Jouissance, as Edelman explains, is a movement beyond pleasure and pain, "a voyage beyond identity, meaning, and law." (25) This got me to thinking that what exactly lays beyond "identity, meaning, and law?" I came to the same answer Edelman did one paragraph later, which is the obvious theme of at least the first chapter, death. Now looking at it from just a singular, metaphysical perspective, and not with the attached meaning and context of No Future, the interesting part of that thought comes in the first clause of the sentence "beyond pleasure and pain"; death is all that exists beyond pleasure and pain. Is that all that lives outside of pleasure and pain for us? Is there anything that lives beyond pleasure and pain? Taxes maybe. Or love. Any ideas.
On a completely unrelated note, on page 22, Edelman strings together feminists, queers, and pro-life supporters as those that are motivated by the death drive and against children. Using his ideas as the backdrop, I don't see how feminists fit into that category. They don't break from the heterosexual normative of society; they break from the patriarchal norms of society. Feminism, in its true sense, supports equality and freedoms for everyone which would seem to spur on futurism, the idea that everyone is born equal with an equal chance to prosper. If queerness is very much associated with death, then a group that looks towards improving the future can't be focused on death? And that got me to thinking: understand Edelman's argument concerning queerness, but wouldn't it more appropriate to equate it with the present over death? No one, as in any person, ever wants to die, so if queerness isn't associated with the "future", in the form of children, would the present be the next alternative, not death?
If I am off base here let me know.
I think pain and pleasure, apart from its physical/literal definition, is an abstract thought that has been constructed socially; therefore, there is indeed nothing that exists out of it because everything has been put into one or the other category.
So I agree with Edelman on the fact that what lies outside of pain and pleasure is death. If you don't live and participate in this world that has created this meaning, then you are dead. Simple as that.
I think you make a good point about feminism. I agree that it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the concepts that he has connected together. I'm a bit confused with your concluding sentences, so I can't comment further.
The taxes thing is pretty funny, btw. But in all seriousness, I don't know if it's necessarily that productive to try and take this out of context; it's just me but my reading was so heavily shaded by Edelman's incorporation of Lacanian signifying topology that I didn't really see it as that helpful. I read him as saying that death isn't 'what's outside' "identity, meaning, and law", but that death represents an outside to reproductive futurism in the same way that Lacan's "real" is what's left behind and unspeakable/unthinkable in the act of signification. So just a comparison to help advance his politico-linguistic-ideology thesis about queerness and reproductive futurism.