#laurenberlant

[artistsintheclassroom8]

We’re flailing when we move to help each other with touch, words, and plans, under the pressure to build on movement culture so that our gestures can extend beyond the beat of the moment, toward the activist time that makes time to craft our commitments to foraging a better good life from the freshly uneven ground we’re wobbling on.

Lauren Berlant

[susiemyersonislifegoals]

Would it be asking too much to wish I had a therapist to whom I could say, "I woke up and put on the entire Rilo Kiley discography and wished I had time to re-read Cruel Optimism," and have hir know exactly what I mean?

[marciebianco]

In light of FW's "Love as a Radical Act" Forum

In terms of thinking through the politics of affect, Lauren Berlant is the scholar to turn to—arguably, she is publishing the most stunning queer/feminist/theoretical work today.

In light of the Feminist Wire's "Love as a Radical Act" Forum (my contribution will be forthcoming), I felt it timely to post her thoughts on love as a political concept:

"The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.

When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land you’re probably going to fall, or hurt your ankle or hit someone. When you’re asking for social change, you want to be able to say there will be some kind of cushion when we take the leap. What love does as a seduction for this is, and has done historically for political theory, is to try to imagine some continuity in the affective level. One that isn’t experienced at the historical, social or everyday level, but that still provides a kind of referential anchor, affectively and as a political project." 

"Love," she explains, "always means non-sovereignty"—is it now too difficult to see why love has not been an effective tool in terms of Neoliberal, "democratic" politics? Yet, in terms of grassroots activism, love is effective. It is with love that collective movements thrive. 

For more from Berlant, go HERE.

[queerbreakup-blog]

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling”