We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws—even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being. [7]

The book represents a rigorous attempt to think at once generatively and against tropes of generation, to work at once in irony and in earnest to demonstrate the political’s material dependence on Symbolic homo-logy.” — Carolyn Denver , Victorian Studies The interruption of the patterns of imagined significance through which everyday life had been interpreted is a kind of death—and, for many thinkers, the beginning of serious thinking. In her “Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy” (1970) Hannah Arendt argues that nearly the entire philosophical tradition has been “in love with death” in this sense. Since Plato, she claims, philosophers have encouraged us to withdraw from the realm of ordinary preoccupations into a new kind of life that resembles death: a private, un-social way of living founded on an insight into the nullity of common human endeavor. From the perspective of the social world, in which personal projects are oriented towards achieving recognition and participating in a common future, philosophers are ambient corpses. Arendt defines herself in opposition to this tradition. She suggests that philosophy’s orientation to death makes it a danger to politics in general and to democracy in particular. Democracy, she claims, depends on a temporal pact (a social contract for time) by which the past can be remembered in the future, and through which the future remains open to novel, and therefore memorable, collective action. Suzanne Barnard, “The Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 173. that life, despite Hitler, goes on, there will always be children.... But then, still as an argument for the inclusion of the “Children’s Songs” in the Poems from Exile, something else asserted itself, which Brecht expressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he seldom shows. “In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That is why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the mother’s womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the children.” While he spoke I felt a force acting on me that was equal to that of fascism; I mean a power that has its source no less deep in history than fascism. [195]Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 326. So, for example, when P. D. James, in her novel The Children of Men, imagines a future in which the human race has suffered a seemingly absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce, her narrator, Theodore Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century democracies—“Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children,” he declares—but also gives voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity: “Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live,” he later observes, “all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” [12] While this allusion to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” may recall another of its well-known lines, one for which we apparently have Eliot’s Wife, Vivian, to thank—“What you get married for if you don’t want children?”—it also brings out the function of the child as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged, after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when he comes upon it in nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and senses.” For the “pathetic” quality he projectively locates in non-generative sexual enjoyment—enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological—exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical to those for which enjoyment without “hope of posterity” is peremptorily dismissed: legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-procreative ideology: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” [13] If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.

But the sinthomosexual won't promise any transcendence or grant us a vision of something to come. In breaking our hold on the future, the sinthomosexual, himself neither martyr nor proponent of martyrdom for the sake of the cause, forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms." (101) Aquello que en una sociedad existe como pura negatividad queda, finalmente, fuera de la vida. Por eso Edelman llama a identificarse con la pulsión de muerte. No sorprende que el libro sea de 2004: la crisis del SIDA es lo suficientemente cercana y lo suficuentemente lejana. Y, en un punto, ¿no expresa ella el Acontecimiento edelmaniano por antonomasia: la homosexualidad convertida en masas de cadáveres demostrando la imposibilidad de la Sociedad como todo articulado, sin resto?Edelman is married to critic and fellow English professor Joseph Litvak. [ citation needed] Bibliography [ edit ] Books [ edit ] Before following Berlant to ask how—or whether—democracy can overcome the present crisis by generating new fantasies of the future, it seems critical to look fantasy over with a more skeptical eye. Berlant suggests that our trouble with fantasy comes from there being, sometimes, a mismatch between the particular fantasies that give coherence, meaning and direction to our lives, and the real conditions necessary for our flourishing. However, it might be the case that fantasy as such is “cruel,” and that the real “good life” is one lived in detachment from, or opposition to, the circuits of fantasy that constitute democracy. The parallels to Macbeth are fairly obvious – here we have a king (in a monarchal system not based solely on hereditary privilege) facing his possible succession. So attached is he to his position of power, he counter-logically exterminates his own subjects, thereby killing individuals but also attempting to kill a future in which he is irrelevant. The irony of course is that with every individual subject he offs, he lessens his own power because his kingdom (and its (future) vitality) shrinks, and his political position becomes no more secure.

See Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184–199. Walter Wangerin Jr., “O Brave New World, That Has No People In’t! The Children of Men,” New York Times Book Review, 28 March 1993, 23.

At the library

Both Smith and Edelman accept that the way of life they seek to promote (philosophy or queerness) can only ever be lived out by a minority (who are, implicitly, ethically superior). The majority of people, each seem to assume, will go along unthinkingly attached to the fantasies that lead them to reproduce social structures that make them miserable. The majority, it seems, is unable to recognize the value of a lifestyle that renounces or at least reigns in the imagination. From the perspective of the philosopher or queer, the work of reproducing the present into the future is always being done by someone else. People have children, enforce social norms, identify with future selves and collective values—all quite automatically—driven by the force of fantasy. That a handful of enlightened individuals choose to opt out of this process in no way threatens its functioning, although queers and philosophers, of course, sometimes do find themselves persecuted. Nevertheless, they neither can, nor would, choose to extend to everyone else the liberation from socially-necessary fictions that is their personal distinction. But Cruel Optimism ends on an unexpectedly up-beat note. Drawing on thinkers like David Graeber and Jacques Rancière, Berlant argues that the “experience of democracy” is that of “being in the middle of the bedlam of world-making… a dense sensual activity of performative belonging.” But she notes that this “hope” for getting out of “the impasse of the present” depends on our generating new fantasies about the future to replace the “good-life fantasies” that are breaking down. We need “optimistic projections of a world that is worth our attachment to it.”