Edelman’s theories are false. He misinterprets the future in psychoanalysis and symbolic law, and undermines queer theory’s potential.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/32/2%20(119)/1/33775/There-s-Nothing-Revolutionary-about-a-Blowjob?redirectedFrom=fulltext]

Edelman’s refusal of politics postulates what he takes to be the radical negativity of jouissance as an “unnamable remainder,” which when harnessed through an identification with the death drive, whatever that means, can actually unravel the social. The problem, if we can be a little technical here, is the unpsychoanalytic way in which Edelman mobilizes Lacanian concepts. 6 5 As practicing Lacanian analyst Judith Feher Guerwich points out, “Jouissance is a legal term — in Latin usufructus — referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to owning it.” Thus, jouissance is not a disruptive remainder; it is instead “the subject’s experience of being for the Other as an object of enjoyment, of use or abuse, in contrast to being the object of the Other’s desire.” What happens when one is captured by the jouissance of the Other is that the Other becomes a frightening mystery, so that the subject is constantly caught in an unanswerable question: What does the Other want from me? The jouissance of the Other then has the special quality of being both real and mythical. The subject attributes qualities to the Other that do not really exist (indeed Lacan goes so far as to argue that the “big” Other does not exist) precisely because the subject remains clueless about who, or even what, this Other actually is. One of the goals of Lacanian psychoanalysis is thus to demystify the Other, and as such, the Oedipal fantasy needs to be exposed as fantasy. When Lacan writes that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” he means that our desires and fantasies come to us from the place of the Other rather than our own conscious ego. These unconscious fantasies, particularly the Oedipal myth, are developed in order to fend off our fear of being encompassed by the jouissance of our primary Other(s) (especially the mother) who leave us helpless before the ultimate question: what does the Other want of us? This fear becomes a wish, including a wish for a law that could keep us from being obliterated by or collapsed into the jouissance of the Other. And this is why, as Feher Guerwich argues, the Oedipal myth in Lacan is an effect rather than a cause of subjectivity. In Freud, acceptance of the threat of castration is what allows the boy to renounce his primary Oedipal desires for the (m)Other and is thus a cause of subjectivity. For Lacan, however, castration names the recognition of the incompleteness of the Other, which is precisely what allows the subject to escape from capture by the Other’s jouissance. Yet , in order to defend against this traumatic recognition, the subject develops the myth of the paternal law that enables the subject to believe that he could fulfill the (m)Other if only it weren’t prohibited. As Lacan puts it, “Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.” 10 11 Because no one’s fantasy is completely correlated with that of another subject, no one can ever be completely reduced to someone else’s object of use (jouissance). Our uniqueness resides in our fantasy life, so from that point of view, our subjectivity is never completely extinguished even in madness. For Lacan, the subject of desire is the subject of the unconscious in a unique sense. Through Lacanian analysis we lose the fantasy of being completely plugged into the Other, but through that loss we gain awareness of ourselves of having our own psychic life. On the other side, however, is psychic death, or the wish to extinguish the subjectivity that is born with our desire and remain instead an object for the Other. The ethical goal is thus to reach the point where the patient can see that jouissance is actually within us and not an all powerful entity who can obliterate us. The fantasy that we are subjected to the Other is a difficult one to release precisely because the unconscious needs to fend off capture by the jouissance of the Other. Paradoxically, we need the fantasy of the symbolic law to feel safe from being consumed by the Other insofar as this Law purports to prohibit certain threatening desires. Rightwing women, for example, develop an unconscious wish for a law that can protect them from the jouissance of the Other, which they identify with the fantasy figure of the homosexual. Thus, antigay politics can be seen as a defensive reaction formation in the classic sense: the jouissance of the Other is outlawed by outlawing gay and lesbian marriage, and therefore the subject is safe. It is this unrealizable unconscious wish that Edelman interprets as a “a tear in the social fabric.” But an unrealizable wish is not “an impossible Real,” as Edelman seems to think. To quote Edelman himself on this misunderstanding in his attempt to salvage jouissance for the acting out of impossible queerness: 12 But to the extent that jouissance as a tear in the social fabric of symbolic reality as we know it unravels the solidity of every object, including the object as which the subject necessarily takes itself, it evokes the death drive that always insists on the void both in and of the subject beyond its fantasy of selfrealization in the domain of the pleasure principle. 