sex, or the unbearable by lauren berlant and lee edelman

8/14/2019 Sex, or the Unbearable by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman

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S E X , O R T H E U N B E A R A B L E

L A U R E N B E R L A N T A N D L E E E D E L M A N


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A series edited by

Lauren Berlant and

Lee Edelman


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L A U R E N B E R L A N T A N D L E E E D E L M A N

Durham and London

2014


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2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o

America on acid-free paper

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

ypeset in Quadraat by seng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library o Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berlant, Lauren Gail, 1957

Sex, or the unbearable / Lauren Berlant

and Lee Edelman.

pages cm (Teory Q)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5580-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5594-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Sex. 2. Queer theory. 3. Intimacy (Psychology)

I. Edelman, Lee, 1953 II. itle. III. Series:

Teory Q.

75.15.47 2014

306.7dc23 2013025531


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C O N T E N T S

Preface vii

1. Sex without Optimism 1

2. What Survives 35

3. Living with Negativity 63

Afterwords 119

Appendix 127

Break It Down, by Lydia Davis

Acknowledgments 135

References 137

Index 141


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P R E F A C E

Sex, or the Unbearable: the title o this book does not offer its readers

a choice between these two terms, as in your money, or your life.

Nor does it mean to imply that we think o sex as reducible to the

unbearable. o be honest, theres not that much sex in the book

either, and the unbearable to which it points is all crossed over

with the enjoyable too. But then again, enjoyment itself, as we dis-

cuss it here, can be unbearable. What we offer instead is an analysis

o relations that both overwhelm and anchor usan affective para-dox that often shapes the experience o sex. We approach sex here

as a site, therefore, at which relationality is invested with hopes,

expectations, and anxieties that are often experiencedas unbearable.

Sex, though subject to the pressures o legal sanction, social judg-

ment, unconscious drives, and contradictory desires, holds out

the prospect o discovering new ways o being and o being in the

world. But it also raises the possibility o confronting our limit in

ourselves or in another, o being inundated psychically or emotion-

ally. Sex, or the Unbearableexamines our attempts to remain rooted

in the social by both holding fast to and moving beyond our ac-

customed ways o experiencing ourselves and our connectedness to

others. It explores the forms o negotiation we resort to in dealing

with intimate estrangement, and it tries to enact, in its own formal

structure, the constant, and at times disconcerting, adjustments

those forms o negotiation demand.Te following chapters approach the scene o relationality by

focusing on the negativity that can make it so disturbing. Nega-

tivity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divi-

sions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or


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E fixity o identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unset-

tles the fantasy o sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not

just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for

the possibility o change. So too nonsovereignty, a term to whichwell return, invokes the psychoanalytic notion o the subjects con-

stitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or

being in control o ourselves and that prompts our misrecognition

o our own motives and desires. At the same time, nonsovereignty

invokes a political idiom and tradition, broadly indicating ques-

tions o self-control, autonomy, and the constraints upon them. o

encounter ourselves as nonsovereign, we suggest, is to encounter

relationality itself, in the psychic, social, and political senses o the

term. For that reason, this book attends to those moments when

negativity disturbs the presumption o sovereignty by way o an

encounter, specifically, an encounter with the estrangement and

intimacy o being in relation. Sex is exemplary in the way it power-

fully induces such encounters, but such encounters exceed those

experiences we recognize as sex.

Tese dialogues explore such encounters while simultaneouslyrecording and performing one. It could be no other way. Relationality

always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging. It puts

into play reaction, accommodation, transference, exchange, and the

articulation o narratives. Just what an encounter entails, however,

remains for us unresolved. As it must. For an encounter refers to an

episode, an event, its fantasmatic scene, and the myriad misrecogni-

tions that inform the encounter and define its limit. Our various ways

o theorizing such encounters with relation shape our different views

o the political and affective consequences o social embeddedness.

We are constantly asking, What do our distinctive responses to each

other and our cases tell us about the structural conditions that pro-

duce the encounter with nonsovereignty in the first place?

