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Out of the throng of voices crowding current debates on the politics of gay marriage, gay parenting, abortion and child pornography, Edelman's arises with singular force. No Future makes no explicit claim to be an “intervention” in current debates, though. Instead Edelman goes directly to the most unquestioned value of our culture - that of “the Child” in whose name queer people have been vilified and denied rights across a range of cultural and historical contexts. The Child, Edelman explains, figures an endlessly redemptive promise; redemption, that is, for a political present that can never attain fullness of meaning without this figure of the Child standing in for the promise of future plenitude. In this politically coercive dynamic, which Edelman names “reproductive futurism”, the Child represents the promise of future plenitude while excluding those who are thought to reject this imagined “future.” In overturning this last sacred cow Edelman also puts forward a radical, and psychoanalytically inspired definition of the political. Placing the political subject onto the Lacanian couch, he reminds us that the sexual and the political cannot and should not be thought separately.
No Future draws heavily on Lacanian theory, along with post-structuralist literary theory and cultural studies, to critique the reproductive futurism at the heart of all cultural discourse concerned with the political. For this reason, Edelman's critique looks to a wide range of cultural products: billboards, musicals, high literature, popular literature, Hitchcock films, and critical theory (namely the work of Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard). Some of his more developed cultural analyses focus on popular culture figures such as Little Orphan Annie, Peter Pan and Harry Potter, while also touching on high culture figures such as Antigone and Silas Marner, which makes for an often entertaining read. His most compelling readings are of two Hitchcock films, North by Northwest and The Birds.