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Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing
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 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.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published December 5, 2022
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306 people want to read
About the author
Lee Edelman
11 books77 followersLee Edelman is a professor and chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and he is currently the Chair of the English Department. He gained international recognition for his books about queer theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies.
Leo Bersani wrote of his most recent book, No Future, "In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of 'reproductive futurism, ' homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality. Edelman's extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument."
Leo Bersani wrote of his most recent book, No Future, "In consistently brilliant theoretical discussions (for the most part, psychoanalytically inspired), as well as in strikingly original readings of Dickens, George Eliot, and Hitchcock, Lee Edelman argues that in a political culture dominated by the sentimental illusions and frequently murderous moral imperatives of 'reproductive futurism, ' homosexuality has been assigned—and should deliberately and defiantly take on—the burden of a negativity at once embedded within and violently disavowed by that culture. The paradoxical dignity of queerness would be its refusal to believe in a redemptive future, its embrace of the unintelligibility, even the inhumanity inherent in sexuality. Edelman's extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 23, 2023
Nothing I can say here will adequately sum up the pleasure that comes in wrestling with this text, in Edelman’s insistence on the negative at every turn, even when many scholars might have taken aim at something more intuitively progressive or positive, as is the case with the turn away from anti-relational queer theory in the wake of queer of color critique. Edelman’s insistence, in following the drive’s pulsion, on negativity’s function makes its point in its very existence as a beautiful book: this is its only positivization, its only sublimation of its constitutive negativity, its only movement from the zero to a one, the book’s beauty and laborious scholarship condensing both the aesthetic education and philosophical knowledge the book sees as positivizations of the negativity of queerness. The final words of the book replicate Pain and Glory’s après-coup in the book’s most poignant positivization, a reminder that an affect of negativity is, too, not-all.
Beautiful, beautiful work that cuts corrosively through knowledge as totality only to dramatize the catachresis it describes. Grateful for Edelman’s dedication to a project this singular.
Beautiful, beautiful work that cuts corrosively through knowledge as totality only to dramatize the catachresis it describes. Grateful for Edelman’s dedication to a project this singular.
May 15, 2024
I have now read this book closely multiple times. I have an article forthcoming that works with Edelman's concept of bad education. This is a brilliant book that I do not find entirely convincing. However, I've tried to document this book's rigor with the following reading notes:
Like No Future, Bad Education is Edelman’s attempt to use Lacanian psychoanalysis and de Manian rhetorical theory to provide a structural understanding of queerness. Arguing that queerness and those who figure as queer are (mis)represented as meaningful, Edelman contends that queerness is a structural lack that undergirds being. Therefore, Edelman propounds a bad education, one which highlights what the Symbolic posits as nothing, as external to being and sense.
The pieces of visual culture that Edelman uses say as much about his work as do the thinkers he exegetes. A movie about a pedophilic priest, another about an allegedly queer couple who terrorizes and murders a suburban family, and histories of runaway friends demonstrate how and why Edelman is not interested in restoring queerness to a pro-social position. Indeed, these perverse examples highlight Edelman’s insistence that queerness is rightly that which is misnamed as a threat to the preservation of meaning and sociality.
Edleman’s preface addresses a fundamental problem of his work: How can one offer a structural theory of queerness as the absence of meaning while neither dismissing contingent political movements who have figured as queer nor suggesting that queer is the only term which is catachrestically named as meaningful? To answer this question, Edelman states that those who figure as that fill in the gaps in the Symbolic, along with their various and attendant contingent political histories, are similar insofar as they are catachrestically designated as meaningful but differ insofar as they do not have the same political histories.
