ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 13 number 1 april 2008

the antisocial thesis in queer theory

ee Edelmans controversial book No Future:
Queer Theory and the Death Drive represents the most recent articulation of the so-called
antisocial thesis in queer theory. This thesis
which emerges in various forms in the work of
Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, and Michael
Warner, among others presents queerness as
deeply antithetical to normative sociality and
seeks to defend forms of queer rebelliousness
against the quest for respectability that characterizes much of liberal gay and lesbian politics
these days. In its most radical forms, the
antisocial thesis celebrates queer eros as a site
of the kind of self-shattering or annihilation that
calls into question the very possibility of coherent
subjectivity. There is much about the antisocial
thesis that I find valuable. I am, for instance,
entirely sympathetic to Warners critique of the
manner in which queer subjects are co-opted into
regimes of sexual shame that serve the dominant
heteronormative narrative of social uprightness.
At the same time, the starkly destructive version
of political negativity advocated by Edelman in
No Future raises questions about the usage of
psychoanalysis in social theory that seem worth
interrogating.
In No Future, Edelman connects queerness to
the Freudian death drive as a means of opposing
the relentlessly future-oriented optimism of
reproductive heteronormativity (an optimism
symbolized by the figure of the innocent child).
The antisocial thesis of his book is that instead of
seeking to dismantle the homophobic representation of queers as death-driven, unproductive, and
socially disruptive, queers should embrace these
negative stereotypes in order to undermine
the social as it is currently configured.

mari ruti
WHY THERE IS ALWAYS
A FUTURE IN THE
FUTURE
Queers should, in other words, take it upon
themselves to embody the threat to the social
fabric that they, whether or not they so wish,
always already signify. Since queer subjects are
by definition aligned with negativity with what
menaces the consistency, integrity, and wellbeing of the establishment their best strategy is
to ride the full force of this negativity in order to
rupture the establishment at its very foundations.
Like the antisocial pulsation of the death drive,
the queer subject erupts into the social field as a
site of anti-identitarian and meaningless jouissance. In Edelmans words: . . . the death drive
names what the queer, in the order of the social,
is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to
every form of social viability (No Future 9).

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/08/010113^14 2008 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250802156109

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future in the future

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.

the future of posthumanist theory

In his critique of the queer utopianism of
Munoz and Dean, Edelman aligns these two
thinkers with the kind of liberal inclusionism that
fails to recognize the insistence of the antisocial
(the death drive) in all social organization. More
specifically, Edelman accuses his opponents of
putting the puppet of humanism through its
passion play once again in the sense that they
promote the redemptive hope of producing
brave new social collectivities (Antagonism
821); in other words, they fall prey to the
humanistic belief that meaning, progress, and
rational understanding are able to transcend the
foundational antagonism of social life.
I would say that this critique misses its mark
quite drastically in that it neglects to discern that
we are here no longer dealing with the customary
split between humanist and posthumanist strands
of thought but rather with a division within
posthumanism itself. The battle lines are not

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ruti
drawn between those who uphold the unitary,
coherent, and fully agentic self of liberal
humanism on the one hand and those who
adhere to the poststructuralist notion of the
decentered and self-divided subject on the other.
Rather, insofar as we find ourselves in the
company of progressive critics who have all
been trained in the ABC of poststructuralism,
and who in various ways appear to take for
granted the demise of the humanist self, we are
faced with a radically more complicated and
infinitely more interesting divergence of
opinions about how to go about theorizing the
subject of posthumanism. The idea that utopian
thinking is by definition liberal that there is no
room for utopianism within posthumanist paradigms is an indication of the extent to which
certain strands of posthumanist theory have
become rigidified into well-worn and lifeless
patterns that no longer serve a critical function;
in such instances, the rote and all too predictable
repetition of stock poststructuralist terminology
serves to bar alternative perspectives that would
revitalize contemporary theory by moving beyond
the dogmas of poststructuralism.
Let us then assume from the outset that the
subject is alienated, fragmented, and non-selfidentical, that its every attempt at self-mastery is
undermined by unconscious currents of desire,
and that its sociality is always disrupted by
violent and antisocial energies. Let us also assume
that non-reproductive pleasure is valuable, that
eros is inherently rebellious, and that we want to
defeat heteronormative structures of social organization. We are then left with the dicier question
of how the (posthumanist) queer subject is to
proceed with its life. After all, the fact that the
subject is socially constituted rather than essential, that it only manages to attain a viable and
culturally intelligible identity at the price of
foundational lack or negativity, and that it is
internally torn by antagonistic forces that pull it
in contradictory directions, does not mean that it
any less than its humanistic counterpart is
released from the task of negotiating a livable life
for itself. The fissure that I see in posthumanist
theory emerges between those who recognize the
necessity of such existential negotiation and those
who persist in the notion that any concession to

