Laurren Berlant - Cruel Optimism (Online Lecture @ Skopje Pride Weekend 2020)
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- čas přidán 26. 08. 2024
- Online lecture and conversation with Lauren Berlant
This event was part of the official program of the queer arts, culture & theory festival Skopje Pride Weekend 2020.
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watch more content from previous years:
SPW '16 | SOLIDARITY: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2016
SPW '17 | TRANS-FORMATIONS: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2...
SPW '18 | QUEERING THE POLITICAL: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2018
SPW '19 | GLITTERING WOUNDS: • Skopje Pride Weekend 2...
CRUEL OPTIMISM
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life-with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy-despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory-with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary-is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.
Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago. Her recent books on sexuality include Cruel Optimism (2011), addressing precarious publics, fantasies of the good life and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the crisis-ridden contexts of the contemporary US and Europe; Desire/Love (2012), an introduction to concepts of attachment, and, with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014), a dialogue/argument about the self-disturbance and repair projected onto sex. She has written theoretically and in more public modes on the affects associated with citizenship, gender, racism, class antagonism, sexuality, trauma and comedy, for example. Her latest work, on the generative intensities of ordinary encounter and world-making, and written with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is called The Hundreds (2019).
Rest in power, Lauren
Changed my life
Cruel optimism is an affective structure in which individuals feel stuck in the same place where people attach sites of flourishment. Ordinary optimism sustains and places you in the world - not always cruel! Politics and love and writing is inherently optimistic - there is a hope in it. Sexual identity is optimistic, intimacy is optimistic - it gives sense of place. Foucault opinions of sex?! What if objects that sustained you turned on you? Conventional forward looking tendency depletes and defeats individual. What if you fall in love or out of love and that threatens whatever makes the world intelligible to you. What if the centrality of labour begins to fade? Any optimism can became cruel optimism if a relation that once sustained you threatens your capacity to survive.
This dialogue is affective! My body feels!
Thank you for this jewel.
Beautiful...absolutely inspiring and exciting
Thank you for uploading !!
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what is she talking about ?
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