Anxieties of a Queer Future:

Signification Anxiety II
Rowan G. Tepper

Signification Anxiety reaches far beyond the Symbolic. One might conceive of it as the motor that

drives contemporary politics, as that which fuels a certain messianic current in political and cultural

discourse. It manifests itself in an anxiety over the future that is to come, and thus structures our history. It

is absolutely no wonder, with the emergence of issues such as Same-Sex Marriage into mainstream

political discourse, that the rhetoric of right-wing religious political opposition has become very frequently

apocalyptic; Mario Felt neatly summarizes one example “citizens whose sexuality is inherently non-

reproductive cause the death, or at least the degeneration of the body politic.” 1 And thus in the figural logic

of the religious right, the queer comes to signify a force of destruction within society, bent on the death of

the social order; the appearance of the queer heralds the end of human history. By virtue (or vice) of an

historical accident, a cabal came to power for whom this figural logic was well suited: although an

ostensibly secular ideology, neoconservatism, through its philosophical pedigree 2, shares a messianic

character with the religious right-wing and thus found a perfectly well suited ally. An article by John Gray,

published two years ago contains some relevant insights:

For contemporary neo-conservatives just as much as for medieval millenarians, the world is the scene of
a vast conflict between good and evil. Neo-conservatives share this apocalyptic worldview with Americ-
an Christian fundamentalists, many of whom expect Armageddon to break out via a conflagration in the
Middle East, but nowadays the apocalyptic mentality does not normally show itself so overtly. 3

Why this apocalyptic sentiment? Why a president who claims to do the will of God? Why do queerness and

sexuality figure so prominently in the political logic of the right? Why is it, Gray continues, that

neoconservatism “replicated a different aspect of Christian belief – the apocalyptic view of history?” And

why is it that,.”wrenching it from its context of faith, they have looked to politics for salvation?” 4

1 Mario Felt Extinction Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage and Modes of Citizenship

2 Neoconservative thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama were either students or readers of Leo Strauss, who was himself a
student of Alexandre Kojeve, who first popularized the idea of “the end of history” in his lectures on Hegel in Paris
during the 1930's
3 John Gray, The Tablet, January 17th, 2004
4 Ibid
 The question becomes more urgent when it becomes apparent that queer opposition has hardly

escaped from apocalyptic rhetoric; apropos of Same Sex marriage (an issue upon which I will not dwell),

Felt writes that the “logic of pure resistance, of queer exteriority, makes it impossible to think of same-sex

marriage in other than apocalyptic terms. Unexamined anxieties about mortality raise the stakes in the

debate on same-sex marriage. Explaining what sustains apocalyptic interpretations of same-sex marriage

could contribute to an appreciation of a pluralized approach to community and equality.” 5 Lee Edelman's

polemic No Future is a quintessential work of this sort of queer resistance. But again, it is little coincidence

that there is at least rhetorical complicity between such antipodes, for intellectual history makes for

monstrous in-laws6. To a certain extent he does acknowledge a kinship of sorts, but in my view

inadequately:

We, the sinthomosexuals who figure the death drive of the social, must accept that we will be vilified as
the agents of that threat. But 'they,' the defenders of futurity... are themselves, however unknowingly, its
secret agents too, reacting, in the name of the future, in the name of humanity, in the name of life, to the
threat of the death drive we figure with the violent rush of a jouissance, which only returns them, ironic -
ally, to the death drive in spite of themselves. Futurism makes sinthomosexuals, not humans, of us all.7

But to the extent that the apocalyptic rhetoric of the right is taken seriously; to the extent that 'they' are not

necessarily defenders of futurity; what then are we to make of Edelman's condemnation of futurism and,

with it, his rhetoric of refusing the future? Moreover, what of his opposition to politics and rejection of

history? Might his polemical position respond to the same anxiety, responding a conservatism of the ego of

his own. But let us first examine his conception of politics and futurism.

It is through language and signification that temporal events may become historical; unintelligible

or insignificant events pass by without ever amounting to an historical footnote. Operating in this register,

politics serves to bring us into history as subjects insofar as it constitutes a matrix of intelligibility for social

reality. Through language, signification and politics, we come to speak about, signify and determine, not

5 Felt
6 Edelman's most prominent theoretical influence is obviously Jacques Lacan; Lacan attended Kojeve's Hegel lectures,
and the influence is evident in his reading and use of the Master/Slave dialectic
7 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pg 153
only past and present events, but those yet to come. Inasmuch as the subject's identity is inscribed as a

history, this subject is immersed in the social existence made possible by

politics... [serving] as the framework within which we experience social reality, but only insofar as it
compels us to experience that reality in the form of a fantasy: the fantasy, precisely of form as such, of
an order, an organization, that assures the stability of our identities as subjects and the coherence of the
Imaginary totalizations through which those identities appear to us in recognizable form. 8

