Lee Edelman

RM

In Bad Education, you describe “education” as the process through which we’re produced as subjects of the law—the process, in other words, through which we’re given the language to make sense of human experience through given names, narratives, figurations, allegories, and so on. In the spirit of your new book, I thought we might start by talking about the education of a certain given name in particular: Lee Edelman.

LE

[Laughs.] Sure.

RM

Before you made a name for yourself within the charged debates of turn-of-the-century queer theory, you were primarily a scholar of twentieth century American poetry. Most of your work from the early to mid 1980s centered around figures like Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and John Ashbery. You even published some of your own poetry around this time in publications like The Nation, too. What drew you to poetry as a young academic? What did your desire for academic life look like in the early years of your career, both as a graduate student at Yale and then also in your first few years of teaching at Tufts?

LE

That’s a really good question, and it entails a necessarily narrative history, the central piece of which is a confession. When I started out, even in graduate school, I had the intention of pursuing poetry as both an academic discipline and a creative practice. That’s why I published poetry early in my career. Winning The Nation’s Discovery Prize for Poetry in 1983 and giving a reading in New York was a turning point for me. Paradoxically, it was what prompted my decision to give up the practice of poetry. As I got a small glimpse of the poetry scene—a glimpse that I may well have misinterpreted—it seemed to me that it functioned largely on the basis of cliques and connections, encouraging the sort of group-identification in which I had no interest. At the same time, I was becoming more and more attuned to the creative possibilities of critical writing.

What had drawn me to poetry from the beginning was the rhetorical richness of its language. When I did my dissertation at Yale on Hart Crane, the thing that was most interesting to me about his poetry was its insistence on negativity. That negativity expressed itself in a particular rhetorical trope, which was catachresis. So, the ground for my movement into theory was already established with my book on Hart Crane. That book differed crucially from another book on Hart Crane that came out around the same time, a book by a very brilliant young scholar named Tom Yingling [Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text], whose primary emphasis was on interpreting Crane as a gay poet. While my book engaged Crane as gay and as a poet, it wasn’t interested in him as a gay poet. It was interested in the queerness of his language, instead: in how his language created possibilities of thought outside the logics by which we normatively understand the construction and expression of ideas. His language, that is, enacted a continuous extension of thought itself, which he metaphorized in the title of his major poem, “The Bridge.”That movement of bridging and breaking at once, of imagining what was previously unthinkable through wrenching violations and distortions of language, defined his catachrestic poetics. For me, the bridge from Hart Crane and twentieth century poetry to my distinctive version of queer theory lies in an understanding of rhetoric as destabilizing language’s customary sense and thereby queering our certainty about what and how things mean.

To come back, then, to your question about my own formation, when I was a graduate student at Yale at the end of the 1970s, there was a radical bifurcation between the program in which I was housed, the program in English Literature, and the Comparative Literature program, where many of the major critics of the moment were theorizing deconstruction. I was aware of the developments in Comparative Literature without being part of them myself. That said, the people I was closest to, including Joe Litvak, who had become my partner, were in the Comparative Literature program. They were studying with Paul De Man, and thinking through questions of interpretation with Derrida, Lacan, Shoshana Felman, and Barbara Johnson. They were opening up ways of thinking about literature that troubled the methodologies still common in the English Department. I see my earliest work, then, as crystallizing a decisive moment at Yale: it carried forward, as it continues to do, the practice of close reading, while taking seriously the problematization of meaning-making that figural language effects.

RM

I want to stick with this idea of rhetoric for a moment. I’m going to jump forward to the present for a second, if that’s alright, in order to get back to the past. In Bad Education, you reference W. H. Auden’s famous proclamation, “poetry makes nothing happen.” You do this specifically in order to draw a bridge of sorts between Auden’s conception of poetry and your own conception of queerness as this type of gesture towards the negation of all representable meaning. I say gesture, specifically, because you treat queerness with this sort of “verbing” quality—it’s a motioning towards the limit of our ability to make sense of the world, an active proposition as opposed to subtextual fodder to mine via close reading. Were you already thinking of poetry in such terms during these early years, or did this bridge between poetry, queerness, and “nothing happening” develop later on?

LE

I was definitely thinking in those terms at the time. Auden writes that poetry makes nothing happen; it’s a way of happening, a “mouth.” That way of happening is very much congruent with what I was encountering in critics like De Man and Derrida, who were moving from structuralism to post-structuralism and who were interested less in what texts mean than in how meaning effects are generated. Such a way of happening, which has nothing to do with producing objective or historical consequences in what passes for “the world,” seemed to me then distinctive of poetry. As I came to realize, however, and this is one of the things that made renouncing poetry-writing easier, the event of language as a way of happening is not bound to any genre. In this sense I followed the trajectory of De Man, who began by exploring “literary language” before acknowledging that nothing reliably differentiates a “literary” from a “non-literary” language. But even he remained committed to the proposition that there is something about the language of “literature” that gives a greater degree of emphasis to the resistance of language to transparency, its resistance, that is, to being reduced to a medium for “communication,” or, in Auden’s terms, a medium for making something happen. Literariness, in other words, interrupts the transmission of messages by diverting language from its ostensible destination and perverting its relation to sense. It thus becomes a template for how language and queerness enact deviations from meaning’s self-evidence.

RM

In the early to mid ’80s, there was a growing space for gay and lesbian studies, as well as feminist theory, within literary criticism. That said, American queer theory, in the proper sense, didn’t emerge as a standalone discipline until a bit later, towards the late ’80s and early ’90s. Prior to the rise of queer theory proper, much of the scholarship around—excuse me if this feels like a vague or wishy-washy term, I’m struggling to think of a more succinct one—“non-heteronormative” sexualities was primarily couched in sociological and historical methods. When this scholarship did intersect with literary criticism, it largely seemed to do so under the guise of extracting some form of subtext from literature itself, in a more or less naked attempt to bolster the sorts of sociological theories of sexuality that were being developed in other departments. I hope I’m not being too leading right now, but my main interest in rehashing this historical narrative is that, by contrast, the way that you engage with sex and sexuality is about as about as structural—or, to put it another way, about as disinterested in history and subtext—as it gets. What initially brought you to sex and sexuality as theoretical concepts? Did you feel like there was theoretical space for your work within the academic discourses around sexuality taking place in the ’80s?

LE

Historically speaking, the early years of what was—at that moment at least—conceptualized as “gay and lesbian studies” were dominated by models appropriated from the sociological and historical disciplines, with a subset of work being done around the psychology of sexuality itself—not the psychoanalysis of sexuality, but the psychology of sexuality. To focus on one of the founding figures of gay and lesbian studies, just before queer theory became the rubric for that discipline: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s first book, Between Men, was essentially a literary application of a model from Rene Girard, a sociologist, which she undertook in order to think about the triangular structure of male desire in which women found themselves—literally, as the title suggests—circulating between men. Of course, the fundamental figure who gave a sociological or socio-historical direction to the emerging field of queer theory in the ’80s was Michel Foucault. To that extent, you had these models for how to do work in sexuality studies that led away from the specifically linguistic or literary; if the linguistic or the literary were brought to bear, it was always, as you suggest, as a way of discovering some sort of social logic enacted in the literary text. And for the most part, as was the case with Foucault and Sedgwick, the central object of that sociological analysis was the pervasiveness of the closet itself. That fascination with the closet seemed to define the coming out of queer theory, which needed, at that moment, to reckon with its own elaboration of a critical identity and to allegorize its own aspiration to institutional acknowledgment. This work was brilliant, necessary, and enabling; it left its traces in some of the early chapters of Homographesis and continues to shape my interest in the social logics that shape the stigmatization of queerness as an intolerable ironization of collective meaning. But that overwhelmingly historical orientation didn’t deeply interest me, in large part because it required hypostatizing “history” as the coagulation of what has “happened,” to return to Auden’s phrase, rather than reading it as a series of figures that are, themselves, a “way of happening.”

