In the End: Theory is (not—) Forever

As you might imagine, not everyone in even the queer academic community applauded No Future’s abrasive, antisocial, f-bombing barrage.¹ But to me it seems entirely appropriate to bring not only the preceding lesson in gender-troubling queer theory but all 10 of our theoretical lessons to an end with Edelman’s incomparable negativity. It seems meet and fitting for us to end our theoretical narrative with Edelman’s queerly affirmative nod toward the death drive, for we’ve learned a few lessons here about the strange relations between narrative writing and our unconscious desire for “the end.” In the beginning, we were subjected to some unsettling lessons in “anthropogenetic” textuality, alienating interpretations of our polymorphously perverse geneses; if we learned those early lessons sufficiently, if we read those lessons and all that followed closely enough, then perhaps here, in the end, we can understand what queer theorist Carla Freccero means when she seriously suggests that “all textuality, when subjected to close reading, can be said to be queer,” why she writes that “if one were being playfully adjectival . . . one might call English departments departments of queer studies”, why she both seriously and playfully holds theory and literature, or theory as literature, to be “always already queer” (2006: 5, 18, 13). For like “queerness,” theory and literature offer themselves as “site[s] of permanent becoming” (Jagose 1996: 131), discursive activities that “can never define an identity” but “can only ever disturb one” (Edelman 2004: 17).

And to return one last time to the titles of our identity-disturbing lessons in theory, we might suggest that that in the end they’re all kind of “queer,” that “queerness” in its most current usage effectively addresses what’s been at stake all along in this strange set of defamiliarizing axioms—that the world must be made to mean; that meaning is only the polite word for pleasure (whether that pleases us or not); that language is by nature fictional, as are we, the animals at its mercy; that our desires are thus never purely instinctual or merely biological but must always be taken literally, to the letter; that we are consequently not quite ourselves today, and weren’t yesterday, and, bet your bottom dollar, still won’t be “tomorrow” (even if the sun does come up); that restless negativity is therefore the actual substance of our subjectivities, what we anti-essentially are; that even our most highly valued documents of civilization will probably always also document our yawping barbarisms, if only because the unconscious, with all its aggressions, “desires, repressions, investments and projections” (Said 1978: 8) is structured like a language; that there’s consequently nothing for us outside the text, which means that we are never born human, much less gendered, but always have to become human (though not necessarily always so narrowly gendered or so monolithically sexuated) in a world that, precisely because it always must be made to mean, could always be made to mean more queerly.

Maybe “queerness” in Edelman’s “antisocial” and “antifuturistic” sense can serve for a while as the last best “critical keyword” for the occluded but constitutive negativity of all human reality after the linguistic turn—the restless force of negativity that pervades the centerless core of “what theory does”—so that what it means in Edelman’s “demeaning” terms “to accept the figural burden of queerness . . . of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void [that is] always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core” could be intimately related to what it means in Lacan’s terms “to accept castration” (2008: 41), to accept “the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (1966d/2006: 262), or to what it means in Adorno and Horkheimer’s terms to “negate reification” (1947/2002: xvii), or to what it means in Culler’s terms to always take “meaning as a problem rather than a given” (2007: 85), or even to what it means in Hegelian parlance to embrace dissolution, to “tarry with the negative,” to engage with “the tremendous power of the negative” so as to free all of our “determinate thoughts from their fixity” (1807/1998: 59, 60).

