Their attempt to solidify queerness with an identitarian frame reveals the desire for ontological capture and destruction

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen

Thinking alongside Antonio Viego, whose important book, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies, he cites at the end of the following quotation, Benedicto voices “a sense of wariness about how the disavowal of the urge to dissolution—an urge that would indeed attest to a universal condition of loss—runs the risk of conjuring, explicitly or implicitly, the queer of color as a figure unfractured by any death instinct, and in turn of repeating, if only by leaving them unremarked, ‘the themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency . . . (that) provide racist discourse with precisely the notion of subjectivity that it needs in order to function most effectively.’”41 Proceeding to consider “the relationship of homosexuality to death,” Benedicto acknowledges, like Eric Stanley and Calvin Warren, that “the threat of literalization [the literalization of homosexuality as a figure of the self ’s annihilation] . . . does not fall on all equally.”42 Writing about Luka Magnotta, who “murdered, dismembered, and decapitated Jun Lin, a Chinese international student whom he allegedly met on Craigslist, and on whose butchered body he performed acts of necrophilia and cannibalism,” Benedicto compellingly theorizes Lin’s “forced racial migration” by Magnotta from “benign invisibility” to “the nonontological place of those whose lives do not matter, the site of blackness.”43 In this context Benedicto asks, “What . . . might prompt Magnotta’s racism other than the fear of seeing, mirrored back at him, reflected in the other’s skin, the condition of nonbeing that is, by virtue of his [i.e., Lin’s] queerness, also necessarily his [i.e., Magnotta’s]?”44 Lin’s racialized Asian body comes to figure the Black body’s racial construction as the catachresis of Blackness itself, as an ontological negation conceivable only by (mis)taking that catachresis for a literal (id)entity: the Black, whose body can thereby signify, in its apparent legibility, nonbeing. At the same time, as Benedicto implies, Lin’s figural “blackness” (borrowed from the equally figural Blackness of those who are culturally literalized as Black) serves to figure, for Magnotta, a queerness that is equally catachrestic and equally literalized in whomever a culture designates as queer. This literalization of catachresis, which turns nonbeing into identity, repeats, of course, the zero’s sublimation into a one. It also shapes the (mis)readings of No Future by Ruti, Coffman, and Cole, all of whom base their arguments on misleading literalizations. Ruti’s contention that No Future advocates “selfdissolution,” for example—despite the book’s repeated assertion that those a culture reads as queer are always “Symbolic subjects consigned to figure the Symbolic’s undoing” (emphasis mine)—finds its counterpart in Coffman’s claim that No Future refuses “politics, futurity, and the symbolic order.”45 Cole then reminds us that such an escape from the Symbolic is impossible: “The real, contrary to Edelman’s claim, is not a place that queers or anyone else could occupy.”46 No Future, however, makes no such claim; instead, it makes the very point that Cole adduces against it: “The figural burden of queerness . . . is that of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with jouissance) always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core[.] Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves; but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures . . . for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within.”47 Each of these critics thus literalizes what No Future describes as figural. By discrediting the straw men they conjure, Ruti, Coffman, and Cole obscure the antagonism that follows from Symbolic division and defend a progressive politics founded, like politics tout court, on the literalization of identities (national, racial, sexed, etc.) essential to the political fantasy “that knowledge could produce a totality.” Such literalizations, insofar as they posit a figural designation as literal, conform to the figural logic that is always, in its essence, a form of misnaming. To say this is not to reify the distinction between the literal and the figurative, but to show that those literalizations themselves aspire to such reification. Inseparable from every politics and therefore mobilized by the right and the left alike, they function as catachrestic identities (the Black, the woman, the alien, the queer) to give local habitation and a name to what, as nonbeing, undoes identity. We might call them, therefore, id-entities: entities, ones, created to embody the libidinal danger of the id’s resistance to the conscious subject’s “being”; entities called into being to be excluded as manifestations of nonbeing. The right repeats this ontological exclusion (which pertains to impossibility) in the form of a social exclusion (which pertains to prohibition). It generates for itself the enjoyment of exclusion by excluding embodiments of enjoyment from the social totality it promotes. The left, pursuing a different path toward the goal of totalization, normalizes the social identities of those produced to embody “nothing”—affirming the positivization that turns the zero into one—as part of an inclusive community whose coherence, in this like its right-wing counterpart’s, excludes the zero of jouissance it rests on nonetheless. Whatever figures that jouissance (the racist, the fascist, the homophobe) persists as a threat to community. To put this somewhat differently: politics functions allegorically, turning the social relations among persons into relations among types of persons (citizen and noncitizen, for example), some of whom come to stand in for the undoing of personhood as such. Once literalized, these identities permit us to know and to regulate a social body whose totality requires the exclusion of those id-entities that materialize ab-sens.48 As Judith Butler observes, “The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as [Michel] Foucault makes plain, a question of power.”49 Allegory, as the figure of the knowledge achieved by negating, through narrative sequence, irony’s negation of determinate sense, expresses, as Walter Benjamin writes, “the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in a harem of objects.”50 In its “voluptuous” display of power, allegory conjures the meaningfulness that irony empties out, proposing, through the temporal movement between past and present, between then and now, the possibility of arriving at knowledge, or, in Benjamin’s phrase, at “the ‘opening of the eyes.’”51 Insofar as it positivizes irony, though, by resolving it into sense, allegory itself is a figure of the irony it means to sublimate. Paul de Man expresses this cryptically: “To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory (as sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero) is to say something that is true enough but not intelligible.”52