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Neither monstrous nor pastoral, but

scary and sweet: Some thoughts on
sex and emotional performance in
Intimacies and What Do Gay Men Want?
a
Lauren Berlant
a
Department of English , University of Chicago , Chicago, USA
Published online: 04 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Lauren Berlant (2009) Neither monstrous nor pastoral, but scary and
sweet: Some thoughts on sex and emotional performance in Intimacies and What Do Gay
Men Want?, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 19:2, 261-273, DOI:
10.1080/07407700903034212

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07407700903034212

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 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, 261–273

Neither monstrous nor pastoral, but scary and sweet:

Some thoughts on sex and emotional performance in
Intimacies and What Do Gay Men Want?
Lauren Berlant*

Department of English, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

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This extended meditation on David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want?

and Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips’ Intimacies focuses on how these
theorists think about sex, more than sexuality: how they use the ways that
sex disorganizes the subject (abjection, impersonal narcissism) to ground
strong accounts of better sociality at the scale of the personal and the
political. The essay investigates the potentiality embedded in optimism
about sex when it’s not a drama but a scene of lightness and the comic.
Keywords: sex; sexuality; affect; Halperin; Bersani; abjection; narcissism

Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips’ Intimacies opens with this hilarious sentence:
‘‘Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to
have sex’’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008, 1). David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want?
focuses on what two people who agree to have sex tend not to say to each other,
especially if those people are aware that their life narrative might convert to an AIDS
memoir if what goes without saying goes wrong (Halperin 2007). Going without
saying or not going with saying: in both of these books sex is a genre for managing
two slightly different things, the coherence of selves and relationality itself, the
unconscious yet all-too-present process of managing the distance and proximity of
what touches us.
Adam Phillips writes the frame chapters to Intimacies. He too is interested in
developing ‘‘a different kind of future in human relatedness,’’ but his model of love
does not derive primarily from what gay men do, say, refuse or want. Rather than
positing love as a deep recognizing transmission between two selves, he models the
ideal lover’s capacity to provide a profoundly reliable attachment on the iconic
mother’s lack of need to be recognized by her child as a condition of her love (117;
90–1). In that non-sacrificial relation the iconic mother does want the child to mirror
her, but also delights in the child’s singularity. Generalized, in this model of
impersonal narcissism the lover stages a love for the thatness of the loved object’s
being, and seeks to reconcile narcissistic-mimetic needs with the desire for the loved
one to become more himself or herself.

*Email: lauren.berlant@gmail.com

ISSN 0740–770X print/ISSN 1748–5819 online

ß 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07407700903034212
http://www.informaworld.com
 262 L. Berlant

One of the difficulties of Intimacies is its constant switch-off between concepts of

love and of attachment, which in psychoanalysis are closer terms than they are in
the vernacular sentimental world, and probably closer terms than they should be.
But this very confusion opens up for them an opportunity to reconceive of love:
in Intimacies love is something less rich and life-promising but more flexible and
animating than its conventions would allow. What follows works with the part
of Bersani’s work in Intimacies that extends this conception of the mother’s
impersonal narcissism to the couple, the gay community, and national life,
attempting ambitiously to explain how the narcissistic-destructive forces of desire
we find in these places might be redirected toward a bearable lightness of being-
connected without demanding to be known. Likewise, Halperin offers an image
of intimate relationality without recourse to deep psychological structure, motive,
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or communication. In What Do Gay Men Want? he sees sexuality mainly as

structured by abjection, by the self-inflation and self-destruction of the subject-
in-jouissance. This process of being ejected from conventional subjectivity provides
for Halperin conceptual leverage out of atrophied moral and psychoanalytic models
of sexuality in general and gay men’s sexuality in particular. Both books move back
and forth between the scene of gay men and sexuality in general, without recourse to
manifest anxiety about historical or embodied variation.
This thinkpiece aspires not to review or to judge in their entirety these rich
and complicated books. My focus is on their attempts to retool narcissism and
abjection for imagining sexuality as something other than a dramatic reenactment of
shame or the death drive; and on their desires to remind sexuality theorists that
realism about sexuality requires more than tracking tragicomic scenes of affective
hangover, such as loss, belatedness, risk, overwhelmedness, shame, grief, trauma,
paranoia and misrecognition. Each book is a reminder to psychoanalytic theorists
that sexuality takes place in the real time of encounters and in contradictory
structurations of desire (the paradox of becoming undone in sex, while becoming
more possible in/with another). Each book is a reminder to affect theorists that
affect, a structure of responsivity, is quite a different thing than emotion, with all its
conventionality and its authenticating centrality to self-understanding in modern
Western cultures.
Bersani writes from psychoanalysis and Halperin writes here against it. But they
advance a similar claim, that sexualized attachment is possible precisely because
desiring subjects are not only incoherent, but seek divesture of the ego at the same
time as they are looking for confirming reciprocity. Halperin mobilizes abjection
to foreground the sense of that incoherence and Bersani focuses on narcissism as
a process that reorganizes it. Objects of desire/attachment can only partially be
adequate to our needs for them to be perfectly in synch with us, given our out-
of-synchness with ourselves and their enigmaticness to themselves, and given the
aggression always bound up in the desire to be bound to others. But, to these
authors, these conditions do not doom sex or attachment to a sorry negativity. The
very structures of contingency often mourned as failed love, shame, domination, or
loss of self are here also scenes of vitalized self-dissemination and optimism – even
redemption. More than that, in taking on being and becoming sexually disorganized,
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 263

queer epistemology here reimagines intimate formalisms not only for the coupled but
the social world.
I’ll close the essay by asking what these kinds of observations about the social
world might mean politically. Can we rehardwire our relation to partiality, to
process, and to the brittle contingencies of being with desire and with other people in
the scene of desire? Can we cultivate a sexual way or attachment style that isn’t
organized by the macho-paranoid-aggressive mode that would kill anything in its
path in order to control the experience of being sexual, e.g. being out of control?
Should we once again turn to sex and love to make things, people, and nations
politically and affectively more viable, just and attached to life?
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Sex, affect, ideology