Thus, Edelman characterizes politics as homologous to the Lacanian Symbolic order. In fact, insofar as

politics operates on a primarily linguistic register, politics constitutes the structuring of the Symbolic,

through which, as Frederic Jameson writes, “the Imaginary itself is assumed into the Symbolic Order by

way of its alienation by language itself.” 9 This assumption of an Imaginary past organizes, orders, and

closes its signifying system.10 The closure effected by fantasy promises meaning, stability and order – at any

price – while, at the same time, extorting allegiance to the governing fantasy, under the threat of social and

political ostracism. Further fleshing out his conception of the political, Edelman writes at an earlier

juncture, that:

Politics names the social enactment of the subject's attempt to establish the conditions for this im -
possible consolidation [of self-identity] by identifying with something outside itself in order to enter the
presence, deferred perpetually, of itself. Politics, that is, names the struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality
in which the subject's alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the endpoint of the endless chain of signifi -
ers lived as history.11

Politics, in Edelman's view would seem to attempt to naturalize linguistic existence, to render the Symbolic

as fully structured as possible. And thus, in an impossible task, politics endeavors to “screen out the

emptiness that the signifier embeds at the core of the Symbolic,” 12 that is, the signifier's perpetual deferral

and non-coincidence with itself.

Politics is therefore the struggle, by means of fantasy and ideology, to realize and establish a final

signifier and bring history to an end, to make history and time comprehensible. Politics serves to produce a

solid foundation, an endless future in which nothing would change, which would serve to consolidate and

8 Lee Edelman, pg11

9 Frederic Jameson The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1, pg 87
10 In the previously cited essay, Jameson notes that structuration by the Imaginary almost universally takes the form of
binary oppositions.
11 Edelman, pg 11, my emphasis
12 Ibid, pg 8
fix identities for all time. Politics thus comes to fulfill Joseph Goebbels' famous definition, being the “art

of making the impossible possible.” 13 Fortunately this is only possible by virtue of a fantasized end.

Unfortunately these fantasies are so believable and seductive that their fantastic natures are readily

forgotten; they soon come to figure either a messianic promise or a fait accompli. However, their fantastic

natures are belied by the interchangeability of particular ideologies and fantasmatic signifiers because they

occupy a structural position that is integral to politics as such.

Reproductive futurism, with its figural representative, the Child, Edelman argues, has been the

most politically efficacious tactic by means of which to command power and preserve the dominant social

order. Moreover, and I add emphasis in this citation, this tactic permeates political discourse, across vast

ideological gulfs:

Futurism thus generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the
end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition
– or to assure a logic of resemblance (more precisely: a logic of metaphoricity) in the service of repres-
entation and, by extension, of desire... futurism – the substrate of politics – encrypts within every political faction a
sort of nonpartisan conservatism, a will to preserve identity... But it does so beneath the banner of openness to
the difference of the Other, ignoring the fact that it values such difference only to overcome it, to realize
the regressive fantasy to which all futurism clings: the Imaginary vision of whatever it is that we (think
that we) desire.14

Moreover, this linear, sequential narrative is what constitutes history, and if we read closely the final

sentence, we find a trace of the Hegelian philosophy of history, for if politics “values such difference only

to overcome it, to realize... the Imaginary version of whatever it is we desire,” 15 this means that political

history culminates in the sublation of all difference into a social order structured entirely by an Imaginary,

and imperturbable by the Real.

In short, Edelman argues that in contemporary politics, the figure of the Child has come to occupy

this structurally defined position of final signifier. It serves as a historical telos which would constitute a

guarantee of the survival and reproduction of the social order, while at the same time, as Imaginary, bring

coherence and stability to identity and meaning. The figure of the Child, Edelman continues, serves not

13 Cited in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York: Zone Books, 1999), pg 77
14 Edelman, pg 60
15 Ibid.
only to subordinate all politics to the “will to preserve identity,” but to perform that subordination in the

individual register, as a

...conservatism of the ego [that] compels the subject, whether liberal or conservative politically, to en-
dorse as the meaning of politics itself the reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality a fantasy
frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the Imaginary form of the Child. 16
Which is to say that the bare self-preservation of the ego in its calcified identity compels the subject to

affirm futurism in this form; the form in which the future merely reduplicates social reality in the name of

