We affirm bad education within intellectual property a form of catachresis as a site within language that explodes the symbolic register through which queerness and blackness are rendered intelligible within the sex-absence of language

With this we may seem to have wandered far from the murder of George Floyd, but Bad Education argues, to the contrary, that this is the immutable structure to which “structural racism” finally refers. While acknowledging historical differences in lived experience, socioeconomic mobility, degree of precarity, access to power, and positioning in the cultural imaginary among those read as Black, queer, woman, trans*, or any other category of social (non)“being” collectively delegitimated as other than human, this book maintains that the stigma attached to such posited identities corresponds to their inflection (in particular communities and at particular historical mo- ments) as embodiments of a negativity inassimilable to being, reflecting their figural status as personifications of ab-sens or of sex in its Lacanian (non)sense.¶ This claim may appear to privilege sex over other conceptual frameworks, like race, but only insofar as one confuses sex with the literalizations that (mis)represent it. Sex, in this context, does not refer to a conceptual formation at all but instead to what conceptual formation necessarily excludes. Lacan, to be sure, invites this confusion by naming as sex the nondifferentiation he attributes to ab-sens. But the movement from sex as negativity, as the nonbeing associated with the Real, to sex as the sexual difference on which the Sym- bolic seems to rest conforms to the logic of fantasy so rigorously theorized. ¶ in Lacanian thought—a logic that attempts to make sex make sense, to positivize its negativity, through the promise of sexual relation. Put otherwise: sexual difference, sexual relation, and the primal prohibition of incest make sex as ab-sens impossible, compelling it always to “mean” in the terms pre- scribed by sens-absexe. Those terms efface sex as the negativity of the primal nondifferentiation negated and replaced by sexual meaningfulness, which is what sexual difference “means”: the libidinized constitution of the subject through difference that libidinizes difference as such, making difference always sexual and sexual difference the Symbolic’s mandate that difference both “be” and be known.15 We come, that is, to be beings through language, which ex- tracts us from ab-sens while making ab-sens inconceivable in the topology of sens-absexe. Sex as determined by ab-sens, therefore, though catachrestically naming nonbeing, will seem to signify, nonetheless, the ontological order that means and that thereby makes sex as ab-sens unthinkable. Though refer- ring to the nondifferentiation pertaining to incest and ab-sens alike, the psy- choanalytic notion of sex, as understood by Lacan, will always be confused with sex as the name for what, in fact, absents it: the differential structure of positive differences.¶ But sex is far from singular as a catachresis of nonbeing. This book insists on the myriad names by which sex as ab-sens can go, including, but never limited to, queerness, Blackness, woman, and trans*. Like sex, these terms never wholly escape their connections to the substantive identities that appear to flesh them out: the queer, the Black, the woman, the trans person, the genderqueer individual. But they exceed these literalizations to name, or misname, that which “is” not. As the introduction explains more fully, there are two main reasons this book elaborates ab-sens through the figure of queerness . The first is its relatively loose association with any specific identity. Primarily ap- plied to something perceived as “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, queer can refer to anything that thwarts, contradicts, or departs from a norm.16 Even where its fluidity of reference, its resistance to taxonomic specificity, allows it to serve as a general rubric for nonnormative sexualities, queer so relentlessly challenges the boundaries of sexuality and normativity that no one can ever definitively succeed in es- caping its connotative reach. Similarly, no one can fully secure it as a proper identity, either, insofar as it signifies diacritically in relation to a norm. What gets taunted as queer in a high school gym class in rural Louisiana may well look heteronormative at an academic conference in New York. By rejecting the positivity of queerness, or the prospect of owning it as an identity, I keep faith with its lexical history and its various social applications, something less easily argued, perhaps, when prioritizing Blackness or woman, for ex- ample, as catachreses of ab-sens. But this book does not shrink from that latter claim; to the contrary, it gratefully acknowledges the feminist, Black, and non-Black scholars whose theoretical boldness sustains it. But given the entanglement of Blackness and woman with histories and identities more clearly defined (to others and themselves alike) than queerness, with its de- termining indetermination, I make my argument about sex and ab-sens by way of it instead. I am mindful of the political value, or strategic necessity, of affirming the specificity of delegitimated identities and of privileging their uniqueness. But the uniqueness of the histories those identities bespeak, and the differences in how they have functioned as embodiments of negativity, does not contradict their shared positioning precisely as such embodiments.¶ This leads to the second main reason for my choice. Queerness, even when transvalued by those who assume it as an identity, implies a disturbance of order, a nonconformity to prevailing logic or law, a glitch in the function of meaning. It retains the pejorative force it confers when it nominates some- thing unusual or out of place: something not meant to appear where it does or not legible in its appearance. The negative associations of queerness speak to the subject’s investment in the system of differences that called it into being in the first place and its intolerance of anything that puts its investment in the stability of those differences at risk. Our constitution through the language of sens-absexe conscripts our thought—our conscious thought—to that differential logic and commits us to its preservation in and as that thought. By fracturing the ontological consistency of what “is,” queerness refutes the education in being—an inherently aesthetic education—that totalizes the empire of sens-absexe as a comprehensive and comprehensible unity. It insists on the outside of signification that make sens-absexe not all. Whatever asserts that incompletion by representing or embodying ab- sens, whatever appears to instantiate queerness in a given order by doing so, will be charged with promoting a bad education: one inimical to the survival and transmission of meaning required by what this book will call the pedag-archival imperative. ¶ Despite the claims advanced in support of liberationist pedagogies, education is inherently conservative. Even in countering a dominant narrative or advancing a progressive position, it enshrines, preserves, and passes on a con- struction of “what is.” Above all, it conjures the subject as an archive of sens- absexe. Whatever the content of an education, the pedag-archival law affirms the ontology of difference, ceaselessly imposing the conjoined imperatives of knowing, meaning, and being. For just that reason, as this book shows, queerness teaches us nothing in two distinct senses of that phrase. ¶ On the one hand, queerness adverts us to what ontology leaves out, if only by figuring—within that ontology—what that ontology excludes. It confronts us with a representation of what the Symbolic posits as nothing, as external to being or sense, lest ab-sens as the absence of differentiation make ontology nothing itself. The events that prompted this preface respond to an anxiety about human ontology induced by those figures whose presence insists that the world as it “is” is not all. After the Supreme Court announced its rul- ing in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, for example, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, lamented that the court, by altering “the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” was “redefining human nature.” It did so, as he saw it, “by erasing the beautiful differences and complementary relationship between man and woman,” which is to say, by undoing the sexual difference that ab- sents ab-sens to establish meaning and, in the process, “human” being.17 Sim- ilarly, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when municipalities across the country authorized murals and street art meant to affirm that “Black Lives Matter,” white Americans in places as heterogeneous as New York, Cincin- nati, and Fresno defaced or attempted to deface them, often justifying their acts, when caught, with the counterclaim that “all lives matter.”18 For them, the “mattering” of Blackness seemed to violate “human nature”; they could register ontological totality only through the (literal) erasure of Blackness. Like queerness, that is, the Blackness that asserts a claim to human mattering can never enter the “all” that comes into being by excluding it. That explains why Calvin Warren, with whose thought my own work resonates, notwith- standing our serious differences, can write that “#Blacklivesmatter is only fac- tual if it can reunite black life with a valuable form, a valuation determined by political calculus. But what if reuniting black life and form is impossible? What if blackness is always already dead, the ‘perfection of death’ as David Marriott would call it, so black life-form is but a fantasy? Can we think of blackness as incontrovertibly formless?”19