Lee Edelman
Biographic Data
| ID | 226951 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lee Edelman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lee |
| FAMILY NAME | Edelman |
| SIGNATURE | EDELMAN L |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 956 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Ce n'est pas ça: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles
Putting the question of legibility raised by theories of ontological exclusion into conversation with the tropology of rhetoric discussed by Paul de Man, this essay thinks Blackness, queerness, and sex as elements of the set of illegibles. Drawing on Lacan's evocation of set theory to describe a relation not based on analogy but not allergic to comparison, a relation that posits a unity among heterogeneous elements, the author argues that the cat…
Sentences
Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences-sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced-this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view of homosexuality as betraying the seriousness of statements. By examining how the latter betrayal gets enacted in the betrayal his sentences perform, it identifies the te…
Responses to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’
Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing
On Solidarity
Reading and Reparative Reading'' bears an equally well-known subtitle: ''You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.''Having traced the dynamics of shame so precisely, Sedgwick fully grasped the shaming her subtitle would perform.To locate oneself as its addressee (which Judith Butler and D. A. Miller, her examples of paranoid reading practices, hardly could avoid) was ipso facto to ''prove'' her point about paranoid hermeneut…
O futuro é coisa de criança: Teoria Queer, Desidentificação E a Pulsão De Morte
Neste ensaio, Lee Edelman articula psicanálise lacaniana e desconstrução para esboçar uma ética radicalmente negativa para a teoria queer. Seu alvo principal é a figura onipresente da Criança, que o autor entende como a insígnia máxima da lógica universalizante do "futurismo reprodutivo". Edelman argumenta que essa Criança representa a promessa de um futuro sem espaço para o queer, entendido como a personificação de uma pulsão de morte implacável…
What Survives
Two Much
Critics of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) have attended to the film's motifs of doubling, pairing, and reversal. We, however, approach Strangers on a Train as an interrogation of the couple form, as a violently comic challenge to its normative regulation of the social order. If the film is obsessed with the number two, it is equally obsessed with all the ways in which this even number can prove to be odd or strange or queer, as ex…
Learning Nothing: Bad Education
Taking queerness as one of the figural names for ontological exclusion (that is, for whatever a particular regime of social being forecloses), this essay focuses on how such a queerness effects an impossible pedagogy that aspires to teach us nothing. Rather than a site of emptiness, however, that nothing comprises the pulsion of jouissance, the insistence of the drive, and the uncognizable pressure of what conduces to no meaning. After exploring …
An Ethics of Desubjectivation
Engaging Lynne Huffer's attempts to produce a queer feminist ethics based on Foucault's notion of desubjectivation, this essay attends to the gap that such an ethics seeks to bridge: the gap between the unlivability that desubjectivation entails and the ethical investigation of how we are to live. It argues that Huffer's work is driven by the tension between these positions and it identifies the drive itself as the reason that tension remains irr…
Sex, or the Unbearable
Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbanc…
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities
Research Article| April 01 2013 Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and th…
I'm Not There: The Absence of Theory
This essay explores the recurrent forgetting of the instability that difference introduces into the realm of theory. Using works by Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Todd Haines as reference points, the author suggests that the reification of difference as specific, identifiable differences marks the inescapable turning away from the absence, the difference from identity, the insistence of exclusion as such that difference tries to address. Argui…
Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social
Research Article| July 01 2007 Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) 106 (3): 469–476. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2007…
Theorizing Queer Temporalities
Research Article| June 01 2007 THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES: A Roundtable Discussion Carolyn Dinshaw; Carolyn Dinshaw Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lee Edelman; Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roderick A. Ferguson; Roderick A. Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Carla Freccero; Carla Freccero Search for other works by this author on: This Site Go…
The Student of Metaphor
Research Article| December 01 2006 The Student of Metaphor Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2006) 17 (3): 195–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Student of Metaphor. differences 1 December 2006; 17 (3): 195–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 D…
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
poetą eleganckim.Estetyzującym i klasycyzującym.Wśród swoich mistrzów wymienia m.in.Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Czesława Miłosza i "poetę poetów", Aleksandra Wata 2 .Inspiracje poetyckie Boczkowskiego, którym właściwie można by poświęcić oddzielne studium, odnajdujemy zarówno w formalnym ukształtowaniu wierszy, jak i w wyborze najważniejszych kręgów tematycznych, wśród których uprzywilejowane miejsce zajmuje -szczególnie w seniliach poetytemat staro…
Post-Partum
In "Queer Post-Politics," his generous and appealingly reasonable response to my essay, "The Future is Kid Stuff," John Brenkman repeats symptomatically the logic of futurism against which I wrote. In doing so, I'd like to suggest, he makes my point by missing it-and missing it not by reason of ignorance, hostility, or haste, but rather by virtue, in large part, of his essay's own virtue: its commitment to reason. Consider how he sets out to make…
Queer Theory: Unstating Desire
