Abstract:Since its publication in 2004, Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive has sparked some of the most heated debates in literary and cultural studies. Yet most engagements with Edelman's text—whether positive, negative, or neutral—tend to resort to paraphrasing and summarizing the book's ideas rather than analyzing its language. Countering this tendency, this essay reexamines No Future and the debates surrounding it in two ways: first, it resituates Edelman's contributions to queer theory in relation to deconstructive theories of rhetoric, irony, and linguistic materiality, unpacking the de Manian strands of No Future that critics have tended to ignore; second, it uses the deconstructive dimensions of Edelman's work to engage in a closer reading of No Future's rhetoric, focusing on the text's ironic use of rhetorical questions. By attending to these overlooked features of No Future, the article demonstrates how Edelman's assertions are insistently tempered by forms of ambiguity, ambivalence, nuance, and irony that challenge critics' dominant conception of the book as intractable and totalizing.

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摘要：自 2004 年出版以来，李·爱德曼 (Lee Edelman) 的《没有未来：酷儿理论与死亡驱动》(No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) 在文学和文化研究中引发了一些最激烈的争论。然而，大多数与爱德曼文本的接触——无论是积极的、消极的还是中性的——倾向于诉诸于解释和总结这本书的想法，而不是分析它的语言。针对这一趋势，本文以两种方式重新审视了《没有未来》及其周围的辩论：首先，它将爱德曼对酷儿理论的贡献与修辞学、反讽和语言物质性的解构理论重新结合起来，解开《没有未来》的德马尼安思潮。批评者往往忽视；其次，它利用爱德曼作品的解构维度来仔细阅读《没有未来》的修辞，重点放在文本上。讽刺性地使用反问句。通过关注《无未来》的这些被忽视的特征，这篇文章展示了爱德曼的断言是如何被模棱两可、矛盾、细微差别和讽刺的形式不断地缓和的，这些形式挑战了评论家认为这本书难以处理和全面的主流观念。