"Queering Nothing" Lee Edelman

[Music] Welcome to Quillet, a podcast all about LGBTQIA 2S+ literature and culture. My name is Lena Matthews, my pronouns are she/her, and you can find me at Lena_Mathews on Twitter and at Quillet Podcast on Instagram. [Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Quillet. I have a very, very, very exciting guest today. Lea Edelman, hi. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. You are a professor of English at Tafts. You are probably most well known for your 2004 book, no future. You are working on nothing at the moment, which I look forward to hearing more about. And yeah, it's, I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Could you maybe introduce yourself a little more and share your pronouns if you want to? Sure. It's a pleasure to be meeting you, Lena. And it's a pleasure to be here. My pronouns are the "he" series. I am probably, as you say, as known as the author of "No Future." I am also the author of "Homographiesis," which was published before that, essays and gay literary and cultural theory. And before that, I book on "Hard Crane," and a book that I co-authored with Lauren Berlant, called "Sex or the Unbearable," which came out in 2014. And I am very happy to say that the most recent book that I have written, "Bad Education," "Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing," is going to be published at the end of this year. I believe the publication date is December 30th by Duke University Press. Oh, very exciting. And so, is it done now? Are you in the editing phase? Are you still writing? Oh, yes. No, no, no. It's in the midst of copy editing proofs, which is a story in itself. Oh, yeah. That's always stressful. But that's really exciting. It is exciting. It's been a book that's taken a while to write, and it's as you can imagine not easy to write about nothing. Yes. Could you tell me more about nothing? Of course, I was interested in speaking with you in general, but the nothing thing, I've been really interested in my research on city novels, actually, on absences. And how can you put an absence, a nothing, a lack of something on the page? Because, of course, even when you just leave space on a page, that is always. That is something. That's exactly right. So, I've really enjoyed finding out a little bit about your ideas about nothing. But I'm not clever enough to understand all of you all of it. But I'm really enjoying it and there are links to Badu and Oji and all of that. So, could you tell us, what is nothing? Why is nothing important? Well, the first thing I have to say is I don't believe for a second when you say you're not clever enough to follow or understand anything that I've written or said. But second of all, I think you've already demonstrated that I'm right by putting your finger exactly on the problem. One cannot articulate nothing, and that's the fundamental issue. Because the interpretation that I have arrived at of queerness is that queerness is not a positive identity. It's not an ontological condition. It's whatever a dominant culture conceptualizes as a threat to ontology to being. And thus, it's highly variable in different circumstances, historically, culturally, even within a given culture, within different sub-populations, what's conceptualized as queer or will vary. Even within so-called queer communities, there are those who are conceptualized and excluded as queer. So, the question of queerness is always associated in my mind with whatever it seems to that given community. Likely, whatever seems likely to eat, to reduce to nothing, the status of the collectivity itself by disturbing, disrupting, or denying the modes of making meaning or the structures of valuation that allegedly bring that community together. So, from that point of view, and this is where your reference to Badgeu comes in, within every community, there is always, as Badgeu would say, an unnamed set. There is a subset of every community, which is the unnamed community. It's the those who cannot be recognized or articulated as such, that the space of the nothing or the zero. That's the space that assures the possibility of transformation of communities themselves because it marks what we have not yet discovered, what we haven't yet theorized or conceptualized or been able to recognize. So that, for instance, if we think at the present moment, in what are called queer communities, we have recognitions for trans persons, for disabled communities, for all sorts of possible ways of thinking about forms of identity. That we're not possible when the gay and lesbian liberation movements were first being articulated. The emergence of these possibilities is the transformation of what at one point was nothing into something. But at every moment, there is another nothing that has not been articulated, so that however progressive we think we are, and this, of course, has everything to do with the controversies at the moment about cancel culture around the world, we feel that those who make mistakes in nomination or who fail to recognize what we have come to recognize as no longer being nothing but being something should be, and sometimes properly, should be chastised or educated. But the problem is that even we will have been guilty of these same things in the eyes of subsequent generations of persons because what is nothing to us will be something to them. So this book is about nothing, but it's about queerness as always occupying the space of that nothing, and therefore asking what would it mean to try to articulate nothing without turning that nothing into just another something? Thank you so much for elaborating on that. I definitely feel like I understand