3. Back to the Future

Unanimously recognized as the founder of antisocial queer theories, Bersani is also the first to attest to their political untenability. Those who would like to more consistently pursue the path he has laid out must thus be willing to risk renouncing politics. Lee Edelman, as I have mentioned, is the one who has expanded on this. In launching a radical attack on the communal sense of LGBTQIA movements, Edelman shields himself by using the criticism against political planning developed by the young Hocquenghem, from whom, in his time, a thankless Foucault also drew.¹ The goal of the following pages is to test the resistance of this defensive tool, or, better yet, to investigate whether or not this defense is more of a boomerang than a shield. It is in fact true that in the seventies, Hocquenghem rejected the “futurist” rhetoric of planning and waiting, but his intention was not to abstain from politics: to the contrary, he expressed the “anal” impatience of an action that needed immediate execution. And while he did reject the bourgeois-capitalist society as well as the proletariat-communist one, he did not repudiate every form of sociality. I predict, therefore, that it is a boomerang that not only returns where it once began, but leads us even further back—not in space: in time.