Questions of futurity and utopia have become prominent in queer studies, a prominence evident in the discussion surrounding Lee Edelman’s book No Future, and perhaps especially in José Muñoz’s recent response, Cruising Utopia. This presentation will consider the relation between two deployments of the figure of the child: Edelman’s in No Future, and Adorno’s in Minima Moralia. In Edelman, childhood figures a certain relation to the future; in Adorno, childhood figures a certain relation to the past. In a situation in which the future may seem identical to the present, may seem fully colonized by capital – even or especially as the colonization of the future by financial speculation has, of late, dramatically stumbled – how do we think a different future, how do we think the future’s non-identity with the present, from a queer point of view? Reading Edelman and Adorno together – a reading Edelman invites by drawing on Adorno for some of his key terms, especially the term non-identity – suggests that we might begin by revisiting the Marxian distinction between history and time.