This process of turning texts into allegories that illuminate a socio-historical logic minimized their rhetorical density so as to turn them into forms of knowledge, making them, ultimately, propositional rather than figural performances. But I was impelled to think together my three overriding interests—poetry, psychoanalysis, and the post-structural theory I cathected at Yale. I was drawn to what all of them shared: an insistence on the signifier’s irreducibility to the signified and so a resistance to the normative structures of meaning that shape the world.

RM

While reviewing your publishing history in preparation for this conversation, I noticed that there was a single substantial gap during your career, from the mid to late ’80s, in which you largely stopped publishing stand-alone essays—of course, your first book on Hart Crane came out in 1987, so this isn’t to suggest that you weren’t publishing period. In 1989, you return with “The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS.” The essay became a major component of your second book, Homographesis, which—and I hope this feels fair to say—was your first major, book-length contribution to the discipline of queer theory, effectively cementing your position as a leading voice within what was at the time a still relatively nascent field of scholarship. In terms of content, more so than theoretical structure, “The Plague of Discourse” offers a significant departure from your earlier work on poetry and poetics—for the first time, we see your work engage explicitly with not only political theory, but also with contemporary social issues concerning queer people. What did you understand the social stakes of theory to be during that moment? Or, to put it another way, what drove this shift within your work? What were the discourses, or who were the voices, against which you were hoping to intervene?

LE

You’ll have to forgive me, but my answer will necessarily be a bit long, because the question is so big. The elephant in the room, with regard to that essay written in the late ’80s, of course, is the transformation of American culture by HIV disease and homophobia—the former reanimating the latter and making it a major tool of political discipline throughout the Reagan-Bush era. Although focused on finishing my book on Hart Crane, I was nonetheless deeply attuned to the rhetoric violently politicizing sexuality, which is always already politicized as a discourse that anatomizes “types” of beings. Anita Bryant’s campaign to “Save the Children,” anticipating contemporary sexual panics that read queerness—especially when visible in public—as ipso facto “grooming,” coincided with the rise of the “Moral Majority” and the re-emergence of Christian nationalism on the American political scene: a Christian nationalism that the Republican Party strategically embraced in a successful effort to consolidate power through the mobilization of anti-Black, anti-queer, and anti-liberal sentiment.

The Left’s response to the AIDS-panic and the weaponization of homophobia entailed exposing the political manipulation of the pandemic and refusing the posture of passive victim in the face of murderous indifference and indifference to homophobic murders. Those responses educated the public, shamed certain politicians and some members of the scientific community, and mobilized vast numbers of people to demand that these crises be taken seriously. At the same time, though, that militancy, while lifesaving for many, also reproduced the binary divisions that the Left aspired to counter. Posing the necessity of militancy against a denigrated passivity reanimated oppositions inseparable from the patriarchal division of labor, divisions central to the cultural stigma attached to gay men. Though reclaiming the activist stance of militancy might overturn the stereotypical figurations of gay men’s frivolity or lack of seriousness, both of which were signified as “faggotry,” it also repeated the rejection of that universally devalued “passivity.” My goal in “The Plague of Discourse” was to read rhetorically the famous slogan produced by the militant group ACT UP: “Silence=Death.” I wanted to interrogate the consequences of defending the dignity and viability of queerness by resorting to the absolute discourse of a mathematical equation—an equation announcing a stable identity incapable of question or debate. This equation, however, which affirmed the literal equivalence of silence and death, which identified those who failed to speak out or act up as accomplices to murder, was itself, in fact, a metaphor that erased its metaphoric status. At a moment when AIDS was “literally” a matter of life and death, the appeal to literalism at the expense of engaging with figural complexity, at the expense of neglecting the potentially self-defeating defense of identity, seemed to mimic the auto-immunitarity to which HIV left bodies susceptible; it set us up to do battle against homophobia and AIDS alike by accepting terms of engagement hostile to queerness from the start.

Leo Bersani—a brilliant theorist, incisive critic, and valued friend—wrote a well-known essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in which he argued that, given the epidemic, analysis, even though necessary, might prove to be an unacceptable luxury. I couldn’t accept that analysis might ever be qualified as a luxury or that action without analysis might ever be seen as a good. Political movements that foreswear that luxury quickly give way to the very abuses they come into being to resist. I caught a glimpse, at that historical moment, of the Left creating a demonized subset of queers even as it positioned itself as defending a “queer community.” The demonized were portrayed as passive, as committed to luxuries (including analysis), as refusing to defend their community and so as contributing to a culture of death. But wasn’t such a culture of luxury, passivity, and death the same culture of narcissism that heteronormative society identified with queerness? Only now so-called queers invoked it precisely to queer or to stigmatize others. My essay, then, called attention to the politics of this rhetoric and, specifically, to the heteronormalizing and historically masculinist logic of rhetorics disavowing rhetoricity, ambiguity, or figuration in order to assert the fixity, the literality, of identities whose truth is as unambiguous as a mathematical equation.

RM

To stick with Bersani and this whole idea of the demonization of analysis as somehow indulgent or passive for a second longer, while also bringing us a bit closer to the present, it perhaps makes sense to talk a bit about the 2005 MLA conference. You participated in a panel debate titled “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” which has often been gestured to as a sort of infamous turning point within queer theory as a discipline, in which it definitively fractured into several distinct theoretical camps. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but, generally speaking, the major dividing line that spurred this fracture had to do with the question of whether or not there is any sort of utopian or future-oriented political value to queerness, either as a sexual identity or as a theoretical framework for apprehending social reality. While the debate was ostensibly organized around Bersani’s work, and particularly his attempt to theorize homosexuality as a type of outlaw, anti-social category in works like Homos, in reality the debate largely seemed hinge instead upon the psychoanalytical approach to theorizing queerness that you had introduced the prior year in your book No Future—which has, of course, come to be seen as an either canonically important or canonically infamous text within queer theory, depending upon who you ask. Each of your fellow panelists, Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz, and Tim Dean—arguably all equally heavy-hitters in the realm of queer theory—devoted the majority of their time to critiquing No Future in no unclear terms. While each of their critiques differed significantly, and while each of them approached the topic with a generous and non-dismissive spirit of good faith, it’s not hard to sense the intensity of the divisions which had started to emerge around this time. Halberstam, for instance, nakedly questioned the intentions of your perceived loyalty to a recognizable “gay male archive,” throwing out names like Proust and Wilde and Genet as examples of theoretical crutches. Muñoz, perhaps most damningly, described the anti-social position—which he attributed to your work in No Future—as “the gay white man’s last stand.” What was the emotional and social climate of this moment like? What sort of battleground did you perceive these debates as being waged upon? I hope this feels like an accurate portrayal of the moment.

