The alternative is the end of the world---rupturing and voiding reality is key for queer liberation.

[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

Two subjects, then, two versions of desire, and two readings of the good collide here. The queerness of non-self-identity that de Man discussed in relation to theory colors life at its “edge,” pleasure at its “outer extremity,” and “desire” in its “radical” form. The order of reality, unable to acknowledge the Real as its own self-resistance, as the structurally generated impediment to that order’s totalization, displaces it onto placeholders of negativity instead, onto figures constrained to embody the voiding, the derealization of “what is.” Such figures are treated as contingent evils in a given situation, but they speak to the radical evil inseparable from Symbolic structuration: the radical evil of the death drive inhabiting the archive for Derrida and the very notion of order for Freud. Ironically, given his exclusion of jouissance from participation in a truth-procedure, it is Badiou’s words describing “the event as such” that best characterize such figures of queerness: “a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing.”45 Catachrestic figurations of queerness share these attributes with the event because they, like it, make present in a world what otherwise counts as nothing. By turning the zero into a one, by positivizing the queerness of ab-sens, these various figures—“the Black,” “the queer,” “the woman,” “the trans* person,” “the terrorist,” inter alia—make possible a (mis)representation of what has no being to represent. They stand in for what displaces the world as given, for what undoes that world in much the same way that an event “compels . . . a new way of being” through a “rupture, an overturning.”46 In each case the act of nomination aims, like Blackness as Frank Wilderson unpacks it, to destroy the world, not just to change it. “Truth forces knowledges,” Badiou writes in Ethics; “the verb to force indicates that since the power of a truth is that of a break, it is by violating established and circulating knowledges that a truth returns to the immediacy [l’immédiat] of the situation, or reworks that sort of portable encyclopedia from which opinions, communications and sociality draw their meaning” (70). Such a “break,” like Lacan’s “irreversible division,” posits truth as the negativity expressed in the internal division of truth itself between the cut of division (“castration”), which is “what truth hides,” and the agency hiding that cut. Bruno Bosteels—challenging the Badiou whose Ethics preserves the unnameable to ward off the evil, the “disaster,” that would follow from its being forced (a position, Bosteels notes, that marks a change from Badiou’s stance in The Theory of the Subject)—underscores a threat this preservation poses to Badiou’s philosophy: the risk “that the unnameable operates only as a kind of point in reserve, from which perspective any subjective procedure of truth could be read as always involving a disaster. . . . [T]he unnameable, instead of mapping an internal limit of an effective procedure of truth, would then block the very possibility of an effective regime of fidelity to any event whatsoever. . . . Indeed, does assuming the unnameable in order to stop evil not mean proposing an insuperable limit to all generic thinking of truth?”47 As this suggests, any requirement to maintain an unnameable (as a “point in reserve”) must impose in advance a rule on the event whose evental status consists precisely in its breaking from the rule of what is. It must assume, within the framework of a given situation, the ability to put a “limit” on the very truth that would transform it. For just this reason, as Badiou himself would subsequently observe, the imperative to preserve an unnameable impinges on the disorganization that a truth-procedure necessarily effects. A decade after his Ethics was published, Badiou declared in an interview: I have publicly renounced the theory of the unnamable, as presented in Ethics. I may very well renounce the use of the term “ethics,” since it has so many countermeanings. . . . I have already asserted, of course, that there is no general ethics, but only ethics in situation, ethics tied to the singular truth-procedures. One has to go even further in that direction. Forcing the right decision regarding a point is the only form of duty we can recognize. The imperative of truths is greater than any other. And I’m inclined to believe that we cannot oppose any formal limits to it.48