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the idea that there are lives to be lived in the

real world dilutes the power of poststructuralism by leading to nave, soft-hearted, and
unsophisticated forms of theorizing. Edelmans
version of queer antisociality is an extreme
statement of the latter perspective.
Edelman follows quite closely the main outlines of the version of Lacanian psychoanalysis
that Slavoj Zizek has been advocating for the last
fifteen years that is, a Lacanianism of the real,
of the sinthome, and of subjective destitution. As
we know, the Lacanian real is a locus of the kind
of drive energy and bodily jouissance that cannot
be disciplined by the symbolic network of
signification. The sinthome is Lacans term for
a tenacious symptom that carries the energy of
the real and that consequently does not yield to
interpretation or working through; the sinthome
does not communicate meaning, but merely
mindless enjoyment.2 Subjective destitution, in
turn, connotes the act of identifying with ones
sinthome at the cost of ones symbolic identity.
For Zizek, this identification with the sinthome
with the real as the barred kernel of jouissance
functions as an assertion of freedom and
resistance in that it suspends the socio-symbolic
rules that under normal circumstances lend
coherence to the subjects existence. Such an
act of subjective destitution annuls the subject as
a moral agent with a meaningful and binding
connection to a world of shared ideals and codes
of conduct. As Zizek claims, subjective destitution is an act of annihilation, of wiping out we
not only dont know what will come out of it, its
final outcome is ultimately even insignificant,
strictly secondary in relation to the NO! of the
pure act (Symptom 44).
Edelman associates queer sexuality what he
calls sinthomosexuality with the antisocial and
rebellious energies of the real. Indeed, his
contention that queerness attains its ethical
value to the extent that it accepts its figural
status as resistance to the viability of the social
(No Future 3) that it forsakes all causes, all
social action, all responsibility for a better
tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms
(101; emphasis in original) reproduces Zizeks
account of subjective destitution in the queer
context. Edelman, moreover, maintains that the

future in the future

antisocial act of identifying with the sinthome
gives the queer subject unrestricted access to
jouissance (86). That is, for all his talk of antiutopianism, Edelmans theory advances a highly
utopian vision of queer sexuality as a site of
constant and unmediated jouissance. Although
I concur with his assessment that jouissance
functions as the suppressed underside of the
social order, I think that the idea that any subject,
however queer, could accede to the continuous
satisfaction of jouissance (86) sounds more
utopian than the utopianism of either Munoz or
Dean. The fact that jouissance, in Edelmans
account, serves the death drive does not change
the fact that he ends up positing a space of
redemption a kind of anti-redemptive redemption for those who are able to accede to the pure
NO of subjective destitution (the NO of No
Future).
For the feminist critic, one of the frustrations
of reading Zizek and Edelman is that, stripped of
their elaborate Lacanian scaffolding, their arguments regarding the disruptive power of the real
are not very different from what Hele`ne Cixous,
c.1975, had to say about the explosive and
subversive potential of feminine sexuality.3 The
difference, of course, is that unlike the suicidal
rhetoric of subjective destitution, Cixous even
at her most radical saw the annihilation of the
normative order as a means of constituting new
forms of sociality, generosity, and love. I would
argue that this key distinction strikes at the very
core of the disagreement between Edelman and
his more utopian critics. And it also relates to
Munozs admittedly controversial statement that
the antisocial thesis is the gay white mans last
stand (825).
My intention here is not to reproach white gay
men for political insensitivity, let alone to fall
into the identitarian trap of positing a coherent
white gay male ideology. But I would like to
take seriously the ideological momentum of
Munozs charge. It seems to me that what
drives this theoretical stab, in part at least, is
the recognition that the kind of radical negativity
and self-dissolution that Edelman (following
Zizek) advocates can only be undertaken from a
position of relative security, that deprivileged
subjects some women, racially and ethnically

marked individuals, and those who lead economically precarious lives (that is, subjects whose
claim to symbolic identity is shaky to begin with)
simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to
the jouissance of the death drive in the way that
more secure subjects might be tempted (or even
compelled) to do. Many queer subjects, of course,
also lead precarious lives, so this is not a matter
of creating divisions between, say, queer theory
and feminism, but merely of remaining cognizant
of the conditions under which subjective destitution as an ethical act becomes a feasible option.
The fact that symbolic subjectivity represses
the asocial energies of the real cannot be
remedied by a theory that annihilates the social
in favor of the real, for this merely reverses the
poles of the binary, replacing one form of
violence by another. Furthermore, the idea that
sociality as such is the enemy of queer
subjectivity fails to adequately differentiate
between hegemonic and enabling forms of
sociality; it fails to take into account the fact
that even though we are inevitably interpellated
into dominant socio-symbolic structures, we
remain capable of loving and giving kinds of
sociality. Along related lines, Edelmans insistence on equating jouissance with the death drive
overlooks those forms of jouissance that reach
toward the sublime, the inspired, and the
transcendently blissful. It is true, of course, that
the Lacanian notion of jouissance connotes a
pleasure that is so acute as to border on the
painful, and that it is consequently impossible to
divorce it from the death drive. But to fully
subsume it to this drive is to deny the possibility
that jouissance can potentially revitalize and
enrich rather than merely obliterate the
subject; it is to ignore the idea that what resides
beyond the social can feed, rather than merely
undercut, the social. In this manner, Edelman
faithfully repeats the uncompromising tenets of
the kind of poststructuralist theory that insists on
the emptiness of subjectivity, that sees no value
in creativity or regeneration, and that cannot
admit notions of reparation or agency into its
steely vocabulary.
The humanist subject can die in a variety of
different ways. Edelmans account of queer
antisociality drains the subject of agency,