more about this now, and that's really helpful. And I was talking to Susan Stryker the other day about transness as kind of. She didn't quite put it that way, but I would say as opening doors to knowledge production, because it allows us to kind of try out new possibilities of existing in the world, as you have just described, I noticed that with my students who definitely live in a new world when it comes to queerness, it's mad the other day we were watching the Nat by Hannah Gatsby, and some of the students were like, "Oh, we were so surprised that this person is talking about how I didn't realise people still existent grow up in a completely homophobic environment." I'm not sure if that's news. It's fantastic, but. Unfortunately, I fear that many of those students of this generation are going to be discovering in the next 20 years that the homophobic environment has not been consigned to the past. No, absolutely. But still, it kind of shows that shift. And I think, as you're saying, and thinking about gender, very strongly as well. So I'm wondering whether does that mean that in your conception of nothing? So nothing is basically the point of knowledge production. Is it where if we want to learn anything new, we have to kind of go through the nothing? That's completely useful as a way of thinking about the relation between education and nothing. Because transformation depends upon the existence of that nothing and the pursuit as it were of nothing. The pursuit of ways of thinking, what the structure of a given collectivity, keeps unthinkable, prevents us from conceptualizing because it deviates from the logics by which meaning is produced within that collectivity. And thus the emergence of these aspects of potentiality that are consigned to the register of nothing always appears as a threat to the normative power establishment because it represents the recognition that what they conceptualize as their authority is always to use a lachanian phrase not all. It's not total. It's not complete, it's not coherent. And thus nothing marks the incoherence of any social order, the way in which that social order only can present the appearance of coherence, by not seeing, not recognizing, or not making thinkable, that which must be excluded from it. And you mentioned gender, and I think that's an extremely apt corollary, because in the book I talk about two other large-scale movements that are also predicated on relations to this notion of nothing. And one is the conceptualism of feminism, which through French feminist theory, and also through a variety of post-French feminist theory critics, has often conceptualized, I think, here of Catherine Mellabou, or Lucie Récaraye, or of Julia Christéva, who've often theorized woman as not possessing being within the terms of Western patriarchal ontology. And by the same token, theorists of Afro-Pesimism have articulated the way that black subjects are not constructed as subjects, but are excluded from the register of ontology and being within the white structure of Western ideological reality production. So queerness is not separate from questions of gender, or questions of race in this regard. My argument is that what makes gender and race and queerness more broadly problematic is precisely their representation of the abtruition of the object, the ontologically excluded into the realm of reality. Yeah. Oh, OK. Thank you for elaborating on that. I think the, yeah, thinking about the element of exclusion there and bringing in Afro-Pesimism, I think that's really important and helpful point. So when you speak about queerness in that sense, the large category of queer that includes non-white, non-sus differently abled bodies. Absolutely. Queerness for me is not, as I said, an ontological condition that is specifiable by some set of non-heterorormative sexual practices. I mean, there are many people who may well be heteronormative, who may also, in situations, be stigmatized as queer. So the function of queerness is to see it as a mobile category, a category from which and into which any identitarian group may in a given context pass. So one of the things that your students actually were remarking when you were talking about their experience of watching that net is that for them, it seems as if, because they've grown up probably in the past one, they're probably twenty, twenty, one years old now, their experience is one in which the discourse, for instance, of same-sex marriage has been around as long as they've been around. So for them, in a certain sense, lesbian and gay experiences are passing out of the register of queerness. Queerness still exists. It's just that they think that they can see a world in which lesbians and gays will not be in the category of queerness. They probably are wrong about that alas, but even if they were right, that would not affect queer theory, because queer theory is precisely the theorization of whatever remains stigmatized and excluded as the abtruition of nothing into the systems of value that constitute a collectivity. Queerness is the name for whatever constitutes for a given collectivity that nothingness, that excluded and stigmatized condition that threatens to annihilate the structures of meaning and value on which the collectivity depends. Yeah, no, thank you so much for explaining that more. And I think that, again, that is really interesting to think of that through the category of what is not rather than what is you, earlier, you mentioned Lacan, and I don't know much about Lacan. So when I was thinking about nothing, I was thinking a lot about non-New and Oji, and I came across app sense, which I thought was just, that was such a fun, helpful thing