postmodernism

Edelmen writes that "queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one" (17). In our culture, queerness does not warrant the same amount of respect as heterosexuality. Gay sex is not procreation so it can only crudely be referred to as "fucking." Queerness defies the heteronormativity that is supposed to define our future. The homosexual has strayed somewhere along the road to normalization. With all of the the associations to the death drive, I started thinking about whether the homosexual could be understood as a homo sacer.

Edelman's interpretation of Baudrillard's "The Final Solution"* resonated with what I've read in Baudrillard's book America.

I read Edelman's use of "queer" vs. "gay" as being very distinct, and because it's a pretty important split, I wanted to hear others' opinions about how you allz are reading this. My understanding of "Queer" draws heavily from my understanding of the Lacanian signifying/real space. I don't claim to have a very complete or deep understanding of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, but, I read the act of signifying as being necessarily incomplete, and producing this space of exclusion which is unspeakable and in part unthinkable.

What do you think Haraway et al. would make of this: http://www.communistrobot.com/viewblog.php?id=591?

Not incredibly related to the reading, but perhaps somewhat . . . I just got off the phone with my best friend who graduated from Tufts last spring. Our standard meandering conversation took us a great deal of places, but one I wasn't expecting was to the topic of favorite professors who have made big impacts in our intellectual/identity formation . . . her most memorable prof is Lee Edelman of the Tufts English Department, a.k.a. Lee Edelman of this week's reading.

Edelman did an interesting critique of some very prominent films, but the critique of Scrooge and A Christmas Carol takes the cake for me. I don't know if Dickens was attempting to say anything that Edelman reads into, except for the idea that children are the key to the future. Honestly, I don't know enough about Dickens to know if he was attempting to depict salvation of the death drive through A Christmas Carol, but the setting does not seem right and it looks like by adding his critique unto it Edelman attempts to blur the line between "reality" and reality.

In reading the introductory part of "No Future," I kept thinking about a pop-culture representation of the need to 'Save the Children,' which Edelman lays at the foundation of politics and Western life: the 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaign ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg) in which the little girl counts (incorrectly, nonetheless, which probably was done so as to make her more endearing to viewers) as she picks off petals from a daisy, and then a nuclear bomb blows up.

http://www.newmuseum.org/

I don't quite know what the "New Museum" is, but it makes a reference to rhizomes on the front page, so I figured it most be postmodern. Its a new building in New York and I was just wondering if anyone else had heard anything about it.

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.

I've been thinking about the interesting/shocking issue of the UNC mascot's organs tied up with sacrifice and secrecy. This may be highly tangential, but I thought of a couple of other examples in which bodies are "secretly" donated . . . and perhaps stripped of their zoe and what remains is the remnants of bios (??). Also, this may open up a space between the two deaths I was trying to talk about in class today . . .