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DIVProminent theorist rethinks the psychoanalytic assumptions underlying queer theory./div

Brings provocative, rigorous and controversial readings of literary and cultural texts to gay critical analysis. Lee Edelman rearticulates the politics of sexuality, addressing some of the most hotly debated issues of our time.

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 queerness: 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.

Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair. Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.

With a unique style that blends drawing, painting, photography, graphic design and text, Johnson creates photographic works that are sardonic, frequently melancholic or nostalgic, but always sharply focused and pitch perfect. Evoking a variety of artistic traditions, from Japanese woodblock prints to Pop Art, many of his pieces incorporate written texts, either original or appropriated from disparate sources, including gossip magazines, pulp fiction, black-box flight recorders and rock lyrics. Johnson's works reveal his fascination with celebrity culture and particularly the juncture of aspirations and fantasies with reality. Hollywood stars and rock musicians, political figures and heroes are often the subjects of his finely tuned visual narratives. Johnson casts his subtle, witty gaze on the seemingly mundane aspects of contemporary culture, particularly that of Southern California during the latter half of the twentieth century, and comes up with brilliant, thought-provoking observations. AUTHOR: Russell Ferguson is chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. ILLUSTRATIONS 100 colour images

Candidat à l’intégration sociale, l’homosexuel est devenu une figure du possible, un personnage respectueux et respectable, un citoyen normal. Lee Edelman fait bien plutôt valoir que, paria politique et social, emblème du gaspillage, de la non-productivité et du non-sens, l’homosexuel est nécessairement et fatalement impossible. En présentifiant ainsi et pour tous l’impossibilité comme telle subvertit le privilège jusque-là réservé à l’hétérosexualité de s’ignorer elle-même. L’oeuvre d’Edelman a suscité la colère d’une droite homophobe autant que celle d’une gauche bien-pensante.

Sexo, o lo Insoportable (2014), adopta la forma de una conversación entre Berlant y Edelman que evoluciona a lo largo de sus capítulos. El sexo es para esta autora y autor un lugar desde el que explorar "la escena de la relacionalidad" centrándose en la "negatividad que puede hacerla tan perturbadora". El sexo es así una metáfora del deshacer: a través de su intensa relación con el otro, la "soberanía fantasmática del sujeto" se desintegra, el yo (temporalmente) se disipa. Exploran sus implicaciones a través de un diálogo que les compromete a lidiar con la negatividad, la no soberanía y la relación social no sólo como conceptos abstractos, sino también como la sustancia y la condición de nuestras respuestas -y nuestras responsa¬bilidades- mutuas. Pero, además, ofrecen un relato intenso y muy perspicaz de las interacciones entre dos sujetos que quizá podría aplicarse fructíferamente a la comprensión de los encuentros en las organizaciones militantes. Muestran algunas de las complejidades de la relacionalidad: es violenta, placentera, productiva, un escenario de fantasía y desconocimiento, todo esto y más. Añadimos en esta edición el opúsculo Deseo/Amor, de Lauren Berlant, publicado poco antes (2012). Se trata de un ensayo introductorio, no escrito para especialistas, y que gira en torno a lo que los teóricos han escrito sobre el deseo y el amor. Pero también es una pieza de pensamiento agudamente desarrollada que persigue qué más puede significar tener una fantasía. Para explicar algunas cosas sobre el deseo y el amor, Berlant ni siquiera intenta pretender captar su estructura esencial. Escenas de agresión y ternura, trauma y placer, de control y no-soberanía nos llevan a identificarnos (con) la actividad del deseo y el amor, rastrear su movimiento y trazar las marcas que dejan en las personas y en el mundo en el que circulan. En suma, no hay manera de captar definitivamente el deseo. Esta es la razón por la que el pensamiento crítico sobre lo que es el deseo se convierte casi inevitablemente en pensamiento teórico sobre el pensamiento mismo.Lauren Berlant (1957-2021) ha centrado su trabajo en el estudio de las fantasías ideológicas de progreso y bienestar existentes en la sociedad estadounidense. Es autora de Desire/Love, Cruel Optimism, The Female Complaint, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Lee Edelman (1953) es un crítico literario y académico estadounidense. Es autor de varios libros: Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire; Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory; No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.

" Croissez et multipliez " : qui oserait aller contre l'appel du futur et de l'Enfant qui l'incarne, tous deux vissés au coeur des arguments des politiques de tous bords ? Lee Edelman ouvre le ban en faisant du queer et du sinthomosexuel (Lacan) ceux qui entravent cette logique futuriste, et ironiquement la démontent. Lus au prisme lacanien, la vie politique américaine, Dickens (Un chant de Noël), Hitchcock (La Mort aux trousses, Les Oiseaux), Baudrillard (La Solution finale), font apparaître cette collusion Enfant-futur pour ce qu'elle est : une ligature entre la fabrique du sens et la reproduction de soi dans ['espèce, pour le plus grand bénéfice des pouvoirs en place.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.