Lee Edelman’s Lesson
Reclaiming critical theory as Bad Education
Samuel P. Catlin
Something is rotten in the state of Florida.
On March 15, 2023, Samuel Joeckel, a professor of English at the private Christian institution Palm Beach Atlantic University (PBAU), publicly announced that he had been informed his contract would not be renewed, as it reliably had been for the preceding twenty years. (All faculty at PBAU are contract workers, as the university does not offer tenure.) The decision followed a review process initiated one month earlier, when university administrators investigated class materials for a unit Joeckel regularly teaches on racial justice. The instigating incident for the review, the administrators told him, was a complaint the university had received, alleging that Joeckel’s lessons constituted “indoctrination.” But Joeckel had been teaching the unit in question for years, so why was this complaint—the first he had received about the course—only aired that winter?
One readily apparent answer has to do with the political context in which these events occurred. Under the Republican governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s educational system is suffering sustained political assault. Colleges and universities have come under particular fire, owing to a long history of conservative fears, some genuinely felt and some cynically rehearsed, about the political biases of professors and students alike.[1] On February 21—less than one week after Joeckel was notified his contract was under review—the Florida House of Representatives introduced CS/HB 999, a bill amending the state statutes to require the discontinuation, at any institution receiving any state funding, of “any major or minor that is based on or otherwise utilizes pedagogical methodology associated with Critical Theory, including, but not limited to, Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.” It’s easy enough to see that the political climate is weighted against Joeckel here. The complainant, we may speculate, was likely emboldened by a state government loudly broadcasting its intention to impose and enforce conservative ideological conformity in higher education. But who was that complainant? As the PBAU administration informed Joeckel, it was a parent of one of his students.
Since college students are, generally speaking, adults, it is critical that we be very clear about what this means: a casualized academic worker lost his job, allegedly because a parent complained to the institution, itself under political pressure from the highest levels of state government, concerning the content of lessons the worker taught to that parent’s adult offspring. We do not know what the student thinks and feels about racial justice or Joeckel’s way of teaching about it. And, in a sense, it doesn’t really matter what the student thinks or feels; the student does not matter. Remarkably, after over a decade of escalating panics over the mediatized figure of “the problem student”—a “constellation of related figures,” the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes, incorporating “the consuming student, the censoring student, the over-sensitive student, and the complaining student”—the student has dropped out of the imagined university where campus culture wars are waged. There is effectively no student in this story. There is only a parent, a teacher, an employer, and the representatives of state power.
*
Or, rather, there is a student in this story, but this student is not a subject—not yet. The student, here, is an object of fantasy, one defined precisely by its not yet having become a subject. Far from Ahmed’s notion of the excessively willful “problem student,” the student is not just a figure of minority—contradicting college students’ legal status as adults—but also, and in quite a technical sense, a figure of innocence: the student has no desires of its own, no identity of its own, no agency of its own. What is at stake—besides, and let us not lose sight of this completely, Joeckel’s livelihood and academic freedom—is the question of what type of subject the student will someday become, when it is allowed to become a subject. When it is allowed, that is, to grow up. “The student” here names an object of custodial, political, ideological, and finally libidinal contestation between parent, teacher, employer, state. In short, the student is the Child.
Here I’m following Lee Edelman’s argument in his 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman argues that the Child is a construction of what Jacques Lacan calls the Symbolic order—“the network of signifying relations that forms . . . the register of the speaking subject and the order of the law.” The Child, Edelman writes, functions phantasmatically as a figure for “the telos of the social order . . . the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust.”[2] The Child is not “to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children”—although, as Max Fox rightly observes in “The Traffic in Children,” historical parents can and do confuse them.[3] Edelman continues:
In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child . . . serves to regulate political discourse . . . by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. . . . [W]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself.
Thinking of the student, or rather the Student, as a type or extension of the Child affords us better traction on the slippery question of why lessons in “racial justice” might especially inflame parental fantasies. To teach about American slavery and the enduring legacy of racial oppression it inaugurated entails despoiling the innocence of the Child as a figure of the nation in its unwounded wholeness, transmitting to it an original sin from which it ought to be protected, and corrupting it with forbidden knowledge: the dirty secret of its own history. Notice, by the way, how in the media’s imagination, the Child turns out under pressure always to be a white one. Sam Adler-Bell, who describes contemporary American political debates over “racial blamelessness” and “absolution” as a “hideous family romance,” is therefore quite correct to direct our attention to the sounding, in these debates, of a distinctly psychoanalytic dynamic. For to tell the history of the Child is to speak the answer to that quintessentially childlike question, at once the most and the least innocent of all questions: Where do babies come from?
