#berlant

[proustiansleep]

LE: In any case, we both see sex as a site for experiencing this intensified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being. And as Lauren and I both want to suggest, that encounter, viewed as traumatic or not, remains bound to the nonfutural insistence in sex of something nonproductive, nonteleological, and divorced from meaning making. In this sense sex without optimism invokes the negativity of sex as a defining and even enabling condition. Gayle Rubin reminds us in “Thinking Sex” that “Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force,” to which we might add: if only sex lived up to such press more often (Rubin 2011, 148)! If only, that is, the Panoptimism that rules us, even (or especially) in our denial of its hold, did not so often lend value to sex through the world-preserving meanings imposed upon it to repudiate its negativity. One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers, in its most intensely felt and therefore least routinized forms, something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value. It takes us instead to a limit, and it is that limit, or the breaking beyond it, toward which sex without optimism points. LB: ...one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, aggression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair ... As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, “When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. —Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex or the Unbearable

[man-peach-reborn]

[veryimportantpeopleshow]

Now that's love! (aka making Vic break)

Watch the episode on Dropout

[elwenyere]

"I am interested in the ways people find sustenance and make survival happen in worlds that are not organized for them. I am interested in why people stay attached to lives that don’t work, as though people would not survive the wholesale transformation of those attachments and the lives built around them, as though they would rather be miserable, stuck, or numb than tipped over in the middle of invention. Making worlds is very hard and losing them is devastating."

-- Lauren Berlant, in "I Don't Understand the God Part"

[milksockets]

If consumption promises satisfaction in substitution and then denies it because all objects are rest stops amid the process of remaining unsatisfied that counts for being alive under capitalism, in the impasse of desire, then hoarding seems like a solution to something. Hoarding controls the promise of value against expenditure, as it performs the enjoyment of an infinite present of holding pure potential.

Cruel Optimism - Lauren Berlant

[ultramoderngurl]

kathryn hahn and kate berlant at the 2025 vanity fair oscar party

[isqbelevans]

[okaydyke]

Very Important People: Barbara and Bill

[alittlevillainy]

for those of you asking, it’s likely the reason vic’s voice is a bit strained because this episode was on day 5 of filming! i think it’s fun though, it made their yelling at the end very dramatic (screenshot from the first last looks episode)

[spammingloveletters]

Naomi and Katie on Gayotic - I think I might have died???

[proustiansleep]

"Attachments are made not by will, after all, but by an intelligence after which we are always running. This lagging and sagging relation to attachment threatens to make us feel vertiginous and formless, except that normative conventions and our own creative repetitions are there along the way to help quell the panic we might feel at the prospect of becoming exhausted or dead before we can make sense of ourselves. In other words, the anxiety of formlessness—whose potentiality follows us everywhere—makes us awfully teachable, for a minute."  —Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

[man-peach-reborn]

Very Important People + Text posts (season 2)

[veryimportantpeopleshow]

Soup allergy warning: contains wheat (and traces of monogamy)

Watch the episode on Dropout

[starkju0]

Barbara and Bill 🥫🥫🥫

[milksockets]

For instance, orgasm seems to make you shatteringly different than your ego was a minute ago, but in another minute you are likely to be doing something utterly usual, like pissing, whispering, looking away, or walking into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator door. Is it not possible that the very unoriginality of the sexual experience, its banality, can also make it worth cherishing? This is not a rhetorical question but one that argues methodologically against the transparency of bodily response. Shattering is not always shattering, just as shame is only one way of coding sexual aversion; sentimentality, say, might be a much bigger threat to someone’s defenses than any sexual event is, pace normative ideology.

Cruel Optimism - Lauren Berlant

[1000rh]

It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter.

– Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022)