Lee Edelman offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape.

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xxi
Introduction. Nothing Ventured: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Afropessimism  1
1. Learning Nothing: Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education  45
2. Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint  93
3. Funny/Peculiar/Queer: Michael Haneke’s Aesthetic Education  123
4. There Is No Freedom to Enjoy: Harriet Jacobs’s Negativity  162
Coda: Nothing Gained: Irony, Incest, Indiscernibility  207
Notes  261
Bibliography  317
Index  333

Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and coauthor, with Lauren Berlant, of Sex, or the Unbearable, both also published by Duke University Press.