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.