LE

I think you’ve characterized the contestation fairly. The terms of the debate could largely be described as setting in opposition those who saw themselves as furthering the liberation of a queer community, or of queer communities, and those—a necessarily smaller group: in the case of that panel, a group of one—who challenged the underlying assumptions of queer communal liberation. As No Future makes clear, I neither conceptualize queerness as an identity nor endorse the cruel optimism (to borrow a phrase from Lauren Berlant, my late collaborator and friend) that fuels the fantasy of queer community. Persons variously identified as queer might well form bonds of solidarity to resist the effects of their stigmatization, but as soon as a communal fantasy emerges—including fantasies of “queer community”—so too does the stigmatization and exclusion (in other words, the queering) of those who put it at risk. Every community, as a community, is structurally anti-queer: it opposes, that is, what refuses or denies its organizing logic while simultaneously producing the queer as necessarily excluded in order to procure its own identity and putative coherence. For queerness, as I see it, is a diacritical, not an ontological, position. Thus, identification as queer exempts no one from the logic of anti-queerness.

No Future observes that the subject’s formation through a language that pushes us to grasp and hold on to an always inaccessible signifier impels the production and defense of meanings that give us our so-called identities—the very identities that my fellow panelists were so eager to hold onto. The will to preserve those identities assures the perpetual queering of those conceptualized as ironizing, challenging, or disabling them. Without invoking the martyrological, one could see the argument of No Future exemplified in the responses of those panelists who needed to reject its thinking of queerness in order to consolidate a “queer community” rooted in the optimism of social and political reform.

RM

That calls to mind for me this moment in the coda of Bad Education, where you explicitly state that if one is to truly follow the type of structural Lacanian argument that you’ve committed yourself to to its logical conclusion, you inevitably end up courting a certain “stain of infamy.” It’s a form of thinking which doesn’t leave any room for gestures towards some sort of greater joy or liberation waiting upon the horizon. It’s a very totalizing way of thinking about the limits of collectivity and political movements. To what extent did the fierce debates surrounding No Future inform your approach to Bad Education as a type of follow up project?

LE

To recognize the limits of collectivity or politics is not, in my view, totalizing, but it does accept certain constraints upon the formation of the subject; most importantly, it sees the subject’s linguistic determination as decisive. Rather than totalizing, however, this determination establishes the rules of the game, the terms that govern the non-totalizable possibilities of human subjection. That said, the debates that No Future occasioned profoundly inform Bad Education. In order to explain just how they do, let me elaborate on what you just said. At the end of Bad Education, I insist that to follow queerness to its logical end as that which derealizes every identity is to court—and I borrowed this phrase from Lacan—“the stain of infamy.” Such a claim opposes the self-evidence of virtue to which communitarians pretend: the self-evident good of maintaining that politics can eventuate in freedom, equality, or even in justice. Having said that, I must add that I understand where the communitarians are coming from. I understand their need to invest in the future as another world, a world to come, that will redeem the failures of this one—the failures, more precisely, of this one to coincide with our infantile fantasies. That need is the common source of politics and religion both and of their shared investment in realizing the identity of meaning and the good. But then all of us are invested, whether we recognize it or not, in preserving some form of identity. I don’t exempt myself from the conservatism inherent in the subject—a conservatism of identity that serves, as Lacan put it in “The Mirror Stage” essay, as the subject’s “orthopaedic” support, but that also leads to all the corollary dangers of rigidification.

In Bad Education I wanted to think about what it would mean—in the Lacanian sense, but also in the “queer” sense—to let go of the respectability of being, to renounce the normalizing submission to the governing distribution of meaning in the world, so as to occupy the place of that which cannot, by virtue of its queerness, be integrated into any acknowledged register of being. To that extent, Bad Education responds to the critiques of No Future by taking the argument of No Future further. It pushes beyond the disidentification of queerness from identity and attempts to think about the queerness as a necessary catachresis—to think about queerness, that is, as a name for something excluded from the substantiality of being— in relation to other types of “identity,” including Blackness, woman, and trans, that are conceived as ontological negations. What does it mean, Bad Education asks, to embody the void of the social order, the nothing that threatens to undo it; what does it mean to signify the destruction of the order of signification?

The specific impetus for Bad Education, as I mention in the book, came from Leo Bersani’s very generous blurb on the cover of No Future [“Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument”]. Many of No Future’s antagonists seized upon that blurb with a smirking glee as if to say, “see, even Leo Bersani, however much he may praise the book, makes clear that Edelman doesn’t teach us how to survive this argument.” I was struck by the insistence that the book should teach us to survive its negativity, to assure the continued transmission, the archivization of the world in the face of its death drive. I wanted to show, in writing this book, that the goal is not to teach us to survive an unsurvivable teaching, but to interrogate our notions of pedagogical “value” by asking what the value of a teaching that is unsurvivable might be. This is a question that follows from my work on Sex or the Unbearable, the book I wrote with Lauren Berlant between No Future and Bad Education. That book examined the implications of confronting what is truly “unbearable”—not unbearable in the sense of, “Oh, this is painful, this is really hard,” but unbearable in the Lacanian sense, unbearable for the subject of the Symbolic: the unbearable of the Real as what cannot be borne, and thus as what we can never acknowledge and must always try to evade. This relation between queerness and the unbearable is crucial to think through, not to simply to understand the intensity of dominant culture’s anti-queerness, but also to understand why all of us, on a structural level, are “anti-queer,” however much we differ in what we conceptualize as “queer.”

RM

Right, there’s no exit. You’re quick to point out in Bad Education that many of No Future’s critics are operating through a fundamental misreading—that they fundamentally underestimate the severity of the argument you’re making. If I understand it right, you’re essentially saying that nobody could “want”—in the proper sense at least—the nothingness that is embodied by queerness, because this nothingness entails not only the destruction of the subject themself, but also the entire landscape of language, ideas, metaphors, and symbols that allow us to articulate “wanting” something in the first place. Some of No Future’s staunchest critics accused you of essentially neglecting the political realities of certain marginalized groups and identity categories, people who might not have the luxury of giving up on the idea of surviving into the future. But that doesn’t seem to be the wager here, yeah? No one can actually perform that sort of refusal of the future—you’re not actually asking anyone to dissolve their psyche or sense of self, as if that were even totally possible in the first place. The project really seems to be more about trying to apprehend the outer limit of social reality, or to grasp with what it means to exist at the edge of that limit. It’s a negative space that even you, as the voice behind Bad Education, are fundamentally incapable of articulating through language. So, in a sense, Bad Education is predestined to fail to live up to its own boldest assertion, yeah? Could you talk a bit about how you approached writing through this predetermined sense of failure? Is misreading an inevitability, to some extent?

