An Interview with Lee Edelman

Omid Bagherli (bio)

Abstract

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and a key figure in queer theory. This interview was conducted in December 2022, a month before Edelman’s fourth book, Bad Education, was published by Duke University Press. In this discussion, Edelman revisits the “antisocial” debate in queer theory and assesses his understanding of negativity and antisociality in relation to the positions of Leo Bersani and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. Edelman also outlines how his thought in No Future and Bad Education interacts with contemporary politics and strands of Afropessimism, feminism, and family abolition.

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and the author of four books: Transmemberment of Song (1987), Homographesis (1994), No Future (2004), and Bad Education (2022). He has also co-authored Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) with Lauren Berlant. Known for his Lacanian and deconstructive mode of reading and for his continued interest in the negativity of the death drive in cultural and sexual politics, Edelman has been a central figure in the field of queer theory and is often associated with the “antisocial thesis” or “antisocial turn” (even if, as this interview illustrates, he meets these designations with reservations). In addition to his publications, Edelman has served as a series editor for Theory Q, a book series published by Duke University Press, since 2014.

Edelman’s most recent book, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing, develops the claims from No Future by arguing that queerness, as a surrogate term for what is “radically inassimilable,” is inimical to aesthetic, philosophical, and social orders. In doing so, Bad Education also considers how the term queerness functions much like Blackness or woman in other fields of theory.

Omid Bagherli:

This special issue’s title, Afterlives of the Antisocial, invites a reflection on the philosophical and theoretical legacy of this strand of inquiry within and beyond queer studies. But in order to do that, I’d first like you to provide a reflection on the institutional impact of what has been termed “the antisocial turn.” So, my first question is: what are your recollections and reflections about that time in the academy, around the time of the release of Leo Bersani’s Homos, and later, No Future? Could you provide your own view of how and why the fairly young field of queer theory or studies congealed and divided in the way that it did?

Lee Edelman:

Although queer studies in the early 2000s was still a fairly young field, it had been flourishing by then for about as long as deconstruction in its heyday. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal Between Men, followed by Epistemology of the Closet, had been fully internalized and incorporated by scholars in the field; Hortense Spillers’s essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” had raised crucial questions about the applicability of gender and sexuality with regard to Blackness; Teresa de Lauretis had coined the term queer theory for the 1990 Conference at Santa Cruz; Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble had already had a tremendously vitalizing impact; Diana Fuss’s groundbreaking anthology Inside/Out had been widely read as consolidating a field and Saint Foucault, Homographesis, Homos, Disidentifications and major texts by Gayle Rubin, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, D. A. Miller, Jonathan Goldberg, Deborah McDowell, Michael Warner, Cindy Patton, Douglas Crimp, and Lauren Berlant had shaped lively debates. There were already extensive engagements with Foucault, Wittig, and Hocquenghem, especially after Michael Moon brought out the English translation of Homosexual Desire in 1993. That same year Series Q at Duke began to publish work in queer theory (No Future appeared under its imprimatur) and the institutionalization of the discipline was well under way.

All of which is to say, that by the time of No Future‘s publication, queer theory was in its unruly adolescence. The first Yale sexuality conference—then called “The Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference” and sponsored by the newly formed Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale—took place in 1987 and the quaintness with which that title now strikes us reflects one of the earliest ruptures in the field. Although Lesbian and Gay Studies had entered the academy in the early eighties, it largely directed its attention to sociological, historical, or psychological questions. What de Lauretis called queer theory marked the bifurcation of the discipline into a more identitarian branch (Lesbian and Gay, subsequently followed by Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies) and a more avowedly theoretical branch, influenced by deconstruction, feminist theory, and critical race studies. So, by 2004 queer theory constituted a significant body of work and had already achieved institutional recognition at numerous universities and colleges.

But institutionalization entails the production of a normalizing logic; it depends on a reductive interpretation of the emergent field itself to satisfy the academy’s conservative understanding of what knowledge-transmission entails. It was both inevitable, therefore, and necessary that queer theory confront the demands for inclusion by those persons and those intellectual perspectives that seemed excluded from its framing. However fractious those debates may have been, they signaled the vitality of the discipline as a site of contestation, as an arena in which intellectual division was keeping thought alive. Having succeeded in articulating a space to think queerness in a monolithically heteronormative academy, queer theory discovered its own monolithic presumptions had to yield to multiplicity too. That entailed, most visibly, the struggle for recognition of the experiences, histories, and theoretical affordances specific to those outside the subject positions of cisgendered white lesbians and gay men, especially bisexuals, trans persons, and queers of color. But it also entailed divisions, especially in those early years, between activists and theorists (we had been living with the AIDS epidemic for over twenty years when No Future came out and for many in the activist community the theoretical investments of queer theory were seen, as Leo Bersani put it, as a “luxury” they couldn’t afford). Even among those who rejected the antithesis of activism and theory, though, divisions emerged between those whose projects reflected the historicist tenor of the times and those who persisted in traditions of deconstructive or psychoanalytic thought that were seen as even less translatable into socially useful terms.