13 He then goes on to claim that queerness “marks . . . the place of a jouissance from which [the symbolic] can never escape.” For Edelman, then, queerness is a kind of radically negative and unnamable Real, a site of disruptive jouissance, the death drive within the social order. Here, Edelman concedes to capture in the jouissance of the Other by clinging to the symbolic law that purportedly prohibits queerness, which can therefore only reappear as a self and socially destructive tear from within. Edelman, in other words, takes the fantasy of the symbolic law as reality, appearing to forget that for Lacan “the Other doesn’t exist.” As we have pointed out, the all encompassing Other (or symbolic) who has the power to completely determine the subject is ultimately only a fantasy, which is why Lacan frequently refers to it as the “barred Other.” 14 There is no “beyond accommodation” to a self encircled symbolic order, as it is described in Edelman’s work. 15 He is the subject who knows what is impossible as opposed to the subject that is constituted through the disruption of a Real that is unknowable but that affects us by throwing time out of joint, as Jacques Derrida reminds us again and again. The beyond of the Real that disjoins temporality or the narrative of historicism is precisely what keeps the future open as a promise of the indetermination that itself disrupts the self enclosure of the symbolic order. We need to underscore this point: the Real is not something. The Real is not “there.” It is, instead, precisely only thinkable as that which disrupts the self enclosure of the symbolic order, but that is not to say that the Real is nothing. Instead, the Real is what remains as “it” effects the disruption of the self enclosure of the symbolic. It is there only in its effects, one of which Derrida emphasizes in Specters of Marx as the disjoining of time that keeps open the future. Indeed, Edelman’s mistake is to frame the real as “impossible,” because the very notion of the impossible is a symbolic one and the Real remains forever other to the symbolic. In other words, if the Real is beyond the knowable then we can never know what is impossible. The future is a promise and not a narrative precisely because the other remains other to all historical attempts to capture what is beyond. To quote Derrida: It was then a matter of thinking another historicity — not a new history and still less a “new historicism,” but another opening of eventness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems and insist on it, moreover, as the very indestructibility of the “it is necessary.” This is the condition of a repoliticization, perhaps of another concept of the political. This future, as promise to come, is exactly what cannot be narrated because there can be no end that encloses the story. And, moreover, this future has nothing to do with heteronormativity, fantasies of imaginary children, or narcissistic self projection. Or, in other words, since the future is not “there” any more than the Real, it cannot be “fucked.” 18 Edelman’s relentless struggle to keep us safe from the emancipatory desire ironically keeps us captured in the jouissance of the Other, here positioned as the inevitability of capitalism, which hangs onto us even as we buy our next sex toy. The future to come remains forever other because the dead can never be put in their place, and they incessantly return to issue demands upon us in the present. For Derrida, the heterogeneity of the Real, or of any event, is precisely that it is an ineffaceable trace. This is why deconstruction, for Derrida, is justice, precisely in that it endlessly moves through the disjoining of time to keep open a place for the other to come. Again to quote Derrida: This necessary disjointure, the de-totalizing condition of justice, is indeed here that of the present — and by the same token the very condition of the present and of the presence of the present. This is where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructible justice, the undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction, to be sure, but a condition that is itself in deconstruction and remains, and must remain (that is the injunction) in the disjointure of the UnFug. Edelman would be wise to remember why the future to come matters to us. Indeed as Derrida urgently reminds us, “Without the opening of this possibility, there remains, perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. A necessity that would not (even) be a fated one.” And for Edelman, it seems that queer theory is indeed fated by the necessity of the worst in its purported identification with the death drive. The dead, or more specifically, the specter, is for Derrida the thing that is no-thing in this world. And yet it is there as a spectral asymmetry, which as Derrida writes, “desynchronizes,” in the sense that it confronts us with what is other and remains an unmasterable disproportion. What Derrida names a “hauntology” is precisely what forces us to be turned toward the dead as the other who calls to us and at the same time disjoins the present so that what we inherit is also a promise to the future, not of the Child, but of the ghost. Thus the future, for Derrida, is our inheritance, not our children’s. And it is what always turns us to the other, and in that sense, the nonnarratable. This is a completely different understanding of death, the future, and inheritance than the one offered by Edelman in his insistence that queerness demands an identification with the death drive as that which rejects futurity in a destructive embrace of jouissance in the present. Indeed, even Lacan asserted that any “will to destruction” in the death drive fundamentally coexists with a “will for an Otherthing [Autrechose].” It is by recognizing that both the symbolic and the narrative structures of history are fantasies that we might open ourselves to a future beyond — one that is indeed unknowable, but one that is ours to inherit.