Early in his introduction, Edelman crucially defines education as that which reproduces and passes on “the world of human sense by turning those lacking speech—infans—into subjects of the law. It inculcates not only concepts and values but also the language by which sensory impressions—otherwise fleeting, discontinuous, chaotic—congeal into a universe of entities that are formalized through names” (1). It is this definition of education, a good, proper, and aesthetic education, which Edelman relies on throughout the remainder of his work. Such an education, for Edelman, both makes the nothing that is outside the Symbolic into a something and reproduces the world as sense (3). Unlike a good education, a bad education registers what is unthinkable and foreign to logic and sense. In order to undertake a bad education, Edelman demonstrates, via sustained reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis, that sex is not the process of sense-making, but precisely the opposite. Sex, which is not to be confused with the historical act of sex, is the unbearable encounter with the Real that ‘short-circuits the totalizing comprehension that solidifies a world’ (9). Through careful engagement with Catherine Malabou and Frank Wilderson, Edelman demonstrates how these philosophers associate, respectively, the women and the Black person, with an ontological impossibility that is anxiously and paranoically addressed through a recourse to violence on people who figure as Black and women. However, Edelman disagrees with how Malabou and Wilderson alike take the position of the women and the Black person as distinctive manifestations of the Real, as manifestations of the Real without analogy. Edelman argues that the while the political histories of those who figure as Black and women are without analogy, they are similar to other terms, such as queer, which also figure as meaningful (mis)representation of what is absent of sense and meaning. Or, in Edelman’s own words, Malabou and Wilderson “each tend to return to a substantive identity as the locus of ontological exclusion” (22). This discussion leads Edelman into reflection on the nonplace, the atopia, that queerness occupies. Reading Socrates’ irony as a folding of meaning over into itself as an atopia that undoes the social order and the philosophies constructed to make sense of that social order. Edelman argues that Plato’s philosophy of Socrates is a failed attempt at bringing the jouissance of Socrates’ atopia back into philosophy. Socrates and Lacan alike were exiled from philosophy for their refusal to provide a good education; it was the two’s corruption of the youth and refusal to acknowledge the gods of their day which resulted in their willing exile from the world of a good education.
Edelman’s first chapter, “Learning Nothing,” begins by asking “is teaching inseparable from the fantasy-logic of reproductive futurism” (45). To answer this question, Edelman exegetes Schiller’s aesthetic education as one that educates the human through a cultivation of beauty. Schiller’s classroom is one that reinforces the marriage between the mind and the world, it is an education that strives to efface internal ruptures of incoherence. Through a close and lengthy reading of Almodóvar’s film, Bad Education, Edelman argues that the film figural representation of sex through homosexuality, gender mobility, and pederastic desire, denote “a constitutive gap in knowledge around which the world takes shape” (79). The film, for Edelman, is less a meditation on pedastric desire and victimhood and more a meditation on the limit experience that is the impossible encounter with the zero’s negativity before its reconversion in a one—a limit experience of jouissance. However, such experiences are incessantly allegorized and reintroduced into sense. And a bad education, one that ironically undoes meaning, is in constant retreat into allegory—a bad education is forced to be good.
Through a reading of Hamlet, Edelman’s second chapter is an admonishment to not heed the pedagogical-archival demand to preserve and pass on knowledge. Archives, Edelman argues, are the materialization of the social’s attempt to itself remembered into the future. Edelman critiques Derrida’s argument that archives bespeak a messianic impulse in which a future different than the present is always a-venir. This messianicity without messianism, for Edelman, however, “compels the choice of life over death, of a conservative rhetoric of futurism over the radical event of the Real” (110). Against Derrida’s messianic futurism, Edelman proffers a non-evolutionary model in favor of the death drive as creation ex nihilo, as that which entirely breaks with the archive.
After a brief reflection on de Man’s argument that literary theory is not fitting to maintain the future of institutionalized literary studies, Edelman begins to exegete how philosophers from Kant to Badiou have thought and repudiated a notion of radical evil. Evil, in this instance, “pertains to its violation of a collective economy of meaning” (127). Crucially, Edelman does not insist that what is constituted as radical evil is derivative of the degree to which the act empirically represents evil, but as an a priori status that exists antagonizes a given system of representations. Edelman illustrates how Badiou, quite unlike the earlier definition of evil, locates evil as a second order of truth. Charting how jouissance, for Lacan, is the unfurling of evil as a death drive, as that which undoes the symbolic order of meaning, Edelman demonstrates how evil is internal to a system of representation. Otherwise put, the gaps of radically evil in the Symbolic are contingently misnamed as queerness, Black, terrorist, inter alia. This notion of evil leads Edelman into a reading of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Though Haneke’s film ironically and satirically undoes the genres of slasher films and home invasions of the Family, his vision of education reconstitutes and restores the aesthetic and ethical values that it undermines. The young home invaders enact a death drive internal to the social order they embody and inhabit. Though Haneke does allegorize his film into an ethical and aesthetic register, Edelman claims that “Reading, analysis, and interpretation all seek to redeem that violence [of the film] through allegorical unveiling, itself the labor of sublimation. That is what meaning means. But the insistence of that violence expresses the queerness of the negativity we view as evil: the violent negativity of the enjoyment to which the subject as such is chained and from which it succeeds in escaping only as Georg, Anna, and Schorschi do” (161).