that I didn't know about as a Lacanian term. And I also came across a quote from WHO Arden that I didn't know, that I should have known, poetry makes nothing happen. I don't know how that kind of went past me, but because I think especially in, in poetry and in queer poetry, the negotiation of nothing, is so interesting, and that kind of in connection to, then a different set of values, you know, like the values of literature and the humanities, that for me really resonated. What does the, what does the Arden quote mean for you, poetry makes nothing happen? And then of course, later on in the stanza says, it's a way of happening. Exactly. So for Arden, of course, the difference, I mean, this is in the context of an energy on the death of W.B. Yates. So Arden is not anti-poetry. But for him, poetry is not about, as he says, making something happen, it's a happening. It is the thing itself. In a sense, if we combine that with the assertion that poetry makes nothing happen, then what poetry makes happen, what poetry makes happen is nothing. It's not that it doesn't make anything happen. Is it it makes nothing happen? It makes what had not been present, what had been to go back to your reference to La Conde, what had been in the realm of Ab, that La Conde writes at A, B, Hife and S, E, N, S, which is to say for him, outside the register of the register of sauce, which is meaning or direction. So Ab's sauce is not something that is meaning less, but it's not in the domain of meaning or meaning lessness. It's outside the entire sphere of meaning. It's what in order for us to live together, exchanging words as we're doing now, and assuming we're understanding ourselves, we have to absent from our consciousness. We have to absent ourselves from Ab's sauce so that we can believe we live in the register of meaning, which we take to be reality. But within that reality, within that register of meaning, there's this continuous pressure of what does not make sense. Poetry is uniquely gifted in pressuring from within language and within literature, the appearance of the meaningfulness and the coherences of meaning that language can deliver, because poetry both overloads language with meaning and exposes the context in which ruptures in meaning occur. Therefore, when Auden writes poetry makes nothing happen, nothing is the great gift that poetry is continuously giving us. In the same way, I would argue, that that queerness is the gift of continuously demonstrating to a given social order or collectivity, that it is not all, that there is something that its sense of its own coherence is foreclosent. Thank you. I find that coming from a queer poet in the context of a eulogy and another unthinkable thing. It's so interesting what thinking is through the nothing that poetry makes happen can reveal on the page or well rather not on the page in our brains. But I really love that connection. And I really love that you're also, that you have written extensively on gay and what queer literature can kind of do in the world. But in, as I understand, in your thinking about nothing, you are writing a lot about films, right? About Animote de la Mala de Cajón and about Hanukkah as well? Yes, that's correct. There are four films that I talk about in the forthcoming book, La Mala de Cajón, Funny Games by Hanukkah, a film by Casey Lemons that I'm not sure if you know called "Eves Bayu" and it's an interesting film from the end of the 20th century by a very astute and a cinematically gifted director named Casey Lemons about the coming of age of two African-American and sisters in the Bios of Louisiana. and the way in which the question of the possibility of an incestuous relation that cannot be articulated haunts and transforms their relationship to their family and to each other. So in a certain sense, the central factor in that film that brings it into the orbit of the book is that the question of incest becomes for our culture in general another figure for what is unthinkable and reduced to the status of nothing. Not simply insofar as incest can be understood as naming abusive sexual relations between persons closely bonded through familial blood relations but rather in the psychoanalytic sense of incest where which is slightly different as the theorist Slova Ejizek notes. Psychoanalytically incest is impossible. Insofar as incest is a fantasy of incestical analysis that is a foundational fantasy for all of us, a fantasy of union with the figure of the other, the primal other. In lived experience where incest is most often accomplished through rape or through violence, the experience is not the psychoanalytic incest it's simply an abuse of power and then encounter with another sexual body. The thing about incest and psychoanalysis is that it's impossible because as a fantasy it can't be actualized and therefore every incotation marks real world attempt to realize incest necessarily becomes simply another intervention within the established structures of reality. In order to understand what that signifies we have to go back to Claude Lévis-Tros who argued that the foundation of culture is the taboo on incest. What that means and the reason that this is even worth talking about is that for culture to separate itself in Lévis-Tros' perspective from nature it was necessary to exclude something. Culture is predicated thus on an exclusion. The exclusion means that for there to be culture there is always something that is rendered unthinkable, the outside of culture. That's why historically and this is where the connection with the its value becomes even more important. Queerness homosexuality as Judith Butler has noted has often been figured in relation to incest