Answers

Edelmans formulation of the antisocial thesis has elicited strong criticism within queer studies. For instance, a recent issue of PMLA the journal of the Modern Language Association includes a forum on the antisocial thesis in which Jose E. Munoz and Tim Dean take issue with Edelmans argument. In an attempt to articulate a more constructive account of queer optimism and future potentiality, Munoz opposes Edelmans contention that there is no future for the queer by asserting that queerness is primarily about futurity (826), about forging new forms of sociality and relationality. Hope, he implies, is not a conservative form of complacency, but rather a way of sustaining a spirit of imaginative inquisitiveness that allows us to envision alternatives to the life-arresting logic of the heteronormative present. Along related lines, Dean defends the possibility of a queer utopia through a Deleuzian notion of becoming as a trope of endless movement that keeps subjectivity mobile without seeking teleological fulfillment. Dean, moreover, points out that the shattering of the establishment that queer eros potentially enacts betokens not the end of sociality but rather its inception (827). That is, the antisociality of queer eros is not purely, or even primarily, negative, but instead gives rise to fresh forms of erotic connectivity forms that are not governed by the stultifying symbolic law of reproduction but that open to a more promiscuous array of intersubjective possibility. The problem with Edelmans argument, Dean suggests, is less its antisociality than the fact that it cannot admit that anything constructive could ensue from this antisociality. I wish to intervene in this debate on two different levels. First, I would like to link the ideological rift that the debate foregrounds to a larger fissure that I perceive in contemporary critical and social theory more generally speaking. I think that the disagreements around the antisocial thesis are as heated as they are in part because at stake is not only the status of queer studies but also the entire future of posthumanist (poststructuralist, constructivist) theory.1 By this I obviously do not mean to belittle the importance of queer studies which I consider as one of my own intellectual playgrounds but merely to connect the dispute at hand to broader ideological disagreements that remain largely unarticulated (or even acknowledged) within the field of posthumanist theory. Second, I would like to challenge the version of negativity that Edelman advances in his account of queer antisociality. Like Edelman, I will read negativity through a Lacanian lens, but my conclusions will differ considerably from Edelmans more orthodox interpretation. I will illustrate that Lacanian negativity, while undoubtedly in many ways alienating and death-dealing, is simultaneously an opening to creativity, inspiration, and psychic potentiality. Far from foreclosing the future in the manner that Edelman proposes, Lacanian negativity holds open the future as a space of ever-renewed possibility. This in turn allows us to begin to conceptualize the contours of posthumanist subjectivity, including queer subjectivity, along less nihilistic lines. After all, barring some lifeerasing catastrophe, there will always be a future in the future, even for Professor Edelman. The question that remains the only question worth asking is what this future should (or could) entail.

Kritik
The affirmatives obsession with life is a symptom of futurist compulsory reproducti on. This type of thinking is heterosexist and fascist, leading to the idea that queers are not worthy of being part of society. Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004. (Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 74-76, JCE) This conflation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of sinthomosexuality ........ Eve with the otherconstitutes, as the film makes clear, a response to an appeal, even if his mode of response is intended to strike us as unappealing.

Compulsory Heterosexuality is the logic of discrimination which materializes into violence against everyone who is incompatible with their world view. Everyone is at risk. Gmez, Political theorist on Hate Crimes, 2005 (Mara Mercedes, On Prejudice, Violence, and
Democracy, la-buena-vida.info, ongoing project from 2005 until 2008, pp. 2-3, JAR) The logic of discrimination seeks to maintain the other ........... or defined as gay, lesbian, and transgender. The Alternative is to Queer Identity: Queering must embrace unintelligibility. We must prevent ourselves from being known, demeaning ourselves and embracing the inhuman suffering that has been projected onto the singled out queer. This alone prevents the violence of signification. Edelman, Professor of English Literature , 2004. (Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 106-109, JCE) But what if it didn't? What if Antigone, ........." to have one, must turn its face.

Queer Pessimism Their discourse of security, the environment and transportation infrastructure is inexplicably tied to the dominant social order of the heternormative nuclear family. This logic exploits the virgin lands and perpetuates eco-destruction. Anderson 11 Jill E. Anderson "THE GAY OF THE LAND: QUEER ECOLOGY AND THE
LITERATURE OF THE 1960S"A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Mississippi, April 2011
The politically sanctioned (and culturally applied) policy of containment is the ....... queer ecocriticism of the destruction of natural resources and abuse of the land itself.

The alternative is abject rejection there is no space for the queer within their social order queerness is ontological dereliction, a void in the coherency of the subject only negativity can reconstitute the socio-symbolic

Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive. 2004 pp. 4-6
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, ......... challenge to the very value of the social itself.