And that’s where Leo Bersani’s work becomes so significant. Insofar as this issue calls itself “the afterlives of the antisocial,” I assume it must refer, if only secondarily, to Bersani’s death in 2022. The afterlives of the antisocial would constitute, to some degree, the intellectual afterlife of Bersani himself. October published “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in the winter of 1987, the same year I presented “The Plague of Discourse” at the annual MLA convention. Both texts responded to the AIDS epidemic by employing psychoanalytic frameworks to examine the representations of gay men in terms of HIV disease. Bersani’s essay addressed the disavowed seductiveness of ego-dissolution and mine explored the figural logics that disarticulate identities. Those similar intellectual investments led both of us to challenge redemptive logics and so to seem opposed to the work of social remediation.

In 1996, when Bersani published Homos, he explicitly celebrated what he saw as gay desire’s “potentially revolutionary inaptitude … for sociality as we know it” (7). His book affirmed what he called the “gay outlaw” as a manifestation of what he proclaimed as “politically unfixable in the human” (71). At the same time, though, he took issue with my own suggestion that “[t]he value of ‘acts of gay self-nomination’ is … equivalent to their negativizing, self-destructing potential” (69). Bersani insisted on a “gay” specificity, as opposed to my own readings of gay signification as a site of the dominant culture’s figural localization of negativity—and specifically, as “The Plague of Discourse” suggested, as a site of the figural localization of the unknowable, of the Lacanian Real inaccessible to Symbolic meaning. Hence, for all his promotion of homo-ness in opposition to forms of redemption, Bersani could refer to a “curative collapsing of social difference into a radical homo-ness, where the subject might begin again, differentiating itself from itself and thereby reconstructing sociality” (177). In this way, Leo remained attached to gayness as a transformative identity category at odds with my sense of gayness or queerness as a figural depository for the radically inassimilable.

When Robert L. Caserio organized a panel for the 2005 MLA convention on “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” he created a rubric meant to link my work (and especially No Future, which had come out the year before) both with Leo’s and with Jack Halberstam’s, Duke having published In a Queer Time and Place the year after publishing No Future. Bringing Jack, Tim Dean, José Muñoz, and me together for a “conversation,” the panel quickly became a debate about No Future, Lacan, and the importance of hope for social transformation. Antisocial very quickly got reduced to another trope for apolitical in a repetition of earlier debates that shaped the emergence of queer theory. For my part, I never conceived myself as an antisocial critic because my focus was on the social logic that necessitated figures of antisociality. I had no interest in affirming a subject position that would somehow dismantle the social, nor did I assert the possibility of occupying a subject position outside the social. I was interested in how sociality requires the generation of the antisocial, which it generates as figures of antisociality, identities constructed to serve as loci of its own antisocial impulse. The emphasis on the figurality of those figures—on their status as positivizations of the negativity the social then seeks to negate—coincided with an emphasis on the antagonism that sunders sociality itself: the antagonism that reflects an attempt to purge the indeterminacy of its own figural status. The question for me has always been: “What are the forms through which the negativity inherent in the social gets abjected onto categories of otherness in order to establish the fantasy of a coherent and internally consistent social order?” That’s why my focus has always been on questions of language and rhetoric: on the figural constructions that we recurrently misconceive as literal identities. So, to get back to your question about the internal divisions of queer theory, the fundamental division reflected in that panel was between those who wanted to argue for a transformative undoing of the social order to secure a more inclusive future and those who explored, as Bersani had put it, what was “politically unfixable.” Muñoz and Dean were on one side and I was on the other, with Jack, at least as I saw it, having a foot in both of those camps.

OB:

That logic of wanting both seems to be a consistent element in the way that you either critique or appraise other thinkers. In Bad Education, in “Nothing Ventured,” you draw attention to how, as you put it, Catherine Malabou “recoils from the consequences her negativity entails” (13). This happens again, I think, with your brief discussion of how Eric Santner “retreats” from an initial insight into negativity (91). Your work tends to notice a kind of wish to recuperate as a second move in a lot of critical writing.

LE:

None of us can avoid the recuperative impulse; it’s impossible, as Bad Education argues, to follow the path of negativity without encountering the negative’s inevitable reversion to positivity, either as a result of our psychic resistance to it or as the result of the resistance inherent in the referential aspect of language. It’s instructive to see how this played out in the career of Bersani himself. After the publication of Homos, in which, as I’ve been suggesting, the recuperation of sociality was already under way, Leo refocused his critical energies. He went from the critic who vaunted homo-ness as a salutary betrayal of sociality to one who would theorize homo-ness as enabling a social order based on impersonal relationality. Even in Homos, he expressed a wariness of his attraction to the negative, associating the death drive with sadomasochism. Homos could endorse the queer’s refusal to embody the good citizen and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” could celebrate the rectum’s “potential for death,” but Bersani stopped short of accepting that the death drive might have something to do with the figural place that queerness was made to occupy in the social order or that its relation to negativity, the Real, and jouissance might have socio-political consequences for those excluded from the order of meaning. Instead, in his work after Homos, he sought to “play to the side of the death drive,” attempting, in a sense, to recuperate homo-ness for a “socially viable” relationality. His elaborations of homo-ness suppressed the shattering of the subject to focus, instead, on the subject’s inaccurate and impersonal replication in the multiplicity of forms of being it encounters in the world. In this way his earlier meditations on formal repetition, linked with the death drive in The Freudian Body, get reconceived as what he calls, in Forms of Being, a “being-togetherness … [that] assumes the capacity of all objects to be less than what each one is, and therefore to participate … in the community of all being” (171). At the end of his career, however, in Thoughts and Things, he rethought this move and acknowledged the negativity whose force he had resisted, experiencing, as he put it, a “reinvig[oration]” of his “negativizing impulse” (25). The tension between the negative (the psychoanalytic account of the death drive) and the affirmative (the formal relationality he associated with art) found expression near the end of Forms of Being: “To open ourselves to those correspondences [of inaccurate replication] requires a relational discipline capable of yielding an ascetic pleasure that may, at least intermittently, supersede the jouissance of ‘the blindest fury of destructiveness'” (177). The tentativeness of “may” and the oscillation of “intermittently” register the ambivalence with which Bersani confronted the social “destructiveness” of jouissance.