Other| October 01 1995 Queer Theory: Unstating Desire Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (4): 343–346. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Queer Theory: Unstating Desire. GLQ 1 October 1995; 2 (4): 343–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Mana…
Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis
Research Article| April 01 1995 Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-1_and_2-149 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis. GLQ 1 April 1995; 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. doi: https:/…
The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids
Research Article| January 01 1989 The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1989) 88 (1): 301–317. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-88-1-301 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS. South At…
Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
poetą eleganckim.Estetyzującym i klasycyzującym.Wśród swoich mistrzów wymienia m.in.Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Czesława Miłosza i "poetę poetów", Aleksandra Wata 2 .Inspiracje poetyckie Boczkowskiego, którym właściwie można by poświęcić oddzielne studium, odnajdujemy zarówno w formalnym ukształtowaniu wierszy, jak i w wyborze najważniejszych kręgów tematycznych, wśród których uprzywilejowane miejsce zajmuje -szczególnie w seniliach poetytemat staro…
Theorizing Queer Temporalities
Research Article| June 01 2007 THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES: A Roundtable Discussion Carolyn Dinshaw; Carolyn Dinshaw Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lee Edelman; Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roderick A. Ferguson; Roderick A. Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Carla Freccero; Carla Freccero Search for other works by this author on: This Site Go…
Queer Theory: Unstating Desire
Other| October 01 1995 Queer Theory: Unstating Desire Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (4): 343–346. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Queer Theory: Unstating Desire. GLQ 1 October 1995; 2 (4): 343–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Mana…
Learning Nothing: Bad Education
Taking queerness as one of the figural names for ontological exclusion (that is, for whatever a particular regime of social being forecloses), this essay focuses on how such a queerness effects an impossible pedagogy that aspires to teach us nothing. Rather than a site of emptiness, however, that nothing comprises the pulsion of jouissance, the insistence of the drive, and the uncognizable pressure of what conduces to no meaning. After exploring …
On Solidarity
Reading and Reparative Reading'' bears an equally well-known subtitle: ''You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.''Having traced the dynamics of shame so precisely, Sedgwick fully grasped the shaming her subtitle would perform.To locate oneself as its addressee (which Judith Butler and D. A. Miller, her examples of paranoid reading practices, hardly could avoid) was ipso facto to ''prove'' her point about paranoid hermeneut…
Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities
Research Article| April 01 2013 Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and th…
I'm Not There: The Absence of Theory
This essay explores the recurrent forgetting of the instability that difference introduces into the realm of theory. Using works by Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Todd Haines as reference points, the author suggests that the reification of difference as specific, identifiable differences marks the inescapable turning away from the absence, the difference from identity, the insistence of exclusion as such that difference tries to address. Argui…
Post-Partum
In "Queer Post-Politics," his generous and appealingly reasonable response to my essay, "The Future is Kid Stuff," John Brenkman repeats symptomatically the logic of futurism against which I wrote. In doing so, I'd like to suggest, he makes my point by missing it-and missing it not by reason of ignorance, hostility, or haste, but rather by virtue, in large part, of his essay's own virtue: its commitment to reason. Consider how he sets out to make…
Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social
Research Article| July 01 2007 Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) 106 (3): 469–476. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2007…
Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis
Research Article| April 01 1995 Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-1_and_2-149 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis. GLQ 1 April 1995; 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. doi: https:/…
An Ethics of Desubjectivation
Engaging Lynne Huffer's attempts to produce a queer feminist ethics based on Foucault's notion of desubjectivation, this essay attends to the gap that such an ethics seeks to bridge: the gap between the unlivability that desubjectivation entails and the ethical investigation of how we are to live. It argues that Huffer's work is driven by the tension between these positions and it identifies the drive itself as the reason that tension remains irr…
The Student of Metaphor
Research Article| December 01 2006 The Student of Metaphor Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2006) 17 (3): 195–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Student of Metaphor. differences 1 December 2006; 17 (3): 195–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 D…
The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids
Research Article| January 01 1989 The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1989) 88 (1): 301–317. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-88-1-301 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS. South At…
Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire
The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids
Research Article| January 01 1989 The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1989) 88 (1): 301–317. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-88-1-301 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS. South At…
Queer Theory: Unstating Desire
Other| October 01 1995 Queer Theory: Unstating Desire Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (4): 343–346. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Queer Theory: Unstating Desire. GLQ 1 October 1995; 2 (4): 343–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-4-343 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Mana…
Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis
Research Article| April 01 1995 Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2-1_and_2-149 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis. GLQ 1 April 1995; 2 (1_and_2): 149–177. doi: https:/…