The answer to this question is twofold. On the one hand, since the Child figures the future of the nation, its history is the blood-drenched, corpse-strewn American past: the Child comes from “Indigenous genocide . . . the enslavement of Africans, the plantation regime, coerced ‘free’ labor, the mine wars and anti-union terror . . . nativist violence, lynching, and Jim Crow apartheid”—episodes whose horrific reality, Adler- Bell writes, has been actively forgotten in the nation’s self- representation. As repressed content is wont to do, though, this history of violence returns, literalized in the masses of people of color organizing in the streets for their collective liberation from a racist police state. For the reactionary Symbolic, these people are taken as what Edelman will call catachreses of nonbeing (more on this concept in a moment). On the other hand, the history of the Child is, very simply, sex: the primal scene of copulation, the brute facts of desire and pleasure. This repressed knowledge, too, returns as a “catachresis of nonbeing”—namely, the increased public visibility of queer and transgender people, who by merely existing betray the possibility of sexual pleasure without reproductive utility, the constructedness of gender, and the mutability of the body. In its innocence, the Child serves as the Symbolic site where sexuality and racial violence run into and across each other as repressed histories that must never be spoken.
From this psychoanalytic vantage, we are now better positioned to see why the right’s anxieties have been aggravated, nearly simultaneously, by matters of racial oppression and of sexuality and gender. We can also start to see why this anxiety has seized upon teaching as the privileged scene of a fantasized Child endangerment: the giving to the Child of knowledge it cannot access on its own, which precipitates its Edenic lapse into both adult sexuality and historical consciousness. While this fantasy does have its gothic extremes—e.g., scenarios in which children are sexually assaulted by their teachers or segregation is reinstituted, now to the disadvantage of whites, in classrooms—it is remarkable that the danger is first and foremost a danger of knowledge. What’s so disturbing about this knowledge, whether construed as knowledge of sex or knowledge of history, is precisely that it was ever repressed in the first place. The return of the repressed terrifies in part because it inadvertently reveals that there is repression, that there is the unconscious. That there are parts of ourselves over which we possess no control, that there are memories we cannot recollect, that our desires exceed our understanding, and, on the Symbolic level, that the stories America tells its white children about the national past and about the natural order of things are not quite the whole truth.
“Queerness, even when transvalued by those who assume it as an identity, implies a disturbance of order, a nonconformity to prevailing logic or law, a glitch in the function of meaning”
– Lee Edelman
The panic around the education of the Child is thus subtended by what Freud calls a wish, a powerfully felt but unstated and perhaps unrecognized desire for a certain “condition of affairs.” With Fox, we can say that the wish to preserve the innocence of the Child is about adults’ “manage[ment of] their relationship to their own desire.”[4] Put otherwise, the anxiety that the Child might not be sexually or historically innocent is a wishing away of the knowledge taught by psychoanalysis itself. It is a wish that there would be no repression and no infantile sexuality, no desire and no death; that there would be no unconscious and, what amounts to much the same thing, no history; that the social order would be a natural, legible, and uncomplicated fact; that the ego would saturate the psyche, be the master of its own domain. As in a nightmare, we witness this wish for innocence being acted out in reactionary politics today, in a time of economic, imperial, and environmental collapse, at the precise moment when the perceived literalization of the return of the repressed threatens the Child. It appears to us as violent authoritarianism, insidious paranoia, and phobic fantasies, all turning furiously, obsessively—pruriently—around the apparently banal scene of a teacher speaking to a student.
