💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › lee-edelman-no-future.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:01:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: No Future
Author: Lee Edelman
Date: 2004
Language: en
Topics: queer, sex, sexuality, identity, anti-social, psychoanalysis
Source: Retrieved on 06/10/2020 from https://archive.org/details/EdelmanNoFutureQueerTheoryAndTheDeathDrive
Notes: Movie stills from the book not included.

Lee Edelman

No Future

Acknowledgements

The following people played significant roles in the production of this

book. A number of them invited me to give lectures that later developed

into chapters; others raised questions that sharpened or helped clarify

its argument. Some assisted in the preparation of the manuscript and the

images used to illustrate it, while others were invaluable in the

editing and design of the book it now has become. Still others, whether

they knew it or not, gave me the courage to let this argument go as far

as it demanded. All, in their various ways, provided the intellectual

companionship without which such a project as this could never be

sustained. It gives me great pleasure to name their names and to

acknowledge their importance to this book: Richard Allen, Nancy

Armstrong, Matthew Bell, Courtney Berger, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani,

John Brenkman, Judith Brown, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Oliver Buckton, Bonnie

Burns, William Cain, Robert Caserio, Jane Chance, Rey Chow, Douglas

Crimp, Andrew Cunningham, Sheila Emerson, Diana Fuss, Jane Gallop,

Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Goldberg, Sam Ishu Gonzales, Ellis Hanson,

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sonia Hofkosh, Judith Hoover, Barbara Johnson,

Elizabeth Langland, Kate Lothman, Robert K. Martin, Pamela Matthews,

Madhavi Menon, David McWhirter, Helena Michie, D. A. Miller, Leland

Monk, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Mary Ann O’Farrell, Joe Parenteau,

Donald Pease, Frances Restuccia, Valerie Rohy, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,

Ashley Shelden, Catharine Spencer, Henry Turner, Rebecca Walkowitz, and

Ken Wissoker.

A special word of thanks must go to Alan, Erica, Larry, Joni, Leah, Avi,

Sam, Greg, Doug, Brian, and Ben. However much they might wish it

otherwise, they are part of this book as well.

My debt to Joseph Litvak is in a category of its own and continues,

daily, accumulating interest beyond my ability to repay it. His

generosity, both emotional and intellectual, makes better everything it

touches and I count myself singularly fortunate to be able to owe him so

very much.

I would like to thank the Trustees of Tufts College for funding the

sabbatical during which I completed work on this book. I am also

grateful to Susan Ernst, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, for providing

the necessary funds to obtain the stills that appear in the text.

The following chapters, in different, and in all cases significantly

shorter, form, have already appeared in print. I am happy to acknowledge

the publishers who have given me permission to include them here.

Chapter 1 was published, in an earlier version, as “The Future is Kid

Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” in

Narrative (January 1998).

Much of what now appears as chapter 2 was originally published as

“Sinthom-osexuality” in Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pamela R. Matthews

Minnesota. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

Most of chapter 4 was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock:

Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales (BFI,

1999).

1. The Future is Kid Stuff

In the spring of 1997, before the right-wing assault on his presidency

succeeded in drawing real blood at last, Bill Clinton was the subject of

a minor but nonetheless telling political controversy. His appearance

beside his wife and daughter in a series of public service announcements

sponsored by the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization, “raise[d)

questions,” according to the New York Times, “about where politics stops

and where public service begins.” Such questions, for those who raised

them at least, reflected a concern that his widespread depiction in a

series of print ads and video spots in support of a group that

identified itself as the Coalition for America’s Children might bolster

the President’s popularity with voters by showing his commitment to a

set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on

the family, to be sure, but that focus on the protection of children. By

showing the President, in the words of the Times, as “a concerned,

hard-working parent”—as one committed to the well-being of those least

able to care for themselves, and specifically as “the defender of

children, on issues like education and drugs”—these public service

announcements seemed likely to heighten his moral stature and, with it,

his standing with the American electorate, or so feared Alex

Castellanos, a Republican media consultant. “This is the father

picture,” he complained in the pages of the Times, “this is the daddy

bear, this is the head of the political household. There’s nothing that

helps him more.”[1]

But what helped him most in these public appeals on behalf of America’s

children was the social consensus that such an appeal is impossible to

refuse. Indeed, though these public service announcements concluded with

the sort of rhetorical flourish associated with hard-fought political

campaigns (“We’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?”),

that rhetoric was intended to avow that this issue, like an ideological

Möbius strip, only permitted one side. Such “self-evident”

one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so

obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits

our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service

announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation.

But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively

political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media

consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar

as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the

logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic

compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically

responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed,

of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book

describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological

limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the

absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by

casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer

resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations.

For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies

attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core,

conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate

social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the

form of its inner Child. That Child remains the perpetual horizon of

every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every

political intervention. Even proponents of abortion rights, while

promoting the freedom of women to control their own bodies through

reproductive choice, recurrently frame their political struggle,

mirroring their anti-abortion foes, as a “fight for our children—for our

daughters and our sons,” and thus as a fight for the future.[2] What, in

that case, would it signify not to be “fighting for the children”? How

could one take the other “side,” when taking any side at all necessarily

constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a

political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it

intends? Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to

the very space that “politics” makes unthinkable: the space outside the

framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the

conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body

politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement

with the cultural text of politics and the politics of cultural texts

lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not

“fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all

politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism. The ups

and downs of political fortune may measure the social order’s pulse, but

queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political

symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be

sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that

follows from reading that figure literally, and hence a place from which

liberal politics strives—and strives quite reasonably, given its

unlimited faith in reason—to disassociate the queer. More radically,

though, as I argue here, queerness attains its ethical value precisely

insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as

resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the

inextricability of such resistance from every social structure.

To make such a claim I examine in this book the pervasive invocation of

the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value and propose

against it the impossible project of a queer oppositionality that would

oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which

is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition.

This paradoxical formulation suggests a refusal—the appropriately

perverse refusal that characterizes queer theory—of every

substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally

defined,[3] and, by extension, of history as linear narrative (the poor

man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as

itself—through time. Far from partaking of this narrative movement

toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of

meaning’s eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to

every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social,

to every social structure or form.

Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of

negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider

accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some

more perfect social order—such a hope, after all, would only reproduce

the constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would

equally occasion the negativity of the queer—but rather to refuse the

insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of

an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible,

inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the question: If not

this, what? Always the demand to translate the insistence, the pulsive

force, of negativity into some determinate stance or “position” whose

determination would thus: negate it: always the imperative to immure it

in some stable and positive form. When I argue, then, that we might do

well to attempt what is surely impossible—to withdraw our allegiance,

however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of

reproductive futurism—I do not intend to propose some “good” that will

thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and

certainly not what we call the “good,” can ever have any assurance at

all in the order of the Symbolic. Abjuring fidelity to a futurism that’s

always purchased at our expense, though bound, as Symbolic subjects

consigned to figure the Symbolic’s undoing, to the necessary

contradiction of trying to turn its intelligibility against itself, we

might rather, figuratively, cast our vote for “none of the above,” for

the primacy of a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic,

which would echo that law’s foundational act, its self-constituting

negation. The structuring optimism of politic s to which the order of

meaning commits us, installing as it does the perpetual hope of reaching

meaning through signification, is always, I would argue, a negation of

this primal, constitutive, and negative act. And the various

positivities produced in its wake by the logic of political hope depend

on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow

escape, and not redouble, such negativity. My polemic thus stakes its

fortunes on a truly hopeless wager: that taking the Symbolic’s

negativity to the very letter of the law, that attending to the

persistence of something internal to reason that reason refuses, that

turning the force of queerness against all subjects, however queer, can

afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us.

Or better: can expose the constancy,the inescapability, of such access

to jouissance in the social order itself, even if that order can access

its constant access to jouissance only in the process of abjecting that

constancy of access onto the queer.

In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the “grimness with which

a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,”

the queerness of which I speak would deliberately. ever us from

ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence

of knowing our “good.”[4] Such queerness proposes, in place of the good,

something I want to call “better,” though it promises, in more than one

sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better

with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls “truth,” where truth does

not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.[5]

Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject,

impossible fully to articulate and “tend[ing] toward the real.”[6]

Lacan, therefore, can write of this truth:

The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch,

which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior.

We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a

modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that

of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from

whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the

subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character

of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of

laws—even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in

every human being.[7]

Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the “aberrant or atypical,”

to what chafes against “normalization,” finds its value not in a good

susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity

that voids every notion of a general good. The embrace of queer

negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it

to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in

its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical

challenge to the very value of the social itself.[8]

For by figuring a refusal of the coercive belief in the paramount value

of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for dialectical

access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social order of the ground

on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social—and

extension, of the social subject; a faith that politics, whether of the

left or of the right, implicitly affirms. Divesting such politics of its

thematic trappings, bracketing the particularity of its various

proposals for social organization, the queer insists that politics is

always a politics of the signifier, or even of what Lacan will often

refer to as “the letter.” It serves to shore up a reality always

unmoored by signification and lacking any guarantee. To say as much is

not, of course, to deny the experiential violence that frequently

troubles social reality or the apparent consistency with which it

bears—and thereby bears down on-us all. It is, rather, to suggest that

queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in

and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally

necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through

the figural logics, the linguistic structures, that shape them. If it

aims effectively to intervene in the reproduction of such a reality—an

intervention that may well take the form of figuring that reality’s

abortion—then queer theory must always insist on its connection to the

vicissitudes of the sign, to the tension between the signifier’s

collapse into the letter’s cadaverous materiality and its participation

in a system of reference wherein it generates meaning itself. As a

particular story, in other words, of why storytelling fails, one that

takes both the value and the burden of that failure upon itself, queer

theory, as I construe it, marks the “other” side of politics: the “side”

where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the

energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the “side”

outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to

futurism’s unquestioned good. The rest of this book attempts to explain

the implications of this assertion, but first, let me sketch some

connections between politics and the politics of the sign by

establishing the psychoanalytic context within which my argument takes

shape.

Like the network of signifying relations that forms the Lacanian

Symbolic—the register of the speaking subject and the order of the

law—polities may function as the framework within which we experience

social reality, but only insofar as it compels us to experience that

reality in the form of a fantasy: the fantasy, precisely, of form as

such, of an order, an organization, that assures the stability of our

identities as subjects and the coherence of the Imaginary totalizations

through which those identities appear to us in recognizable form. Though

the material conditions of human experience may indeed be at stake in

the various conflicts by means of which differing political perspectives

vie for the power to name, and by naming to shape, our collective

reality, the ceaseless conflict of their social visions conceals their

common will to install, and to install as reality itself, one

libidinally subtended fantasy or another intended to screen out the

emptiness that the signifier embeds at the core of the Symbolic.

Politics, to put this another way, names the space in which Imaginary

relations, relations that hark back to a misrecognition of the self as

enjoying some originary access to presence (a presence retroactively

posited and therefore lost, one might say, from the start), compete for

Symbolic fulfillment, for actualization in the realm of the language to

which subjectification subjects us all. Only the mediation of the

signifier allows us to articulate those Imaginary relations, though

always at the price of introducing the distance that precludes their

realization: the distance inherent in the chain of ceaseless deferrals

and substitutions to which language as a system of differences

necessarily gives birth. The signifier, as alienating and meaningless

token of our Symbolic constitution as subjects (as token, that is, of

our subjectification through subjection to the prospect of meaning); the

signifier, by means of which we always inhabit the order of the Other,

the order of a social and linguistic reality articulated from somewhere

else; the signifier, which calls us into meaning by seeming to call us

to ourselves: this signifier only bestows a sort of promissory identity,

one with which we can never succeed in fully coinciding because we, as

subjects of the signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves, can only

ever aspire to catch up to whatever it is we might signify by closing

the gap that divides us and, paradoxically makes us subjects through

that act of division alone. This structural inability of the subject to

merge with the self for which it sees itself as a signifier in the eyes

of the Other necessitates various strategies designed to suture the

subject in the space of meaning where Symbolic and Imaginary overlap.

Politics names the social enactment of the subject’s attempt to

establish the conditions for this impossible consolidation by

identifying with something outside itself in order to enter the

presence, deferred perpetually, of itself. Politics, that is, names the

struggle to effect a fantasmatic order of reality in which the subject’s

alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity at the

endpoint of the endless chain of signifiers lived as history.

If politics in the Symbolic is always therefore a politics of the

Symbolic, operating in the name and in the direction of a constantly

anticipated future reality, then the telos that would, in fantasy, put

an end to these deferrals, the presence toward which the metonymic chain

of signifiers always aims, must be recognized, nonetheless, as belonging

to an Imaginary past. This means not only that politics conforms to the

temporality of desire, to what we might call the inevitable historicity

of desire—the successive displacements forward of nodes of attachment as

figures of meaning, points of intense metaphoric investment, produced in

the hope, however vain, of filling the constitutive gap in the subject

that the signifier necessarily installs—but also that politics is a name

for the temporalization of desire, for its translation into a narrative,

for its teleological determination. Politics, that is, by externalizing

and configuring in the fictive form of a narrative, allegorizes or

elaborates sequentially, precisely as desire, those overdeterminations

of libidinal positions and inconsistencies of psychic defenses

occasioned by what disarticulates the narrativity of desire: the drives,

themselves intractable, unassimilable to the logic of interpretation or

the demands of meaning-production; the drives that carry the

destabilizing force of what insists outside or beyond,because foreclosed

by, signification.

The drive—more exactly, the death drive—holds a privileged place in this

book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the

logic of the Symbolic, as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the

subject from within, 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. Lacan makes clear that the death drive

emerges as a consequence of the Symbolic; indeed, he ends Seminar 2 with

the claim that “the symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and

insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the

death instinct as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in

travail, in the process of coming, insisting on being realized.”[9] This

constant movement toward realization cannot be divorced, however, from a

will to undo what is thereby instituted, to begin again ex nihilo. For

the death drive marks the excess embedded within the Symbolic through

the loss, the Real loss, that the advent of the signifier effects.

Suzanne Barnard expresses this well in distinguishing between the

subject of desire and the subject of the drive: “While the subject of

the drive also is ‘born’ in relation to a loss, this loss is a real

rather than a symbolic one. As such, it functions not in a mode of

absence but in a mode of an impossible excess haunting reality, an

irrepressible remainder that the subject cannot separate itself from. In

other words, while desire is born of and sustained by a constitutive

lack, drive emerges in relation to a constitutive surplus. This surplus

is what Lacan calls the subject’s ‘anatomical complement,’ an excessive,

‘unreal’ remainder that produces an ever-present jouissance.”[10]

This surplus, compelling the Symbolic to enact a perpetual repetition,

remains spectral, “unreal,” or impossible insofar as it insists outside

the logic of meaning that, nonetheless, produces it. The drive holds the

place of what meaning misses in much the same way that the signifier

preserves at the heart of the signifying order the empty and arbitrary

letter, the meaningless substrate of signification that meaning intends

to conceal. Politics, then, in opposing itself to the negativity of such

a drive, gives us history as the continuous staging of our dream of

eventual self-realization by endlessly reconstructing, in the mirror of

desire, what we take to be reality itself. And it does so without

letting us acknowledge that the future, to which it persistently

appeals, marks the impossible place of an Imaginary past exempt from the

deferrals intrinsic to the operation of the signifying chain and

projected ahead as the site at which being and meaning are joined as

One. In this it enacts the formal repetition distinctive of the drive

while representing itself as bringing to fulfillment the narrative

sequence of history and, with it, of desire, in the realization of the

subject’s authentic presence in the Child imagined as enjoying

unmediated access to Imaginary wholeness. Small wonder that the era of

the universal subject should produce as the very figure of politics,

because also as the embodiment of futurity collapsing undecidably into

the past, the image of the Child as we know it: the Child who becomes,

in Wordsworth’s phrase, but more punitively, “father of the Man.”

Historically constructed, as social critics and intellectual historians

including Philippe Ariès, James Kincaid, and Lawrence Stone have made

clear, to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural

identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the

social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held

in perpetual trust.[11]

In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not

to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children,

serves to regulate political discourse—to prescribe what will count as

political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to

the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never

permitted to acknowledge or address. From Delacroix’s iconic image of

Liberty leading us into a brave new world of revolutionary

possibility—her bare breast making each spectator the unweaned Child to

whom it’s held out while the boy to her left, reproducing her posture,

affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself—to the revolutionary

waif in the logo that miniaturizes the “politics” of Les Mis (summed up

in its anthem to futurism, the “inspirational” “One Day More”), we are

no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future

than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the

Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal,

entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good,

though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are

allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized

subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued

than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at

risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. Hence, whatever refuses

this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective

reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the

organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously,

to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism

on which meaning always depends.

So, for example, when P. D. James, in her novel The Children of Men,

imagines a future in which the human race has suffered a seemingly

absolute loss of the capacity to reproduce, her narrator, Theodore

Faron, not only attributes this reversal of biological fortune to the

putative crisis of sexual values in late twentieth-century

democracies—“Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in

books, in life had increased and became more explicit but less and less

in the West we made love and bred children,” he declares—but also gives

voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child

as the obligatory token of futurity: “Without the hope of posterity, for

our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead

yet live,” he later observes, “all pleasures of the mind and senses

sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored

up against our ruins.”[12] While this allusion to Eliot’s “The Waste

Land” may recall another of its well-known lines, one for which we

apparently have Eliot’s Wife, Vivian, to thank—“What you get married for

if you don’t want children?”—it also brings out the function of the

child as the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality

rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our

collective narratives and our collective narratives of meaning. Charged,

after all, with the task of assuring “that we being dead yet live,” the

Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural

transcendence of the limits of nature itself), exudes the very pathos

from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when he comes

upon it in nonreproductive “pleasures of the mind and senses.” For the

“pathetic” quality he projectively locates in non-generative sexual

enjoyment—enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty,

substitutive, pathological—exposes the fetishistic figurations of the

Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms identical to

those for which enjoyment without “hope of posterity” is peremptorily

dismissed: legible, that is, as nothing more than “pathetic and

crumbling defences shored up against our ruins.” How better to

characterize the narrative project of The Children of Men itself, which

ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects from the start, with

the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth?

After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York

Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between

description and performance of the novel’s pro-procreative ideology: “If

there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.”[13] If,

however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame

must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments

understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as

responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality,

and, inevitably, life itself.

Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of

mankind’s children, succumbs so completely to the

narcissism—all-pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically

misrecognized—that animates pronatalism,[14] why should we be the least

bit surprised when her narrator, facing his futureless future, laments,

with what we must call a straight face, that “sex totally divorced from

procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic”?[15] Which is, of

course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to

allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically

heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond

meaning driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that

is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the

imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For the

Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth

of heterosexual sex-impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the

future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of

signifying futurity-figures our identification with an always

about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the

social order of meaning inherent in the structure of Symbolic desire

that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as

meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because

unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the

signifier, that “meaning,” despite itself, means.

The consequences of such an identification both of and with the Child as

the preeminent emblem of the motivating end, though one endlessly

postponed, of every political vision as a vision of futurity must weigh

on any delineation of a queer oppositional politics. For the only

queerness that queer sexualities could ever hope to signify would spring

from their determined opposition to this underlying structure of the

political—their opposition, that is, to the governing fantasy of

achieving Symbolic closure through the marriage of identity to futurity

in order to realize the social subject. Conservatives acknowledge this

radical potential, which is also to say, this radical threat, of

queerness more fully than liberals, for conservatism preemptively

imagines the wholesale rupturing of the social fabric, whereas

liberalism conservatively clings to a faith in its limitless elasticity.

The discourse of the right thus tends toward a greater awareness of, and

insistence on, the literalization of the figural logics that various

social subjects are made to inhabit and enact, the logics that, from a

“rational” viewpoint, reduce individual identity to stereotypical

generality, while the discourse of the left tends to understand better

the Symbolic’s capacity to accommodate change by displacing those logics

onto history as the inevitable unfolding of narrative sequence. The

right, that is, better sees the inherently conflictual aspect of

identities, the constant danger they face in alterity, the psychic

anxiety with which they are lived; but the left better recognizes

history’s persistent rewriting of those identities, finding hope in the

fact that identity’s borders are never fully fixed. The left in this is

always right from the vantage point of reason, but left in the shade by

its reason is the darkness inseparable from its light: the defensive

structure of the ego, the rigidity of identity as experienced by the

subject, and the fixity of the Imaginary relation through which we

(re)produce ourselves. This conservatism of the ego compels the subject,

whether liberal or conservative politically, to endorse as the meaning

of politics itself the reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality

a fantasy frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the

Imaginary form of the Child.

Consider, for example, a local moment from the ongoing war against

abortion. Not long ago, on a much traveled corner in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, opponents of the legal right to abortion plastered an

image of a fuIl-term fetus, larger in size than a full-grown man, on a

rented billboard that bore the phrase: “It’s not a choice; it’s a

child.” Barbara Johnson, in a dazzling analysis of anti-abortion

polemics like this, has demonstrated how they borrow and generate tropes

that effectively animate by personifying the fetus, determining in

advance the answer to the juridical question of its personhood by means

of the terms through which the fetus, and therefore the question, is

addressed.[16] Rather, therefore, than attempt to deconstruct this

particular rhetorical instance (rather, that is, than note, for example,

the juxtaposition of the pronoun “it,” appropriate to a fetus, with the

supremely humanizing epithet “child,” which might call for a gendered

pronoun, in order to show how this fragment of discourse maintains the

undecidability it undertakes to resolve, casting doubt thereby on the

truth of its statement by the form of its enunciation), I want to focus

instead, for a moment, on the ideological truth its enunciation,

unintentionally perhaps, makes clear.

For, strange as it is that a gay man should say this, when I first

encountered that billboard in Cambridge I read it as addressed to me.

The sign, after all, might as well have pronounced, and with the same

absolute and invisible authority that testifies to the successfully

accomplished work of ideological naturalization, the biblical mandate

“Be fruitful and multiply.” Like an anamorphotic distortion that only

when viewed from the proper angle assumes a recognizable form, the

slogan acquired, through the obliquity of my subjective relation to it,

a logic that illuminated the common stake in the militant right’s

opposition to abortion and to the practice of queer sexualities—a common

stake all too well understood (as the literalization of a figural

identity) by radical groups like the Army of God, which claimed credit

for the Atlanta terrorist bombings in 1997 of an abortion clinic and a

nightclub frequented by lesbians and gay men. The Cambridge billboard

thus seemed to announce what liberalism prefers to occlude: that the

governing compulsion, the singular imperative, that affords us no

meaningful choice is the compulsion to embrace our own futurity in the

privileged form of the Child, to imagine each moment as pregnant with

the Child of our Imaginary identifications, as pregnant, that is, with a

meaning whose presence would fill up the hole in the Symbolic-the hole

that marks both the place of the Real and the internal division or

distance by which we are constituted as subjects and destined to pursue

the phantom of meaning through the signifier’s metonymic slide.

No more than the right will the left, therefore, identify itself with

abortion; instead, as the billboard noted with scorn, it aligns itself

with “choice.” Who would, after all, come out for abortion or stand

against reproduction, against futurity, and so against life? Who would

destroy the Child and with it the vitalizing fantasy of bridging, in

time, the gap of signification (a fantasy that distracts us from the

violence of the drives while permitting us to enact them)? The right

once again knows the answer, knows that the true oppositional politics

implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal

discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as

these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the

capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the

contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as

putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends. With this

in mind, we should listen to, and even perhaps be instructed by, the

readings of queer sexualities produced by the forces of reaction.

However much we might wish, for example, to reverse the values

presupposed in the following statement by Donald Wildmon, founder and

head of the homophobic American Family Association, we might do well to

consider it less as an instance of hyperbolic rant and more as a

reminder o the disorientation that queer sexualities should entail:

“Acceptance or indifference to the homosexual movement will result in

society’s destruction by allowing civil order to be redefined and by

plummeting ourselves, our children and grandchildren into an age of

godlessness. Indeed, the very foundation of Western Civilization is at

stake.”[17] Before the self-righteous bromides of liberal pluralism

spill from our lips, before we supply once more the assurance that ours

is another kind of love but a love like his nonetheless, before we

piously invoke the litany of our glorious contributions to the

civilizations of East and West alike, dare we pause for a moment to

acknowledge that Mr. Wildmon might be right—or, more important, that he

ought to be right: that queerness should and must redefine such notions

as “civil order” through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the

reproduction of futurity?

It is true that the ranks of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and

transgendered parents grow larger every day, and that nothing intrinsic

to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgendered, transsexual, or queer predisposes them to resist the

appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place

themselves outside or against the acculturating logic of the Symbolic.

Neither, indeed, is there any ground we could stand on outside that

logic. In urging an alternative to the party line, which every party

endorses, in taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism

and arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its

end, I am not for a moment assuming that queers—by which I mean all so

stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not

themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial

narrativity of reproductive futurism.[18] But politics, construed as

oppositional or not, never rests on essential identities. It centers,

instead, on the figurality that is always essential to identity, and

thus on the figural relations in which social identities are always

inscribed.

To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the dominant

order, is neither to be nor to become that drive; such being is not to

the point. Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing

and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of the

drive. As the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that

permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on

disturbing, on queering, social organization as such—on disturbing,

therefore, and on queering ourselves and our investment in such

organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only

ever disturb one. And so, when I argue, as I aim to do here, that the

burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an

oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the

governing fantasy of realizing, in an always indefinite future,

Imaginary identities foreclosed by our constitutive subjection to the

signifier, I am proposing no platform or position from which queer

sexuality or any queer subject might finally and truly become itself, as

if it could somehow manage thereby to achieve an essential

queerness.[19] I am suggesting instead that the efficacy of queerness,

its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a Symbolic reality

that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in

it, clinging to its governing fictions, its persistent sublimations, as

reality itself. It is only, after all, to its figures of meaning, which

we take as the literal truth, that we owe our existence as subjects and

the social relations within which we live—relations we may well be

willing, therefore, to give up our lives to maintain.

The Child, in the historical epoch of our current epistemological

regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the

misrecognition of figure. It takes its place on the social stage like

every adorable Annie gathering her limitless funds of pluck to “stick

out [her] chin/ And grin/ And say: ‘Tomorrow!/ Tomorrow!/ I love ya/

Tomorrow/ You’re always/ A day/ Away.’”[20] And lo and behold, as viewed

through the prism of the tears that it always calls forth, the figure of

this Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s

rainbow, serving like the rainbow as the pledge of a covenant that

shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now—or later.

Recall, for example, the end of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993),

his filmic act of contrition for the homophobia some attributed to The

Silence of the Lambs (1991). After Andrew Beckett (a man for all

seasons, as portrayed by the saintly Tom Hanks), last seen on his

deathbed in an oxygen mask that seems to allude to, or trope on,

Hannibal Lecter’s more memorable muzzle, has shuffled off this mortal

coil to stand, as we are led to suppose, before a higher law, we find

ourselves in, if not at, his wake surveying a room in his family home,

now crowded with children and pregnant women whose reassuringly bulging

bellies displace the bulging basket (unseen) of the HIV-positive gay man

(unseen) from whom, the filmic text suggests, in a cinema (unlike the

one in which we sit watching Philadelphia) not phobic about graphic

representations of male-male sexual acts, Saint Thomas, a.k.a. Beckett,

contracted the virus that cost him his life. When we witness, in the

film’s final sequence, therefore, the videotaped representation of

Andrew playing on the beach as a boy, the tears that these moving

pictures solicit burn with an indignation directed not only against the

intolerant world that sought to crush the honorable man this boy would

later become, but also against the homosexual world in which boys like

this eventually grow up to have crushes on other men. For the cult of

the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since

queerness, for contemporary culture at large as for Philadelphia in

particular, is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end.

Thus, the occasion of a gay man’s death gives the film the excuse to

unleash once more the disciplinary image of the “innocent” Child

performing its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction. We

encounter this image on every side as the lives, the speech, and the

freedoms of adults face constant threat of legal curtailment out of

deference to imaginary Children whose futures, as if they were permitted

to have them except as they consist in the prospect of passing them on

to Children of their own, are construed as endangered by the social

disease as which queer sexualities register. Nor should we forget how

pervasively AIDS—for which to this day the most effective name

associated with the congressional appropriation of funds is that of a

child, Ryan White—reinforces an older connection, as old as the antigay

reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom’s destruction,

between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity.[21]

This, of course, is the connection On which Anita Bryant played so

cannily when she campaigned in Florida against gay civil rights under

the banner of “Save Our Children,” and it remains the connection on

which the national crusade against gay marriage rests its case.

Thus, while lesbians and gay men by the thousands work for the right to

marry, to serve in the military, to adopt and raise children of their

own, the political right, refusing to acknowledge these comrades in

reproductive futurism, counters their efforts by inviting us to kneel at

the shrine of the sacred Child: the Child who might witness lewd or

inappropriately intimate behavior; the Child who might find information

about dangerous “lifestyles” on the Internet; the Child who might choose

a provocative book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in

short, who might find an enjoyment that would nullify the figural value,

itself imposed by adult desire, of the Child as unmarked by the adult’s

adulterating implication in desire itself; the Child, that is, made to

image, for the satisfaction of adults, an Imaginary fullness that’s

considered to want, and therefore to want for, nothing. As Lauren

Berlant argues forcefully at the outset of The Queen of America Goes to

Washington City, “a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by

one imagined for fetuses and children.”[22] On every side, our enjoyment

of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose

freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of

potential encounters, with an “otherness” of which its parents, its

church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible

access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all

in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of

a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child

who must never grow up. Not for nothing, after all, does the historical

construction of the homosexual as distinctive social type overlap with

the appearance of such literary creations as Tiny Tim, David Balfour,

and Peter Pan, who enact, in an imperative most evident today in the

uncannily intimate connection between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, a

Symbolic resistance to the unmarried men (Scrooge, Uncle Ebenezer,

Captain Hook) who embody, as Voldemort’s name makes clear, a wish, a

will, or a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child.

That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege,

condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer

sexualities precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as

sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly finds itself

condemned: an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an

Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of

heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid

sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of

reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the

battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a

Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists, queers, and those who support

the legal availability of abortion. Indeed, as the Army of God made

clear in the bombmaking guide it produced for the assistance of its

militantly “pro-life” members, its purpose was wholly congruent with the

logic of reproductive futurism: to “disrupt and ultimately destroy

Satan’s power to kill our children, God’s children.”[23]

Without ceasing to refute the lies that pervade these familiar

right-wing diatribes, do we also have the courage to acknowledge, and

even to embrace, their correlative truths? Are we willing to be

sufficiently oppositional to the structural logic of

opposition—oppositional, that is, to the logic by which politics

reproduces our social reality—to accept that the figural burden of

queerness, the burden that queerness is phobically produced precisely to

represent, is that of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary

unity, the force that insists on the void (replete, paradoxically, with

jouissance) always already lodged within, though barred from,

symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s

very core? Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic

ourselves; but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our

cultural production as figures—within the dominant logic of narrative,

within Symbolic reality—for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for

the death drive it harbors within.

As the name for a force of mechanistic compulsion whose formal excess

supersedes any end toward which it might seem to be aimed, the death

drive refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal. Such a

goal, such an end, could never be “it”; achieved, it could never

satisfy. For the drive as such can only insist, and every end toward

which we mistakenly interpret its insistence to pertain is a sort of

grammatical placeholder, one that tempts us to read as transitive a

pulsion that attains through insistence alone the satisfaction no end

ever holds. Engaged in circulation around an object never adequate to

fulfill it, the drive enacts the repetition that characterizes what

Judith Butler has called “the repetitive propulsionality of

sexuality.”[24] The structural mandate of the drive, therefore, could be

seen to call forth its object or end, indeed, the whole register of

sexuality itself, as a displacement of its own formal energies, as an

allegorization of its differential force. But that force can never be

separated from, can never be imagined as existing before, the Symbolic

order of the signifier that it functions to transgress, which is why

Lacan argues that “if everything that is immanent Or implicit in the

chain of natural events may be considered as subject to the so-called

death drive, it is only because there is a signifying chain.”[25]

One way to approach the death drive in terms of the economy of this

“chain of natural events” thus shaped by linguistic

structures—structures that allow us to produce those “events” through

the logic of narrative history-is by reading the play and the place of

the death drive in relation to a theory of irony, that queerest of

rhetorical devices, especially as discussed by Paul de Man. Proposing

that “any theory of irony is the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any

theory of narrative,” de Man adduces the constant tension between irony

as a particular trope and narrative as a representational mode that

allegorizes tropes in general. Narrative, that is, undertakes the

project of accounting for trope systematically by producing, in de Man’s

rehearsal of Schlegel, an “anamorphosis of the tropes, the

transformation of the tropes, into the system of tropes, to which the

corresponding experience is that of the self standing above its own

experiences.” In contrast, as de Man makes clear, “what irony disrupts

(according to Friedrich Shlegel) is precisely that dialectic and

reflexivity.” The corrosive force of irony thus carries a charge for de

Man quite similar to that of the death drive as understood by Lacan.

“Words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want

them to say,” de Man notes. “There is a machine there, a text machine,

an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness ... which inhabits

words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any

narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and

dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any

narration.”[26] The mindless violence of this textual machine, so

arbitrary, so implacable, threatens, like a guillotine, to sever the

genealogy that narrative syntax labors to affirm, recasting its

narrative “chain of ... events” as a “signifying chain” and inscribing

in the realm of signification, along with the prospect of meaning, the

meaningless machinery of the signifier, always in the way of what it

would signify. Irony, whose effect de Man likens to the syntactical

violence of anacoluthon, thus severs the continuity essential to the

very logic of making sense.

How should we read this constant disruption of narrative signification,

a disruption inextricable from the articulation of narrative as such,

but as a version of the death drive, which Barbara Johnson calls, in a

different context, “a kind of unthought remainder ... a formal

overdetermination that is, in Freud’s case, going to produce repetition

or, in deconstruction’s case, may inhere in linguistic structures that

don’t correspond to anything else”?[27] If irony can serve as one of the

names for the force of that unthought remainder, might not queerness

serve as another? Queer theory, it follows, would constitute the site

where the radical threat posed by irony, which heteronormative culture

displaces onto the figure of the queer, is uncannily returned by queers

who no longer disown but assume their figural identity as embodiments of

the figuralization, and hence the disfiguration, of identity itself.

