noticed that people regularly return to unpleasurable experiences and memories, what he termed the ‘compulsion to repeat’, which ‘pays no heed to the pleasure principle’ (57, 61). Developing on from this compulsion to return again and again to what has gone before, Freud proposed the existence of what he termed ‘der Todestrieb’ – the death drive sometimes translated as the death instinct – to explain what he saw as ‘the drive to return to the inanimate’ because ‘the inanimate existed before the animate’ (78). Freud propounded the view that there were two drives – the death drive and Eros – the interaction of which produces the vibrancy of life, a constant struggle or working-through of resistance, each one to the other. In Jean Laplanche’s view, this ongoing struggle between the death and life drives manifests ‘not as a difference between sexuality and a non-sexual aggressivity, but in the heart of sexuality itself ’ (1999, 40). In his critique of No Future and as part of his intention to reframe the death drive for ‘a different – one might say queerer – vision of futurity’, Tim Hird, M. J. (2008). Queering the non/human. Taylor & Francis Group. Dean remarks that ‘Edelman advocates our embracing – even identifying with – something that is not of the order of representation, namely, the death drive’, to which Dean asserts he is ‘not convinced that it is possible, even were it deemed politically desirable, to embrace or identify with a drive’ (2008). This statement needs unpacking, namely Dean’s representation of Edelman’s remarks on the death drive, politics, possibility and queerness. This section introduces my interpretation of Edelman’s formulation of queerness as it relates to the death drive before I argue that No Future is not about considering possibilities but rather is a meditation on a range of impossibilities. First, the impossibility of exercising agency if one partakes of a system steeped in reproductive futurism which permeates all social, political and cultural structures. Secondly, the intolerable living conditions created for those figured as sinthomosexuals through heteronormativity’s employment of reproductive futurism as a fantasy/ phantasy (Segal 2000) against the death drive through the inauguration of a series of defence mechanisms, namely denial, splitting, idealisation and projective identification (Klein 1997/1946; 1997/1948; 1997/1955; 1997/1957). Third, the impossibility of launching a queer political resistance to heteronormativity without its being recuperated and neutralised by reproductive futurism in the process and put into the service of heteronormativity. Fourth, the Queer’s figuration as the death drive and how that both facilitates while ultimately preventing heteronormativity’s desired fulfilment of itself in the figure of the Child. Edelman’s ‘impossible project’, which he claims stakes ‘its fortunes on a truly hopeless wager’, presents us with an interpretation of queerness that promises ‘absolutely nothing’ (2004, 4, 5). It promises nothing, in my view, precisely because the death drive is already within us. To accept that – the what ‘is’ – is to accede to this book’s argument.5 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 authenticor substantive identity’ (24) because it ‘is never a matter of being or becoming’ (25), the 5 This puts me in mind of Eckhart Tolle’s promulgation of ‘the Now’ in which he urges readers to ‘End the delusion of time … To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation … The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, fulfilment in whatever forms. Both are illusions’. 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)