Lauren Berlant in Melbourne

Posted on | August 8, 2008 |

Next week I’ll be in Melbourne because Lauren Berlant is coming to town! Hoping to see lots of you locals at this:

The University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Dean’s Lecture,
in association with The School of Culture and Communication

Professor Lauren Berlant

‘After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present’

Wednesday 13 August 6.30-7.45 pm

Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch Building

This is a paper about the fraying of a fantasy, a fantasy of “the good life.” When Margaret Thatcher announced, in 1987, that “there is no such thing as society” but only “individual men and women and . . . families,” she described the cultural program that accompanied the waning of the social democratic contract that had shaped, with variation, Western global economic policy since the end of World War II. But the fantasy of meritocracy, of a national, economic, and intimate world that would reward hard work and good intentions so that people could think about life as a process of adding up to something, has worn out less quickly than the economic, political, and material infrastructure that supported it. This talk takes two films by Laurent Cantet that document the intimate experience of the wearing out of that fantasy, the normative good life fantasy that sustained heterosexual intimacies in their most minute gestures for the last half century. All over Europe now, the word “precarity” stands for an alliance amongst everyone living the fraying of “the good life”” as a political promise and romantic fantasy: the paper frames its investigation of the post-normative by questioning whether precarity describes well enough the new conditions of alliance that might produce not only new politics, but new fantasies about individual and collective flourishing.

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. Her publications include a trilogy on national sentimentality in American culture — The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke, 1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke, 2008). Her interest in collective attachments and affects is followed throughout the edited volumes Intimacy (Chicago, 2000); Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (with Lisa Duggan, NYU, 2001); and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004). Professor Berlant is co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and has recently edited two special issues of the journal entitled On the Case, which bring together leading thinkers to examine the “case”—the standard unit in law, medicine, psychoanalysis, the humanities, the sciences, and popular culture.

This lecture is free of charge and open to all staff, students and members of the public.
The venue is wheelchair accessible.

Category: Events

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