by dominant culture. What is called misedination or in the 19th century was called amalgamation is also figured as incest. So relations between across racial barriers, relations of persons of the same sex are all figured as incest which tells us that what incest as a fantasy is a fantasy of moving outside the order of culture, the order of meaning, and entering into contact with that which is excluded or reduced to nothing. Insaying then that queerness wants to recuperate or retrieve that nothing, I'm not saying that queerness is on the side of incest as improper sexual relations between closely bonded family members. What I'm saying is that that is simply one of the misnomers of the fantasy of achieving a relation that is outside the bounds of normative meaning. Yeah, absolutely and I think that is kind of prevalent in a lot of the ways in which queerness, I think not so much maybe anymore now but for a long time was represented in film and literature, for example, through the doppelganger and the double, right? So like queerness as being associated with the evil twin, as with being too similar, as an uncannily similar. So I think that it's important to think through where those representations come from. So yeah, I find that that really helpful and in general I found this very helpful to think about the connections between but also the differences of like nothingness versus impossibility and othering. So nothingness as in kind of, yeah, a bit like the non-lead, like a space that is kind of that is outside but that is also not that doesn't necessarily have to be marked, right? Well, that's right. In fact, in that education, one of the words that I use to try to explore this concept is a word that goes back to Plato's symposium and it's atopia. Oh yes. And the thing about atopia is that it was used to describe Socrates. I mean, Socrates is seen by much of philosophy as the founding figure of Western philosophy. But in fact, for Lacan, Socrates is the, and actually, this is, I make much of this in the book, Socrates is himself a sort of figure who is outside the philosophical tradition precisely because Socrates is the figure of atopia himself. Socrates was often described by his contemporaries as having catalytic fits. He would suddenly freeze. He would seem to go into another world. He would be outside the register of reality as we know it. And then he would come back to himself. And this was described as his atopia. And Socrates himself as in his irony, which dismantled the structures of normative meaning transmission was also seen as a topic in precisely the sense of strange, foreign, or queer. And it's not irrelevant, of course, that the ultimate fate of Socrates was to be cast out and killed, required to commit suicide, precisely for corrupting youth and for worshipping gods that are foreign to the gods of the state. That's what queerness is always seen as doing, worshipping a god foreign to the normative gods of the state, which is what reproductive futurism and corrupting youth precisely by teaching them nothing, by teaching them something that is seen in the eyes of the culture at large as worthless. Isn't that what all of the culture wars going on in, I believe they're going on in England, France, as well as in the US around teaching gender theory or teaching queer theory are about that you're teaching them nothing and by doing so you're corrupting them. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, yeah, it's a bit, I still, you know, I find it difficult to wrap my head around, although I understand the kind of in a way I understand what is going on, but on the other hand, I want to kind of not understand why, yeah, I mean, in the UK it's at least for my sense even, even worse at the moment than in Germany or kind of this sudden, you know, obsession with transphobia. Yeah, it's very difficult to, yeah, I don't know what to do with it, but maybe, maybe nothing is the answer to that as well. I don't know that we can afford to do nothing about it, but I do think that, I do know, I know that that's how it should meant it all, but I do think that you're right that in a certain sense trans lives have become the lightning rod for anti-queer energies at the moment because they bring together the profound anxiety about what is perceived by the dominant culture as a threat to the value simultaneously of sex and gender. Both systems seem to be targeted for them as no longer the undisputed ways in which we make sense of our world. Insofar as they are asked to recognize that there are persons whose life experiences are determined by their experience of being trans and that this is not a mistake or a misrecognition on their part or an imposition by a culture that is frivolously giving them false ideas of their identity, but this is a profound experience of how they're being in the world becomes possible. But that means that from the normative point of view, the queer is insisting on its presence within a framework of reality that, and this is the crucial point, Nina, that I think we always have to bear in mind. That framework of reality is seen as absolutely and profoundly threatened with dissolution by the adherence of normativity, by the assertions of the queer nothing, because it threatens to reduce the entire framework of their reality to nothing because it's exposed as not inevitable. Yeah, yeah, no, I think absolutely the, and I think that is also where those connections between, for example, transphobia and racism come in, right, that if the normative structures are of course not just insistent on upholding a cis binary-gendered body, but the model is a cis white-gendered body that is gendered in a very specific