Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.
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What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.
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queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)
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Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.
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think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.
Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.