LE

I want to start by addressing the impossibility of willing one’s own dissolution. In psychoanalysis, the drive is what never bows to “our” volition; it registers the division of the subject by separating the subject of desire (of what we can recognize as desire) from the subject of the drive. Lacan calls the drive to jouissance a radical desire, radical in its lack of any recognizable object. The goal of the drive is its insistence as the vector of jouissance. That’s why the enjoyment the drive procures eludes reduction to pleasure. Its good diverges from the conscious subject’s good—and from the conscious subject’s desire—and it even can put the survival of the conscious subject at risk. The death drive is hardly a “luxury”; it’s a psychic structure intrinsic in any constituted subject and the denial of that drive to marginalized, disempowered, or de-legitimated subjects is nothing less than a denial of their subjectivity for the purposes of preserving them as figural objects of “sympathy” by the dominant class. That having been said, it’s important to add that No Future, as you astutely note, asks no one to dissolve their subjectivity because, of course, no one can. Even suicide, after all, is an attempt to assert, not dissolve, one’s will. The rejection of futurity never entailed the denial of temporal succession; instead, it denied the ideological construction of value in relation to the regulatory fiction of “the future”—a regulatory fiction that establishes the Child as the figural embodiment of value and the “queer” as the Child’s antithesis: the undoing of value as such. To that extent, what many of No Future’s critics failed to see was that the death drive with which the book was concerned extended from the individual subject to the Symbolic order itself. Hence it was never about the voluntarism of an individual rejecting the future, and thereby rejecting language and law. No Future, instead, called on queers to accept their figuration of that refusal. And to that extent the imperative of the book was always, effectively, political even in its opposition to the ideological framing of politics as such. We can never, as I said in No Future, step outside the symbolic order but we can decide, for political reasons, to accede the burden of embodying queerness, which is to say, of embodying the negativity of queerness as the death drive, the auto-undoing, of every normalizing order. The question was never, as many antagonists of No Future wanted to pretend, a call for suicidal ecstasy. My work never called for that; ironically, they were probably getting that from a hasty reading of Leo’s argument in Homos. But the willingness to accept one’s figuration of jouissance in the dominant cultural optic is quite different from the claim that Leo was made at the end of “Is the Rectum a Grave?” about the specific subjectivity of gay men.

The question of failure that you refer to could perhaps be put somewhat differently. If we return to the beginning of this interview and to Auden’s assertion—his poetic assertion—that poetry makes nothing happen, that it’s a way of happening or a mouth, then it becomes even clearer that neither Bad Education nor No Future aspire to realize the Lacanian Real or undo the Symbolic order. That would be above my pay grade. [Laughs.] I’m not delusional enough to attempt such a thing nor foolish enough to want to. In fact, in its readings of Haneke’s Funny Games and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Bad Education attends to the nightmare that the Real, in its unbearability, occasions when encountered by Symbolic subjects. And yet, the burden of queerness is to instantiate, though only at the level of figure, that very unbearability: to allegorize the dissolution of meaning—and so the coherence of the world—in order to insist on what every world qua world excludes from being. Bad Education—as the Coda explicates in relation to critics of No Future—maintains that even for those intent on the void that meaning would suture, there’s no escape from the allegorizations that commit us to that logic of meaning. To that extent, like No Future before it, Bad Education could be said to enact what Jack Halberstam evokes as the queer art of failure. But that failure denotes the inevitable failure of the subject to escape subjectivity’s constraints—constraints that bind us, willingly or not, to a normalizing investment in meaning and to an anti-queer conservatism inseparable from identity. We all have a conservative investment in the continuity of our own consciousness. Bad Education anatomizes that conservatism, demonstrating why we are doomed to reenact it and why we could only experience the alternative, were it possible, as a nightmare. Contrary to the liberationist arguments implicit in the claims of my fellow panelists at that 2005 MLA convention, the collapse of the symbolic order would result in the terrorization of the subject that Haneke posits in Funny Games. Unrestrained jouissance refuses the dignity of the subject. It allows each of us to be instrumentalized to satisfy the other. And while there are those who claim to want this, at least on the level of theory—I’m thinking, for instance, of Guy Hocquenghem’s thought, which follows from the Marquis de Sade’s—few would find that state enjoyable, except perhaps in the Lacanian sense, in which enjoyment is makes no distinction between pleasure and pain.

RM

I was actually hoping to address Hocquenghem. It’s interesting to think of the two of you in tandem, because, in a sense, you take up a similar structural argument to the one that he makes in his opus, Homosexual Desire. Much like yourself, Hocquenghem is interested in this drive—towards nothing, in your words, or towards “homosexual desire,” in his—that refuses all incorporation into social identity or meaning. He’s also similarly invested—despite his use of the term “homosexual” desire—in this idea that the realization of such a desire would entail the destruction of all sexual categories, including not only heterosexuality, but also all forms of sexuality that might be gathered under the banner of “queerness.” That said, Hocquenghem’s vision of this liberation is comparatively quite cheery—he paints this very utopian image of a world-to-come in which all social categories and forms of difference melt away, leaving a state of pure exchange of joy and energy and desire between non-differentiated subjects. He was very interested in cruising, obviously. I found myself thinking of the two of you in tandem, because you’re performing an almost total inversion of his work—the structural argument is relatively similar, but the end result you gesture towards is significantly more nightmarish.

LE

That’s true. One simple way of making sense of that inversion would be to say that it historicizes both of us. Hocquenghem expresses the idealism associated with May of ’68 in France: the anticipation of a world made new through a utopian becoming where those in the streets would overcome the limits of possibility, enabling, as the slogan went, jouissance without impediments. There’s something of this to be found, as well, in Foucault’s readings of SM culture as mapping bodily zones of pleasure that transcend outmoded logics of desire. But I, too, of course, am historicized by the moment I inhabit. I came of age later than Hocquenghem and saw, as did he, the neo-Conservatism to which it led in France after the ascent of the New Right brought Reagan to the White House and Thatcher to 10 Downing Street. Though I, like Hocquenghem, belonged to the generation of the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and women’s and gay liberation, those struggles, and the idealism that fueled them, rubbed up against the protean mutability of exclusionary practices and discourses. These formed the soundtrack of the ’80s when the American Right, encouraged by such powerful figures as Lee Atwater, made racism and homophobia—and the AIDS panic so cynically used to reinforce both—the twin pillars of the Republicans’ political strategy. In the wake of all of that, the fantasy of liberation was difficult to sustain, not only on historicist grounds (where “liberation” only signified new strategies of containment), but also on the grounds of the theory by which the repetition of exclusionary structures of made “sense” for me: Lacanian psychoanalysis.

RM

I want to switch gears for a second and talk about the writing process for Bad Education in a more general, bird’s eye view sense. I kept on finding myself thinking about the book in terms of genre, or perhaps rhetorical strategy. There are certain passages that seem to quite openly court controversy—or, to use the term you borrowed from Lacan, a “stain of infamy.” I’m thinking, for instance, of your assertion that philosophy, progressive politics, and aesthetic education are as responsible for the continuation of this project of exclusion and non-being—or, the continuation of the fundamentally conservative structure of political life as we know it—as phenomena like racism, or homophobia, or femicide. To be clear, you obviously aren’t saying that these are interchangeable concepts that should be engaged with through similar terms. Nonetheless, you position them as being part and parcel of a shared social project. One genre that came to mind for describing this style of intense critical directness was “polemic”—but I’m actually not sure if that’s the right word to describe your work, on second thought. You’re somewhat equally invested in underscoring the impossibility of your own position, which sets the work apart from the type of unidirectional flow of criticism that one tends to associate with the polemic. Were you thinking much about genre while structuring Bad Education?

