When you're born, all you want is food, and by the time you're eight, or by the time you've been in primary school for awhile, or whatever, you have feelings about citizenship, you have feelings about race, you have feelings about gender and sexuality. Fear is natural, but the objects that make you afraid emerge historically. Aesthetics is one of the few places we learn to recognize our emotions as trained and not natural.
Those two conflicting thoughts don't make me psychotic: contradiction enables people to proceed wanting a whole set of things from their institution or from their object.Īlso, if you work on political emotions, one of the things you have to deal with all the time is the pedagogy of emotion. For example, I could love the state because it delivers resources to a whole set of people not really caring about the specificities of who those people are, and I could hate the state because it tries to produce universal citizenship.
#CRUEL OPTIMISM MEANING HOW TO#
The second thing is I really do want to understand how to work with political incoherence, and I am irritated by the kinds of arguments that people use about certain kinds of voting blocs voting against their interests, since everyone has conflicting interests. People make contradictory demands of the objects that hold up their world. They want them to be transparent, but they want also to have them to be flexible and improvisatory. I realized that the juridical object and the intimate object were more similar than they were different, because people want their objects to protect them, but they don't want them too over-present. The same people can be authoritarian, libertarian, aggressive, passive, romantic, and unsentimental about citizenship: and then I realized that the same sentence could be written about love and attachment. So I got interested in the history of the law’s orchestration of bodies, and I got interested in thinking about the ways that certain kinds of institutional forms held up the world, with respect to which people in everyday life were extremely incoherent. What really interested me was the relationship between conventional form and erotic attachment - people's relation to the world, people's need for the world to look a certain way. As I was coming out, nobody was working on citizenship as a vehicle for world-building that had anything to do with sexuality, except allegorically. Lauren Berlant: I was always interested in the relationship between law and subjectivity. What first oriented you in that direction? What got you so curious about intimate life as a scene of citizenship drama? You're also interested in the murky, the intimate and the banal dimensions of citizenship.
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A shorter version of this interview recently appeared in Toronto Xtra! The full version is presented here.ĭavid Seitz: We have this commonsense understanding of citizenship as legally, juridically endowed. In this interview, Berlant gives her take on contemporary queer and austerity politics, the political implications of powerful new book Cruel Optimism, and the insights of queer theory for the present. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has generated a path-breaking body of scholarship that has opened up and reinvigorated interdisciplinary conversations about citizenship, sex, law and neoliberalism for over two decades. See David Seitz's most recent contributions to Society & Space here: Limbo life in Canada’s waiting room: Asylum-seeker as queer subject
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