Education is the creation of a symbolic order that renders the queer and the black as negation

[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

¶ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to educate means, in its earliest sense, “to bring up (a child) so as to form his¶ or her manners, behaviour, social and moral practices.” Only later does it signify¶ “to teach (a child) a programme of various academic and non-academic subjects,¶ typically at a school; to provide with a formal education. Also: to provide (an adult)¶ with instruction, esp. in a chosen subject or subjects at a college, university, or other¶ institution of higher education.”1¶ By twice referring to it within parentheses, these¶ definitions remind us that the child is the exemplary object of education, lending¶ even adults engaged in “formal” or “higher” education an implicit association with¶ something that is not—or not yet fully—formed. Such formation (formation in¶ French names a program of educational training or development) seeks to “elevate”¶ the child, to bring it up, to raise it from animal existence to human subjectivity by¶ bringing it into conformity with the logic of a given world. Jacques Lacan describes¶ this process as “l’apprentissage humain,” thus identifying it both as human learning and as learning to be a human.2¶ Education reproduces, it passes on, the world¶ of human sense by turning those lacking speech—infans—into subjects of the law.¶ It inculcates not only concepts and values but also the language by which sensory¶ impressions—otherwise fleeting, discontinuous, chaotic—congeal into a universe¶ of entities that are formalized through names.¶ Building on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who focused on the basic or elementary structures affecting human relations, Lacan asserts from early on the key to¶ a recognizable human order: “that the symbolic function intervenes at every moment and in every aspect of its existence.”3¶ This Symbolic function, with its constitution of a signifying order, produces the subject within a world that¶ appears accessible to comprehension.4¶ Lacan insists on this point: “If the¶ human subject didn’t name things—as Genesis says was done in the earthly¶ Paradise, with the major species first—if it didn’t come to an agreement¶ on this mode of recognition, no world of the human subject’s, not even a¶ perceptual one, would be sustainable for more than an instant.”5¶ Even the¶ Lacanian Imaginary, then, though characterized by our attachment to images that afford a first glimpse of coherence and unity, relies on the Symbolic¶ to imbue its perceptions with stability and duration. The shaping, survival,¶ and transmission of a world thus depend on an education that brings us into¶ being as human subjects by bringing us into, then bringing us up in, the order¶ of the Symbolic.¶ The language that produces the subject within this order of signification,¶ however, also installs an absence at that order’s very core.6¶ When Jean Hyppolite, attending one of Lacan’s seminars, responded to the latter’s account¶ of the Symbolic by asserting, “We can’t do without it, and at the same time¶ we can’t situate ourselves within it” (nous ne pouvons pas nous en passer,¶ et toutefois nous ne pouvons pas non plus nous y installer), Lacan immediately agreed: “Yes, of course, naturally. It’s the presence in absence and the¶ absence in presence” (Oui bien sûr, naturellement. C’est la présence dans¶ l’absence et l’absence dans la présence).7¶ By embedding us in a reality given¶ shape and persistence by Symbolic articulation, by names that impose relational systems on inconsistent Imaginary perceptions, language also enables¶ us to generate the notion of something that escapes it, something that remains definitionally exterior to systems of meaning or signification. Alenka¶ Zupančič puts this well: “Within reality as it is constituted via what Lacan¶ calls the Imaginary and the Symbolic mechanisms, there is a ‘place of the lack¶ of the Image,’ which is symbolically designated as such. That is to say that¶ the very mechanism of representation posits its own limits and designates a¶ certain beyond which it refers to as ‘unrepresentable.’”8¶ Only the Symbolic¶ organization of a world allows something to be missing from it; only Symbolic reality creates the place for the lack of the Image, or for the thought¶ of an absence in the system, and so for an encounter with the unnameable¶ that Lacan names, nonetheless, as the Real. By producing the machinery for¶ “symbolically designat[ing]” what escapes Symbolic designation, for conceptualizing, in other words, the place of something incompatible with the logic¶ of meaning, the Symbolic allows for the thought of “nothing,” of what possesses no being in the world, while making that nothing impossible to think except in the form of “something.” Education intends precisely that: the foreclosure of the nothing the Symbolic calls forth as its excess or remainder—a¶ foreclosure that effectively makes something of nothing, reproducing the¶ world as sense, while, correlatively, imposing on certain persons the burden¶ of figuring nothing. ¶ But what if education in its second moment, the one that the both the¶ Oxford English Dictionary and common usage describe as “higher,” insisted¶ on the nothing, on the exclusion, that threatens to derealize the world?