LE

I was quite conscious in writing No Future of engaging in a polemic. While making a theoretical intervention in the conceptualization of queerness—and, at the same time, a queer intervention in the thinking of psychoanalysis—I wanted to write a scholarly book that was engaged and, in its way, militant. That led to a short, combative text directed against a generalized ideology of futurism, but targeting in particular those who vaunted the sanctity of “life” while denying people access to healthcare, impeding efforts to combat HIV disease, and demonizing those whom they identified as promoting a “culture of death.” So, yes, the polemic as genre shaped the writing of No Future. But Bad Education is not a polemic. It makes an argument, to be sure, and that argument often challenges the dominant progressive fantasy of a community without exclusion. But that’s only because, were a non-exclusive or “queer” community possible (which it isn’t insofar as “community” requires a sense of the common good that positions as “queer” those persons who either refuse or seem to refuse it), that would be the only community with which I could identify—a non-communal community committed to its inevitable non-unity and lacking the definitional borders that would register its identity. So, if Bad Education underscores the impossibility of my own position, which is also to say, the impossibility of a progressive, non-exclusionary, or “queer” position, then that follows from the impossibility of a “good” politics exempt from the violently phobic defenses of those condemned as “bad.” The investment in certain forms of identity and certain forms of jouissance marks the Right and the Left alike. The drive’s jouissance may be the “good,” for Lacan, that registers (for both the conscious subject and the social order) as “evil,” but it manifests itself in our passionate defense of what conceptualize as “good.” The ideals, the values, we cherish as “good” are therefore, ironically, also the vectors through which we encounter the “evil” jouissance attributed to the other.

Value—as we understand from Paul de Man’s work on Nietzsche and Rousseau—can only ever be posited; it’s asserted by way of an initiating act whose success depends on power. But the power that establishes value effaces the fact of its establishment, taking it, instead, as self-evident and given in advance. Thus, even in stressing the contextual particularity of given values, that very contextualization presupposes a certain universality at whose core lies the unacknowledged power to posit those values. And if value derives from power, which it enforces as well as reflects, then neither the Left nor the Right can appeal to values “innocently.” In the Coda to Bad Education,I address one of No Future’s critics who wrote something to the effect of: “Unlike Edelman, I think queerness should struggle to change people’s lives for the better.” That sounds admirable, doesn’t it? It might even define the “good.” But at the same time, that’s the problem: our “goodness” enables our jouissance through assertions of our unlikeness to those we situate as other. Did No Future identify reproductive futurism and reframe our understanding of queerness in order not to change people’s lives? And who determines what constitutes changing lives for the better? “To change people’s lives for the better” is a radically empty claim and is, therefore, one that Gandhi and Hitler could equally endorse.

No Future challenged the Child’s position as an uncontested value made to function, as if wholly naturally, as the symbol of value itself. And after its publication, the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism made even more visible the mobilization of the Child for political ends. But Bad Education took so long to write that I feared its moment might have passed before the book came out. Unfortunately, that fear has proved unwarranted. The book arrives at a moment when the question of values, education, and queerness is so hotly and widely contested that one might think I were orchestrating the political landscape to sell my books. I mean, we’re living through a moment of insidious attempts to ban classroom discussions of race and sexuality, to eliminate books dealing with critical race theory and queer theory from public libraries, and to paint gender affirmation as child abuse and queerness as inseparable from “grooming.” While politicians gin up fear that drag queens are sexualizing children and stripping them of their innocence, conservatives like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, sign laws that make it easier to employ children younger than 16 in hazardous occupations. They’re eager to protect children from exposure to books and to drag queens, but not from exposure to toxic chemicals or dangerous work-place conditions.

RM

I’m so glad you brought up the figure of “the Child” specifically, because that was something else I was hoping to address. While the animus of “the Child” remains omnipresent in our political landscape, the stakes seem to have shifted between the time of No Future and that of Bad Education. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the primary vector through which this threat to children’s innocence was figured was that of, for lack of a less identitarian term, capital-G and L Gays and Lesbians—I’m thinking about the mainstream culture war debates around gay marriage, military participation, surrogacy, post-AIDS assimilation, the corporatization of “pride,” and so on. That vector seems to have largely shifted onto the figure of trans people, as well as people—like drag queens—who are not necessarily trans, but who nonetheless stoke this mainstream anxiety around gender fluidity—I’m thinking not only of the bans on drag performance that you’ve pointed to, but also all of the recent political turmoil around policing gender affirming healthcare, especially for trans youth. Your work constantly returns to this idea of “the Child” as the living figuration of a political promise for a better future constantly deferred, an uncorrupted innocence under siege. That innocence isn’t a fact, of course. It’s actively produced. It’s a fantasy of a life free of corruption, or a life free to do as it pleases, which is imposed upon those who embody “the Child.” That production leads to a paradox. It is an attempt to create a subject that has no worldly desires of its own. At the same time, creating a subject inherently creates a subject capable of desire—as you’ve repeatedly pointed towards, our capacity to want is the foundation upon which our ability to live is formed. You can’t simultaneously impose a desire for innocence upon “the Child” and also expect it to do as it pleases free from outside interference—the imposition of innocence upon children operates in direct contradiction to the desire to see them exist free of adult desires. How has your approach to theorizing the figure of “the Child” shifted over your career? In some sense, the structure hasn’t really changed over the last twenty or thirty years, and yet, in another sense, the political landscape surrounding children today feels wildly alien to that of the turn of the century.

LE

To go back to the first thing you said, No Future makes an anti-identitarian argument that many found deeply uncomfortable, especially as expressed in my assertion that queerness is not an identity but the disturbance or disruption of identity. Queerness, as I use the term, has no ontological specification; like the man in the title of Robert Musil’s novel, it is inherently “without qualities.” What counts as queer today, in a given community or location, may not count as queer tomorrow, or in a different social context. One of the things that we’ve seen since the publication of No Future—and it’s something to which No Future already pointed in advance—is that cisgendered gay men and lesbians have been accorded, at least for the moment and in certain places, a space, however narrow, of protection by the state. Such normalization can work to dissipate the “queerness” of those populations, though the heightened virulence and volume of the anti-LGBTQ+ reaction is furiously at work re-queering gayness in America and elsewhere. The “normalization” of gayness, therefore, may prove to be only temporary. Stigmas rarely vanish; they just await metastasization. So, whatever normalization may be gained by certain groups included in the LGBTQ+ acronym, the Q that signifies queerness retains, definitionally, its stigma, even if those it nominates will change with place and time.

And you’re absolutely right to identify trans persons as the “queers” of choice at this moment. Like the schoolyard bullies so many of them were, adherents to the agenda of the radical Right have a canny instinct for singling out the most vulnerable for attack; and in this case they’ve perversely joined forces with some who purport to be on the Left. So TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, can embrace the anti-trans rhetoric that emanates from the Right even as the Right, notwithstanding its profound opposition to feminist ideology, can dress its anti-trans hatred as a defense of women’s rights. Nor is the Left immune to the panics fueled by the right-wing language of “grooming,” “indoctrination,” and “sexualization.” It’s telling to examine the trajectory of the current resurgence of anti-queer rhetoric. What started with a concerted attack on “drag queen story hours” at local libraries—events at which drag queens, as a public service, read stories to children whom their parents brought, of their own volition, to attend—soon led to the legislative targeting of drag as such and then, by extension, of trans-persons, phobically conceptualized as “performing” in “drag,” and so to legislation that would prohibit not only drag performers, but also, potentially, trans individuals, from appearing in any public space where children might be present. Such legislative imperatives, modeled on the draconian anti-gay laws imposed by Putin on Russia, hew closely to the logic outlined in No Future: the freedoms and rights of adults are denied in the name of protecting the Child. Thus, the targeting of drag queen story hours in libraries spurred the ongoing move to purge libraries of books that acknowledge the reality of diversity, of non-heteronormative families and individuals, and of historical injustices. And if exposing children to stories either read by drag queens or discussing “queer” lives could be seen as “grooming” and “abuse,” then it was just a small step to denying trans youth access to gender affirming care and to denying parents the right to assist their children through transition.

