Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes 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, Almodovar, 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.
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and coauthor, with Lauren Berlant, of Sex, 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 AlmodOvar's Bad Education 45 2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That's Out of Joint 93 3. Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke's Aesthetic Education 123 4. There Is No Freedom to Enjoy: Harriet Jacobs's Negativity 162 Coda: Nothing Gained: Irony, Incest, Indiscernibility 207 Notes 261 Bibliography 317 Index 333
"This intervention is provocative in its paradoxes. . . . Bad Education thus poses a stunning criticism of all that 'is' by commanding a radical (re)turn to a deeply radical Lacan." - Dylan Lackey (Invisible Culture) "Bad Education expands on Edelman's widely influential claims in No Future, clarifying his framework and answering his critics. . . . Edelman doubles down on abstraction while engaging deeply with the work of recent Afro-pessimist critics. Refusing the charge that by pitching his argument at the level of structure rather than social reality he has disregarded race, Edelman instead argues that Blackness, like queerness, should be apprehended primarily as structure." - Heather Love (Critical Inquiry) "Edelman's best work, and, even among other works of provocatively imagined, carefully argued, high-octane theory, Bad Education is a masterpiece. ... [It] helps us begin to see how the intellectual work happening under the banner of queer theory in 2023 really has changed." - Jordan Alexander Stein (American Literary History) "Demanding and dazzling . . . indeed a beautiful book." - Maral Attar-Zadeh (The Cambridge Review)
