And yes, within a few pages, there’s that creeping sensation that, whatever makes you tick, it’s got you on the fast track to ruin and disappointment. Yes, the University of Chicago professor will break down everything you hold dear: food, love, politics, family, virtuous New Year’s resolutions. OK, yes, her latest book is called Cruel Optimism. “Lauren Berlant is not shitting on you or your dream. “One of the most rewarding aspects of Berlant’s work and of Cruel Optimism in particular is the sheer transformative force within the field of the political that the analysis of chosen texts offers.Berlant is required reading that should somehow help ‘activist theorists and artists back to the question of what kind of form a gesture is, what kind of imminent expressivity it holds, and what kind of affective pedagogy might be effected by it’ (261) in the work of ‘having a life’ make sense.” - Alex Lockwood, Culture Machine

Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present. 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. 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.”Īrguing 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. 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.

Labor and Working-Class History AssociationĪ relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.

Association for Middle East Women's Studies.Author Resources from University Presses.Journals fulfilled by DUP Journal Services.

Books on optimism