*
Edelman’s goal in No Future was to advance a Lacanian critique of the ideology he termed “reproductive futurism,” an ideology for which the Child serves as the organizing trope. If No Future, read in the present moment almost twenty years after its publication, can teach us what’s at stake in the education of the Child, Edelman’s new book Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—his first since 2014’s Sex, or the Unbearable, co-authored with the late Lauren Berlant—sheds some light on how Samuel Joeckel’s lessons on racial justice can constitute, in the imagination of the American right, a “bad education” deserving of censure. Across theoretically formidable, densely argued readings of literary and cinematic works—by Pedro Almodóvar, William Shakespeare, Michael Haneke, Harriet Jacobs, and Kasi Lemmons—Edelman advances a deceptively simple, albeit counterintuitive, thesis: that all education “is inherently conservative.” He writes: “Despite the claims advanced in support of liberationist pedagogies . . . even in countering a dominant narrative or advancing a progressive position, [education] enshrines, preserves, and passes on a construction of ‘what is.’” Writing a little like a student, Edelman commences his introduction by quoting the Oxford English Dictionary, reminding us how “the child” is “the exemplary object of education, lending even adults engaged in ‘formal’ or ‘higher’ education an implicit association with something that is not—or not yet fully—formed.” Education, then, is indissociable from the ideology of reproductive futurism.[5] From Edelman’s perspective, a bad education is one “inimical to the survival and transmission” of “meaningful being,” of Symbolic subjectivity.
Bad education is thus aligned with “queerness” as Edel-man theorizes it: “a disturbance of order, a nonconformity to prevailing logic or law, a glitch in the function of meaning.” Queerness is “bad” because it draws our attention to the fact that there is something other than “what is”—it teaches us that there is nothing, an anarchic negativity “foreclosed from Symbolic reality and inaccessible to sense” and at the same time constitutive of the ontology that excludes it. Following Lacan, in No Future Edelman already identifies this nothing with the Real, with jouissance, and with the death drive—a conjunction of pleasure and destruction that opposes queerness to the Child. And just as the Child is not itself the future it figures, neither is queerness itself the nonbeing, “the remainder of the Real,” it “embodies” in the Symbolic. This embodiment is what Edelman means by “catachresis of nonbeing.” And queerness is only queer theory’s preferred example among a constellation of such catachreses: Blackness in Afropessimist thought, trans* in (a certain lineage of) trans studies, and woman in twentieth-century continental feminist philosophy, among others. These catachreses teach that there is nothing. Their lesson is inimical to education and intolerable for reproductive futurism, and so the people regarded as “literalizing” the catachresis—queer people, Black people, brown people, Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, unhoused people, and/or women, again among others and depending on context—become phobic objects.
As complicated as Edelman’s argument is, once its premises are understood, it is not so difficult to recognize the relevant effects in reactionary politics. For the American Right, which clings to an overtly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic social order in its wish for innocence, any pedagogy that does anything with catachreses of nonbeing other than exclude, oppress, degrade, and/or annihilate them—a pedagogy, say, like Samuel Joeckel’s—necessarily makes for a bad education. However, if we take Edelman’s argument seriously, it follows that a pedagogy’s badness consists less in the content of the lessons than in the performative potential of these lessons to induce a “glitch in the function of meaning.” Thus, there is no essentially bad education: what from the conservative perspective is the worst of educations can, from a progressive viewpoint, be a good education, an education that “enshrines, preserves, and passes on a construction of ‘what is.’” The “liberationist pedagogies” that the Republican Party, plus a cadre of deputized parents, seeks to legislate out of existence are still pedagogies that affirm a national future—the disagreement is a cosmetic (which is not at all to say trivial) one over what that future will look like.
Such pedagogies, insofar as they “afford . . . the shelter of meaningful being to those living negated identities” through gestures of reparation, inclusion, representation, and legitimation, can only operate by recoding such “negated identities” positively; they are no more able to think the persistence of nonbeing than the reactionary pedagogies they challenge. Both the liberal or progressive and the conservative, even fascistic visions of “good education” on offer in American politics today comprise wishes for a total, unwounded, and innocent social order purged of the negative. Whereas the right-wing attack on higher education has been single-minded in its stamping out of all those “theories” listed in Florida’s CS/HB 999, this fundamental consensus can perhaps explain why the liberal response has taken the incoherent form of “kettle logic”: a shifting admixture of doubling down (The “bad education” is really a good education), dismissal (The “bad education” is not really being taught at all ), and cowardly concession (The “bad education” really is bad ).[6] The right at least understands that it hates catachreses of nonbeing, even if it cannot cogently explain why; progressive liberalism, because it is committed to a politics of inclusion, remains blind to its more basic agreement with the right.
Neither the subject nor the world can be made whole.