Where the political interventions of identitarian minorities—including

those who seek to substantialize the identities of lesbians, gay men,

and bisexuals—may properly take shape as oppositional, affording the

dominant order a reassuringly symmetrical, if inverted, depiction of its

own ostensibly coherent identity, queer theory’s opposition is precisely

to any such logic of opposition, its proper task the ceaseless

disappropriation of every propriety. Thus, queerness could never

constitute an authentic or substantive identity, but only a structural

position determined by the imperative of figuration; for the gap, the

non coincidence, that the order of the signifier installs both informs

and inhabits queerness as it inhabits reproductive futurism. But it does

so with a difference. Where futurism always anticipates, in the image of

an Imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will suture identity by

closing that gap, queerness undoes the identities through which we

experience ourselves as subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance

that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already

foreclosed.

Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but,

rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic

order. One name for this unnameable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is

jouissance, sometimes translated as “enjoyment”: a movement beyond the

pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a

violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law. This

passage, toward which the pulsion of the drives continuously impels us,

may have the effect, insofar as it gets attached to a particular object

or end, of congealing identity around the fantasy of satisfaction or

fulfillment by means of that object. At the same time, however, this

jouissance dissolves such fetishistic investments, undoing the

consistency of a social reality that relies on Imaginary

identifications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paternal

metaphor of the name.[28] Hence, for Lacan there is another name that

designates the unnameability to which jouissance would give us access:

“Behind what is named, there is the unnameable,” he writes. “It is in

fact because it is unnameable, with all the resonances you can give to

this name, that it is akin to the quintessential unnameable, that is to

say to death.”[29] The death drive, therefore, manifests itself, though

in radically different guises, in both versions of jouissance. To the

extent that jouissance, as fantasmatic escape from the alienation

intrinsic to meaning, lodges itself in a given object on which entity

comes to depend, it produces identity as mortification, reenacting the

very constraint of meaning it was intended to help us escape. But to the

extent that it tears the fabric of Symbolic reality as we know it,

unraveling the solidity of every object, including the object as which

the subject necessarily takes itself, jouissance evokes the death drive

that always insists as the void in and of the subject, beyond its

fantasy of self-realization, beyond the pleasure principle.

Bound up with the first of these death drives is the figure of the

Child, enacting a logic of repetition that fixes identity through

identification with the future of the social order. Bound up with the

second is the figure of the queer, embodying that order’s traumatic

encounter with its own inescapable failure, its encounter with the

illusion of the future as suture to bind the constitutive wound of the

subject’s subjection to the signifier, which divides it, paradoxically,

both from and into itself. In the preface to Homographesis I wrote that

the signifier “gay,” understood “as a figure for the textuality, the

rhetoricity, of the sexual ... designates the gap or incoherence that

every discourse of ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual identity’ would master.”[30]

Extending that claim, I now suggest that queer sexualities, inextricable

from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the

gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of

knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never

escape. As a figure for what it can neither fully articulate nor

acknowledge, the queer may provide the Symbolic with a sort of necessary

reassurance by seeming to give a name to what, as Real, remains

unnameable. But repudiations of that figural identity, reflecting a

liberal faith in the abstract universality of the subject, though better

enabling the extension of rights to those who are still denied them,

must similarly reassure by attesting to the seamless coherence of the

Symbolic whose dominant narrative would thus supersede the corrosive

force of queer irony. If the queer’s abjectified difference, that is,

secures normativity’s identity, the queer’s disavowal of that difference

affirms normativity’s singular truth. For every refusal of the figural

status to which queers are distinctively called reproduces the triumph

of narrative as the allegorization of irony, as the logic of a

temporality that always serves to “straighten” it out, and thus

proclaims the universality of reproductive futurism. Such refusals

perform, despite themselves, subservience to the law that effectively

imposes politics as the only game in town, exacting as the price of

admission the subject’s (hetero)normalization, which is accomplished,

regardless of sexual practice or sexual “orientation,” through

compulsory abjuration of the future-negating queer.

It may seem, from within this structure, that the Symbolic can only win;

but that would ignore the correlative fact that it also can only lose.

For the division on which the subject rests can never be spirited away

and the signifying order will always necessitate the production of some

figural repository for the excess that precludes its ultimate

realization of the One. In a political field whose limit and horizon is

reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this death drive, this

intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexuality’s implication in the

senseless pulsions of that drive. De-idealizing the metaphorics of

meaning on which heteroreproduction takes its stand, queerness exposes

sexuality’s inevitable coloration by the drive: its insistence on

repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance to

determinations of meaning (except insofar as it means this refusal to

admit such determinations of meaning) and, above all, its rejection of

spiritualization through marriage to reproductive futurism. Queerness as

name may well reinforce the Symbolic order of naming, but it names what

resists, as signifier, absorption into the Imaginary identity of the

name. Empty, excessive, and irreducible, it designates the letter, the

formal element, the lifeless machinery responsible for animating the

“spirit” of futurity. And as such, as a name for the death drive that

always informs the Symbolic order, it also names the jouissance

forbidden by, but permeating, the Symbolic order itself.

By denying our identification with the negativity of this drive, and

hence our disidentification from the promise of futurity, those of us

inhabiting the place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness

and enter the properly political sphere, but only by shifting the

figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of

queerness, after all, and the need to fill it remain. By choosing to

accept that position, however, by assuming the “truth” of our queer

capacity to figure the undoing of the Symbolic, and of the Symbolic

subject as well, we might undertake the impossible project of imagining

an oppositional political stance exempt from the imperative to reproduce

the politics of signification (the politics aimed at closing the gap

opened up by the signifier itself), which can only return us, by way of

the Child, to the politics of reproduction. For the liberal’s view of

society, which seems to accord the queer a place, endorses no more than

the conservative right’s the queerness of resistance to futurism and

thus the queerness of the queer. While the right wing imagines the

elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the

left would eliminate queerness by shining the cool light of reason upon

it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression

free of the all-pervasive coloring, the determining fantasy formation,

by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone,

the undoing of the social order and its cynosure, the Child. Queerness

thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the right wing the nothingness

always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left,

nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification.

But this is where reason must fail. Sexuality refuses demystification as

the Symbolic refuses the queer; for sexuality and the Symbolic become

what they are by virtue of such refusals. Ironically—but irony, as I’ve

argued, always characterizes queer theory—the demystification of

queerness and so, by extension, of sexuality itself, the demystification

inherent in the position of liberal rationality, could achieve its

realization only by traversing the collective fantasy that invests the

social order with meaning by way of reproductive futurism. Taken at its

word, that is, liberalism’s abstract reason, rescuing queerness for

sociality, dissolves, like queerness, the very investments on which

sociality rests by doing away with its underlying and sustaining

libidinal fantasies. Beyond the resonance of fantasy, after all, lies

neither law nor reason. In the beyond of demystification, in that

neutral, democratic literality that marks the futurism of the left, one

could only encounter a queer dismantling of futurism itself as fantasy

and a derealization of the order of meaning that futurism reproduces.

Intent on the end, not the ends, of the social, queerness insists that

the drive toward that end, which liberalism refuses to imagine, can

never be excluded from the structuring fantasy of the social order

itself. The sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice

of the queer.

Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe

understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the

signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation

giving health care benefits to Same-sex partners of municipal employees.

He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky,

that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the

marital bond. “Society,” he opined, “has a special interest in the

protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains

the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and

socialization of children, the state has a special interest in

marriage.”[31] With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly

committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing

health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent

his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends

on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such

fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law

had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual

assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme,

condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of

authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine

love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’

has no future and cannot give future to any society.”[32] Queers must

respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by

insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not

only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and

integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the

whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and

every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social

order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck

Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the

Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole

network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.

We might like to believe that with patience, with work, with generous

contributions to lobbying groups or generous participation in activist

groups or generous doses of legal savvy and electoral sophistication,

the future will hold a place for us—a place at the political table that

won’t have to come at the cost of the places we seek in the bed or the

bar or the baths. But there are no queers in that future as there can be

no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that

there can be no future at all: that the future, as Annie’s hymn to the

hope of “Tomorrow” understands, is “always/ A day/ Away.” Like the

lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn, forever “near the goal” of a union

they’ll never in fact achieve, we’re held in thrall by a future

continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue the dream of

a day when today and tomorrow are one. That future is nothing but kid

stuff, reborn each day to screen out the grave that gapes from within

the lifeless letter, luring us into, ensnaring us in, reality’s gossamer

web. Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive

onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy

that so defines them. But they’re positioned as well to recognize the

irreducibility of that fantasy and the cost of construing it as

contingent to the logic of social organization as such. Acceding to this

figural identification with the undoing of identity, which is also to

say with the disarticulation of social and Symbolic form, might well be

described, in John Brenkman’s words, as “politically

self-destructive.”[33] But politics (as the social elaboration of

reality) and the self (as mere prosthesis maintaining the future for the

figural Child), are what queerness, again as figure, necessarily

destroys—necessarily insofar as this “self” is the agent of reproductive

futurism and this “politics” the means of its promulgation as the order

of social reality. But perhaps, as Lacan’s engagement with Antigone in

Seminar 7 suggests, political self-destruction inheres in the only act

that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in

the name of having a life.

If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of

futurity, if the jouissance, the corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer

(non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to

consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual

reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which our queerness

could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the

death drive we’re called on to figure and insisting, against the cult of

the Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy

Hocquenghem made clear, are “not the signifier of what might become a

new form of ‘social organisation,’” that we do not intend a new

politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these

fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the

future. We choose, instead, not to choose the Child, as disciplinary

image of the Imaginary past or as site of a projective identification

with an always impossible future. The queerness we propose, in

Hocquenghem’s words, “is unaware of the passing of generations as stages

on the road to better living. It knows nothing about ‘sacrifice now for

the sake of future generations’ ... [it] knows that civilisation alone

is mortal.”[34] Even more: it delights in that mortality as the negation

of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life. It

is we who must bury the subject in the tomb-like hollow of the

signifier, pronouncing at last the words for which we’re condemned

should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that

the Child as futurity’s emblem must die; that the future is mere

repetition and just as lethal as the past. Our queerness has nothing to

offer a Symbolic that lives by denying that nothingness except an

insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an

insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of

futurity, shattering narrative temporality with irony’s always explosive

force. And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and

queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively—to

insist that the future stop here.

2. Sinthom osexuality

Sinthomosexuality: consider this neologism, grafting, at an awkward

join, the sounds of French and English, to the benefit of neither, like

a signifier each prefers to represent as foreign in the hope of thereby

keeping it unheard of and unheard.[35] If this word without a future

seeks a hearing here, it’s not to play for time or, like Scheherazade,

to keep at bay its all too certain doom. It would assert itself instead

against futurity, against its propagation, insofar as it would designate

an impasse in the passage to the future and, by doing so, would pass

beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes. Can that be

right, though? How could “saving” name a future that, whatever else it

holds in store, is bound to hold our deaths? Just how could time to

come, from which, in time, we’re destined all to vanish, give the

narcissistic solace that the ego, so conservative, so tethered to

Imaginary form, so fixed to fixity, demands? In short: through fantasy.

The central prop and underlying agency of futurism, fantasy alone endows

reality with fictional coherence and stability, which seem to guarantee

that such reality, the social world in which we take our place, will

still survive when we do not. It thus compels us to identify ourselves

with what’s to come by way of haven or defense against the ego’s certain

end. Elias Canetti seems to touch on this when writing about the human

subject’s investment in futurity: “[He] not only want[s] to exist for

always, but to exist when others are no longer there. He wants to live

longer than everyone else, and to know it; and when he is no longer

there himself, his name must continue.”[36] His name, that is, his

surrogate, must take the subject’s place; it must survive, if only in

fantasy, because fantasy names the only place where desiring subjects

can live. The sheltering office of fantasy, in concert with desire,

absorbs us into scenic space until we seem to become it, until we seem

so fully at one with the setting of our fantasy, the frame wherein we

get to see what is where we are not, that the subject of fantasy, Lacan

asserts, where this fantasy space is concerned, though “frequently

unperceived ... is always there.”[37]

Is always there. Transformed into setting, hence, literally,

mise-en-scène, the Lacanian subject of fantasy takes the place of place

itself, merging so fully with the sense of reality imbuing the imagined

scene that even its absence as an actor in that scene portends neither

loss of presence nor the absence of the consciousness that lets it

“know” itself. Instead, as Slavoj Žižek writes, “In [fantasy] I find

myself reduced to the evanescent point of a thought contemplating the

course of events during my absence, my non-being.”[38] To be there

always, though unperceived, to inhabit the space of perception as such

and thus to become the witness to one’s absence, one’s disembodiment:

such fantasy presumes a reality guaranteed, not threatened, by time,

sustained by the certainty that a “course of events” is bound to

continue its course in due course long after we are gone. And isn’t it,

then, an effort to fill what Lacan calls the lack in the Other—the place

of the absent signifier from every signifying chain and hence of the

very division around which the subject itself takes shape—through a

stop-gap identification with the empty place of the gaze in a gesture of

hopeless optimism for which we’re always compelled to opt: an optimism

hung on the slender thread of a future for which we would lay down our

lives in order to flesh out the fatal blank, the impossible Real, of

that gaze?

Sinthomosexuality, on the other hand—denying the appeal of fantasy,

refusing the promise of futurity that mends each tear, however mean, in

reality’s dress with threads of meaning (attached as they are to the

eye-catching lure we might see as the sequins of sequence, which dazzle

our vision by producing the constant illusion of consequence)—offers us

fantasy turned inside out, the seams of its costume exposing reality’s

seamlessness as mere seeming, the fraying knots that hold each sequin in

place now usurping that place. The sinthome—a term, as Lacan explains in

Seminar 23, that he takes from an “old way of writing what was written

later as ‘symptom’”[39]—speaks to the singularity of the subject’s

existence, to the particular way each subject manages to knot together

the orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. But by calling

attention to the status of the word as an archaic form of writing—thus

inflecting it in the direction of the letter rather than of the

signifier as bearer of meaning—Lacan, who will subsequently describe the

sinthome as “not ceasing to write itself,” implies from the outset its

relation to the primary inscription of subjectivity and thus to the

constitutive fixation of the subject’s access to jouissance.[40] Though

it functions as the necessary condition for the subject’s engagement of

Symbolic reality, the sinthome 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.

As the template of a given subject’s distinctive access to jouissance,

defining the condition of which the subject is always a symptom of sorts

itself, the sinthome, in its refusal of meaning,procures the determining

relation to enjoyment by which the subject finds itself driven beyond

the logic of fantasy or desire. It operates, for Lacan, as the knot that

holds the subject together, that ties or binds the subject to its

constitutive libidinal career, and assures that no subject, try as it

may, can ever “get over” itself—“get over,” that is, the fixation of the

drive that determines its jouissance. Explaining the sinthome’s

centrality to the subject’s accession to the Symbolic, Dominiek Hoens

and Ed Pluth observe, “The subject is able to take its place in the

Symbolic order by means of an element heterogeneous to that order. Yet

this element is also included in the Symbolic in some way. This order

is, then, ultimately grounded in something that is not of the order

itself. From the point of view of the subject, one can say that the

condition of the possibility of being a subject implies that it must

stick to a certain sign that cannot be integrated into the Symbolic

order, even though it is not completely alien to the Symbolic.”[41]

Such a “sign,” as Hoens and Pluth make clear, does not operate as a

signifier, since it can’t be exchanged for another one that purports to

make good its lack. It accedes to no equivalent, to no translation, and

thus to no meaning. Instead, it denotes “an isolated signifier/sign

taken out of the Symbolic order” (8): a “pure sign,” a site of

singularity and hence of nonexchangeability that fixes us as

definitively, and as meaninglessly, as a fingerprint. If this

singularity alone effects our access to the Symbolic, it also, as Hoens

and Pluth make clear, “puts the whole order into question and is thus a

pure negation of what the order stands for” (9). This antithetical

grounding, whereby the structure of Symbolic reality rests on what also

serves to negate it, informs the process of signification by which the

subject strives to make sense of itself in the face of a limit—an

internal limit, not one that confronts it from without—encountered in

the sinthome’s, and in the sinthomosexual’s, senseless jouissance.

For the sinthome “is literally our only substance,” as Žižek rightly

asserts, “the only positive support of our being, the only point that

gives consistency to the subject.”[42] As the subject’s “only

substance,” though, the sinthome, like a catachresis, brings the subject

into being at the cost of a necessary blindness to this determination by

the sinthome—a blindness to the arbitrary fixation of enjoyment

responsible for its consistency. Disavowing the meaningless fiat of such

a catachrestic sinthome, the subject misreads its identity as a metaphor

instead, one that names its elation to an Other whose positivity seems

to guarantee Symbolic reality itself. Such a subject, who would thereby

mistake the sinthome for a site of potential meaning, can be said to

“believe in” its sinthome (as opposed to identifying with it), which, as

Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq point out, “is to believe in the

existence of a final signifier, S2, to reveal the ultimate signification

and sense of S1. The condition for this is the guarantee that the Other

has no lack.” The Lacanian formula for such a belief, as Verhaeghe and

Declercq observe, “consists in adding three dots (...) to the letter:

S1....”[43] Consonant with what I am arguing here, this ellipsis itself

should be understood as the defining mark of futurism, inscribing the

faith that temporal duration will result in the realization of meaning

by way of a “final signifier” that will make meaning whole at last.

Sinthomosexuality, by contrast, scorns such belief in a final signifier,

reducing every signifier to the status of the letter and insisting on

access to jouissance in place of access to sense, on identification with

one’s sinthome instead of belief in its meaning.

Proust, in a well-known passage from the Recherche, describes a “game

wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with

water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are

without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and

twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses

or people, solid and recognisable.”[44] This figure for figure’s ability

to conjure a universe out of itself simultaneously bespeaks the

disfiguration or undoing of reality so important to de Man:the

dissolution of everything we understand as “solid and recognisable”

insofar as it proves to be an effect of something (language, for de Man;

the sinthome, for Lacan) without intrinsic meaning, like the pieces of

paper that originally appeared “without character or form.” If the

sinthome thus names the element through which we “take On ...

distinctive shape,” and if, like figure, it assures our access to a

“recognisable” world by allowing us, as Lacan explains, to “choose

something ... instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the

destruction of the symbolic universe)”[45] then it is also the case that

whatever exposes the sinthome as meaningless knot, denying our blindness

to its functioning and destabilizing the ground of our faith in reality,

effects a disfiguration with possibly catastrophic

consequences—consequences Žižek characterizes as “pure autism, a psychic

suicide, surrender to the death drive even to the total destruction of

the symbolic universe.”[46]

Glossing Lacan’s description of the sinthome as “not ceasing to write

itself” (“ne cessantpas de s’inscrire”), Roberto Harari discusses the

sinthome, belief in which forestalls this “total destruction of the

symbolic universe,” in terms of what is “necessary” for the survival of

the subject: “‘That which does not cease to write itself’ alludes to a

theoretical constellation that returns inexorably, incessantly. In the

last instance, the necessary is that which must not be gotten rid of; if

it comes away, it must be tied back in—it’s necessary, one cannot hide

it. In colloquial terms, we could say ‘I can’t live without it,’ or

‘it’s part of my life, it’s irreplaceable.’ Here, of course, we are not

referring to any intersubjective relations; it is a question of “Without

that—entailed by my way of dealing with it-I cannot live. It is

necessary for me.’ A nodal category, in sum, illuminated by Seminar

24.”[47]

Harari goes on to evoke the sinthome as “an uncoupled One, outside any

sequence; it answers to no integration, no context, no history, no full

or anticipated meaning.”[48] 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, about which Lacan declares in his seminar

devoted to the sinthome: “The death drive, it is the Real in so far as

it can only be thought as Impossible, which is to say that each time it

shows the tip of its nose, it is unthinkable.”[49] I am calling

sinthomosexuality, then, the sire where the fantasy of futurism

confronts the insistence of a jouissance that rends it precisely by

rendering it in relation to that drive. Sinthomosexuality also speaks,

as neologistic signifier, to the “sin” that continues to attach itself

to “homosexuality” (a “sin,” as I argue in chapter 3, that can make the

sinthomosexual into something of a s[a]in[t]) and materializes the

threat to the subject’s faith that its proper home is in meaning, a

threat made Real by the homosexual’s link to a less reassuring “home”:

the sinthome as site of jouissance around and against which the subject

takes shape and in which it finds its consistency. By the way of this

infelicitous term, I mean to suggest that homosexuality, understood as a

cultural figure, as the hypostatization of various fantasies that trench

on the antisocial force that queerness might better name, is made—that

is, both called forth and compelled—to carry the burden of sexuality’s

demeaning relation to the sinthome, the burden of what Lacan describes

as the absence of a sexual relation: the absence, that is, of a

complementarity to naturalize relations between the sexes insofar as all

sexuality suffers the mark of the signifier as lack. 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. Lacan, moreover, himself makes

clear the risk at which such jouissance puts reproductive futurism when

he observes that “the end of jouissance—as everything Freud articulates

about what he unadvisedly calls ‘partial drives’ teaches us—the end of

jouissance does not coincide with what it leads to, namely, the fact

that we reproduce.”[50]

That risk informs the cultural fantasy that conjures homosexuality, and

with it the definitional importance of sex in our imagining of

homosexuality, in intimate relation to a fatal, and even murderous,

jouissance—a fantasy that locates homosexuality in the place of the

sinthome, constructing it always as what I call sinthomosexuality. For

example, in 1997, while Andrew Cunanan, quondam gay club kid turned

serial killer of (mostly) gay men, held the U.S. media in a rapt

fascination that promised its own sort of jouissance, Gary Bauer, of the

Family Research Council, opined that “those who practice homosexuality

embrace a culture of death” and Peter A. Jay, a regular contributor to a

column in the Baltimore Sun, echoed this phrase (itself a commonplace in

anti-abortion polemics) to draw what seemed an obvious link to Cunanan’s

murderous rampage: “For haif a century at least, male homosexual life in

the United States has been a culture of death.... Sooner or later, a

product of that culture was going to take violence on the road.... There

will be other young men who have come face to face with the knowledge

that their own lives are blighted and doomed ... and now want to

experience the rush of killing in more traditional ways” (emphasis

mine).[51] Concurring in this notion that murderousness inhabits the

traditional, if not traditionally familial, repertoire of gay values,

Larry Kramer, writing in the New York Times, gave voice to his hope for

a transformation that would literally revitalize gay culture: “Allowing

sex-centrism to remain the sole definition of homosexuality is now

coming to be seen as the greatest act of self-destruction. There is a

growing understanding that we created a culture that in effect murdered

us, and that if we are to remain alive it’s time to redefine

homosexuality as something far greater than what we do with our

genitals.”[52]

But can anyone, Larry Kramer included, believe that such acts of

redefinition, however intent they may be on obscuring the realities of

“what we do with our genitals”—by labeling us as “artistic” perhaps, or

as a “gentle, loving people,” or maybe just as possessed of a fabulous

instinct for color and style—would alter the all-pervasive fantasy

within which our meaning is always a function not only of what we do

with our genitals but also of what we don’t do: a function, that is, of

the envy-, contempt-, and anxiety-inducing fixation on our freedom from

the necessity of translating the corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of

fucking into the infinitely tonier, indeed sacramental, Latin of

procreation? It is not, after all, mere coincidence that Bauer’s

evocation of sex-obsessed homosexuals willfully “embrac[ing] a culture

of death” should follow, in his view logically, from his meditation on

the spiritual significance that quickens the month of June in the West:

“Traditionally, June is a month jam-packed with weddings,” he tells his

readers, “a time to celebrate the abundance of God’s love and His

special plan for procreation. ‘Male and female He created them,’ the

Book of Genesis says, and through this natural pairing of one man and

one woman a family is created and the hope of a new generation is

carried forward.”[53]

“A family is created”: like Freud’s “a child is being beaten” (which no

doubt must follow in the fullness of time), the phrase strategically

elides the agency by which this end is achieved. No fucking could ever

effect such creation: all sensory experience, all pleasure of the flesh,

must be borne away from this fantasy of futurity secured, eternity’s

plan fulfilled, as “a new generation is carried forward.” Paradoxically,

the child of the two-parent family thus proves that its parents don’t

fuck and on its tiny shoulders it carries the burden of maintaining the

fantasy of a time to come in which meaning, at last made present to

itself, no longer depends on the fantasy of its attainment in time to

come. June may remain the privileged season for Bauer and his flock to

extol what they see as the “hope of a new generation,” but it is always

open season on those who would fly in the face of the mandate that they

“suffer the little children” and who force the world, in consequence, to

brood upon the abyss, which appears to be less engaging than cooing over

the fledgling brood in the nest: less engaging, that is, unless one can

manage to coo and brood at once, like opponents of women’s abortion

rights displaying their fetal photos like favorite snapshots from family

albums and brandishing them all the more avidly when the fetus, after

abortion, most clearly resembles a fully-formed child. Such acts of

fetishization by those intent on affirming “life,” acts that make

visible the morbidity inherent in fetishization as such, are by no means

outside the central currents of social and cultural discourse. To the

contrary, they allow us access to the very logic that drives that

discourse: a logic not for June alone but truly for all seasons, and

never more clearly visible than in the season in which, throughout the

West, we are ordered, each and everyone, to attend to the birth of the

Child.

Take, for example, Tiny Tim—or even, with a nod to the spirit of the

late Henny Youngman, “Take Tiny Tim, please!” His “withered little

hand,”[54] as if in life already dead, keeping us all in a stranglehold

as adamant as the “iron frame” supporting his “little limbs” (94); his

“plaintive little voice” (99) refusing any and every complaint the

better to assure its all-pervasive media magnification, in the echoes of

which, year in and year out, God blasts us, every one; his “little,

little” (125) figure parading its patent vulnerability with the

all-too-sure conviction of embodying the ruthless spiritual uplift, the

obligatory hope for the future to come, imposed by the celebration of

Christmas, “when its mighty Founder,” as Dickens pointedly reminds us,

“was a child himself” (104); and his “patient and ... mild” (125)

disposition so thoroughly matching the perfect humility of its coercive

self-display that his father with “tremulous” voice recalls how Tiny Tim

“hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and

it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made

lame beggars walk, and blind men see” (94).

Very pleasant indeed. And more pleasant by half than remembering,

instead, who made lame beggars lame (and beggars) and who made those

blind men blind. But then, A Christmas Carol would have us believe that

we know whom to blame already, know as surely as we know who would

silence the note of that plaintive little voice and require that the

“active little crutch” (94) kick the habit of being leaned on. For the

inexplicable sufferings of the world, which smolder through the text

like its dense brown fog, rise, in the story’s logic, like acrid smoke

from a sodden faggot: rise, that is, from the one whose stingy,

reclusive, and anticommunitarian ways express themselves fully when he

stands exposed as that criminal by criminals themselves reviled: as the

dreaded pedocide. “Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an

oyster” (46), Scrooge may owe his representation to the traditional

iconography of the miser as filtered through the lens of a liberal

critique of emergent industrial capitalism, but the sins of the counting

house count for little in the course of Dickens’s text until they are

made to account metonymically for the death of that little, little child

for whose threatened absence from the merry-making of Christmases Yet to

Come the jury need not even leave the box in order to find Scrooge

guilty as charged of what the indictment would no doubt characterize as

“futuricide” by “hum-buggery.”

Others, those more invested than I in a reading practice that defines

its goal as setting the record straight about authors and characters who

are not, might dwell on Scrooge’s choice not to marry in favor of

partnership with Jacob Marley (like himself, a bachelor businessman)

whose name he declines to paint over even after his partner’s death and

to which he continues to answer just as if it were his own: “It was all

the same to him” (46). They might point to the implicit anality in the

text’s depiction of that partnership and cite the lament of Marley’s

ghost that he never allowed his spirit, in life, to rove “beyond the

narrow limits of our money-changing hole” (61); they might point to the

ghost’s remark to Scrooge—“1 have sat invisible beside you many and many

a day” (63)—or to Scrooge’s comment on the bond that once connected him

to his fellow apprentice, Dick Wilkins: “He was very much attached to

me, was Dick” (75). They might even point to the charwoman’s

representation of Scrooge as a “wicked old screw” who deserved that his

worldly goods be stolen from the very bed of his corpse because, as she

puts it derisively, he wasn’t “natural in his lifetime” (115). And in

light of all this, such critics might claim that Scrooge has need of a

rainbow flag, not a Christmas tree, with which to spruce up his home. In

proposing that Scrooge be viewed, instead, as a canonical literary

instantiation of sinthomosexuality, I make no pretense of revealing an

“identity” encoded in the text. Rather, I want to attend to the potent

effects of the cultural fantasy linking Scrooge to the fate of Tiny Tim

as surely as the sinthome is linked to the historical consistency of the

subject, or as queer sexualities are linked to the conceptual coherence

of heterosexual desire.

Scrooge, after all, as a bachelor in a text that declares “a bachelor

... a wretched outcast” (103) while pausing to limn its narrator, with

an almost palpable defensiveness, as “man enough” (82) to have been

turned on by the bountiful charms of Belle’s beautiful daughter, exudes

from the outset a mode of enjoyment alien to that of the community at

large and alien, more importantly, to the very concept of community at

all. “It was the very thing he liked,” Dickens writes, insisting on

Scrooge’s disengagement from every form of human fellowship and every

act of social intercourse: “To edge his way along the crowded paths of

life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the

knowing ones call ‘nuts’ to Scrooge” (47). If this form of enjoyment

effectively makes him seem nutty to those around him, the pleasure

Scrooge takes, what turns him on, comes in part from refusing to use his

nuts to drop acorns from the family tree. Indeed, his every enjoyment

betrays the logic of such a refusal, the exquisite pain of a negation so

great that he almost seems to rebuff the very warm-bloodedness of

mammalian vitality, as if, like a textbook-perfect example of the death

drive according to Freud, he aimed to return to the icy, inert

immobility of a lifeless thing: “The cold within him froze his old

features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his

gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in

his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows,

and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with

him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and he didn’t thaw it one

degree at Christmas” (46).

Place beside this description of Scrooge a passage from Lacan’s Seminar

23, Le sinthome, where he remarks, in the course of discussing the

foreclosure of meaning in the Real, “It sets everything on fire, the

Real. But it’s a cold fire. The fire that burns is a mask, if I might

put it this way, of the Real. The Real of it is to be looked for on the

other side, the side of absolute zero.”[55] Scrooge, like an incarnation

of the Real’s cold fire nearing absolute zero, threatens a shutdown of

life’s vital machinery by exposing it as machinery, by denying the

spiritualization that would bathe it in the warmth of Symbolic meaning

and deliver it to the midwives we’re compelled to become in the order of

reproduction. Such refusal to embrace the genealogical fantasy that

braces the social order cannot, as A Christmas Carol makes clear, be a

matter of public indifference. For the point of the tale, and hence of

its status as the text that enjoys the cultural distinction, above all

others in our literary canon, of an annual ritual of repetition that

supplants as much as it supplements the season’s more properly sacred

rites, is that Scrooge, 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 Žižek’s words, “the total destruction of the symbolic

universe.”

“Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,” Scrooge

urges his nephew, Fred; “Keep itt” the nephew counters, “But you don’t

keep it.” “Let me leave it alone, then,” his exasperated uncle responds

(48). Neither nephew nor text can consent, however, to leave Scrooge

alone to leave Christmas alone, for Christmas here stands in the place

of the obligatory collective reproduction of the Child, the obligatory

investment in the social precisely as the order of the Child, which

demands our collective assent to the truth that the Child exists to make

flesh. Even more: it demands that our collective assent be affirmed by

naming, humiliating, and then, at its whim, redeeming the one who won’t

give it—affirmed, that is, by the structural mandate that he who refuses

the Child be refused, providing the occasion for communal access to the

negativity of a jouissance for which, as its embodiment, the

sinthomosexual must, in the first place, be projectively reviled. If, as

the terroristic adage of our culture’s long children’s hour proposes,

“it takes a village to raise a child,” then, we might add, it takes,

albeit perversely, a villain too: a Scrooge, a sinthomosexual, on whom

to project the force of the death drive and the obtrusion of the Real,

which can never be acknowledged as the engine driving the reproduction

of the social itself.

The pleasurable fantasy of survival (Tiny Tim, as Dickens, in a

last-minute addition to the manuscript, writes, does “NOT die” [56]),

requires, therefore, more than anything else, the survival of a fantasy:

the fantasy, for instance, that Tiny Tim, futurity’s fragile figure,

does not excite an ardent fear (or is it a fearful ardor?) to see him,

“as good as gold ... and better” (94), at last cash in his chips; the

fantasy, in fact, that Scrooge, not we, must answer for such a fantasy;

and, equally self-serving, the fantasy, perhaps the most pleasurable of

them all, that the pleasure we derive from Scrooge’s “salvation” through

punitive abjection shares nothing with the sadomasochistic enjoyment

Scrooge figures within the text. A Christmas Carol thus engages a truth

about the nature of neighborly love far removed from the surfeit of

communal goodwill its conclusion appears to endorse. 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.[57] 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!”[58] 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.

