Bad Education

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 AlmodOvar'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) "Demanding and dazzling . . . indeed a beautiful book." - Maral Attar-Zadeh (The Cambridge Review)