Edelman’s target of critique in his fourth chapter are proponents of the aesthetic’s pro-social capabilities. Noting how such proponents insist upon the aesthetic’s ability to cultivate pro-social changes in behaviors and thought, Edelman argues on behalf of the legacy of critique and suspicion. To do this, Edelman returns to Lacan’s The Thing as that which eludes aesthetic intelligibility and constitutes an insurmountable, originary division in sociality. Against those who see an aesthetic education as one in which a shared universality is recognized, Edelman insists the opposite: the aesthetic is itself an identity politics. Edelman then importantly shifts into the argument that sustains the remainder of the chapter: “we should also consider the injustice done to those excluded from the realm of being, those figured as its negation to defend the concept of aesthetic totality against its own inherent antagonism. These are the queer, the Black, the monstrous, the alien, the irrational, the nonhuman in all its various iterations, and they include, as Harriet Jacobs makes clear in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, those persons who, though acknowledged as “beautiful,” belong to a cate- gory whose negation defines and sustains aesthetic community” (176). As a scholar of religious literature, I was fascinated to find that Edelman locates Jacobs within a tradition of antinomian heretics who claim a law above the law of the world (179-182). Such antinomianism, whether reactionary or abolitionist, is a libidinal indulgence of radical enjoyment. However, Jacobs (and F. Douglass, too) side with a moral education in which reason triumphs over desire. As such, Edleman’s remarks on the law, antinomianism, and freedom consummate in a wonderfully provocative sentence: “Philosophy’s identification of freedom with reason’s domination of desire presupposes a desire for freedom that reason alone can secure” (191). Enjoyment, even when refused, remains omnipresent. A bad education, for Edelman, does not preach the triumph of reason over desire, but becomes responsible for irresponsibly undoing the reason of philosophy.
Edelman’s final chapter, “Coda,” Edelman focuses on misreadings of No Future that turn nonbeing into identity, the zero’s sublimation into a one. Edelman does in reference to thinkers akin to Hegel and Schiller who posit that art mediates and unifies the ideal with beauty.
Like No Future, Bad Education is Edelman’s attempt to use Lacanian psychoanalysis and de Manian rhetorical theory to provide a structural understanding of queerness. Arguing that queerness and those who figure as queer are (mis)represented as meaningful, Edelman contends that queerness is a structural lack that undergirds being. Therefore, Edelman propounds a bad education, one which highlights what the Symbolic posits as nothing, as external to being and sense.
The pieces of visual culture that Edelman uses say as much about his work as do the thinkers he exegetes. A movie about a pedophilic priest, another about an allegedly queer couple who terrorizes and murders a suburban family, and histories of runaway friends demonstrate how and why Edelman is not interested in restoring queerness to a pro-social position. Indeed, these perverse examples highlight Edelman’s insistence that queerness is rightly that which is misnamed as a threat to the preservation of meaning and sociality.
Edleman’s preface addresses a fundamental problem of his work: How can one offer a structural theory of queerness as the absence of meaning while neither dismissing contingent political movements who have figured as queer nor suggesting that queer is the only term which is catachrestically named as meaningful? To answer this question, Edelman states that those who figure as that fill in the gaps in the Symbolic, along with their various and attendant contingent political histories, are similar insofar as they are catachrestically designated as meaningful but differ insofar as they do not have the same political histories.