“Whoever attempts to submit to the moral law” Lacan informs us, “sees

the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and

increasingly cruel.”[59] Thus, Scrooge’s death, when revealed by the

spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, far from rescuing Tiny Tim, assures his

death as well. For the miser’s grave serves to realize the negativity,

the cruel enjoyment, the jouissance of the “neighborly love” to which

his days on earth were devoted, expressing the triumph of the death

drive and reifying the fatality he always embodied. 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. For Scrooge turns Christmas Yet to Come, like the spirit who ushers

it in, into nothing but a “spectral hand and one great heap of black”

(111). He uncovers with this the vivifying fantasy of reproductive

futurism as merely the illusion by which we fill out the place of the

Other’s gaze, the traumatic obtrusion of the Real that’s evoked by the

spectre’s “Unseen Eyes” (113).[60] As “Scrooge” thus names the “wicked

old screw” who screws, or fucks with, the future, so A Christmas Carol,

like the sinthomophobic culture that it reflects, must, to preserve the

fantasy that lives with our Tiny Tims, give a turn of the Scrooge that

turns him toward the promise of futurity by turning him into “a second

father” (133) to the boy who “did NOT die.” With this act of conversion,

like those alleged by “ministries of hope” that promise “life” to those

grown sick-to-death of being queer, A Christmas Carol is able to

resurrect both Scrooge and Tiny Tim by liberating the Santa the

sinthomosexual would deny.[61]

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” (134). 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. But we might do well to recall that Lacan, toward

the end of his career, maintained that by moving beyond, by traversing

“the fundamental fantasy,” we confront the meaningless spur or nub of

our access to jouissance, the Thing that holds the drive,

indecipherably, in a fixed rotation around it. And faced with this

sinthome, itself the limit of every analysis and beyond interpretation,

the subject, he proposed, must come at last to identify with it. The

subject, that is, must accept its sinthome, its particular pathway to

jouissance, as its “Real identity, connecting it to the Real of its

being” (68), in the words of Verhaeghe and Declercq. This, I suggest, is

the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order

intent on misrecognizing its own investment in morbidity, fetishization,

and repetition: to inhabit the place of meaninglessness associated with

the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality

whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint

imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture—the culture

of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary lures—as

always already a “culture of death” intent on abjecting the force of a

death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. The death drive as

which the queer figures, then, refuses the calcification of form that is

reproductive futurism, since the Lacanian death drive, as Žižek

observes, “is precisely the ultimate Freudian name for the dimension

traditional metaphysics designated as that of immortality—for a drive, a

‘thrust,’ which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of generation and

corruption, beyond the ‘way of all flesh.’ In other words, in the death

drive, the concept ‘dead’ functions in exactly the same way as

‘heimlich’ in the Freudian unheimlich, as coinciding with its negation:

the ‘death drive’ designates the dimension of what horror fiction calls

the ‘undead,’ a strange, immortal, indestructible life that persists

beyond death.”[62]

Such immortality pertains to what the Symbolic constitutively

forecloses: not reality, not the subject, not the future, not the Child,

but the substance of jouissance itself, the Lacanian lamella, on which

the sinthomosexual lives and against which social organization wields

the weapon of futurity to keep the place of life empty—merely a hollow,

inanimate form—the better to sustain the fantasy of its endurance in to

come. The death drive’s “immortality,” then, refers to a persistent

negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor

survival, nor any promise of a future. Instead, it insists both on and

as the impossibility of Symbolic closure, the absence of any Other to

affirm the Symbolic order’s truth, and hence the illusory status of

meaning as defense against the self-negating substance of jouissance.

Make no mistake, then: Tiny Tim survives at our expense in a culture

that always sustains itself on the threat that he might die. And we, the

sinthomosexuals who, however often we try to assert that we’re “more”

than what we do with our genitals, are nonetheless convicted from the

outset of stealing his childhood, endangering his welfare, and,

ultimately, destroying his life, must respond by insisting that Tiny Tim

is always already dead, mortified into a fetish animated only by the

collective fantasy wherein he doesn’t rise up and ask in reproach,

“Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”[63] Because there isn’t now, and

never has been, much doubt about who killed him, because his death can

always be traced to the sinthomosexual’s jouissance, why not acknowledge

our kinship at last with the Scrooge who, unregenerate, refuses the

social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the Child, for the

sake of whom, as the token of accession to Imaginary wholeness,

everything else in the world, by force if needed, must give way?

And so it does, unfailingly, especially when that force directs its aim

at actual, flesh-and-blood children, provoking the violence they’re made

to suffer in the name of a God who, some report, urged us to suffer

them: the institutional violence, for example, of a near universal

queer-baiting intended to effect the scarification (in a program of

social engineering whose outcome might well be labeled “Scared

Straight”) of each and every child by way of antigay immunization. Might

not the narrative of A Christmas Carol, with its scarification of

Scrooge, serve as a sort of booster shot administered once a year? For

Scrooge himself must not be Scrooge lest Tiny Tim should die. The

not-yet-repentant Scrooge, therefore, who identifies with his sinthome,

must disappear at the end of the text only to reappear elsewhere in the

ranks of Dickensian pedophobes. Consider, for example, Monsieur the

Marquis as described in A Tale of Two Cities: his face itself a death

mask, lacking the slightest sign of life, except, we are told, for “two

compressions, or dints” where his nose was “pinched at the top of each

nostril,” and these, the only indices of vitality he betrayed,

“persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally

dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then they

gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance.”[64]

The fatal drive evinced by these flickering pulsations of his nostrils

find its literalization when his speeding carriage accidentally drives

over a child in the street. Unmoved by the desperate father’s grief,

Monsieur the Marquis observes the crowd that gathers slowly around him,

looking to him like nothing so much as “rats come out of their holes”

(114). Responding at last to their sullen presence, he offers a virtuoso

display of the narcissism, the anticommunal enjoyment, that constitutes

the hallmark of the future-killing queer, contemptuously declaring,

before flinging a coin as recompense for the death, “It is extraordinary

to me ... that you people cannot take care of yourselves or your

children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know

what injury you have done my horses?” (114).

In Dickens’s version of talion law, the Marquis, like the child he runs

over, must die, whereas Scrooge, converted to futurism through his

life-changing vision of a futureless future, is granted the very gift of

life he gives to Tiny Tim. But granted it only insofar as he gives that

life to Tiny Tim, becoming a “second father” to the boy by renouncing

the intolerable narcissism that futurism projects onto those who will

not mirror back its own Imaginary form. For the sinthomosexual’s

narcissism is a narcissism unto death, exposing a duality or division

internal to narcissism itself. Just as the projection of the sinthome

onto those condemned as sinthomosexuals enacts the sinthomatic drive of

reproductive futurism, so the sinthomosexual’s association with

narcissistic satisfaction, in light of the self-satisfaction afforded by

futurism’s repudiation of narcissism, betrays an awareness that

something internal to narcissism itself resists its libidinal investment

in the ego as a form. Narcissism, then, like jouissance, names two

contradictory states, one of which shelters the ego from the other’s

self-destructive effects.

As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis observe in The Language of

Psychoanalysis, Freud proposed two radically different interpretations

of narcissism, first arguing that it marked the subject’s cathexis of

the ego as an object and later insisting on the priority of an

objectless narcissistic state.[65] Ironically, in his final theory,

Freud’s initial interpretation is hypostatized as secondary narcissism,

while his second interpretation comes to identity the narcissism he

characterizes as primary. These antithetical renditions of narcissistic

libidinal cathexis bisect narcissism aq the very point where the

question of the object emerges, and therefore where the question of the

ego’s privilege as an object is at stake. Primary narcissism

acknowledges no separation of ego and id. As a result, it carries into

the heart of all subsequent elaborations of narcissistic love a

resistance to the ego’s autonomy, a reminder of something other than,

incompatible with, the supremacy of Imaginary form. Secondary

narcissism, on the other hand, makes an idol of the ego, but only by

means of an Imaginary identification of the ego with the Other, an

identification that secures the fixity and coherence of the ego’s form

while activating aggressive energies to defend the integrity thus

attained. This secondary narcissism becomes the pervasive understanding

of narcissism as such, against which Joan Copjec importantly recalls the

Lacanian response: “Since something always appears to be missing from

any representation, narcissism cannot consist in finding satisfaction in

one’s own visual image. It must, rather, consist in the belief that

one’s own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism,

then, seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject

constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize

itself. What one loves in one’s image is something more than the image

(‘in you more than you’). Thus is narcissism the source of the

malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity

it unleashes on all its own representations.”[66]

We might then, with a nod to Lacan, express the double dynamic at work

in narcissism as follows: narcissism is always a narcissism of the

Other. By this I mean not only that the Other, conceptualized as the

obstacle to our own coherence, seems always to occasion the narcissistic

aggression around which the subject takes shape, but also that

narcissism bespeaks the ascription to the ego of recognizable and

defensible form only insofar as narcissism is invested from the outset,

which is to say, primally, in the nondifferentiation of ego and id, in

the unsymbolizable Real of the drive that imperils the ego as object. In

a series of readings indispensable for their insights into the relations

of psychoanalysis and form, Leo Bersani proposes that “sexuality would

be that which is intolerable to the structured self,” because, as he

goes on to assert, “sexuality—at least in the mode in which it is

constituted—could be thought of as a tautology for masochism.”[67] This

responds to Freud’s own assertion in his New Introductory Lectures that

“masochism is older than sadism, and that sadism is the destructive

instinct turned outward.” To which Freud then goes on to add: “It really

seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or

person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the

impulsion to self-destruction.”[68] What Freud calls “self-destruction”

here names the undoing of the ego’s organization, its undoing as an

organization, by returning to its continuity with the id through the

collapse of “secondary narcissism” into its “primary” condition. Hence

narcissism’s first paradox: it loves Otherness too well, beyond all

reason, beyond all pleasure, even unto death. And from this there

follows a second paradox: narcissism, construed as libidinal investment

in the formalized ego it cathects, by means of which the self attempts

to assure its own preservation, comes nonetheless to designate a

life-denying economy, a Scrooge-like self-containment, marked by a fatal

rejection of the energies on which social survival depends.[69] Might

this, then, be the place to recall that Freud’s earliest invocation of

narcissistic investment occurs in the context of theorizing the origins

of gay male sexuality?[70]

Not, of course, that we needed Freud to establish this connection:

Plato’s Athenian Stranger already suggests as much in the Laws, when,

notwithstanding his stated belief that “somehow every one is by nature

prone to that which is likest to himself” (emphasis mine), he insists

that “the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is

contrary to nature” (emphasis mine)—and contrary to nature despite the

fact that such practices, scorned for what he sees as their defining

self-indulgence, enact what the Athenian characterizes as the “lawless

natures” of men (emphasis mine).[71] With this paradox, similar to those

informing our understanding of narcissism, the Stranger reads as

unnatural submission to the lawlessness of one’s nature; equally

important, he does so by asserting that same-sex desire, ineluctably,

opens onto the threat of societal death by “destroying the seeds of

human increase” (§838). Nature here is less the ground for arbitrating

sexual values than the rhetorical effect of an effort to appropriate the

“natural” for the ends of the state.[72] It is produced, that is, in the

service of a statist ideology that operates by installing

pro-procreative prejudice as the form through which desiring subjects

assume a stake in a future that always pertains, in the end, to the

state, not to them. Hence, the Athenian Stranger insists not only on the

central importance of “laws that would master the soul of every man, and

terrify him into obedience” (§839), scaring the subject straight just as

Dickens’s spirits terrified Scrooge, but also on practices intended to

inculcate social and cultural values (including the abjection of

same-sex desire and anything viewed as narcissistic) that the Stranger

would like to see “sanctioned by custom and made law by unwritten

prescription” (§841).[73] The narcissism associated with homosexual

desire thus becomes, for Plato no less than for Freud, the basis for

social survival by being severed from itself, undergoing transvaluation

from primary to secondary, from life-negating to vital, insofar as it is

able to dissociate itself, at least nominally, from itself (changing its

name from narcissism to “heterosexuality,” “altruism,”

“civic-mindedness” or, most prized of all, “parental love”). Perhaps,

then, in a cultural moment that offers no respite from the ideological

tropism turning our eyes toward the light of a future suspended before

us like a hypnotist’s watch,[74] we might ask ourselves how and to what

effect the primal negativity that Scrooge must renounce for the sake of

Tiny Tim, and thus for redemptive faith in futurism, returns, albeit in

altered form, as the unacknowledged energy of futurism itself.

How better to engage such a question as it follows from my reading of A

Christmas Carol than by turning to a text that turns to the event

following Christmas by a week and repeating, though this time in secular

form, futurity’s condensation in the Child: a text that turns on the

literalization of the figurative New Year’s baby, who turns, in turn, a

solitary, miserly, misanthropic man, a bachelor properly linked with

those I’ve described as sinthomosexuals, away from his backward turn of

mind and the sterility of his (be)hindsight, toward the prospect of a

future in which his narcissism can find its proper stake.[75] Who could

evince more pointedly the deathly shriveling of vital forces, the closed

economy of the backward gaze, than George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a man

whose very name sounds the sigh (“alas”) of a mourner turned toward the

past as he licks the wounds of his endless grief—or endlessly grieves in

order to have a reason to lick his wounds. But as Eliot’s narrative

skein unravels, Raveloe’s weaver must, like Scrooge, be purged of what

the novel describes as “the repulsion [he] had always created in his

neighbors” as a result of “his general queerness.”[76] Toward that end,

the author deploys her plot to weave him into the social text, making

him give up his worship of gold for the golden curls of the child that

he finds on his hearth, precisely on New Year’s Eve, as the assurance

not only of his future, but also of hers and ours as well.

Not that Eliot depicts this golden child as a golden calf: that role, of

course, is assigned to Marner’s stash of hoarded coins, which, prior to

their disappearance, had “kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle,

leading to nothing beyond itself” (125). The child he discovers on New

Year’s Eve and names Hephzibah—Eppie, for short—allows him to escape his

fixation on both the accumulated coins he would obsessively handle,

insistently count and touch, and on those about which he only dreamed

“as if they had been unborn children” (21). Such “unborn children” they

might well be, for the refusal of normative engagement with the social

that leads him to bestow his affections upon such figurative children

alone usurps the reproductive imperative that requires his

literalization of that figure lest future children remain “unborn.” Like

Scrooge, whose realization of the death drive would abolish the future

in the form of Tiny Tim, Marner, in his scorn for the interconnections

of ‘ which the social fabric is woven, poses, as the following passage

makes I clear, a threat not only to his own well-being, but also to the

social order’s—a threat to our faith in its consistency and, in

consequence, to its survival, for the assurance of which nothing quite

does the trick like the image of the innocent Child: “In old days there

were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the

city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are

led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put in theirs, which

leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they

look no more backward; and that hand may be a little child’s” (131). If

Marner, through the allegedly compassionate intervention of Eliot and

Eppie combined, becomes, in his meek and modest way, a pillar of the

social order instead of the implicit counterinstance adduced in the text

as a pillar of salt, it is only because the threat of that salt, with

which Eliot has no beef, cures him. After all, at the moment on New

Year’s Eve when Marner first opens his cottage door he does so to look

to the past, not the future, still clinging to the hope of his money’s

return rather than looking ahead. But Eliot effects a narrative stroke

that permits her to show him as if he’d been struck by the biblical fate

inflicted on those who turned, against the angel’s command, ass-backward

to gaze at Sodom, called here, with an aptly ambiguous genitive, “the

city of destruction.” With his hand on the latch of the still open door,

“he was,” the narrator informs us, “arrested,” though not, of course, by

a Raveloe vice cop, but, instead, by one who is playing the nice cop:

that is, by the benevolent authority of the author, who rebukes the

regressive narcissism of his solitary ways and leads him “to a calm and

bright land,” which is to say, to the future. Toward that end, when she

suddenly has him “arrested ... by the invisible wand of catalepsy” Eliot

tells us that he stands “like a graven image, with wide but sightless

eyes” (100).[77] In this state of suspended animation, appropriate

emblem of the sinthomosexual’s intended suspension of animation, Marner,

now the image of those lifeless images engraved on the coins he had

prized as life, is given another chance for life, a prospect of rebirth,

and given it in the form of the Child who crawls implausibly through his

open door with all the salvific contrivance befitting a pint-sized deus

ex machina.

But the narrative machinery that draws this diminutive deity to the

weaver’s door is engaged, paradoxically, to effect his release from the

“ever-repeated circle,” the compulsion to repeat, that Eliot’s novel

identifies quite explicitly as machinery. Having turned his back on

humankind, the weaver, through years of solitude, has become an

extension of his loom itself, which, “as he wrought in it without

ceasing, had in its turn wrought on him, and confirmed more and more the

monotonous craving for its monotonous response” (42). That loom is

clearly defined in I the text as a machine for producing sameness, which

allows it to serve as a figure for the repetitive insistence of the

sinthome, or even for its embodiment in sinthomosexuality: “The livelong

day he sat at his loom, his ear filled with its monotony, his eyes bent

close down on the slow growth of sameness in the brownish web, his

muscles moving with such even repetition that their pause seemed as much

a constraint as the holding of his breath” (21). The novel that bears

Silas Marner’s name may recoil from the weaver’s enactment here of

something truly inhuman, something meaningless and mechanistic, that

replaces volition and agency with subjection to the drive.[78] It may,

that is, recoil or turn back from this turning back toward a sameness

that, like Sodom, seems to make us all worth no more than our salt in

the end. But no less than “recoil” can avoid the trace of the “cul” with

which it’s informed can the..!lovel avoid repeating the weaver’s

repetitions at his loom.

Precisely through the machinery of its plot, after all, Eliot’s text

implicitly plots its likeness to that machinery. As justly, then, as

Silas Marner, accused of theft in Lantern Yard, could say to his

one-time friend, William Dane, “You have woven a plot to lay the sin at

my door” (14), so, too, could he charge George Eliot with a similar

weaving of her own, a weaving that lays at his doorstep the sin of

ensnarement by, and entanglement in, the “slow growth of sameness in the

brownish web” that he spins, “like a spider” (16), from himself, but

that also lays at his doorstep, and literally, the Child intended to

free him from its narcissistic skein. Although Eliot traces Marner’s

“sin” to the mechanistic, and therefore inhuman, logic he instantiates

in directing his energies so monotonously to his loom, she can hardly

escape its taint herself, having “woven a plot” that depends on an

equally relentless narrative machinery. What else, we might ask, is

Eliot’s famous web of human relations if not a sort of Rube Goldberg

machine in which the pulling of the tiniest string over there

reverberates with unexpected consequence for someone over here? What,

after all, are the chances—how astronomical must be the odds—that a

near-sighted, nearly friendless man, still mourning the theft of his

long-hoarded gold, would suffer a cataleptic fit in his doorway one

frigid New Year’s Eve at the very moment that a golden-haired child,

attracted by the light from his wide-open door, should toddle away from

the corpse of her mother, frozen in the snow onto which she’d collapsed

in an opiated haze, and seat herself silently before the hearth, where

the near-sighted man, his seizure now past, could mistake her bright

hair for his gold?

Whatever the chances, it’s Chance alone, the god of novelistic

contrivance, that thereby gives Marner his second chance, which is all

the more worthy of our attention here in that Eliot’s novel repudiates

Chance in favor of natural sequence, excoriating those who rely on

Chance as prone to narcissistic indulgence: “Favourable Chance is the

god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law

they believe in.... The evil deprecated in that religion [of Chance], is

the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its

kind” (74). It is, of course, literally a religion of Chance that dooms

Marner as a youth in Lantern Yard when the “narrow religious sect” (9)

he belongs to determines that he is guilty of theft by means of the

drawing of lots: “The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty” (13).

But there’s not too much difference when, many years later, Eliot

contrives to allot him the chance—through a logic of Chance that cannot

be concealed in the costume of “orderly sequence”—to affirm his own

innocence through that of the Child whose improbable, and even

unnatural, appearance by the glow of his hearth on New Year’s Eve will

have the effect of thawing his heart and claiming him for nature once

more.

But here is the nub of the matter. Silas Marner, while endorsing the

“orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind,”

and with it the narrative necessity inseparable from reproductive

futurism, introduces its privileged emblem, the promise condensed in the

image of the Child, as a figure of naturalization: as a figure, to be

sure, of nature, but one that reads nature itself as a figure that

language must posit in order to designate something that’s absent from

nature as such (not for nothing does the Child enter Marner’s life as a

wholly unnatural supplement). And what’s missing from nature, what the

figure of naturalization attempts to secure, is the system of values,

the moral economy, that Marner, like all social subjects, is made to

value as nature itself—the system of values the novel, however fantastic

or queer the machinery by which it “brings forth” that implausible end,

must characterize as “orderly,” as part of the natural order, and not,

therefore, as requiring to be posited at all.

The novel, then, as if “naturally,” offers us Eppie, in her relation to

Marner, as the material embodiment of futurism, a proper “New Year’s

Baby” who affirms the endless renewal of time. She was, we are told, “an

object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward,

and carried them far away from their old eager pacing toward the same

blank limit— carried them away to the new things that would come with

the coming years” (125). Now, at what we are wont to call the “dawn” of

a new millennium, could anything seem more certain than that “the coming

years” will come? That the movement of life is forward? That those who

embrace “the same blank limit”—narcissistically, repetitively—destroy,

as Plato’s Athenian claimed, “the seeds of human increase”? But if

narcissism, as I’ve argued, is always a narcissism of the Other, if the

weaver’s monotonous turnings back speak less to his self-enclosure than

to his openness to an Otherness, however self-negating, that Lacan

associates with das Ding, “the mythical object whose encounter would

bring about full satisfaction of the drive,”[79] then the nature the

novel poses in opposition to that narcissism, the nature borne by the

new-born, intends a defense against that Otherness. Even as the seed

meant to save us from the sinthomosexual’s repetitive investment in the

Same brings forth a crop that the logic of nature ordains to be “after

its kind,” so the weaver’s love for Eppie, intended to open him to

difference, more precisely, as the novel acknowledges, “blent them into

one” (130). Doesn’t this very avowal of the One, this faith in

heteroreproduction’s capacity to affirm and secure Symbolic closure,

anticipate the self-deconstructing words by which Marner (and the novel)

will announce the triumph of a now thoroughly naturalized futurism over

the narcissistic economy of sinthomosexuality: “I’ve come to love her as

myself” (181)? He comes to love her, in other words, not only in the way

he formerly had been able to love himself, but also in a way that allows

him figuratively to love himself still in her. “Love” Lacan writes,

“while it is true that it has a relationship with the One, never makes

anyone leave himself behind.”[80] Why marvel that reproductive futurism

repeats what it poses as passing beyond? Old Mr. Lammeter at the novel’s

end instructs us in what we need to know about the real relations

secured by nature’s stylization in the image of the Child: “Things look

dim to old folks; they’d need have Some young eyes about ‘em, to let ‘em

know the world’s the same as it used to be” (182).

To “know the world’s the same”: through purporting to be wed to the

value of difference in heterosexual combination and exchange futurism

merely perpetuates Lammeter’s tenacious will to sameness by endlessly

turning the Other into the image of itself, endlessly protecting the

fantasy space in which it is always there. Narcissism, on the other

hand, construed in terms of sterility and a nonproductive sameness,

takes in and takes on, perhaps too well, the Other it loves to death,

pushing beyond and against its own pleasure, driving instead toward the

end of forms through the formalism of the drive. Freud, as the century

just ended began, already advised us that parental love demands to be

viewed as “nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again.”[81] But the

ostensible self-evidence, throughout our culture, of the difference

between narcissism, on the one hand, and the selflessness we associate

with the care and nurturing of children, on the other, between the

figures of sinthomosexuality and the sinthomatic drive to produce and

abject them, makes clear, as the twenty-first century starts, that

what’s finally at issue in the production of the Child and the future it

serves to figure, for Silas Marner, for Scrooge, and for all who must

live under futurism’s gun, is the style by which a culture enacts its

sinthome while disavowing it.

Only such stubborn disavowal can account for the imputation to the

sinthomosexual of the fatality of the Same, a sameness at odds with the

jouissance to which the sinthomosexual figures access, even though

sinthomosexuality insists on the constancy of such an access, the

persistent availability of this jouissance closed off by reproduction.

For the “speaking body,” Lacan proposes, “can only manage to reproduce

thanks to a misunderstanding regarding its jouissance. That is to say

that it only reproduces thanks to missing what it wants to say, for what

it wants to say (veut dire)—namely, as French clearly states, its

meaning (sens)—is its effective jouissance. And it is by missing that

jouissance that it reproduces.”[82] As reproduction makes clear that

jouissance has been missed—has been spoiled or, better, fucked up—so

jouissance can only fuck up the very logic of reproduction, the logic by

which, as Lammeter explains, old folks “need have some young eyes about

‘em, to let ‘em know the world’s the same.” Futurism thus generates

generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward

the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of

turning back time assure repetition—or to assure a logic of resemblance

(more precisely: a logic of metaphoricity) in the service of

representation and, by extension, of desire.[83] Given this inertial

investment in the sameness that’s abjected as sinthomosexuality,

futurism—the substrate of politics—encrypts within every political

faction a sort of nonpartisan conservatism, a will to preserve identity,

a compassion responsive to the Imaginary order’s identificatory

imperative. But it does so beneath the banner of openness to the

difference of the Other, ignoring the fact that it values such

difference only to overcome it, to realize the regressive fantasy to

which all futurism clings: the Imaginary vision of whatever it is that

we (think that we) desire. From this springs a final paradox:

homosexuality, though charged with, and convicted of, a future-negating

sameness construed as reflecting its pathological inability to deal with

the fact of difference, gets put in the position of difference from the

heteronormativity that, despite its persistent propaganda for its own

propagation through sexual difference, refuses homosexuality’s

difference from the value of difference it claims as its own.

This paradox determines the trajectory of a recent essay by Jean

Baudrillard that was published under the deliberately inflammatory

title, “The Final Solution.” Baudrillard asserts that the human species

is confronting a life-and-death crisis around the question of

reproduction, more specifically, around its determination by way of

sameness or difference. But a vortex of contradictions engulfs his use

of these various terms, occasioning, or rather seeming to occasion, a

transvaluation of values in accordance with which they appear to signify

against our expectations: “There is something occulted inside us: our

deaths. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within

each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality

lies in wait for us. It’s common to speak of the struggle of life

against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle

against the possibility that we will not die. At the slightest

hesitation in the fight for death—a fight for division, for sex, for

alterity, and so for death—living beings become once again indivisible,

identical to one another—and immortal.”[84]

Far from speaking, with the sinthomosexual, for the death drive and its

disarticulation of forms, Baudrillard remains an advocate here of

reproductive futurism, explicitly enlisting this notion of death, this

resistance to immortality, against the force of the death drive, which

he assimilates to, and disavows as, the paradigm of sameness: “The death

drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state

before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a

state in which we lived before we became mortal and distinct from one

another” (6). He may trumpet what he calls here the “fight for death” in

thus opposing himself to the death drive, disparaged as eternal pursuit

of the Same and hence as immortality, but opprobrium, in Baudrillard’s

argument, still attaches to the death drive only insofar as it

constitutes a mortal threat to the survival of the human—insofar, that

is, as its sameness might make human difference different. The

immortality for which he reproves it, then, threatens the human

precisely with a death he would have us fight against. It names the

endless negation of form, and so of what, for Baudrillard, defines the

value of “difference”: that is, our distinctly human identity.

As he sketches an evolutionary movement from “the absolute continuity

found in the subdivision of the same—in bacteria—to the possibility of

life and death” (7), by which latter phrase he indicates the attributes

of sexual reproduction, Baudrillard, complicit with tendencies of

scientific discourse in general, celebrates the triumph of sexed

reproduction over genetic duplication in a teleological narrative that

itself reduplicates the Freudian account of genitality’s triumph over

the various “partial” drives. Naturalizing this trajectory from the

replication he associates with genetic immortality to the procreation

made possible by encountering sexual, and therefore genetic, difference,

Baudrillard sounds the note of futurism’s persistent love song to

itself, its fantasy of a dialectic capable of spinning meaning out of

history, and history out of desire:

Next [after the evolutionary moment of bacterial replication], the egg

becomes fertilized by a sperm and specialized sex cells make their

appearance. The resulting entity is no longer a copy of either one of

the pair that engendered it; rather, it is a new and singular

combination. There is a shift from pure and simple reproduction to

procreation: the first two will die for the first time, and the third

for the first time will be born. We reach the stage of beings that are

sexed, differentiated, and mortal. The earlier order of the virus—of

immortal beings—is perpetuated, but henceforward this world of deathless

things is contained within the world of the mortals. In evolutionary

terms, the victory goes to beings that are mortal and distinct from one

another: the victory goes to us. (7)

Or goes to “us” so long as “we” don’t identify—or get identified by

others—with the regressive “order of the virus,” of immortal sameness or

repetition, that threatens “us” with the sort of death Baudrillard

refuses to embrace (a death through viral replication like that

associated with what was referred to, twenty years ago, as “the gay

plague”): “This is the revenge taken on mortal and sexed beings by

immortal and undifferentiated life forms. This is what could be called

the final solution” (8). Thus death, the corollary of difference, can

function as a value for Baudrillard in the context of individual

identities alone (because this, after all, allows for the Couple’s

dialectical survival in the “third”); it retains its negative valence

where the species itself is concerned.[85]. The latter’s impulse to

immortality, to perpetuating its self-perpetuation through the mechanics

of genetic exchange, must resist the backward appeal of “involution,”

which signifies, for Baudrillard, the regressive “nullification of

differences” (8). It must, that is, remain the same in its difference

from the lethal sameness it condemns for its nullification of

difference, thus affirming as constant the One of the Couple and the

fantasy of the sexual relation as the “duality that puts an end to

perpetual indivision and successive iterations of the same” (9).

Unless, of course, such iterations of the same put an end to it instead.

And that, according to Baudrillard, is precisely what “sexual

liberation” intends:

The first phase of sexual liberation involves the dissociation of sexual

activity from procreation through the pill and other contraceptive

devices—a transformation with enormous consequences. The second phase,

which we are beginning to enter now, is the dissociation of reproduction

from sex. First, sex was liberated from reproduction; today it is

reproduction that is liberated from sex, through asexual,

biotechnological modes of reproduction such as artificial insemination

or full body cloning. This is also a liberation, though antithetical to

the first. We’ve been sexually liberated, and now we find ourselves

liberated from sex—that is, virtually relieved of the sexual function.

Among the clones (and among human beings soon enough), sex, as a result

of this automatic means of reproduction, becomes extraneous, a useless

function. (10)

The meaning of “sex,” which Baudrillard had identified earlier as a mode

of reproduction (“sexed, differentiated, and mortal”) distinct from that

of “deathless things” (such as viruses and bacteria) by virtue of its

mingling of genes to create “new and singular combination[s],” undergoes

an important mutation here. How else to explain his odd characterization

of artificial insemination as “asexual” and (continuous in this with

cloning) as reproduction “liberated from sex”? For whatever the

mechanism by which it’s achieved—and “artificial” seems largely a

diacritical term intended to naturalize the proactive function of

heterosexual intercourse—insemination, the fertilization of egg by

sperm, defines the very principle of sexual reproduction for

Baudrillard. But the evolutionary argument for genetic combination (the

essay’s original meaning of “sex”) has morphed, as it often it seems to

do, into a panicky offensive against reproduction without heterogenital

copulation (the subsequent meaning of “sex”). What can the lament for

the putative loss of the sexual function mean, therefore, if not its

very opposite: that heterosexuality, stripped of its reproductive alibi,

must assume at last the despiritualized burden of its status as sexual

function, as sinthomosexuality; that in the face of what Baudrillard

calls “automatic” or “biotechnological” modes of reproduction, it must

recognize the “extraneous” element in sex that is never extraneous to

sex and that marks it as a “useless function,” as a meaningless and

unrecuperable expense, or even, as Jacques Derrida has written with

regard to différance, “as expenditure without reserve, as the

irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is,

as the death instinct.”[86]

Like Faron, the narrator of The Children of Men, for whom sex in a world

without procreation—without “the hope of posterity, for our race if not

for ourselves”—becomes “almost meaninglessly acrobatic,” Baudrillard

recoils in horror before this “useless” sexuality. And a “useless

function” for Baudrillard, as his use of the same phrase elsewhere

suggests, means one that refuses meaning: “At the extreme limit of

computation and the coding and cloning of human thought (artificial

intelligence), language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes a

definitively useless function. For the first time in history we face the

possibility of a Perfect Crime against language, an aphanisis of the

symbolic function.”[87] Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones introduced to

identify the anxiety-inducing prospect of the disappearance of desire,

refers in the passage from Baudrillard to the fading or, more ominously,

to what he describes as the “global extermination of meaning” (70), the

unraveling of the braid in which reproductive futurism twines meaning,

desire, and the fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport. At the same time,

though, it also evokes the subsequent use of the word by Lacan, for whom

it refers instead to the fading or disappearance of the subject, whose

division the signifier effects in such a way that “there is no subject

without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject.” Lacan will then go on to

add, “There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only

from its aphanisis in the Other locus, which is that of the

unconscious.”[88] Meaning, that is, against whose aphani sis

Baudrillard’s jeremiad is launched, always already entails, for Lacan,

the aphanisis of the unconscious: “When the subject appears somewhere as

meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance”

(218). Appalled by the imminence of a “final solution,” the liberation

from sexual difference intended by the force of “perpetual indivision

and successive iterations of the same,” Baudrillard holds fast to the

meaning whose “global extermination” sinthomosexuality is always

imagined to effect and whose Symbolic exchange jouissance would reduce

to a “definitively useless function.”[89] And he does so in the hope of

perpetuating the temporal movements of desire, of shielding himself from

the unconscious and the iterations of the drive, and securing, through

futurity, through the victory of narrative duration over irony’s

explosive negativity, a ground on which to stand: “The stakes,” he

warns, “are no longer only that ‘history’ is slipping into the

‘posthistorical,’ but that the human race is slipping into the void”

(19)’

And all because (heterosexual) sex has “become extraneous, a useless

function,” has become, that is, void of content once the inspiriting

meaning it carried—both like, and in the form of, a Child—has vanished

into the unregenerate materiality of the signifier.[90] For “the

signifier” as Lacan declares in his interpretation of “The Purloined

Letter,” “is not functional”; it exceeds its use-value in the service of

signification and, especially as localized in what the essay punningly

engages as “the letter,” it brings us back to the Real, to the fatality

of “what remains of a signifier when it has no more signification.”[91]

Apostrophizing just such a signifier, Lacan, in his reading of Poe’s

short story, makes clear just what remains: “nothing, if not that

presence of death which makes a human life a reprieve obtained from

morning to morning in the name of the meanings whose sign is your crook”

(51). Baudrillard, like Silas Marner and Scrooge, may walk through the

valley of the shadow of death, but with meaning as his shepherd he shall

always want, desiring from morning to morning the continuation of the

reprieve by which he perpetuates the fantasy space essential to his

desire. “We see no white winged angels now,” George Eliot observes. “But

yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put in

theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so

that they look no more backward; and that hand may be a little child’s.”

Or rather, though that Child be as helpless as Eppie, as delicate as

Tiny Tim, it must be the hand of a “little child” that lifts us into the

future and thereby saves us, in the words of Baudrillard, from “slipping

into the void” of all that is “backward” or “involuted,” of all that he

condemns as “successive iterations of the same” that are, themselves,

precisely what old Mr. Lammeter knows we value in the Eppies and Tiny

Tims who embody reproductive futurism.

As those faces of Eppie and Tiny Tim turn their eyes to us once more,

soliciting the compassion that always compels us to want to keep them

safe (in the faith that they will confer on us the future’s saving

grace), let me end with a reference to the “Fourteen Words,” attributed

to David Lane, by which members of various white separatist

organizations throughout the United States affirm their collective

commitment to the common cause of racial hatred: “We must secure the

existence of our people and a future for white children.”[92] So long as

“white” is the only word that makes this credo appalling, so long as

figural children continue to “secure [our] existence” through the

fantasy that we survive in them, so long as the queer refutes that

fantasy, effecting its derealization as surely as an encounter with the

Real, for just so long must sinthomosexuality have a future after all.

