Showing papers by "Lauren Berlant published in 2013"

Sex, or the Unbearable

Abstract: Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair. Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Abstract: History hurts, but not only. It also engenders optimism and disappointment, aggressions that respond to the oppressive presence of what dominates or is taken-for-granted. Both emotions are responses to prospects for change. It is not usual to think of critical theory as an optimistic genre, since it creates so much exhausting anxiety about the value of the pleasure of thinking even the “thinkiest” thought.1 But the compulsion to repeat optimism, which is another definition of desire, is a condition of possibility that also justifies the risk of having to survive, once again, disappointment and depression, the protracted sense that no-one, especially oneself, is teachable after all. All that work for what? Love isn’t the half of it.