Early in his introduction, Edelman crucially defines education as that which reproduces and passes on “the world of human sense by turning those lacking speech—infans—into subjects of the law. It inculcates not only concepts and values but also the language by which sensory impressions—otherwise fleeting, discontinuous, chaotic—congeal into a universe of entities that are formalized through names” (1). It is this definition of education, a good, proper, and aesthetic education, which Edelman relies on throughout the remainder of his work. Such an education, for Edelman, both makes the nothing that is outside the Symbolic into a something and reproduces the world as sense (3). Unlike a good education, a bad education registers what is unthinkable and foreign to logic and sense. In order to undertake a bad education, Edelman demonstrates, via sustained reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis, that sex is not the process of sense-making, but precisely the opposite. Sex, which is not to be confused with the historical act of sex, is the unbearable encounter with the Real that ‘short-circuits the totalizing comprehension that solidifies a world’ (9). Through careful engagement with Catherine Malabou and Frank Wilderson, Edelman demonstrates how these philosophers associate, respectively, the women and the Black person, with an ontological impossibility that is anxiously and paranoically addressed through a recourse to violence on people who figure as Black and women. However, Edelman disagrees with how Malabou and Wilderson alike take the position of the women and the Black person as distinctive manifestations of the Real, as manifestations of the Real without analogy. Edelman argues that the while the political histories of those who figure as Black and women are without analogy, they are similar to other terms, such as queer, which also figure as meaningful (mis)representation of what is absent of sense and meaning. Or, in Edelman’s own words, Malabou and Wilderson “each tend to return to a substantive identity as the locus of ontological exclusion” (22). This discussion leads Edelman into reflection on the nonplace, the atopia, that queerness occupies. Reading Socrates’ irony as a folding of meaning over into itself as an atopia that undoes the social order and the philosophies constructed to make sense of that social order. Edelman argues that Plato’s philosophy of Socrates is a failed attempt at bringing the jouissance of Socrates’ atopia back into philosophy. Socrates and Lacan alike were exiled from philosophy for their refusal to provide a good education; it was the two’s corruption of the youth and refusal to acknowledge the gods of their day which resulted in their willing exile from the world of a good education.
Edelman’s first chapter, “Learning Nothing,” begins by asking “is teaching inseparable from the fantasy-logic of reproductive futurism” (45). To answer this question, Edelman exegetes Schiller’s aesthetic education as one that educates the human through a cultivation of beauty. Schiller’s classroom is one that reinforces the marriage between the mind and the world, it is an education that strives to efface internal ruptures of incoherence. Through a close and lengthy reading of Almodóvar’s film, Bad Education, Edelman argues that the film figural representation of sex through homosexuality, gender mobility, and pederastic desire, denote “a constitutive gap in knowledge around which the world takes shape” (79). The film, for Edelman, is less a meditation on pedastric desire and victimhood and more a meditation on the limit experience that is the impossible encounter with the zero’s negativity before its reconversion in a one—a limit experience of jouissance. However, such experiences are incessantly allegorized and reintroduced into sense. And a bad education, one that ironically undoes meaning, is in constant retreat into allegory—a bad education is forced to be good.
Through a reading of Hamlet, Edelman’s second chapter is an admonishment to not heed the pedagogical-archival demand to preserve and pass on knowledge. Archives, Edelman argues, are the materialization of the social’s attempt to itself remembered into the future. Edelman critiques Derrida’s argument that archives bespeak a messianic impulse in which a future different than the present is always a-venir. This messianicity without messianism, for Edelman, however, “compels the choice of life over death, of a conservative rhetoric of futurism over the radical event of the Real” (110). Against Derrida’s messianic futurism, Edelman proffers a non-evolutionary model in favor of the death drive as creation ex nihilo, as that which entirely breaks with the archive.
