Description: Lee Edelman offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape.
Review Quotes: "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