For what keeps it alive, paradoxically, is the futurism desperate to

negate it, obedient in that to the force of a drive that is futurism’s

sinthome.

3. Compassion’s Compulsion

Compassion can be a touchy subject, touching, as it does, on what

touches the heart by seeming to put us in touch with something other

than ourselves while leaving us open, in the process, to being read as

an easy touch. Not that some anticompassionate lobby takes arms against

the emotion, mounting a campaign of aversion therapy meant to bring out

the latent “ouch” in compassion’s electric “touch.” What makes

compassion so touchy is, rather, the absence of such a lobby, the fact

that every hardening of the heart against compassion’s knock presents

itself as hard-headed reason intent on denying false compassion to keep

the way clear for the true. For just as compassion confuses our own

emotions with another’s, making it kissing cousin to its morbid obverse,

paranoia, so it allows no social space that isn’t already its own, no

ground on which to stand outside its all-encompassing reach. From

ruthlessness to schadenfreude, its antonyms proliferate, but who would

make his home in the sterile landscape they call forth? What future

could one build upon their unforgiving slopes when communal relations,

collective identities, the very realm of the social itself all seem to

hang on compassion’s logic—though that logic, in turn, as Kant insists,

may hang on the formal abstraction of compassion’s tender touch until it

becomes the vise-like grip of duty’s iron fist. That fist may then curl

back inside compassion’s velvet glove, but only the better to pack the

punch that, even when stopping us dead in our tracks, always stops us in

the name of “love.”

If compassion in this takes love’s name in vain, it’s vain to think

compassion outside the register of love. One could, for example, cite

Augustine, who observes, in On Christian Doctrine, that the fifth of the

seven steps to wisdom (he calls it the “counsel of compassion”)

involves, along with a cleansing of the soul, diligence “in the love of

[one’s] neighbor.”[93] I prefer, however, to cite Ronald Reagan, a

traditionalist of compassion himself, by way of introducing a text that

addresses compassion and its politics—the futurism to which Silas Marner

and Scrooge were ultimately converted—in order to engage the figure

called forth to embody its negation. “We shall reflect the compassion

that is so much a part of your makeup,” President Reagan declared in his

first inaugural address. “How can we love our country, and not love our

countrymen,” he asked rhetorically, “and loving them,” he then asserted,

“reach out a hand when they fall.”[94] Let me freeze-frame that figure

of compassion—its defining feature, its distinctive touch—so as to focus

on the outstretched hand evoked by the President who, according to a

number of Republican intellectuals and politicians, deserves to join the

four already honored on Mount Rushmore. Now, with that image firmly in

mind, let us cut to Mount Rushmore itself, where this figure of speech

will be literalized and its emotional claim—to which Reagan supposed

that resistance was all but unthinkable—will receive an unexpected

response from one who refuses compassion’s compulsion as if he had taken

to heart in advance the doctrine for which another Reagan is famous:

“Just say no.”

I refer, of course, to Leonard (Martin Landau), the sadistic (and

tellingly fashion-conscious) agent of America’s cold war enemies in

Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Dedicated “secretary” and

loyal right arm to his superior, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason),

Leonard—with obvious pleasure—arranges the various acts of violence that

his boss’s plans demand. As pitiless and persistent as the crop-dusting

plane that terrorizes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in the film’s most

famous sequence, Leonard—unmoved by sympathy, deaf to claims of human

fellowship—materializes the force of negation, the derealizing

insistence of jouissance, from which Scrooge and Silas Marner were led

by the hand of a little child. Pursuing the film’s protagonists, in the

movie’s climactic scene, across the massive presidential faces at Mount

Rushmore’s national shrine, Leonard brings to a head, as it were,

Hitchcock’s concern throughout the film with the characteristically

“human” traits that conduce to sociality, traits to which, as

sinthomosexual, Leonard stands opposed: compassion, identification, love

of one’s neighbor as oneself. Aptly, therefore, the scene, unfolds on a

stage that consists of lifeless rock endowed with human form, invoking

the tension between the appeal of form—and hence of the formal identity

by which the subject imagines itself—and the rock of the Real that

resists whatever identity the subject imagines. These carvings,

moreover, literalize, as if attempting to make proper, the rhetorical

catachresis by which we are able to speak of a mountain’s “face.” In the

process, they bring us face to face with the similar catachresis that

produces, but also disfigures—returns to its status, that is, as

figure—the human face as the face of everything we recognize as

human.[95]

So, when Roger Thornhill extends his hand to lift Eve Kendall (Eva Marie

Saint) from the craggy ledge to which she holds after Leonard has pushed

her from the monument’s face to her all but certain death, his act of

compassion on the stony cliff redeems the stony-heartedness (or so we

are meant to think) that Eve and the American intelligence officials for

whom she is working displayed in permitting Leonard to set Thornhill up

to be killed by the crop-dusting plane. But hardness of heart is hardly

a charge to which the government’s top cops cop. Even when fully

informed about Thornhill’s thorny situation, when he knows, that is,

that his opposite number has mistaken this smooth-talking advertising

man for George Kaplan (a fictional agent invented to “divert suspicion”

from his “real Number One,” this very same Eve Kendall, engaged in

various acts of espionage “right under [the enemy’s] nose”), the head of

American intelligence, known as the Professor (Leo G. Carroll),

announces to his colleagues that Roger Thornhill will have to fend for

himself.[96] Questioned about the morality of such a refusal of any

intervention on Thornhill’s behalf—“Aren’t we being just a wee bit

callous?” an agency official asks—the Professor indignantly dismisses

all such charges out of hand: “No, my dear woman, we are not being

callous.... We created George Kaplan ... for a desperately important

reason. If we make the slightest move to suggest that there is no such

agent as George Kaplan ... then Number One ... will immediately face

suspicion, exposure, assassination, like the two others who went before”

(46). With so calculated a lesson in compassion—that it commits us to a

calculus, a quantification of the good—the Professor attempts to plant

his feet securely on moral high ground, while justifYing pulling the rug

out from under Thornhill’s in the process. On Mount Rushmore’s literal

high ground, though, when Leonard—once again, literally—plants his foot

to the same effect (similarly targeting Thornhill to take the necessary

fall), treading on the fingers with which Thornhill precariously clings

to the monument’s face, the callousness the Professor so lightly

shrugged off now attaches to Leonard with a vengeance, so that he, with

the crack of a bullet fired by a government marksman from above, can

take the fall at last not only for Thornhill, but also for the Professor

himself and, perhaps, for the film as well.

But shed no tears for Leonard. Though a victim of compassion’s

compulsory disavowal of its own intrinsic callousness, a sacrifice to

its claim to hold the other in love’s embrace, Leonard refuses

compassion, or refuses at any rate its fantasy, insofar as he incarnates

the radical force of sinthomosexuality, the positioning of the queer as

a figure for the subject’s unthinkable implication in the Real as

evinced by the meaningless jouissance made available through the

sinthome. In sinthomosexuality, the structuring fantasy undergirding and

sustaining the subject’s desire, and with it the subject’s reality,

confronts its beyond in the pulsions of the drive whose insistent

circulation undoes it, derealizing the collective logic of fantasy by

means of which subjects mean, and giving access, instead, to the

jouissance, particularized and irreducible, that registers the

unmasterable contingency at the core of every subject as such. All

sexuality, I’ve argued, is sinthomosexuality, but the burden of figuring

that condition, the task of instantiating the force of the drive (always

necessarily a partial drive, one incapable of totalization) that tears

apart both the subject’s desire and the subject of desire, falls only to

certain subjects who, like Leonard, serve as fall guys for the failure

of the sexual relation and the intolerable reduction of the subject to

the status of sinthome. Such sinthomosexuals fall because they fail to

fall in love, where love names the totalizing fantasy, always a fantasy

of totalization, by which the subject defends against the disintegrative

pulsion of the drive.[97] As Jacques-Alain Miller observes, “Perversion

is the norm of the drive. Thus, what is problematic is the existence of

a sexual drive toward the opposite sex. Lacan’s thesis here is that

there is no drive toward the opposite sex; there is only a drive toward

the libido object, toward partial satisfaction qua object. To take a

person, a whole person as an object, is not the role of the drive, it

leads us to introduce love.”[98]

But love, Lacan argues, with its orientation toward the wholeness of a

person, only reproduces (and in more ways than one) the subject’s

narcissistic fantasy in the face of the originary wound inflicted by the

fact of “sexed reproduction,” a fact that produces the living being at

the cost of sufficiency unto itself. Love expresses the subject’s

pursuit “not of the sexual complement,” according to Lacan, “but of the

part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the fact that he

is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer immortal.”[99]

Love, therefore, like fantasy, seeks to regain that lost immortality,

and to do so, fantasmatically, by translating sexed reproduction,

through which immortality was lost, into the very mode and guarantee of

its future restoration. The future assured by, so as to assure, the

continuity of sexed reproduction establishes the horizon of fantasy

within which the subject aspires to the meaning that is always, like the

object of desire, out of reach. SinthomosexuaIity, by contrast, affirms

a constant, eruptive jouissance that responds to the inarticulable Real,

to the impossibility of sexual rapport or of ever being able to signify

the relation between the sexes. It stands in the place of the drive that

is, for Lacan, “profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the

portion of death in the sexed living being.”[100] Sinthomosexuality,

then, like the death drive, engages, by refusing, the normative stasis,

the immobility, of sexuation to which we are delivered by Symbolic law

and the promise of sexual relation. Scorning the reification that turns

the sexed subject into a monolith, a petrified identity, in an effort to

evade the impossibility, the Real, of sexual difference,

sinthomosexuality breaks down the mortifying structures that give us

ourselves as selves and does so with all the force of the Real that such

forms must fail to signify.[101] With no sympathy for the subject’s

desires and no trace of compassion for the ego’s integrity, with no love

insofar as love names the subject’s defense against dissolution,

sinthomosexuals, like the death drive they are made to represent—and

made to represent insofar as the death drive both evades and undoes

representation—endanger the fantasy of survival by endangering the

survival of love’s fantasy, insisting instead on the machine-like

working of the partial, dehumanizing drives and offering a constant

access to their surplus of jouissance.[102] As such, they might well be

characterized by the words attributed to François Abadie, formerly mayor

of Lourdes and a senator aligned with France’s Radical Left before he

was expelled from the Party for articulating, in the pages of Le Nouvel

Observateur, his repugnance at “those I call the grave diggers of

society, those who care nothing [for] the future: homosexuals.”[103]

This confiation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of

sinthomosexuality continues to shape our social reality despite the

well-intentioned efforts of many, gay and straight alike, to normalize

queer sexualities within a logic of meaning that finds realization only

in and as the future. When the New York Times Magazine, for example,

published in 1998 an issue devoted to the status items specific to

various demographic groups, Dan Savage found in a baby’s gurgle the

music to soothe the gay male beast: “Gay parents,” he wrote, “are not

only making a commitment to our political future, but to the future,

period.... And many of us have decided that we want to fill our time

with something more meaningful than sit-ups, circuit parties and

designer drugs. For me and my boyfriend, bringing up a child is a

commitment to having a future. And considering what the last I5 years

were like, perhaps that future is the ultimate status item for gay

men.”[104] The messenger here may be a gay man, but the message is that

of compulsory reproduction as inscribed on the anti-abortion billboard I

mentioned in chapter 1: choose life, for life and the baby and meaning

hang together in the balance, confronting the lethal counterweight of

narcissism, AIDS, and death, all of which spring from commitment to the

meaningless eruptions of jouissance associated with the “circuit

parties” that gesture toward the circuit of the drive. This fascism of

the baby’s face, which encourages parents, whether gay or straight, to

join in a rousing chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” suggests that if

few can bring up a child without constantly bringing it up—as if the

future secured by the Child, the one true access to social security,

could only be claimed for the other’s sake, and never for one’s own—then

that future can only belong to those who purport to feel for the other

(with all the appropriative implications that such a “feeling for”

suggests). It can only belong to those who accede to the fantasy of a

compassion by which they shelter the infant future from sinthomosexuals,

who offer it none, seeming, instead, to literalize one of Blake’s

queerest Proverbs of Hell: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than

nurse unacted desires.”[105]

Who would side with such “gravediggers of society” over the guardians of

its future? Who would opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage’s

“something more meaningful”? What might Leonard teach us about turning

our back on what hangs in the balance and deciding—despite the rhetoric

of compassion, futurity, and life—to topple the scales that are always

skewed, to put one’s foot down at last, even if doing so costs us the

ground on which we, like all others, must stand? To figure out how we

might answer that question, let’s think about Leonard as a figure, one

metonymically figured in North by Northwest by the terra-cotta figurine

(“a pre-Columbian figure of a Tarascan warrior” [106], according to the

screenplay, that is referred to throughout the Mount Rushmore episode

simply as “the figure” [e.g., 138]), which contains, like a secret

meaning, the secrets on the microfilm hidden inside it. In Leonard, to

be sure, the figure of the sinthomosexual is writ large-screen, never

more so than during what constitutes his anti-Sermon on the Mount, when

by lowering the sole of his shoe he manages to show that he has no soul,

thus showing as well that the shoe of sinthomosexuality fits him—and

that he’s wearing it—insofar as he scorns the injunction to put himself

in the other’s shoes. But the gesture by which he puts his stamp on

sinthomosexuality—by stamping on the fingers with which Thornhill holds

fast to the monument’s ledge with one hand while he holds fast to Eve

with the other—constitutes, as the film makes clear, a response to an

appeal, even if his mode of response is intended to strike us as

unappealing.

After giving Eve the “vicious shove” that sends her down the

mountainside to almost “certain death” (145), Leonard seems to back

away, the figure now firmly in hand. Thornhill, by contrast, takes Eve

in hand as the ridge on which she had come to rest collapses beneath her

feet, leaving her hanging from Thornhill’s arm as he struggles at once

to ding to the cliff and to the life that he now holds dear. Unable to

save himself without plunging Eve into the void, unable to lift her up

without intervention from above, he calls out in anguish to Leonard,

calling him back to the fated encounter from which, in possession of the

precious figure at last, he was ready to move away. “Help,” and then

again, “help me,” groans Thornhill, his face as ashen as those on the

monument itself. The sincerity that banishes banter here, the almost

shocking plaintiveness as plainness displaces wit, identify this as a

moment of categorical transformation, as if, through the love he bears

for Eve and by which he bears her up, Thornhill himself were born again,

and borne away from the verbal games, the Madison Avenue wittiness and

delight in linguistic play, that threatened to earn him the epithet, “a

very clever fellow,” that served as the villain’s epitaph in Strangers

on a Train. As Thornhill’s compassionate passion spirits the spirit of

play away, Leonard, as if himself now inspired by Bruno, that “very

clever fellow” from Hitchcock’s earlier film, is moved to reply to

Thornhill’s call by calling upon the callousness that Bruno brought to

bear on Guy when he kicked at the fingers by which Guy held on to the

merry-go-round-gone-mad. Deliberately trampling on Thornhill’s hand,

Leonard now channels Bruno as if responding thereby to the earnestness

with which Thornhill tunes Bruno out. Might not this exchange of

attributes, this transference at the moment of Thornhill’s unexpectedly

heartfelt appeal, lead us to wonder just what Thornhill wants when he

calls out to Leonard for help?

No doubt he solicits compassion, as does Hitchcock here as well: the

protracted notes of Hermann’s score, their weightiness reinforced by the

rolling thunder of percussion, add weight to Thornhill’s predicament as

he waits for Leonard to act, all the while bearing the full weight of

Eve, who depends on him literally now. The reduction of Hitchcock’s

palette to an almost monochromatic slate, the blue-gray shade evocative

of rock and rigor mortis, gives visual point to the near complete

encroachment of the void by drawing us into the depths that seem to

swallow Thornhill and Eve. And the patent literalization here of the

concept of suspense—already patented in Hitchcock’s name after Young and

Innocent, Saboteur, To Catch a Thief, and Vertigo—names this as a moment

where mise-en-scène serves to indicate Hitchcock’s hand in the scene as

he forces his viewers to suffer the pain of the other as their own, to

feel on their pulse the visceral sense of the characters’ suspense.

Such control of the viewers’ emotions produces compassion but doesn’t

reflect it. Dining with Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay for

North by Northwest, Hitchcock reportedly whispered across the table with

delight: “Ernie, do you realize what we’re doing in this picture? The

audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment

we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that

chord and they react that way. And someday we won’t even have to make a

movie—there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just

press different buttons and they’ll go ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaah’ and we’ll

frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?”[107]

The machinery of cinema envisioned here turns audience members into

machines themselves, receptacles for stimuli that compel their

performance of automatic, predetermined responses. Enacting a scenario

worthy of Sade, this cinema without need of a movie would deny any

agency to its viewers, reducing them merely to some, and not to the sum,

of their parts. with this quasi-pornographic fantasy of manipulating

people through electrical stimuli, Hitchcock, always eager to maximize

directorial control, imagines a cinema of neuronal compulsion exempt

from the burden of having to deal with subjectivity at all. This view of

the end of cinema, understood in its double genitive sense, reads the

spectator’s sense of compassion, of emotional investment in the image on

screen, with so little compassion of its own, that it fully acknowledges

film as a form of Imaginary entrapment in which the filmmaker mobilizes

identification with a totalizing image as surely “implanted in

[viewers’] brains” as electrodes themselves would be. Hitchcock’s

fantasy, in other words, speaks less to his futuristic anticipation of

what cinema might become than to his actual understanding of what

narrative cinema always already is. His version of cinema models as much

as it mirrors the subject’s imagined sense of wholeness or integrity,

leaving that subject helpless before the coercions of the image,

helpless to let go of the image that gives it the image of itself. When

Hitchcock, then, like Thornhill, seems so genuinely to call forth

compassion, when he moves the viewer to pain at the imaged threat to the

image as such, he does so while invoking a jouissance that responds to

something mechanical—beyond volition, automatic—at the very heart of the

experience that compels us to compassion: the jouissance of passing

beyond the limit of the human and dissolving into the drive that insists

beyond the subject’s desire. He therefore calls upon Leonard,

sinthomosexual aud director surrogate, to step right up to the challenge

and answer Thornhill’s call for compassion by putting his best foot

forward and helping Thornhill learn to let go.

Thornhill may not intend his plea to be answered in quite this way, but

our sense of what Thornhill is asking for is what Leonard’s act

suspends. That Thornhill’s initial entreaty, “Help,” becomes, almost at

once, “Help me,” suggests neither lack of commitment to Eve nor the

limits of his compassion. Thornhill’s anguished suspense, after all,

like that of the spectator as well, speaks to his identification with

Eve, suspended as she is from the face of the cliff and pulling him into

danger as he tries to pull her out. “Help me” must mean, then, “Help me

help her,” and therefore “Help us” as well, or even “Help me change ‘me’

to ‘us’; help me be joined to her.” As such, his plea’s sincerity

attests to the seriousness of coupling aud the earnestness always

imposed by futurism’s reproductive logic (not for nothing is the woman

named Eve) Leonard, of course, is far from wild about this importance of

being earnest or this strange request that comes to him, almost

literally, out of the blue, to drop his stance of enmity, and the figure

he took from Eve, lest Thornhill, in dropping Eve, drop something more

precious than all his tribe: the fantasy of heterosexual love, and the

reproductive Couple it elevates, as delivering us from the pull of the

Real and the absence of sexual rapport by delivering us, dialectically,

from a knowledge with which we can’t live: the knowledge that, to quote

Lacan, “the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the

blow of individual death.”[108]

Despite that blow, the sinthomosexual opposes the fantasy that generates

endless narratives of generation. Hearing, to borrow Joel Fineman’s

phrase, “the sound of O” in Thornhill—the “O” that parades as

Thornhill’s initial to the extent that it stands for nothing—Leonard

refuses the tragedy of desire that Thornhill’s cry portends.[109] To the

contrary, Leonard, linked as he is to the figure full of microfilm,

North by Northwest‘s MacGuffin (Hitchcock’s term for an object invested

with “vital importance” in the narrative, though it “is actually nothing

at all”[110]) might interpret Thornhill’s tragedy as his newfound

sincerity in the face of this threat to Eve and thus as his ceasing to

stand for nothing, his turning away from the empty “O” that turns the

globe to rot, in order to stand for the law of desire to which we

properly owe our standing as subjects of the Symbolic. Leonard thus

stands opposed to the desire for which Thornhill solicits support by

standing on the hand that Leonard refuses to lift in order to help

him—or, to inflect that last phrase differently, refuses to lift the

better to help him: to help him slip free of fantasy and the clutches of

desire, free of the hold by which love holds off his access to

jouissance while offering, instead, the promise of totalization and

self-completion, the Imaginary One of the Couple and its putative sexual

rapport, in a future that’s unattainable because always still to

come.[111]

Lacan affords us some guidance here through his gloss on the legend of

St. Martin, whose response to a certain beggar who asked for his help on

a cold winter’s day was to cut his own warm cloak in two and give half

to the man who had nothing. “Saint Martin shares his cloak, and a great

deal is made of it,” Lacan observes in invoking this touchstone of

compassion. “We are no doubt touching a primitive requirement in the

need to be satisfied there, for the beggar was naked. But perhaps over

and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for something else,

namely that Saint Martin either kill him or fuck him. In any encounter

there’s a big difference in meaning between the response of philanthropy

and that of love.”[112] The love Lacan refers to here, the love that

surpasses philanthropy (etymologically, the “love of man”), disdains the

Imaginary structure informing the inevitably narcissistic love we take

for love itself. What Lacan calls love in this passage exceeds all

feel-good forms of altruism with which we’re wont to identify

compassionate identification, the compassion that, Lacan points out,

reinforces the ego’s narcissism. “My egoism is quite content with a

certain altruism,” he declares, “altruism that is situated on the level

of the useful.” And he adds, to make this clearer still: “What I want is

the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own”

(187). Lacan, however, distinguishes all such altruism, philanthropy,

and compassion from the kind of love the beggar may actually have been

soliciting from the saint: “It is in the nature of the good to be

altruistic. But that’s not the love of thy neighbor” (186). Instead, at

the heart of the neighborly love that Augustine associated with the

“counsel of compassion,” Lacan perceives the function of “malignant

jouissance” (187). And this alone, Lacan insists, explains why Freud,

confronted with the biblical injunction to “love one’s neighbor,”

“retreats in understandable horror” (193).

Lacan, of course, is thinking of Civilization and Its Discontents, where

Freud, having noted with understatement that “men are not gentle

creatures,” questions the imperative to “love one’s neighbor,” since,

for most human beings, in his view, “their neighbor is for them not only

a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to

satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work

without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize

his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and

kill him.”[113] One might hear in this a faint echo of Kant, who,

maintaining “that our species, alas! is not such as to be found

particularly worthy of love,” insists that love, as a feeling, cannot be

imposed upon us as duty, since what we do by constraint of duty is not,

it follows, done from love. The commandment to love one’s neighbor,

therefore, cannot, as Kant puts it, “mean, ‘Thou shalt first of all

love, and by means of this love (in the first place) do him good’; but:

‘Do good to thy neighbor, and this beneficence will produce in thee the

love of men.’”[114] Lacan draws out the extent to which such a

translation of “love one’s neighbor,” though appearing to support a

compassionate love with its roots in the Imaginary—by virtue of which “I

imagine [others’] difficulties and their sufferings in the mirror of my

own”—has the effect, to the contrary, of rupturing the subject’s

Imaginary totalization, the image of self-completion that “love” as

fantasy would sustain, by installing the abstract logic of duty as the

submission to moral law, whereby pathos becomes pathological and reason

the logical path.[115] In this way the command to love one’s neighbor

unleashes its negativity against the coherence of any self-image,

subjecting us to a moral law that evacuates the subject so as to locate

it through and in that very act of evacuation, permitting the

realization, thereby, of a freedom beyond the boundaries of any image or

representation, a freedom that, like the ground of God’s power,

according to Lacan, ultimately resides in nothing more than “the

capacity to advance into emptiness” (196). Kant’s duty to conform to

moral law without any pathological motive, for the sake of duty alone,

thus trenches, and this marks the central point of Lac an’s elaboration

of Kant with Sade, on the question of jouissance: “When one approaches

that central emptiness, which up to now has been the form in which

access to jouissance has presented itself to us, my neighbor’s body

breaks into pieces” (202). Here, in this access to jouissance,

paradoxical though it may seem, psychoanalysis encounters the innermost

meaning of the commandment to “love one’s neighbor,” which, as Lacan is

quick to remind us, “may be the cruelest of choices” (194).

Thus Leonard, the sinthomosexual, by pressing his foot onto Thornhill’s

hand, attempts to impress upon Thornhill the fact that by breaking his

hold on the cliff Leonard gives him the break for which he’s been

asking: the neighborly love sufficient to break him open with jouissance

and launch him into the void around and against which the subject

congeals. In the earnestness of Thornhill’s cry, Leonard hears what

Saint Martin was deaf to in the shivering beggar’s plea: a request,

beyond what the subject knows, for something beyond his desire. If that

meant for Lacan, where the beggar was concerned, that “Saint Martin

either kill him or fuck him,” then Leonard, as reified obstacle to

(hetero)sexual rapport, enacts in his dealings with Thornhill the one as

displacement of the other.[116] Treading on Thornhill’s fingers beneath

the eyes of America’s patriarchs, standing in for Symbolic law, Leonard

can hardly fail to assume an allegorical aspect, as if he embodied an

iconic response to the question posed by Lacan: “Does it go without

saying that to trample sacred laws under foot ... itself excites some

form of jouissance?”[117] Bound to the law, whose potential

transgression both elicits and inflames it, desire as lack always lacks

what it takes to let go of the law that it tramples precisely to the

extent that it lacks what it takes to dare to let go, tout court. But

Leonard, by going beyond transgression and so beyond the law, engages

jouissance that is unconstrained by fantasy or desire. For the

sinthomosexual, who figures the unrestricted availability of jouissance,

the continuous satisfaction that the drive attains by its pulsions and

not by its end, threatens the subject inhabiting the temporality of

desire, the subject who clings to the nonsatisfaction that perpetuates

desire and finds its defense against jouissance in the narrative

dilation that endlessly begets the future by always deferring it.[118]

Thus aligned with the law’s prohibitions that keep its object out of

reach, desire is desire for no object but only, instead, for its own

prolongation, for the future itself as libidinal object procured by its

constant lack. Paradoxically, then, Lacan’s objet a, the object/cause of

desire, does not partake of desire itself; instead, it consists of the

jouissance that desire must keep at a distance insofar as desire relies

on that distance, on that lack, for its survival. Sinthomosexuality, by

contrast, brings into visibility the force of enjoyment that desire

desires to put off. In doing so, the sinthomosexual reveals, unendurably

to the subject of the law, enjoyment’s infiltration of, its structural

implication in, the very law of desire that works to keep jouissance at

bay.

Sinthomosexuality, in other words, finds something other in the words of

the law, enforcing an awareness of something else, something that

remains unaccounted for in the accounts we give of ourselves, by

figuring an encounter with a force that loosens our hold on the meanings

we cling to when, for example, we cry for help. The force thus figured

is figured in the film by Leonard’s relation, as I suggested before, to

what the film describes as “the figure,” itself a mere reification of

the empty core around which it is shaped and whose “contents,” inserted

to fill that void, determine what it “means.” In this sense, the figure

seems to operate primarily as a figure for figure as such and not, as

various readers of the film—including Raymond Bellour—have argued, as a

figure for Eve, or for Eve as a figure for the “threatening body” of the

mother.[119] Thornhill, in the scene at the auction house, fully

cognizant that Eve has betrayed him, may refer to her, contemptuously,

as “this little piece of—sculpture” (90), but the figure that comes to

figure figure’s murderous duplicity passes—or rather is transferred, in

a movement that literalizes “metaphor” while instantiating metonymy—into

Leonard’s hands from Eve’s when the two of them struggle on Mount

Rushmore. It thus makes him, not her, the figure of figure in the scene.

This act of transference, in other words, reinterprets the metaphoric

spiritualization of difference, the transformation of two into One, as

the random slippage of metonymy into which every One must fall.[120]

Unlike the metonomy as which Lacan is known for having defined desire,

however, this exposure of the metonymic substrate on which metaphoric

meaning always rests undoes the substitutive structures of

identification and so of love, and thus destroys the very place from

which the subject is able to desire—the place from which the subject

takes its desire through identification with the Other.

As a “gravedigger of society,” one who “care[s] nothing [for] the

future,” Leonard, the sinthomosexual, annuls the temporality of desire,

leaving futurity, like the reproductive Couple charged with the

responsibility of bearing it, “suspended, interrupted, disrupted,” in

the words de Man uses to characterize the impact of irony on

narrative.[121] Leaving the “intelligibility of (representational)

narrative disrupted at all times,” inducing, as de Man says elsewhere,

“unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness,” irony, with its

undoing of identity and refusal of historical progression, with its

shattering of every totalized form (and of every form as totalization),

names the figure as which Leonard’s relation to the terra-cotta figure

figures him.[122] The shot of the broken clay figure adduced just after

Leonard is shot, substituting the destruction of that object for the

shattering of his body at the end of its fall, thus portrays, in the

sinthomosexual’s fate, the fatality he would inflict: the dissolution

effected by jouissance, before which, as Lacan asserts, “my neighbor’s

body breaks into pieces.” The Tarascan figure thus literally embodies—by

endowing with the image of a body—the central and structuring emptiness

it is intended to contain. And true to the radical groundlessness that

irony effects, we can never decide if the pieces of film that emerge

when that figures breaks open are the precipitates of its

emptiness—images, that is, of this hollowing-out, this vacancy that

always inhabits the image as Imaginary lure—or images, instead, of the

fantasy precipitated to counter such an emptiness: the fantasy of the

image as negating such a vertiginous negativity, as filling the void

with the fantasy structure that constitutes desire. For the strips of

film, like North by Northwest, image the emptying-out of the image, the

escape from its illusory “truth”; at the same time, though, and

precisely by imaging the emptying-out of the image, they substantialize

it once again, regenerating the Imaginary fantasy of a totalizing

form.[123]

But note in this a paradox: this emptiness internal to the figure, and

into which it breaks, suspending by means of irony all totality and

coherence, expresses the presence of jouissance, the insistence of the

drive, and the access, therefore, to the perverse satisfaction of which

the drive is assured, while desire as enabled by fantasy, though aiming

to fill that emptiness by according it a substance and a form, only

substitutes absence for presence, endless pursuit for satisfaction, the

deferral that conjures futurity for the stuff of jouissance. This, one

might say, is the irony of irony’s relation to desire. For just as

compassion allows no rhetorical ground outside its logic, no place to

stand beyond its enforced Imaginary identifications—by virtue of which,

whatever its object or the political ends it serves, compassion is

always conservative, always intent on preserving the image in which the

ego sees itself—so irony’s negativity calls forth compassion to negate

it and thereby marks compassion and all the components of desire, its

defining identifications as well as the fantasies that sustain them,

with the negativity of the very drive against which they claim to

defend.[124]

What in our current moment evinces this irony of compassion more clearly

than the reading of homosexuality as always sinthomosexuality? Consider,

for example, Pope John Paul II’s unambiguous affirmation in July 2000

that those of us outside the heterosexual norm deserve, as he put it, to

be treated “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” No sooner had

the Pontiff spoken those words than he felt it important to let us know

that “homosexual persons who assert their homosexuality,” who do not,

that is, repress or deny their sexual orientation, suffer an “objective

disorder.” They possess what he called an “inclination ... toward an

intrinsic moral evil.” This, he compassionately proceeded to declare,

precludes the possibility of any legitimate claim to “civil legislation

... introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable

right.”[125] One could easily imagine how some might dismiss such

“compassion and sensitivity” out of hand. Certain that the Church, in

its vigilant program to sniff out “moral evil,” is simply, in this

particular instance, barking up the wrong tree, they might well decline

to accept such accounts of our sexual inclination. But the decline of

civilization itself, in the opinion of the Church, would be guaranteed

if many twigs or—heaven help us!—twigs in general were bent as we’re

inclined. For if “no one has any conceivable right” to engage in

“homosexual acts,” it is only insofar as “homosexual acts” lead no one

to conceive; they violate natural law, so-called, the Catechism asserts,

to the extent that they inevitably close off “the sexual act to the gift

of life.”[126] That gift, understood by the Church as the gift of

compassion par excellence, despite the doctrine of celibacy to which its

own priests still are pledged, compels its continued repudiation of

homosexual acts. Only, from such a perspective, a deeply misguided sense

of compassion leads “well-intentioned” persons to act “with a view to

changing civil-statutes and laws” in response to “the pro-homosexual

movement[‘s] ... deceitful propaganda.” The Church, by contrast, as the

Vatican puts it, “can never be so callous,” and therefore, as a letter

of admonition to Catholic Bishops maintained, deviation from official

Church doctrine where homosexuality is concerned, even “in an effort to

provide pastoral care[,] is neither caring nor pastoral.”[127] A similar

sentiment was expressed in a statement attributed to Concerned Families

of Maryland, a nonsectarian organization devoted to the implementation

of “family-friendly” social policies: “There is more compassion,” the

statement averred, “in truth than [in] deception, and more compassion in

denouncing homosexuality than [in] endorsing it.”[128]

That compassion can look like callousness, then, and callousness like

compassion, that the bleeding-heart sob sister’s tears can destroy what

her tough-talking, tough-love-promoting twin’s invective purports to

redeem, suggests that compassion and callousness differ only by decree,

as the Professor inadvertently demonstrated near the outset of North by

Northwest. This irony must be lost, however—it’s incumbent that it be

lost—on all who would stand with Saint Peter’s heir on the rock of

compassionate love. And lost on them most through the loss of the

Leonards, and of all the sinthomosexuals, whose loss is perceived as

none at all since they represent loss itself: represent, more precisely,

loss of self, of coherence, of life, and of heirs. “Gay activism is

wholeheartedly determined,” writes Father John Miller, the author of

Called by Love and editor of the Social Justice Review, “to do battle

against human life.” Therefore, Father Miller insists, “Mistaken

compassion must not allow us to ‘grant’ civil rights to gays.... We have

every natural, God-given right to discriminate against immoral,

unhealthy, ugly, society-disturbing behavior.”[129] This negation of the

negativity, the jouissance, of the sinthomosexual epitomizes the logic

of compassion to which we are constantly “called by love.” In the

process, it determines dialectic, in its temporal elaboration, as always

what Lacan would call a “dialectic of desire.”[130] Or, to put that

somewhat differently, the fantasy on which desire subsists needs

dialectic as temporalization, as the production of narrative sequence

moving toward an always unrealized end. Desire, that is, in opposition

to the sinthomosexual who figures the drive, necessitates the emergence

of fantasy precisely to screen out the drive’s insistence. That fantasy,

always experienced as the very reality in which we live, installs the

law’s prohibition as a barrier to protect against jouissance and opens

the space of desire to an infinite future of failed pursuit through

which desire, like Faust, refuses its satisfaction or enjoyment,

prolonging itself by negating the satisfaction at which it aims and only

through that negation engaging the enjoyment it refuses to know.[131]

The relation of desire’s dialectic, with its endless unfolding of

futurity, to the sinthomosexual’s death drive, with its enjoyment that

is always “at hand,” echoes the relation of allegory to irony as

elaborated by de Man.[132] Allegory, as de Man explains it in “The

Rhetoric of Temporality,” enacts “the tendency of ... language toward

narrative, the spreading out along the axis of an imaginary time in

order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous within the

subject” (225). Hence, as he goes on to assert, “allegory exists

entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now, but always a

past or an endless future” (226). Irony, on the other hand, reduces time

to “one single moment” (225) that allows “neither memory nor

prefigurative duration” (226). It is, instead, de Man insists,

“instantaneous like an ‘explosion,’ “ a characterization to which he

adds the telling phrase, “and the fall is sudden” (225). If compassion

for others, in Reagan’s view, moves us to “reach out a hand when they

fall,” could we think of compassion in terms of allegory’s logic of

narrative sequence, which resists, while carrying forward—through and as

the dilation of time—the negativity condensed in irony’s instantaneous

big bang? In that case this version of compassionate love, intended to

buck up the order of desire whose form is reproductive futurism, would

allegorize, to the profit of dialectic, the expense of the unrecuperable

irony that compassion necessarily abjects in whomever it reads as

sinthomosexual, whomever it sees as a threat to the law (understood as

the law of desire) by figuring an access to jouissance that gives them

more bang for their buck.[133]

Consistent with such a translation of irony into the narrative order of

allegory, by means of which such irony is both exceeded and carried over

at once, exceeded, that is, by an excess of the negativity that is

thereby negated in it, North by Northwest gets rid of the sinthomosexual

with a bang of its own, the irony of which gets voiced in the mordant

comment that Leonard’s shooting provokes from his superior, Vandamm.

