Jan 21, 2022
Lee Edelman on the narrative implied by optimism. I’m thinking whether the ‘refusal to live it while one could’ here is necessarily always a corollary to ‘bestowing a value on life by way of the future anterior’? Does optimism always presuppose an implicitly *completed* action?
Like, I get (and appreciate) how Edelman and Berlant are unpicking the structure of optimism here in favour of negativity, but I wonder if optimism necessarily has to be relegated to a process that is always-already completed
So here’s Berlant later in the book defining their divergence from Edelman. I think this is closer to my position, in that it prizes ‘the ongoing now’ as a temporal field of potentiality without the need to foreclose on the idea of a future