Bad Education refuses to fill the void that that passes on the constitution of “what is.” Instead, it catachrestically teaches us nothing to reject the desire to map legibility onto queerness.

It follows that queerness, as the figure of such a radical unbecoming, maintains a persistently negative link to the logic of education. Queerness, wherever it shows itself (in the form of a catachresis), effects a counterpedagogy, refuting, by its mere appearance, the reality that offers it no place—or that grants it the place of what nullifies as well as the nonplace of the null. Like poetry in W. H. Auden’s well-known phrase, queerness makes nothing happen; it incises that nothing in reality with an acid’s caustic bite. Like a flame that affords the hapless moth an unsentimental education, so queerness dissolves the coherence to which our reality pretends, belying the comprehension, the unifying framework of the world, that the Child as meaning’s cynosure ostensibly preserves.3 Futurism compels us to indoctrinate children in what ought to be, not what is, shrouding them in the blinder of the putative innocence associated with the Child and imposed onchildren the better to enable the social control of adults. In the eyes of this all-pervasive regime, “the queer,” like a counterfactual assertion produced in the land of the Houyhnhnms, represents, wherever the Child is concerned, the Swiftian thing which is not: it represents, that is, the being who intends the negation of being as such—the negation of being as defined, at least, by reproductive futurism. Thus queerness, from the normative perspective, promotes what I’m calling here bad education, the education that teaches us nothing but the nothing of the thing which is not. Like the Child, the queer is a fantasy figure catachrestically produced to fill in the void that precludes the world’s totalization. The Child, however, signals the attainment of that totality in the future while the queer stands in for the obstacle impeding its realization in the present. Fleshing out the cut of division in terms of contingent historical identities constructed to ontologize ontological exclu - sion, those who are queered are libidinally stained with the negativity of the thing which is not. They threaten the Child, and therefore the future, by desublimating its “innocence,” reducing it from privileged object of desire to the void at the core of the drive.