Edelman’s understanding of “The Child” as a point of rejection is both fantasmic and conservative in nature – it’s a misrepresentation of Lacanian theory, and is contingent on an erotophobic understanding of the final frontier of antinormativity.

I introduce metapsychology as a new analytic that zeroes in on the underlying psychological assumptions inherent in queer conceptualizations of desire, sexuality, sex, and subjectivity. By analyzing the uninterrogated psychological conventions that subtend the field’s most established critical formulations, my essay questions the presumptive radicalism of avowedly “negative” or “antinormative” theorizations. Focusing on the contentious and influential insistence that “true” queerness demands a rejection of the child, the essay examines the kinds of normative psychological assumptions this argument reproduces. I draw on Jean Laplanche’s theorization of the adult-infant relationship to problematize the easy, and by now kneejerk, association of the child with heteronormative sexuality. Although the critique of the child largely derives its psychological legitimacy from applications of Lacan, a close reading of the metapsychology underpinning these claims will demonstrate that the popular formulation, Child=Social and (therefore) Queer Subject=anti-Child, fundamentally misreads Lacan’s complex model of the relationship of the “Other” to “desire.” To further particularize the role of the child in these formulations, this chapter shows that central to Laplanche’s critique of Lacan is the claim that grasping the child in material (rather than strictly linguistic) terms, provides a necessary prerequisite for establishing the realism of unconscious sexuality. For Queer Studies, this Laplanchian critique of Lacan will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and allegedly extreme denouncing the child may seem, the attack on the figurative or hypothetical child does more to defend and perpetuate erotophobia than to challenge or undo it. Part II The total conflation of radical critique with antinormativity is an essential feature of No Future’s rhetorical strategy. This is unsurprising since Edelman’s argument declares that only the resistance to normativity as extreme as the one he’s suggesting qualifies as actually, “truly” radical. Using “queerness” as a synonym for truth, Edelman contends that “truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the ‘aberrant or atypical,’ to what chafes against ‘normalization,’ finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good … its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.”20 Aligning queerness with truth on one side and the “general good” of “generalization” and “the social itself” on the other, Edelman establishes the groundwork for coding any opposition to his “opposition” as necessarily sentimental, lazy, or weak-willed. In their performative conversation, Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant resists having her attachment to “repair” characterized by Edelman as a “fantasy of making a big picture of a repaired world of happy lovers, adequate storytellers, and properly recognized beings,”21 but even as she issues this plea for a different dialogic ethics, her demand to have the rigor of her negativity recognized as such betrays the development of an exchange where her every attempt to theorize reparative possibilities is met with Edelman’s insistence that her “hopefulness” or belief in a “scene” is unwarranted, misplaced, fantasmatic, and psychologically and politically naïve. When Berlant diagnoses the problem with Edelman’s argumentative tactics, she suggests that, “maybe you believe less in the structural generativity of this worlding work than I do; I don’t know. I do know that central to my own approach to this conversation has been not to take on many of your challenges directly in order not endlessly to dig into your positions under the fantasy that in so doing either one of us will persuade the other.”22 Interpreting their impasse to result from Edelman’s “bad faith” argumentation, Berlant accuses Edelman of relational unkindness as though his critical responses are technically accurate and only their deployment, in this conversation with her, are unfair and misguided. What goes entirely unnoticed in this exchange, or to my mind in any of the criticisms leveled at No Future, is that the force of Edelman’s authority as a “radical” critic derives from his privileged position in relation to subjectivity’s structural “truth.” Against every other theorist’s sentimental aspirations for a “better life,” Edelman begins by asserting that, “negativity, in my view, speaks to the fact that life, in some sense, doesn’t ‘work,’ is structurally inimical to happiness, stability or regulated functioning.”23 A few pages into No Future, a similar repetition of the word “structure” organizes the momentum of Edelman’s claims: “queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them.”24 Here, as throughout Edelman’s text, he refers to “structures” and “logics” of subjectivity/sociality as established, ontological “fact[s]” as if his use of these terms was not an application of theory developed in metapsychology and extended to literary queer theory. Using Lacan to furnish a literary-political vocabulary for his own argument about the inherent social-psychic negativity of queerness, Edelman repeatedly insists on the “structural” foundation of his claims, as though his position is the only theoretically rigorous scenario for subjectivity (as Lacan has defined it). However, what this angle obscures is the fantasy underlying it: of a neutral, pure, unmediated “theory” that he, as a brave and careful close reader, is faithfully extrapolating from. Once the object of his inquiry is nothing less than human “drives” themselves, and drives behave “structurally” and “negativity” is “structural,” then any conclusion that does not resemble his own betrays its own fantasmatic investments. Therefore, in order to project the naturalness of his own interpretation, and to disclaim its interpretive nature, Edelman’s rhetorical strategy systematically occludes the manifold leaps and moves he makes in order to link “queerness,” “sexuality,” “negativity,” and “sociality” in the particular way that he has. In spite of deconstruction’s lessons about the constructedness of every binary, No Future, apparently un-self-consciously, positions the “truth” of queerness on the “bad” (=good) side of the drive and against the “good” (=bad) side of the “social.” This application of structuralism (as a study of relations) to sexual politics in order to advance what it is calling desire’s structural, transcendental truth, enables Edelman to offer a “truly hopeless wager”— by positioning himself as the courageous messenger of this unavoidable “truth”— that insists on “taking the Symbolic’s negativity to the very letter of the law,” a proposition which seems again to suggest that his application of Lacan is in fact really only a dutiful “close reading” of the “very letter of the law.” But this insistence that No Future is only the natural outcome of accepting the structural truth of sociality and sex obscures the endless analogies, applications, and category errors that Edelman’s argument depends upon for its smooth rhythm as a polemic where truth is defined as the “truly hopeless” extrapolation of ontological “facts.”25 For example, in Edelman’s text the following argumentative structures recur: “truth like queerness,” “queer theory as the other side of politics,” politics “like the network of signifying relations that forms the Lacanian Symbolic,” politics as the name for “the space in which Imaginary relations … compete for Symbolic fulfillment,” politics as that which “conforms to the temporality of desire,” “death drive names the queer,” “death drive marks the excess embedded within the Symbolic,” “future” as that which “marks the impossible place of an Imaginary past,” and “the Child” as having “come to embody for us the telos of the social order.”26 To understand how Edelman—a critic so well-versed in deconstruction—could reproduce the very fantasy of absolute legibility that those interpretive techniques were intended to dismantle is to consider how for Jacques Derrida, the metaphysics of presence was not an intellectual faw that could have been avoided by a more rigorous thinker but rather a feature of thought itself. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, “the privilege of phone does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy … The system of ‘hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak’ through the phonic substance – which presents itself as the non-exterior, non-mundane, therefore non-empirical or non-contingent signifer—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch.”27 If deconstruction is not another doxa but instead a method of reading it is because “self-presence” is not a voluntaristic choice but an effect of how thinking functions in relation to symbolization.28 More locally, and returning to the status of critique in antinormative thought and No Future specifically, this essay is interested in how the Child—as the normative exemplar par excellence—not only stabilizes a series of incoherent interpretive claims as structural facts, but also points to a limitation in how the child—as a psychological position—is conceived in prevailing psychoanalytic thought. Whereas the critical viability of No Future hinges on Edelman’s distinction of “actual children” from the “Child as figure,” this chapter is interested in understanding the child as a particular relation to time and sexuality that is categorically distinguishable from other/adult developmental moments. In this context, the ostensible extremism of Edelman’s call to “fuck the future” reveals itself to be both utopian and misguided to the extent it mistakes his own fantasy of the child for an assault on the “figure of the Child.” Therefore, rather than decrying No Future’s self-proclaimed radical message, this essay will show that telling the child to “fuck off”29—while irresistibly cathartic and empowering—is actually conservative, traditional, and uncritical in both its content and its theoretical approach. Although Edelman’s argument expects, even depends upon, the reader’s offended objections, a deep engagement with Laplanche’s re-examination of the child within the psychoanalytic paradigm contests No Future’s linking of any opposition to its own oppositionality with a pious defense of the reproductive future and demonstrates instead that if saying “fuck you” to the child seems in any way radical it is because of how insufficiently and superficially the dominant model of subjectivity construes the role of childhood in “adult” sexuality. From the perspective of this essay, Edelman’s absolute reduction of all identifcatory positions to either “with or against” the Child misrepresents as the final frontier of antinormative thought a relation to sexuality that is actually pre-critical, and ultimately erotophobic.