Bad Education

“Bad Education demonstrates, with a rare combination of philosophical rigor, lucidity, and eloquence, how Lee Edelman has initiated a new mode of thinking queerness and the human. In this landmark work, Edelman’s analysis of the ‘catachreses of ab-sens’ stands apart from most analyses of queerness—not only in its breadth and ambition but also in its challenge to the liberationist pedagogies of sex, race, and knowledge. Whether ‘queerness teaches us nothing’ or not, Bad Education invites new ways of thinking about the lesson that queerness presents.” - David Marriott, author of Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being

“Bad Education is a remarkable achievement of scholarship, rhetoric, and political acumen. I am captivated by the precision of Lee Edelman’s argument, the scope of the texts he analyzes, and the brilliance of his writing. Arriving at exactly the right time, this is a major scholarly advancement, dazzlingly delivered.” - Elizabeth A. Wilson, author of Gut Feminism

"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." 

"Demanding and dazzling . . . indeed a beautiful book." - Maral Attar-Zadeh, The Cambridge Review

“[Edelman] is an insightful analyst of the dynamics that organize the social, dynamics of disavowal and justification and self-delusion. . . . His work has the power to interrupt and short-circuit various certainties and commitments.”

“I began reading Lee Edelman’s work because other people I respected . . . told me to. . . . I continued reading Edelman because I was drawn in by both the style of his sentences and the rigor of his argument.”

“It might still be possible to learn something from someone who tells us there is nothing to learn. . . . Edelman’s ideas challenge us to live with paradoxes, not resolve them.”