Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2004
Impervious to analysis and beyond interpretation, the sinthome — as stupid enjoyment, as the node of senseless compulsion on which the subject’s 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 … 38
Thus, 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 — by reducing the assurance of meaning in fantasy’s promise of continuity to the meaningless circulation and repetitions of the drive.
Scrooge [in Dickens novel The Christmas Carol], as sinthomosexual, denies, by virtue of his unwillingness to contribute to the communal realization of futurity, the fantasy structure, the aesthetic frame, supporting reality itself. He realizes, that is, the jouissance that derealizes sociality and thereby threatens, in Zizek’s words, “the total destruction of the symbolic universe.” 44
Scrooge,the self-denying miser — living alone, and in darkness, on gruel — extends to his neighbors, however unneighborly it no doubt makes him appear, the same self-denying enjoyment to which he readily submits as well.
In this he enacts the negativity both Freud and Lacan discerned in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself; he unleashes,that is,as the love of his neighbor, the force of a primal masochism like that of the superego asserting its singular imperative, “Enjoy!”
What might seem to bespeak narcissistic isolation from everyone around him — his self-delighting stinginess, his solipsistic rejection of comforts, no less for others than for himself instantiates, then, a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire. It expresses, that is, the will-to-enjoyment perversely obedient to the superego’s insatiable and masochistic demands.
Scrooge’s persistence, therefore, as Scrooge, as the child-refusing sinthomosexual whom the spirit of Christmas Yet to Come exposes as a life-denying black hole, must be understood as determining that there can be no future at all.
Only by thus renouncing ourselves can queers escape the charge of embracing and promoting a “culture of death,” earning the right to be viewed as “something far greater than what we do with our genitals.”
A Christmas Carol, with astonishing clarity, spells out just how we gain that “right” when we learn that Scrooge, now family-friendly and blissfully pro-natalist, subsequently had (alas, poor Marley) “no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards”. By accepting this peter-less principle, we might eventually gain acceptance as the “social equals and responsible citizens” that Larry Kramer and others have demanded we become; we might find ourselves, like Scrooge, reborn, made over as “second father[s] “to the future, permitted to perform our part in the collective adoration of the Child and so to reinforce the fantasy always figured by Tiny Tim. 47
the sinthome refers to the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive
Where the symptom sustains the subject’s relation to the reproduction of meaning, sustains, that is, the fantasy of meaning that futurism constantly weaves, the those fantasies by and within which the subject means. And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,” the those fantasies by and within which the subject means.
And because, as Bruce Fink puts it, “the drives always seek a form of satisfaction that, from a Freudian or traditional moralistic standpoint, is considered perverse,” the sinthome that drives the subject, that renders him subject of the drive, thus engages, on a figural level, a discourse of what, because incapable of assimilation to heterosexual genitality, gets read, as if by default, as a version of homosexuality, itself conceived as a mode of enjoyment at the social order’s expense. As Fink goes on to observe: “What the drives seek is not heterosexual genital reproductive sexuality, but a partial object that provides jouissance.”
Sinthomosexuality, then, only means by figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion — a fantasy on which every subject’s cathexis of the signifying system depends. As the shadow of death that would put out the light of heterosexual reproduction, however, sinthomosexuality provides familial ideology, and the futurity whose cause it serves, with a paradoxical life support system by providing the occasion for both family and future to solicit our compassionate intervention insofar as they seem, like Tiny Tim, to be always on their last legs. 113