Edelman’s theory is wrong and is a bad model for understanding education it provides irony to his model and makes it lose credibility queer theology solves better and other scholars have much better philosophies and metrics

And convergence is what most attracts me to Edelman. It is also what most exasperates me. Traditional Christian analyses of sin (or “nothing”) teach us to respond to it with some remedial deprivation: separate yourself from “this present evil age” (Gal 1:4) by pursuing poverty, chastity, martyrdom. This lesson seems to me unbalanced, so I hope for a better education somewhere else. Edelman seems to understand the problem in the same way as me, but his only remedy is an ironic disposition. Speaking of the BLM protests in 2020, he writes,

The events of this June exemplify the imperative of affording the shelter of meaningful being to those living negated identities. But they also remind us that meaningful being occasions those negations in the first place. That is the structural lesson that Bad Education attempts to unfold: the lesson that, as lesson, can only ironize what it teaches.

He still believes in progressive politics but is not naive. He calls inclusion an “imperative,” but he knows that inclusion always involves exclusion of somebody else, who endangers or refuses the new inclusivity. He concludes, then, with irony, the emotional equivalent of pious poverty.

Edelman’s queer theory gives a unique and urgent analysis. But it’s making me restless, and I won’t settle for irony. I think queer theology and “gay science” give us better responses.

The queer theologian Linn Tonstad has already considered this knot in Edelman’s thinking. She sees a parallel between his “queer negativity” and Augustine’s talk of original sin. She emphasizes this parallel so strongly that Paul Griffiths sees in her work “the delicious possibility that queer theology in at least one of its forms might be a kind of Jansenism”—the early modern heresy that emphasized human depravity. (Notably, an essay important to both Edelman and Tonstad, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” begins with an epigraph from the most famous Jansenist, Pascal: “The self is detestable.”) Some queer theologians write apologiae to the church, to include those who are excluded; Tonstad wants to consider what we do when we realize total inclusion isn’t possible.

Which is another reason Bad Education disappointed me: the author doesn’t seem to like anything. Everything, even writing this book, is a failure to include everyone and everything that needs to be. (“[T]his book will try, and fail” even to teach us that lesson, he says.) The voice of the book is a killjoy. But in his acknowledgements, that little, perfunctory section I often skip, I found an entirely different spirit, overflowing with gratitude and vitality, without a hint of irony. For a mentor (who wrote “Is the Rectum a Grave?”): “the man and his kindness were inseparable from his genius.” For a friend, “whose presence in my life makes living it that much more fun.” For his partner: “this book, like everything else that I do, is done for him, with him, and through him. I owe whatever I may be as a critic to all that I’ve learned from him.” Edelman claims he cannot teach us how we might survive his “bad education.” But he could say how he has learned to survive it, and as an educator no less.