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ruti
meaning, and creative capacity, allowing it to be
overtaken by the mindless and mechanical
(inhuman) pulsation of the death drive. But
there are those of us who would like to
reconfigure the posthumanist subject in less
dejected terms, who, instead of dismissing
notions like agency, creativity, and inner restoration, would like to figure out what these concepts
might mean in the posthumanist context. This is
not a matter of returning to a time before
poststructuralism but rather of working toward a
place beyond it; it is not a matter of discarding
the critical tools that we have gained from
poststructuralism but rather of putting these
tools to different, less doctrinaire use; and it is
not a matter of holding on to an outdated vision
of the masterful and self-transparent subject but
rather of building a better understanding of what
it means to live in the world as an embodied
creature who can never fully master or understand the parameters of its own being.
Those of us advancing this newer version of
posthumanist theory tend to possess a strong
commitment to matters of social survival, justice,
and responsibility. As a result, we are not averse
to the possibility that hopefulness may at times
be more radical than the cynicism of neoLacanian austerity. I would propose that it is in
these more supple genres of posthumanist theory
that the innovative spirit of poststructuralism
lives on in an invigorated and rejuvenated form. I
would also argue and this point should not be
taken as a criticism of Edelman whose stylistic
acrobatics I count among the merits of No Future
that insofar as these new forms of posthumanist
theory reject faithfulness to chill, stagnant, and
deadening forms of overworked rhetoric, they
exemplify what is most revolutionary about
queerness, namely its resistance to obsolete
kinship structures of all kinds. For me at least,
there is nothing as strange as queer theory that
remains stubbornly devoted to the most sacrosanct pieties of poststructuralism.

from negativity to creativity

One way to rethink posthumanist theory along
more affirmative lines is to reconsider the status
of negativity. In what follows, I will try to do this

117

through Lacan not because I think that Lacan

stands for posthumanist theory at large what
constitutes the fluid parameters of this theory is
at best an open question but because Lacanian
notions of negativity are central not only to
Edelmans account of queer antisociality but also
to what we, in broad theoretical terms, tend to
envision when we talk about poststructuralist or
constructivist conceptions of subjectivity.
In the Lacanian context, it is important to note
right away that we are dealing with two different
versions of negativity. The first is the familiar
notion of constitutive lack or alienation that
results from the subjects interpellation into the
symbolic law of the signifier and that the subject
attempts to overcome through imaginary fantasies of plenitude and wholeness.4 The second is
the radical negativity of the real that I have
already discussed. While the first form of lack or
negativity tends to be associated with Lacans
early work (the seminars of the 1950s and early
1960s), the negativity of the real emerges as a
central theme in his late work (the seminars of the
late 1960s and the 1970s).5 However, these two
forms of negativity are closely intertwined in the
sense that the foundational lack caused by the
signifier functions as the tear or wound within
our being through which the jouissance of the
real finds its way into the symbolic realm.
Foundational lack is thus difficult to confront
not only because it reminds us of our incomplete
status, but also because it serves as a portal to
what is potentially most uncanny about ourselves,
namely the rebellious drive energies that animate
our being but that remain beyond our capacity to
signify.
It is common to regard the Lacanian notion of
constitutive lack as a site of deprivation and
mourning. Likewise, it is customary to think of
the signifier primarily as an insidious tool of
subjection that divests us of agency. However, it
is useful to keep in mind that without the
signifier, none of us would have a psychic life.
We would be incapable of meaning production,
with the result that there would be little that
would be innovative about human life.
Interpreters like Edelman tend to see the
symbolic as a monolithic monster that evacuates
subjectivity of jouissance, yet without our

future in the future

participation in symbolic structures of meaning
we would be deprived of many of the things that
give us pleasure in the world, including our
ability to engender new forms of meaning.6
Though there is no doubt that we are subjected
to the larger symbolic structures of the world, we
also have the capacity to mold the world through
our imaginative activity; language, even when it
partakes of collective regimes, is never fully
oppressive, but remains open to various types of
inventive reconfiguration. Lacan suggests, in fact,
that even though we can never master the
signifier let alone the signified we possess a
certain degree of poetic leeway with respect to the
signifier.7 The same way that Heidegger connects
creativity to the subjects ability to dwell in the
world in poetic rather than purely instrumental
ways, Lacan envisions creativity in terms of the
subjects capacity to take a poetic approach to the
world, an approach that is content to play with
meaning without attempting to arrest it in
unequivocal or transparent definitions.
The Lacanian notion of constitutive lack is
therefore not merely what violates the body and
its jouissance, but also what grants us the gift of
psychic and significatory potential. What is more,
insofar as this lack causes desire, it induces us to
turn outward in pursuit of things that might add
multidimensionality to our lives (such as, for
instance, new goals, objects, meanings, and ways
of being). Without lack, we would have no reason
to be interested in anything beyond ourselves; we
would have little curiosity regarding the world
and the things, objects, and beings that inhabit
and make up that world.8 From this perspective,
it is precisely the fact that we are lacking that
we are creatures of desire that allows us to
approach the world as a space of possibility. After
all, if we felt entirely whole and self-contained, we
would have no conception of the world as a place
that can potentially meet our desires; we would
have nothing to induce us to keep moving
forward. In this manner, lack gives rise to a self
that is open to and hungry for the world.
Because the world is filled with marvelous
objects that entice our desire because the world,
while certainly full of limitations and deprivations, is also brimming with possibilities we are
compelled to reach beyond our own solipsistic