Tough the negativity inseparable from the sexual encounter

comes to the fore most insistently in the final chapter o this book,

it makes itsel felt repeatedly in the dialogues that follow. For en-counter in all its ambiguity shapes the experience o sex, giving rise

to various forms o response, including, as the first two chapters

suggest, optimism and reparativity. We wonder throughout these

dialogues whether it is possible to endure the experience o rela-


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tion in the absence o optimism for bearing or surmounting what

overwhelms us in ourselves and in each other. Is optimism, in fact,

invariably at work in negativity? Or, conversely, is optimism a dis-

avowal o whats unbearable in negativity? Do we even mean thesame thing by optimism? Tis book attempts to hold such ques-

tions steadily in view. Even where we disagree with each other in the

ways that we address them, though, we proceed together through

the breaks and divisions that enable conversation, politics, and the

creation o new social forms.

Sex, or the Unbearableis thus an experiment in the forms o theo-

retical production. It proceeds from the belie that dialogue may

permit a powerful approach to negativity, since dialogue has some

o the risk and excitement we confront in the intimate encounter.

Not for nothing does the list communication and conver-

sation as the primary meanings o intercourse. In its dialogic struc-

ture, then, this book takes shape as collaboration, argument, and

exploration at once. It belongs to an experimental genre in which

theory, politics, and close textual analysis encounter the pedagogi-

cal necessity o responding to the provocations o otherness. Dia-logue commits us to grappling with negativity, nonsovereignty, and

social relation not only as abstract concepts but also as the sub-

stance and condition o our responsesand our responsibilities

to each other.

Reimagining forms o relation entails imagining new genres o

experience. Tese chapters try to extend the generic contours o

theoretical writing by making exchange, dialogic give-and-take, a

genuine form o encounter. By that we mean that throughout this

book we try to attend not only to what we can readily agree upon

but also to what remains opaque or unpersuasive about the others

ideas, what threatens to block or stymie us. Resistance, miscon-

struction, frustration, anxiety, becoming defensive, feeling mis-

understood: we see these as central to our engagement with each

other and to our ways o confronting the challenge o negativity

and encounter. Far from construing such responses as failures inthe coherence or economy o our dialogues, we consider them indis-

pensable to our efforts to think relationality. An academic culture in

the United States still dominated by the privilege o the monograph

only rarely affords occasions for critics to converse with each other


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E in print. Tat may reflect conversations low place in the hierarchy

o literary genres. Structurally determined by interruption, shifts in

perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up o con-

trol, conversation complicates the prestige o autonomy and the fic-tion o authorial sovereignty by introducing the unpredictability o

moving in relation to another. One never can know in advance to

what ones interlocutor will respond or what turns the conversa-

tion may take through the associations o a single word. We are

aware that what were saying here sounds a lot like what we say

about sexand that, o course, is the point. As the book proceeds,

the structural resonances among sex, politics, and theory become

ever more insistently the focus o our analysis.

Tis discussion starts, as all discussions do, in the middle o

many idioms and vernaculars and at the point where many gene-

alogies converge. Entering a conversation always means entering

it with an idiolect that has to adjust to someone elses, difficult as

that may be. As a consequence, our own conversation includes and

exceeds us at once; references taken for granted by one person are

foreign to another; historical contexts or philosophical grounds arenever fully shared (nor could they be, given the infinite expansion

o knowledge that would require); alignments o context or refer-

ence take shape simultaneously as gaps, missed encounters, and

blockages. So the process o clarification on which we embark must

operate immanently from within the conversation rather than by

appealing to an objectivized understanding o a set o issues that

the conversation unproblematically presupposes. Each o us offers

a set o terms that start to look different when the other uses them,

and each o us develops ways o testing out, querying, and account-

ing for the others conceptualizations. Tis process might make any

reader, including the writers themselves, desire some dictionary or

reference point to stabilize the conversation or long for an accom-

panying seminar to fill in the gaps and provide us with background

knowledge to make the going smoother. But conversation, like rela-

tionality, proceeds in the absence o such a reference point or undis-puted ground, often, in fact, producing the fiction o that ground

only retroactively.

