Quotes from Lauren Berlant

And above all, I will argue the necessity for preserving, against all shame, a demanding question of revolution itself, a question about utopia that keeps pushing its way through a field of failed aspirations, like a student at the back of the room who gets suddenly, violently, tired of being invisible.

insofar as an American thinks that the sex he or she is having is an intimate, private thing constructed within a space governed by personal consent, she or he is having straight sex, straight sex authorized by national culture; she or he is practicing national heterosexuality...

How long have people thought about the present as having weight, as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?

there is nothing more alienating than having one's pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.

The U.S. worker] gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g. via sports).

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.

A Lillian B. Rubin) Los niños le dan la impresión de ser realistas depresivos, que en general no idealizan las luchas de sus padres ni sus formas de sobrevivir, mientras que al mismo tiempo se sienten protectores en relación con ellos por lo normal de su humillación social.

where love and desire are concerned, there are no adequate examples; and all of our objects must bear the burden of exemplifying and failing what drives our attachment to them.

Additionally, using the forms of publicity that capitalist culture makes available for collective identifications, some of these sex publics have exposed contradictions in the free market economics of the right, which names nonmarital sex relations as immoral while relations of economic inequality, dangerous workplaces, and disloyalty to employees amount to business as usual, not provoking any ethical questions about the privileges only some citizens enjoy.

La voz en off (en Rosetta y La promesse ) sería algo así como "Quédate junto a mí, no me avasalles, no digas nada, no interfieras con mi deseo de imaginarme cómo se sentiría que reconocieses mis necesidades, di algo, dame algo, intentémoslo, quedémonos callados".

my practice is always to stage incommensurate approaches to a problem/object in order to attend to its instability, density, and openness.

Theory, as Gayatri Spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: I am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. I am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought.

He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolution.

El dolor psíquico experimentado por las poblaciones subordinadas debe ser tratado como ideología, no como un conocimiento anterior a la caída de Adán y Eva o como una teoría social comprensiva condensada... Pensar otra cosa implica afirmar que el dolor es meramente banal, una historia que ya siempre se ha contado.

El sentimentalismo de arriba hacia abajo atenúa los riesgos de las condiciones del privilegio, al hacer que las obligaciones de actuar sean sobre todo paliativas, cosa de no cambiar los términos fundamentales que organizan el poder sino de ir en pos de las elevadas pretensiones de sensibilidad, virtud y conciencia vigilantes.

on flat affect] ... worlds and events that would have been expected to be captured by expressive suffering—featuring an amplified subjectivity, violent and reparative relationally, and assurance about what makes an event significant—appear with an asterisk of uncertainty.