universe. Furthermore, as I have already implied,

this turning outward is not limited to an
encounter with already existing objects but
entails the strong aspiration to bring new objects
into being. Indeed, insofar as Lacan helps us
appreciate what it means to live in the interval
between the self and the world between lack and
possibility he enables us to see that the myriad
products and fabrications of the human psyche
function as vehicles through which the foundational negativity of existence assumes a positive,
tangible form. Because we can never repossess the
blissful state of plenitude (prior to the signifier)
that we imagine having lost, because we cannot
ever attain what Lacan calls the Thing the
primordial object that promises unmediated
jouissance we are driven to look for substitutes
that might compensate for our sense of lack; we
are motivated to invent objects and figures of
meaning that can, momentarily at least, ease and
contain the pain of our primordial loss.9 As Lacan
observes in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the
Thing as a site of impossibility can only be
brought to life through a series of substitutes. If
the Thing were not fundamentally veiled, Lacan
explains, we wouldnt be in the kind of
relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole
of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass
it in order to conceive it (118). That is, it is
precisely because the Thing is irrevocably lost,
because it cannot be resurrected in any immediate form, that we scurry from signifier to signifier
in an attempt to embody it obliquely. Like a
potter who creates a vase around emptiness,
creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex
nihilo, starting with a hole (120), we fashion a
signifier, or a string of signifiers, to give form to
the void within our being.10
Lacan stresses that emptiness and fullness
the void of the vase and the possibility of filling it
are introduced to the world simultaneously
(Ethics 120). This is a metaphoric means of
conveying the idea that the subjects inner lack
and its creative capacities come into being in
tandem: it is exactly because the subject lacks
that it is prompted to create and it is through its
creative activity that it manages to give concrete
form to its lack. There is, as it were, a direct link
between lack and creativity, between the subjects

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self-alienation on the one hand and its capacity to
generate imaginative ways of coping with this
alienation on the other.11 This in turn suggests
that the subjects ability to hold open its lack to
tarry with the negative, to express the matter in
Hegelian terms is indispensable for its psychic
vitality. Such tarrying with the negative could in
fact be argued to be the greatest of human
achievements, for it transforms the terrors and
midnights of the spirit into symbolic formations,
imaginative undertakings, and sites of delicate
beauty that make the world the absorbing and
spellbinding place that it in its most auspicious
moments at least can be.
In this context, it is important to specify that
the translation of lack into creativity is not a
matter of dialectical redemption in the sense of
granting us the ability to turn negativity into a
definitive form of positivity. Our attempts to
name our lack are transient at best, giving us
access to no permanent meaning, no solid
identity, no unitary narrative of self-actualization.
Any fleeting state of fullness or positivity that we
may be able to attain must always in the end
dissolve back into negativity; any endeavor to
erase lack only gives rise to new instances of lack.
This means that the process of filling lack must
by necessity be continually renewed. It cannot be
brought to an end for the simple reason that we
can never find a signifier that would once and for
all capture the contours of the lost Thing.
However, far from being a hindrance to
existential richness, this intrinsic impossibility
the fact that every attempt to revive the Thing
unavoidably falls short of its mark is what
sustains us as creatures of becoming and what
allows us, over and again, to take up the
inexhaustible process of signifying beauty. As
Kaja Silverman remarks:
Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It
is born of a loss which can never be adequately
named, and whose consequence is, quite
simply, the human imperative to engage in a
ceaseless signification. It is finally this neverending symbolization that the world wants
from us. (146)

It is in this sense that we shape the world as much

as it shapes us.

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touching the real

Edelman equates queer negativity with the
Lacanian real and with the sinthome as what
carries the trace of the real because, in his
estimation, the only way to undermine the
hegemonic symbolic is to suspend or annihilate
its power to generate meaning. There is, in
Edelmans account, no room for non-hegemonic
forms of signification: the signifier and the
dominant symbolic coincide seamlessly in a
manner that ensures that the signifier is always
already and automatically tyrannical. This is why
only the antisocial energies of the real can keep
the queer subject from being engulfed by
normative and complacent sociality.12 But if we
allow for the possibility that the signifier does not
invariably obey the dictates of the normative
symbolic that it is capable of poetic and
innovative interventions in the sense that I have
described it becomes necessary to rethink the
relationship between the symbolic and the real; it
becomes conceivable that the unruly energies of
the real can sustain and revitalize, rather than
merely weaken, the signifier. Indeed, in his
197576 seminar on the sinthome (Seminar 23)
a seminar that represents the final phase of his
thinking Lacan maintains that only those forms
of signification that successfully capture something of the raw energies of the real remain
creative. That is, it is only through the dynamic
interaction between the symbolic and the real that
the signifier manages to replenish itself. Without
this interaction, Lacan posits, the signifier would
rapidly grow stale and static. In this sense, only
signification that manages to activate morsels of
the real remains capable of transformation.
Speaking of the epiphanic and strangely
inspired writing of James Joyce, Lacan argues
that Joyce is able to invent revolutionary forms of
language forms of language that alter the
normal rules of signification precisely to the
extent that he manages to touch the real. More
specifically, Lacan proposes that Joyce achieves
inspired modes of writing modes of writing that
reveal the jouissance of the writer because he
identifies with his sinthome. Lacan in fact
concludes that writing, for Joyce, is equivalent
to the sinthome; it is only insofar as Joyce is

future in the future

infected by the virus of the sinthome that he is a
true artist.13 This implies that even though Lacan
draws a connection between the sinthome and the
death drive, identification with the sinthome is
not, for him, exclusively a matter of subjective
destitution (as Zizek and Edelman insist). Rather,
it is a means of linking the symbolic and the real
so as to generate fresh forms of signification.14 As
a matter of fact, Lacan interprets Finnegans
Wake as Joyces solution to the fact that the
death drive is inherently unthinkable. As Lacan
states:
The death drive, it is the real insofar as it
cannot be thought except as impossible. That
is to say, every time that it shows the tip of its
nose, it is unthinkable . . . What is unbelievable is that Joyce . . . could find no other
solution but to write Finnegans Wake.
(Le Sinthome 25; my trans.)

