Bad Education Edelman

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing BadEducation

Lee Edelman

December 416 pages, 105 color illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1862-9 $29.95/£22.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1597-0 $109.95/£88.00

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.

Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing LEE EDELMAN

“Bad Education demonstrates, with a rare combination of philosophical rigor, lucidity, and eloquence, how Lee Edelman has initiated a new mode of thinking queerness and the human. In this landmark work, Edelman’s analysis of the ‘catachreses of ab-sens’ stands apart from most analyses of queerness—in its breadth and ambition, but also in its challenge to the liberationist pedagogies of sex, race, and knowledge. Whether ‘queerness teaches us nothing’ or not, Bad Education invites new ways of thinking about the lesson that queerness presents.”—DAVID MARRIOTT, author of Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being

“Bad Education is a remarkable achievement of scholarship, rhetoric, and political acumen. I am captivated by the precision of Lee Edelman’s argument, the scope of the texts he analyzes, and the brilliance of his writing. Arriving at exactly the right time, this is a major scholarly advancement, dazzlingly delivered.” —ELIZABETH A. WILSON, author of Gut Feminism

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 “absens” 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.

THEORY Q A series edited by Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, Benjamin Kahan, and Christina Sharpe

Also by Lee Edelman

Sex, or the Unbearable with Lauren Berlant

paper, $23.95/£17.99 978-0-8223-5594-6 / 2013

No Future Queer Theory and the Death Drive