“That wasn’t very sporting,” he chides the Professor, “using real

bullets.” Leonard’s insistence on the Real thus gives way to a

fantasmatic reality as the film dismisses irony with this brief ironic

epitaph, discarding, along with Leonard, Thornhill’s single most obvious

trait, or the trait that could only be obvious so long as he himself

remained single. Married—and that marriage occurs, we might say, in the

gesture that has him drop irony so as to keep from dropping Eve—he

drops, as if it were casually, one last line to mark his change. “I’m

sentimental,” he affirms to Eve in the final words of the film, his body

now falling all over hers as she, permitted to do so at last, falls

backward onto the bed. We need not accept that this statement expresses

a wisdom hard-won by escaping the force field of irony’s negations; we

need not, in fact, accept that this statement lacks irony itself. But

the irony, then, would be Hitchcock’s, or North by Northwest‘s, instead

of Thornhill’s, and would ironize the sentimentality to which Thornhill

lays claim at the end of the film by ironizing the claim of sentiment,

which is allegory’s claim as well, to have superseded irony—to have

pulled itself up by its bootstraps from under the sinthomosexual’s boot

to assure thereby the survival, in the future unfolded by desire, of the

ego’s Imaginary unity, which compassion is always compelled to conserve.

Could any film image more elegantly the conservation of such an image or

render more economically the dialectic of desire as it reinterprets the

fatal fall into the abyss of jouissance as an endless fall forward

through time designed to keep jouissance at bay? Hanging from the face

of the cliff inscribed with those blindly staring faces—imaging the

founding fathers and, with them, the faith that the law of the father,

by closing the door on jouissance, can serve as a shelter and guarantee

for the image we take as our own—the Couple procures its future, and

ours, by enacting the dialectic through which the self purports to find

itself, in another phrase from de Man, “standing above its own

experiences.”[134] Thus, the scene on Mount Rushmore can only conclude,

the escape from the threat of the death drive embodied by Leonard can

only take place, through a sequence combining the acts of suspending,

annulling, and raising up. No sooner has the death drive that Leonard

drives home been suppressed by the force of the law than the film

suppresses all reference to agencies other than those of the Couple.

Closing in tightly on Thornhill and Eve, their faces the privileged

sites of Imaginary totalization in the film, the camera compels a

suspension of logic as Thornhill lifts Eve to safety, single-handedly in

more ways than one, by lifting her body from the face of the cliff

directly into the upper berth of a bedroom coach on a train. As Eve is

borne up and into the berth that the future itself may be born, the film

enacts a dialectic of continuity through disconnection, achieving, like

allegory in the words of de Man, “the illusion of a continuity that it

knows to be illusionary,” and granting the reproductive Couple the

prolongation of its desire across, but also by means of, a break like

that of anacoluthon.[135]

The genuine strangeness of this moment, which often occasions a laughter

compounded of disappointment and relief, centers on Hitchcock’s

willfulness—or even his perversity—in arranging the Couple’s escape from

the void through a sequence that reinstalls that void at the center of

its structure. Though the reproductive Couple’s joined hands join hands

with Hitchcock’s cinematic technique to figure the logic of continuity

here, this sequence flaunts the discontinuity of what its continuity

editing joins. The temporal and spatial violations involved in the

syntax of this movement, which conflates the particulars of an

all-but-impossible rescue from the cliff with the act, both more

plausible and more mundane, of lifting Eve into the berth, coincide with

the film’s violation of naturalism’s insistence on the synchronization

of sound as the words on the audio track cease to coincide with the

movements of Thornhill’s lips. Out of this gap thus opened in the

“reality” of the film, which responds to the ruptures of space and time

(divided between events on the cliff and on the train) that close-ups

and editing conceal, a voice that comes from somewhere else—the voice,

to be sure, of Thornhill but coming from somewhere beyond his image,

coming, in fact, from the very future that he labors to bear in the body

of Eve—delivers them into that future with four simple words: “Come

along, Mrs. Thornhill.” With this the film successfully lifts us all

into that future. To the extent that it carries us forward, though, like

the train onto which the happy Couple is magically transported, the

engine driving that movement here is fantasy alone: the fantasy, first

and foremost, that this whole scene is not a fantasy but, rather, a

return precisely to what is plausibly mundane; the fantasy, then, that

futurity, the temporality of desire, can effectively structure our

reality by denying the pressure of the Real. Thornhill’s bandaged

fingers may carry Leonard’s imprint still (and the screenplay, following

Thornhill’s last words, calls them to our attention), but the film, only

able to come to a close by opening onto desire, desires its way to

survival by casting Leonard, once it has cast him out, as a dream from

which it awakens—unlike Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus—into history,

temporality, and the cycles of reproduction.

This is the compassionate destiny destined to keep the romantic Couple

from ever reaching its destination. For that end, whatever the subject

may hope, is not to be won through the realization of (hetero)sexual

rapport, through a union with the “opposite” sex it imagines might

complete it. Indeed, as Paul Verhaeghe writes, “Whatever efforts the

subject makes to join his or her body via the Other of language, he or

she will never succeed, because the gap [between jouissance and the

Other] is precisely due to this Other of language.”[136] That gap, in

other words, is coextensive with the subject “qua living being” destined

to suffer, as a consequence of the fact of “sexed reproduction,” an

irreparable loss of what nothing in the Symbolic is sufficient to

restore: “the part of himself, lost forever, that is constituted by the

fact that he is only a sexed living being, and that he is no longer

immortal”—no longer, in other words, whole, complete, or sufficient unto

himself.[137] This primal or originary lack precludes the One of sexual

relation, the reconstitution of unity anticipated by reproductive

coupling across the divide of “sexual difference.” Lacanian sexual

difference, as Joan Copjec rightly remarks, “is a real and not a

symbolic difference,” and Žižek, drawing on Ernesto Laclau, makes clear

just what that means: “To put it in Laclau’s terms—sexual difference is

the Real of an antagonism, not the Symbolic of a differential

opposition: sexual difference is not the opposition allocating to each

of the two sexes its positive identity defined in opposition to the

other sex (so that woman is what man is not, and vice versa), but a

common Loss on account of which woman is never fully a woman and man is

never fully a man—‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ positions are merely two

modes of coping with this inherent obstacle/loss.”[138] This loss or

lack of the Real accounts for the emergence of the subject of the drive,

but the Symbolic order repeats and displaces that lack in the lack that

constitutes the subject of desire. Isn’t this precisely the fate

foretold in the familiar Lacanian anecdote about two children, brother

and sister, turned, by the signifiers that translate sexual difference

from the Real to the Symbolic, into strangers on a train? “For these

children,” Lacan informs us, “Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth

two countries toward which each of their souls will strive on divergent

wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they

are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own

superiority without detracting from the glory of the other.”[139]

Seeking restitution in the order of the Symbolic for a loss that they

suffer in the Real, a loss from which the drive emerges as the

structurally “excessive, ‘unreal’ remainder that produces an

ever-present jouissance,”[140] these children, like Thornhill and Eve,

are destined to book their own berths on the train called Desire, which

leads, as it does in Williams’s play, to an end informed by the train of

births that procures its endless locomotion.[141]

North by Northwest will appear, then, to have taken its hero on a

journey, to have moved him by teaching him how to b e moved, to have

brought him, as Raymond Bellour suggests, “from an ignorance to a

knowledge,” recalling in this the narrative logic of temporal succession

whereby allegory sorts out and distributes sequentially, in an effort to

make intelligible, the incompatible pressures that irony condenses in

every instant.[142] The film’s last shot would seem to confirm such a

triumph of allegorization by flattering the “knowingness” of an audience

always happy to give a hand—as much to itself as to the film—when the

phallic symbol it failed to see coming comes handed to it like a gift.

Hitchcock never tired of pretending to reveal what that last shot meant:

“There are no symbols in North by Northwest,” he told Cahiers du Cinéma.

“Oh yes! One. The last shot. It’s a train entering the tunnel after the

love scene between Grant and Eva Marie Saint. It’s a phallic symbol. But

you mustn’t tell anyone.”[143] As symbol of the Symbolic here, of the

law of the father as the law of desire barring access to jouissance, and

hence of the normative faith in the One of the reproductive Couple, the

phallic symbol would put its seal on the overcoming of irony. But to the

extent that it does so by founding its order of meaning on the

meaningless signifier that always comes from the field of the Other,

impelling us thereafter to seek a “return” to a fantasmatic coherence by

riding the rails, like the brother and sister Lacan adduces in his

fable, toward the part of ourselves forever lost and displaced into

“Ladies” or “Gentlemen,” to that extent the phallic symbol reinstates

the very irony, the simultaneity of contradictions, the intolerable

“dizziness to the point of madness,” that its constant promise of

“meaning” constantly means it to transcend. Those children, as

realizations themselves of reproductive futurism—into which, as surely

as night follows day, they are doomed to be railroaded too—image the

only answer permitted to the question of desire by a signifying chain

whose closure arrives in a future definitionally deferred: a future

they, as children, may serve to figure for a time, but one they will

have to figure out how to sustain in time to come. The mise-en-abîme

that reproductive futurism is thereby compelled to effect—propelled by

desire, guaranteed by the phallus, and figured by the Child—would defend

against the abyssal irony it negates and preserves at once. But in doing

so, it exposes the compassion for which Saint Martin provides the model,

the compassion that nothing dares to resist in the social field of

desire, as merely another name for the symbolic mandate of castration:

the law that we, like Saint Martin’s beggar, solicit for the wool it

pulls over our eyes in order to blind us to the jouissance that would

knock them right out of our heads.

Leonard, the sinthomosexual, loves his neighbor enough to say no, to

give him the kick that he’s begging for and from which he gets his

kicks. Unlike Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner (1982), a later

sinthomosexual who faces a similar moment of truth when Rick Deckard

(Harrison Ford), the adversary pursuing him to his death, hangs

pitifully over the void, Leonard, more fully embodying the machinery of

the drive than his android brother, resists, in extremis, the lure of

any redemptive humanization. Not for him an identification with the

image of the Other, nor any sentimentality over the form of the

totalized self; not for him the elegies Batty intones in the wake of

rescuing Deckard, nor such tokens of transcendent survival as the dove

that flies upward at Batty’s death, equating thereby his last act of

compassion with a now fully humanized soul. Leonard’s sole act is to

grind his sole, like a brand, into Thornhill’s flesh, crushing the hand

toward which, unmoved, he refuses to reach out his own.[144] Moved only

by the death drive’s compulsion, instead, he gets to the heart of the

plea for help by helping the other to get in touch with his ways of

getting off. Batty’s altruistic gesture, then, like Saint Martin’s act

of compassion, may earn the spiritual seal of approval implied by the

wings of the dove, but Leonard’s exemplifies the difference “between the

response of philanthropy and that of love.”

The sinthomosexual, then, as saint? Saint Leonard, as Martin Landau

plays him, usurping Saint Martin’s place? But the sinthomosexual won’t

offer a blessed thing by way of salvation, won’t promise any

transcendence or grant us a vision of something to come. In breaking our

hold on the future, the sinthomosexual, himself neither martyr nor

proponent of martyrdom for the sake of a cause, forsakes all causes, all

social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the

perfection of social forms. Against the promise of such an activism, he

performs, instead, an act: the act of repudiating the social, of

stepping, or trying to step, with Leonard, beyond compulsory compassion,

beyond the future and the snare of images keeping us always in its

thrall. Insisting, with Kant, on a freedom from pathological motivation,

on a radical type of selflessness no allegory ever redeems, the

sinthomosexual stands for the wholly impossible ethical act. And for

just that reason the social order, repeating in the form of compassion

the negativity it abjects, proves incapable of standing him. Instead,

that order continues to fill its constitutive gap with futurism,

elaborating allegorically, in the temporality of narrative sequence, the

contradictory tensions of its relation to the Real and thus to the drive

as the residue that haunts it with jouissance. The future serves as a

placeholder, then, to maintain, while seeming to overcome, the

Symbolic’s incompleteness, but the sinthomosexual erupts from within as

the obstacle to such a fantasy of eventual totalization, and, therefore,

as an obstacle to fantasy as such.

In this sense, the sinthomosexual embodies intelligibility’s internal

limit and situates his ethical register outside the recognizably human.

To gain a better purchase on this, consider for a moment a recent work

whose orientation toward futurism, bespeaking its passionate commitment

to a politics of compassion, commits it to repeating the refusal it aims

explicitly to refuse. Judith Butler, in writing Antigone’s Claim, sets

out, like Thornhill as he takes Eve’s hand (in a double sense) on Mount

Rushmore, to forestall an impending injury by resisting the repetition

of the logic responsible for causing Antigone’s death. Denying the

assertion that Symbolic law necessitates such repetitions, insisting,

rather, that the law depends on the appearance of such a necessity,

Butler sets out to rewrite that past in order to rescue Antigone from

the tomb in which she’s been buried alive—and buried not only by Creon,

but also, as Butler suggests, by readers including Hegel and Lacan.

Condemned in every instance for crossing, in life, the boundary of life

and death, for passing beyond the space of social recognition and

viability, Antigone figures for Butler “the unlivable desire with which

she lives.”[145] Antigone, that is, comes to allegorize the steady

pressure of a catachresis that moves her beyond intelligibility and so

toward new forms of social relation, or even, as Butler expectantly

writes, toward “a new field of the human, achieved through political

catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as

human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own

founding laws” (82).

So figured, Antigone makes her claim on behalf of all whom the laws of

kinship consign to what Butler, after Orlando Patterson, describes as

“social death” (73):

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is

not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that

persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode.

What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the

livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional

sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only

how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints

but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life

by depriving it of a sense of ontological certainty and durability

within a publicly constituted political sphere. (78)

Antigone lays claim, in the powerful voice that Butler’s argument gives

her, to a proper place in the order of things, though that place must

exceed all propriety, to a “livable” life in the “political sphere,”

though that life won’t affirm the Symbolic. Rejecting the perpetual

melancholia of loving “in an ontologically suspended mode,” this

Antigone refuses to be deprived, by the normative and normalizing logics

of social legitimation and cultural intelligibility, of the “ontological

certainty and durability” that she demands, “in spite of its

foreclosure,” as the prerogative of her love. Resolute in her

transgressiveness, she emerges, awful and triumphant, from her silent

tomb in Butler’s last sentence, determined to rearticulate the law whose

unvarying repetition would sentence her and all her unkinned kind to a

death-in-life forever: “She acts, she speaks, she becomes one for whom

the speech act is a fatal crime, but this fatality exceeds her own life

and enters the discourse of intelligibility as its own promising

fatality, the social form of an aberrant, unprecedented future” (82).

What is promised both in, and in the form of, this “aberrant,

unprecedented future” is nothing less than a Symbolic without exclusion

or foreclosure, a Symbolic whose newly articulated norms would embrace,

and thereby restore to life, those whom Butler characterizes as “dying,

yes, surely dying from a lack of recognition, dying, indeed, from the

premature circumscription of the norms by which recognition as a human

can be conferred, a recognition without which the human cannot come into

being but must remain on the far side of being, as that which does not

quite qualify as that which is and can be” (81). Butler’s claim never

seems more compelling nor demurral more inhumane; but never does she

sound more committed to “ontological certainty and durability,” to the

cause of the human as capable of coming fully into being through some

proper, as opposed to “premature,” “circumscription of the norms.” As a

result, her “radical sexual politics” (75) seems all too familiarly

liberal and her engagement with psychoanalysis all too “American,” as

Lacan might say, in its promise to provide the excluded with access to a

livable social form. That form, of course, is the future that Antigone’s

“promising fatality” would procure: a form that translates fatality into

the means, not the end, of life insofar as fatality here comes to mean

the rearticulation of meaning through a transformation of the

signifier’s capacity to mean. She may enter “the discourse of

intelligibility as its own promising fatality,” but Antigone, in fact,

neither promises nor desires an end to intelligibility. To the contrary,

she promises the endless entrance into intelligibility of all that has

been excluded. The “discourse of intelligibility,” in other words,

continues to reign supreme; it merely expands to accommodate what it

formerly disallowed. Thus, Butler’s faith in its ever-widening horizon

of inclusiveness, the liberal version of futurism’s realization of

meaning in time, reproduces, though from the political left, the

fantasmatic security effected at the end of North by Northwest when the

film dispatches Leonard, who refuses to “come into being” as “human,”

while it patches, with Hitchcock’s “phallic symbol,” the gap his refusal

gestures toward in intelligibility as such.

Antigone’s “promising fatality,” then, the dissension said to enter

discourse through her speech act’s “fatal crime,” opens the possibility

of signifying what signification had denied. With such an act, according

to Butler, “the human has entered into catachresis” because Antigone,

though definitionally excluded from the “public sphere of the human,”

“speaks in its language” nonetheless, altering and enlarging the meaning

that the signifier “human” is able to convey, until, as Butler tells us,

“we no longer know its proper usage” (82). Except, of course, insofar as

the human remains bound to the notion of futurity as the site of its

endless realization through and as catachresis. But if this is the

“promising fatality” for which Butler’s Antigone wants to speak, it

would seem to preclude the “aberrant, unprecedented future” that Butler

intends. For the promise of such a “fatality” animates language from the

outset in the constitutive catachresis by means of which language posits

meaning while concealing the meaningless machinery of its own linguistic

positing. Catachresis, in other words, constrains all words to be always

already other. But that otherness, disruptive though the meanings toward

which it transports our words may be, necessarily means reassuringly for

us as subjects of the Symbolic insofar as we read it as signaling the

necessary production of future meanings and thus as affirming the

identity of the future with the promise of meaning itself.

So Antigone may well depart from her tomb at the end of Butler’s

argument, returning to life in the political sphere from which she was

excluded, but she does so while preserving the tomb itself as the burial

place for whatever continues to insist outside of meaning, immune to

intelligibility now or in any future yet to come. She emerges from her

tomb, that is, only to claim, for those condemned to.unlivable lives on

account of unintelligible loves, “new schemes of intelligibility” that

would make them, as Butler scruples to note, “legitimate and

recognizable” (24). This Antigone, it follows, comes out (with all the

implications of that phrase) only by coming back to the intelligibility

that she, like Leonard, renounced, confirming, in the process, the

legitimacy of the institutions of legitimation, however much what counts

as legitimate must undergo change with time. Ironically, Butler’s

reading thus buries Antigone once more—or buries in her the

sinthomosexual who refuses intelligibility’s mandate and the correlative

economy that regulates what is “legitimate and recognizable.” Just as

the law in North by Northwest is compelled to get rid of Leonard, so

Butler’s reading expels the Antigone who turns no face to the future but

takes to heart the meaning of her name, “construed as ‘anti-generation’”

(22). Like the “aberrant, unprecedented future” to which she stakes her

political claim, Butler’s Antigone, far from transforming Symbolic law,

repeats it—and repeats it, in fact, as nothing less than the law of

repetition by which our fate is bound to the fate of meaning through

signification whose continued functioning always relies on reproductive

futurism.

Small wonder, then, that her subversive act, her “rearticulation of the

norm” (76), while promising to open what Butler calls a radical “new

field of the human,” returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable

liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,

“the future.” And since nothing is ever less “aberrant, [or]

unprecedented” than the “future,” which functions as the literal end

toward which Antigone’s Claim proceeds, we should not be surprised that

the phrase itself reiterates, rather than rearticulates, an earlier use

of the term. In the course of responding to Lacan’s account of

Antigone’s “death-driven movement” across the barrier of the Symbolic,

Butler identifies exactly what the “duty imposed by the symbolic is,”

and she does so by quoting Lacan: “‘to transmit the chain of discourse

in aberrant form to someone else’” (52). With this Antigone’s “aberrant

... future” proves orthodox after all. Undermining its claim to be

aberrant and unprecedented at once, it transmits, in the requisite

aberrant form, as futurity always demands—in the form, that is, whose

aberrant quality is therefore anything but and whose future repeats its

precedents precisely by virtue of being “unprecedented”—the Symbolic

chain of discourse, in which, as everyone knows (and this, of course, is

precisely what everyone knows), intelligibility must always take place.

But what if it didn’t? What if Antigone, along with all those doomed to

ontological suspension on account of their unrecognizable and, in

consequence, “unlivable” loves, declined intelligibility, declined to

bring herself, catachrestically, into the ambit of future meaning—or

declined, more exactly, to cast off the meaning that clings to those

social identities that intelligibility abjects: their meaning as names

for the meaninglessness the Symbolic order requires as a result of the

catachresis that posits meaning to begin with. Those figures,

sinthomosexuals, could not bring the Symbolic order to crisis since they

only emerge, in abjection, to support the emergence of Symbolic form, to

metaphorize and enact the traumatic violence of signification whose

meaning-effacing energies, released by the cut that articulates meaning,

the Symbolic order constantly must exert itself to bind. Unlike Butler’s

Antigone, though, such sinthomosexuals would insist on the

unintelligible’s unintelligibility, on the internal limit to

signification and the impossibility of turning Real loss to meaningful

profit in the Symbolic without its persistent remainder: the inescapable

Real of the drive. As embodiments of unintelligibility, of course, they

must veil what they expose, becoming, as figures for it, the means of

its apparent subjection to meaning. But where Butler’s Antigone conduces

to futurism’s logic of intelligibility by seeking no more than to widen

the reach of what it allows us to grasp, where she moves, by way of the

future, toward the ongoing legitimation of social form through the

recognition that is said to afford “ontological certainty and

durability,” sinthomosexuality, though destined, of course, to be

claimed for intelligibility, consents to the logic that makes it a

figure for what meaning can never grasp. Demeaned, it embraces

de-meaning as the endless insistence of the Real that the Symbolic can

never master for meaning now or in the “future.”

That “never,” Butler would argue, performs the law’s instantiation,

which always attempts to impose, as she puts it, “a limit to the social,

the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we

cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power” (21).

Committed as she is to intelligibility as the expanding horizon of

social justice, Butler would affirm “our own power” to rearticulate, by

means of catachresis, the laws responsible for what she aptly calls our

“moralized sexual horror” (71). Such a rearticulation, she claims, would

proceed through “the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable

nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the

very terms that are meant to enforce its silence” (78). This, of course,

assumes that “the unspeakable” intends, above all else, to speak,

whereas Lacan maintains, as Copjec reminds us, something radically

different: that sex, as “the structural incompleteness of language” is

“that which does not communicate itself, that which marks the subject as

unknowable.”[146] No doubt, as Butler helps us to see, the norms of the

social order do, in fact, change through catachresis, and those who once

were persecuted as figures of “moralized sexual horror” may trade their

chill and silent tombs for a place on the public stage. But that

redistribution of social roles doesn’t stop the cultural production of

figures, sinthomosexuals all, to bear the burden of embodying such a

“moralized sexual horror.” For that horror itself survives the fungible

figures that flesh it out insofar as it responds to something in sex

that’s inherently unspeakable: the Real of sexual difference, the lack

that launches the living being into the empty arms of futurity. This, to

quote from Copjec again, “is the meaning, when all is said and done, of

Lacan’s notorious assertion that ‘there is no sexual relation’: sex, in

opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation,

to communication.”[147] From that limit of intelligibility, from that

lack in communication, there flows, like blood from an open wound, a

steady stream of figures that mean to embody—and thus to fill—that lack,

that would stanch intelligibility’s wound, like the dotting factor in

blood, by binding it to, encrusting it in, Imaginary form. Though bound

therefore to be, on the model of Whitman, the binder of wounds, the

sinthomosexual, anti-Promethean, unbound, unbinds us all. Or rather,

persists as the figure for such a generalized unbinding by which the

death drive expresses at once the impossible excess and the absolute

limit both of and within the Symbolic.

On the face of Mount Rushmore, as he faces the void to which he himself

offers a face, Leonard gestures toward such an unbinding by committing

himself to the sinthomosexual’s impossible ethical act: by standing

resolutely at, and on, and for that absolute limit. Alenka Zupančič, in

Ethics of the Real, notes that what Kant called the ethical act “is

denounced as ‘radically evil’ in every ideology,” and then describes how

ideology typically manages to defend against it: “The gap opened by an

act (i. e., the unfamiliar, ‘out-of-place’ effect of an act) is

immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image. As a rule

this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public

alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question

already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to

want this!”[148] The image of suffering adduced here is always the

threatened suffering of an image: an image onto which the face of the

human has coercively been projected such that we, by virtue of losing

it, must also lose the face by which we (think we) know ourselves. For

“we are, in effect,” as Lacan ventriloquizes the normative understanding

of the self, “at one with everything that depends on the image of the

other as our fellow man, on the similarity we have to our ego and to

everything that situates us in the imaginary register.”[149] To be

anything else—to refuse the constraint, the inertia, of the ego as

form—would be, as Zupančič rightly says, “impossible, inhuman.” As

impossible and inhuman as a shivering beggar who asks that we kill him

or fuck him; as impossible and inhuman as Leonard, who responds to

Thornhill by crushing his hand; as impossible and inhuman as the

sinthomosexual, who shatters the lure of the future and, for refusing

the call to compassion, finally merits none himself. To embrace the

impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomosexual: that, I suggest, is

the ethical task for which queers are singled out. Leonard affords us no

lesson in how to follow in his footsteps, but calls us, beyond desire,

to a sinthomosexuality of our own—one we assume at the price of the very

identity named by “our own.” To those on whom his ethical stance, his

act, exerts a compulsion, Leonard bequeaths the irony of trying to read

him as an allegory, as one from whom we could learn how to act and in

whom we could find the sinthomosexual’s essential concretization: the

formalization of a resistance to the constant conservation of forms, the

substantialization of a negativity that dismantles every substance. He

leaves us, in short, the impossible task of trying to fill his

shoes—shoes that were empty of anything human even while he was wearing

them, but that lead us, against our own self-interest and in spite of

our own desire, toward a jouissance from which everything “human,” to

have one, must turn its face.

4. No Future

In an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe that was published to coincide

with Mother’s Day in 1998, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West announced

their campaign for what they called a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a

series of proposals designed, in their words, to “strengthen marriage

and give greater electoral clout to mothers and fathers.” To achieve

such an end—an end both self-serving (though never permitted to appear

so) and redundant (what “greater electoral clout” could mothers and

fathers have?)—the essay sounded a rallying cry that performed, in the

process, and with a heartfelt sincerity untouched by ironic

self-consciousness, the authors’ mandatory profession of faith in the

gospel of sentimental futurism:

It is time to join together and acknowledge that the work that parents

do is indispensable—that by nourishing those small bodies and growing

those small souls, they create the store of social and human capital

that is so essential to the health and wealth of our nation.

Simply put, by creating the conditions that allow parents to cherish

their children, we will ensure our collective future.[150]

Ignore for a moment what demands to be called the transparency of this

appeal. Ignore, that is, how quickly the spiritualizing vision of

parents “nourishing and growing ... small bodies and ... small souls”

gives way to a rhetoric affirming instead the far more pragmatic (and

politically imperative) investment in the “human capital ... essential

to the health and wealth of our nation.” Ignore, by so doing, how the

passage renominates those human “souls” as “capital” without yielding

the fillip of Dickensian pathos that prompts us to “cherish” these

“capital”ized humans (“small” but, like the economy in current usage,

capable of being grown) precisely insofar as they come to embody this

thereby humanized “capital.” Ignore all this and one’s eyes might still

pop to discover that only political intervention will “allow,” and the

verb is crucial here, “parents to cherish their children” so as to

“ensure our collective future”—or ensure, which comes to the same in the

faith that properly fathers us all, that our present will always be

mortgaged to a fantasmatic future in the name of the political “capital”

that those children will thus have become.

Near enough to the surface to challenge its status as merely implicit,

but sufficiently buried to protect it from every attempt at

explicitation, a globally destructive, child-hating force is posited in

these lines—a force so strong as to disallow parents the occasion to

cherish their children, so profound in its virulence to the species as

to put into doubt “our collective future”—and posited the better to

animate a familial unit so cheerfully mom-ified as to distract us from

ever noticing how destructively it’s been mummified. No need to trick

out that force in the flamboyant garments of the pedophile, whose fault,

as “everyone” knows, defaults, faute de mieux, to a fear of grown

women—and thus, whatever the sex of his object, condemns him for, and

to, his failure to penetrate into the circle of heterosexual desire. No

need to call it names, with the vulgar bluntness of the homophobe, whose

language all too often is not the bluntest object at hand. Unnamed, it

still carries the signature, whatever Hewlett and West may intend, of

the crime that was named as not to be named (”inter christianos non

nominandum”) while maintaining the plausible deniability allowing

disavowal of such a signature, should anyone try to decipher it, as

having been forged by someone else. To be sure, the stigmatized other in

general can endanger our idea of the future, conjuring the intolerable

image of its spoliation or pollution, the specter of its being

appropriated for unendurable ends; but one in particular is stigmatized

as threatening all end to the future itself. That one remains always at

hand to embody the force, which need never be specified, that prohibits

America’s parents, for example, from being able to cherish their

children, since that one, as we know, intrudes on the collective

reproduction of familialism by stealing, seducing, proselytizing, in

short, by adulterating those children and putting in doubt the

structuring fantasy that ensures “our collective future.”

I’ve already defined this child-aversive, future-negating force,

answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism, as

sinthomosexuality, a term that links the jouissance to which we gain

access through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack

in Symbolic meaning-production on account of which, as Lacan declares,

“there is no sexual relation.” Designating a locus of enjoyment beyond

the logic of interpretation, and thus beyond the correlative logic of

the symptom and its cure, 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. For the subject of desire

now comes to be seen as a symptomatic misprision, within the language of

the law, of the subject’s sinthomatic access to the force of a

jouissance played out in the pulsions 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 sinthome unravels 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.”[151] 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.

The agent responsible for effecting their destruction has been given

many names: by Baudrillard, a “global extermination of meaning”; by

Hewlett and West, whatever refuses to “allow parents to cherish their

children”; by François Abadie, “homosexuals” as “the gravediggers of

society”; by psychoanalytic theory, the death drive and the Real of

jouissance. Just as the Lacanian sinthome knots together the Imaginary,

Symbolic, and Real, so sinthomosexuality knots together these threats to

reproductive futurism. No political catachresis, such as Butler

proposes, could forestall the need to constitute, then, such a category

of sinthomosexuals. For even though, as Butler suggests, political

catachresis may change over time the occupants of that category, the

category itself, like Antigone’s tomb, continues to mark the place of

whatever refuses intelligibility. Catachresis, moreover, cannot assure

the progressive redistribution of meaning. To the extent that the

rearticulation of the signifier, and therefore the reach of a term like

“human,” supplements without effacing the prior uses to which it was

put, no historical category of abjection is ever simply obsolete. It

abides, instead, in its latency, affecting subsequent significations,

always available, always waiting, to be mobilized again. Catachresis can

only formalize contestation over “the proper,” repeating the violence at

the core of its own always willed impositions of meaning.

Sinthomosexuality presents itself as the realization of that violence

exactly to the extent that it insists on the derealization of those

meanings, occupying the place of what, in sex, remains structurally

unspeakable: the lack or loss that relates to the Real and survives in

the pressure of the drive. Because the Child of the heteroreproductive

Couple stands in, at least fantasmatically, for the redemption of that

loss, the sinthomosexual, who affirms that loss, maintaining it as the

empty space, the vacuole, at the heart of the Symbolic, effectively

destroys that Child and, with it, the reality it means to sustain.[152]

Nor could any sinthomosexual, whatever the revisions of sociocultural

norms catachresis may entail, escape the coils of the twisted fate that

ropes him into embodying such a denial of futurity, such a death blow to

meaning’s survival in the figure of the Child, simply by virtue of

being, or having been, someone’s Child himself.