Where Zizek and Edelman advocate the pure NO

of subjective destitution as a response to what is
impossible about the death drive, Lacan
suggests that Joyce weaves this impossibility
into the folds of his art, thereby fending off death
(at least for the time being).
There is no doubt that language is a trespasser,
an intruder, in the domain of the real. However,
it may be exactly because the real makes language
struggle forces it to fight for its territory, as it
were that the encounter with the real can make
language fiercely inventive. In his commentary
on Lacans interpretation of Joyce, Roberto
Harari proposes that epiphanies represent a
dazzling insurgence of the real within the
symbolic. An epiphany, Harari asserts, is a
sudden glimmer revealing something essential
(66) a palpable disclosure of an unexpected
presence or depth. The cause of an epiphany can
be entirely banal or trivial, but its revelatory
power leads to the kind of writing that takes over
or possesses the writer. The writer is, so to speak,
being called to writing and experiences the act of
writing as something that is guided by an
unknown external force.15 Epiphanies, Harari
concludes, allow the writer to bite into bits of
the real (141). Joyces signifiers, in other words,
are unique to the extent that they breathe to the
rhythm of the real. In a way, what Joyce reveals is

that even though the real as such cannot be

written, one can write in such a way as to brush
against it; ones signifiers can transmit a sliver of
the real.
Without question, the insurrection of the real
within the symbolic carries the destructive force of
the death drive. Joyce like Edelmans sinthomosexual dissolves meaning. He undoes
destroys and dismembers language. However,
unlike the self-annihilating sinthomosexual, Joyce
is driven by a certain elan or improvised ardor.
Regardless of how defiant or subversive his writing
gets, Joyce endeavors to awaken, rather than to
choke, the signifier. In other words, he harnesses
the destructiveness of the death drive in the
service of new life. One could, in fact, argue that
creativity is precisely this: the ability to produce
an opening for the new by taking apart the old.
More specifically, it seems clear that the (late)
Lacan of Seminar 23 recognizes that language
challenges normative structures as much as it
reinforces them and that to some extent we
create the language that we use. As Lacan asserts:
This assumes or implies that one chooses to
speak the language that one effectively
speaks . . . One creates a language insofar as
one at every instant gives it a sense, one gives a
little nudge, without which language would
not be alive. It is alive to the extent that one
creates it at every moment. It is in this sense
that there is no collective unconscious. There
are only particular forms of the unconscious to
the extent that everyone, at every instant,
gives a little nudge to the language that he
speaks. (Le Sinthome 133; my trans.)

This statement which implies that we are

capable of giving language a little nudge that
transforms it to something that is uniquely ours
is quite different from the earlier (and more
familiar) Lacanian idea that we are subject to
hegemonic structures of meaning. What is more,
Lacan, at this final stage in his thinking, no
longer sees language and jouissance as mutually
exclusive. Instead, Lacan suggests that the
signifier transmits jouissance exactly to the
extent that it touches the real.
Interestingly, Zizek admits that moments when
the real penetrates the symbolic reveal the

120

ruti
inconsistency of the symbolic. However, because
he regards this primarily as a sign of the failure of
the symbolic, he never takes the logical step of
acknowledging that the real can alter (rather than
merely devastate) the symbolic. Or to express the
matter more precisely: Zizek refuses the idea that
the real can emerge within the symbolic in lifeenhancing rather than life-threatening ways.16 In
contrast, I have tried to illustrate that the
moments when the real penetrates the symbolic
are not necessarily indicative of the failure of
signification, but rather of its irrepressible
aliveness. I believe that such moments are
swerves or productive irregularities that serve to
disband and displace congealed structures of
meaning. In this manner, the negativity of the
real becomes generative in that it fuels the worldshaping capacities of the signifier.17
Along similar lines, what I find missing in
Edelmans theory of queer antisociality is a
stronger awareness of the potentially life-altering
dimensions of asocial experience. By this, I
obviously do not wish to imply that queer
subjects should take up the burden of replenishing the social. Indeed, it should be obvious by
now that I do not agree with Edelmans equation
of queerness with antisociality to begin with.
But more specifically, I question Edelmans
decision to read the antisociality of eros as
uncompromisingly destructive, without any
recognition of the possibility that erotic surrender can lead to subjective renewal. I concur that
the destruction of sociality is in many ways the
very point of eros in the sense that erotic
experience ushers the subject beyond the realm
of socially mediated identity. Eros annihilates
the boundaries between self and other, inviting
the other to dwell within, and in some ways take
possession of, the self. As Bataille once put it,
the purpose of eros is to test and defy the selfcontained character of the participators as they
are in their normal lives; because eros strikes
at the inmost core of the living being, it can
bring about the momentary dissolution of the
individual as he or she exists in the realm of
culture and everyday reality (17). Edelman is
thus correct in suggesting that eros communicates the death drive. But surely this is not the
entire story.

