Mourning and Militancy

In a contribution to a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on Displacing Homophobia, Lee Edelman applies the lessons of Derridian deconstruction to the AIDS activist movement slogan Silence=Death. Claiming that our slogan calls for a discourse of facts marshalled against a demagogic rhetoric, Edelman concludes that the equation unknowingly produces the literal as a figure, and thereby betrays its ideological entanglement in the binary logic of Western discourse.