Surface Writing: Berlant and Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable

Sharon Cameron suggests that Emerson’s “Experience” posits the death of his son not only as an acutely devastating experience (even as it is) but also as an analogy for what is disastrous and dissatisfying about experience as such. Along these lines, Sex or the Unbearable takes the unbearability of sex as example of and analogy for the hazardous allure of being-in-relation. The first thing to note about Sex, or the Unbearable is that “unbearable” names something necessarily equivocal. That we are as inclined to talk about unbearable beauty or pleasure as we are unbearable humiliation or pain underlies the book’s implicit premise that if the unbearable names a site in which one is invested, it’s not always clear if and when the investment should be jettisoned or sustained, or why, for better and for worse, it’s so difficult to tell the bearable and the unbearable apart. After all, “bearable” and “unbearable” aren’t opposites. The difference between them is as minute and elusive as that between patience and impatience. Berlant’s most recent book before this one, Cruel Optimism, investigates the slow psychical deaths to which we acclimate and grow inured in our commitment at nearly any cost to the toxic futural promise of what she calls cruel optimism. Edelman’s most recent book, No Future, celebrates the negativity of a drive that variously corrodes and warps the futurally oriented politics whose murderousness liberalism misrecognizes as the forms of hope and compassion to which we find ourselves ruthlessly indebted. Taken together, Cruel Optimism and No Future describe the panic of I can’t live with it and I can’t live without it, through the surprising, challenging labor of living presently, otherwise, without reverting to the horizon to which “otherwise” so often cleaves. Sex, or the Unbearable, a dialogue in three parts, is an experiment in navigating this “taken together.”

It’s not often that the form of a book so deftly serves as its own case study. This collaboration between Berlant and Edelman has a feel for the ecology of thinking as it passes between two points. Like holding one’s breath under water or passing a balloon back and forth without its touching the floor, these conversations illuminate the sense of timing with which ideas respond to and are shaped by each other. By contrast, in collaborations such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s Forms of Being or Arts of Impoverishment, the ceding of one voice to another is impossible to trace, if the ceding happens at all; as often, the attraction of these works lies in the seeming production by two authors of a single, sustained voice. On the other side of the dialogic spectrum, Bersani’s Intimacies takes the form of three essays by Bersani followed by one by Adam Phillips, a collaboration that feels contractual rather than synchronically negotiated. The predeterminedness of the borders between these thinkers and their thoughts sets in relief the theatre of pervious boundaries in Sex, or the Unbearable. As described in the book’s introduction, these dialogues are both performance and recording. On a different aesthetic register and in homage to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the lava lamp of the mind, this looping of live verses and pre-recorded chorus is like a lava lamp in two colors; the love child of lava meets Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet balcony.

Berlant and Edelman open their archive of sex without optimism with Miranda July’s “Me, You, and Everyone you Know” and Larry Johnson’s “Untitled.” These works suggest the interesting difficulty of finding points of erotic attachment-dispersal not already stippled with optimism’s horizonal dread. In the manner less of negative space than chiaroscuro, Berlant’s and Edelman’s accounts of sex without optimism clarify optimism’s own perverse ubiquity. In holding my own candidates to the light of theirs, the terms by which I disqualify or include the former tacitly compels an...