After a brief reflection on de Man’s argument that literary theory is not fitting to maintain the future of institutionalized literary studies, Edelman begins to exegete how philosophers from Kant to Badiou have thought and repudiated a notion of radical evil. Evil, in this instance, “pertains to its violation of a collective economy of meaning” (127). Crucially, Edelman does not insist that what is constituted as radical evil is derivative of the degree to which the act empirically represents evil, but as an a priori status that exists antagonizes a given system of representations. Edelman illustrates how Badiou, quite unlike the earlier definition of evil, locates evil as a second order of truth. Charting how jouissance, for Lacan, is the unfurling of evil as a death drive, as that which undoes the symbolic order of meaning, Edelman demonstrates how evil is internal to a system of representation. Otherwise put, the gaps of radically evil in the Symbolic are contingently misnamed as queerness, Black, terrorist, inter alia. This notion of evil leads Edelman into a reading of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Though Haneke’s film ironically and satirically undoes the genres of slasher films and home invasions of the Family, his vision of education reconstitutes and restores the aesthetic and ethical values that it undermines. The young home invaders enact a death drive internal to the social order they embody and inhabit. Though Haneke does allegorize his film into an ethical and aesthetic register, Edelman claims that “Reading, analysis, and interpretation all seek to redeem that violence [of the film] through allegorical unveiling, itself the labor of sublimation. That is what meaning means. But the insistence of that violence expresses the queerness of the negativity we view as evil: the violent negativity of the enjoyment to which the subject as such is chained and from which it succeeds in escaping only as Georg, Anna, and Schorschi do” (161).
Edelman’s target of critique in his fourth chapter are proponents of the aesthetic’s pro-social capabilities. Noting how such proponents insist upon the aesthetic’s ability to cultivate pro-social changes in behaviors and thought, Edelman argues on behalf of the legacy of critique and suspicion. To do this, Edelman returns to Lacan’s The Thing as that which eludes aesthetic intelligibility and constitutes an insurmountable, originary division in sociality. Against those who see an aesthetic education as one in which a shared universality is recognized, Edelman insists the opposite: the aesthetic is itself an identity politics. Edelman then importantly shifts into the argument that sustains the remainder of the chapter: “we should also consider the injustice done to those excluded from the realm of being, those figured as its negation to defend the concept of aesthetic totality against its own inherent antagonism. These are the queer, the Black, the monstrous, the alien, the irrational, the nonhuman in all its various iterations, and they include, as Harriet Jacobs makes clear in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, those persons who, though acknowledged as “beautiful,” belong to a cate- gory whose negation defines and sustains aesthetic community” (176). As a scholar of religious literature, I was fascinated to find that Edelman locates Jacobs within a tradition of antinomian heretics who claim a law above the law of the world (179-182). Such antinomianism, whether reactionary or abolitionist, is a libidinal indulgence of radical enjoyment. However, Jacobs (and F. Douglass, too) side with a moral education in which reason triumphs over desire. As such, Edleman’s remarks on the law, antinomianism, and freedom consummate in a wonderfully provocative sentence: “Philosophy’s identification of freedom with reason’s domination of desire presupposes a desire for freedom that reason alone can secure” (191). Enjoyment, even when refused, remains omnipresent. A bad education, for Edelman, does not preach the triumph of reason over desire, but becomes responsible for irresponsibly undoing the reason of philosophy.
Edelman’s final chapter, “Coda,” Edelman focuses on misreadings of No Future that turn nonbeing into identity, the zero’s sublimation into a one. Edelman does in reference to thinkers akin to Hegel and Schiller who posit that art mediates and unifies the ideal with beauty.
November 8, 2024
This is a very difficult book, in several senses of the word. I believe that if you read this book slowly, carefully, attentively, even cautiously, and if you understand at least 70% of the argument it makes, it may well have the capacity to permanently complicate your life. It will sit like a devil on your shoulder if you take its claims seriously. If you finish this book without it altering the way you make sense of the world, I would go so far as to claim that you have not really understood it.
Perhaps the book’s greatest irony (and one which it fully takes into account) is that its exposé of the unavoidable misnaming and allegorization of negativity, in offering critical tools for identifying and anatomizing these misnomers, ultimately gives the charitable reader an uneasy sense of “enlightenment.”
Perhaps the book’s greatest irony (and one which it fully takes into account) is that its exposé of the unavoidable misnaming and allegorization of negativity, in offering critical tools for identifying and anatomizing these misnomers, ultimately gives the charitable reader an uneasy sense of “enlightenment.”
November 11, 2025
Preface, intro
Want to read
September 30, 2024306.760 Ede
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