Let me hasten to add that I don’t exempt myself from the resistance to negativity, either. To write about negativity is always to undertake to tame it, to make sense of it, to put it to work, however much one wants to do otherwise. Our thought about negativity is mediated by what Freud calls the secondary process while negativity as such draws its energy from the displacements of the primary process. Hence, we’re always, in our critical work, domesticating it for thought, even in the process of addressing the disruptions of thought that it produces. That’s why, as I argue in Bad Education, we can neither realize negativity nor escape it.

OB:

Another important figure that you’ve just mentioned in the framing and debate of the antisocial turn is José Esteban Muñoz. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz calls what we’ve been discussing as the antisocial thesis the “antirelational thesis” (11). I think it’s also worth quickly noting that Muñoz swiftly associates the “antirelational” stance with another term of longstanding debate, paranoid reading (borrowed from Sedgwick).

While I think that the connection between these two framings is interesting, I actually wanted to hear more about something you briefly mention in your recent article “On Solidarity.” There, you intimate a turn in Muñoz’s thought toward the “negativizing impulse” that sounds similar to what you say of Bersani. You write that you found The Sense of Brown “so compelling, especially insofar as it elaborated, far more fully than Cruising Utopia, the negativity on which the concept of disidentification rests” (105n12). Could you explain what you mean here, and how you found Muñoz’s later work to be different from his position in Cruising Utopia?

LE:

In the preface to Sex, or the Unbearable Lauren Berlant and I addressed the anxieties produced by widespread misconstructions of the “antisocial thesis.” As we argued there, negativity inheres in any political project or in any analytic of the social opposed to the prevailing logics within which reality can be thought. In Homos, Bersani elaborated the antisociality of what he called the “gay outlaw,” a figure whose salutary association with betrayal refuses “to accept a relation with any given social arrangement” (171). As I just mentioned, however, he simultaneously attempts to redeem what he sees as the gay “inaptitude … for sociality” by reading its negativizing tendency as prelude to “a reinventing of the social” (7, 171). Even in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” when he seems most antagonistic to the notion of redemption—”But what if. … the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it“—Bersani immediately does just that, going on to frame “sexuality … as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence” (222). Affirmations of redemptive hope, promises of collective reinvention, anticipations of Deleuzian becoming: these subtended all the resistances to the “antisocial thesis.” José Muñoz responded by adducing the imagining of a “then and there,” of a transformative communal possibility that he links to futurity in Cruising Utopia and privileges over the negativity both necessary for, an incompatible with, that possibility’s realization. As this suggests, the opposition to the “antisocial thesis” was, in large part, an opposition to the discourse of negativity even though that negativity was vital to its own political hope: the negativity that insisted on the void in any given social logic and so made possible a resistance to the social order as given. What my own work maintained, to the dismay of some, was the necessary corollary. Insofar as every social order must perpetuate that void—insofar, that is, as the structure of the social requires ontological exclusion, requires the negation of the figure made to embody the antisocial—the problem inheres in the social itself and not in its contingent forms. The antisocial, as Lauren and I put in Sex, or the Unbearable, must be seen “not in any simple antithesis to the social but rather as intrinsic to it” (xiii).

Your focus on the shift in terminology from “antisocial” to “antirelational” gestures toward the superimposition of an adjacent debate about paranoid and reparative criticism onto the responses to the “antisocial thesis” and its focus on negativity. Muñoz, of course, asserts in Cruising Utopia that he doesn’t “want to dismiss the negative tout court.” (12). His “argument,” he declares, “with the celebration of negation in antirelational queer critique is its participation in what can only be seen as a binary logic of opposition” (13). Needless to say, since he’s explicitly responding to No Future here, I find this unpersuasive, especially since that text makes clear that “queer theory’s opposition is precisely to any such logic of opposition” (24). In fact, it’s hard to credit a resistance to binary opposition to someone who embraces “anti-antirelationality.” Nor is the context of that descriptor’s appearance in Cruising Utopia insignificant. Muñoz adduces it to characterize a passage from Eileen Myles’s memoir, Chelsea Girls, about which he says: “I want to suggest that this passage could be seen as representing an anti-antirelationality that is both weirdly reparative and a prime example of the queer utopianism for which I am arguing” (14).

