Lee Edelman (Book order)

Lee Edelman Book order

Lee Edelman is a distinguished professor whose work has significantly shaped queer theory. Initially a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry, he evolved into a central figure in the field, exploring the intersections of sexuality, rhetoric, cultural politics, and film. His influential writings have gained international recognition for their deep dives into queer theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic thought. Edelman argues that in a culture obsessed with a 'reproductive futurism,' homosexuality should embrace a potent negativity, a defiance rooted in refusing redemptive futures and instead accepting the inherent unintelligibility and inhumanity of sexuality.

Bad Education

416 pages
15 hours of reading

4.0(5)Add rating

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.