LEE EDELMAN AND THE QUEER STUDY OF RELIGION. Edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Marie Tonstad. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 280. Hardback, $160.00. BAD EDUCATION: WHY QUEER THEORY TEACHES US NOTHING. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. 368. Paperback, $28.95. SEX, OR THE UNBEARABLE. By Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 168. Paperback, $24.95. NO FUTURE: QUEER THEORY AND THE DEATH DRIVE. By Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 208. Paperback, $25.95. To start: an admission. I've been working on this essay, on and off, for months. I've started over several times. Now, it's a week overdue. And I've got nothing. Except, maybe, a question—that isn't mine. What if we still have something to learn from Lee Edelman (Brintnall, Graybill, and Tonstad 2024, 211)? This question is Linn Marie Tonstad's. It's from “Saying Nothing,” the final chapter in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion. I keep returning to this question. I can't let go of it. Or it won't let go of me. What if we still have something to learn from Lee Edelman? And what if it's something, Tonstad writes, “that we will always and impossibly have to learn again, because it can't be learned in any final way—it can only be shatteringly encountered, over and over . . .” (2024, 211)? Tonstad's still-not-letting-go questions make ways for me to ask some others. What if the something we still—always, again, over and over—have to learn from Edelman is nothing? Can we learn nothing? Or can we only—ever, again, impossibly—encounter it, shatteringly? Is that what nothing makes of learning: a shattering encounter? Now I've got some questions: about learning, about nothing. I'm going, in this essay, to approach them. Approach? Yes, because they're questions about learning, and about nothing. And because I'm following Edelman. “Every attempt to think ontological negation”—to think nothing—can, Edelman writes, “only aspire to approach the nothing” (2022, 43). So approach, then. I'll make three approaches to these questions: by ways of encounter, queer, and learning. Before I do, I'll situate myself using two frames. One is a practical pedagogical scene. The other is the preface to Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion. The first frame limits me. It delimits my textual engagements to one or two of Edelman's texts. Why? Because that's what my students and I would, practically, do in a course. (We'd do so amid engagements with others' texts.) The two texts I'll engage are Sex, or the Unbearable, in which Lauren Berlant and Edelman engage each other, and Bad Education, Edelman's most recent monograph. The second frame supports me—especially the editors' conclusion that for Edelman, “nothing is, ultimately everything” (Brintnall, Graybill, and Tonstad 2024, ix). “Edelman's nothing,” they write, “is the structural limit that defines any relation” (2024, ix).1 It does so from the other side. Nothing's not contained within relations' limits. It can't be. Nothing's excessive. It's too much for us. Still—always—nothing haunts us. “The nothing precluding totality,” Edelman writes, “will always elude our grasp, but not for a moment does it relinquish, or even loosen, its grasp on us” (Edelman 2022, 259).2 Haunting us, holding us, nothing is our undoing. Nothing, the editors write, “undoes the fantasies, faiths, and fictions that keep ourselves and our realities moored” (2024, x). Incised in reality, nothing has an acid effect: “dissolving,” Edelman writes, “the familiar logic of the world that constitutes our reality” (2022, 47).3 No wonder nothing leads us—over and over—to shattering encounters. With these two frames in place, I'll begin approaching questions. First approach: by way of encounter.4 how to live relationally; how to confront our own self-division; how to experience the unbearable undoing of the logic that binds us to the world; how to share a thought or an object when the pressure of its handling by another risks breaking the object.5 (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 69) Reading these words, each time, I wonder: aren't they about learning? About what happens in any pedagogical scene? I wonder these things because these words describe the difficulties, the dangers, that students and I encounter every time we encounter each other, together, in a classroom. We encounter them every time we encounter the pedagogical possibility—fraught, complicating, potentially shattering—of learning that might undo us. That makes me wonder: is learning always—only ever—an encounter?6 (Isn't it?) An encounter inherited by impossibility? When we come together to learn, we do so, I think, in what Edelman calls “our willingness to encounter the possibility of coming apart in the work and enjoyment of thinking” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 109). Our willingness to come undone by learning. Our willingness to encounter, through learning, nothing. Nothing is the impossibility that makes relation possible.7 And nothing is what we have to learn—still, again, always—from queer. Second approach: by way of queer.8 It's an other way of encountering, an other question about, nothing. Queer is no way to be. To be queer is to be nothing. It's, Edelman writes, “not to be” (2022, 94). Or, at least, not to be one. Time for a quick queer counting lesson. Queer counts, ontologically, as zero. And zero is number's nothing. Zero is no number—just like queer is no thing. It doesn't count. It can't be counted. Zero, Edelman writes, “maintains the place of queerness as ceaseless negativity” (Edelman 2022, 90). Zero does numerically what nothing does ontologically. It “structures the order of number,” Edelman writes, “while remaining unthinkable as zero within it” (2022, 94).9 Because how could anyone