“the Child [which] has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one

for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”17 The figure of the Child thus signifies “the fetishistic

fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is

central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.18

What is troubling in Edelman's condemnation of reproductive futurism is that it assigns a role to

queer opposition to assert in the same breath “that the Child as futurity's emblem must die; that the future

is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past,” 19 and moreover, that he assigns an ethical value to this

mode of opposition when he writes: “This, I suggest is the ethical burden to which queerness must

accede... to inhabit the place of meaninglessness associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate,

and unregenerating, sexuality... rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism...” 20 This ethical

supplement is troubling, especially in light of Jameson's reading of Lacan, wherein he argues “that

Imaginary thought patterns persist into mature psychic life in the form of what are generally thought of as

ethical judgments... simply positional descriptions of the geographical relationship of the phenomenon in

question to my own Imaginary conception of centrality.” 21 Which is to say that insofar as Edelman is

asserting an ethical imperative, he has only incompletely freed himself from Imaginary structures and

oppositions. Consequently, we come to suspect that Edelman's assertion that “the future is mere repetition
16 Ibid. pg 14
17 Ibid, pg 11
18 Ibid, pg 21
19 Ibid, pg 31
20 Ibid, pg 47-8
21 Jameson, pg 95. In the same essay he writes: “We may further document the archaic or atavistic tendencies of ethical or
moralizing thought by observing that it has no place in the Symbolic Order, or in the structure of language itself, whose
shifters are positional and structurally incapable of supporting this kind of situational complicity with the subject
momentarily occupying them” pg 87
and just as lethal as the past” constitutes a mere reduction of futurity to a single model.

It is, moreover, little surprise that the future of reproductive futurism hardly qualifies as a future.

For if the future of reproductive futurism constitutes the unchanged and identical reproduction of extant

social reality, can this ideology be worthy of the title of 'futurism?' If the reply occasioned by this question

is in the negative, which I would insist is the only possibility, then the figure of the Child must be regarded

with greater suspicion. For such a future would of necessity be post-historical, that is, no future at all, for

there would be nothing left to come. In the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “Our time is no longer a time able to

feel and represent itself as a time making history, as a time producing the greatness of History as such. Our

time is conscious of itself as a nonhistorical time.... unable to open itself to any future, and unable to

determine any historical present.”22 Thus, if identification with the Child effects a subordination of the

present to eternal futurity, this means precisely that the future has been decisively closed off. It is in this

context that we may see that perhaps it is not “what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest

despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively – to insist that the future stop here,” 23 but rather, the

least queer. For it is one thing to undo “the identities through which we experience ourselves as subject,

insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already

foreclosed,”24 but to flatly refuse the future as such is entirely another. Moreover, if reproductive futurism

turns out to also refuse the future, then the political picture becomes more complex.

The Child thus appears as a ruse. There is no future to reproductive futurism, and the distinctness

of Edelman's opposition has been shown to harbor no less of an Imaginary component. And yet the

anxiety remains. Thus I can agree in principle to Edelman's assertion that “homosexuality is thought as a

threat to the logic of thought itself insofar as it figures the availability of an unthinkable jouissance that

would put an end to fantasy – and, with it, to futurity,” 25 with two caveats: that the indefinite article 'a' be

22 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, pg 145-6

23 Edelman, pg 31
24 Ibid, pg 25
25 Ibid, pg 39
inserted both between “to” and “fantasy” and between “to” and “futurity.” For there is indeed a futurity

against which one ought fight (even as much as that ought remains in question), and there is a fantasy

against which one ought fight. But Edelman errs insofar as he accedes to the simplicity of a binary

opposition between a “death drive” and “futurity.” To cite but one fault of the binary, death is always in

some way deferred and must come by way of the future; Nancy writes that death is born in us with sense

and, therefore: “Death is the absolute signified, the sealing off of sense. It is the name, but 'to be born' is the

verb. It is certainly neither false nor excessive to say that all production of sense – of a sense making sense

in this sense – is a deathwork.”26. Moreover, Edelman constructs another opposition between “meaning” and

“nonmeaning”, the Symbolic and the Real, and yet they are inextricably linked, for instance in the sinthome:

The sinthome... speaks to the singularity of the subject's existence, to the particular way each subject man-
ages to knot together the orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real... Though it functions as
the necessary condition for the subject's engagement of Symbolic reality, the sinthome refuses the Sym -
bolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers; it admits no translation of its singularity and there-
fore carries nothing of meaning...27

