Education serves as the indomitable social good a regime of aesthetic ideology that is critical to save the child that relies on the ontological negation of Black and Queer bodies.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 1, Duke University Press]//owen

Good education serves the social good by negating whatever refuses that good and thereby endangers the Child, even if that danger inheres in the very nature of children themselves. Education, like heterosexuality, becomes a compulsory reproduction, procuring the Child for an order of truth that denies the foundational negativity, deficiency, perversion on which it rests. In the aftermath of such education, as Israël concludes, “one no longer knows anything about the universe of the drive, because the only small way to safeguard something of it is in knowing nothing about it.” This is the context in which he defines “education as antidrive.”27 Education effectively seals the drive off from the logic of comprehension as if recognizing the drive’s expression of ab-sens within the world of sens-absexe. Not reducible to the mere inversion of either knowledge or sens-absexe, ab-sens as negativity inheres in the knowledge sens-absexe affords. Insofar as that knowledge requires the subtraction or absenting of sex as ab-sens, it preserves the primal cut of division (the psychoanalytic referent of sex) in the ab of subtraction that makes sensabsexe the equivalent of sens-ab(ab-sens). Adorned with innocence as privileged nonknowledge, the Child perpetuates, through its sublimation, the enforced nonknowledge as and in which the “universe of the drive” insists. It reenacts, by way of allegory, the sublimation of the Thing—the creation of something out of nothing—as the dialectical negation of negativity that generates futurity. Allegory, sublimation, and dialectic, then, share a logic with one another, each naming a mode of production that displaces into systematic knowledge a negativity impossible to comprehend and at odds with all totalized forms.28 It follows that a fourth term, education, must take its place beside them: the education that perfectly complements the Child as the promise of coherent totality—the education that is always, in Friedrich Schiller’s formulation, an aesthetic education. For humanity to attain its proper moral state requires, for Schiller, the realization of an aesthetic self-totalization: “Every individual man, it may be said, carries in disposition and determination a pure ideal man within himself, with whose unalterable unity it is the great task of his existence, throughout all his vicissitudes, to harmonize.”29 The process of this harmonization, as effected by the “cultivation of Beauty,” constitutes “the education of humanity” and depends on the coordination of life in time (the life of the individual) with the development of moral possibility through and as the State.30 Schiller writes, “The great consideration, therefore, is that physical society in time may not cease for an instant while moral society is being formed in idea, that for the sake of human dignity its very existence may not be endangered. When the mechanic has the works of a clock to repair, he lets the wheels run down; but the living clockwork of the State must be repaired while it is still in motion. . . . We must therefore search for some support for the continuation of society.”31 The Schillerian aesthetic, as Paul de Man notes, links sensory content and abstract form—the “sensuous world to a world of ideas,” as Schiller writes—for reasons that have everything to do with the future that the Child is meant to secure.32 “The necessity of this synthesis,” de Man remarks, “is made in the name of an empirical concept, which is that of humanity, of the human, which is used then as a principle of closure. The human, the needs of the human, the necessities of the human are absolute and are not open to critical attack.”33 Needless to say, this “human,” whose continued survival the Child guarantees, constitutes a central site of ideological contestation. But insofar as “we are all Schillerians,” according to de Man—adherents, whether we admit it or not, of an aesthetic ideology intimately bound up with reproductive futurism— such contestation concerns the definition, not the value, of the “human.”34 Though the regime of aesthetic ideology protects that value from “critical attack,” queerness refers to whatever poses the threat of such attack, to whatever opens a wound within the logic of the aesthetic by exposing the negativity from which Schiller and the Schillerian tradition retreat.35 To confront such negativity would dismantle the foundation supporting the “empirical concept” of “humanity”—the fantasy of self-authorizing sovereignty. As Schiller writes, “The person must therefore be its own ground, for the enduring cannot issue from alteration; and so we have in the first place the idea of absolute being grounded in itself, that is to say of freedom.”36 To clarify the stake in this aesthetic ideology—and in the sublimation that gives birth to the Child—let us focus briefly on de Man’s account of an even more rigorous effort to establish a self-grounding philosophical system. In “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” de Man looks at what happens when Blaise Pascal, having noted that geometry refuses to define its principal objects (movement, number, and space), asserts that this “lack of definition is rather a perfection than a fault” (le manque de définition est plutôt une perfection qu’un défaut) and claims that these principal objects have a “necessary and reciprocal relation” (une liaison nécessaire et réciproque) in which he implicates time as well (“le temps même y est aussi compris”).37 To exemplify this reciprocity, he explains the homology among these “first objects” with reference to the “two infinities” of enlargement and contraction. Just as a movement can be made faster or slower, and numbers can be made larger or smaller, so space can always be increased or diminished, and temporal duration extended or reduced. Movement, number, space, and time are thus, for Pascal, always infinitely distant from their radical extremes: nothingness and infinity (“le néant et l’infini”).38 But the demand that these realms remain perfectly homologous encounters a certain difficulty when Pascal confronts the status of the “one” (which, according to Euclid, is and is not a number) and then tries to correlate the one with something that cannot be included in the realm of space because it is characterized as “indivisible” and therefore as lacking spatial extension. Pascal writes, “The only reason that the one is not included in the ranks of the numbers is that Euclid and the first authors who dealt with arithmetic, having several properties to give it that were common to all the numbers other than one, excluded the one from the meaning of the word number, so as not to have to say all the time we find such and such a condition in all numbers other than one.”39 At the same time, however, according to Pascal, Euclid recognizes that the one, insofar as it