If I didn't understand the book, at least I learned, in the process of reading it, to be a more honest reader and scholar.Īs i've been reading this book over the past month, i've tried to share it with most everyone i am around-sentences, snippets, or general ideas. Switching my conception of the folder from "MY synopsis of Jacque Derrida! MY connections! MY understandings!" to simply content on my computer that is either useful or just clutter, is exactly what she encourages when she empathetically describes how "it is awkward and it is threatening to detach from what is already not working" (263). If not, oh well, it's just another file that's cluttering my computer: time to delete it. Maybe, when I'm rummaging through the almost entirely useless contents of my "Derrida, Jacque" folder from four years ago, I'll find a somehow useful misunderstanding that I had about him. This honesty isn't posed as an answer, but rather as therapeutic, lifecoach-esque advice to stop securing the condition of our mistakes' repetitions, and instead to open ourselves to the possibility of, even if accidentally, landing on a new, felicitous mode of flourishing. To recognize how the drama of what we are attached to sabotages us, and to evaluate and be honest about the value of that drama. And this is, in a sense, what Berlant encourages us all to do, as readers, audiences, and political subjects.
It de-dramatizes the epic accomplishment of nailing my Berlant reading experience and capturing it for my catalogue. This new reading process attends to the content in front of me. So I scrapped it all, and tried to develop a new reading process. This turned into a vicious cycle, since, as I wrote, my anxiety grew as well and made the content of my synopses worse and worse. So as I read, I desperately tried to summarize the chapters in a way that was better, more comprehensive, more effective, with my mind set on the "Berlant" entry of my catalogue. Further, my attachment to my catalogue made me anxious about confronting the fact that my synopses might all be useless. I realized, as I write these synopses and accumulate more and more "knowledge," that my need to fill up my catalogue overshot the actual content value of my synopses. I have a catalogue of synopses I've written that summarize many of the works by theorists, philosophers, and literary critics I've read. I was faced with an additional challenge: I developed a cruel optimistic relation with the book itself and with my process of reading theory in general, which the book generously gave me the tools to defuse. You're going to be distracted by thoughts of your own troubling attachments, which both give you the strength to live and prevent you from really living. I think one of the biggest challenges of reading this book, beyond the complex points and the difficult and beautiful prose, is that, if you read it right, you're going to be faced with your own cruel optimistic relations. 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. A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.
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