Just prior to this, he explicitly conflates what Caserio called the “antisocial thesis” with what Muñoz now calls the “antirelational thesis,” a rubric he variously associates with “paranoid” criticism, with theories asserting “the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference,” and with work refusing “an understanding of queerness as collectivity” (11). That these characterizations may be contradictory (the negativity that denies queerness the coherence of community responds, for example, to the non-singularity of sexuality as a trope of difference) serves largely to underscore that Muñoz’s turn to the trope of “antirelationality” bespeaks first and foremost his (binary and oppositional) investment in the paranoid/reparative debate whose mapping onto the “antisocial thesis” helped to shape the latter’s reception. You’ll never lose money, especially in America, investing in Utopian hopes; but you’ll also always get a healthy return by speculating on paranoia. Perhaps that seeming paradox speaks to the connection between the two—a connection similar to the one obtaining between Muñoz’s antiantirelationality and the negativity it refutes.

That’s what I find so interesting in Muñoz’s final project, a project that he and I discussed the last time that we met. It engages brownness as “here and now” in contrast to his Utopian pursuit of queer futurity’s “then and there.” From the first, with Disidentifications, Muñoz had recognized the negativity—the force, precisely, of dis-identification—necessary for any approach to what a social order excludes. In responding to No Future, though, he misrecognized, from my perspective, what that book shared with his own negativity. In his rejoinder to No Future—”the future is only the stuff of some kids”—he missed the point that the future is not the stuff of any kids; it’s always an ideological fantasy, embodied by the Child and relentlessly imposed on living children (positively or negatively, to aggrandize or to devalue them) to preserve a social logic that does indeed deny certain kids a future, as made clear by No Future‘s reference to the white separatists’ “Fourteen Words,” but that does so in the name of the Child. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Child, in its function as regulatory ideal, usually (although not always) will assume the salient attributes—including race, ethnicity, and religious persuasion—of the community that deploys it. We see that even in Muñoz’s text when he, at the very moment of characterizing the Child as “always already white,” invokes the pathos of the Child representing communitarian survival precisely on behalf of children of color: “all children are not the privileged white babies to whom contemporary society caters” (94). Rightly identifying “a crisis in afrofuturism,” which is to say, the murderousness of a social order that interprets Blackness as ontological negation, Muñoz, in my view, failed to see that the privileging of the Child, even when conceived as a Child of color, repeats the logic that generates such murderousness in the first place: the logic of conceptualizing the future, and the Child, as a property to be claimed in the service of power relations of the here and now. Without renouncing queer futurity, though, Muñoz opens onto something else in The Sense of Brown, something he seems to acknowledge in writing that “[b]rownness diverges from my definition of queerness” (121). The “here and now” of brownness, that is, comes back to the negativity at the heart of Disidentifications: “Owning the negation that is brownness is owning an understanding of self and group as a problem in relation to a dominant order, a normative national affect” (40). I don’t want to go on too long about this, but I do think that the link between brownness and negation, and, indeed, the “owning [of] negation,” is crucial to its “divergence” from Muñoz’s earlier framing of queer futurity. But what’s constant, and telling, is the focus on affect, or on what he calls “brown feelings” (40). Affective responses to experiences of negation, and their potentially negativizing consequences, offer an important arena for critical exploration and they have produced, as with The Sense of Brown, some rich and remarkable texts. My own work, though, attends to the structures that generate such negations and remains wary of giving feelings any epistemological privilege insofar as they are (over)determined by those same structures too.

OB:

Now, I’d like to consider your work in some more detail. How would you characterize the shift or relation from your work in No Future to Bad Education? It’s very clear that you’re continuing and developing on No Future’s insights, but there’s also a slight adjustment that’s palpable to me, but very hard to articulate. The best way that I can put it now is that Bad Education is shifting away from the study of a kind of recurrent fantasy-scene of the Child, the couple, and the queer or the sinthomosexual, to a stronger focus on queerness as an anti-philosophy. How do you understand the relation between the two book projects?

LE:

The link between the two projects has to do with how philosophy, acknowledged as such or not (and philosophy, for Lacan, shares fundamental precepts with religion) undergirds a given society’s determination of value. As we see in the case of Socrates, philosophy bears crucially on education insofar as it determines the values a culture chooses to transmit. It’s important to remember that Socrates was sentenced to death for two things: for worshipping foreign gods and for corruption of the young—something we all should reflect upon at this moment of politically mobilized panic about sexual knowledge, access to information, and “protecting” the “innocence” of children.