Te question o assumed knowledge can also manifest itsel as

a question o address. Any given reader may feel that the conver-


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sation is taking place elsewhere, failing to address her or him, or

that it shifts its address unpredictably from inclusion to exclusion.

Being in relation invariably involves the animation o distance and

closeness; in that sense even direct address can be felt as indirectand acknowledgment can seem like misrecognition. Both o us had

that experience in the course o these conversations, and it would be

surprising i our readers did not have it too. But the process o nego-

tiating those shifts, o finding ones bearings, is at the center o the

ongoing project o relationality we explore in this text.

o sustain the critical dialogue we put fidelity to our ideas and

their consequences above the performance o our friendship, on the

one hand, or the scoring o points, on the other. (Whether or not we

succeed, o course, is not for us to say.) Tough friendship serves

as the ground from which these dialogues arise, it doesnt prompt

us to deny our differences or obscure our intellectual or political

commitments. At the same time, those commitments themselves

are what these dialogues put to the test. In the course o these con-

versations we both experienced clarification, surprise, and, most

important, transformation; there were moments, that is, when thecontours o our own understandings noticeably shifted and some-

thing o the others language or intellectual imperatives affected our

own. Te differences in our political and theoretical investments did

not, o course, disappear, but something else, new ways o inhabit-

ing those investments, appeared as well.

For all the insistence o such differences, though, we acknowl-

edge at the outset that we came to these dialogues with similar

intellectual backgrounds and theoretical allegiances. Some might

see that as a limitation, a failure o the dialogue to allow for an en-

counter with the disturbances o multiple kinds o difference. But

even in the narrowcast o an encounter with the similar we recog-

nize no putative sameness o self, no sovereignty, no coherence,

and no identity that doesnt reveal its ownradical differences. o be

sure, many other encounters than this one both could and should

take placeand encounters with other sorts o difference thanthose that develop here. But one o the points this book hopes to

make is that any encounter (with the world, with another, or even

with onesel ) discloses a nest o differences that carry what Barbara

Johnson so memorably called the surprise o otherness (1987, 16).


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E One o our goals, as weve already mentioned, is to think to-

gether about the social, political, and theoretical consequences o

negativity. Negativity points to many kinds o relation in what

follows, from the unbearable, often unknowable, psychic conflictsthat constitute the subject to the social forms o negation that also,

but differently, produce subjectivity. Generally negativity signifies

a resistance to or undoing o the stabilizing frameworks o coher-

ence imposed on thought and lived experience. In its disturbance

o such totalizations, negativity enacts the dissent without which

politics disappears. Negativity, in this sense, is inseparable from

the struggles o subordinated persons to resist the social conditions

o their devaluation. However, by challenging the coherence o the

categories through which the subordinated produce their claims for

legitimation, negativity can also become an obstacle to their orga-

nized resistance to things as they are. Tis double valence o nega-

tivity accounts for its centrality to a set o debates that have occu-

pied queer theory for some timeand that occupy our debate with

each other here.

One o the motives for our orientation toward questions o nega-tivity and relation is to dislodge one position in those debates, what

has been called the antisocial thesis, from a set o understandable

anxieties that it has provoked among some queer thinkers. Te his-

toric practice o studies has been toward reclaiming and

repairing lost histories and ongoing practices o delegitimation.

Negativity as a source for social theory tends to reject the impulses

to repair social relations that appear to us irreparable, and in that

light, our work might seem quietistic, apolitical, nihilist, defeatist,

or even irresponsible. By engaging closely with sociality and with

our own deep-rooted tendencies to think about its zones o opti-

mism and longing, we are seeking to make a persuasive case for

the necessity o recognizing the importance o addressing struc-

tural antagonisms in any analytic o the social. In doing so, we seek

to affirm negativitys central role in any antinormative politics. We

hope this conversation might permit a reframing o the antisocial

1. While evidence o that debate abounds, the most concentrated venue

o its performance can be found in the roundtable Te Antisocial

Tesis in Queer Teory.


