Lauren Berlant Quotes

And above all, I will argue the necessity for preserving, against all shame, a demanding question of revolution itself, a question about utopia that keeps pushing its way through a field of failed aspirations, like a student at the back of the room who gets suddenly, violently, tired of being invisible.

How long have people thought about the present as having weight, as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?

...insofar as an American thinks that the sex he or she is having is an intimate, private thing constructed within a space governed by personal consent, she or he is having straight sex, straight sex authorized by national culture; she or he is practicing national heterosexuality...

there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.

[The U.S. worker] gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g. via sports).

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.

Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.

Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking

where love and desire are concerned, there are no adequate examples; and all of our objects must bear the burden of exemplifying and failing what drives our attachment to them.

Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.

I found, when circulating chapters from this book, that some readers feel I am too hard on heterosexuality. I do not mean to be coming out against it. I simply do not see why the nation has to have an official sexuality, especially one that authorizes the norm of a violent gentility; that narrows the field of legitimate political action; that supports the amputation of personal complexity into categories of simple identity; that uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote shame for non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship. This is the heterosexuality I repudiate.

(A Lillian B. Rubin) Los niños le dan la impresión de ser realistas depresivos, que en general no idealizan las luchas de sus padres ni sus formas de sobrevivir, mientras que al mismo tiempo se sienten protectores en relación con ellos por lo normal de su humillación social.

Negativity as a source for social theory tends to reject the impulses to repair social relations that appear to us irreparable, and in that light, our work might seem quietistic, apolitical, nihilist, defeatist, or even irresponsible. By engaging closely with sociality and with our own deep-rooted tendencies to think about its zones of optimism and longing, we are seeking to make a persuasive case for the necessity of recognizing the importance of addressing structural antagonisms in any analytic of the social. In doing so, we seek to affirm negativity's central role in any antinormative politics. We hope this conversation might permit a reframing of the antisocial thesis that has already generated such lively debate and so much important theoretical work by its critics and adherents alike. Part

Additionally, using the forms of publicity that capitalist culture makes available for collective identifications, some of these sex publics have exposed contradictions in the free market economics of the right, which names nonmarital sex relations as immoral while relations of economic inequality, dangerous workplaces, and disloyalty to employees amount to business as usual, not provoking any ethical questions about the privileges only some citizens enjoy.

From the beginning, entire populations of persons were excluded from the national promise which, because it was a promise, was held out paradoxically: falsely, as a democratic reality, and legitimately, as a promise, the promise that the democratic citizenship form makes to people caught in history. The populations who were and are managed by the discipline of the promise— women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, homosexuals— have long experienced simultaneously the wish to be full citizens and the violence of their partial citizenship.

El sentimentalismo de arriba hacia abajo atenúa los riesgos de las condiciones del privilegio, al hacer que las obligaciones de actuar sean sobre todo paliativas, cosa de no cambiar los términos fundamentales que organizan el poder sino de ir en pos de las elevadas pretensiones de sensibilidad, virtud y conciencia vigilantes.

La voz en off (en Rosetta y La promesse) sería algo así como "Quédate junto a mí, no me avasalles, no digas nada, no interfieras con mi deseo de imaginarme cómo se sentiría que reconocieses mis necesidades, di algo, dame algo, intentémoslo, quedémonos callados".

El dolor psíquico experimentado por las poblaciones subordinadas debe ser tratado como ideología, no como un conocimiento anterior a la caída de Adán y Eva o como una teoría social comprensiva condensada... Pensar otra cosa implica afirmar que el dolor es meramente banal, una historia que ya siempre se ha contado.

He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolution.

[on flat affect] ... worlds and events that would have been expected to be captured by expressive suffering—featuring an amplified subjectivity, violent and reparative relationally, and assurance about what makes an event significant—appear with an asterisk of uncertainty.

Lauren Berlant has called such a fantasy of happiness a "stupid" form of optimism: "the faith that adjustment t o certain forms or practices of living and thinking will secure one's happiness" ( z o o z : 75

I do not subscribe to 'been there done that', I want to be able to use all of my tools to move a problem.

29. These tensions are discussed at length in Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547–566.

It [women's culture] survives also because it's central fantasy, and the one this book elaborates, is the constantly emplotted desire of a complex person to rework the details of her history to become a vague or simpler version of herself, usually in the vicinity of a love plot

And for their incredible scholarship and friendship, my thanks to: Andrea Ballestero, Lauren Berlant, Alex Blanchette, David Bond, John Borneman, Ella Butler, Summerson Carr, Molly Cunningham, Paul Edwards, Didier Fassin, Cassie Fennell, Elaine Gan, Stefanie Graeter, Hugh Gusterson, Orit Halprin, Isao Hashimoto, Gabrielle Hecht, Stefan Helmreich, John Jackson, Cory Kratz, Max Liboiron, Mark Maguire, Kai Mah, Kate Mariner, Andrew Mathews, Amy McLachlan, Greg Mello, Ned O’Gorman, Trevor Paglen, Juno Parrenas, Columba Peoples, Kareem Rabie, Laurence Ralph, Patrick Rivers, Michael Rossi, Nick Shapiro, Audra Simpson, Sverker Sorlin, Christian Tompkins, Anna Weichselbraun, Kaya Williams, and Jessica Winegar.

In ambivalence, we want and we don’t want what we want. Or we want parts but not wholes and resent the added freight. Or we’re averse to what we’re attached to but can perform neither a reconciliation nor a cleavage. It can be a dramatic state but it’s also likely to be a mess of loose live wires that it’s hard to put a finger on. This complex of intensity within ambivalence extends from disrespect of populations as in misogyny and racism to scenes of love and political obsession. For any important object becomes a source of roiling, confused ideation about who’s powerful and who’s not, and what the potentials are for cohabitations of the world. Sometimes the internal clash comes from the inconvenience paradox of dependency itself, of needing people or a situation and hating to have that need. Then, being in relation, and forging attachments within it, both threatens and relieves us from our sovereign fantasies and states.

To convert a rhetorical question into an actual one is to engage in a political action about what gets taken for granted: to refuse, to out, what is left unsaid.

In some ways, this paradox bears resemblance to the one examined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild traveled to rural Louisiana—where waterways are among the most polluted in the nation—to ask how it is that poor southern whites whose land, water, and bodies have been devastated by industrial toxicity continue to vote for probusiness conservatives committed to deregulation and, hence, environmental destruction.74 In other words, why do poor southern whites undermine their own best interests? Hochschild finds the answer in a complex mix of rural whites’ gratitude for their industrial jobs, their Christian belief that God will ultimately restore any human damage done to the Earth and to their own bodies, and their belief that the government cannot be trusted to help them. Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.”75

There is nothing I love more than watching someone use their freedom. If there's a thing like freedom and you use it I will love a thing about you. I'll coast in awkward transit, family meals, and acrid sex to get next to a freedom. I'll fling myself at ordinary monsters if in the crevasse of the mistake I get next to a freedom. We bear each other hoping to breathe in each other's freedom.

The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence.

Theory, as Gayatri Spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: I am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. I am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought.

my practice is always to stage incommensurate approaches to a problem/object in order to attend to its instability, density, and openness.

Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969, imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as “a small-town one that holds close and high a life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier predations of inequality.

Desire describes a state of attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that is generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it. This gap produces a number of further convolutions. Desire visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. Your

Most people, however, do not experience consciously the benefits of the vicissitudes of their desires. This is in part because they frequently confuse their desire for the comfort and self-development of a reliable love with a desire for a degree of stability and non-ambivalence that live intimacy can rarely sustain.