From Plato through Hegel to Alain Badiou, Plato’s major contemporary exponent, the western philosophical tradition opposes the queerness of jouissance, its foreignness to the subject of rational thought. Badiou states this explicitly: “philosophy wants to know nothing about jouissance.” Though he’s also indebted to the thought of Lacan, whom he labels an anti-philosopher, Badiou resists the negativity to which jouissance, in psychoanalysis, is bound, which is to say, the jouissance by which sense or meaning is unbound, as in primary process thought. Philosophy, to be philosophy, to take shape as the love of wisdom or knowledge, must reject the perpetual disruption of knowledge by the Real of jouissance, which functions, in this context, like irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: a “permanent parabasis.” Like irony, jouissance continuously interrupts philosophy as mastery. If Lacan is an anti-philosopher, then it’s because he refuses the formalization of knowledge or the establishment of objective principles by which to regulate psychoanalysis. Badiou distinguishes the antiphilosophical imperative of Lacanian psychoanalysis from his own philosophical investments by condensing Lacanian practice into a single statement—”I dissolve” or “I undo”—which he contrasts with the philosophical utterance par excellence: “I found” or “I establish.” Whether by varying the length of the psychoanalytic session, refusing empirical criteria to evaluate the training of psychoanalysts, or recurrently dissolving his schools, Lacan, for Badiou, embodied the cut, the negativity, the interruption that makes psychoanalysis inherently antiphilosophical in its commitment to thinking the subject’s determination by jouissance.

Psychoanalytic and philosophical schools of thought—with their differing thoughts on schooling—thus stand in radical opposition. No Future‘s analysis of the socio-political discourse of the Child led to Bad Education‘s questions about the pedagogical logics by which we manage the Child’s transition into a (re)productive adult. In this sense, I see Bad Education as exploring our anxieties about cultural transmission and the preservation of dominant values, what the book calls “the pedag-archival imperative,” in the face of figures of queerness (xvi). To be honest, it’s a bit unnerving how much No Future and Bad Education speak to our contemporary moment. So many of our current political flash points center on children and education, and especially on the so-called right of parents to “protect” their children, even in public spaces, from anything or anyone that would expose them to realities from which their parents would prefer that they be kept away. The purging of school libraries, the banning of classroom references to queer lives or to histories of racial injustice and white privilege, the incendiary proliferation of discourses of “grooming” all aim at an ideological cleansing of the public sphere of an otherness construed as inherently aggressive or assaultive—as a non-consensual encounter with an otherness, a queerness, seen as imposing on children, regardless of their parents’ will, a knowledge that violates their “innocence.” All of this hews to the template of Vladimir Putin’s promulgation of laws in Russia prohibiting any mention or representation of non-normative sexualities where minors might encounter them—a law that Putin now wants to extend in order to ban what the law describes as “gay propaganda” for people of all ages. Make no mistake: all expressions of queerness are defined as “gay propaganda.” So the inseparability of queerness from determinations of a proper education seems particularly pressing now. At the moment of our conversation, I note the introduction of two bills in the West Virginia legislature that purport to protect minors from obscene materials but include in that definition exposure to or performances by transgender persons. Such a law would make it illegal to be a transgender person in school.

OB:

That certainly illustrates how both texts give insight to today’s situation. It also, I think, emphasizes the connection between the two “anti-s” in our discussion. What the “antiphilosophy” of Lacanian psychoanalysis shares with the (purported) “antisocial turn” within queer studies is a concentrated interest in the negativity of jouissance within the order it studies.

Now, it would be useful to outline how Bad Education directly links its project with other fields of theory that are thinking about the negativity of the social order in similar terms. I wanted to hear more about how, in your account, Afropessimist thinkers theorize Blackness in a loosely analogous way to how you read queerness and also how, both earlier and later than No Future, some feminists think femininity or woman within patriarchy in a comparable way. In Bad Education, you turn to the psychoanalytic concept of sex to bring these fields into conversation. Could you outline how “sex,” as you use it, connects these three fields and their unstable objects of study?

LE:

What truly links these fields for me is that sex, queerness, Blackness, and woman are all signifiers that contest, far more than they specify, their referents. Rather than identifying something known, they open speculation into what and how these signifiers “mean.” Of course, many who work in Black studies, feminism, and queer theory would deny that assertion, just as many in psychoanalysis would resist that understanding of sex. For such persons those terms have fixed referents that serve as the basis for disciplinary practices, usually historical, sociological, diagnostic, or communitarian: practices that have to do with the substantialized identities of “Blacks,” “women,” or “queers” as they experience their being in the world. Notwithstanding the value of that work, it’s not what I pursue. For me, those various signifiers attempt to nominate figures of exclusion from the determining frameworks of meaningfulness or of value. Rather than signifiers, in other words, of ontologically determinate beings, they are figures for what remains outside the horizon of ontology. They are, therefore, as I argue, catachreses: attempts to domesticate the unnameable by giving it a name. They seek, that is, to substantialize the other of meaningful being by locating it in particular beings (“the” Black, “the” woman, “the” queer) who then can be abjected from the social body to effect its consolidation.

This brings us back to your question, “How is sex an operator in this particular category?” The thing to understand here is that sex as a psychoanalytic concept is not a substantive that designates either an empirical condition (as some would understand “male” and “female”) or any putative relation between sexuated subjects. Sex, instead, is the indicator of a cut, a gap, a division that enables the process of sexuation. It is the fundamental division by means of which a world of meaning takes shape. It is not a division that emerges by recognizing a priori differences, by seeing how things “really” are. It’s the division that makes possible the being of things, and the being of the world, in the first place. That’s why a crucial analog for that foundational division is Ferdinand de Saussure’s differentiation of signifiers and signifieds. In the beginning, for psychoanalysis, is not the word but the radical of division of which the word itself is a signifier.