way and is threatened by any categories outside of it, right? I mean, especially also all kinds of non-binary gender. I think that's completely right with one caveat, and the caveat is that we must assume that all social collectivities are dominantly white, so that it is equally possible, and we see it happening, for instance, in Ghana, for, for, for, policies that are majority black and that are governed by blacks to deploy the exact same queer phobia in order to stigmatize exclude and annihilate portions of the population that obtrude nothingness within those cultures as well. But it's certainly the case that in white dominant cultural formations, the anti-blackness that permeates those formations is equally engaging the anxiety about the dissolution of the framework of meaning as is the transphobic and the queer phobic more broadly, and the misogynistic aspect of those cultural expressions. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for, for bringing that in, yes, of course. I think I was just kind of thinking also along the lines of, you know, what, what you have said about, um, about reproductive futurism and how you're right about it in the future, where um, I've, uh, I think it was, it was either a YouTube lecture or a YouTube interview that I listened to where you were explaining that, you know, if all our efforts focus on a, a utopian future with no difference, then they're, they're futile because there will be no, such a future. So we need to kind of recognize what, what is happening instead. And I thought that was also a really important point as, you know, someone who likes to think about utopian futures. And I think that can also, that also has its place, but it can't be, it can't be the, the end of everything. Um, so I, I also, I found that really, really helpful. No, I think you're right that, that we should think about utopian futures. That doesn't mean we should embrace them or that we should cease to critique or complicate them. Um, but nothing, nothing should be excluded from the pressure of nothing, including utopian futures. So to go back to the, the quotation that you, or the, the, the concept that you cited, a utopian future without difference to me would be dystopian. I mean, the, the, who, who among us would want to live in that world? It's the sort of totalitarian fantasy par excellence. And that, of course, is the problem with utopia that, you know, in all sorts of science fiction literature, one of the things that is a persistent trope is that you recognize in pursuit of utopia that you had utopia, but when you were seeking it, that the utopia that you are seeking is in some sense, an inseparable from the pursuit itself. And so I think what we can say is that all of our contestations now, all of the political struggles we're engaging in, even in confronting the horror of the ascendance of right wing authoritarianism around the world at this moment. I would not call this utopia, but I would say that we have to recognize that the, the dissensual conflict over what politics should or could be is our goal. It's not that we want uniformity and unanimity. And it's not that we want to fail to recognize. And here's the real kicker for those of us who are invested in thinking queerness. It's not that we want to fail to recognize even the ways in which certain populations of right wing authoritarians can find themselves in a queer position vis-a-vis normativity. One of the reasons that I think American liberals, for instance, and perhaps some of the liberals with a small L in the UK as well, fail to appreciate the efficacy of either a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump is precisely because they fail to recognize the degree to which the population of largely rural, largely white, largely middle class or lower middle class people in the, in both the US and in England see themselves as queered by dominant culture. See themselves as excluded and marginalized. And this is not, you know, I'm not playing my violin for them. I'm just saying that we need to recognize that that conceptualization of queerness as exclusion from access to privilege, elite culture or cultural recognition can energize right wing authoritarianism as easily as it can energize the movements to make the excluded nothing of what we think of as queerness as visible as well. And I, ever the optimist, I wrote down a little, what you said before that about utopia itself is inseparable from its pursuit, which, you know, I think is one of the ways to move us forward. But yeah, recognizing what is going on as you're saying without, without playing your violin for people, but just understanding how those mechanisms of exclusion are kind of visible and felt by, by different groups that we're not necessarily thinking about. I think that's really important. And I, I want to ask you so many more questions about, about nothing because I, I find it, I find it fascinating. But we have been talking for some time, so I was just wondering before I ask you my final question, is there anything that you would kind of be remiss to mention that you'd like to, like to say, another example maybe from your book or? Well, let me think for one second. There was something that you just, that what you said just made me think of and it had to do with not, not with, again, I, you're, I want to underscore that I am not writing a, a, a, a, paint for the, the poor downtrodden, white, rural, uh, American and, and, and in identifying them with the possibility of experiencing their own queerness. What, what I'm suggesting rather is that we need to recognize how in the face of the upsurgence of right wing authoritarianism into positions of power, one