The registers of the Symbolic and the Real are thus not opposed in a binary fashion. If anything, the

sinthome serves as the permeable mediation that both establishes ones existence in the Symbolic Order as

well as defining one's access to jouissance. This is to say that, while meaningless in itself, the sinthome can

readily acquire meaning, in a process that Edelman denotes as “believing in” one's sinthome, in doing so, the

subject “disavow[s] the meaningless fiat of such a catachrestic sinthome, the subject misreads its identity as

a metaphor instead, one that names its relation to an Other whose positivity seems to guarantee Symbolic

reality itself..” Thus what was in itself meaningless can usurp the place governing meaning. And moreover,

in another philosophical view, this does not occur of necessity, for “joy, jouissance, to come, have the sense of

birth: the sense of the inexhaustible imminence of sense.” 28

And yet Edelman insists upon an identification with the death drive and sinthome as an integral

moment of a queer ethics, in the sense of figuring a resistance to the Symbolic Order. That is, in order to

induce an episode of Signification Anxiety within the Symbolic Order, one identifies with and unveils its

26 Nancy, pg 3
27 Edelman, pg 35
28 Nancy, pg 5
own death drive,

...a persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any
promise of a future. Instead, it insists both on and as the impossibility of Symbolic closure, the absence
of any Other to affirm the Symbolic order's truth, and hence the illusory status of meaning as defense
against the self-negating substance of jouissance.29

Indeed, demonstration of the impossibility of Symbolic closure by means of a master signifier would send

shudders throughout the Symbolic order; and, if it came to pass that all assurances were uprooted by these

means, this would bring an end to the deferred futurity at which No Future takes aim.

Again, we return to the problems of politics and history in our time. Edelman assiduously eschews

any political program, having already characterized politics as the process by which the Imaginary imparts

structures upon the Symbolic, forming social reality. Furthermore, politics bears an intimate relationship

with the constitution of history. He writes:

Politics... in opposing itself to the negativity of such a drive, gives us history as the continuous staging of
our dream of eventual self-realization by endlessly restructuring, in the mirror of desire, what we take to
be reality itself. 30

And if we recall a passage that was cited earlier, Edelman continues: “Politics, that is, names the struggle to

effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject's alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at

the endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history.”31 This is a completely faithful transposition into

Lacanian terms of Kojeve's thesis on the end of history! In politics, some arbitrary sign always holds the

place of the master signifier. Which is to say that, there is no conceptual difference between Edelman's

theory of history and politics and the Kojeve-inspired theories of history at its end. No wonder Edelman

disavows politics and history!32 But why the future with it? Because, if his belief in the end of history is

earnest, the future is indeed just as lethal as the past, for at every moment history has already ended. Toward

the end of No Future, Edelman writes of this history, citing De Man's essay on Walter Benjamin:

Such a history... “pertains strictly to the order of language,” whose “permanent disjunction” or determining lack effects

29 Edelman, pg 48
30 Edelman, pg 10
31 Ibid, pg 11
32 No wonder, considering that it was Francis Fukuyama who wrote in the WSJ Opinion Journal, October 2001, “We remain at
the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic
West.”
 the “illusion of a life' in response to the interminable movement toward the closure of meaning in the symbolic... “As
such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language... no knowledge about man, can be
derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really temporal either, because the
structure that animates it is not a temporal structure.”33

But this completely dodges the question of the end of history, as well as its practical political

consequences in contemporary society. To relegate history and politics entirely to the Symbolic Order is to

elide the necessity of opposing the concept of a completed history; for Jameson writes: “In terms of

language, we must distinguish between our own narrative of history... and the Real itself, which our

narratives can only approximate in asymptotic fashion and which 'resists symbolization absolutely.'” 34 This

is to say that despite claims otherwise, the Real obtrudes into History and changes it; and moreover, our

History, as a matter of fact, is not an isolated, discursive phenomenon, but a practice that has very real

effects.

This is to say that Edelman presupposes that history, at least in its Symbolic form, is always already

completed; consequently, the future is condemned to repeating the idealized Imaginary image of the past,

in such a way that all political programs “as political programs, are programmed to reify difference and thus to

secure in the form of the future, the order of the same.” 35 Thus politics, in the traditional sense, at the end

of history would be quintessentially conservative of the social order. However, there is another, more

disturbing face to this condition. Giorgio Agamben, whose work here develops from readings of Georges

Bataille and Michel Foucault, points to the change that was concealed behind the mask of reproductive

futurism, the change that may have incited the apocalyptic fear of queerness:

33 Ibid, pg 152
34 Jameson, pg 107
35 Edelman, pg 151
 Seen in this light, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century truly constitute the other face of the
Hegelo-Kojevian idea of the end of history: man has now reached his historical telos and, for a humanity
that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means
of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme
political (or rather impolitical) task. Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no
longer have any essence or identity – who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their
inactivity – and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a
task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks in the name of
the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well be -
ing seem to appear as humanity's last historical task – if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a 'task.' 36

This is to say that if history is considered to have ended, whether it has or not, politics does not remain

content to simply assuage anxiety through attempts at Symbolic closure; it is too well evident that the Real

intrudes into every life, at every moment, although in most moments by means of what Jameson glosses as

“The Lacanian notion of an 'asymptotic' approach to the Real, moreover, maps a situation in which the

action of this 'absent cause' can be understood as a term limit, both indistinguishable from the Symbolic

(or the Imaginary) and also independent of it.” 37 Thus politics takes real, existent human life as its proper

object, and insists that this is its proper domain. Thus Foucault's concept of biopower might be

understood as the afterlife of political history, in which we become so anxious over the stability and

coherence of the Symbolic order that politics takes the most private and pleasurable experiences into its

domain. Unless there is some other history, some other future, than the ones condemned and abandoned

by Edelman, I fear that life will asphyxiate as a consequence of a politics of the Symbolic based upon

a kind of horror of the future since they refuse to entertain the incompletion that it necessarily holds in
it. One could say they do everything to turn away from the simple truth of our death: the fact that it is
already premature and before term. Hence their haste to affirm that an epoch has ended, a time is over. 38
It is a politics that seeks to arrogate to itself total control over the order of biological life, in addition to

social life, a politics about which one can read daily, in the news. This is a politics that is convinced that

there is nothing historical left to be done, coupled with a politics convinced that its dominion over life

must become absolute.

Another history, another future... We must envision a future after the end of history, a future that
36 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Translated by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004),
pg 76
37 Jameson, pg 107
38 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, Translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993). pg 268
does not condemn us to bare repetition and to an unchangingly conservative social order. I have already

cited Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot to indicate the kind of theory that offers a vision of a future

that is somewhat queer, insofar as beginnings and ends are never absolute, and insofar as this future is not

knowable in advance. It is eminently communitarian; it does not close in upon us. I first cite Nancy:

This spacing of time itself is nothing else than otherness, heterogeneity emerging in time... emerging out
of nothing – or going into nothing (birth or death). This nothing – which is always 'future' – is nothing: it
is not another, negative substance beside the self-succeeding one. This nothing means that nothing takes
place in the happening, for there is no place to take; but there is the spacing of a place as such, the noth-
ingness spacing time, opening up in it an otherness, the heterogeneity of existence. 39
He then continues to write of this future which has broken the bonds of homogeneity, and which

communicates future possibilities to us:

Through these fragile 'signals' (rather than 'signs'), it is history that is offering itself to us. It is the
chance, which we have to take, to have another history come, to have another utterance of the 'we,' an -
other enunciation of a future40
It is thus, according to faint signals, we must envision a future written “outside language and outside of

theology,” our unknown but human future written “through what will most distance it from language: the

cry – that is to say, the murmur; cry of need or of protest, cry without words and without silence, an

ignoble cry – or, if need be, the written cry, graffiti on the walls.” 41 This on the condition that it will be

written “never in the zones of authority, power, or the law, not in those of order, of culture or heroic

magnificence, any more than in the lyricism of good company, but rather such as it was born even to the

point of the spasm of a cry.”42 Against the messianic dream of absolute knowledge, an end of history that

closes the gap in the symbolic order, the cry communicates without words what Nietzsche wrote one

hundred and twenty-five years ago in The Gay Science,

My thoughts... should show me where I stand; but they should not betray to me where I am going. I
love my ignorance of the future and do not wish to perish of impatience and of tasting promised things
ahead of time.43

While it is queer and perverse enough to embrace future-denying signification and figuration, it is queerer

still and enormously more perverse not to “insist that the future stop here,” 44 but rather to propose a

39 Nancy, pg 162
40 Ibid, pg 164-5
41 Blanchot, pg 262
42 Ibid.
43 Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), pg 230-1
44 Edelman, pg 29
future that is foreclosed neither through the repetition of a past, nor by an end, but one that is radically

unknown – a future that figures into no history. Let me conclude with a final citation from Blanchot that

well reflects my position:

Let us gamble on the future: let us affirm the indeterminate relation with the future... [let us] say: wel-
come to the future that does not come, that neither begins nor end and whose uncertainty breaks his -
tory. But how do we think this rupture? Through forgetting. Forgetting frees the future from time it-
self.45

45 Blanchot, pg 280