As I put it in Bad Education, one could imagine a mythic origin, then, a genuine creation ex nihilo, in which division initiates being by dividing nothing from itself, producing as the primal difference that between nothing and what splits off from it: the not-nothing whose negated negativity then gets positivized as “something.” Psychoanalysis attends to this constitutive division as it determines the experience of the subject (divided between conscious and unconscious, between the pull of desire and the compulsion of the drive) and as it leads us to fantasies of suture through the sexual relation. Sex, in this way, refers to the incomprehensible negativity of division as well as to the fantasy of positivized entities whose relation might resolve it. Thus “sexual difference,” for Lacan, attempts to master that division. The matching doors to which he refers in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” bear differentiating signifiers, “Hommes” and “Dames,” and that difference attests to the imperative to locate a positive empirical difference to explain the rupture that produces the empirical as we know it. Understanding sex in this way allows us to see that race and sexuality function similarly. They too purport to positivize poles across the divide of a gap. Bad Education argues that all the names used to frame or explain that divide are always catachreses that seek to disavow the intractable negativity of the divide itself.

OB:

Great—this is helpful and allows me to press further into how you’re placing these categories alongside each other. I was hoping that you could expand on your claim, then, that in some sense queerness as a category possesses an almost tactical or political advantage over these other terms in the way that its ambiguity allows it to resist (but not totally) any move to positivize it. Could you outline why queerness is your preferred term over Blackness or woman or transness?

LE:

The virtue of queerness is that it begins as a term of wonder, curiosity, or fear, a term to mark, and eventually to stigmatize, the unfamiliar, alien, or non-normative without being bound to any particular identity. At the outset, there are no fixed attributes to the quality of queerness except its non-conformity to a given order’s customs. Even now, when queer seems synonymous with “non-normative” sexualities, the boundaries of that category are open to debate. Should middle-class cis-gendered gays and lesbians in Western democracies count as “queer” in the age of “marriage equality”? Even the endless proliferation of initials in LGBTQIAA+ reminds us that there are countless unnamed and unrecognized subsets of sexuality. Perhaps there are as many sexualities as subjects—or perhaps there are even more, since it’s not necessarily clear that one subject is confined to one sexuality.

For me, though, the virtue of queerness lies not in its open-ended reference to non-normative sexualities but rather its open-ended reference to non-normative subject positions, thus mobilizing an older sense of queerness as foreign to the logic of community. But “queerness” is not a “privileged” term in the sense that it has some greater truth or purchase over others. “Blackness” and “woman” do similar work as tropes of ontological negation referring to an exclusion from meaning required for the positing of collectivity. That’s not to say that “Blackness” or “woman” is synonymous with queerness, but rather that each of them constitutes what Derrida called a “nonsynonymous substitution.” Each has its own distinct history and each occasions different lived experiences; each bears different consequences for relations to power, privilege, and community. But all of them figure, in particular contexts, the ontological negation through which a social order enacts the antisociality by means of which it undertakes to secure its social coherence.

OB:

This next question follows on from what we’re discussing here. I want to raise this question with some care for obvious historical and political reasons, but I also want to know how your reading of “queerness as foreign to the logic of community” leads you to either directly engage with or skirt topics that many would rather not broach. I’m referring both to the way that you take up incest, on the one hand, and the figure of either the pedophile or the pederast on the other. How do these two topics fit into the way that you are theorizing queerness?

LE:

Well, let’s start with incest. As I describe it in Bad Education—and this directly relates to what “sex” is—incest is the name, the catachresis, by which we identify a fantasy of what preceded the fall into subjectivation and difference. Incest names a fantasy (which, like many fantasies, is anxiogenic as soon as we get too close to it) of returning to the Lacanian Imaginary state, to union with the pre-Oedipal (M)/Other, and so of dissolving our subjectivity, of escaping the burden of in/dividuation. It thus designates a regression from the Father’s law, his prohibition of access to the (M)/Other that installs the subject in the Symbolic; but, crucially, the regression that incest imagines posits a return to the Imaginary from the subject position that return would annihilate. To echo Slavoj Žižek’s cogent remarks, to that extent, the fantasy of incest, strictly speaking, is impossible. This is not to deny that what legal codes statutorily identify as incest takes place, often with horrific violence. But from the psychoanalytic perspective, incest as escape from Symbolic positioning is an unrealizable fantasy for the subject to achieve. We can never return to the moment before our separation from das Ding (the Thing), to the fullness of undifferentiated presence; we only ever conceptualize it as lost. That fullness, after all, is the divided subject’s retroactive construction; there is no subject before the division that produces the Thing as loss. What the law prohibits as incest never gives access to that Thing because the Thing as such is only the loss of the Thing; it has no positive presence. Whatever fantasy legally designated acts of incest may serve to satisfy, they can never, as Žižek reminds us, offer access to the Thing. Quite simply, where the Thing is, we are not. What the law prohibits as incest never eventuates in what incest as psychoanalytic fantasy intends. In Lacan’s words, “ce n’est pas ça.”

