No God, No Future: Lee Edelman’s Queer Secularity

This paper revisits a canonical text of queer theory, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and argues that this book has been misunderstood insofar as it has not been received as theorizing the secular. Taking No Future as a work of philosophy of religion in the sense that, like much work in philosophy of religions over the past two decades, it attempts to expose the religious genealogy of Western secular modernity, the paper puts this book into conversation with philosophy of religion and religious studies more broadly. This conversation affords a fresh reading of Edelman’s familiar critique of “reproductive futurism” alert to its intersections with such themes and discourses of philosophy of religion as political theology, aura, the post-secular turn, and messianism/messianicity.