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thesis that has already generated such lively debate and so much im-

portant theoretical work by its critics and adherents alike.

Part o the problem we have to confront in trying to move that

debate forward, however, is that the very name antisocial disre-gards our persistent embeddedness in and attentiveness to sociality.

It is not a matter for either o us o standing outside the social or

sociality or against the possibility o creating more capacious social

worlds. Rather we recognize that negativity emerges as resistance

to the fixity o social forms that seem to define the possibilities for

and the limits o relationality. We want to explore the valences o

social intensities and fantasies, o the contradictory pressures im-

plicit in established forms o relation, in order to read them not in

any simple antithesis to the social but rather as intrinsic to it.

We recognize too that antisocial has sometimes functioned as

a synonym or coded shorthand for antisentimental or antirepa-

rative. Where the issues o sentimentality and repair are concerned,

our positions are not identical and we do not agree in all cases on

the meanings o those terms. Tese dialogues address them directly,

though, and try to work through the ways we understand the in-vestments they bespeak. Nor do we exempt ourselves from invest-

ments, including unrecognized investments, in what those terms

may name. Our approach, however, depends on acknowledging the

specific contexts o their uses in order to recognize both what they

enable and what they might foreclose. Tis book thus aspires to re-

formulate discussion o the antisocial thesis by conceding from

the outset that the questions o sociality so vigorously argued in its

wake are genuinely hard and politically imperative, which is why

they call forth such intensity o thought on all sides o the debate.

It is in the context o that debate that we came to put this book

together. Having mounted different but related arguments against

the normative domination o sex, sexuality, and political collectivity

by the ideological lure o the future, we were separately called on by

Heather Love to give papers at a conference, Rethinking Sex (2009),

that she was organizing in honor o Gayle Rubin. Initially invited togive papers at a session tentatively called omorrow, we decided

instead to have a public conversation that would build on Rubins

writings in order to move beyond the accounts o futurity we each

had separately produced and engage instead the implication o sex


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E in the normative logic o optimism. We began with the notion o

optimism because it hooks us to fantasies o the good life, how-

ever the good life may be defined. Often such optimism enacts the

hope o successful integration into dominant orderssocial, psy-chic, and politicalby anticipating ways o resolving the various

contradictions amid which we live. Sex, as a locus for optimism, is

a site at which the promise o overcoming division and antagonism

is frequently played out. But the consequences o such efforts to re-

solve our social and psychic contradictions can include the estab-

lishment o sexual norms and the circumscription o sex for socially

legitimated ends. It can equally, however, give rise to fantasies o

sexual liberation and a paradise o polymorphous sexualities. We

have different concerns about the effects and efficacy o these fan-

tasies, which led us to wonder what it would mean to think about

or even desire the experience o sex without optimism. What i we

accepted the challenge o negativity and began the process o con-

ceptualizing sex in the absence o such optimism? What sorts o

displacements would it introduce into our ways o thinking sex?

Tat first conversation challenged clichs about the antisocialthesis by making criticism a social and collaborative form even

while broaching sociality and sex outside their connection to re-

pair. Our presentation at the Rethinking Sex conference, the basis

for chapter 1, undertook to show that negativity, far from being re-

ductively antisocial, is invariably an aspect ofthe social: that soci-

alitys inherent contradictions give rise to structures o self-relation

fundamentally out o synch with themselves. We began with a com-

mon interest in negativitys resistance to forms o sovereignty and

so in its status as an impediment to normativitys will to social clo-

sure and coherence. Our discussion touched on the tragic, dramatic,

and comic frames that negativity can inhabit and surprisingly (to

us) found its focal objects in the vistas o the queer adorable. Te

energy informing that dialogue emerged from our efforts to be in re-

lation at once to each other, our objects, and our ideas, while unfold-

ing the negativity o relation as indispensable to political vitality.In the aftermath o that conversation, finding ourselves still

working through the questions that it raised, we began to ask i it

would be useful to try to expand it into a book. So when we were

invited the following year to take part in a panel at the annual con-


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vention o the Modern Language Association that was being orga-

nized in memory o our friend and colleague, Eve Kosofsky Sedg-

wick, we decided once more to use the opportunity to pursue these

ideas together. Sedgwicks work, over the arc o her career, inspiredus to return to the ideological imbrications o sex and the forms o

optimism, but to do so by engaging negativity in the context o her

analyses o repair.

