No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Lee Edelman's new book is not principally a work of film studies. Nonetheless, there are several reasons why this brilliantly argued and overtly polemical book should be brought to the attention of the film studies community. In the first place, the final two of the book's four chapters present bravura readings of Hitchcock, with chapter three devoted to an analysis of only the final minutes of North by Northwest (1959), and chapter four to a reading of The Birds (1963). (These chapters, one might note parenthetically, represent an exciting culmination of over a decade of work Edelman has produced on Hitchcock and on other canonical texts of classical Hollywood cinema, which have appeared variously in journals and collections). Secondly, Edelman's book elaborates a new way of conceiving the relationship between critical theory (and especially, a revitalized psychoanalysis), cultural studies, and film studies. Finally, there is the "queer theory" of the book's subtitle: Edelman's book doesn't just show us what a queer reading practice should look like -for, after all, film studies has had well over a decade of work engaged in queering the canon -but more importantly, shows us the profound stakes in such reading practices, insisting that they are charged with a radical ethical injunction, beyond any comforting dream of "assimilation".