In Cruel Optimism, I encounter a compelling account of the strange “exuberant attachments” that keep ticking in us despite the licking (or abuse) that life at this historical juncture offers. I see a vivid account of the ways we hold on in the face of a precariousness that wears life out so that the texture of everything becomes almost too slippery to hold or too threadbare to grasp. We read and hear each other to productive ends. In the same vein, both of us are interested in what is negotiated by different collectives and individuals who are able to perform or enact certain performances of queer temporality that unmoor us from those things that are so suffocating and damaging in life, the logics and forces that one experiences as compelled durational performances. Berlant and I are tethered insofar as we share an interest in describing one overarching phenomenon, which is basically outlining the affective work we do to endure and sustain ourselves during cruel times where we feel the erosion of once sustaining good-life genres. While Berlant and I share many interests and political attachments, I do not want to ameliorate the real differences between our positions. On one immediate level, Cruel Optimism is about maintaining traction in our presentness, while my writing about the concrete utopian project of imaging queer futurity is an attempt to think and act beyond the pragmatic thinking that hinders minoritarian politics in the present. Critical investments in thinking about the performative work utopia does can take different forms. But both of us do participate in traditions of theory that are engaged with the topic. It should be clear to readers of both our work that Berlant does not write under the sign of the utopian in the same way I do. My reflections on Berlant’s already influential book open with me taking the liberty of positioning Berlant’s work alongside my own writing on utopia. Durham: Duke University Press.Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism risks thinking the utopian in ways that are both bold and revelatory. (2021) The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Environment and Planning d: Society and Space 27(1): 12–28. (2009) Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. (1978) Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction. Political Research Quarterly 68(3): 642–646. (2015) Against thinning and teleology: Politics and objects in the face of catastrophe in Lear and von Trier. (2022) Sexual citizenship, pride parades, and queer migrant Im/Mobilities. (2012) Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. (2020) The Colonizing Self, or: Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. (2018) War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought. Political Research Quarterly 68(3): 623–636. (2015) Public things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the democratic need. New York: Penguin Random House.Įdelman, L. (2016) The book of joy: lasting happiness in a changing world. (1995) Guest column: What does queer theory teach us about X? PMLA 110(3): 343–349.īerlant, L. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(1): 18–23.īerlant, L. (2016b) Trump, or political emotions, The New Inquiry. Environment and Planning d: Society and Space 34(3): 393–419.īerlant, L. (2016a) The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press.īerlant, L. (2008) The female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics. (1997) The queen of America goes to Washington city: essays on sex and citizenship. (1993) The theory of infantile citizenship. University of Minnesota Press.īerlant, L. (2021) Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press.īeltrán, C. (2005) Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life.
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