Sex, or the Unbearable by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (review)

In her last book, Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant opened with the pronouncement that all affective relationships are optimistic. Now, in Sex, or the Unbearable, she investigates that claim further by singling out sex as a form of relationality that, at its best, connects us with others and, at its worst, disconnects us from ourselves. In some ways Berlant and coauthor Lee Edelman follow a fairly familiar claim of Leo Bersani’s, from the AIDS era, that sex signals a shattering of the self, offering, in its place, a jouissance that threatens the social order by subordinating identity to pleasure. Yet Berlant and Edelman (two titans of contemporary queer theory) build upon Bersani’s theorization of sex as potentially negative to skewer some of our society’s most sacrosanct concepts: the pursuit of happiness, the cult of cuteness, and faith in good karma.

What unites Lee Edelman, author of the invaluable No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and Berlant is the critical interest they share in a fairly recent trend in LGBT studies: queer negativity, that is, the darker side of the social and psychic experiences of being queer as they complement the heretofore sunnier side of sexuality studies (i.e. pride, liberation, normalization). Sex remains central to issues of queer negativity since it is through sex that our limits are continually tested and where de-essentializing forces are unleashed for better or worse. In dialogue with each other throughout the book’s three short chapters, Sex, or the Unbearable puts Berlant and Edelman in a kind of dialogic exchange, or – perhaps more apropos in this context – in a Socratic form of intercourse. Think of a kinkier, twenty-first-century version of Plato’s Symposium.

Chapter 1, “Sex without Optimism,” uses Lacan’s well-known hypothesis that there is no sexual relation as a gateway into the negativity of sex, specifically its ability to intensify one’s feeling of “nonsovereignty,” the authors’ term for the undoing of any stable subjectivity, or what they call a state of “radical incoherence” (3). Both agree that Gayle Rubin’s depiction of queer people as sexual outlaws overdramatizes their social roles. Edelman, the clearer of the two writers, puts it this way: “One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers…something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value” (12). Chapter 1 is the most provocative in its critique of happiness, which is exposed as another “regulatory norm” akin to heterosexuality (18). Berlant and Edelman take aim at the predominance of the emoticon, specifically, the “regime of the smiley face,” and America’s (largely online) obsession with the adorable (19). The popularity of all things cute and adorable, they argue, draws its strength from the sublimation of more extreme aesthetic states such as the sublimely beautiful or the abjectly ugly. Amongst the authors’ archive of texts to analyze is Miranda July’s film “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” which has been practically crying out for a queer-positive interpretation since its release in 2005. It gets it here, and expertly so.

At issue in Chapter 2, “What Survives,” is the personal challenge to endure in the face of paranoia, depression, and bad karma, a designation used in the Sedgwickian sense of feeling trapped within a negative affective field. In fact the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is the ethical axis on which Chapter 2 rests: it reads as a rare kind of critical elegy of an important influence and friend, but also as the authors’ engagement with the late theorist and the negativity inherent in her (final) thoughts on living with and dying of cancer. Sex, or the Unbearable’s third and final chapter, “Living with Negativity,” is the book’s longest section as it includes a close reading of Lydia Davis’s “Break it Down,” a discussion of fetishism, and, most interesting of all, a political theory that embraces the negativity of division (“within community as well as the division...