At the center of this politically manipulated outrage is the figure of the Child. Even when enacting laws that result in negative outcomes for children (including higher rates of bullying, depression, and risk of suicide) the forces of anti-queerness march beneath the banner of the Child, where the Child is understood as the instantiation of “innocence” and the promise of the future. But that “innocence,” as Bad Education shows, means an ignorance of anything adults decide their children shouldn’t know. It means locking them into a fantasy world—the fantasy world of their parents—uncomfortably at odds with the realities of children’s experiences as embodied subjects. Denying both infantile sexuality and the unconscious sexual knowledge that gets transmitted within the family by touches, looks, and expressions that imprint the child’s own bodily pleasures with an overlay of sexual meanings, “defenders” of the Child ironically contribute to the sexual abuse they decry by fetishizing the notion of “innocence” and fixating on children’s bodies as sites of sexual violation. In other words, the Child excites for them the fantasy of its violability, though they can consciously access that fantasy only by way of its negation. As I argue in Bad Education, knowledge and education as such raise the specter of violation; they get framed as vectors through which the Child is removed from the authority of its parents and stripped of its “innocence”—we might say “adult-erated”—by ideas from which its parents would keep it. The exercise of control implicit in “keeping” their children from such ideas reminds us that the Child as a figure often presupposes that children “belong” to their parents, that they constitute a form of property, and that their rights must necessarily be constrained for their “own good.”

That this echoes arguments for racialized slavery predicated on Enlightenment descriptions of Black people as childlike, culturally immature, and incapable of Reason may help explain why queer theory (sometimes called “radical gender theory”) and critical race theory form the two main targets of the Right’s attack on education. As Hortense Spillers showed so forcefully, the Atlantic slave trade and racialized slavery effected an un-gendering of the enslaved Black subject. Blackness, that is, was excluded from the normative ideology of (white) gender relations and so, as we see in the anti-Black panic fomented by the school desegregation debates, the presence of Black children in classrooms with whites was seen as threatening to “queer” the latter by dismantling the (white) logic of gender and improperly sexualizing white children. Subtending the animus against the ostensible teaching of critical race theory in schools is the latest variant of white anxiety about Blackness as sexual contagion.

Thus, these panics all mobilize the “innocent” Child to express the fear, excitement, and desire its violability arouses. But that discourse of innocence is a dangerous fantasy designed to repress the most scandalous doctrine that psychoanalysis ever articulated: that of childhood sexuality. Without ignoring the realities of sexual abuse, psychoanalysis makes clear that children aren’t sexualized by drag queens, strangers, or books. They are sexualized by the unconscious investments of their parents or of the other caretakers who routinely dress, clean, and bathe them and whose attentiveness to their bodies implants in children, unexceptionally, unconscious significations that sexualize their pleasurable sensations.

RM

I’m glad that you brought up Hortense Spillers. One of the most notable developments in your thought over the last decade or so, which really comes to the fore in Bad Education, is your increasing engagement with Black studies, and more particularly Afropessimist thought. There’s a way in which your engagement with Afropessimism perhaps responds to José Muñoz’s claim that the antisocial position was, “the gay white man’s last stand.” One of the main lines of criticism leveled against No Future had to do with the racial, sociological, and historical underpinnings of the psychoanalytic tradition that you work through, as well as the types of texts you chose to foreground, which were for the most part respected entries in the established Western academic canon. That said, I feel as if it would be unfair to characterize your engagement with Afropessimism as being primarily an attempt to redress these criticisms, which have mostly been leveled by scholars associated with what has often been labeled “queer of color critique.” Rather, to your point about queerness being a structural condition without strict identitarian determination, your invocation of Afropessimism serves to draw conceptual throughlines between disparate, structurally aligned theories of social life that have too often been taken out of dialogue with one another—whether the structuring of academic departments is to blame for this or something else is up for debate. In a sense, writers like Frank Wilderson, Ronald Judy, and Calvin Warren often seem to be much more central interlocutors with your work in Bad Education than any of the expected, “usual suspects” of queer theory and literary criticism. What drove you towards engaging with Afropessimism? Did a desire to address race more explicitly in Bad Education lead you to the Afropessimists, or, conversely, did their work force you to consider a restructuring of your own thought? I don’t want to pose such a strict binary, of course—I hope you know what I mean?

LE

I do. I argued in No Future that the “fourteen words,” an oath by which certain white supremacists pledge to protect the future for white children, should register as chilling not only for its specification of whiteness, but also for the reproductive futurism invested in the figure of the Child as such. Whiteness, in this instance, is essential to their conceptualization of the Child, but the Child as a disciplinary figure has no intrinsic relation to whiteness. Rather, the Child embodies those attributes with which a given community, at a given time, identifies itself and in which it images its survival. Now many critics of No Future have argued that the Child is always and indicatively white. That was the claim most effectively made by my late friend, José Muñoz. But that claim, as I’ve argued, misreads No Future in a self-deconstructing way. Muñoz begins by noting, rightly, that children of color are often excluded from the dominant white imaginary of the Child. Not always—I’ve written about counterexamples, including U. S. anti-abortion campaigns—but with a noticeable and disturbing frequency. In the face of that racialized conception of the community whose future the Child assures—a racialized conception with murderous implications for Black people and persons of color—Muñoz asserted that we need to preserve the ideology of futurism so that non-white children and “queer youths of color actually get to grow up.” To note that this framing reproduces exactly the ideology of the Child, or that it does so in a way that dismantles the claim that the Child is always white, is neither to dismiss nor to trivialize the importance of “youths of color” surviving. It’s rather to point to the violence implicit in making the Child the image of a community’s survival and establishing reproductive ideology, the imperative of preserving and protecting the future for a fantasmatic Child, the horizon of political endeavor. Life in the present, not the future, needs protection. The future, like the Child, is a projection and just as “youths of color” need to survive, so too do adults and seniors of color. So long as we’re ruled by the ideology of the Child—whatever its race, ethnicity, or religion—those construed as enemies of the Child will be demonized as queer. And we see that demonization is in every community and collectivity that subscribes to reproductive futurism. As I note in Bad Education, Uganda is currently in the process not only of increasing its already steep penalties for non-heteronormative sexual relations, but also of making it fundamentally illegal to openly identify as gay. Politicians in nations like Uganda and Kenya justify such laws by representing homosexuality as a legacy of white Western colonial rule—a legacy that threatens the integrity of indigenous culture and African children. The Child thus instantiates a communal ideal deployed for regulatory ends.

Now all of these questions about communitarianism, queerness, and identity get filtered through my understanding of psychoanalytic theory and, in particular, the notion of jouissance that Lacan extracted from the work of Freud. When I began to read Afropessmist theory, I recognized its similarity to some of the arguments of No Future and I found myself compelled by the similarities and the differences between certain Afropessimist accounts of Blackness and my own conceptualization of queerness. So much of the dazzling work of thinkers associated, in one way or another, with Afropessimism—Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Calvin Warren, Christina Sharpe, and David Marriott, among others too numerous to name—has emphasized, like my Lacanian reading of queerness, structural constraints on “liberatory” movements that perpetuate social exclusion and condemn the subject, as psychic subject, to a logic of repetition. I share the Afropessimist commitment to the question of ontological negation and, especially in the work of Marriott, to thinking the non-self-identity of Blackness. The link between queerness and Blackness for me, beyond the fantasies about sex and gender that racialized slavery imposed on Black subjects, centers on this non-self-identity, this figuration of an impossibility that must be conceptualized as ontologically impossible, but that must, at the same time, be conceptualized so as to be exiled from the realm of ontology. Both, in my reading, catachrestically nominate the undoing of social logics by identifying an inherent threat to the stability of identity itself. Blackness and queerness as frameworks for thinking particular populations carry different historical framings, different social meanings, and different experiential consequences. But they can nonetheless function as what Derrida calls non-synonymous substitutions, as correlative figures that designate a radical negativity that threatens the coherence of the world.

