Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

by Lee Edelman

Published by: Duke University Press Books

Series: Theory Q

Imprint: Duke University Press

Sales Date: 2023-01-27

Paperback

CA$37.95
Hardcover

CA$136.95

Published: January 2023

Product Details

Imprint: Duke University Press

Series: Series: Theory Q

Page Count: 368 Pages

Illustrations: 105 illustrations

Dimensions: 152.00 x 228.00

368 Pages, 152.00 x 228.00 x 0.90 in, 105 illustrations

Paperback

CA$37.95

ISBN: 9781478018629

Quantity

In Stock

Add To Cart

Add to Wishlist

Description
Authors
Contents
Reviews

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.

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 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

"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

Books

Authors

Journals

On The Site

Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

Related Books