cannot be conceived as a nothing (“un néant”), belongs to the same “genre” as number. As soon as they are added together, after all, two ones will produce a number. Two indivisible spatial entities, by contrast, each lacking spatial extension, could never yield a spatial expanse by virtue of being combined. In the absence of this homology between the one (in the realm of number) and an indivisible entity (in the realm of space), Pascal, in de Man’s analysis, has to “suspend this separation while maintaining it—because the underlying homology of space and number, the ground of the system, should never be fundamentally in question.”40 So Pascal finds a corollary for the indivisible entity by introducing the zero, which, while not a number itself, is presupposed by number and has equivalents in the registers of motion, space, and time: “If you want to find a comparison in the realm of numbers that accurately represents what we are considering in the realm of extension, it would have to be that of zero to numbers. Because zero is not of the same genre as numbers, . . . it’s a veritable indivisible of numbers just as the indivisible is a veritable zero of extension.”41 As Ernesto Laclau describes it, “The zero is radically heterogeneous with the order of number” but “crucial if there is going to be an order of number at  all.” It allows, moreover, “the homology between number, time and motion . . . to be maintained” insofar as it provides “the equivalent of ‘instant’ or ‘stasis’ . . . in the order of number.”42 Much as the aesthetic, in de Man’s words, restores for Schiller “equilibrium, harmony, on the level of principles,” so the zero, for Pascal, as de Man observes, recovers “the homogeneity of the universe.”43 De Man locates the zero’s importance, however, in its allegorical relation to the arbitrariness of linguistic definition—the arbitrariness that lets Euclid exclude the one from definition as a number while defining magnitudes in such a way that it belongs to the “genre” of number. The zero, as de Man expands on its brief appearance in Pascal’s text, correlates with geometry’s nondefinition of its own initial principles and the lack of any demonstrable ground to undergird its logic; “all these truths,” Pascal writes, “are incapable of demonstration, and yet they are the foundation and the principles of geometry.”44 This allows de Man to characterize Pascal’s project in these terms: The continuous universe. . . is interrupted, disrupted at all points by a principle of radical heterogeneity without which it cannot come into being. Moreover, this rupture. . . does not occur on the transcendental level, but on the level of language, in the inability of a theory of language as sign or as name . . . to ground this homogeneity without having recourse to the signifying function . . . that makes the zero of signification the necessary condition for grounded knowledge. The notion of language as sign is dependent on, and derived from, a different notion in which language functions as rudderless signification and transforms what it denominates into the linguistic equivalent of the arithmetical zero. It is as sign that language is capable of engendering the principles of infinity, of genus, species, and homogeneity, which allow for . . . totalizations, but none of these tropes could come about without the systematic effacement of the zero and its reconversion into a name. There can be no one without the zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero. The zero is always called a one, when the zero is actually nameless, “innommable.”45 The value of this account for my argument lies in its evocation of the zero’s “effacement” and its concomitant “reconversion” into, its representation as, a positivized and enumerable entity, which is to say, a “one.”46 This “systematic” effacement of the zero as the disruptive and heterogeneous principle on which the “continuous universe” depends enacts a logic that underlies the aesthetic for Schiller, the supplement for Derrida, education for Rousseau, and sublimation for Lacan. Not that these terms are interchangeable or that they signify the same thing, but each reinforces the social imperative toward the “marriage” of “mind and world,” toward a unified system, a comprehension, that strives to efface its internal rupture, its structural impossibility, through repetitive tropological substitutions that turn the zero into a one—substitutions that make the ontological negations articulated as queerness or Blackness (for example) assume the positivized form of social identities: “the queer” or “the Black.”47 Consonant with such a logic, though, the negativity of this repetition and its underlying drive experience “reconversion” into the “truth” of reproduction, redescribing the stasis of its iterations as a movement toward futurity.48 This, of course, is the function of the Child and the stake in its education. Could teachings at odds with this logic add up to anything at all, having nothing at all to add but the persistence of nothing in the “guise” of the one—nothing to add but the negative sign that signals a primal subtraction: the negativity added to the sign as such in order to show, as de Man writes above, that “language as sign is dependent on, and derived from, a different notion”? If sublimation, aesthetics, and logic turn the zero into one, this “different notion” reverses the process by making the one, the referential entity, into something unintelligible: the “linguistic equivalent” of zero. Such a “different notion” may echo what Brian Rotman has in mind when he discusses the insistence of Simon Stevin, a sixteenth-century Flemish mathematician, “on a semiological account of number, . . . which transferred zero’s lack of referentiality, its lack of ‘positive content,’ to all numbers.”49 Like queerness as ontological negation, this notion leads to nothing in the social order of meaning: which is to say, to the nothing of the “zero of signification” that always subtends that order. Andrzej Warminski associates this zero with the “stutter of sheerly mechanical enumeration,” a phrase that echoes the words of de Man in “Hegel on the Sublime” and so might gloss the zero as well: “Like a stutter, or a broken record, it makes what it keeps repeating worthless and meaningless. . . . Completely devoid of aura or éclat, it offers nothing to please anyone.”50 How could the nothing of the zero, with its machine-like repetitions, ever generate value or make a positive contribution to life? Simply put, it cannot. The very concept of “value” requires the zero’s sublimation insofar as it privileges the framework of meaning, the universe of sens-absexe, that requires the absenting of ab-sens to turn a profit on negativity by swelling the world into sense. A teaching that profits no one and that “offers nothing to please”: to what could that teaching amount if not a radical threat to the one, to the Child, to the good, and so to the future? In an aesthetic order based on the harmonization of sign and meaning, that teaching could serve as nothing more than the sign of a bad education.