RM

Right. You are quite clear on the point that queerness, in your usage of it at least, does not correspond to some sort of positive or representable sexual identity. Rather, it gestures towards, as you say, a nothingness excluded from civil society which cannot have a name of its own. On the level of language then, “queerness” as a term is merely the best allegorical approximation for this nothingness that you have at hand. The defense you make for using “queerness” in particular—as opposed to, following the Afropessimists, “Blackness,” or following some strains of feminist theory, “women”—has to do with the fact that it is a bit more amorphous, or less historically loaded, of a term—beyond sexuality, it can also be used to signal this general idea of the strange, or the bizarre. One piece that I found particularly fascinating about your engagement with these disparate theoretical camps, each of which is making a similar claim regarding ontological exclusion and humanity, and each of which is similarly critical of representation and notions of fixed identity, is that there’s this constant sort almost helpless compulsion to nonetheless foreground the identitarian term that closest fits each thinker’s subjectivity as a type of master term—even though you’re all essentially trying to find the language to approximate this idea of ontological exclusion, you ultimately return to “queerness,” the Afropessimists return to “Blackness,” the feminist theorists you invoke return to “women,” and so on. I was hoping you might be able to talk a bit about how you go about squaring this tension between, on the one hand, rejecting political identities and trying to articulate that which both exceeds and negates identity and also, on the other, recognizing this recurring draw towards a personal investment in certain terms that are more closely bound up in your own lived history and subjectivity.

LE

Well, I don’t want to say that I escape the problematic that you’ve identified, but I’m not interested in establishing “the queer” or “the Black” as having some sort of privileged relation to this ontological exclusion. To that extent, I think that there’s a clear difference between my work and that of those who want to say that there is some unique relation between Blackness or womanhood and ontological exclusion. As you know, Bad Education elaborates queerness without ontologizing queers. All who wish to identify themselves as queer are free to do so, but the queerness in which I’m interested in has nothing to do with self-nomination, which is always a form of identification, of ontological assertion. I’m interested, instead, in the stigmatization of someone else as queer in order to assert one’s claim to being, to ontological viability.

So, to return to your question, do I think that my own subjectivity determines my decision to privilege “queerness” as a primary, but by no means exclusive, term for what is ontologically excluded? No doubt. But not in the self-affirming way of queer auto-nomination. Were I to have seized on “woman” or “Blackness” as the term for what I primarily (but, again, not exclusively) figure as queerness, many would read those terms as having a fixed and legible relation to Black people or women as social subjects. It’s much less likely that non-Blacks or non-women would recognize the possibility of their own potential designation by those figures, or, indeed, that they would be recognizable precisely as figures. By contrast, queerness is notoriously hard to pin down. Some, of course, might reflexively associate it with lesbians, gays, or bisexuals—but, as I was saying earlier, it’s possible to argue that cisgendered gays and lesbians are—or were—in the process of ceasing to be queer in our culture. The ever-expanding acronym that tries to encompass queerness, sometimes rendered as LBGTQIAA+, marks the inherent void in its own nomination by way of two crucial signifiers: first, the “Q” for queerness, which distinguishes itself from the other letters even while it brings them together; and the “+,” which marks the impossibility of naming the void in any set. It’s that self-recognition of the impossibility of its “proper” designation that I’m trying to get at in privileging “queerness,” which is also to say it’s the insistence of the empty set within it, the unnameable subset incapable, within the language of the moment, of being thought, substantialized, or counted: the subset that registers as “nothing,” but whose nothingness fundamentally determines the (im)possibility of queerness as such.

RM

Your distinction between theories that form a singular relation between one term and ontological exclusion and your own use of queerness is definitely clarifying. Part of what I was trying to drive at is this idea of hope, or a sort of hopeless attachment to the world as it is. One of my favorite parts of your work is the fact that you make it exceedingly clear that you aren’t wagging a finger at anyone who continues to remain politically engaged in spite of this sort of inherent or unavoidable conservatism that undergirds all collective politics. Analysis affords us the distance to see that conservatism, but it’s never enough distance to get outside of it entirely—you can’t maintain that sort of analytic remove indefinitely. We’re hopelessly drawn back into the world as it is, because we’re subjects who are formed through it. We inherently have wants and desires of our own, and those wants and desires are in all cases centered around the world as it already exists. It’s a hopeless attachment to things as they are that inescapably flies in the face of our best interests or analytical intentions. What drew you to engage with this idea of a persistent attachment to the world? On a personal level, what hopelessly draws you back to things as they already are?

LE

Well, one of the critiques of No Future—it hasn’t been made of Bad Education yet, but it’s early, give them time [Laughs.]—was that it’s apolitical, or that it pointedly refuses political engagement. I think that’s as much a misreading as it would be to say that when Auden asserted that “poetry makes nothing happen” he therefore meant that poetry is opposed to something happen. But poetry, in Auden’s poem, is described as a way of happening. And so too, I think, is No Future as an anti-political polemic. The responses No Future generated make clear the necessarily political consequences of its reframing of the political field. In exploring the specular relation to the Child of those on the Left and on the Right, No Future wasn’t throwing in the towel and saying, from a position of Olympian disinterest, “a plague on both your houses; let’s give up and have a good time.” It was arguing for a different way of conceptualizing queerness, temporality, and social cohesion. To be sure, it insisted on the structural constraints that doom us, as psychic subjects, to division, exclusion, and negativity; and refused messianic promises of an elsewhere or an overcoming. But it invited an imagination of life not cushioned by futurism’s fantasies, a life perhaps better able to confront the recurrent renewal of hatred without recourse to the very ideology that fuels it in the first place. It’s important, after all, to understand that the mini-Mussolinis of the Right who are recklessly destroying people’s lives in a cynical appeal to extremist voters rarely really care about or are touched by the issues with which they gin up the base. These people are largely indifferent to whether a drag queen reads to kids in a library or that a library has a book about gay penguins. I mean, they’ve probably never set foot in a library before, so why should they care?

RM

[Laughs.]

LE

But what they do understand and care about is how rhetoric manipulates people. And that’s why so much of my work engages the rhetoric through which political crises are generated, addressed, and, temporarily, resolved. My argument in No Future, in a certain sense, follows from “The Plague of Discourse.” It centers on the rhetorical structures by which certain populations, “queers,” are demonized and by which those figures are then deployed to generate political effects, on the one hand, and communal jouissance on the other. That latter is the substrate of politics, its unacknowledged support. But it’s not in itself political and politics never fully contains it. The political manipulation of jouissance as a non-political surplus of enjoyment (a surplus unrelated to any specific political “affiliation”) compels us to think politics differently, to address its relation to the unconscious, without moralizing jouissance or exempting ourselves from subordination to it. Neither No Future nor Bad Education prescribes some proper, successful, or politically correct relation to jouissance. Both, though, insist on the poverty of critiques of power that ignore it. For many, the negativity of jouissance emerges in the self-righteous fury unleashed against those politically positioned as enemies of the Child. The fig-leaf of moral principle hides the violent enjoyment such rage unbridles. By treating politics in wholly “political” terms, we find ourselves trapped in a repetitive discourse that parrots reproductive futurism and commits us, whatever our political affiliation, to bend our knee to the idol into which the Child has been made.