In this sense, incest is another name for the opening onto the impossible Real to which queerness and Blackness (among other catachreses) are also assimilated as figures. It signals the collapse of logic, temporality, and narrative by collapsing difference into sameness and thereby precluding articulated meaning. As I note in Bad Education, the category of incest has often been expanded to include both homosexuality and, as Christina Sharpe reminds us, inter-racial sexual unions, which were denounced as amalgamation. In this way incest functions as a trope for the general destitution of meaning by undoing the differential economy that undergirds signification.

If incest, though, like queerness, figures an opening onto the Real, that doesn’t mean that incest is identical to queerness. It functions, instead, like “Blackness” or “woman,” as another nonsynonymous substitution. But this collocation leads us to an important point about queerness. The project of thinking queerness or of elaborating queer theory need not entail the affirmation of everything framed as “queer.” Queer theory, especially in the afterlife (which is really just the ongoingness) of the “antisocial thesis,” differs from the identitarianism of demographic studies insofar as it recognizes queerness as diacritical rather than substantive. Its meaning is always relational; it has no fixed political affiliation, either to the left or the right. From the vantage point of the conservative impulse inherent in a social formation, queerness will always appear as a threat to the conventional order of things. But where the order of things is governed, as in the US after World War II, by a dominant liberal consensus, right-wing populism and fascist resistance can register as queer. It’s not irrelevant, as I argued in a paper about the presidency of Donald Trump, that the recurrent denunciations of his personal and political behavior found expression in a single, outraged assertion to which political pundits returned incessantly: “this is not normal.” Queerness encompasses everything that registers as “not normal.” Queer theory doesn’t ask us to endorse all the subject positions that rubric may include, but rather to interrogate the logics of exclusion and the contradictions in the positing of values by which social orders project their internal antagonism onto subjects who, made to figure that social order’s negativity, can be negated in the hope of getting rid of the antagonism itself. Another way of putting this is to insist once more that queerness should not be construed as a positive category. On the one hand, it’s never stabilized in a positive identity and, on the other, it’s never validated as bearing a positive value. Instead, it challenges every distribution of value, power, and meaning.

The question of pedophilia, then, must present itself to any discourse inquiring into and challenging the logic of normativity. But it’s a question almost impossible to address insofar as it tends more often to function as a signifier of sexual panic than as a signifier of sexual attraction to and/or exploitation of children. In part, that’s because the ideological category of the “child” now encompasses not only adolescents, but often even young adults. At the same time, we see our culture increasingly stigmatizing sexual relations between persons who differ in age by more than a handful of years. And in our eagerness to protect people from the compulsion to “consent” to unwanted sexual encounters, we’ve extended the category of child—that is, of those construed as incapable of giving consent—to all people, regardless of age, insofar as they are defined by certain relations (teacher/student or employer/employee, for example). In this exceedingly moralistic context, any examination of pedophilia—including reflections on its history, its social construction, or its strategic deployment as a reductio ad absurdum of any rejection of sexual norms—gets perniciously conflated with advocacy for or endorsement of it. My own work doesn’t engage pedophilia except to note that the dominant sacralization of the Child is both a spur to, and a reflection of, a fixation on the sexuality of children that gets negatively expressed—through an insistence on children’s “innocence,” which is always excitedly imagined as under threat of violation. Those banning books about same-sex penguins from elementary school libraries are clearly expending a lot of energy seeing children in relation to sex.

Fundamental to much of this panic, of course, is an intensification of resistance to what is still Freud’s most reviled pronouncement: the existence of infantile sexuality. The child’s experience of somatic pleasures at zones (oral, anal, genital) that will be variously invested later in its sexual organization remains, for many—perhaps for most—intolerable to contemplate. Equally intolerable is the recognition, which comes by way of Lacan and Laplanche, that the child’s first encounters with the inherently enigmatic signifiers of sexuality most often come by way of its parents’ unconscious relations to its body. In light of this pervasive disavowal, the idea of thinking children as subject to sexual sensations, or even of thinking children and sex in non-phobic, non-negative perspectives, can register as supporting pedophilia and can seem like an assault, a violation in itself. Like Freud’s theories of child sexuality, though, such thought is not a violation of the child but, rather, of the Child; it violates the fantasmatic purity of the future the Child is made to signify, exposing the Child as a veil behind which parents and the social order alike mask their (inevitable) implication in the eroticization of children. Acknowledging children as sexual rather than treating sexuality as something that adulterates their intensely cathected “innocence” might well diminish the degree to which living children suffer that eroticization as embodiments of the Child.

