Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing [Hardcover]

Long awaited afterNo Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’sBad Educationproposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.USLee Edelman offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape.Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, author ofNo Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and coauthor, with Lauren Berlant, ofSex, or the Unbearable, both also published by Duke University Press.Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xxi
Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism  1
1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar’sBad Education  45
2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint lÓ6