A little over seven years ago – around the time, as it happens, when my first child was born – I read Leo Bersani’s Homos and Iannis Stavrakakis’s Lacan and the Political in quick succession; like most of my reading and, indeed, general activity at the time, it seemed a fairly arbitrary combination.

Lee Edelman’s No Future brings together what we might (in honour of the late Richard Rorty) call the liberal-ironist Lacanian notion of “the political” with Bersani’s delineation of the “homo” as a figure of anticommunal sexual resistance; the enculated offspring of the two is the “sinthomosexual”, Edelman’s walking neologism who “accedes” to the real of sex from which society must be defended. The snares of transgressivity are generously strewn in the path of this ambulating figure, and the sharp twanging that one occasionally detects in the background of Edelman’s boisterous polemic is, I would suggest, the sound of assorted traps being sprung.

Let’s start with “the political”. The sinthomosexual stands outside of politics as such, because politics as such (in Edelman’s account) is predicated on the future projection of an imaginary past, through the mediation of the symbolic child. Any political program whatsoever must legitimate itself according to this schema; accordingly, the sinthomosexual has no program, being denied access to the means of legitimation. What the sinthomosexual accesses instead, by means of the ironic resources of figuration, is the primary negation at the root of the symbolic, which the phantasmatic projective circuit of reproductive futurism aims to foreclose. In a certain sense, then, the sinthomosexual is (or has a kind of privileged access to) the matter of politics itself: the very (un-)thing that all political projects and identifications must disavow in order to function.

I describe this notion of the political as “liberal-ironist” because it maintains that the symbolic field of politics must be structured around an abjection/projection mechanism, which nominates some particular category of person to be the bearer of its own disavowed jouissance. If it isn’t “the queer”, it will be someone else (and has in fact in the past been “someone else”, for example the blood-libelled “Jew”). There is nothing really that can be done about this: any political intervention will at best constitute a new symbolic mapping, supported by a new register of imaginary totalizations, and displace the figure of accursed jouissance into some other category.

This is the Lacanian way of saying that the poor are always with us; it assumes that abjection and disavowal must coalesce around some scapegoated figure, and that this figure, chosen from among the register of constituted social categories, must always substantialize an identity. “The queer” can only become the bearer of accursed jouissance once queer existence has attained a certain degree of visibility. The more visible and substantial, the more threatening: much of the homophobic language Edelman cites is aimed at dissolving the social category of the homosexual, returning “same-sex orientation” to the status of a psychiatric disorder of individuals rather than a locus of political organisation, the source of a demand for recognition.

The liberal-identitarian response to this reactionary drive to re-pathologize homosexuality is to defend the integrity of the category against its desubstantialization: to assert that “the queer” exists normally, and has a right to its place within a stable symbolic mapping. The liberal-ironist response is however to observe, as Edelman does, that the symbolic mapping is stabilized through an imaginary totalization, inseparable from its corresponding abjection and disavowal of the “primary negativity” of the symbolic, and to insist on countering this very process, in the site where it occurs, through the ironic “assumption” of the figure of negativity itself.

Edelman will maintain that this position stands in opposition to liberalism, because for him the liberal is always the liberal-identitarian who seeks to construct a multicultural agora of equally-recognised and respected identities (“and so on, and so on”, as Zizek would say). In describing Edelman’s own position as “liberal-ironist”, I mean to indicate a complicity underlying this opposition, which is rooted in a shared disavowal – to put it vulgarly, a disavowal of the economic. What is the role of “imaginary totalization” in the facts, which are nothing if not political, of economic oppression and inequality? What has the real of sex to do with primitive accumulation? The answer in both cases is not nothing; but this makes it all the more significant that, in a polemic on the “cultural text” of the political, the structuring opposition should be between the individual (qua sinthomosexual narcissist) and the communal (qua secondary narcissism, or “narcissism of the other”).

As Edelman argues convincingly, right from the opening pages of the book, the communal is the transcendental ground of US political discourse: it seems as if no political move is possible that does not refer itself to communal values, or seek legitimation by inscribing itself on the “Mobius band” of secondary narcissism. But the political moves excluded by this grounding are, above all, economic moves: is not the problem facing the American liberal left, such as it is, one of how to formulate and justify an economic program in terms essentially foreign – indeed, intrinsically hostile – to any such formulation?

It is here that we must distinguish between the communal and the collective, in terms of the type of political agency that each instantiates. The “community” stands for continuity, the reproduction of social forms and the guarantee of the imaginary integrity of those forms qua form. The collective, by contrast, exists by virtue of the force of its own decision to be (always ultimately grounded in a political intervention), and the truth of its becoming: its “future” is precisely not the projected realization of a forlorn imaginary cohesion, but the insistence of the unstable forces it convokes, in the jeopardy of faithfulness, into a present. It exists in the trace of a formal break or innovation, a founding iconoclasm; in other words, it is invented and invested by the primary negativity of the symbolic.

Now, the first chapter of Edelman’s book does indeed end with an address to a “we” – “we queers” – that is presented with the option of acceding to the particularity of the sinthome and insisting, in Edelman’s words, that “the future [e.g. of reproductive futurism] stops here”. The problem at this point is one of identifying the manner of the anabasis that assembles this “we”. It is assuredly not a communal “we”, not a tribe whose customs and manners might be found archived in the sex museums, bath house memoirs and oral history transcripts that increasingly constitute the resources of an already nostalgic queer identity. Its universality is, in effect, the universality of a particularity, that of the sinthome that marks each individual’s entry, qua individual, into the symbolic. And this is not a bad place to start; but the question is, how – and in what company, and under what formal aegis – does one mean to go on?

What, finally, connects the figure of the sinthomosexual to that of the homosexual? On this point, it seems to me, Edelman equivocates. Abjection and stigmatization generate a figure to which the abject and stigmatized can accede, and so may be thought of as having a kind of privileged access; thus, “queerness” is a contingent manifestation of the projection/abjection mechanism sustaining communal politics, and only happens to attach itself to homosexuals because they happen to violate the symbolic norms of that politics in a particularly visible and outrageous manner. As Edelman says, if it wasn’t us it would be someone else. What’s more, neither of Edelman’s two “literary” sinthomosexuals, Scrooge and Silas Marner, is noticeably characterized by positive homosexual desire: among the things Marner loses in his exclusion from Lantern Yard is the girl he hoped to marry. So the position of the sinthomosexual, while stabilized by historically effective social circumstances, is in a certain sense also “floating” and up for grabs. Not only is everybody, in Ginsberg’s words, “a little bit homosexual”: everybody is also capable, in one manner or another, of acceding to the sinthome through which the primary negativity of the symbolic manifests itself, in them, as immanent exception or symbolic excess.

The snare that I think proves most damaging to No Future’s thesis is not in fact that of special pleading on behalf of “the queer”, with all the attendant question-begging issues of identification that would entail, but that of emphasizing the particularity of the sinthome over its universality: both are equally destructive of communal politics, but it is in the latter that the aleatory trajectory of the affinitive comes into play. This, needless to say, remains to be worked out, but the specific problem with Edelman’s emphasis on particularity, primary narcissism and an essentially private communing with the real of the drives is that it reinvests precisely the psychiatric model of queerness as individual perversion and social disorder that the “queer event” sought to overturn. The urgent question remains that of the anabasis which might convoke a collective body – and with it a politics worthy of the name.

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