Lee Edelman: Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

LEE EDELMAN
(TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS, USA):
Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing: Pedagogy, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (16-17 Aug) 2015
If meaning-making incorporates subjects into the sociality of the symbolic, it does so at the expense of an unreadable remainder that Lacan describes as an ab-sense impervious to any formalization. Incapable of being represented (like the null set that, as Badiou reminds us, is always included in the set of “what is”), this nothing cannot and must not be taught: cannot because it is not transmissible in the formal sequence of a truth and must not because it threatens pedagogy’s rootedness in sublimation. Queer theory, as I discuss it here, approaches that nothing as the negativity that sublimation enacts in the very effort to overcome it. This version of queer theory will explore what happens when the preservative function of dialectic, with its valorization of Truth as Idea, confronts the insistent unbinding inherent in the Real of the drive. Engaging the contradictory pedagogical imperatives of philosophy and psychoanalysis, these lectures will consider how queerness profoundly disrupts the transmission of values through the pressure of a negativity impossible to realize as a value. Negating first and foremost the sovereign subject of humanist ideology, this negativity opens onto the beyond of that subject’s ostensible freedom: a beyond in which the “nothing” of enjoyment relocates the subject in the drive, thus posing a radical challenge to our understanding of freedom. The first lecture, “Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic Education,” takes Funny Games, Haneke’s 1997 film, as an exemplary instance of the negativity that animates philosophy’s conceptualization of freedom through self-reflection. In doing so, it locates the constraint inherent in the thought of freedom: a constraint that produces the queer as the unfreedom of freedom itself. The second lecture, “There is no Freedom to Enjoy,” puts Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl into dialogue with contemporary anti-queer discourses to trouble the link between reason and freedom that informs both our pedagogy and our politics. Taken together, these lectures will suggest that the discourse of freedom remains bound to the hope of freedom from the ab-sense, the pure negativity, or the nothing induced by the queer.

[@johnstewart7025]

Remodeling of enjoyment: Cicero said that happiness came from moral living and moral living came from happiness, or perhaps it sometimes CAN come from there.

[@johnstewart7025]

Suppressing your pleasure is pleasurable to me.

[@eyesofnihility]

Brilliant

[@swimmingchicken7254]

i dont get it

[@Argentarius11]

So how exactly does "Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing"? I agree that Foucault sucks, but there must be more.

[@danpatrick24]

Foucault “sucks” why?

[@Argentarius11]

@@danpatrick24 Foucault's statement that "Gender is a social construct" is completely misleading and only partially true.
He was a philosopher, not a scientist. He can dodged the vast amount of peer review research that disproves this statement by saying that "Science" is used by Elites to further their own power. That flawed statement is now critical to both Queer Theory and Third wave feminism. With Lyotard and Derrida, he maintained that all grand Western Narratives, Judaism, Christianity, Liberalism, Marxism, ect..................were all false. He throws everything out, brings nothing.
However, he very dishonestly sneaks Marx back in using Marx's Conflict Theory. That is so dishonest. If all Grand Narratives are false, you wouldn't talk about great Jesus is. But Marx gets a pass.
By the 1990's, Post Modernism was burned out in college campuses. It is too Nihilist. Foucault's philosophy is a wrecking ball. He is very good at destroying Western Culture. However, he creates NOTHING.
You can't run a family, a business or a country using his version of Post Modernism. Noam Chomsky called him "the most immoral person I ever met". Chomsky got that right.

[@younanthenzardan]

@@danpatrick24 ur joking right? Foucault was a pedophile

[@matthewkopp2391]

Foucault is against most of queer theory.

[@zeenuf00]

​@@danpatrick24foucault was an evil pos who knowingly gave teenage male prostitutes AIDS.

[@seungwanstone1853]

so many words without saying anything

[@mattbuchanan325]

They are certainly good at that.

[@2xWhitney]

@@XYZ-Dragon_Cannon "everyone woman that disagrees with my shitty academic theory is an insert race pick me"

[@spitegoblin1574]

There's gotta be someone commenting this on lectures to boost them in the algorithm