Matthew 10:34-36 has long been read either as a description of the worldly consequences of choosing to follow Jesus or evidence that Jesus was far more revolutionary than has been commonly thought. I will side with the second group of readers, but I hope to do so in a way that fleshes out the sort of revolutionary the Matthean Jesus was, as well as what exactly he was trying to revolutionize. I will do so with the help of queer theorist Lee Edelman (and, by association, to Jacques Lacan as well). In his celebrated book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman argues that our culture is driven by a reproductive futurism focused on the figure of the “Child.” This Child, situated in the future, is the focal point of discourses of heteronormative progress (“We need to do this for the children;” “What kind of world will our children inherit?”). By making the Child the telos of our striving, the culture of reproduction that engenders children is both privileged and protected, and the emptiness at the heart of the signifier, within whose economy this preference is played out, is denied. The future-fixed present actually ends up being rooted in an Imaginary, mythical past whose influence yields a vision of tomorrow that only renders the present reiterative.
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