OB:

That framing, again, of “assault” reminds me of a thought I had when reading the section in Bad Education—when you outline the way deconstruction appeared as a threat for people from a variety of political investments. One of the examples you choose is the journalist Michiko Kakutani, whose attack on deconstruction (and other theoretical approaches, like multiculturalism, feminism, queer theory) you say is instructive. It occurred to me that Kakutani’s The Death of Truth echoes an earlier rejection of theory, this time of Freudian psychoanalysis, in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s 1984 The Assault on Truth. The parallel between the two titles is striking! Masson’s project, as I understand it, is predicated on rejecting the Freudian theory of childhood sexuality and fantasy that you’ve just outlined, and instead alleging that, in founding this now classic theory, Freud effectively denied what he had previously believed: that his patients were assaulted as children. “An act was replaced by an impulse, a deed by a fantasy,” he says. So, for Masson, the truth of The Assault on Truth is that Freudian theory’s focus on impulse and fantasy actively represses/repressed the actual assault of children, who are by implication always innocent of sexuality. The assault on children (perhaps the Child) and Truth are one here, and Freudian thought is guilty of facilitating harms to both. Would you say that’s accurate?

LE:

You’re right that Masson rejected Freud’s argument that children experience sexual fantasy, insisting, instead, that in abandoning the “seduction theory,” Freud was intent on masking the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse. It seems to me crucial to recognize, though, that Masson’s focus on the reality of childhood sexual violation and Freud’s focus on the reality of childhood sexual fantasy are by no means incompatible. One does violence to children by conceiving the two as mutually exclusive. But the reduction of sexual fantasy to a mere transcription of literal events suits the purposes of a social order so anxious to “protect” children from sexuality that it eroticizes their “innocence,” as I suggested above, and perversely creates the conditions that make such violation more likely. The point of contact between Kakutani’s and Masson’s defenses of “Truth” is the dangerous insistence on Truth as literal, singular, and universally available. Truth, as our courts of law make clear, is an interpretation or a judgement that takes place within specific frameworks for deciding what counts as evidence. Within the rules of such interpretative games, Truth can be determined. But it requires the specification of those rules, and conformity to evidentiary norms, for Truth to count as Truth.

OB:

That’s extremely clarifying. Finally, since we’ve touched on the ideology and politics of the Child and family, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the term “abolition” and how it intersects with your approach to negativity. The term abolition has been applied in the context of slavery, property, police, and prisons, but there’s also been a recent revival in the last decade or so in calls to abolish the family. There are a number of theorists active in this field, but one in particular, Kathi Weeks, has mentioned your work when providing a general overview of family abolition. What’s most striking, though, is Weeks’s wording towards the end of her article “Abolition of the Family,” where her focus on negativity is close to yours. Following Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, Weeks claims that an abolitionist movement “would put nothing in the place of the family” (16, emphasis added). Could you speak to how your critique of reproductive futurism either relates to family abolitionism or to the idea or process of abolition more generally?

LE:

Well, No Future proposes no blueprint for a better social order. It argues that the problem is not the shape of a particular social order, but the fact of social order itself. While we continuously transform our social orders in response to the internal antagonisms that make them unsustainable, whatever we produce in their stead will reproduce their structuring antagonisms insofar as these are the antagonisms that inhere in the subject of language. I’m sympathetic to the project of challenging the dominance of the family but unable to imagine forms of child-rearing free from what makes family problematic. But if we’re thinking in terms of abolition, I’m especially sympathetic to analyses of children as figures of non-freedom, however much that non-freedom may be, or be thought, in the child’s best interest. The child, after all, has no claim to sovereignty, except in judicially determined situations where, as legal jargon tellingly puts it, the child is “emancipated.” Denied the capacity to give consent, subordinated to the will of its parents with regard to educational and medical decisions, even where its life may be threatened by the parents’ refusal of treatment as a consequence of “deeply held” religious beliefs, the child, who is always enslaved to the Child, needs incisive political attention—and all the more so insofar as the child, as the thorniest figure of non-freedom, is nonetheless subjected to racially-inflected judicial determinations of when, in criminal or disciplinary procedures, it will be treated as an adult. But while I welcome the abolition of the child’s enslavement to the murderous image of the Child, I’m under no illusion that that would be possible. Nor, almost 2500 years after the sentence of death was imposed on Socrates, can I see an end to the moralized panic about the queer corruption of youth. The antagonism relentlessly projected onto such “antisocial” figures springs from the antisociality inherent in the social, which is why the various afterlives of the “antisocial thesis” will continue to play themselves out just as long as social order endures.

Omid Bagherli is a graduate student in English and 2024–25 Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His work focuses on representations of thwarted historical recovery and redress in contemporary literature and film.

Works Cited

• Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke UP, 2014.
• Bersani, Leo. Homos. Harvard UP, 1996.
• –––. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October, vol. 43, 1987, pp. 197–222.
• –––. Thoughts and Things. U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. British Film Institute, 2004.
• Edelman, Lee. Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing. Duke UP, 2022. Theory Q.
• –––. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. Series Q.
• –––. “On Solidarity.” Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, special issue of Representations, edited by Debarati Sanyal, Mario Telò, and Damon Ross Young, vol. 158, no. 1, 2022, pp. 93–105.
• Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2009.
• –––. The Sense of Brown. Edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, Duke UP, 2020. Perverse Modernities.
• Weeks, Kathi. “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal.” Feminist Theory, vol. 24, no. 3, 2021, pp. 433–53. Sage Journals.