On October 12, 1998—the evening of the death of Matthew Shepard, a

twenty-one-year-old gay man then enrolled at the University of Wyoming

who was lured from a bar by two straight men and taken in the dark to a

deserted spot where he was savagely beaten, pistol-whipped, and then

tied to a wooden fence and abandoned to the brutal cold of the night

(from which he would not be rescued until some eighteen hours later,

when he was discovered, already comatose, by a bicyclist who thought the

limp, bloody body lashed to a post was a scarecrow)—on that evening of

Matthew Shepard’s death a hospital spokesman, “voice choked with

emotion,” made the following statement to the national press: “Matthew’s

mother said to me, ‘Please tell everybody who’s listening to go home and

give your kids a hug and don’t let a day go by without telling them you

love them.’”[153] These words of a grieving mother, widely reported on

the news, produced a mimetic outpouring of grief from people across the

country, just as they had from the spokesman whose own voice choked as

he pronounced them. But these words, which even on the occasion of a gay

man’s murder defined the proper mourners as those who had children to go

home to and hug, specified the mourning it encouraged as mourning for a

threatened familial futurity—a threat that might, for many, take the

form of Matthew Shepard’s death, but a threat that must also, for

others, take the opposite form: of Shepard’s life.[154]

Thus, even as mourners gathered to pray at the bier of a mother’s slain

child, others arrived at his funeral to condemn a “lifestyle” that made

Matthew Shepard, for them, a dangerous bird of prey. An article printed

in the New York Times speculated that the symbolic significance, for the

killers, of leaving his body strung up on a fence might be traced to

“the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a

warning to future intruders.”[155] The bicyclist who mistook him for a

scarecrow, then, would not have been far from the mark; for his killers,

by posing Shepard’s body this way, could be understood to be crowing

about the lengths to which they would go to scare away other birds of

his feather: birds that may seem to be more or less tame—flighty, to be

sure, and prone to a narcissistic preening of their plumage; amusing

enough when confined to the space of a popular film like The Birdcage

(1996) or when, outside the movies, caged in the ghettos that make them

available for ethnographic display or the closets that enact a pervasive

desire to make them all disappear—but birds that the cognoscenti

perceive as never harmless at all.[156] For whatever apparent difference

in species may dupe the untrained eye, inveterate bird-watchers always

discern the tell-tale mark that brands each one a chicken-hawk first and

last.

In an atmosphere all atwitter with the cries that echo between those who

merely watch and those who hunt such birds, what matter who killed Cock

Robin! The logic of sinthomosexuality justifies that violent fate in

advance by insisting that what such a cock had been robbing was always,

in some sense, a cradle. And that cradle must endlessly rock, we’ve been

told, even if the rhythm it rocks to beats out, with every blow of the

beating delivered to Matthew Shepard’s skull, a counterpoint to the

melody’s sacred hymn to the meaning of life. That meaning, continuously

affirmed as it is both in and as cultural narrative, nonetheless never

can rest secure and, in consequence, never can rest. The compulsive need

for its repetition, for the drumbeat by which it pounds into our heads

(and not always, though not infrequently, by pounding in a Matthew

Shepard’s) that the cradle bears always the meaning of futurity and the

futurity of meaning, testifies to something exceeding the meaning it

means thereby to assure: to a death drive that carries, on full-fledged

wings, into the inner sanctum of meaning, into the reproductive mandate

inherent in the logic of futurism itself, the burden of the radically

negative force that sinthomosexuality names.

Only the dumbest of clucks would expect such a story about the stories

by which familial ideology obsessively takes its own pulse to assume a

conspicuous place among cultural narratives valued for parroting the

regulatory fantasy of reproductive futurism. What would induce a social

order that hawks that ideology to foul its own nest with texts that

explore how the fact of this iterative parroting speaks, regardless of

intention or will, to the structuring mechanism of a death drive within

its life-affirming thematics? Yet such a text might just feather the

nest it seems ordained to foul if the tensions of form and content it

describes were projected, in turn, onto it: if, that is, its efforts to

resist the imperative of futurism were reduced to the status of

ill-conceived themes in a work viewed as worthy of attention on account

of its technical achievement alone; or, better still, if the challenge

it poses to dominant reproductive ideology could plausibly be made to

serve the cause of naturalizing futurity. Though the survival of the

stories in which they appear may demand that Silas Marner and Scrooge be

converted by a Child, and that Leonard, for not converting, be,

eventually, destroyed, a story resistant to Symbolic survival through

reproductive futurism might still survive if its narrative thematics,

like Leonard, could be discarded and its formal properties, like Scrooge

or Marner, could conduce to Imaginary form. And where better to look for

that rara avis among privileged cultural narratives—for the text that

could help us confront the relentless reproduction of reproductive

ideology—than to Hitchcock’s tour de force, The Birds (1963).

Reviewing the film with enthusiasm in the pages of the New York Times,

Bosley Crowther, establishing the terms by which the film would be

praised and dismissed for years, distinguished between what the film had

to say and the way in which it said it: “Whether or not it is intended

that you should find significance in this film, it is sufficiently

equipped with other elements to make the senses reel. Mr. Hitchcock, as

is his fashion, has constructed it beautifully, so that the emotions are

carefully worked up to the point where they can be slugged.”[157] This

tension between the film’s technique and its questionable

“significance,” found an echo in a letter that Hitchcock received on the

film’s initial release. It reads, as quoted by Robert Kapsis: “Sir, I’m

quite unhappy to inform you of my disappointment with your latest

production, The Birds. I had counted on your usual excellent direction

and I was not let down, but your finish can only be described as

useless.”[158] Recalling Baudrillard’ s complaint that sex, in the era

of biotechnological reproduction, “becomes extraneous, a useless

function,” the writer interprets Hitchcock’s film, despite its skillful

direction, as refusing to embrace the reproduction of meaning and

thereby becoming, like sex without procreation according to the narrator

of The Children of Men, “almost meaninglessly acrobatic.” In fact, in a

phrase whose ambiguity the author of the letter may not have intended,

he leaves undecidable to what he refers in describing the film’s

“finish” as “useless,” suspending its meaning between the uselessness of

the director’s polished technique and the uselessness of the film’s

deliberately disorienting conclusion. In either case, the “finish” fails

not simply, as many maintain to this day, because the film is open-ended

(suggesting a dizzying array of possible futures beyond its frame), but,

more significantly, because it declines to affirm as certain any future

at all.

Hitchcock himself presented the film as a triumph of technique,

immodestly declaring it, on just that ground, “probably the most

prodigious job ever done.”[159] But even while remarking on the

technical difficulties that the film both posed and overcame, he

defended it against critical objections that it seemed to lack

“significance” or some clear thematic point, by pitching the film as a

warning to those who might contemplate crimes against nature.

“Basically, in The Birds, what you have is a kind of an overall sketchy

theme of everyone taking nature for granted,” he explained before

summarizing his own interpretation: “Don’t mess about or tamper with

nature.”[160] If something in this reading sticks in one’s craw, it’s

not simply the simplification, but also, and more pressingly, the clear

contradiction between this would-be embrace of the natural, on the one

hand, and the significance attached to the technical manipulation of

reality by the camera, on the other. Neither in theme nor in visual

practice does The Birds sing Mother Nature’s praise; nor do mothers and

children receive from the film the extorted tribute that sentimentality

would grant them as “their due.” The Birds, to the contrary, comes to

roost, with a skittish and volatile energy, on a perch from which it

seems to brood—dispassionately, inhumanly—on the gap opened up within

nature by something inherently contra naturam: the death drive that

haunts the Symbolic with its excess ofjouissance and finds its figural

expression in sinthomosexuality.

Like swallows returning to Capistrano, critics of Hitchcock’s film

return to the question its various characters pose: What do the bird

attacks mean? “What do you suppose made it do that?” wonders Melanie

Daniels (Tippi Hedren) after the first gull gashes her head. “What’s the

matter with all the birds?” asks Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) following

a full-scale assault on the children celebrating her daughter’s eleventh

birthday. “Why are they doing this, the birds?” young Cathy (Veronica

Cartwright) inquires of her older brother, Mitch (Rod Taylor), echoing

the question that an overwrought mother poses to Melanie in the wake of

an attack on the center of Bodega Bay: “Why are they doing this? Why are

they doing this?” But why, we might ask, need we still ask why? Some

time ago Robin Wood observed that “the film itself is quite insistent

that either the birds can’t be explained or that the explanation is

unknown.” He then went on to argue, persuasively, that the birds “are a

concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and the unpredictable, of whatever

makes human life and human relations precarious, a reminder of the

fragility and instability that cannot be ignored or evaded and, beyond

that, of the possibility that life is meaningless and absurd.”[161] This

largely compelling account of the film, to which I will return, rightly

resists the impulse to localize the meaning of the attacks, but in doing

so it refuses as well to localize the contexts within which this very

refusal of meaning takes place. The narrative that raises

meaninglessness as a possibility, after all, necessarily bestows a

particular meaning on such meaninglessness itself. By deploying, in

other words, a given figure, such as, in this instance, the birds, as

the signifier intended to materialize the general “possibility that life

is meaningless,” the text necessarily gestures toward a specific threat

to meaning and suggests particular strategies by which one might manage

to ward it off.

Though Wood, then, astutely identifies the birds with “whatever makes

human life and human relations precarious,” there is something else that

he needs to observe: they come from San Francisco, or, at any rate, it’s

in San Francisco that we first see them flit through the air. And

another thing: they seem to display a strong predilection for children.

When Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), the butchly tailored and tweedy

bird-lover who knows the perfect time for The Tides—conveniently making

her entrance as Melanie, talking to her father by phone, is providing an

account of the schoolhouse attack—dismisses out of hand the notion that

the birds could have mounted such a raid, she turns to Melanie and

demands of her with unconcealed condescension: “What do you think they

were after, Miss...?” “Daniels,” Melanie informs her, before delivering

her icily calm response: “I think they were after the children.” “For

what purpose?” Mrs. Bundy presses, and Melanie, after a pause fully

worthy of the governess in James’s The Turn of the Screw, accepts the

challenge and rises to it, enunciating each syllable precisely: “To kill

them.” To be sure, the objects of avian violence most gruesomely

visualized in Hitchcock’s film—Dan Fawcett, Annie Hayworth, even Melanie

Daniels herself—are not exactly spring chickens; but the threat of the

birds achieves its most vividly iconic representation in the two crucial

scenes where they single out young children to attack.

Their first all-out assault, their first joint action, as it were, takes

place at the party thrown in honor of Cathy Brenner’s eleventh birthday,

the prospect of which gave Mitch—who subsequently passed it on to

Melanie—the idea of presenting his sister with a pair of lovebirds as a

gift.[162] Though a single gull had already struck Melanie on the

forehead the day before, the choice of the children’s party for this

first fully choreographed attack suggests the extent to which the birds

take aim at the social structures of meaning that observances like the

birthday party serve to secure and enact: take aim, that is, not only at

children and the sacralization of childhood, but also at the very

organization of meaning around structures of subjectivity that

celebrate, along with the day of one’s birth, the ideology of

reproductive necessity.[163] Like Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in

Strangers on a Train, who punctures the balloon of cuteness that hangs

like a halo above one annoying child and has no compunction about

casually tossing a second, and even more troublesome tot, to what might

well have proven his death, the birds beset the children with an

unconstrained aggression that reflects and displaces the aggression

adults aggressively punish in children.

So when Cathy, blindfolded to play her part in the game of blind man’s

buff, is stunned by the first glancing blow from a bird, she assumes

without hesitation that she’s been struck by another child and calls to

the others, more in pique than in pain, “Hey, no touching allowed!”. As

dozens of birds then swoop down with hoarse cries, inducing a sort of

echoing screech in the children, who panic and run, the film implies

that the ravaging birds are too like the children to like them too much,

or to like them as more than the objects of a murderous, and murderously

derealizing, drive.

Hitchcock stresses this aggressive echoing (and this echoing aggression)

as determining the relation between children and birds from the opening

scene of the film. Though the camera, from the outset, frames Tippi

Hedren, whom Hitchcock “discovered” and groomed for this film, the

audience first gets to feast on her face when she turns toward the

camera in response to what critics conventionally call a “wolf whistle.”

But the source of that whistle, significantly, is less a sheep than a

lamb in wolf’s clothing, a cheeky young boy whose age we might put, to

hazard a guess, at eleven. Melanie, expecting some loutish lothario as

she wheels about to confront him, flashes a smile of relief and surprise

when she sees that this would-be cock of the walk is no more than a

featherweight bantam. Charmed by his boyish bravado, the crowing of a

youngster sufficiently cocky at eleven to augur with absolute certainty

a full-fledged prick by twenty-one, Melanie, failing to see the

incipience of that straight male sense of entitlement for which she will

want, in a matter of minutes, somehow to dip Mitch Brenner’s wings,

responds to this sexually freighted call by hearing its amorous coo in

the key of a prepubescent chirp. Her smile acquits the act of what she

grasped as its aggression (about which, though prepared to squawk, she

wasn’t really ruffled) when she thought it the sonorous panting of one

more accustomed to wearing long pants.

No sooner has her face lit up—her anger defused, her defenses let

down—at the vision of the Child, than Melanie hears the whistle return,

multiplied a hundred times over, but coming from somewhere else.[164] A

cut to Melanie’s point of view now shows us the sky in long shot and in

it a virtual cloud of gulls, whose calls seem to mock the boy’s whistle

as these birds of a feather, neither sowing nor reaping, noisily cruise

San Francisco. In reverse shot, that cloud crosses Melanie’s face, her

joy in the boy eclipsed by the cries of the languidly circling gulls,

their harsh and guttural echo stripping the whistle of its charm, as if

their taunt were targeting both the woman and the boy. Or targeting,

instead, what the film had allowed the two to perform together: a

pantomime of erotic tension resolved in the figure of the Child (who

gives such tension the meaning that relieves it of all taint), by

reading the constitutive friction—the determining aggression—inherent in

eros as the agency that generates meaning and the Child in a single

blow, breeding thereby a happy heterosexual economy in which the Child

means “meaning” for adults, who can only attain it by virtue of

participating in the labor of giving (it) birth.[165]

This sequence, then, like an egg, contains the film in embryonic form,

with Melanie caught between a libidinal energy redeemed through the

figure of the Child, the heterosexualized version of eros traditionally

served sunny-side up, and the disarticulation that scrambles it in the

figure of the birds: the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal

and mindless drive. It may be the boy in this scene who whistles, but

through him, and through its investment in him, we can hear reproductive

futurism trying to whistle past the graveyard. And just as the boy’s

sweet tweet is cheapened by the echoing cheep of the birds, so the

reassuring meaning of heterosexuality as the assurance of meaning itself

confronts in the birds a resistance, call it sinthomosexuality, that

fully intends to wipe the satisfied smile off Melanie’s face. By yoking

her thus to the birds through the boy, this sequence might well be

construed as the egg from which Melanie’s story emerges, but this scene,

however primal within the logic of the film, refers to a moment outside

the film and marks, as would an umbilicus, a distinctly nonavian origin

that Hitchcock’s film reproduces so as to generate The Birds.

Donald Spoto has written an account of the moment to which this sequence

harks back, the moment when Hitchcock first noticed the blonde he

thereafter took under his wing: “One morning ... Hitchcock and Alma [his

wife] were watching the NBC network’s Today show. He saw a commercial

featuring an attractive, elegant blond who passed across the screen and

smiled, turning amiably in response to a little boy’s wolf-whistle....

That morning, he told his agents to find out who she was, and that

afternoon an appointment was made for her.”[166] The commercial, for

Sego, a diet drink meant to account for the numerous backward glances,

signs of a different kind of hunger, bestowed on the blonde by the

various men she passes on the street, resolves itself more pointedly

than Spoto’s account suggests. For Hedren, holding a bag of groceries as

she stops to admire the fashions displayed in the window of a store,

stands with her back to the camera when the sound of the wolf-whistle

puts her on notice that she’s on display herself. She starts to turn,

but before we’re allowed a glimpse of her expression, the camera cuts to

an insert shot of the whistle’s unlikely source: a boy, to be sure, as

Spoto notes, eleven years old, more or less, but crucially—and this

Spoto doesn’t report—the boy is portraying her son. Sitting in the car

(like Melanie’s, a convertible) where his mother had left him waiting

while she went to take care of her chores, the child gets his mother’s

attention by offering the tribute of a man, then deflecting its erotic

implications by flashing the guileless grin of a boy. Hedren’s broad

smile in response to the joke allows her, and the audience of the

commercial as well, to bask in the innocent glow of the Child, ignoring

the fact that the boy takes the place—one he’ll soon enough fully

assume—of the numerous men whose heads Hedren turned as she passed them

just moments before.

And no head turned with more interest than Hitchcock’s when Hedren came

into view, enacting the narrative logic at work in the commercial’s

ideology: a logic wherein the permissibly “innocent” whistle of the

Child resolves the explicitly sexual energies (understood as more

threatening, more aggressive) that the commercial nonetheless, and at

the same time, undertakes to promote and inflame.[167] Hitchcock, a

model spectator here—in more than one sense of the phrase—identifies

with, and reproduces, the youngster’s bird-like trill of desire; like

the boy, he too responds to the vision of Hedren by sounding a call,

summoning her to the meeting that ultimately led to her starring role in

The Birds. In the film, though, when Hitchcock introduces her in a

version of the scene that introduced her to him, he then proceeds to

complete that scene by inserting a shot of the birds. Not that they

haven’t been heard from already: their cries thread their way through

the audio track from before, one might say, its beginning. Though a

visual fade-out separates the opening credits from the narrative proper,

the clamor of the birds persists as a bridge of sound between the two.

When the film fades in (through the blue-green filter that announces its

dominant tones), the sights and sounds of San Francisco command our full

attention. The birdcalls, though continuous, become mere background to

the scene until, as if they were prompted by Melanie’s endorsement of

the Child—her endorsement of the Child’s dissimulation of

heterosexuality as sexuality—the gulls parrot back the boy’s whistle as

materialized agents of sexual threat.

Bringing out, in the process, the relentless aggression and insistence

of the libidinal drives—drives that the Child as embodiment of

reproductive futurism serves to mask; bringing out the violent erotics

at the heart of a Hitchcockian compulsion that repetitively rehearses,

deprived of its grace, the child’s expectant grace note, the birds enact

the process of bringing or coming out per se, shedding invisibility here

and demanding, having been present before, to be recognized, to be seen.

Like Marion the Librarian in The Music Man, Melanie Daniels might be

moved to exclaim: “There were birds/ In the sky/ But I never saw them

winging/ No, I never saw them at all/ ‘Til there was you”[168]—words no

less apt to be voiced at a second blonde Marion’s moment of truth, when

her highway to happiness abruptly dead-ends on her taking for the

simple-minded innocence of a Child, and thus reading as redemptive, the

wounded-sparrow twitchiness she encounters in Norman Bates. More hawk

than sparrow, but birdlike himself, of course, Norman puts the lie to

the avian analysis he offers while chatting with Marion: “I think only

birds look well stuffed because, well, because they’re kind of passive

to begin with.”[169] But The Birds, like Psycho, portrays the revenge

(which thereby reinforces the fantasmatic threat) of those

conceptualized as “passive” by depicting the activist militancy that

attends their coming out—especially when that activism takes the form,

as with Leonard in North by Northwest, of an “impossible, inhuman”

act.[170]

One might, to be sure, object that Hitchcock’s favored cinematic

strategy, a distinguishing feature of his camera’s unremitting

epistemological investigations, consists in his bringing out this

latency, some might call it a queerness, that inhabits things that

otherwise tend to pass without remark: a pair of scissors, a household

key, a dangling piece of rope.[171] As enacted in The Birds, however,

this coming out, the seed for countless interpretations of what it

means, refuses the promise of meaning condensed in the seed that is the

Child; nor would it be flying too far afield to suggest that the birds,

by coming out, give the bird to the fantasy of reproduction as the

seedbed of futurity through its meaningful sublation of the otherwise

meaningless machinery of the drive. What Butler calls the “heterosexual

matrix” may tempt us, with Susan Lurie, to consider the birds as phallic

part-objects, or, alternatively, with Slavoj Žižek, as the maternal

superego in visible form. By resisting the appeal of such couplings,

however, heterogenitality’s either/or, we might manage to kill those two

birds with one stone and suggest that the birds in Hitchcock’s film, by

virtue of fucking up—and with—the matrix of heterosexual mating,

desublimate the reproductive rites of the movie’s human lovebirds, about

which, as about the products of which, they don’t give a fiying

fuck.[172] They gesture, that is, toward the death drive that lives

within reproductive futurism, scorning domestication in the form of

romance, which is always the romance of the Child.

But one thing in this must be perfectly clear: my point is not to equate

the birds with homosexuality nor to suggest that they be understood as

“meaning” same-sex desire. Neither is Hitchcock’s film, as I read it, an

allegory of gay coming-out. Insofar as the birds bear the burden of

sinthomosexuality, which aims to dissociate heteronormativity from its

own implication in the drive, it would, in fact, be more accurate to say

that the meaning of homosexuality is determined by what the film

represents in them: the violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity

and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance, which find their

perfect expression in the slogan devised by Hitchcock himself for the

movie’s promotion, “The Birds is coming.”[173]

Though participating in the narrative covenant of futurity through its

promise of something, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “evermore about to be,”

this slogan, at the same time, points to a radical coming without

reserve that expends itself improvidently, holding nothing in trust for

tomorrow and refusing therefore all faith in the sort of narrative

intelligibility that Hamlet, for instance, defers to when he forbears

from deferring his fate: “Not a whit, we dety augury. There is a special

providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if

it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.

The readiness is all” (V. ii. 220–224). The falling sparrows of

Hitchcock’s film—and the film will specify sparrows as the birds that

fall from the Brenners’ chimney like a living stream of soot or waste,

turning meaning, wherein we think we live, into chaos and filth and

death—decline, in their present progressive coming, in the constancy of

the jouissance as which they now come out, to “be not to come,” in

Shakespeare’s words, since coming becomes their being.[174] Exposing the

latent impropriety informing the structures of the proper, embedding

grammatical violation in the very logic of grammar itself, “The Birds is

coming” anticipates the film’s libidinal economy by confounding our

anticipation of simple syntactic or narrative sense. The catchphrase

fucks with the copula, meaning that meaning comes apart, thus

advertising the threat of The Birds to the narrative teleology of the

subject, always constituted at the expense of jouissance, at the cost of

the violent involuntarity, the pulsive pressure of a coming, in the

throes of which the subject of meaning could only come apart too.[175]

Trenching as it does on this trench in the subject that jouissance

hollows out, the slogan alludes to a fissure that sunders the syntax of

social reality just as the slogan itself seems to sunder the agreement

of subject and verb. “Coming” thus comes into conflict with the

subject’s predication of a future to come, and The Birds, as the site of

this conflict, no less than the birds that flesh it out, claws at our

faith in the future, at the generative grammar of generation, by coming

instead at the death drive, in the grip of which, insofar as we come, we

thereby come to naught—or come, which may come to the same in the end,

to a place like Bodega Bay.

What a perfect spot for a pair of lovebirds to build their little nest.

Defined, as if allegorically, in opposition to San Francisco, the

sophisticated urban center described by Cathy, quoting her brother,

Mitch, as “an anthill at the foot of a bridge,” Bodega Bay might stand

for the concept of natural beauty as such were it not for the fact that

its natural settings have the peculiar habit of metamorphosing into

clearly unnatural cinematic effects. Time and again, and at pivotal

moments, its vistas get flattened into obvious sets or derealized by

filmic artifice, as, for example, when Melanie is crossing the lake to

the Brenner farm, or when she and Mitch share their thoughts and a drink

before the gulls interrupt Cathy’s party, or when Melanie and Annie,

having opened the door to discover a lifeless bird, gaze up toward the

light of the moon that ought to have kept it from losing its way, or

when Melanie, catching sight of a crow as it glides toward its perch

near the school, follows its downward descent and discovers the

playground now covered with birds. At the heart of each of these

episodes lies an avian annunciation that brings with it no glad tidings,

no miraculous conception. Instead, boding ill for Bodega Bay and for

those whose abode it is, these birds expose the misconception on which

its reality rests: the misconception that conception itself can assure

the endurance, by enacting the truth, of the Symbolic order of meaning

and preserve, in the form of the future, the prospect of someday

redeeming the primal loss that makes sexual rapport impossible and

precludes the signifying system from ever arriving at any closure.

For the politics of reproductive futurism, the only politics we’re

permitted to know, organizes and administers an apparently

self-regulating economy of sentimentality in which futurity comes to

signify access to the realization of meaning both promised and

prohibited by the fact of our formation as subjects of the signifier. As

a figure for the supplementarity, the logic of restitution or

compensation, that sustains our investment in the deferrals demanded by

the signifying chain, the future holds out the hope of a final undoing

of the initiating fracture, the constitutive moment of division, by

means of which the signifier is able to pronounce us into subjectivity.

And it offers that hope by mobilizing a fantasy of temporal reversal, as

if the future were pledged to make good the loss it can only ever

repeat. Taking our cue from de Man’s account of Walter Benjamin’s “The

Task of the Translator,” we might note that the future can engage

temporality only in the mode of figuration because futurity stands in

the place of a linguistic, rather than a temporal, destiny: “The

dimension of futurity,” according to de Man, “is not temporal but is the

correlative of the figural pattern and the disjunctive power which

Benjamin locates in the structure of language.” That structure, as de

Man interprets it, requires the perpetual motion of what he calls “a

wandering, an errance,” and “this motion, this errancy of language which

never reaches the mark,” is nothing else, for Benjamin, than history

itself, generating, in the words of de Man, “this illusion of a life

that is only an afterlife.”[176] Confusing linguistic with phenomenal

reality, that illusion, which calls forth history from the gap of the

“disjunctive power” internal to the very “structure of language,” names

the fantasy of a social reality to which reproductive futurism pledges

us all.

It is just such a violent reduction of reality to the status of an

illusion, the result of approaching history, with de Man, as a rhetoric

or poetics rather than as the ongoing dialectic of meaning’s eventual

realization through time, that is brought to bear on Bodega Bay in the

figure of the birds. Not that I wish to define them as merely the

sliding of the signifier, as if, become truly incapable now of

distinguishing a hawk from a handsaw, Hamlet replied to Polonius, when

asked what he’s reading, “Birds, birds, birds.” But I do want to argue

that Hitchcock’s birds, in the specificity of their embodiment, resist,

both within and without the film, hermeneutic determination—and they do

so by carrying, in the figural atmosphere through which they wing their

way, the force of a poetics never fully contained by a hermeneutic

claim, where “poetics,” as the term is used by de Man, identifies a

“formal procedure considered independently of its semantic

function.”[177] Expressing this surplus of “formal procedure” that

inhabits and exceeds (and so threatens to confound) the imperative to

generate meaning, the birds may persistently beat against, but are

destined nonetheless to fly through and not from, the medium of meaning

in which they come only to mean its degeneration. Though our faith in

social reality makes that reality seem as natural as the very air we

breathe, the radical excess that the birds connote, like the constant

iteration and accumulation of heterosexualizing narratives—social and

political narratives no less than literary or aesthetic ones—bespeaks a

drive that eludes all efforts to formulate its meaning.[178] The formal

insistence of the drive, in fact, has the effect of deforming meaning

insofar as it shows how the absolute privilege accorded the “semantic

function” serves as the privileged mechanism for maintaining the

collective “illusion of a life.” Expressing the unintelligibility of

this formal mechanism or drive, the birds usher in the collapse of an

ideologically naturalized reality into the various artificial props that

are jerry-rigged to maintain it.

If this appears to impose on The Birds a weight of linguistic

implication beneath which the film itself must collapse, then perhaps we

ought to bear in mind that Melanie, as she proudly announces to Mitch,

is actually enrolled at Berkeley in a course on General Semantics. Still

more to the point, the film begins as she’s heading toward Davidson’s

Pet Shop, where she expects to find a mynah bird she has ordered as a

gift for her aunt—a practical joke of a gift, we soon learn, since her

aim is to shock her “straight-laced” aunt by teaching the bird a few

“four-letter words” that Melanie has picked up at school. In narrative

terms, the mynah bird will prove to be a red herring, but only because

it undergoes a symbolic exchange with the lovebirds in the aftermath of

the exchange of words between Melanie and Mitch. Like the mynah bird

whose place they take, the lovebirds—a variety of parrot, though very

few lovebirds are able to talk—are made to signify the signifying

potential inherent in the “natural”; they reflect, that is, the human

determination to make the world answer to, and in, the voice of the

subjects addressing it. By doing so they confirm as natural the order of

meaning itself, which coincides, though not coincidentally, with the

heterosexualizing logic that renders the world and the subject

intelligible through the promise of their mutual completion in the One

of sexual rapport.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Melanie’s lovebirds most

clearly perform the naturalization of human meaning at the moment when

the film strategically seems to personify them as children. I refer to

the sequence where Melanie is on her way to Bodega Bay, the wheels of

her sportscar squealing as she takes each turn in the road too fast. The

camera directs our attention to the lovebirds beside her in their cage,

their bodies tilting left and right each time the car rounds a curve.

Always earning the laugh it solicits, this passage shows us the

lovebirds in the connotative plumage of their smallness and dependency:

it reads them, that is, much as Melanie reads the whistling boy: as

“cute.” But the ideological labor of cuteness, though it falls most

often to the smallest, imposes no insubstantial burden in a culture

where cuteness enables a general misrecognition of sexuality (which

always implicitly endangers ideals of sociality and communal enjoyment)

as, at least in the dominant form of heterosexual reproduction, securing

the collective reality it otherwise threatens to destroy.[179] Visually

framed as children, then, and serving as figures for the romantic

ideology that turns lovers into children themselves to explain (which is

also to say, to elide) how children are produced (consider the fate of

Cupid, who, despite his passionate involvement with Psyche, we image as

prepubescent), the lovebirds, shadowed by the mynah bird whose narrative

place they take, are thereby made to speak the truth of a General

Semantics. They mean here as figures of meaning—of, more precisely, the

domestication, the colonization, of the world by meaning—insofar as

their cuteness both echoes and reinforces the meaningfulness of the

Child about which even the dumbest animals are “naturally” able to

speak.

But how could these lovebirds, whose very name weds them not just to

each other but also, and in the process, to the naturalization of

heterosexual love, anticipate the rapacious violence with which their

fine feathered friends will divorce themselves—unexpectedly, out of the

blue—from the nature they’re made ideologically, and so unnaturally, to

mean? How else but with the eruption, or, as I’ve called it, the coming

out, of something contra naturam always implicit in them from the start,

something we might catch sight of, for instance, in the question that

Cathy blurts out (one camouflaged only in part by its calculated alibi

of cuteness), which demands that the lovebirds speak their compulsory

meaning louder still: “Is there a man and a woman? I can’t tell which is

which.”[180] Melanie, to whom she directs this question, deflects it

with an uncomfortable laugh and a dismissive, “Well, I suppose.” But

what if her supposition were wrong? Or what if, more disturbing still,

her answer were literally true: what if the structuring\principle, the

worldmaking logic of heterosexual meaningfulness were merely a

supposition, merely a positing, as de Man would say, and not, therefore,

imbued with the referential necessity of a “meaning”? After all, as de

Man reminds us, “language posits and language means ... but language

cannot posit meaning.”[181]

Cathy’s question could only mean by casting a shadow of doubt on the

subjectifying principle that collocates meaning itself with the

structures of sexual difference—the principle, for example, first

sounded in the whistle by which both the boy and the movie read sexual

difference as self-evident. No birdbrain, Cathy must understand that the

lovebirds, in their sameness, their apparent interchangeability, resist,

or suggest a resistance to, this heterosexual dispensation by suggesting

the unintelligibility inherent in sexual difference itself. We might

even hear in her question an unintentional echo of Proust, whose

narrator in Sodom and Gomorrah remarks, while watching Charlus and

Jupien strike poses in an effort to maneuver their mutual cruise into a

somewhat more intimate docking, “One might have thought of them as a

pair of birds, the male and the female, the male seeking to advance, the

female—Jupien—no longer giving any sign of response to this stratagem,

but regarding her new friend without surprise ... and contenting herself

with preening her feathers.”[182] For Proust’s anatomically

indistinguishable lovebirds, “male” and “female” are positional

attributes deprived of any self-evidence for the reader from the start

(occasioning the necessity of specifying Jupien by name as the “female”

bird); yet the preening positional presence—partly peacock, partly

vulture—introduced by the very possibility of imagining two lovebirds of

the same sex hovers already in the atmosphere that Cathy’s question,

despite its “innocence,” threatens to make heavy. For that question,

simply cuckoo when asked of a heterosexual pairing, parrots what

everyone wonders where same-sex couples are concerned, the meaning of

all such couplings being coupled to the meaning that heterosexuality

alone is permitted to determine and confirm.

If these lovebirds, as in the molting season (“a particularly dangerous

time,” as Melanie says to a skeptical Mitch), were imagined, with

Cathy’s query, to drop their beads and their feathers at once, as what

could they possibly come out in the collective fantasy life of America

circa 1963 but members of that reprehensible tribe of ever-lurking

predators, looking like scavenging crows in the standard dark raincoats

of their kind, who gather in public parks and school playgrounds waiting

until the moment is ripe to pick up some innocent kid for the peck that

everyone, even the pecker himself, perceives as the kiss of death? Birds

of ill omen condemned to such fruitless matings on the wing, these

raptors who famously feed on the young they’re unable themselves to

produce may merit the title “degenerate” for such antipathy to

generation and for their practice, instead, of a jouissance indifferent

to social survival. Not that the scene at the schoolhouse, perhaps the

most famous in the film, is meant to “mean” allegorically any scenario

such as this. The crows, unlike the mynah bird, resist the demand that

they speak to us; no stool pigeons, they won’t talk.[183] If they fly in

the face of meaning, though, they do so on wings unable to shed the

meanings with which they’re feathered, wings that beat to the steady,

relentless rhythm of the drive (“Don’t they ever stop migrating?” a

weary Annie Hayworth asks) and reduce the hope of futurity to nothing

but empty repetition, the promise of reproduction to the constant coming

of jouissance, as if to affirm the value, above all else, of a bird in

the hand.

Whatever else we may learn by going to school at Hitchcock’s

schoolhouse, then, we must surely be struck by the structure of this

brilliantly realized scene of instruction—struck, that is, by the

strictness with which, in a masterstroke, he constructs it by

restricting the play of his camera to patterns of formal repetition.

Throughout his career in film, of course, Hitchcock engendered anxiety

by rhythmically cutting between images of people or things that were

certain to cause an explosion, sometimes literally, when they converged.

