Queer Theory & Futurism

[Mark Kohut]

you will recall that marinetti's futurism is savaged big time in AtD...

--- On Sat, 2/20/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Queer Theory & Futurism
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, February 20, 2010, 10:40 AM
> On this day in 1909 the Italian poet
> F. T. Marinetti published his
> "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" in the Paris
> newspaper, Le
> Figaro. This is regarded as the birth of the Futurist
> movement, which
> in radical or watered-down ways had a significant influence
> on modern
> art and literature, and on modern communications theorists
> such as
> Marshall McLuhan. The Futurist movement celebrated the
> techno-discord
> it saw on the horizon -- the rush of cars, the collapse of
> community,
> the shock of new and now. Although it derided Romantic
> nostalgia,
> Marinetti's preamble to the Manifesto could get lyrical:
> 
> http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/20/2010
> 
> Book Review - No Future: Queer Theory And The Death Drive
> (Queer
> Theory/Cultural Studies)
> 
> In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically
> uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target
> is the
> all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the
> linchpin of
> our universal politics of "reproductive futurism." Edelman
> argues that
> the child, understood as innocence in need of protection,
> represents
> the possibility of the future against which the queer is
> positioned as
> the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial,
> and
> future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy
> of
> queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this
> refusal of the
> social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges
> queers to
> abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their
> status as
> figures for the force of a negativity that he links with
> irony,
> jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.
> 
> Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a
> compelling case
> for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner
> without little
> Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces
> two of the
> director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard
> of North by
> Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple
> precariously
> above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The
> Birds, with
> their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach
> of
> contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear
> not only on
> works of literature and film but also on such current
> political
> flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing
> down the
> theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a
> passion
> certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its
> readers.
> 
> http://up_yours.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_up_yours_archive.html
>