On the Inconvenience of Lauren Berlant: Impasse, Ambivalence, Fantasy

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 how notions of vitality, sex negativity, visceral attachment, personal inconvenience, humorless, and impasse structure different conceptions of politics, fantasies of citizenship, and architectures of domination.

Kennan Ferguson argues that Berlant is a theorist of vitality insofar as they are consistently concerned with revitalizing meanings – of language, of feeling, and of the particularities of human being. For Ferguson, the goal of Berlant’s work has always been to escape ‘the dead metaphor.’ Claire McKinney enacts this goal by taking up Berlant’s generative negativity – instead of dismissing bad feelings or bad faith, McKinney identifies how Berlant used critique and paradox to unearth new forms of engagement and relationality. She uses the SCUM Manifesto to develop a critique of the inexorable dependencies central to Berlant’s thinking, where the rejection of sex becomes a lens through which to engage the role of attachment in political life and subject-formation. Samuel Galloway also takes up the question of attachment, using Berlant’s concept of ‘loosening’ to consider embodied and affective relationships to ambivalent objects, asking after bodily practices that can engender scenes of unlearning. For Galloway, the stomach acts as both object and metaphor through which scenes and practices of unlearning unfold, and works to visceralize, shape, and orient an ambivalent relationship to the good life. Libby Anker takes up Berlant’s speculative work, The Hundreds, co-authored with Kathleen Stewart, to consider the contours of worldmaking in “the shitstorm of life.” Anker considers how people constantly negotiate the pressures and constraints of the contemporary moment to creatively make life. Where Anker takes up the invitation to think in the midst of the shitstorm, Joseph Fischel begins with Berlant’s works on fetal citizenship and humor to articulate what he names a ’feminist otherwise.’ This is a feminist mode of coping with the contemporary, horrifying moment that isn’t inflated by heroic genres of subversion or resistance, but still finds more than flat ways of rounding out a critical relationality waged through dark humor. Hagar Kotef also engages Berlant to confront the horrors of the present, shifting from humor and embodiment to the violence of decolonization. She develops a critical dialogue between Berlant and Fanon to explore the fantasy of decolonization as a form of cruel optimism, a political impasse that requires we radically rethink paths for freedom, equality, and justice.

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

Chairs

• Samuel R. Galloway Purchase College

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University

Presenters

• Danielle Hanley Clark University

• Kennan Ferguson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

• Claire C. McKinney William & Mary

• Hagar Kotef SOAS, University of London

• Joseph Fischel Yale University