This sequence seems to allegorize such a rhythmic repetition by

producing a rhyme or analogy between, on the one hand, the director’s

formal control (increasing the level of tension by cutting repeatedly

from shots of Melanie, shown in increasingly tighter close-up, to shots

of the birds as they gather on the jungle gym behind her) and, on the

other, the thematization that such a formalism elicits (visualizing that

notion of increase through the multiplication of the crows). As the

cigarette, from which Melanie distractedly takes deep, occasional drags,

burns down, like the lighted fuse of a bomb, time and hope for the

future both going up, as we watch, in its smoke, more and more birds,

indistinguishable, all as similar to each other as clones, alight as the

visual antitypes to the reproductive future that the children, as

figures of increase themselves, should signify and assure.

Heard but not seen in this sequence, though, the children, turned into

songbirds now, triangulate Melanie’s relation to the crows, lending

their voices to a score that serves, in no small part, to underscore the

formal repetitions of the scene. The verses they sing perversely veer

from sense to nonsense, back and forth, with no clear sense of

direction, mixing narrative fragments that allude to a failure of

heterosexual domesticity (“I married my wife in the month of June”; “She

combed her hair but once a year”; “With every stroke she shed a tear”;

“I asked my wife to wash the floor”; “She gave me my hat and showed me

the door”) with incremental repetitions of insistent, suggestive, and

ultimately meaningless sounds (“Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, now, now, now”;

“Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dossle-tee, rustical-quality,

ristle-tee, rossle-tee, now, now, now”). The formula of the song (or its

lack thereof) makes it, in principle, endless: verses repeat out of

order, nonsense syllables expand and contract. For just that reason it

has the effect of marking time in this scene: of measuring and

prolonging the deferral of Melanie’s mission to the schoolhouse (she has

come to pick up Cathy and so to put Lydia’s mind at ease) and to

identify such deferral with temporality itself. The order of narrative

futurity for which the children have come to stand thus stands, with

this song, exposed as bound to a structure of repetition—a structure

that, as the formal support of the meaning of social reality, is always

necessarily inaccessible to the reach of any such meaning itself. Its

formal excess, unaccounted for in meaning’s domestic economy,

betrays—like the children’s song, or the crows—the intractable force of

a drive that breaks, again and again, like the pulsating waves in which

the bird attacks seem to come, against and within the reality that

meaning attempts to erect against it.[184] Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t

be too surprised that when Melanie turns and discovers the crows, massed

as if striving to materialize the Kantian mathematical sublime,

Hitchcock frames her reaction shot against a thoroughly de realized

background, evoking with this the derealization effected by the birds as

they bring out the repetition compulsion, the violence intrinsic to the

drive, that Symbolic reality closets in itself while projecting it onto

sinthomosexuals, who are thus made to figure jouissance.

Out to get the children, then, by coming, and coming out, the birds,

when they flock from their playground perch, seem to darken the sky like

a stain. They emerge, as Hitchcock shoots the scene, as if from the

school itself to suggest the unacknowledged ghosts that always haunt the

social machinery and the unintelligibility against which no discourse of

knowledge prevails. As horrified youngsters shriek and flail, racing to

return to the shelter they still think their parents and home can

provide, the birds bear down with talon and beak, pecking and scratching

at eyes and skin, clearly out for blood. “Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, now,

now, now” comes back with a vengeance here, unpacked, in these winged

chariots not content to hover near, as the full-fledged force of the

death drive that its repetition bespeaks. Rereading this scene at a

pivotal moment in his career-long ambivalence about The Birds, Robin

Wood described it as localizing the ostensible “weakness” of the film in

“the perfunctory treatment of the children ... Hitchcock’s notable

failure to respond to the notion of renewed potential they and the

school might have represented, his reduction of the concepts of

education and childhood—the human future—to the automatic reiteration of

an inane jingle.”[185] Though distorted by its blindness to the point of

reducing the “human future” to “automatic reiteration,” a blindness

inseparable from its own “automatic reiteration” of the logic that

always tops our ideological charts (let us call that logic “poptimism”

and note that its locus classicus is Whitney Houston’s rendition of the

secular hymn, “I believe that children are our future,” a hymn we might

as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it), Wood’s

observation picks up, nonetheless, on what other readings ignore:

Hitchcock’s reduction of childhood, education, reality, and the future

itself to the status of mere machinery, of automatic reiterations—which

is to say, their reduction to the meaningless pulsions of the

drive.[186]

If the bird attacks, as many suggest, seem colored by desire, enacting

as sexual aggression the experience of sexuality itself, then they mark

the place where sexuality and the force of the death drive overlap,

exposing what Jean Laplanche calls “a kind of antilife as sexuality,

frenetic enjoyment [jouissance], the negative, the repetition

compulsion.”[187] In this they bespeak what regimes of normativity, of

sexual meaningfulness, disavow: the antisocial bent of sexuality as

such, acknowledged, and then as pathology, only in those who are bent

themselves. “Sexuality in the context of family and procreation has

natural limits,” claims Alan Keyes, conservative radio talk show host

and occasional candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. “It

has built into it constraints, responsibility, discipline and so forth.”

“Restraint,” by contrast, Keyes opines, “goes counter to the whole idea

of sexuality that’s involved in homosexuality itself, which is to say

sexuality freed from constraint, freed from convention, freed from the

context and limitations of procreation.”[188] Dissociating reproductive

pleasure from the frenzied shock of jouissance, the joys of procreation

from the “violent liveness” of what, after Lauren Berlant, we should

characterize as “live sex,” Keyes, defending the comic book version of

heterosexuality (to be sure, the only version that has ever been given

us to read), posits sexuality as hetero to normative heterosexual

practice, linking access to “frenetic enjoyment,” the loss of control in

jouissance, to a homosexuality that is made to appear as

sinthomosexuality.[189] For sexuality itself now carries the sinthome’s

intolerably de-meaning mark.

Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the world condensed in

Bodega Bay because they, like the “Homosexual Generation” Ken Worthy

wrote of as “driven and driving” in a book from 1965, “so hate the world

that will not accept them that they, in turn, will accept nothing but

the destruction of that world.”[190] “Driven and driving”: a perfect

description of the family at the end of the film. In a landscape that

pulses with volatile birds, they pack themselves into Melanie’s car,

still clinging, albeit desperately, to hope, that thing with feathers,

in the form of the lovebirds that Cathy cannot bear to leave behind:

hope, that is, for the future—for the reproductive future—that Cathy and

the lovebirds together would, in another context, affirm.[191] It may be

just such a future that the family, driven from domestic security by the

birds, is driving toward at the end; but the film’s insistently

“useless” finish will offer us only the image of driving, or even of

drive itself, while the soundtrack supplies, in Hitchcock’s words, a

“monotonous low hum ... a strange artificial sound, which in the

language of the birds might be saying, ‘We’re not ready to attack yet,

but we’re getting ready. We’re like an engine that’s purring and we may

start off at any moment’”.[192]

Should we ask, with other critics, at what this Hitchcockian engine is

driving, we might be torn between interpreting the birds, with Wood, as

“a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and unpredictable,” or, with

Žižek, as “the incarnation of a fundamental disorder in family

relations.” But such alternatives come together in the film as they come

together in the logic of heterosexual familialism as well. For

Hitchcock’s anatomy of “family relations,” especially as Žižek depicts

it, should strike us as mechanically predictable in accounting for the

mechanicity driving the birds: “The father is absent, the paternal

function ... is suspended and that vacuum is filled by the ‘irrational’

maternal superego, arbitrary, wicked, blocking ‘normal’ sexual

relationship.”[193] Like the momism as which it will not come out, this

reading, promoted by the film itself, blames the mother for the terror

that descends with the birds insofar as it also blames her for “blocking

[her son’s] ‘normal’ sexual relationship.” Though this has the merit of

seeing the birds, like Leonard, Silas Marner, and Scrooge, as reified

obstacles to the dominant fantasy of (hetero)sexual rapport, we haven’t,

apparently, progressed very far from the pseudo-psychology popularly

hawked at the time that the film was made, a psychology epitomized by

the following instance of that era’s received ideas: “Kinsey has given

us a brutal picture of the homosexual’s mother, listing, a. her

overpossessive love of him during his infancy and early childhood, and

b. her underlying hatred of his wife, no matter how wise, devoted, and

long-suffering the latter may be.”[194] This mass-market version of gay

etiology might afford us some interpretive purchase on the film by

allowing us at last to make sense of the ascot Mitch wears beneath his

sweater and letting us catch the full force of her drift when Annie

wistfully muses out loud, “Maybe there’s never been anything between

Mitch and any girl”. But the birds don’t alight in Hitchcock’s film

because Mitch is light in the loafers.[195] They come because coming is

what they do, arbitrarily and unpredictably, like the homosexuals Keyes

condemns for promoting “a paradigm of human sexuality divorced from

family and procreation, and engaged in solely for the sake of ...

sensual pleasure and gratification.”[196] They come, that is, to trace a

connection, as directly as the crow flies, between “disorder in the

family” and the rupture, the radical loss of familiarity, unleashed by

jouissance. 1t is not, therefore, that the birds themselves mean

homosexuality, but that homosexuality inflects how they figure the

radical refusal of meaning. Whatever voids the promissory note, the

guarantee, of futurity, precluding the hope of redeeming it, or of its

redeeming us, must be tarred, and in this case, feathered, by the brush

that will always color it queer in a culture that places on queerness

the negativizing burden of sexuality—sexuality, that is, as sinthome, as

always sinthomosexuality: sexuality as the force that threatens to leave

futurity foutu.

Cathy, Eppie, Tiny Tim, the constantly multiplying children of Eve with

the hopes that get put in their outstretched hands and the dreams that

get read in their always wide eyes: dare we see, in the end that’s

forbidden to be one, this endless line of children—a genetic line, a

narrative line, stretched out to the crack of doom—as itself the

nightmare of history from which we’re helpless to awake? For these

“innocent” children, who blind us to futurism’s implication in the

blindness of the drive, reproduce a collective fantasy—one that touches,

in refusing the negativity it opposes to the nature these children

affirm, the depths of that negativity in the violence that informs the

refusal itself.

Doesn’t Benjamin, in his “Conversations with Brecht,” seem to recognize

something similar when he recalls his response to Brecht’s telling him

that life, despite Hitler, goes on, there will always be children....

But then, still as an argument for the inclusion of the “Children’s

Songs” in the Poems from Exile, something else asserted itself, which

Brecht expressed as he stood before me in the grass, with a passion he

seldom shows. “In the fight against them nothing must be omitted. Their

intentions are not trivial. They are planning for the next thirty

thousand years. Monstrous. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They

hit out at everything. Every cell flinches under their blows. That is

why not one of us can be forgotten. They deform the baby in the mother’s

womb. We must under no circumstances leave out the children.” While he

spoke I felt a force acting on me that was equal to that of fascism; I

mean a power that has its source no less deep in history than

fascism.[197]

Its sources in history no less deep because not different from those of

fascism, this “force” that acts on Benjamin, this unidentified “power,”

might well be seen as what I’ve called “the fascism of the baby’s face,”

which subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics

itself (of politics, that is, in its radical form as reproductive

futurism), whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to

wear—Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or

of an ever expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity. Which is not to

say that the difference of those political programs makes no difference,

but rather that both, as political programs, are programmed to reify

difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the order of

the same. And this, as we saw in North by Northwest, occasions the

emergence of history through the dialectic of desire, producing a

temporalization that generates, like the “structure of allegory”

according to de Man, narrative as the constant movement of and toward

intelligibility.[198]

Such a history, though, as Lacan and de Man, in their quite different

ways, understand, “pertains strictly to the order of language,” whose

“permanent disjunction” or determining lack effects the “illusion of a

life” in response to the interminable movement toward the closure of

meaning in the Symbolic. If this is the history to the survival of which

we must always, as humans, be pledged, or the history through which,

catachrestically, we first hope to win recognition as human, then we

might do well to recall de Man’s words on Benjamin’s concept of history:

“It is this errancy of language, this illusion of a life that is only an

afterlife, that Benjamin calls history. As such, history is not human,

because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not

natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal, in the sense that no

cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which

as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really

temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a

temporal structure.”[199]

Rather than expanding the reach of the human, as in Butler’s claim for

Antigone, we might, with Leonard and the birds, insist on enlarging the

inhuman instead—or enlarging what, in its excess, in its

unintelligibility, exposes the human itself as always misrecognized

catachresis, a positing blind to the willful violence that marks its

imposition. “There is, in a very radical sense,” writes de Man in the

essay on Benjamin, “no such thing as the human. If one speaks of the

inhuman, the fundamental non-human character of language, one also

speaks of the fundamental non-definition of the human as such.” This

erasure of the human is implied, for de Man, in Benjamin’s notion of

reine Sprache, which, though commonly interpreted in terms of the sacred

or divine, designates for Benjamin, according to de Man, “a language

completely devoid of any kind of meaning function, language which would

be pure signifier, which would be completely devoid of any semantic

function whatsoever.”[200] Putting a permanent end to Melanie’s hope of

a General Semantics, such a reine Sprache, such an absolutely inhuman

and meaningless language, could only sound to human ears like the

permanent whine of white noise, like the random signals we monitor with

radio telescopes trained on space, or perhaps like the electronically

engineered sound with which Hitchcock ends The Birds.

In what he called a “monotonous low hum,” whose drone might recall the

“monotonous response” of Silas Marner’s loom, in the “strange

artificial” sound that brings Hitchcock’s film to its “useless”

“finish,” we hear, if not the siren song, then the birdcall of futurity.

The engine revs; the machine purrs on; the family drives through danger;

and something implacable, life-negating, inimical to “our” children,

works to reduce the empire of meaning to the static of an electric buzz.

We, the sinthomosexuals who figure the death drive of the social, must

accept that we will be vilified as the agents of that threat. But

“they,” the defenders of futurity, buzzed by negating our negativity,

are themselves, however unknowingly, its secret agents too, reacting, in

the name of the future, in the name of humanity, in the name of life, to

the threat of the death drive we figure with the violent rush of a

jouissance, which only returns them, ironically, to the death drive in

spite of themselves. Futurism makes sinthomosexuals, not humans, of us

all.

We shouldn’t dismiss as coincidence, then, that the catchphrase best

expressing our current captivity to futurism’s logic and serving as a

bridge between left and right in the American political scene, is one

that sinthomosexuals, like Hitchcock’s birds, could endorse as well:

“Leave no child behind.” In repeating it, though, sinthomosexuals bring

out what’s “impossible, inhuman” within it: a haunting, destructive

excess bound up with its pious sentimentality, an overdetermination that

betrays the place of the kernel of irony that futurism tries to

allegorize as narrative, as history. The political regime of futurism,

unable to escape what it abjects, negates it as the negation of meaning,

of the Child, and of the future the Child portends. Attempting to evade

the insistent Real always surging in its blood, it lovingly rocks the

cradle of life to the drumbeat of the endless blows it aims at

sinthomosexuals. Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and

left to die—sacrificed to a future whose beat goes on, like a pulse or a

heart—and another corpse will be left like a mangled scarecrow to

frighten the birds who are gathering now, who are beating their wings,

and who, like the drive, keep on coming.

<quote> You heard me, there can be no thought of joy.

Frenzy I choose, most agonizing lust,

Enamored enmity, restorative disgust.

Henceforth my soul, for knowledge sick no more,

Against no kind of suffering shall be cautioned.

I mean to savor to my own self’s core,

Grasp with my mind both highest and most low,

Weigh down my spirit with their weal and woe,

And thus my selfhood to their own distend,

And be, as they are, shattered in the end. (part 1, lines 1765–1775)

</quote>

[1] James Bennet, “Clinton, in Ad, Lifts Image of Parent,” New York

Times, 4 March 1997, A18, New England edition.

[2] Donna Shalala, “Women’s Movement,” 150^(th) Anniversary of the First

Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, 17 July 1998,

http://www.hhs.gov/news/speeches/sene.html. Note also the fundraising

slogan of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League

(NARAL): “For our daughters, our sisters, and our granddaughters.”

[3] Such a fantasy of substantialized and oppositional identities

characterizes the Lacanian Imaginary stage, as distinct from the

Symbolic order’s wholly differential system of signifying relations.

[4] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New

York: Continuum, 1994), 325.

[5] He writes, for example, in Seminar 17: “Ce que la vérité, quand elle

surgit, a de résolutif, ça peutêtre de temps en temps heureux—et puis,

dansd’autres cas, désastreux. On ne voit pas pourquoi la vérité serait

forcément toujours bénéfique.” Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre XVII,

L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 122.

[6] “Je dis toujours la vérité: pas toute, parce que toute la dire, on

n’y arrive pas. La dire toute, c’est impossible, matériellement: les

mots y manquent. C’est même par cet impossible que la vérité tient au

réel” Jacques Lacan, Télévision (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 9.

[7] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis

Potter (New York: Norton, 1992), 24.

[8] In this context, another quotation from Adorno’s Negative Dialectics

might be useful: “If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection

of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be

true—if it is to be true today, in any case—it must also be a thinking

against itself. If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes

the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical

accompaniment with which the ss liked to drown out the screams of its

victims” (365).

[9] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in

Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed.

Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991),

326.

[10] Suzanne Barnard, “The Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and

Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love,

Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 173.

[11] See, for example, Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social

History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books,

1962); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England,

1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); and James Kincaid, Child

Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge,

1992) and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).

[12]

P. D. James, The Children of Men (New York: Warner Books, 1994), 10,

13.

[13] Walter Wangerin Jr., “O Brave New World, That Has No People In’t!

The Children of Men,” New York Times Book Review, 28 March 1993, 23.

[14] “Narcissism!” the cry will go up. “Who, after all, more

self-denying, more willing to sacrifice, than a parent? Who more

committed to hours of work without ever getting paid?” Not paid? Consult

the ledger book of social approbation. Tax codes, baby registries, the

various forms of parental leave: these, of course, all pale before the

costs of raising a child. But pro-natalism’s payoff isn’t primarily

measured in dollars or sense. It’s registered in the universal

confirmation of one’s standing as an adult and in the accrual of social

capital that allows one a stake in the only future’s market that ever

really counts.

[15] The lines preceding this read: “One might have imagined that with

the fear of pregnancy permanently removed, and the unerotic

paraphernalia of pills, rubber and ovulation arithmetic no longer

necessary, sex would be freed for new and imaginative delights. The

opposite has happened. Even men and women who would normally have no

wish to breed apparently need the assurance that they could have a child

if they wished” (James, The Children of Men, 167).

[16] See Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A

World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987),

184–199.

[17] Donald Wildmon, “Hope ’97 Tour to Counter Pro-Homosexual Philosophy

in American Culture,” American Family Association Action Alert, 25

February 1997, http://www.cfinwed.com/HEADLINE.HTM.

[18] Consider, in this regard, the controversy that followed Senator

Rick Santorum’s remarks to the Associated Press in April 2003 linking

homosexuality with bigamy, incest, and the endangerment of the family.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times taking issue with Santorum’s

comments could refute him only by echoing the discourse of familial

values and reproductive futurism: “But gays and lesbians are more than

just sons and daughters. We’re moms and dads, too. My boyfriend and I

adopted a son five years ago, and we plan to adopt again. As more

same-sex couples start families, it’s going to be harder for Republicans

like Mr. Santorum to say we are somehow a threat to the American

family.” Dan Savage, “G.O.P. Hypocrisy,” New York Times, 25 April 2003,

A33.

[19] There are many types of resistance for which, in writing a book

like this, it is best to be prepared. One will be the defiantly

“political” rejection of what some will read as an “apolitical”

formalism, an insufficiently “historicized” intervention in the

materiality of politics as we know it. That such versions of politics

and history represent the compulsory norm this book is challenging will

not, of course, prevent those espousing them from asserting their

“radical” bona fides. A variant will assail the bourgeois privilege

(variously described, in identitarian terms, as “white,” “middle-class,”

“academic,” or, most tellingly, “gay male”) by which some will allege

that my argument here is determined. That many of those proposing this

reading will themselves be “white,” “middle-class,” and “academic”—and,

perhaps, not a few “gay males”—will not disturb the ease with which such

“determination” is affirmed. I have somewhat greater sympathy for those

who might be inclined to dismiss the book for its language (which

they’ll call jargon), for its theoretical framework (which they’ll view

as elitist), for its difficulty (which they’ll see as pretension), or

for its style (which they’ll find to be tortuous). These objections at

least have the virtue of acknowledging a frustration of desire in the

face of what is experienced as of a drive. “Somewhat greater” though it

may be, however, my sympathy for even this form of response has its

limits as well, I confess.

[20] Martin Charnin (lyrics) and Charles Strouse (music), “Tomorrow,”

from Annie (1977).

[21] See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Some Binarisms (1),” in Epistemology of

the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 128.

[22] Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.

[23] Quoted by Kevin Sack in “Officials Look for Any Links in Bombings

in Atlanta,” New York Times, 2 February 1997, A13, New England ed.

[24] Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological

Imaginary,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

(New York: Routledge, 1993), 62.

[25] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, 212.

[26] Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 179, 181.

[27] Barbara Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge, Mass.:

Basil Blackwell, 1994), 98.

[28] Thus Lacan observes that Freud “doesn’t hesitate to make the point

in Civilization and its Discontents that there is nothing in common

between the satisfaction a jouissance affords in its original state and

that which it gives in the indirect or even sublimated form that

civilization obliges it to assume.” See Lacan, The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, 199–200.

[29] Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of

Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, 211.

[30] Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural

Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), XV.

[31] Ryan Slattery, “Cardinal Law Urges Menino to Veto Bill Giving

Benefits to City Workers’ Partners,” Boston Sunday Globe, 17 March 1996,

68.

[32] “Pope Warns Against ‘Inauthentic’ Version of Family,” 26 January

2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76598,00.html.

[33] See John Brenkman’s response to my original formulation of this

argument: “Queer Post-Politics,” Narrative 10 (2002): 177.

[34] Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 138, 147.

[35] The first two syllables of the word, therefore, should be

pronounced as in the French sinthome, but the subsequent syllables

should be pronounced as they would be in English. Hence:

“san-TUM-o-SEX-u-al” and “san-TUM-O-sex-u-AL-ity.”

[36] As cited in Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 87n. The quotation

originally appeared in Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol

Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 227.

[37] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four

Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.

Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 198r), 185.

[38] Slavoj Žižek, “‘The Thing That Thinks’: The Kantian Background of

the Noir Subject,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso,

1993), 222.

[39] C’est une façon ancienne d’écrire ce qui a été, ultérieurement,

écrit ‘symptôme.’” Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome (typescript of Seminar 23,

1975–76, University of Texas at Austin), I. The translation is mine.

[40] Reading this process of fixation in relation to Freudian theory’s

anticipation of Lacan’s account of the sinthome, Paul Verhaeghe and

Frédéric Declercq observe the priority of these definitive fixations

over repression and its symptomatic traces: “A psychoanalytic cure

removes repressions and lays bare drive-formations. These fixations can

no longer be changed as such; the decisions of the body are

irreversible. This is not the case for the positions of the subject

toward the drive processes; these can be revised. There are two

possibilities: whether the subject now accepts a form of jouissance that

he earlier refused, or he confirms this refusal.” Paul Verhaeghe and

Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal: Le sinthome or the Feminine

Way,” in Reinventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke

Thurston (New York: The Other Press, 2002), 63.

[41] Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth, “The sinthome: A New Way of Writing an

Old Problem?” in Thurston, Re-inventing the Symptom, 7. All subsequent

references are to this edition; page numbers will be cited

parenthetically.

[42] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso,

1989), 75 .

[43] Verhaeghe and Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal,” 67. All subsequent

references are to this edition; page numbers will be cited

parenthetically.

[44] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott

Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), I: 51.

[45] Quoted in Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 75.

[46] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 75.

[47] Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the

Final Lacan, trans. Luke Thurston (New York: The Other Press, 2002),

122–123.

[48] Ibid., 125.

[49] Lacan, Le Sinthome, 134. The translation is mine.

[50] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: On Feminine

Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–73, Encore, ed. Jacques

Alain-Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 120.

[51] Gary Bauer, “Family Research Council Fundraising Appeal Letter from

Gary Bauer,” 2 June 1997,

http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/frc970602.htm; Peter A. Jay, “After the

Holocaust, Still Playing with Fire,” Baltimore Sun, 20 July 1997.

[52] Larry Kramer, “Gay Culture, Redefined,” op-ed, New York Times, 12

December 1997, A23.

[53] Bauer, “Family Research Council Fundraising Appeal Letter.”

[54] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in The Christmas Books; Volume

1 (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 97. All subsequent citations

from A Christmas Carol are to this edition and will be cited

parenthetically.

[55] Lacan, Le Sinthome, 130. The translation is mine.

[56] De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 226.

[57] Lacan, for instance, writes: “And what is more of a neighbor to me

than this heart within which is that of my jouissance and which I don’t

dare go near? For as soon as I go near it, as Civilization and Its

Discontents makes clear, there rises up the unfathomable aggressivity

from which I flee, that I turn against me” (Lacan, The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 186).

[58] Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 7.

[59] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 176.

[60] Such a relation to the Other, however, must be read through the

lens that Joan Copjec insists on when she issues her corrective to the

conceptualization of the gaze in theories of film: “When you encounter

the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The

gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or

recognition; it is clouded and turned back on itself, absorbed in its

own enjoyment. The horrible truth, revealed to Lacan by Petit-Jean, is

that the gaze does not see you. So, if you are looking for confirmation

of the truth of your being or the clarity of your vision, you are on

your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming; it will not validate

you.” Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 36.

[61] “Ministries of hope”: the very name betrays the opposition between

futurism as anticipation of temporal redemption and homosexuality as

meaning’s dead end.

[62] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political

Ontology (New York: Verso, 2000), 294.

[63] The allusion, of course, is to the dream Freud famously recounts of

the father who falls asleep after sitting by the body of his son who has

died. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans.

James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), 5: 509–511.

[64] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Vintage, 1990),

113. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited

parenthetically.

[65] See the entry for “Narcissism” in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis,

The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:

Hogarth Press, 1983), 255–257.

[66] Copjec, Read My Desire, 37.

[67] Leo Bersani, “Sexuality and Esthetics,” in The Freudian Body:

Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 38,

39. Bersani, significantly, goes on to ask, in “Freud’s New World,” a

later essay in this volume, “Must we now conceive of sado-masochism as a

form of narcissism?” (89).

[68] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in The

Standard Edition, 22: 105.

[69] Consider in this regard Freud’s discussion of the “narcissistic”

nature of both germ cells and malignant neoplasms in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, in The Standard Edition, 18: 50. Later in the same text Freud

asserts: “Our argument had as its point of departure a sharp distinction

between ego-instincts, which we equated with death-instincts, and sexual

instincts, which we equated with life instincts. (We were prepared at

one stage to include the so-called self-preservative instincts of the

ego among the death instincts; but we subsequently corrected ourselves

on this point and withdrew it)” (53).

[70] In a note added in 1910 to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,

Freud evokes narcissistic object choice to describe male homosexuals

who, identifying with their mother, “take themselves as their sexual

object.” In The Standard Edition, 7: 145.

[71] All citations from Plato’s Laws are taken from the translation by

Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, in Great Books of the Western

World, vol. 7, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, (Chicago: Encyclopedia

Brittanica, 1952): 707, 646, 736. I recognize that the words translated

by Jowett as “nature” are not, in all cases, identical. But this

translation economically makes a point about the naturalization of

nature as the work of ideology, which we thus can see at work in the

translation’s deployment of “nature” itself

[72] For a similar argument, though produced toward different ends and

with a different set of values, see Randall Clark, “Is Sodomy Unnatural?

(And What’s Wrong with That?): Plato’s Response to John Finnis and

Martha Nussbaum,” published by the Claremont Institute,

http://adnetsolfp2.adnetsol.com/ssl_claremont/publications/apsa98/apsa98_clark.cfm.

[73] Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 737, 738.

[74] The hypnotic fantasy of futurity, binding us to our collective

social reality, is linked, of course, to the hypnotic power we are made

to affirm in infants. Consider, for example, this allusion to the doxa

that infants exert a galvanic force: describing the enduring appeal of

“punch bowls” at parties and festive celebrations, Amanda Hesser writes,

“People gravitate toward punch bowls and surround them, as they do a

newborn.” “Dip into the Past,” New York Times, 15 December 1999, D1.

[75] For a discussion of “(be)hindsight,” see my Homographesis, 179–183.

[76] George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (Harmondsworth,

England: Penguin, 1996), 77, 83. Subsequent references are cited

parenthetically.

[77] At the same time that Marner suffers his cataleptic rigidification,

Molly, Eppie’s mother, succumbs to a death described in a similar way:

“The complete torpor came at last” (ibid., 108). Her addiction to opium

evinces a repetition compulsion equivalent to that enacted in Marner’s

union with his machine.

[78] That the monotonous and repetitive task has a quasi-masturbatory

insistence reinforces the association of sinthomosexuality with a

nonproductive jouissance.

[79] Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the

Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 37.

[80] Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 47.

[81] Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard

Edition, I4: 9I.

[82] Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 120–121.

[83] Though desire, as Lacan reminds us, may function metonymically, we

misrecognize it as a metaphor, as the representation of what bears

within it the essence or truth that will fill out our lack. Hence, as we

will see in chapter 3, the exposure of desire as mere metonymy has the

effect of seeming to undo it.

[84] Jean Baudrillard, “The Final Solution,” in The Vital Illusion, ed.

Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5–6. All

subsequent references to this volume appear in parentheses.

[85] In the muddle of his argument, which plays fast and loose with the

critical terms it introduces, Baudrillard explicitly denies this claim,

arguing that, in its folly, “humankind puts an end to natural selection,

a process that implies, according to the laws of evolution, the death of

any given species—including its own.” But then he goes on to write: “By

ending natural selection, humankind contravenes symbolic law, and in so

doing effectively risks its own disappearance” (ibid., 18). But, by the

terms of his argument, doesn’t this mean that humankind’s “ending [of]

natural selection” must take place within the framework of natural

selection? Hence the risk “of its own disappearance,” the risk that

Baudrillard decries in the biotechnological experiments to which he

alludes, comports with the mandate of evolution that embraces

unproblematically “the death of any given species.” This is the death

that Baudrillard is unwilling to accept, even if “evolution,” the figure

of the nature that his argument naturalizes, will.

[86] Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans.

Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19.

[87] Jean Baudrillard, “The Murder of the Real,” in The Vital Illusion,

69. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

[88] Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 221.

Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.

[89] Baudrillard seems explicitly to deny this: “Life ‘means’ nothing,

not even human life; if it is precious, it’s not as a value but as a

form, a form that exceeds all individual and collective value” (“The

Final Solution,” 28). But his subsequent insistence that the “Perfect

Crime” is impossible because language itself must always be “the best

deterrent against the global extermination of meaning” clearly

establishes his own investment in the preservation of that meaning. And

he follows this insistence on the survival of meaning with the phrase,

“So the game is not over,” a clear echo of the phrase with which, at the

conclusion of “The Final Solution,” he equally envisions the survival of

the species: “But this game is not over yet. We can count on fierce

resistance from the mortal creatures that we are, a resistance that

springs out of the depth of the species, its vital exigency, its refusal

of any final solution” (30). The vital exigency that resists the

destruction of the species, on the one hand, and language’s deterrence

of the global extermination of meaning, on the other, thus occupy

analogous places in Baudrillard’s argument. He may claim that “life

‘means’ nothing; not even human life,” but human life and meaning prove

homologous for him.

[90] As Lacan writes in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,”

“the pretentions of the spirit would remain unassailable if the letter

had not shown us that it produces all the effects of truth in man

without involving the spirit at all.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A

Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 158.

[91] Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey

Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic

Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1988), 40, 51.

[92] See, for example, the information provided by the Anti-Defamation

League’s Web site: adl.org/hate_symbols/numbers_14words.html.

[93] Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1997), book II, chapter 7, section II,

pp. 34, 35.

[94] Ronald Reagan, “First Inaugural Address,” in Speeches of the

American Presidents, 2d ed., ed. Janet Podell and Steven Anzouin (New

York: H. W. Wilson, 2001), 873.

[95] I take this use of “disfiguration” from the work of Paul de Man,

for whom it signifies the reduction of a perceptual reality to a

rhetorical construct. See, for example, the essays collected in The

Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). For

a fuller account of disfiguration and the face, see my essay “Imagining

the Homosexual: Laura and the Other Face of Gender,” in Homographesis.

[96] Ernest Lehman, North by Northwest: The MGM Library of Film Scripts

(New York: Viking, 1972), 45, 46. All subsequent references to this

screenplay are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

[97] This is not to say that those persons who are read as figures of

sinthomosexuality are themselves incapable of love, but only that the

figure of the sinthomosexual materializes the anxiogenic force of a

compulsion whose mechanical quality is posed against the

spiritualizing—and therefore “humanizing”—ideology of “love.”

[98] Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Perversion,” in Reading Seminars I and

II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and

Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 313.

[99] Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 205.

Earlier in this volume, Lacan differentiates the fundamental narcissism

of love from the function of the drive when he notes that he himself has

come close to what Freud “articulates when he distinguishes between the

two fields, the field of the drives on the one hand, and the

narcissistic field of love on the other, and stresses that at the level

of love, there is a reciprocity of loving and being loved, and that, in

the other field, it is a question of a pure activity durch seine eigene

Triebe, for the subject” (200).

[100] Ibid., 205.

[101] For a fuller account of this logic in relation to the death drive,

see Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s

Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991). On the impossibility of

sexual difference: it is important to remember that the fantasy of

sexual relation rests on the belief that sexual difference marks the

site of a complementarity that can fill the subject’s constitutive lack.

This attempt to turn the Real of sexual difference, its resistance to

any structure of intelligibility, into the possibility of sexual

relation, and thus into the ground of the subject’s putative access to

meaning’s totalization, allows it to undergird the dominant logic of

reproductive futurism. It follows, therefore, that any insistence on the

Real of sexual difference, and consequently on the impossibility of

sexual rapport, must comport with the negativity that sinthomosexuality

always signifies.