121

Eros undoes the self. It fractures mastery and

coherence. But it also possesses the power to
confer upon the individual the ardent and muchcoveted sense of feeling fully alive. As Julia
Kristeva states, eros grants the subject the
impression of speaking at last, for the first time,
for real (Tales of Love 3). Passionate eros is
the time and space in which I assumes the
right to be extraordinary, Kristeva continues.
I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity
(ibid. 5). That is, eros can give rise to a piercing
sensation of self-awakening. Precisely because
eros entails the incorporation of the other within
the self, it allows the self to overstep its normal
boundaries, and to access facets and potentialities
of its being that ordinarily remain hidden or
inactive. The instability of eros can therefore be
lived as deeply transformative in the sense that it
enables the subject to arrive at a strikingly
unforeseen experience of itself. The shattering
that eros implies, in other words, works to
reorganize the selfs contours; it allows the self
to momentarily lose itself so as to be able to
resurface altered, with its parameters
renegotiated.
In the same way that Joycean epiphanies lead
to the reconfiguration of language, eros can lead
to the reconstitution of subjectivity. Antisocial or
asocial experiences are obviously valuable in
themselves, but if they entice us it is in part
exactly because they revive our social being; they
bring the real into our symbolic existence in ways
that energize our lives. On this view, the real is
not merely the harbinger of destruction, but
rather what lends agility to our symbolic
identities. Indeed, I would argue that conceptualizing the relationship between the symbolic and
the real as a binary structure where the subject
either inhabits the symbolic as a fully socialized
being or enters the real through a radical act of
subjective destitution is just about as counterproductive as the full-blown reverence of the
symbolic. I agree that the valorization of the real
is a way of subverting the ideologically complacent structures of the symbolic order. At the
same time, taking up permanent residency in the
real is hardly a viable option. Peering into
the abyss, remaining aware of lack, tarrying
with the negative, as well as self-annihilation as a

future in the future

means to transformation all make sense to me.
But the idea of the real as an alternative to
symbolic subjectivity simply does not. What
would such existence mean in concrete terms?
Why the impulse to delimit resistance to one
experiential register the real instead of
interrogating the vibrant interplay between the
symbolic and the real (and the imaginary, for that
matter)? And why the urge to cast the real wholly
outside of life? If the goal is to escape the rigidity
of the dominant social order, why build an
equally categorical escape?

the singularity of being

The reading of the world-shaping capacities of the
signifier and of Joyces subversive writing
practice that I have presented here is far from
original in the sense that it represents a familiar
line of argumentation in contemporary literary
criticism. Kristevas 1974 Revolution in Poetic
Language (and it is worth noting the closeness of
the publication date to Lacans seminar on the
sinthome) already articulates many of the same
themes. My argument, then, is not that Lacan
presents a groundbreaking interpretation of Joyce
but rather that those interpreters of Lacan Zizek
and Edelman in this case who choose to ignore
this component of Lacanian psychoanalysis end
up producing overly dispirited theories of subjectivity and (the impossibility) of social change.
They turn to the real as a site of subjective
destitution exactly because they fail to see the
signifier as a site of innovative energy and regard
it, instead, as a mere tool of hegemonic power.
Yet this is not at all what Lacan argues in
Seminar 23.
It may help to press the argument a step
further. The Lacanian real carries the death drive
in that it signals the dissolution of social
subjectivity. Yet moments of such dissolution
are not solely self-negating; they can also make us
feel . . . well . . . immediately real. They may in
fact be the closest we ever get to feeling fully
present to ourselves. Poststructuralist theory has
insisted that the human subject is never present
to itself. However, I would argue that the
Lacanian real gives us a posthumanist manner
of understanding what it might mean to attain a

momentary glimpse of self-presence. The fact

that touching the real annihilates structures of
language and sociality that it arrests the
customary workings of consciousness allows
for a direct way of experiencing the world; the
real defies social intelligibility, but it enables us
to feel immediately intelligible to ourselves. And
it makes us aware of those details, textures, and
intensities of the world that usually remain
eclipsed by our social preoccupations. Such
moments of hitting the real rare moments
when we find ourselves at the edges of coherent
subjectivity represent a rupture of our usual
way of being, which means that they can offer us
the kind of fullness or intensity of experience that
normally eludes us.
Proust gives a famous example of such
unmediated experience by describing a torrent
of involuntary memories conjured up by the
evocative taste of madeleine cake. He stresses that
tasting the cake accomplishes what his will and
intelligence have struggled in vain to attain, for it
convenes in a tangible way experiences long
forgotten (4347). A slightly different version of
encountering the real can be found in Prousts
portrayal of the epiphany-producing vision of the
distant and sun-bathed steeples of Martinville
(17780). Proust depicts this vision as one that
grants him (or the narrator, more property
speaking) access to the kind of truth or meaning
that is otherwise unapproachable, and the frenzy
of writing that ensues (the beautiful page of prose
that the narrator composes as a response to the
vision) could be said to represent an effort to
name the epiphany after the fact to capture on
the written page an encounter with the real. More
generally speaking, we might conceive of such
moments as startling jolts or flashes of insight
that slice open the world and that compel us to
experience both the terror and ecstasy of facing
the sublime. This is exactly why Lacan links
jouissance to mystical experiences of being
transported beyond the everyday world.
Christopher Bollas in turn characterizes such
ephemeral states of altered perception in more
mundane terms, as simple self experiences
moments of simplified or suspended consciousness that allow us to fall to a place of depth
beyond thinking (17). We emerge from that

