On the Inconvenience of Lauren Berlant: Desire, Democracy, the Commons

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This panel is one of a two-part series organized around a forthcoming volume, On the Inconvenience of Lauren Berlant, celebrating the rich legacy left by Berlant to contemporary political theory. Its contributors examine key themes, vocabularies, and intellectual innovations through essays that expand Berlant’s thinking in new and unique ways. Berlant challenged their fellow theorists to think and act differently, even as they take up well-worn concepts and objects of political thought. In taking up this challenge, thinking with and against Berlant in productive ways to reshape the current political-theoretical landscape, these panelists to re-imagine the contours of political life, focusing specifically on the place of sex, desire, ambivalence, infrastructure, and privacy in our conceptions of politics, citizenship, and collectivity.

Elena Gambino invokes Berlant the would-be historian: she unpacks how Berlant offers a vocabulary for thinking history as an object of intensely ambivalent desire, and makes the case that sexual history represents a paradigmatic occasion for reflecting on the ambivalence of one’s desirous attachments: it is a genre that cultivates precisely the sort of unbearable (and therefore transformative) intimacies that preoccupy Berlant’s work. Lida Maxwell draws together Berlant’s writings on sex to examine the relationship between sex and politics. She suggests that sex is an experience that uniquely shapes our capacity to be democratic citizens. Moving from sex to desire, Ali Aslam, Dave McIvor, and Joel Schlosser consider the ambivalence of desire present in Berlant’s work. They productively extend Berlant’s concept of ‘the common’ to encompass a notion of democratic power. They also rework Berlant’s theory of desire to capture its myriad forms, which helps these authors articulate the concept of democratic desire, a desire to shape the self and world in common. Considering the structures that sustain this common world, aylon cohen receives Berlant as a queer anarchist political theorist of non-sovereignty. cohen explores the political register of non-sovereignty in the form of shared living among strangers through Berlant’s treatment of infrastructure, attending to the kinds of political infrastructure that seek to hold open conflict and sustain political difference. Moving between the infrastructural and the intimate, Helen Galvin Ross turns to the recent Dobbs decision as it bursts open and redraws the boundaries of privacy, republicizing the reproductive body. In conversation with Berlant’s concept of fetal citizenship, Ross asks after the objects, attachments, and affective structures that are entangled with privacy in the American imaginary, and how these produce a new notion of fetal citizenship in the post-Roe era. Finally, Danielle Hanley revisits Berlant’s conception of ‘the common’ as “an action concept that acknowledges a broken world and the desperate need for a transformative infrastructure.” Through an engagement with the Greek chorus, she works to disrupt some of the institutional grounds of the contemporary ‘we’, where the chorus becomes a space to rehearse and retrain affective attachments into new forms of political collectivities.

Each of the papers on this panel stages a critical encounter with the enduring work of Lauren Berlant. Taken together, they invite us to redefine, reappraise, and rework core concepts of political thought by demanding that we think them in critical relation to the crisis ordinary of our present moment. By putting Berlant in dialogue with a wide range of thinkers to interrogate the way people form political intimacies, weather precarity, and propose bearable modes of attachment as they endeavor after both structural and subjective transformation, the contributors to this panel propose ways Berlant’s oeuvre illuminates the political challenges of our contemporary condition.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Danielle Hanley Clark University

Presenters

• Joel Alden Schlosser Bryn Mawr College

• Ali Aslam Mount Holyoke College

• David W. McIvor Colorado State University

• Lida E. Maxwell Boston University

• Elena Gambino Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Aylon Cohen University of Chicago

• Helen Galvin Ross University of Chicago