[102] Some readers may reasonably be tempted to ask if the

sinthomosexual must always be male. As my insistent refusal of identity

politics should be taken to suggest, the sinthomosexual has no

privileged relation to any sex or sexuality—or even, indeed, to any

species, as chapter 4 makes clear. My principal examples in this book,

however, with the exception of chapter 4, focus on male sinthomosexuals

because our culture most frequently imagines, and our artists most

frequently depict, sinthomosexuality as embodied by machine-like men

(and often, in science fiction, they are replaced by machines as such)

who stand outside the “natural” order of sexual reproduction. (The

movement between man and machine can be charted by considering the

following sinthomosexuals: Aldous Huxley’s Mustapha Mond; James

Cameron’s Terminator; and H. G. Wells’s sexless, and hence parasitic,

Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds.) The overwhelming prevalence

of male sinthomosexuals in cultural representation reflects, no doubt, a

gender bias that continues to view women as “naturally” bound more

closely to sociality, reproduction, and domesticating emotion. Even in

representations of women who fail to embrace these “natural” attributes

and thus find themselves assimilated to the sort of fatality the

sinthomosexual embodies, such refusals are themselves most often

“explained” by reference to the intense fixation of their emotional

attachments. Thus, while any number of female characters might be

considered in terms of sinthomosexuality (Du Maurier’s—and

Hitchcock’s—Mrs. Danvers, for instance, or Ben Ames Williams’s Ellen

Berent in his novel, Leave Her to Heaven, which became the basis for

John Stahl’s film), to engage them here would necessitate a parsing of

the category to identify their differences from sinthomosexuality as I

discuss it here. (These female characters, for instance, are determined

by socially legible desires—typically in the form of obsessive

“love”—rather than by the refusal of sociality and desire. Katharine, in

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, might be a noteworthy

counterexample.) Valuable as the exploration of such gendered

differences would be, I have chosen not to engage it here lest the

introduction of taxonomic distinctions at the outset dissipate the force

of my larger argument against reproductive futurism. [201] “Party Ousts

‘Phobe French Senator,” Yahoo News, 3 August 2000,

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/po/20000803/co/2000903002.html.

[103] Dan Savage, “The Baby,” New York Times Magazine, 15 November 1998,

95.

[104] Dan Savage, “The Baby,” New York Times Magazine, 15 November 1998,

95.

[105] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Poetry

and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Garden City, N.J.:

Doubleday, 1965), 37.

[106] Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey

Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic

Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1988), 40, 51.

[107] Cited in Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred

Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), 440.

[108] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 205.

[109] With this reference to Joel Fineman’s analysis of Othello, I mean

to suggest that Thornhill, who, like Othello, is associated with the “O”

of desire—though North by Northwest explicitly affirms the “nothing” for

which that “O” stands—becomes a figure through whom our faith in desire,

our confidence in its world-making logic, can be confirmed as the ground

of futurity. Hence the matchbook on which that “O” is displayed, and

that earlier led him to assert that it, and, by extension, he, stood for

nothing, becomes the means by which he later warns Eve of the threat to

her life itself. At that moment, he fills the “O” with the sound of the

desire that he had earlier denied. See Joel Fineman, “The Sound of ‘O’

in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in The Subjectivity

Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of

Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 143–164.

[110] Alfred Hitchcock, cited in François Truffaut, Hitchcock, revised

ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 138.

[111] In contrast to this Imaginary One, or the One of sexual rapport, I

am proposing here a One outside the logic of totalization: the One of

the sinthome, about which Roberto Harari writes as follows: “Lacan

posits—in another strange aphorism, from Seminar 19—that ‘There is One,’

in isolation, but no universe. For this one is no longer an index of

itself: it is not the mark of totality, of the unification inherent in

‘personality.’ It does not even refer to a trait allowing partial

identification in the Other. Better still—we are no longer dealing with

the one that can be counted, situated in a problematic of repetition.

This is why ‘There is One’ can be said to invoke the One of the

sinthome, thus indicating a marginal instance, since it can be neither

totalized nor added up. Situated elsewhere, on another edge, it operates

as the support of the speaker. We could define it as an uncoupled One,

outside any sequence; it answers to no integration, no context, no

history, no full or anticipated meaning. It therefore persists in an

awkward, troubling manner.” Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name,

125–126.

[112] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, 186. Subsequent

references are cited parenthetically.

[113] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard

Edition, 21: 109, III.

[114] Immanuel Kant, Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of

Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, in Great Books of the Western

World, vol. 42: Kant (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 376.

[115] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 187. Subsequent references

are cited in parentheses.

[116] Ernest Lehman’s screenplay introduces Leonard as follows: “A man

is playing croquet all by himself in the fading light. His name is

LEONARD. Later, we will see him at closer range and perhaps be slightly

repelled. He is about thirty, but looks much younger, for he has a soft

baby-face, large eyes, and hair that falls down over his forehead. His

attitudes are unmistakably effeminate” (11). Note that the mutually

substitutive relation of killing and fucking can also be seen in the

enactment by Leonard of the “murder” of Vandamm with Eve’s blank-filled

gun.

[117] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 195.

[118] See, for example, Jacques-Alain Miller’s formulation of this

aspect of Lacan’s thought: “What Freud calls the drive is an activity

which always comes off. It leads to sure success, whereas desire leads

to a sure unconscious formulation, namely, a bungled action or slip: ‘I

missed my turn,’ ‘I forgot my keys,’ etc. That is desire. The drive, on

the contrary, always has its keys in hand.” “Commentary on Lacan’s

Text,” in Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, 426.

[119] Raymond Bellour, “Symbolic Blockage,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in

The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: University of

Indiana Press, 2000), 191.

[120] The figure is linked to Leonard before this final struggle. It is

he, of course, who directs Vandamm’s attention to it in the auction

house, and it appears in the frame a number of times while Leonard, with

Eve’s gun behind his back, enacts what his boss first interprets as his

jealousy of her.

[121] Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 184.

[122] Ibid., 179, n. 21; Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in

Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,

2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 215.

Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

[123] To the extent, of course, that these pieces of film refer to North

by Northwest itself, they point to its own oscillation between the

reinforcement and the rupturing of Imaginary form.

[124] When Lacan calls attention to the subject’s retreat from

jouissance and the transgression it entails, he gestures as well toward

the logic according to which altruism, the realization of compassion,

would necessarily carry with it the trace of the negativity it negates:

“We retreat from what? From assaulting the image of the other, because

it was the image on which we were formed as an ego. Here we find the

convincing power of altruism. Here, too, is the leveling power of a

certain law of equality—that which is formulated in the notion of the

general will. The latter is no doubt the common denominator of the

respect for certain rights—which, for a reason that escapes me, are

called elementary rights—but it can also take the form of excluding from

its boundaries, and therefore from its protection, everything that is

not integrated into its various registers” (The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, 195). The sinthomosexual figures what must be

excluded from protection, denied certain “elementary rights,” insofar as

it threatens the boundaries securing the form of the social subject and

thereby denies the authority of social organization or the “general

will”: the will, that is, to articulate itself in an image whose

totalization must be secured precisely by means of the meaning that

futurity affirms.

[125] “Some Considerations Concerning the Catholic Response to

Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons,”

June 1992 letter to American bishops,

http://www.polarnet.ca/~prince/dignity/rights.html.

[126] “Chastity and Homosexuality,” in Catechism of the Catholic Church

(Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994), 2357, p. 566.

[127] Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care

of Homosexual Persons (October 1986), sections 9, 15,

http://www.polarnet.ca/~prince/dignity/halloween.html.

[128] “Homosexuality,” Concerned Families of Maryland,

http://www.us2000.org/cfmc/poshomosex.htm. The nonsectarian nature of

this group reflects the universality of the dogma of reproductive

futurism: “We believe the family is the heart of our nation and the key

to any true progress to restoring our moral bearings and building a

better future for our children.”

[129] Reverend John Miller, “Homosexuality: What? How? Dangers and

Remedies,” Social Justice Review,

http://www.txdirect.net/users/dgreaney/homosex.htm, pp. 3, 5.

[130] See Lacan’s essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the

Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A

Selection. Note especially the oft-cited penultimate sentence of this

essay: “Castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can

be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire” (324).

[131] See Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter

Arndt (New York: Norton, 2001), 47:

[132] I take this phrase from Jacques-Alain Miller, who writes of “the

pervert” that “he has an immutable, constant share that is always ready

to use—it is at hand, an at hand enjoyment.” “On Perversion,” in Reading

Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, 310.

[133] Note that Lacan traces the dialectic of history back to the advent

of Christianity: “It is also Christianity that associates that death [of

God in the crucifixion of Christ] with what happened to the Law; namely,

that without destroying the Law, we are told, but in substituting itself

for it, in summarizing it, and raising it up in the very movement that

abolishes it—thus offering the first weighty historical example of the

German notion of Aufhebung, i.e., the conservation of something

destroyed at a different level—the only commandment is henceforth ‘Thou

shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,

193).

[134] De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” 177.

[135] De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 226.

[136] Paul Verhaeghe, “Lacan’s Answer to the Classical Mind/Body

Deadlock: Retracing Freud’s Beyond,” in Barnard and Fink, Reading

Seminar XX, 135.

[137] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 205.

[138] Copjec, Read My Desire, 201; Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 272.

[139] Lacan recounts this anecdote in “The Agency of the Letter in the

Unconscious”: “A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little

girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next

to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can

be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. ‘Look,’ says the brother,

‘we’ve arrived at Ladies!’; ‘Idiot!’ replies his sister, ‘Can’t you see

we’re at Gentlemen’” (Écrits, 152).

[140] Suzanne Barnard, “The Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and

Other Jouissance,” in Barnard and Fink, Reading Seminar XX, 173.

[141] That the train is the vehicle of temporal, and hence of narrative,

dilation may be underscored by the fact that the train on which

Thornhill encounters Eve is expressly identified as the

Twentieth-Century, inscribing its function in registers of time and

space at once (see Lehman, North by Northwest, 48).

[142] Bellour, “Symbolic Blockage,” 81.

[143] Bellour, “Symbolic Blockage,” 81.

[144] The trope of the extended hand, or its refusal, figures in any

number of representations of sinthomosexuals. Perhaps the most concise

summation of its part in the logic of reproductive futurism can be found

in Disney’s The Lion King (directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff,

1994). Viewers will recall the moment when Scar, the connotatively queer

brother of the Lion King, Mustafa, finds his sibling clinging to a cliff

while thousands of frenzied wildebeests are rampaging below. Holding his

brother’s paws in his own, Scar lays out his plan to take over the

kingdom and then, releasing his grip, lets Mustafa fall to his death.

The unwed Scar now assumes the throne and the consequences are dramatic:

the fertile land becomes a landscape of death, ruled by the

sinthomosexual Scar and his carrion-eating hyenas. This condition of

morbidity persists until the eventual restoration of Simba, Mustafa’s

son and rightful heir, who returns to the kingdom with Nala, who is

destined to be his queen. The film finds its apt conclusion, therefore,

by affirming the continuity of the “Circle of Life.” It repeats the

opening sequence, which depicted the celebration of Simba’s birth, but

this virtually identical sequence celebrates the birth of Simba’s son.

With such an emphasis on repetition, we see once again the compulsion to

sameness in reproductive futurism that old Mr. Lammeter remarked in

Silas Marner. It is, of course, this sameness that futurism abjects in

the sinthomosexual.

[145] Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 23. All subsequent page

references are from this edition and will appear parenthetically.

[146] Copjec, Read My Desire, 206, 207.

[147] Ibid., 207.

[148] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso,

2000), 95.

[149] Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 196.

[150] Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, “For Mothers, It’s No

Paradise,” Boston Sunday Globe, 10 May 1998, C7. My quarrel with this

article, I want to make clear, is not with the particular suggestions it

offers for improving the lives of underpaid working women and mothers;

it is a quarrel, instead, with the ideology invoked to naturalize and

promote those suggestions.

[151] Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis:

Theory and Technique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997),

211.

[152] In Seminar VII Lacan tells his audience, “And one of you, in

explaining to me what I am trying to show in Das Ding, referred to it

neatly as the vacuole.” He then goes on to observe: “Where, in effect,

is the vacuole created for us? It is at the center of the

signifiers—insofar as that final demand to be deprived of something real

is essentially linked to the primary symbolization which is wholly

contained in the signification of the gift of love.” See Lacan, The

Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, 150.

[153] “Murder Charges Planned in Beating Death of Gay Student,” 12

October 1998, CNN Interactive,

http://www.cnn.com/US/9810/12/wyoming.attack.03

[154] It is worth noting, in this context, that less than two weeks

after Shepard’s murder, the New York Times reported on an effort in Fort

Collins, Colorado (where the hospital in which Shepard died was

located), to list sexual orientation as a protected category in its

antidiscrimination ordinance. The article included the following

sentence describing one of the responses provoked by the distribution of

materials supporting that addition to the law: “‘I was handing out

stickers on a parade route, and one boy held out his hand for one,’

recalled Bob Lenk, spokesman for the group promoting the ordinance

change. ‘His mother said, “You put that on him and I’ll break your

arm.”’” James Brooke, “Anti-Bias Effort Roils City Where Gay Man Died;’

New York Times, 28 October 1998, A16.

[155] James Brooke, “Gay Man Dies from Attack, Fanning Outrage and

Debate,” New York Times, 13 October 1998, late ed., A17.

[156] Consider, for example, the following passage, which appeared in

i.e., an online Web magazine published by the Family Research Council

the same month that Matthew Shepard was killed: “Homosexuality is not

merely about a harmless personal preference. It is about a lifestyle

that involves having sex with another person of the same gender. More

often than anyone would like to admit, it’s about promiscuity—and even

violence. It is about unnatural, unsafe, and unhealthy behavior.” Laurel

L. Cornell, “Coming Out of Homosexuality: What’s This All About,”

October 1998,

http://www.frc.org/ie/ie98j

[157] Bosley Crowther, “The Birds: Hitchcock’s Feathered Friends Are

Chilling,” New York Times, 1 April 1963, 53.

[158] Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1992), 65.

[159] Alfred Hitchcock, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’ s ... The

Birds,” originally published in Take One 1, no. 10 (1968): 6–7;

reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995), 315.

[160] Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed in “Just One Hitch,” also cited in

Camille Paglia, The Birds (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 88.

[161] Robin Wood, “The Birds,” in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1989), 153, 154.

[162] In his otherwise numbingly faithful adaptation of Harry Potter and

the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Chris Columbus, the director, deviates from

the letter of J. K. Rowling’s text in an early scene that directly

alludes to Hitchcock’s film. Raised by his Aunt and Uncle Dursley,

monsters of normativity (the novel’s first sentence: “Mr. and Mrs.

Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were

perfectly normal, thank you very much” [202]), and led to believe that

his parents were killed in a car crash during his infancy, when, in

fact, they were wizards murdered by the evil Lord Voldemort (a

sinthomosexual no matter what the future volumes in the series may

reveal), young Harry, like Cathy Brenner, finds something left for him

unexpectedly as his eleventh birthday draws near: in Harry’s case, a

letter, which the Dursleys manage to seize and burn before he is able to

read it. This purloined letter, a copy of which, arriving at Privet

Drive the next day, encounters a similar fate, turns into three more the

following day and twelve more after that. The novel, unlike Columbus’s

film, says nothing about the agency by which these letters appear,

though it does provide, by way of allusion, a basis for the filmmaker’s

decision about how that omission should be redressed:

“No post on Sundays,” [Mr. Dursley] reminded them cheerfully as he

spread marmalade on his newspapers. “No damn letters today—” Something

came whizzing down the kitchen chimney a s he spoke and eaught him

sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, thirty or forty letters

came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The Dursleys ducked, but

Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one. (41)

If the letters take the place of the invading sparrows that spill down

the chimney of the Brenner house on the evening of Cathy’s eleventh

birthday, the movie cannily seizes on this to explain their arrival in

the first place. For the director, in a series of interpolated scenes,

shows owls, atypically flying by day, that carry the letters to the

Dursleys’ home and then perch on nearby rooftops and cars as if waiting

for a response. Before the chimney disgorges its multiple missives that

fateful Sunday morning, Harry, catching a glimpse of something

fluttering past the window, draws back the curtain to see what it is. At

just that moment the director, instead of inserting the anticipated shot

depicting Harry’s point of view, cuts to a long shot of Harry seen at

the window, but from its other side, and framed by the Dursleys’ house,

lawn, and car, all covered, like Hitchcock’s jungle gym, by a plethora

of birds. Quotations from J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s

Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1998).

[163] That birthday celebrations are determined by the ideology of

reproductive necessity is underscored by a sentence that appeared, in an

unrelated context, in the pages of the New York Times. Evoking the

genocidal terror enforced by the Khmer Rouge, an article on Cambodian

photography during the years of the Pol Pot regime begins by

differentiating the photographic record left by that dictatorship and

the uses to which photography is normally put in the Western World:

“There are no wedding pictures here. No babies. No birthdays.” Seth

Mydans, “Khmer Rouge Photography: Smiles Were Rare,” New York Times, 24

January 1999, section 4, p.5. The trajectory evoked by this sentence is

that of the organizing (and heterosexually insistent) narrative that

shapes the connection for us between meaning and subjectivity. While

Cathy’s eleventh birthday, then, might be read by some as marking the

onset of sexual maturation (a possibility that would be reinforced by

her desire for lovebirds as a gift), my point is not that this

particular birthday asserts the link between subjectivity and the

reproductive imperative, but rather that birthday rituals as such

perform the indissociability of subjectivity from reproductive futurism.

Put otherwise: birthdays should be understood as marking not only the

date of our birth, but also the rite of birth itself, the celebration of

reproduction.

[164] The vision of the child here is heartening, of course, not only

because it substitutes the “innocent” child for the “lecherous” adult,

thus purging heterosexuality of the taint of sex through a form of

metaleptic reversal in which cause is replaced by effect, but also

because the child, by thus displacing the heterosexual male adult, is

reassuringly heterosexualized even at the moment of this displacement.

[165] In the so-called Final version of the script, Annie Hayworth, when

she admits to Melanie her own unhappy history with Mitch, delivers a

speech, not included in the film, that evokes her commitment to the

children she teaches in Bodega Bay, describing them as the source of

meaning in her life, indeed, as her raison d’être: “I’ll go into that

classroom on Monday morning, and I’ll look out at twenty-five upturned

little faces, and each of them will be saying, ‘Yes, tell me. Yes,

please give me what you have.’ (pause) And I’ll give them what I have. I

haven’t got very much, but I’ll give them every ounce of it. To me,

that’s very important. It makes me want to stay alive for a long long

time.” The Birds, script by Evan Hunter, 26 January 1962, shot sequence

202.

[166] Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred

Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), 474.

[167] Like Melanie Daniels, the woman in the commercial is framed, of

course, as complicit with these aggressive energies of eros; she has,

after all, “provoked” them by using the diet drink the commercial is

selling.

[168] The Music Man, words and lyrics by Meredith Wilson, opened on

Broadway in 1957 and was released as a film in 1962.

[169] Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Joseph

Stefano.

[170] Mrs. Bundy, echoing Norman Bates, says to Melanie in The Tides:

“Birds are not aggressive creatures, Miss. They bring beauty to the

world.” This calls to mind a similar assessment of another airy

creature: “Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty,” as Emory

announces in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1968), 102.

[171] See under “bird” in the Random House Dictionary of the English

Language (second edition, unabridged), definition 4: “Slang. a person,

esp. one having some peculiarity: He’s a queer bird.”

[172] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of

Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 5, 35–78, 151 n. 6; Susan Lurie,

“The Construction of the ‘Castrated’ Woman in Psychoanalysis and

Cinema,” Discourse, no. 4 (winter 1981): 52–74; Slavoj Žižek, “Les

Oiseaux: Le surmoi maternel,” in Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu

savoir sur Lacan sans jamais oser le demander à Hitchcock, ed. Slavoj

Žižek (Paris: Navarin Éditeur, 1988), 197–207. Both Lurie’s and Žižek’s

articles are important interventions in the critical debate around The

Birds. My point is not to diminish their value, but to locate the

heterosexualizing binarism on which the effort to read the filmic text

so frequently finds itself stuck.

[173] Evan Hunter, the screenwriter for The Birds, recalls what happened

when Hitchcock announced his promotional slogan to the advertising staff

at Universal:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “here’s how we’ll announce the movie. Are you

ready?” There was a moment of suspenseful silence, the master at work.

Spreading his hands wide on the air, Hitch said, “The Birds is coming!”

It was pure genius. A seemingly ungrammatical catchphrase that combined

humor and suspense. One of Universal’s young advertising Turks said,

“Excuse me, Mr. Hitchcock, sir?” Hitch turned to him. “Don’t you mean

‘The birds are coming,’ sir?” (Evan Hunter, Me and Hitch (Boston: Faber

and Faber, 1997], 76–77).

[174] Falling from the chimney like dirt or shit, like parodic reversals

of Santa Claus, with his more successfully sublimated gifts, these birds

enact Hitchcock’s phobic fantasy about uncleanliness and waste. The

salesman in The Tides will excoriate birds in general as “messy”

creatures and the metalepsis that reads the birds, the source of waste

that drops from the sky, as a trope of waste themselves (dropping out of

the sky and into visibility in the film), is central to Hitchcock’s

text. Spoofing The Birds in High Anxiety (1977), Mel Brooks understands

this intuitively as he graphically depicts the plague of birds producing

a plague of shit. For a fuller consideration of Hitchcock’s relation to

questions of waste and anality, see my essays “Piss Elegant: Freud,

Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay

Studies 2, nos. 1–2 (1995): 149–177 and “Rear Window‘s Glasshole,” in

Out-Takes: Essays in Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 72–96.

[175] That notion of coming as coming apart will be represented most

clearly in Melanie’s fate. She suffers her psychological breakdown, her

dissociation from symbolic meaning, as a result of her decision to

remain in Bodega Bay for Cathy’s party. Perhaps, in this context, it is

useful to recall the words with which Cathy begged Melanie to stay: “Oh,

won’t you come? Won’t you please come?”

[176] Paul de Man, “Conclusion: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the

Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1986), 92.

[177] De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 268.

[178] By using the term “heterosexualizing” I do not mean to suggest

that these narratives, in any simple, unmediated way, produce the

heterosexual desire within which particular subjects locate their

specific erotic investments; rather, I argue that these narratives

produce heterosexuality as the dominant mode of ideological

self-recognition for heterosexual and nonheterosexual subjects alike.

They set forth the logic that enables the subject to imagine its own

reality, affording a social trajectory that polices the possibilities of

alternative experiences, by establishing a narrative template that

articulates reality as the arenaTor a mandatory movement toward the

subject’s “realization,” a movement that both presupposes and procures a

fundamental allegiance to futurity.

[179] For a superb and profoundly influential analysis of the

anticommunalism of eros, see Leo Bersani’s Homos (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. 151–181.

[180] The sex of a lovebird is so difficult to determine that some

authorities suggest only DNA testing can settle the question with

certainty.

[181] Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism,

117.

[182] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. Scott Moncrieff

and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Modern

Library, 1993), 4:8.

[183] Whatever they might have to say would surely include something

about the status of Jim Crow laws and the integration of American

schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Such a racializing

implication of the birds, however, is specific to this sequence, for the

oddity that prompts Mrs. Bundy to reject the possibility of a “bird war”

is that elsewhere birds of different feathers turn out to be flocking

together (as we see at the end of the film).

[184] Making preparation s to flee the house that has been under siege

by the birds, Mitch turns on the car radio and hears a news report that

ends by asserting: “It appears that the bird attacks come in waves, with

long intervals between. The reason for this does not seem clear as yet.”

[185] Robin Wood, “Retrospective,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall

Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press,

1986), 39–40.

[186] It is surely not insignificant that this sequence ends after

Melanie and Cathy, having rescued a girl knocked down by the ravaging

crows, lead her to the shelter of an unlocked car. Cars and driving have

been, and will be, a recurrent image in the film—the image of the

constancy of drive itself.

[187] Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey

Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 124.

[188] Alan Keyes, The Alan Keyes Show, radio transcript from Friday, 10

July 1998,

http://alankeyes.com/071098.html

[189] Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 73.

[190] Ken Worthy, The Homosexual Generation (New York: L.S.

Publications, 1965), 184.

[191] Fleeing her home at the end of The Birds, Cathy Brenner takes

nothing that belonged to her past but the lovebirds that figured her

future: the lovebirds she dreamed of in her canopied bed before

Hitchcock laid bare the nightmarish ease with which even the sweetest,

the most innocent pecks give way to the brutal aggressiveness of

heartless little peekers. Conveying the lovebirds from house to car in

the cage they must never leave, she bears them across a threshold not,

as we tend to think, between past and future but rather between the

familiar, familial structures futurity rests on and the aversive avian

uncertainties aimed at tearing those structures apart. This act of

transporting or carrying across, evoking the etymology of “metaphor,”

suggests that futurity functions for us precisely as a metaphor: a

transference aiming to master the fearful proximity of what we can’t

know by giving that hole in our knowledge an Imaginary form. But

reproductive futurism, the temporal continuity promised through the

pairing of the lovebirds, is itself, I’ve suggested, the lovebirds’s

cage: the radically circumscribed fantasy space of the always already

known that makes the future the only thing we’re ever permitted to

see—makes it, in fact, the very site from which we see ourselves by

filling up the void of the gaze where the Real, the Symbolic’s hollow

core, threatens to void us, too. Futurism thus casts its investment in

repetition as reproduction, a value it then affirms against the pulsive

iterations of the drive, the narcissistic returns of “sameness,” the

sinthomosexual’s jouissance. Only in the shelter secured by this cage

does reality seem to be seamless, its bars appearing to bar the trauma

of an encounter with the Real. But the Real, as Hitchcock’s film makes

dear, insists nonetheless in the form of the birds that fly in nature ‘s

face, clawing and pecking at the order of forms with its constant

promise of meaning: the birds that even within their cage still carry

the tag of the Real.

Though struck by a gull herself when the children at her party come

under attack, Cathy’s love for the lovebirds—her longing to take them

under her wing—preserves the hope of a future that she must embody no

less than they. By contrast, recall Faulkner’s portrait of the

sinthomosexual as a young boy. Already, at five, under a physician’s

care (“undersized, weak, and with a stomach so delicate that the

slightest deviation from a strict regimen fixed by the doctor would

throw him into convulsions”) and the object of an all-determining

prognosis (“he will never be a man, properly speaking”), Popeye, in

Sanctuary, runs off on the day that a “children’s party,” much like

Cathy’s perhaps, is given on his behalf. (William Faulkner, Sanctuary

The Corrected Text [New York: Vintage Books, 1993], 308).

He flees through a bathroom window but not without first, as Faulkner

pauses to note, leaving something to remember him by: “On the floor lay

a wicker cage in which two lovebirds lived; beside it lay the birds

themselves, and the bloody scissors with which he had cut them up alive”

(309). Rejecting the figural enactment of metaphor by which Cathy

affirms futurity, Popeye puts in the place that he vacates, as a

substitute or trope for himself, the visual image of contiguity,

unmotivated by any necessity: the wicker cage and, “beside it,” the

bloody scissors and lifeless birds.

But even so radical an undoing of metaphor (the spiritualizing relation

whose governing logic of matching, coupling, and generating meaning is

condensed in the mated birds) can no more escape its destined

recuperation as a metaphor for Popeye (or for the sinthomosexual as

such) than his destruction of the lovebirds can prevent his being

associated, metonymically, with birds himsel£ From the outset of the

novel, when he crouches in the bushes as Horace Benbow drinks from the

spring, Popeye’s occulted presence encounters an echo in the scene:

“Somewhere, hidden and secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and

ceased” (4). And when Horace catches a glimpse of Pop eye (“His face had

a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light ... he had

that vicious, depthless quality of stamped tin”), the echo sounds more

insistently: “Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in a monotonous

repetition: a sound meaningless and profound” (4). Like Silas Marner’s

“monotonous craving for [the] monotonous response” of his loom, the

bird’s “monotonous repetition” evokes the machine-like, desubjectivizing

aspect of the sinthomosexual’s jouissance—the antipathy to “natural”

meaning intrinsic, like the bird, to nature itself—that casts a queer

light on Pop eye’s face and marks it with the “vicious, depthless

quality” associated with industrial manufacture and such commodities as

cheap “stamped tin.” Like the stupid or meaningless repetition of sound

in the juxtaposition of “sound” and “profound,” the song of the bird,

and thus Popeye, too, confounds the social order of meaning by

assimilating the value enshrined in “profound,” the depth in which truth

claims to make its home, with its obverse, with everything “depthless”

or “meaningless,” as if—with a nod to “De Profundis,” Wilde’s letter

from Reading Gaol—we suddenly found the fundament at the foundation of

the profound.

Sanctuary focuses on nothing so much as Popeye’s profound implication in

this machinery of de-meaning—unless it’s the specification of sexuality

as the field in which he performs that de-meaning most effectively,

pulling around himself all the more tightly the noose of meaning that

compels him to mean the impediment to meaning’s reproduction. His

repeated association with “viciousness” (“his hat jerked in a dull,

vicious gleam in the twilight” [203]; “Popeye looked about with a sort

of vicious cringing” [204]; “he performed it with a sort of vicious

petulance” [205]) reminds us that “vicious” and “vice” both derive from

vitium, Latin for fault, defect, flaw. But the most titillating flaw to

which the novel alludes, the sexual defect made visible in the “corn-cob

[that] appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint” (283), makes

flesh the fatality, the mindless machinery, with which sinthomosexuality

contaminates the heterogenital making of flesh. While Temple Drake,

Popeye’s victim (“You got a boy’s name, ain’t you?” [206], Reba Rivers

observes), may express her contempt for Popeye’s failure to perform like

a “man” in his assault (“Come on. Touch me. Touch me! You’re a coward if

you dont [sic]” [218]), his unnaturalness seems to enfold her as well

when she imagines, even while Popeye’s hand is “jerking inside her

knickers” (220), that she has become a man herself, endowed with what

the corncob stands for: “Then I thought about being a man, and as soon

as I thought it, it happened. It made a little plopping sound, like

blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward. It felt cold, like the

inside of your mouth when you hold it open. I could feel it, and I lay

right still to keep from laughing about how surprised he was going to

be” (220). But Popeye’s surprise should not be ours insofar as this

hallucinatory change of sex, while accentuating the defectiveness of

Popeye’s masculinity (even Temple is more of a man than he), also

registers the homosexual inflection of sinthomosexuality, the

indissociability of same-sex desire from its threat to reproductive

futurism.

The morbidity that Popeye embodies (even alive he “might well have been

dead” [308]), the Scrooge-like chill of his flesh (“Then it touched me,

that nasty little cold hand, fiddling around inside the coat where I was

naked. It was like alive ice” [218]), the absence of vital force to

which the prosthetic corncob speaks, come together in the

pathos-inducing image for which, at least metonymically, Pop eye must

pay in the end: not the shooting of Tommy, the desecration of Temple, or

the mob violence against Lee Goodwin, but, beyond these, the deathliness

of Ruby’s infant (“never more than half alive” [207]) that signals most

efficiently the danger he portends. Though Popeye, of course, has no

literal responsibility for the illness of the child, he embodies the

“evil” whose outcome the infant’s cadaverous torpor conveys: “It lay in

a sort of drugged immobility, like the children which beggars on Paris

streets carry, its pinched face slick with faint moisture, its hair a

damp whisper of shadow across its gaunt, veined skull, a thin crescent

of white showing beneath its lead-colored eyelids” (116). And Faulkner

reinforces the connection between the sinthomosexual and the destruction

of the child when Benbow plumbs the depths of Pop eye’s “evil” in the

void of a youngster’s eyes, themselves as leaden in death as the

“lead-colored” eyelids of Ruby’s son: “Perhaps it is upon the instant

that we realise [sic], admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil,

that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression he had once seen in

the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation,

the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the

motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature” (221). To which it

seems almost redundant to add: “profoundly,” but also meaninglessly.

The sinthomosexual who stops the world, who exposes the Real in reality

and shatters the totalized significations, all the meanings that

metaphor generates, into the shards of material signifiers only

metonymically linked, destroys, by revealing the promiscuous

conjunctions of signifiers without benefit of marriage, all faith in the

redemptive possibility of their meaning-producing rapport. The thematic

extension of the wound thus inflicted on the viability of any thematics

is the sinthomosexual’s insistence on the lack of a sexual rapport, on

the absence of any natural or instinctive relation between the sexes, of

any complementarity, any access to meaning between them. Incarnating the

impediment to the fantasy of a futurism that’s consecrated to and by the

child conceived as its realization, the sinthomosexual blights both the

child (“He’s going to die” [208], Temple mutters, looking at Ruby’s

sickly son) and the heterosexual couple’s integrity as the synthesis

redeeming Symbolic difference by repressing jouissance. For the

sinthomosexual, like jouissance, makes the sexual relation impossible,

obtruding with the force of the Real on the fantasy of the reciprocal

fulfillment of male and female in the One of the Symbolic couple. This

explains why Reba Rivers, the madam who voices the naturalizing doxa of

heterosexuality (“A young man spending his money like water on girls and

not never going to bed with one. It’s against nature” [255], she

proclaims), rejects Popeye not for murder or rape, but rather for the

sexual parasitism that binds him like a shadow (or the shadow of

something worse) in too intimate a union with other men, thus casting

the shadow of depthlessness, of a meaningless automatism, over them and,

more disturbingly, over (hetero)sexual rapport.

The novel, with the aid of Miss Reba, graphically renders this perverse

relation in the unnatural pairing of Popeye and Red (the prosthetic

corncob come to life—or life reduced to the corncob), whom he brings, to

her horror, into Reba’s house to satisfyTemple’s sexual needs and, in

doing so, Popeye’s as well. “The two of them,” Reba announces to her

friends with regard to Temple and Red, “would be nekkid as snakes, and

Popeye hanging over the foot of the bed without even his hat took off,

making a kind of whinnying sound” (258). Whinnying, jerking, losing

himself in mechanical contortions, Popeye enacts the jouissance

forbidden by, and impossible within, the order of reproduction. This

third who intrudes on the privacy of the Couple, who lurks behind the

straight man’s back, usurps the place of the child to destroy what the

latter is adduced to confirm: the privileged access of heterosexual

coupling to the authenticity of nature itself. Not for nothing does

Benbow’s success in getting Reba to help him learn the truth about

Popeye depend on his willingness to play the trump card of sentimental

futurism: “‘Have you got children?’ She looked at him. ‘I don’t mean to

pry into your affairs,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about that woman.

She’ll be on the streets again, and God only knows what will become of

that baby’” (211).

[192] Quoted in Truffaut, Hitchcock, 297.

[193] Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan

through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 99.

[194] Worthy, The Homosexual Generation, 44.

[195] Not only for his eagle eye where sartorial style is concerned, but

also for his exemplary insights into Hitchcock’s style more generally, I

am delighted to express deep gratitude for my ongoing conversations with

D. A. Miller.

[196] Keyes, The Alan Keyes Show.

[197] Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical

Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,

1978), 218.

[198] De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 225.

[199] De Man, “Conclusion: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the

Translator,’” 92.

[200] Ibid., 96–97.