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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, 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.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism 1
1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar'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