think, how could anyone count—numerically or ontologically—the excessive, queer negativity of zero? That's just it: no one could. Queer zeroes out identity. It's no identity. It's no one's identity. Queer exerts “the constant pressure of the zero,” Edelman writes, “that procures and undoes every ‘one’” (2022, 95). So no one could be queer. No one could be queer. Because one can't be zero. There's more, still, to learn from this queer counting lesson. To recap: queer makes happen, makes, and unmakes. Or, maybe, queer makes happen, and what it makes happen—nothing—makes and unmakes. Makes and unmakes what? Well, us. Which depends on a relation: reality. Which fashions each one. Unless, or until, there's a shattering encounter, called learning. Third approach: by way of learning. We're trained to configure, and count, learning by objects and objectives. An example: the objective of absorbing, or assimilating, or incorporating (all ways of containing) an object of information, configured and counted as a what. Learning, so configured, becomes info-containment. It's a process of containing more whats—and, one by one, increasing our count. So learning is made a matter of counting. But nothing's not a what. It's just not. So we can't count it. More than that, it disrupts our count, our way of counting, the way we've learned to count. How? By confronting them with nothing and its unbecoming no, which counts as zero. This queer confrontation confounds learning-as-counting. It reiterates something we still have to learn about learning: that queer, “as the figure of such a radical unbecoming,” Edelman writes, “maintains an intensely negative link to the logic of education” (2022, 92). It's the logic of counting: as a strategy of containment; as a mode of acquisition; as a practice of addition. This logic is of ever more, never less. Queer says, effectively, no to this educational logic that refuses it. It counters this logic that won't, or can't, count it. Queer, Edelman writes, “effects a counterpedagogy” (2022, 47). It effects—it makes happen and makes—a counter way of teaching and learning. This way refutes—it unmakes—“the reality,” Edelman writes, “that grants it no place” (2022, 47).11 Queer's counterpedagogy unworks the learning-as-counting logic from its no place. It unravels usual senses of learning: through an encounter with nothing. This encounter would, counterpedagogically, “initiate transformations whose end,” Edelman writes, “is only the endless opening onto the necessity of new ones” (Berlant and Edelman 2014, 18). Ones we—still, over and over, again—have to encounter, however shatteringly, as encounterpedagogical openings. Such openings pose, and leave open, counterpedagogical questions. “What could it mean,” Edelman writes, “to take seriously teaching's status as an impossible profession and the teacher's relation to the students as promoting—rather than cultural survival, the commandment to remember, or archival consignation—a radical queerness” (2022, 121)? One “whose assault on meaning, understanding, and value,” Edelman writes, “would take from them more than it gives” (2022, 121)? How could we counterpedagogically practice these questions? What might that do, or undo, to logics of educounting—in contemporary classrooms, in contemporary colleges or universities? And studying religion? The chapters in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion articulate, in their own ways, what we, still, have to learn from Lee Edelman about studying religion. They do so in different registers: theoretical, theological, traditional, textual, ethical. They approach, again and again, the pedagogical problems posed by queer negativity: its nothing, its no, its counteractions. (We can, remember, only ever approach these problems. We can't resolve them. They tend more toward reality-dissolution than any real resolution.) I started with questions. I ended with more questions. That might be unsatisfying. It might be frustrating. I recognize that. And I'm OK with that. Why? Because unsatisfaction and frustration feel like appropriate feelings when confronting Edelman's queer, counterpedagogical challenges to how we do what we do when we do something called “studying religion.” Unsatisfaction and frustration are, likely, what students feel when queerly counterpedagogical approaches say no to their desires for religion to be (made into) a solid, stable object, or for learning to be (made to feel like) an accomplished more of knowledge-acquisition—of counting, starting with one. Edelman's challenges are to unlearn familiar, objectivated, objectivized senses of learning. They redirect, by refusal, ways of learning: away from what, and toward how. Or maybe I think that because I'm interested in—no, curious about—how they practically undo specific pedagogical procedures. I mean what happens in classrooms, with students. That's where, and how, these challenges become most challenging. How would enacting Edelman's queer counterpedagogy, or encounterpedagogy, practically alter how we do what we do in classrooms: what we call teaching and learning? How would embodying this counterpedagogy profoundly change how we encounter teaching and learning, and our students, and ourselves, in practical pedagogical scenes? What if an encounter, however shattering, is what happens—or what this counterpedagogy makes happen? If what we call religion is (among other things) about calculating and recalculating value, about counting and recounting meaning, about configuring and reconfiguring reality, then how would Edelman's counterpedagogical figures—of zero, of nothing, of queer—affect how we approach and activate a study of religion? What if studying religion were enacted, queerly and counterpedagogically, as a way of attempting (always failing, but still . . .) to learn—by encountering—nothing?