Throughout these 10 lessons, I’ve insisted that theoretical writing—writing about “writing as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646)—involves a thoroughgoing refusal to fix meaning, a perpetual attempt “to dereify the language of thought” (Jameson 2009: 9). At the risk of seeming to reify this very refusal of fixity, of letting this “refusal to fix meaning” become the fixed meaning of theory itself, I will end by stating my own interpretive desire to perpetually connect this “refusal to fix” to whatever “resistance to regimes of the normal” we can muster, to perpetually fix this “refusal to fix” to our ongoing political and aesthetic project of making “the world queerer than ever” (Warner 1993: xxvi, xxvii). The world, let’s say, is always already queerer than ever, but only because it still always has to be made that way, still has to be written that way—by us. For to rewrite the words from Jean-Luc Nancy that appeared at the end of our lesson on Hegel, this queerer-than-ever “world is precisely what . . . manifests itself as a restlessness”—this globally restless and eternally queer negativity is “not only ours” but “is itself ‘us’ ” (Nancy 2002: 78), all of us, every single one of us, living or dead—strangely enough. For Hegel, let’s recall, though no longer living, still writes that “something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here’, it at once is and is not” (1812/1998: 239). And Lacan, let’s remember, though likewise no longer alive, still writes of the written letter not “that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes” (Lacan 1966a/2006: 17).² And so maybe the queerest thing about us animals at the mercy of moving letters will always be that “we’re here” and we’re not wherever we end up going. And perhaps “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory” (Culler 2007: 1) can serve, if only for the passing moment, as our queerest, our strangest, our strongest way of “coming to terms” with this (no) future, this eternally returning affirmation, in the present that we’re making, of the future of the word—“no.”

Which is what I think I mean when I write that in the end “theory is (not—) forever,” an inscription I’m sure I mean to be taken three ways—theory is forever; theory is not forever; and theory is this perpetual not—is this restlessness of the negative, is this refusal of the authority of every is that there is—forever (or at least for as long as “human reality” is still a going concern and not yet a total goner). What I think I mean by writing “theory is (not—) forever” is that all theoretical writing is “always already queer” to the extent that “theory never stops coming back” (Rabaté 2002: 10) as the personal and collective site of our permanent(ly) becoming (undone), so that, at least in theory, “we never stop losing ‘the fixity of [our] self-positing’ ” (Nancy 2002: 79). Like any productive unfixity, like any “possibility of change,” like anything that restlessly moves—like “all textuality,” like all writing, like all of “us”—theory is here, and it’s queer, and, at the same time, it’s not.

So I’m tempted in this penultimate paragraph simply to trot out the old activist taunt “get used to it!” once again and consider my work done. But if theory is indeed (not—) forever, then this work, our arduous “attempt to dereify the language of thought,” our protracted “labor of ambiguating categories of identity,” can never be quite so tidily finished. For any “terms” with which we could ever fully “come to terms” would not be effectively theoretical terms, and any writing that we could ever get comfortably “used to” would not be specifically theoretical writing, would not be the radical “practice of creativity” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262) to which it’s been my great pleasure to introduce you here. For to revisit some rude and radical statements about theory that appeared at the beginning of this introduction, isn’t the “whole point” of theory not to get used to anything but rather, in Judith Halberstam’s words, “to fuck shit up” (2006: 824)? Isn’t the aim of theory to produce or provoke “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix)—those perceptions of the present to which we’ve gotten all too commonly accustomed? And isn’t “the task of theory . . . to make the present and thus to . . . invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (Hardt 2011: 21)? If our actively and provocatively “making the present” is indeed the perpetual “task of theory,” as Michael Hardt proposes in “The Militancy of Theory,” then our having gotten used to any present that presently is could only mean our having gotten off task, our having settled for taking the meanings of the present, the past, and the future, as reified givens rather than as ever-startling problems.

So perhaps we’d best get used to not getting used to the activities nicknamed “theory.” And perhaps getting used to never getting used to theoretical writing means nothing more or less than taking the full measure of Foucault’s militant wisdom and joining him in (still) thinking (about thinking) that “there are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (1986: 7).

Notes

¹ See, for example, Hall (2006), Halberstam et al. (2006), and Dean (2008). But see also Ruti (2008).

² Hegel, Lacan, and basically all the dead writers who ever lived can be said to “still write,” to still be writing, by virtue of the literary convention that bids us describe “what has been written” in the present tense, as if we’d just seen a ghost. This apparitional aspect of all textuality is more or less what I was getting at back in the introduction when I referred to “the undead,” to “everyone who still participates in human reality, if only in the spectral form of writing.”