Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant (review)

Cathected to ideals and values that are unrealizable under present conditions, we gamely strive to realize them anyway. Our subjectivity “wears out” in pursuit of promises that cannot be kept, or cannot be kept with the tools available, or the purpose of which was never to be kept, or the keeping of which actually hurts. “Cruel optimism” is the condition in which our optimism about such promises is injurious to us. Berlant’s premises describe a world of “normal trauma” in which there is numbness and panic and not much else, but most admirable about her work is the kindness with which she writes it. Hard-toned sentences describing the “affectisphere” or “affect world” always shift to clauses of compassion for all of us living through “an impossible, but no longer unlivable, situation.” Her paragraphs often open with conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, considerate signaling phrases. The effect resembles stuttering, the sort of coming to one’s senses for just a moment that Berlant argues is one subjectivity of the “normal crisis” through which we live. Happily, Berlant is not merely a diagnostician. The reader of her book is enabled to reach salutary resolutions about living in the “One-Third World” where the goodies accumulate. Reading the book helped me to stop smoking.