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Sex, or the Unbearable (Theory Q) by [Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman]

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Lauren Berlant

Lee Edelman

Sex, or the Unbearable (Theory Q) Kindle Edition

by Lauren Berlant (Author), Lee Edelman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Part of: Theory Q (7 books)

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Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.

Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.

Print length

168 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Duke University Press Books
Publication date

November 18, 2013
File size

1094 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Cruel Optimism, The Female Complaint, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, all also published by Duke University Press.

Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He is the author of L'impossible Homosexuel; No Future, also published by Duke University Press; and Homographesis.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

“What’s lovely about this exchange is that Berlant and Edelman’s mutually locked horns don’t make us feel as though a cleverer person has already figured things out and we’re simply not smart or qualified enough to piece together the unspoken counterarguments they would have to our doubts.” -- Colin Low ― Against the Hype

"Berlant and Edelman’s three-act dialogue is wonderfully intriguing, especially in regard to how the dialogue itself bears witness to the intellectual process of ‘thinking through’ in the dialogic form." -- Marcie Bianco ― Lambda Literary Review

"This collaboration between Berlant and Edelman has a feel for the ecology of thinking as it passes between two points. Like holding one’s breath under water or passing a balloon back and forth without its touching the floor, these conversations illuminate the sense of timing with which ideas respond to and are shaped by each other." -- Michael D. Snediker ― Theory & Event

“Berlant and Edelman take debates around the antisocial thesis as a point of departure to theorize the importance of relationality, loss and repair, sovereignty, and negativity in the politics and ethics of queer theory. Despite the overlapping topics of interest that have marked their respective works, their varying theoretical approaches make for a smart, enlivening, and productive conversation in Sex, or the Unbearable.” -- Fiona I. B. Ngô ― American Studies

“While Berlant and Edelman do not address popular romances, their work can be informative to the work of romance scholars in tackling issues of the place of sex and the erotic, especially within some romance tropes, such as discovery of a new sexual orientation plots in queer romances, or submissive-for-you plots in many erotic romances of all orientations.” -- Amanda Jo Hobson ― Journal of Popular Romance Studies

“Among the book’s major attractions is its inventive dialogic form, and Berlant and Edelman’s masterful close readings of diverse media. The authors alternate named passages, riffing on each others’ ideas and including their moments of complex ambiguous affect, including responses to the other of misappropriation, frustration, delight and surprise, so often elided in collaborative critical theory. This dialogic form and its auto-analysis is one of the great intellectual joys of the book, a fascinating and inventive device well-suited to a discussion of the complex investments subjects have in relationality, including sex, conversation, and pedagogy.” -- Jessica Durham ― Colloquy Published On: 2015-11-01

“These two authors offer an intense and highly insightful account of interactions between two subjects that, I suggest, could be fruitfully applied to understanding encounters in organizations. They show some of the complexities of relationality: it is violent, pleasurable, productive, a scene of fantasy and misrecognition, all these and more.” -- Nancy Harding ― Gender, Work & Organization Published On: 2016-01-01

“As an overall project, Sex, or the Unbearable pushes forward the debate on queer negativity and antisociality, whilst also contributing to contemporary queer, feminist and cultural theory’s wider critiques of academic knowledge production and the political utility of academic scholarship.” -- Kathryn Medien and Jacob Breslow ― Sexualities Published On: 2015-09-01 --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00I6ZL22G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press Books; Illustrated edition (November 18, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 18, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1094 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,469,496 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #503 in Semiotics & Theory Literary Criticism
- #779 in Gay Studies
- #1,506 in Counseling & Psychology eBooks on Human Sexuality

Customer Reviews:
14 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		74%
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Diogenes

We have heard a great deal of this before

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2016

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I greatly admire both these writers and am especially fond of Edelman's No Future, but I was shocked to find that so much about the arguments being made here seems old and tired. We have heard a great deal of this before, over and over, especially regarding anti-normativity and the critique of "sovereignty." Not to mention the rehashing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. From the very first paragraphs, I felt a sinking in the stomach and, to my amazement, began skipping at an early stage. Rather than joining in the blurbs' celebration of the book's renovation of (queer) theory, I would say the book shows where things are now stuck. Moreover, the book practically suffocates in the authors' narcissism.

6 people found this helpful

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andronicus

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2016

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another brillant opus from edelman and his co-author berlant...they ""fill every rift with ore""

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Frank Brancely

Wow.

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2016

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I am not going to provide some kind of Nietzschean weak-strong review of my encounter with this book as if that were even possible.

One person found this helpful

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Christine Etienne

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2017

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Ugh this book is so excellent.

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Colin

Vital reading for critical theorists/students

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2014

The dialogue between critical theorists Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable is crucial for anyone who, like me, just doesn’t get Lee Edelman. Edelman has gained notoreity in critical circles for his radically antisocial position in his 2006 book No Future, but it’s not that I don’t get his relentlessly hammered point about the exclusionariness inherent in any account of social order, even an avowedly critical or inclusionary one. Rather, I don’t get why he wants to keep making it. The most eye-opening thing about this book is that Berlant, his compatriot in negativity, doesn’t get it either. For her, articulating the negativity/nonsovereignty inherent in any relational encounter is helpful for herself and others in shifting the atmospheres around which such encounters take place, allowing for movement beyond a pointless (because inevitably failed) struggle with negativity. When Edelman insists that even a hope such as this is rife with negativity, Berlant asks him what he sees as the implications of his work. To her, his work makes him just as complicit in the kinds of pedagogical optimism to which she is self-professedly committed. Why else would he bother articulating it?

Among other things, this book’s portrayal of Berlant and Edelman’s live, embroiled disagreement has helped me to escape being rendered mute by my fear of mischaracterizing Edelman’s argument, which has proven so endlessly mischaracterizable by so many smarter people than me, if his multiple MLA rebuttals of them are any indication.* But those mutual rebuttals have unfolded in the slow time of monographic work and conference Q&As. By contrast, the structure of the dialogue between Berlant and Edelman, which opens with their joint avowal of the negativity/nonsovereignty inherent in all encounters, at least makes their ensuing disagreements feel like a proper engagement with each other rather than a consistently one-sided conversation with an oppositional strawman. Not that there aren’t strawmen in this book, since one of its pleasures is watching Edelman continually recast Berlant as a reparative/naïve theorist, and Berlant in turn calling him out for mischaracterizing her claims. However, having Berlant as an interlocutor forces Edelman to come the closest he has yet to stating his optimisms outright. He confesses that flourishing for him involves engaging in a realistic, continual struggle with negativity (see page 11), and that part of this engagement involves taking up the position of devil’s advocate against another’s position even if, for instance (and this is only implied), he is a lot more aligned with Berlant’s belief in helping others into a realist relation to negativity than he admits (see page 115).

What’s lovely about this exchange is that Berlant and Edelman’s mutually locked horns don’t make us feel as though a cleverer person has already figured things out and we’re simply not smart or qualified enough to piece together the unspoken counterarguments they would have to our doubts. But as Berlant and Edelman admit in the preface, their focus on continually clarifying their positions in the face of each other’s skepticisms and misrecognitions keeps the book on the lean, succinct track of explaining negativity’s relation to optimism, reparativity and living from two different perspectives, all in a highly abstract and general register. This means that the book can only remain a prelude to all the different directions in which its theory of negativity can be put to productive thought, including about sex itself. For example, the book never directly tackles the sex pastoralists that might be their obvious interlocutors, e.g. those sex-positive liberals who worship at the church of consent, a term denoting a sovereignty that cannot hold within the risky, negativity-ridden space of the intimate encounter. But perhaps to call such interlocutors “obvious” is unwise, if we are to absorb Berlant and Edelman’s point, which is that we should ever leave ourselves open to the surprise of how others (and even our selves) might be affected by what we have to present and take that in turn into new, surprising and often unbearable directions.

* For samplers of Edelman’s MLA parries against utopian theorists, see [...] and [...]

32 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Michelle

A lovely, difficult conversation.

Reviewed in Canada on February 15, 2014

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As if often true, I didn't understand much of what Berlant and Edelman were talking about, and I also didn't always agree with them. But I loved being a part (through reading) of this often fascinating conversation.

This book is probably not a great intro to either author's work, don't be fooled by the small page count. It took me weeks to work through the book. But for me, it was well worth it. I posted no fewer than 3 amazing quotations on my facebook from it (all Berlant, although she wasn't always my favourite throughout).

matthew

Sex, or the unbearable isn't for the general reader ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2016

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Sex, or the unbearable isn't for the general reader. Despite being very well written it's contents can seem a little confused even with a higher than average vocabulary. I find it hard to fully review this book due to only understanding around 60 percent of it's context

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