In a way, this goes back to your question of failure. On a certain level, our political actions all necessarily fail. Community is never fully achieved; and not because something is missing that would make the community whole, but rather because something excessive is present: the queer that figures its undoing. And politics, as the fantasy of a perfectly self-regulating social structure, requires the purgation of those construed as responsible for that structure’s imperfection. So, America’s racial massacres and sexual panics keep repeating. How can we put the past behind us when it continues to provide an avenue for communal jouissance? The utopian faith of the Left in a community no one feels excluded mirrors the aim of the Right for a community whose values are universally shared. Both depend on excluding those who would introduce division and both ignore the division required for communal jouissance. Instead of investing in a future wherein the community will be inclusive and the forces of division at last beaten back, we might do well to acknowledge our own jouissance in the process of beating them back. Life, and especially political life, inheres in that beating back, which also, it goes without saying, revels in the division it aims to surmount. Our jouissance, in this way, is not oriented toward the end as its ultimate object, but to the immediacy of its own expression, to the enjoyment of the “beating back” itself, to the movement of the drive.

RM

I love that idea of seeking a sense of enjoyment rooted in the present—this understanding that nothing is built to last, or that all of our efforts have their own undoing coded within them. Perhaps to find a note for us to end on, I want to stick with this sense of being rooted in the present. This is perhaps a bit sentimental, but in the acknowledgments to Bad Education, you explicitly reflect upon the passing of a number of intellectual companions who left this world in the years directly prior to the book’s publication—at turns dear friends and incisive critics, these are people with whom you worked to build an intellectual world. Whether you want to call that world queer theory or literary criticism or something else, they are people who you have spent decades laboring alongside to build up a canon of thought that has had a somewhat singular impact upon American intellectualism. In particular, you name Eve Sedgwick, José Muñoz, Barbara Johnson, Lauren Berlant, and Leo Bersani. I thought it was such a touching ode to this series of companions who were not only “educators” in the literal, vocational sense, but who were also directly responsible in part for your own education—whether you want to call it a “good” or “bad” education—through their intellectual engagements and companionship. Could you talk a bit about what intellectual companionship, or friendship, means to you? If, as you put it in Bad Education, the greatest thing one can aspire to teach a friend is nothing, what does it mean to you to be present with these other thinkers, not just as intellectual interlocutors, but also more importantly, as friends?

LE

Friendship, it seems to me, is really a process of being there with someone, and becoming someone else through contiguity with that person, through the love, the enlightenment, the otherness, the opacity they engender. As William Blake said, the hardest thing is to put another before you, to actually confront their otherness. Intimate relationships ask us to do that and it’s one of the ways we come to see the otherness in ourselves. Not because the other is merely a figure for the otherness of ourselves, but because we can see in the other, in the loved one, in the friend, things they can’t see in themselves and, through that, we may come to reflect on things we don’t recognize about ourselves as well. Our closeness to the other, our intimacy and love, rest on bases that are often dissimulated by the stories we tell ourselves about our relations. The great gift of friendship is the encounter with the nothing, the space that’s unnamed because imperceptible until the encounter with the intimate other makes the presence of that “nothing” visible. Friendship, in that sense, affords us the chance to discover what was unrepresentable, but nonetheless “present,” before the event of the friendship itself. This leads back to the notion of the empty set that holds open the space that has no name in a given social situation but makes possible the introduction of something that situation could not acknowledge, something that enables discovery, transformation, and radical renewal, but only by way of the negativity that undoes the order of being, the world in which it registered only as “nothing.”

I’m reminded in this context of something I wrote in Sex, or the Unbearable, a dialogue with my late friend, Lauren Berlant. In the course of thinking about our conversation, about its pleasures and its difficulties, and especially the difficulties of thinking about relationality in relation to a dear friend and a critical interlocutor, I wrote that thinking with and against are the same. To think with someone is not necessarily to agree with them, but it is to think against them, in intimacy and opposition both—in the intimacy of opposition whereby you can lie up against someone and at the same time experience that againstness as the freedom and the security to abandon the protocols that, in most relations, keep us from voicing conflict. The closer you get, the more easily conflictual friction can find expression: and when you’re engaged in a common intellectual project that thinking with and against at once can afford an enjoyment where pleasure and pain are indistinguishable. For the strings of a violin to resonate, you need the hollow of the box beneath them. That opening, figuring the nothing or the void, affords their vibration a richness. To engage an intellectual companion is to create various worlds of thought together, so even when you open a negative space, a space of negativity, it provides an opportunity for that thought, that idea, that conceptual framework to resonate. To that extent, this conversation with you has exemplified intellectual companionship. We’re here as two people who have never met; you know little about my non-professional life and I know nothing about yours. And yet, both with and against each other we can find an exhilaration in the act of thinking together.

RM

I love that. I couldn’t help but think about Genet’s idea of betrayal while you were talking about working with someone as working against them. This idea of betrayal being a sort of highest manifestation of love for another, or the highest recognition of one’s admiration and indebtedness to another. It’s a recognition of the impossibility of total and final unity, an expression of a fundamental love for another’s otherness that supersedes the pleasure of your togetherness—to really love someone is to affirm that they not only cannot, but also more importantly should not, become one with you.

LE

That passage was so central to Leo’s work. For him, it suggested that loving someone sufficiently to betray them bespoke a refusal to let that love become an encrusted form. To prevent love from becoming immobile or fixed, a dead monument to itself, you need to betray it in a certain sense, and thereby you preserve it. That dialectical relationship was central to his view of “homoness” and of being in the world. Of course, I don’t think of my own relationship to those companions that you mentioned as specifically involving betrayal, but that’s only because the negativity of conflict, the friction of againstness, seems so intensely bound up with respect and love, with a shared commitment to thinking and ideas, and to the joy of being discomfited by countervailing argument, that I register it as the manifestation and not the betrayal of love. I think Leo would agree. But, thinking about the deaths of these remarkable friends takes me back to the start of this conversation, when I was talking about being a young gay man imagining the possibilities of what is now queer theory in the midst of the AIDS pandemic. For me, the life of theory has been shaped by the experience of untimely loss and so by the notion of untimeliness, of futures and their foreclosure. If deconstruction introduced an element of play into the act of rhetorical analysis, it also made clear the threat as to which that play could be perceived—a threat to the seriousness of received ideas, to the notion of cultural value, and to the consolations of humanism. The thrill that came with theory—the charge of its capacity to exemplify, with a rigorously elegant logic, the fractures of logic itself—sprang from its capacity to create through undoing without seeking to exempt itself from the negativity it mobilized. To be part of that intoxicating community of thought, first at Yale and later in the company of so many brilliant queer theorists, was to experience the enjoyment, the negativity, inherent in communal jouissance. And that may explain, at least in part, why theory for me both can, and must, address the intensity of bonds that make intellectual companionship at once so precious and so precarious—so precious because so precarious. But it also may explain why the whole of my work is suspicious of such intensities and committed to charting the interplay of psychic and rhetorical practices that excite communal jouissance by destroying lives in the name of the logic on which community depends.