Lauren Berlant

Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar and cultural theorist regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021.

Berlant wrote on public spheres as they affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation. Berlant's writings have been translated into at least eight languages.

Early life and education Berlant was born on October 31, 1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Berlant graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College in 1979, then an MA from Cornell University in 1983, after they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago. The university awarded them a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1989), a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring (2005), and the Norman Maclean Faculty Award (2019).

Berlant's other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship and, for their book Cruel Optimism, the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association Berlant was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship—the title essay winning the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American literature —introduced the idea of the "intimate public sphere" and looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate. In his review, José Muñoz described it as both intersectional, following Kimberlé Crenshaw, and "post-Habermassian", in the vein of work by Nancy Fraser and Berlant's frequent collaborator Michael Warner. Berlant pursued this mass cultural phenomenon of "women's culture" as an originating site of “intimate publics", threading the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics through fantasies rather than ideology. Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as Show Boat, Imitation of Life, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Cruel optimism manifests as a relational dynamic in which individuals create attachment as "clusters of promises" toward desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. Maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable. Elaborating on the specific dynamics of cruel optimism, Berlant emphasizes and maintains that it is not the object itself, but rather the relationship:

A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing. So you can't say that there are objects that have the quality of cruelty or not cruelty, it's how you have the relationship to them. Like it might be that being in a couple is not a relation of cruel optimism for you, because being in a couple actually makes you feel like you have a grounding in the world, whereas for other people, being in a couple might be, on the one hand, a relief from loneliness, and on the other hand, the overpresence of one person who has to bear the burden of satisfying all your needs. So it's not the object that's the problem, but how we learn to be in relation.

An emphasis on the "present", which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness", turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises. Berlant suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain "genres" are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.

Berlant has edited books on Compassion (2004) and Intimacy (2001), which are interlinked with their seminal work in feminist and queer theory in essays like "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?" (with Michael Warner, 1995), "Sex in Public" (with Michael Warner, 1998), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (edited with Lisa Duggan, 2001), and Venus Inferred (with photographer Laura Letinsky, 2001).

Style Berlant's writing is semantically dense and formally experimental. They co-wrote with multiple other academics (collaboratively with Michael Warner and Kathleen Stewart, in dialog with Lee Edelman) and as part of collectives (including Chicago Cultural Studies Group in the early 1990s, The Late Liberalism Collective in the mid-00s, and Feel Tank Chicago for two decades). A large part of Berlant's critical and creative work in the last two decades of her/their life took the form of interviews and dialogs.

In 2019, Berlant published The Hundreds with Stewart, a collection of brief writing (a hundred words or a multiple of a hundred words) on ordinary encounters, applying affect theory to moments of unexamined daily life. The painting is now in the Collection of The National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum . Berlant died at a Chicago hospice facility on June 28, 2021, at age 63. They are survived by their partner Ian Horswill.

Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Berlant began donating them in 2014.