122

ruti
place amplified. As Bollas explains, The person
who cannot do this will have less psychic
vocabulary, fewer props for the dreaming
of lived experience, and so a diminished
internal world when he returns to being a
complex self (2223).
The momentary death of social subjectivity
can serve life in the sense that it can carry us to
what Harari calls the hiding place of being
(74). In this context, it might be useful to recall
Eric Santners distinction between two forms of
interpellation. The first is what we usually
understand by the term, namely our induction
into the normative socio-symbolic structures of
the world (interpellation in the Althusserian
sense). The second is a function of being
summoned to an inspired manner of encountering the world. Santner talks about divine
revelation as such an alternative form of interpellation a calling that cannot be resisted but
he also implies that we can envision it in broader,
less theological terms as a matter of being called
upon to meet whatever it is that, at any given
moment, takes on a force of necessity for us. The
real conjures up the latter kind of interpellation.
What is at stake here is the difference between a
socially mediated identity on the one hand and a
certain kind of subjective singularity on the other
a difference, that is, between an identity that
relies on cultural forms of authorization and one
that in some ways eludes or exceeds these forms.
Santner correctly underscores that the real is
connected to what is most singular about
subjectivity. Because the real does not enter
into the domain of social exchange or
negotiation because it only reveals itself in
the fissures of the symbolic it marks what is
unique about each individual; it represents an
uncontrollable eruption of singularity beyond the
social. As Santner remarks, the singular self the
self that can most truly say I (86) possesses
an actuality beyond all social generality or
classification. This singular self conveys the fact
that after the subject has been divested of its
symbolic commitments there is still something
that remains: the indigestible real of being.
Although Santner thinks along the same lines as
Zizek and Edelman in the sense that he links
subjective singularity to the death drive to the

123

utter alterity, asociality, and existential loneliness

of death18 his analysis remains more sinuous in
that he never loses track of the affirmative
potentialities of the real: the fact that it can give
us access to what Santner calls the sparks or
blessings of more life (142).19
Singularity in the Lacanian sense borders on
the death drive. But, as I have tried to
demonstrate, it is also a matter of creative
living, of the always idiosyncratic ways in which
we manage to bring the energies of the real into
the symbolic realm. In Seminar 23, Lacan stresses
that Joyce is singular to the extent that his art
attains the real. Indeed, he maintains that Joyce
becomes a unique individual and Lacan here
quite emphatically uses the humanistic term
lindividual to refer to Joyce precisely because
he is able to connect the symbolic with the
sinthome (as the depository of the real).20 On this
view, it is not only how we die or face the
prospect of our mortality but also how we
inhabit language that singularizes us, that gives
our identities a distinctive resonance. Although
being compelled to participate in a common
symbolic system on one level deprives us of
individuality, on another level it offers us a
possibility of carving out a singular place within
that order, of claiming language for our own
purposes. Harari points out that when the
symbol and the sinthome are separated, this is
an effect of the discourse of the master (88). In
other words, when our discourse fails to carry the
real, it obeys the masters dominant law.
Discourse that touches the real, in contrast,
crafts what in earlier philosophies was called a
personality or character. From this point of view,
the act of identifying with ones sinthome is less a
matter of self-annihilation than of actualizing
ones singularity.
Lacan therefore connects singularity or to
follow his somewhat surprising wording,
individuality to what we can least control,
namely the surplus energies of the real that bear
the force of necessity for us. To put the matter in
slightly different terms, one might say that it is
only insofar as subjectivity is always inevitably
assaulted by the disruptive and irrepressible real
that we are able to pursue singularity. In this
context, it is helpful to recall Jonathan Lears

future in the future

suggestion that to the extent that the psyche lives
under conditions of excess, it tends to constantly
disrupt itself. These disruptions do not necessarily aim at anything in particular, but simply
express the psyches inability to keep things fixed
and unchanging. Such breakdowns can obviously
become an occasion for injury or disintegration.
Yet Lear stresses that they can also provide a
precious opportunity for growth and creative
insight. As Lear elaborates, the psyches selfdisruptive quality manages to break through
established psychic structures and thus presents
itself as a possibility for new possibilities (112).
That is, breakdowns in normal psychic
functioning forge a space for potentialities that
have either been absent from or hidden by the
subjects established psychic structure; they take
the psyche into new and unexplored territories.
In Lears terms, when there is a break in the
subjects psychic structure, there is suddenly
room to move in all sorts of directions (124).
This, I would maintain, allows us to understand
why the disquieting energies of the real do not
necessarily obliterate subjectivity, but rather
contribute to our capacity to conceptualize
psychic potentiality and aliveness in the posthumanist context.
I agree with Edelman on one important point,
namely that fixating on the future can keep us
from living in the present, can to borrow from
Santner keep us from fully entering the midst
of life (9). As Edelman suggests, the dream of
futurity keeps the place of life empty (No
Future 48) in the sense of draining the present of
vitality. From this point of view, moments when
we access the real are valuable in part precisely
because they put the future on hold, because they
enable us to experience the distinctive cadence of
the here and now. During such encounters with
the real we are without past or future, our entire
being unified in a single instant of the present. At
the same time, to cast the future as an inherently
fantasmatic quest of salvation, as Edelman does,
is to portray it in unnecessarily narrow and
unimaginative terms. After all, the future is the
very antithesis of the kind of stasis or inertia
implied by the Lacanian notion of fantasy. It is a
flickering and ever-fragile way of sustaining the
idea that we can participate in an ongoing and

endlessly renewed process of becoming. The

future, in other words, is never determined but
inherently open ended; far from a predetermined
fantasy, it is a manner of remaining alive to the
utter unpredictability of existence. And to
the extent that this unpredictability defines the
human condition, the future is not a matter of
denying death but merely of holding on to the
possibility that between the present moment and the moment of
death we are capable of meeting
the world in ways that are worthy
of our passion.

