![]() An affective portrait of the 99%."-Caitlin Hu "Bitch" "This is Berlant at her most revolutionarily queer, questioning what would happen if we stopped thinking of ourselves in terms of identity categories, and instead reorganized our sense of self around the specific objects and ideas to which we are attached and the affects that they produce in us."-Chase Dimock "Lambda Literary Review" " Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant's brilliant new book, lays bare the price of our habitual ways of thinking about subjectivity, temporality, affect, attachment, and political investment. Cruel Optimism is less brutal analysis than a dark, lush still-life of American fantasies and our Quixotic lunges toward them. 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. It is a wild, deeply witty examination of our attachments to food, love, politics, family, and pop culture."-Kate Clinton "Progressive" "Lauren Berlant is not shitting on you or your dream. ![]() Ward "New Formations" "If you are looking for some new language to use to describe the current crisis of hope, read Cruel Optimism. ![]() Cruel Optimism does precisely what Berlant's work always does - it changes the conversation in such a way that it makes you wonder why we weren't talking about these things all along."-Anna E. " Cruel Optimism is a must read for any scholar interested in exploring the affective dimensions of precarity. 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. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Ī relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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