Many readers will understandably be frustrated with Edel-man for refusing to offer a programmatic alternative to either conservative protofascism, which he unambiguously opposes, or progressive liberalism, which he is willing to critique. One senses he is used to provoking frustration: a significant chunk of Bad Education’s coda is dedicated to refuting the objections to No Future’s apparent political quietism voiced by Merrill Cole, Chris Coffman, and the late Mari Ruti. However, to ask Edelman to overcome the problem he diagnoses—to demand from him a better wish for an undivided subjectivity—is to misunderstand his project from the start. He is explicit that the book cannot possibly serve as a last word on the questions it addresses. Its “structural analysis” of “the radical negativity that the Symbolic order relegates to nonbeing, to the atopic space of incest, enjoyment, and the Thing” is intended as a supplement to “the empirical, contextual, and culturally specific framings provided by Black studies and critical race theory; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; feminist analysis; disability studies; queer theory; and trans* studies, among many others.” At the political level, likewise, Bad Education does not replace constructive programs but rather supplements them, in the properly Derridean sense.[7] “My claim for the structural, and therefore intractable, insistence of division and exclusion undoubtedly poses a challenge to the political hope for ‘collective becoming,’” Edelman writes toward the end of the book, “but it does not imply that those bound to such hope are dupes who need wising up. We all, inevitably, are bound to that hope . . . education’s allegorical logic, in the form of ‘wising up,’ can offer us no escape.” The upshot is not that we should refuse “the shelter of meaningful being to those living negated identities”—anything but. Doing so, however, will not and indeed cannot dislodge the Symbolic logic that produces those catachreses of nonbeing in the first place.[8] For neither the subject nor the world can be made whole. That is perhaps the fundamental political lesson of psychoanalysis.
Still, the world can and must be made better, even if we concede that “nothing can ground the good of that ‘better’” except, as Edelman has it, a “commitment to the ‘not’ of the ‘nothing’ that persists, beyond intelligibility.” The pedagogical task of a bad education, which “can only ironize what it teaches,” is never to let us forget this political teaching of psychoanalysis and to allow it to complicate our struggle for something better—a struggle against, for example (but there will always be more examples to come), the destruction of our educational institutions.
[1] For instance, the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts school in Sarasota with a reputation as an LGBTQ-friendly environment, was dismantled and reinvented almost overnight in early January 2023. See, e.g., “Governor Ron DeSantis Appoints Six to the New College Board of Trustees,” FLGov.com, January 6, 2023, www.flgov.com/2023/01/06/governor-ron-desantis-appoints-six- to-the-new-college-of-florida-board-of-trustees.
[2] While I will be speaking only about the Child as a Symbolic figure here, it’s important also to note how this ideological construct is propped up by material exigencies in the United States today which conspire to keep parents thinking about their college-aged offspring as minors in a more prosaic sense. In addition to a long history of the American college officially acting in loco parentis as the young adults in its charge learn how to think for themselves and be for themselves, critics of neoliberalism have reminded us how skyrocketing tuition and the massive expansion of the predatory industry known as “student debt” turns undergraduates into objects of financial speculation, a setup that keeps parents literally invested in their offspring’s college experiences (whether through the various material and personal sacrifices parents make to prepare their children for success or through the cosigning of loans both generations will likely be paying off until death). This economic arrangement has fostered the reconfiguration of higher education as a service industry, a mentality expressed, Ahmed notes, as much by those who administer this service as by those who consume it. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 175–200; Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 215–258; and, for a discussion of how the neoliberal remaking of American higher education intersects with the conservative culture wars, focusing specifically on the current crisis in Florida, Dan Royles, “The DeSantis School,” The Baffler, April 27, 2023, thebaffler.com/latest/the-desantis-school-royles.
[3] See Max Fox, “The Traffic in Children,” Parapraxis 1 (Winter 2022), www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-traffic-in-children.
[4] See also Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Penn-sylvania Press, 1992).
[5] It should be noted, however, that in Bad Education Edelman largely eschews the terminology of No Future, writing not of “repro-ductive futurism” but instead of a “pedag-archival imperative,” a formulation derived partially from the work of Jacques Derrida.
[6] See Freud’s famous discussion of the joke about the kettle in The Interpretation of Dreams.
[7] I.e., as it supplements, it also necessarily disturbs. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 141–164.
[8] Here we might think, for instance, of how the political and social gains made by gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in the United States over the past two decades have opened a space for the intensified targeting of transgender people, formerly understood to belong to the same political coalition.