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

Berlant and Edelman take debates around the antisocial thesis as a point of departure to theorize the importance of relationality, loss and repair, sovereignty, and negativity in the politics and ethics of queer theory. Despite the overlapping topics of interest that have marked their respective works, their varying theoretical approaches make for a smart, enlivening, and productive conversation in Sex, or the Unbearable. The book is broken into a co-written preface, three chapters, and a couple of afterwords. The first chapter, “Sex without Optimism,” focuses on how relationality is imagined as optimistic only through the loss of negativity. As Berlant explains, “We came to the question of sex without optimism focusing on the ways that sex undoes the subject” (4). For Edelman, this is very much related to his project in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. In both places, he questions the “orientation toward a future,” an optimism which leaves a “gloss we might think of as a finish, in more than one sense of that term” (3). From this position, Berlant creates a space for herself when she quips, “I am a utopian, Lee is not” (5). She continues, “I do not see optimism primarily as a glossing over, as a ‘fantasy’ in the negative sense of resistance to the Real. I am interested in optimism as a mode of attachment to life. I am committed to the political project of imagining how to detach from lives that don’t work” (5). As such, the two authors outline their varying stakes for thinking through the issues of the book.

“What Survives,” the next chapter, was originally written shortly after Eve Sedgwick’s death, and fittingly ruminates on failure, loss, and reparation in the engagement of Sedgwick’s scholarship. In this chapter, the two authors consider the notion of repair as both pernicious (Edelman) and as transferential (Berlant). Edelman takes up Sedgwick’s work in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” arguing that her take on reparativity is deeply connected, rather than opposed, to paranoia. According to Edelman, Sedgwick leads “reparativity and its project of survival back into the paranoid…making difference out of sameness by naming as two what amounts to one” (43). At the same time, he suggests that Sedgwick both requires a distinction between “good” and “bad” and proposes thought beyond “good” and “bad.” Berlant argues that a reading of Sedgwick needs to account for how repair does not necessarily imply the “trumping” of one model over another; rather, “the transferential situation lets us encounter where we don’t make sense without being defeated by it” (54), meaning that the work of repair is not always an impulse “toward mastery” of the self.

The compelling final chapter, “Living with Negativity,” considers the sovereign subject, incoherence, and what the ethical engagement of theorists might be. The chapter begins with the most tense, argumentative moment of the book. Edelman outlines the role of sex in contemporary political debates, where discussions of sex may seem anachronistic and too personal in fields interested in the distribution of rights or the management of populations. In querying the current stakes of queer theory, he glosses over the differences in his and Berlant’s thinking. He characterizes Berlant’s utopianism regarding the transformation of systems of domination as reliant upon a “dedramaticization” of negativity (64). In contradistinction, his work pursues those negative encounters as drama and therefore “ruptures in logic” itself (65). Berlant retorts that she has not been arguing for a reparativity to take the place of the nonsovereign subject, nor has she been arguing against drama. Rather, she asserts, it is important to understand how the uneasiness created by negative encounters is negotiated, not just that the encounters happen (67). At the core of this debate are the stakes of queer theory: what its uses are, if it is outdated, what it can do if we are not future-oriented as theorists. These very questions bring about contradictions and disagreements, but Berlant ends on...