Queer pessimism and refusal opens up new ways of thinking which challenges the dominant narrative of futurity.

In his polemic book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman challenges the politics of “reproductive futurism” and calls for a queer ethics that embraces the future-negating stance as which queer identity has been positioned within the heteronormative, future-positive order: “That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic benefciary of every political intervention.”7 Cultural and political order, Edelman argues, thus always anticipates “the Child as the image of the future it intends”.8 Choosing not to have children or failing to reproduce or to live a life in which sexuality is not ordered according to a heteronormative reproductive regime thus becomes synonymous with the negation of the future. Thus, “queerness names the side of those not ‘fghting for the children’, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confrms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”9 In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed builds on Edelman’s thesis and interprets Alfonso Cuarón’s flm adaptation of P.  D. James’ novel Children of Men (2006) as a flm through which reproduction as the ideal of the promise of happy futures can be interrogated. The flm envisions a dystopic future in which humanity is struggling with the disastrous effects of climate catastrophe, refugee crises and human infertility. No new human has been born for two decades, and most people have succumbed to fatalism, numbness and despair. News of the fatal stabbing of the youngest person on Earth—tellingly referred to as “Baby Diago” despite Diago having been 18 years old at the time of his death—is met with collective shock and grief: “no future means no children”.10 For Ahmed, the flm offers ways to think about the future and hope in political struggle. Drawing on Edelman, she points out that Edelman’s “inhabiting the negative” offers possibilities which, seemingly paradoxically, can be hopeful and optimistic. Queer pessimism, Ahmed points out, “matters as a pessimism about a certain kind of optimism, as a refusal to be optimistic about ‘the right things’ in the right kind of way”.11 Much like the political pessimism of the intellect promoted by Adorno and Horkheimer, then, queer pessimism as outlined by Ahmed is not a default mode but a mode of critique which helps to challenge hegemonic forms of acceptable affect and attitude. Consequently, Ahmed objects to pessimistic attitudes as “a matter of principle”, which in turn might “risk being optimistic about. What particularly interests me here in Ahmed’s argument for a queer pessimism is what she calls “alien affect”.13 In the context of a politics which rests on refusing to be content with what is and on putting faith in the possibilities for a better world, queer pessimism as a negation of hegemonic forms of affrmation and as an “alien affect” can become a way to rethink the present. Queer pessimism as alien affect is the expression of a refusal to feel the “right” kind of emotions about the “right” kind of things—it is, as Ahmed says, a “being for being against”.14 Coming back to Edelman, queer pessimism as alien affect can become a queer opposition to a narrative of hope which “would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism”.15 Queer pessimism’s refusal to affrm this narrative of hope and futurity opens up new ways of thinking the future by challenging the “structuring optimism of politics”.16 It can question and refuse the politics of the “temporalization of desire”, its “translation into a narrative”17 that demands drives and desires to be in the service of socially meaningful teleological structures which culminate in the “pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value”.18 The queer-pessimistic opposition to this notion of the Child as universal futurity, and therefore the demand of every desire to be aimed at the realisation of this normative vision of futurity, is thus an “appropriately perverse refusal” in that it “will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane”.19 Such a mode of opposition is “perverse” because its articulation of the unthinkable poses a scandal in a world dominated by the “compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism”.20 In a world which demands the sameness of sexual and heteronormative desire—a desire which always must serve a purpose for the future—such a “perverse” opposition registers as deviant. Consequently, Edelman provocatively champions the death drive as a queer mode of affrming the being against and thus appropriates the (mis)use of Freudian terminology in homophobic discourse in a gesture of subversive affrmation. Its pessimism is only truly pessimistic for those who buy into the dominant narrative of futurity. Its epistemological and ethical value, then, lies precisely in its potential for becoming a mode of critique which refuses to accept dominant narratives of the human future. Here, queer-pessimist futurity is close to Schopenhauer’s thinking about time and futurity