This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible, zone defined by being in life without wanting the world—the fundamental political affect, well-known to historically and structurally subordinated people (people of color, of non-normative sexuality, proletarianized laborers), but not only. Reading with Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, and Harryette Mullen, it describes life at the limit of optimism in terms of suicidal ideation and a dissociative poetics that allow breathing room for survival.

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her recent books include: with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds, a book of theoretical poems generating concepts of the ordinary, and “Cruel Optimism” (Duke University Press, 2011), which addresses precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary US. She blogs at Supervalent Thought and is a founding member of the art/activist group Feel Tank Chicago.