notes
1 By posthumanist theory I mean French poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and their
multiple derivatives.
2 In Seminar 23, Lacan explains that thesinthome
is an older spelling of the word symptom.
3 See Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa. Irigaray, of
course, argues along similar lines inThis Sex Which
is Not One.
4 For Edelman, the future is precisely such an
imaginary fantasy of plenitude and wholeness.
Indeed, one reason Edelman attacks the future so
vehemently is that he believes that we look to the
future to close the existential gap opened up by
the signifier. We, in other words, expect the
future to recreate a fantasmatic past without
division or antagonism.
5 For a delineation of the different periods in
Lacans work see Fink, A Clinical Introduction to
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Zizek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology.
6 Elsewhere, I argue against the tendency to
equate the Lacanian symbolic with what
Foucault means by hegemonic power. Although
the symbolic can be harnessed for regulatory
ends, it is not synonymous with regulatory power.
And although it carries the Law of the Father, it
simultaneously embodies the always unpredictable (and thus unlawful) logic of signification.
7 Lacan describes this imaginative leeway as the
subjects capacity to make use of the poetic
function of language (Ecrits 264) ^ the fact that
language by definition perpetuates the radical slipperiness, multiplicity, and polyvalence of meaning.

124

ruti
8 As Silverman proposes, our very capacity to
love and cherish others derives from our lack
in the sense that it is only insofar as we
desire that we are induced to care about the
contours and unfolding of the surrounding
world.
9 Kristeva argues along these lines in Black Sun.
10 Silverman elucidates Lacans argument in
chapter 2 of World Spectators.
11 This is not to deny that there are specific
signifiers that can harm us. My point is merely
that language as such is not merely what mortifies
but also what animates us. It could be argued, of
course, that it is logically impossible to use signification to repair the foundational damage done by
the signifier, that the constitutive lack inflicted by
the signifier cannot be appeased by other signifiers. But I think that we are dealing with two
very different registers (and moments) of signification. As I have tried to demonstrate, even though
our initial encounter with the signifier is wounding
in the sense that it causes alienation, it also grants
us access to structures of meaning production that
we can subsequently use to cope with this
alienation.
12 As Edelman argues, the sinthome promises an
alternative to such sociality because it refuses the
symbolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers; it admits no translation of its singularity
and therefore carries nothing of meaning, recalling
in this the letter as the site at which meaning
comes undone (No Future 35).
13 Lacan writes: But it is clear that Joyces art is
something so particular that the term sinthome is
what suits it best (Le Sinthome 94; my trans.). On
Joyces jouissance, Lacan states: Read the pages of
Finnegans Wake, without trying to understand. It
reads. If it reads . . . it is because one feels present
the jouissance of the one who wrote it (165;
my trans.).
14 Referring
maintains:

to

Joyces

epiphanies,

Lacan

When one lists them, all of his epiphanies are

always characterized by the same thing,
which is very precisely the consequence
that results from the error in the knot,
namely the fact that the unconscious is
connected to the real . . . It is altogether
readable in Joyce that the epiphany is what

125

establishes that, because of a fault, the

unconscious and the real become
connected. (Le Sinthome 154; my trans.)
It should be noted that, insofar as Lacan believes
that the unconscious is structured like language,
his references to the unconscious here are meant
to evoke the symbolic (as opposed to the imaginary or the real).
15 As Lacan puts it: Joyce felt himself
overwhelmingly called (Le Sinthome 89; my
trans). Cixous gives a wonderful depiction of this
notion of being called to writing in Coming to
Writing.
16 Zizek argues against those critics of Lacan who
regard the symbolic as a closed system that
determines the framework of our existence in
advance, that allows for no possibility of reconstituting our symbolic universe. However, in his opinion, the symbolic is not altered through
innovative forms of signification but rather
through radical acts of subjective destitution that
bring the real into the symbolic in purely destructive ways (Ticklish 262^ 63).
17 There is, moreover, no need to think of this as a
matter of the signifier colonizing the real, for the
real can hardly be exhausted; the fact that the
signifier dips into the real does not deplete
the real, but merely serves to connect two very
different registers of subjective existence.
18 This is, of course,
phenomenological insight.

classically

19 Edelman, in contrast, equates singularity with

the death drive As he puts it:
Impervious to analysis and beyond
interpretation, the sinthome ^ as stupid
enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subjects singularity
depends ^ connects us to something Real
beyond the discourse of the symptom,
connects us to the unsymbolizable
Thing over which we constantly stumble,
and, so in turn, to the death drive . . .
(No Future 38)
20 Lacan announces: It is insofar as the
unconscious becomes connected to the sinthome,
which is what is singular about every individual,
that one can say that Joyce, as it is written somewhere, identifies himself as an individual
(Le Sinthome 168; my trans; emphasis in original).

future in the future

Again, the unconscious here implies the
symbolic.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The Complete Text. Trans.

Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2005.

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Mari Ruti
Department of English
University of Toronto
170 St. George Street
Toronto
Ontario M5R 2M8
Canada
E-mail: mari.ruti@utoronto.ca