..., 1997) and, as editor, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004). She is currently finishing The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture , editing a book on the case study, and working toward getting to Cruel Optimism...

...Gila Ashtor Taking Lauran Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as exemplary of recent attempts to integrate psychoanalysis and ideology critique, this essay focuses on the psychological paradigm underlying such an evocative phrase in order to demonstrate that even the most capacious interpretations...

... technology and education by invoking Lauren Berlant’s term cruel optimism and challenges assertions that technical savvy yields more jobs for undergraduates and that moocs reduce the cost of higher education. Chun insists that if the humanities are at risk, it is because they have capitulated...

... the technocratic knowledge economy. But within that institutional situation, it has the capacity to tinker with the symbolic order of computing, such that it is not ultimately constrained by an agenda of efficiency, rationality, and optimization. Such an approach would contribute to the speculation of a less...

... yourself from the disappointing object. You ought to break up, but you don’t. What’s disappointing, in other words, is your own optimism: your continued belief in the world’s being enough for the desires that tether you to it, all evidence to the contrary. I owe this understanding of optimism to Lauren...

... personal yet not social responsibility, to optimize self-care and reward, and to demonstrate entrepreneurial acumen so as to feature more favorably in the story or to move on in the competition—may be neglected as a topic for serious scholarly inquiry even as this thinking has come more and more to define...

... gonzález 3 The Politics of Translation in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo lauren berlant 20 Cruel Optimism rachel bowlby...

... puts it, “folded into life” (10). These conditions might include cruel optimism, “Panoptimism” ( Berlant and Edelman 3 ), or self-aggressing or other-aggressing moralism. Huffer does not disagree with Berlant and Edelman’s analysis that ego-defensive forms of optimism aiming at preservation attack what...

... as bringing to the fore the modern optimism of simplicity and, conversely, of the simplicity of optimism in our modernity. One can see how the force of simplicitas, whose casualties include divorce and reproductive rights or all manners of queer and unreadable alliances, often proceeds under the banner ofthe...

... of optimization is suspended? How is a work born from infrastructure then refigured once detached from the demands to differences 223 remain “positivistic, strictly...

.... They critiqued the embrace of a techno-utopianism that, as Chun pointed out, keeps us trapped in what Laurent Berlant calls “cruel optimism” as we continually justify our existence in terms that are not our own. Cruel optimism allows us...

... is precisely what threatens to impede the optimization of capital flow. In tracing out what will optimize capital flow, Smith creates a narrative of organizational dynamics that echoes the trope of affective universality that Eustace...

... of epidemic has many important symptomatic consequences for policy and ideological debate in explicitly public spheres, consequences that necessitate further reflection. This shift can be summarily described as a move from an inflationary economy of optimism toward an economy of erotic recession...

.... sexuality feminism sexual politics #MeToo Here is what we know: feminist political optimism in the United States is difficult to come by in the current environment. The revolution (let’s call it what it is) of our lifetimes veers hard right as the u.s. state engages open warfare on air, water, land...

... and self-possession, the various parties who have found cause for optimism in the commons concept have reproduced one feature of that which they would resist: an intolerance for ambivalence, for contingency, for the awkwardness of living with others, which no social theory can or should try to wish away...

... of the intellect that justly distrusts any inclusion into liberal humanism and any International that remains predicated on anti-Blackness and the Black Radical optimism of the will, one that instead trusts the capacity of decolonial revolution to reintroduce invention into existence and to create a polis...

... in the twenty-first century, “reality is broken” and can only be saved through games that turn “a real problem into a voluntary obstacle” and activate “genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism” for resolving...

...-loss narrated in such a way that Proust’s authorship is never in question. Indeed, even the septet gives up on the radical potential of ego renunciation. In the end, one of Vinteuil’s musical motifs asserts itself and brings the piece to a joyful, heavenly close. Bersani’s optimism for an impoverished...

... as an index of good sex? And who is the “we” that might “know” consent? This keyword essay locates contemporary feminist consent discourse within the long history of consent in u.s . jurisprudence. This origin story highlights consent’s vexatious nature, for the optimism of liberal humanism’s freedom...

..., drug legalization, a large-scale reorganization of agricultural working conditions, or an end to racial capitalism, but better choices: individual self-regulation and self-optimization. Darlene’s happy ending consists of her solitary engagement in projects of self-improvement: she takes up running...