Post-Partum
In "Queer Post-Politics," his generous and appealingly reasonable response to my essay, "The Future is Kid Stuff," John Brenkman repeats symptomatically the logic of futurism against which I wrote. In doing so, I'd like to suggest, he makes my point by missing it-and missing it not by reason of ignorance, hostility, or haste, but rather by virtue, in large part, of his essay's own virtue: its commitment to reason. Consider how he sets out to make…
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
poetą eleganckim.Estetyzującym i klasycyzującym.Wśród swoich mistrzów wymienia m.in.Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Czesława Miłosza i "poetę poetów", Aleksandra Wata 2 .Inspiracje poetyckie Boczkowskiego, którym właściwie można by poświęcić oddzielne studium, odnajdujemy zarówno w formalnym ukształtowaniu wierszy, jak i w wyborze najważniejszych kręgów tematycznych, wśród których uprzywilejowane miejsce zajmuje -szczególnie w seniliach poetytemat staro…
The Student of Metaphor
Research Article| December 01 2006 The Student of Metaphor Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google differences (2006) 17 (3): 195–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; The Student of Metaphor. differences 1 December 2006; 17 (3): 195–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-019 D…
Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social
Research Article| July 01 2007 Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) 106 (3): 469–476. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lee Edelman; Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2007…
Theorizing Queer Temporalities
Research Article| June 01 2007 THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES: A Roundtable Discussion Carolyn Dinshaw; Carolyn Dinshaw Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lee Edelman; Lee Edelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roderick A. Ferguson; Roderick A. Ferguson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Carla Freccero; Carla Freccero Search for other works by this author on: This Site Go…
I'm Not There: The Absence of Theory
This essay explores the recurrent forgetting of the instability that difference introduces into the realm of theory. Using works by Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Todd Haines as reference points, the author suggests that the reification of difference as specific, identifiable differences marks the inescapable turning away from the absence, the difference from identity, the insistence of exclusion as such that difference tries to address. Argui…
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities
Research Article| April 01 2013 Occupy Wall Street: "Bartleby" Against the Humanities Lee Edelman Lee Edelman Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays on theory, film, and literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and th…
Sex, or the Unbearable
Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbanc…
An Ethics of Desubjectivation
Engaging Lynne Huffer's attempts to produce a queer feminist ethics based on Foucault's notion of desubjectivation, this essay attends to the gap that such an ethics seeks to bridge: the gap between the unlivability that desubjectivation entails and the ethical investigation of how we are to live. It argues that Huffer's work is driven by the tension between these positions and it identifies the drive itself as the reason that tension remains irr…
Learning Nothing: Bad Education
Taking queerness as one of the figural names for ontological exclusion (that is, for whatever a particular regime of social being forecloses), this essay focuses on how such a queerness effects an impossible pedagogy that aspires to teach us nothing. Rather than a site of emptiness, however, that nothing comprises the pulsion of jouissance, the insistence of the drive, and the uncognizable pressure of what conduces to no meaning. After exploring …
What Survives
Two Much
Critics of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) have attended to the film's motifs of doubling, pairing, and reversal. We, however, approach Strangers on a Train as an interrogation of the couple form, as a violently comic challenge to its normative regulation of the social order. If the film is obsessed with the number two, it is equally obsessed with all the ways in which this even number can prove to be odd or strange or queer, as ex…
O futuro é coisa de criança: Teoria Queer, Desidentificação E a Pulsão De Morte
Neste ensaio, Lee Edelman articula psicanálise lacaniana e desconstrução para esboçar uma ética radicalmente negativa para a teoria queer. Seu alvo principal é a figura onipresente da Criança, que o autor entende como a insígnia máxima da lógica universalizante do "futurismo reprodutivo". Edelman argumenta que essa Criança representa a promessa de um futuro sem espaço para o queer, entendido como a personificação de uma pulsão de morte implacável…
Responses to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’
Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing
On Solidarity
Reading and Reparative Reading'' bears an equally well-known subtitle: ''You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.''Having traced the dynamics of shame so precisely, Sedgwick fully grasped the shaming her subtitle would perform.To locate oneself as its addressee (which Judith Butler and D. A. Miller, her examples of paranoid reading practices, hardly could avoid) was ipso facto to ''prove'' her point about paranoid hermeneut…
Sentences
Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences-sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced-this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view of homosexuality as betraying the seriousness of statements. By examining how the latter betrayal gets enacted in the betrayal his sentences perform, it identifies the te…
Ce n'est pas ça: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles
Putting the question of legibility raised by theories of ontological exclusion into conversation with the tropology of rhetoric discussed by Paul de Man, this essay thinks Blackness, queerness, and sex as elements of the set of illegibles. Drawing on Lacan's evocation of set theory to describe a relation not based on analogy but not allergic to comparison, a relation that posits a unity among heterogeneous elements, the author argues that the cat…
Sociology (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Icon (7 works) · Citation (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (6 works)