¶ Could such an education resist the imperative of affirmation and reproduction? Could it think the insistence of nothing without attempting to redeem¶ it? Philosophical engagements with the zero or the void, psychoanalytic¶ accounts of the force of the Real, and political analyses of the social structures dooming certain lives to nonbeing: all have entered the curricula of¶ the contemporary Western academy. Woman as ontological impossibility,¶ for example, shapes the work of such prominent feminists as Luce Irigaray¶ (“The question ‘what is . . . ?’ is the question—the metaphysical question—¶ to which the feminine does not allow itself to submit”), Julia Kristeva (“On¶ a deeper level, however, a woman cannot ‘be’; it is something which does¶ not even belong to the category of being”), and Catherine Malabou (“This¶ assimilation of ‘woman’ to ‘being nothing’ perhaps opens a new path that¶ goes beyond both essentialism and anti-essentialism”). Similarly, the antithesis of Blackness and being has shaped the thought (from Frantz Fanon forward) of many Black intellectuals, including Sylvia Wynter (“Blacks . . . have¶ been socialized to experience ourselves in . . . negative being”), Jared Sexton¶ (“Black lives matter, not in or to the present order of knowledge that determines human being, but only ever against it, outside the limits of the law”),¶ and Fred Moten (“Blackness is prior to ontology . . . it is ontology’s anti- and¶ ante-foundation”).9¶ Meditations on the function of the void or the null set¶ in the presentation of being, moreover, play crucial roles in my own work as¶ well as in that of philosophers and critics such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou.¶ Yet even as deconstructive, feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, and racecentered theories have entered the university, they’ve engendered violently¶ negative reactions to their institutionalization, fueling the ongoing culture¶ wars in the United States and abroad.10 By addressing nothing’s (non)place¶ in any constituted order of thought, and thereby seeming to disturb metaphysics and social value alike, these, like the fields that house them (most¶ often the humanities and social sciences), find themselves reduced by their¶ opponents to the figural status of the nothing they engage. Excoriated for debasing reality and truth (a charge leveled by the right-wing Norwegian¶ mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik as well as by the “liberal” American¶ cultural journalist Michiko Kakutani), these discourses refuse the normative¶ paradigm of education as world transmission—as the preservation, mutatis¶ mutandis, of reality as it “is.”11 They focus, instead, on what thought and education register as the unthinkable, as foreign to logic or sense. They promulgate¶ a “bad education” by attesting to what Slavoj Žižek calls, in the course of a¶ reading of Immanuel Kant, “the ontological incompleteness of reality itself.”12¶ Lacan attributes that incompleteness to the Symbolic formation of the¶ subject and the structure of the unconscious. In Seminar XI he remarks that¶ “discontinuity . . . is the essential form in which the unconscious appears to¶ us” and then wonders whether the “absolute, inaugural character” of that discontinuity can manifest itself only against “the background of a totality.”13 “Is¶ the one anterior to discontinuity?” he asks; is there a unity, in other words, before the negativity that introduces the division, the “discontinuity” that characterizes the unconscious? He follows with this response: “I do not think so,¶ and everything I have taught in recent years has tended to exclude the need¶ for this closed one. . . . You will grant me that the one that is introduced by the¶ unconscious is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture.”14 This inaugural¶ rupture, prior to the “being” of the “one” that it would split, presupposes¶ for Lacan no unified “background,” no whole that precedes its division. He¶ thus argues that “the first emergence of the unconscious . . . does not lend¶ itself to ontology.”15 Indeed, the unconscious, as he puts it, “is neither being¶ nor non-being” precisely because “what is ontic in [its] function . . . is the¶ split.”16 That split, which makes possible all that appears, can never appear¶ “in itself ”; it possesses no “in itself ” to appear but produces the appearance¶ of the “in itself ” through its primal division or negativity. Escaping containment by the either-or logic of “to be, or not to be,” it opens an absence that¶ Lacan rewrites as “ab-sens” in L’Étourdit. As the absenting of meaning from¶ being, as the insistence of what can never be counted as part of any world,¶ ab-sens has no place in the order of sense that assumes “the background of a¶ totality” wherein being and meaning both depend on each other and prop¶ each other up.17