You should prefer a method of queer unintelligibility in academic spaces that refuses to generate knowledge that necessitates the ontological exclusion of queerness

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education

Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 3, Duke University Press]//owen

At the beginning of “The Resistance to Theory,” Paul de Man notes his essay’s unexpected engagement with “the question of teaching”: “This essay was not originally intended to address the question of teaching directly, although it was supposed to have a didactic and an educational function—which it failed to achieve.”1 In a brief sketch of the essay’s history, he informs us that he wrote the original version as an entry on “literary theory” that he had been invited to produce for “a collective volume entitled Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures” (3). The essays in the collection, to be published under the auspices of the Modern Language Association, were meant to survey relevant publications in the field, to define important areas of academic dispute, and “to lay out a critical and programmatic projection of the solutions which can be expected in the foreseeable future” (3). The essay de Man submitted, however, was rejected for not meeting this mandate. De Man acknowledges that he “found it difficult to live up, in minimal good faith, to the requirements of the program and could only try to explain, as concisely as possible, why the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of its definition” (3). This failure to fulfill the “educational function” with which he had been charged leaves its trace in the published version’s turn to what the original did not address: “the relationship between the scholarship . . . , the theory, and the teaching of literature” (3–4, emphasis mine). The “impossibility of [theory’s] own definition” prompts de Man to ask if theory could ever be compatible with teaching or if, instead, it necessarily disrupts the “educational function” and its “pedagogical objectives” (3), challenging everything “teachable, generalizable, and highly responsive to systematization” (19) by means of theory’s self-resistance, its status as “theory and not theory” (19) at once. This non-self-identity, like Hamlet’s inability to be or not to be the referent of his name, or like the one’s inability, according to Euclid, to be or not to be a number, characterizes both literature and theory for de Man and disorients pedagogical institutions that rest on the systematization of knowledge.2 No Lacanian himself, and not prone to engage psychoanalysis or its vocabulary, de Man, as we saw in chapter 1, by focusing on the zero as suturing the fracture in the “homogeneity of the universe,” though only by introducing an element “heterogeneous with regard to the system and nowhere . . . a part of it,” recognizes, like Jacques Lacan, that language generates—and generates systematically—the beyond of its systematization.3 Theory makes evident a rupture in teaching’s framework of intelligibility that allegory and catachresis, like the zero, plaster over. The former affords us a “pseudoknowledge” that “pretends to order sequentially . . . what is actually the destruction of all sequence,” while the latter posits and positivizes the nothingness of the zero (“the name is the trope of the zero”), always “nameless, ‘innommable’” in itself, through an act that “usurp[s], by imposition . . . the authority of cognition.”4 What in each of these cases seems to reinforce the coherence of the order of meaning turns out, as read through the lens of theory, to fracture the system of knowledge production it supposedly secures. In the middle of “The Resistance to Theory,” therefore, de Man reframes this titular resistance, redescribing it as “a resistance to reading” (15) and specifying it as a resistance to rhetorical readings attentive to the “literariness” that “disrupts the inner balance” (14) of the trivium, the classical model of education, in much the same way that the zero, which secures the “homogeneity of the universe” for Pascal, simultaneously disrupts the homogeneity “of the [mathematical] system” insofar as it is “absolutely heterogeneous to the order of number.”5 This paves the way for de Man to characterize reading’s negativity as what “prevents all entities, including linguistic entities, from coming into discourse as such” (19). Theory thus becomes an impediment to the generation of knowledge, including the knowledge of theory that literary studies purports to convey. What teaching could allow for the systematic transmission of such a system-destroying practice, one whose aneconomy keeps “all entities . . . from coming into discourse”? Faced with what de Man calls “this undoing of theory, this disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic to the general science of man and of the phenomenal world” (17)—faced, that is, with the “undoing” that theory occasions and suffers at once (the undoing of what is “teachable, generalizable, and highly responsive to systematization”)—how could theory lend itself to scholarship’s “pedagogical objectives”? From the outset, de Man approaches these questions by rejecting the notion of teaching as “primarily an intersubjective relationship between people,” defining it, instead, as “a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved” (4). Viewing teaching as “scholarly, not personal,” he scorns the frequent attempts to model it, as he writes in an acid phrase, on “show business or guidance counseling” (4). With specific regard to literary scholarship, which should, “in principle, . . . be eminently teachable,” de Man suggests that it ought to involve two different but “complementary” components: “historical and philological facts as the preparatory condition for understanding” and the “methods of reading or interpretation” that build on those facts (4). Adopting a tone of confidence in the future of literary studies, de Man asserts that these “methods” can “hope to evolve by rational means, despite internal