of the ironies and this is a profound irony, I think of our times, is that progressives, including queer progressives, or those who identify themselves as queer and progressive, found themselves in the position of saying, but wait, the norms of civilized behavior are being violated. And we discover at that moment just how culturally attached all of us are, whether we conceive ourselves of queer or not, to certain norms of value and meaning. And therefore, what I want to suggest is that we need to think queerness not as a positive value in and of itself, but as a persistently negative value whose negativity is its value. It may disturb us as much as it's disturbing them and that just as we sometimes take pride, whoever this we that I've just alluded to maybe, I mean, because I don't believe in the ontological category of queer people. I don't believe that there are people who are queer. I believe there are people who in a given cultural formation are queer and can assume their status as queer by that cultural formation. But those of us who are queer by a given cultural formation and assume that status are profoundly threatening its survivability. He must recognize, therefore, that those who who are potentially threatening the survivability of the norms that we cling to are the mirror image of our relation to dominant culture. - That is so well put. I like the mirror image of that. And thank you. I already look forward to editing this episode and listening to that again, because I feel like I would like to kind of replay that now and think about it again. But the, yeah, I think it's really important to think about, yeah, I think the mirror image is just a very good image for that. Thank you so much. That helps me think about things in a new way. And also the, you know, I always struggle with the word ontology and ontological. It's just sometimes they're always kind of, I really have to kind of rethink what that means. But I like the, you're thinking about queers not being an ontological category, but it's something that is that you are being queered and can then claim the status. I think that's also a really, a really helpful reflection. So thank you for helping me deal better with the word ontological. They are shy away from the own. - Don't be afraid of ontology, except to me extent that those who believe in ontology can only believe in ontology in so far as they exclude certain categories from being. So ontology is the realm of what is and what can be. But it can only be. Ontology is only ever formulated through an exclusion. And that's the danger of ontology. We, whoever are queered by a given social order are the refuse of ontology. - Thank you for teaching me about ontology and sharing so much about your work. I found this really, you know, a lot of the time in these conversations, it's more about, you know, kind of asking what you're working on at the moment. But of course your book has already finished. I'm just having to wait for it to come out. But today I felt like it was just kind of, I get to ask all my questions about all kinds of cool concepts. So I hope that was okay for you. It was very interesting for me. - It was a complete pleasure. And one of the things it made at such a pleasure is how present you were and how clearly the conversation was a conversation that mattered to both of us and that, you know, that allowed both of us to recognize how consequential nothing is. - Absolutely. And on that note, I have only one more question before the nothing of the end of the track. And that is, if you could give me only one queer text film artwork, whichever that I absolutely must read, watch, consume, which one would that be? - You know, I told you before we began that I was going to disappoint you here. And it has everything to do with the fact that I don't believe that there is a queer text. All texts are queer, as I understand it. That is to say, all texts offer the possibility of retrieving from within them or of moving through them in order to conceptualize the space of that nothing just as we did with all of them. So to give you one, would fall back into the very danger that ontology makes clear, that there is a one, that there is something that is unique or that is special or that is privileged. So to name one would be to say, well, why by a female author and not a trans author, why by a black critic or artist and not an Asian critic or artist? Why, you know, why this and not that? So my answer is all texts are queer, read them all, read the text of yourself. That's probably the queerest text to you of any. And it's the one that you will have the least success in reading but the most opportunity to try to. - Well, if that's not the perfect answer for an episode of nothing, I don't know what could be, an episode on nothing rather. (laughing) Thank you so much for this. - It's been a pleasure. - Thank you, yeah, for taking the time out of your day to speak with me and to my students indirectly. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Lee. - Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation. It's been a pleasure meeting you. - Thank you. - Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. If you liked this episode, why not follow @Lina_Messu's on Twitter or @QuiletPodcast on Instagram. Share your thoughts. Share your future guests you'd like to help. If you're interested in my private guest or in any of the people and texts that we've mentioned in this episode, you check the show notes. Everything is listed and linked there. And also, especially if you're an educator using this episode, there is a list of questions that find us in the show notes as well. I hope you like it. Have a good day.