Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (review)

"Queer optimism" would be likely to dispel the shame so important in queer theory and to reverse the negative impulse that has more generally motivated much work in the field. But a finer distinction is at work in Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Michael Snediker notes that much queer-theory work focused on shame and committed to forms of negativity "in fact seems optimistically motivated" (15). Leo Bersani's notorious "self-abolition" is in fact fairly self-hyperbolic, for example, and Judith Butler's melancholy "doesn't seem quite melancholic" (72, 20). In these and in other cases, optimism of a certain kind gives queer theory a different feel, which might also be said to lighten some of the heavier moods known to (and even definitive of) queer people. Snediker defines this form of optimism and shows it at work in the lyric persuasions of poets including Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop. Nothing suddenly cheerful emerges from these poets, however, for just as Snediker discovers optimism in the negativity of queer theory, he discovers something like negativity in queer optimism, which is not at all a matter of hope for a better queer future but an entirely different way of looking on the bright side.

Traditionally "utopic" optimism has a promissory bent. It tends toward sentimentality rather than rigorous thinking about what might be, which is why it is not typically an option for radical thought or oppositional critique. Traditional optimism (defined here through reference to Leibniz and, by contrast, the hermeneutics of suspicion) presumes the existence of whole human selves (rather than "subjectivities") and in many other ways takes too much on faith. Queer optimism attaches to no future but focuses instead on the present; it is not about hopes for the future but the possibility that what exists right now is interesting. Queer optimism does not take happiness on faith but still takes it seriously, and these forms of positive interest make queer optimism a kind of "meta-optimism," a mode of forbearance toward better possibilities. Rigorous and critical, queer optimism also has fundamental implications for who we are: neither whole human selves nor "subjectivities," but "aesthetic persons" who exist insofar as we find it interesting to do so.

Snediker wants to theorize this new form of optimism in part because he wants to close the gap between what the queer theorists find interesting (or true) and what they might want for themselves. He explains the difference—and the reason to resolve it—autobiographically. His commitment to the shattered, performative, or fictional selfhood of queer theory could only be an intellectual one, he says; it could not meet personal needs. His work in Queer Optimism is an effort to reconcile intellectual and personal commitments in a form of feeling capable at once of shame and pride, skepticism and pleasure, pessimistic critique and optimistic interest in the truths happiness might bespeak.

If lyric poetry might not seem to be the first place to go for this reconciliation, Snediker justifies his focus upon it first through reference to lyric's notorious shamelessness. Grounded in presumptions not unlike those at work in optimism itself, lyric utterance is in fact the most challenging test-case for any effort to redeem it. Snediker also sees poetry "as the space from which one might escape . . . the nonnecessary interlineations of suffering and being: suffering and writing, suffering and thinking" (36). If we have unnecessarily associated these things, poetry is our best hope for uncoupling them, and achieving something that may be Snediker's most exciting objective: a nonnegative form of intelligence, a world in which "joy could be a guarantor of truth" (20). Or a world in which smiles are authentic. Hart Crane features smiles throughout his work and critics have tended to read them as false, fleeting, or ironic performances. But what if we were "to take smiles seriously as unyielding rhetorical and affective phenomena"? (52...