Given the inevitable, and often unbearable, disturbances onto

which sex can open, how is it possible, we asked ourselves (and

each other and Sedgwick as well), to address that negativity as in-

separable from what is most compelling in sex? In pursuing this

thought we had to deal with the difficulty o articulating the join

o psychic and social scenes and dynamics. Any analytic encounter

with sex should push psychoanalytic accounts o the subject and o

the subjects psychic experience to acknowledge and address their

constitution within an invariably political field. Sedgwicks interest

in Silvan omkins and Melanie Kleinespecially as her theoretical

and activist concerns intersected with her own therapeutic ambi-

tions inA Dialogue on Loveencouraged us to tackle a question thatfollowed directly from our previous dialogue: Can we hope to trans-

form our relation to the structural disturbance o the subjects co-

herence without just producing ever new fantasies o simplifying or

repairing it? Our efforts to respond to the challenge posed by such

ruptures o continuity gave shape to the talk that later became our

second chapter, What Survives. Sedgwicks death, which viscer-

ally brought home the insistence o rupture in relation, impelled us

to explore what followsaffectively, narratively, and politically

from the persistence o negativity in every practice o repair.

Among the responses that greeted our presentation o What

Survives were several that wondered how to survive the irreparable

negativity it evoked. Te possibility o a life not governed by the

logic o repair seemed, according to some in the audience, unbear-

able to imagine. How, in the absence o wanting to repair, could one

possibly go on? What would such going on look like i we turned ourtheory into practice? Would living with negativity entail the death

o the optimism that animates desire and energizes politics? We

felt a responsibility to address these questions as clearly as possible

and to flesh out the imbrication o negativity, politics, and the phe-


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E nomenality o life in order to show how negativity is not the oppo-

site o politics, not a practice o withdrawal from contesting the

terms or structures o existence, but rather a challenge to engage

with politics in unexpected places and in unpredicted ways.We also felt the need to think about theory as a type o social

practice and to consider the aesthetic in terms o the narratives

with which we turn life to account. In the first chapter we focused

on separate aesthetic (and, in each case, visually iconic) objects

through which to organize our speculations on what sex without

optimism might mean. In the second we used Sedgwicks texts to

approach whats beyond the optimistic model o attachment forms

meant to solve the problem o living. What survives once the model

o reparative relation is forced to share space with all sorts o nega-

tivity or when it starts to open onto a negativity o its own? For the

final chapter we thought it important to link the question o living

with negativity to the processes o narratingit, gathering up the di-

verse kinds o realism, causality, fantasy, and organization in move-

ment that narrative forces to the fore. It struck us as crucial, in that

regard, to engage a common text, one that would somehow speak tothe question o living with negativity while opening onto the inter-

relations among sex, narrative, and the prospect for changing how

we inhabit and relate to the world.

After considering a wide array o objects that might galvanize our

thought, we read Lydia Daviss Collected Storiestogether and knew we

had found our author. Tough drawn to a dozen o Daviss texts,

each perfect for this chapters project, we decided to direct our ener-

gies to a close reading o only one. A single text seemed fitting here

because this chapter, following our speculations on repair in What

Survives, concerns finding ways o living with an object, or with the

loss or breakdown o an object, that roots one in the world.

Break It Down, the story we finally chose, engages living with

others and living on in their absence. Enigmatic and haunting, filled

with the pathos o a narrator not fully controlling what he reveals,

Break It Down provides a scaffold for this chapters meditationson negativity. It does so, moreover, while enacting a continuous in-

terrogation o what sex means. Because it plays so crucial a role

in Living with Negativity and because we want it to enter our con-

versation here in its own right, we have reprinted Break It Down


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sex, or the unbearable by lauren berlant and lee edelman

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