crises, controversies and polemics” (4). But when he subsequently characterizes theory as “a controlled reflection on the formation of method,” which makes it, at least in this “rational” form, “entirely compatible with teaching” (and which accounts for the fact that “important theoreticians” can be “prominent scholars” as well), he immediately pauses to acknowledge that the compatibility of theory with teaching vanishes once “a tension develops between methods of understanding and the knowledge . . . those methods allow one to reach” (4). To the extent that “a discrepancy between truth and method” constitutes, for de Man, “an inherent focus of the discourse about literature,” it follows that neither “the notion of ‘literature as such’” nor the “distinction between history and interpretation” can simply “be taken for granted” (4). As theory’s “controlled reflection on the formation of method” parts ways with knowledge, “controlled reflection” leads only to reflections on reflection’s escape from control. What begins (in apparent innocence) as an inquiry into methods of literary reading now confronts a self-reflexive abyss that troubles such foundational assumptions as “historical and philological facts.” Nothing, it seems, can hold these reflections on the “formation of method” in check since such “control” would be determined by the “method” on whose formation theory reflects. By demonstrating that the knowledge at which method arrives may not be sustained by the methodological model producing it in the first place, de Man dismisses the epistemological “control” that makes theory and teaching compatible. In this context, where “it . . . is not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language” (11), literary studies can no longer claim institutional justification on the basis of promoting humanistic values (among which knowledge is foremost) or of developing an intimate bond between ethics and the study of aesthetics. To the contrary: insofar as theory reveals “the impossibility of its [own] definition” and then spreads this definitional uncertainty to the objects and methods of literary scholarship, it bespeaks a “negative moment,” to borrow a phrase de Man uses elsewhere, that the dominant aesthetic ideology compels both scholars and institutions to disavow.6 This accounts for the persistent animus against theory “in the name of ethical and aesthetic values” as well as for “the recuperative attempts of theoreticians to reassert their own subservience to these values” (4). De Man highlights the normativity of these values by stressing the allegiance they routinely command from theorists and opponents of theory alike. But the “recuperative attempts” of theoreticians to endorse these “ethical and aesthetic values” inadvertently reveal those values themselves as modes of recuperation, as attempts to assert the value of value over and against the “negative moment” when value succumbs to critique without providing the ground for making critique a value in itself. Never will de Man more clearly indict the reign of “ethical and aesthetic values” in the practice of literary theory, even if he can only do so while maintaining the vestigial value of truth: “If this is indeed so,” he pronounces, referring to the separation of truth and method that makes theory “an obstacle” to scholarship and teaching, “then it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true” (4). With this assertion he touches on something central to bad education: the failure inherent in every effort to teach “what should not be taught,” the failure to encounter the zero as zero without turning it into a one. Treating theory as “teachable, generalizable, and highly responsive to systematization” (19) would constitute as effective a resistance to theory, and to theory’s “impossibility of . . . definition,” as would consigning it to the ranks of “what should not be taught” and “teaching what is not true.” What, in that case, would it mean to teach what is “true” but “should not be taught”? I have argued thus far that “what should not be taught” refers to what dissolves a social reality, undoing its coherence as a system adequate to designate what “is.” Bad education unleashes the queerness that empties out meaning, derealizes being, and forces us to face our facelessness, our status as posited entities in a system of signification.7 The various catachreses of queerness (a set that is always definitionally open) give queerness a local habitation and a name to defend against this nothingness, to refigure its zero as a one whose subsequent abjection from the collectivity procures the collective itself as one—a one that survives through such abjections alone and becomes, in effect, their archive. Queerness, to the contrary, figures the cut, the ab-sens, that fractures coherence, even if that cut’s negativity is needed to make identity possible. In this sense, queerness expresses the madness of the Symbolic’s division into places in the absence of the Imaginary tether that binds them to meaning through sens-absexe. What, after all, is sens-absexe if not the order of meaning or sense produced by the subtraction of sex as ab-sens, where sex is already a subtraction from sense anterior to sense itself ? Sex is the senselessness of this primal subtraction that can never be governed by sense, the queerness of the cut that separates the subject of desire from the subject of the drive, the collective from its figures of jouissance: those catachreses of queerness who would void its meaning and so destroy it. If the insistence of this cut makes resistance to identity, coherence, and even to life as what Lacan calls “the service of goods,” inextricable, in the form of the drive, from identity as such, if it points toward a “universal” queerness (one that ruptures, universally, the universality of the one), then it associates that queerness not only with the energy of a relentless negativity but also with the notion of radical evil as thought (and repudiated) by Western philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Alain Badiou.8