I'm not sure how I feel about Edelman's use of Baudrillard, especially the sentence "And all this [the human race slipping into the void] because (heterosexual) sex has "become extraneous, a useless function"" (65). First, I read Baudrillard as opposing two types of death: the death of the individual versus a second death, which is really more like deathlessness, that comes from identicality. Baudrillard's distinction echoes the Aristotelian distinction between humans, who are unique and hence mortal, or mortal and hence unique, and animals, which are identical, and consequently treated as a species of 'deathless things'. Consequently, Baudrillard can say things like simulacra cannot die because they've already been purged of their own death.
Edelman writes that Baudrillard embraces (individual) death in opposition to the death (that is really deathlessness) that would come from 'endless iterations of the same' (65). This is pretty on-key with my reading of Baudrillard. He then says that the 'endless iterations of the same' is traditionally associated with queerness and the death drive. At first, I wanted to say that in fact uniqueness, as the precondition of death (in the first sense) would be associated with the death-drive. However, and this is my first problem, it seems that it is in fact associated with sameness, as Edelman shows with his Freud quotation. This is borne out in Baudrillard, when he says cloning could only be the product of the death drive (96). (I guess when he equates sex with death on the next pagehe is using death in the first sense.) Anyway, conceding that sameness=the death drive=queerness and chalking my confusion so far up to my ignorance of Freud, then what to make of lines such as, "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 to assure repetition"(60). In the next line, Edelman writes that this repetition is conducted under the banner of a love of the Other, which seems to help, but then queerness just seems to be disillusioned futurism qua endless iterations of the same. I guess my question comes down to the extent to which queerness/death-drive is getting treated as the second form of death -endless iterations of the same, which seems to be the case by chapter two - and the extent to which it is getting treated as death in the sense of an end of the social order, that is, no more children. These two positions don't seem at all compatible, but maybe I just don't really understand the Freudian death-drive…