Whatever else it is, the affective turn is also a return to thinking about ideology.
Ideology theory has long been the place to which political thinkers have gone
for explanations of how people’s desires become shaped by attachments to modes of
life to which no one remembers consenting, at least initially. It doesn’t matter whether
these modes of life might actually threaten well-being or provide a seemingly neutral,
reliable, normative framework for enduring in the world, or both. We assume our
position as subjects in a normative social world and therefore it is in us as
a structuring condition for apprehending anything, and our literacy in normativity
constitutes the measure of our competence at being humans. Most important,
our sense of reciprocity with the world as it appears normatively, our sense of what
a person should do in the world and expect from it, saturates what becomes our
visceral intuition about how to manage living. Intuition is where affect meets
ideology. You forget when you learned to use your inside voice – it just seems like the
default mode, even to write in it.
The story of how intensities of attachment to participating in reproducing the
intelligibility of the world that forces countervailing affective forces into line with a
normative realism is the story of liberal subjectivity’s fantasies of individual and
collective sovereignty, the public and the private, and the distribution of sensibilities
that disciplines the imaginary about what the good life is, and how good people act.1
But the idiom affect theory provides focuses not on orthodoxies of normative
institutions and practices, but on clashes between the discipline of normativity and
the processes of longing, memory, fantasy, affective projection, grief and sheer
psychic creativity that renegotiate, constantly, the terms of reciprocity that seem to,
but never quite do, saturate the atmosphere that presents itself as one’s historical
situation. In affect theory laws, norms and events are not seen as determining
anything. They induce what counts as life conventionally and they shape probable
responses, but are always running up against what’s not trainable about people, who
are always creating folds of being-otherwise in a way that stretches out and gives
unpredicted dimensions to historical and subjective experience.
This is where a problem of the relation between sex and sexuality come in. Recent
queer theoretical books – take Andrew Parker and Janet Halley’s (2007) After Sex?
or Heather Love’s (2007) Feeling Backward as examples – focus on the ways that
 264 L. Berlant

affect and pedagogies of emotion are central to the history of modern sexuality, but
there’s barely any sex in them. Sexuality has become the more interesting place where
critics redefine the history of modernity by tracking how people became visible
according to a species logic of moral development. Sexuality has become the complex
place disciplined by norms, hierarchical ideologies of intelligibility that link external
states to projections about a kind of subject’s internal worth. But, in this recent
work, sexuality is also the place where atmospheres of affective discernment and
emotional creativity engender possibilities for better reciprocity that were not
defeated by political norms or institutions. The optimism of queer will rides the
waves of the power of phantasy-in-practice to subvert the foreclosures sought by
dominant institutions and norms.
In Intimacies and What Do Gay Men Want?, though, it’s not sexuality but sex
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that reveals the cleavages in normalizing ideology and creates openings for better
futures. As though not wanting to be distracted by shaping forces of history and
memory or the world-building potentialities of alternative affectivity, Halperin and
Bersani look at sex as the most intractable problem for managing and imagining
sociality. Cannibalism, imperialism, barebacking, the death drive. Inhuman, all-
too-human, monstrous, evil. Abject, narcissistic. Sex appears in these books as a
threat – potentially for good but mostly for bad. Sex provides a context for talking
about what’s irrational in ordinary action, about the subject’s ordinary (appetitive,
affective, psychological and political) non-sovereignty. It enables the books to link
some of what makes worlds (reproduction and intimacy) with their destruction
(aggression, the refusal of alterity, and HIV positivity) in a way that seems to leave
little middle room for nuance. Sex makes and it destroys. Someone is always inflating
his ego and someone is being dominated, sometimes the same person at the same
time. Sex thereby provides a singular scene for talking about the limits to associating
the human with ethical, intentional action. As Halperin writes, ‘‘Do the terms
intentional and unintentional exhaust the range of possible explanations?’’ (60).
Indeed, although both books turn to the ethical to solve problems that have not been
solved by politics (and seem a bit alienated from politics, because they see it,
ultimately, as an agent of moralism) they also reveal the impossibility of sexual
ethics, if by that we mean a sexual ethics that would discipline in advance how sex
affects the intimate encounters and scenes of reciprocity that govern political and
ordinary sociality.
Yet, after so many years of separating sex from sexuality, and after so many years
of equating sex and sexuality with loss (from shattering to shame and melancholia),
these two reparative books are trying to imagine something in sex. They’re trying to
imagine something muddled in humans that is attached to life, along with everything
we know about the anxiogenic, crazy, aggressive, deluded, destructive, dissipating,
incoherent, non-virtuous effects of sexual desire and sex acts themselves.2 Something
in sex that is attached to life does not necessarily mean something attached
to normative sociality, though. That is the conundrum these books confront.
Dissimilar methodologically, they are very close in their phenomenological scenarios:
AIDS, barebacking, and any sexual subject’s dissolution in jouissance saturate the
conceptual atmosphere.
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 265

Held/killed
What Do Gay Men Want? opens wandering between the aesthetic world where ‘‘gay
men just want to be held’’ and the journalistic/public policy world where ‘‘gay men
actually want to be killed’’ (1). Between held and killed, Halperin argues, academic
queer studies hasn’t had much to say. That’s not entirely true, of course: between
held and killed there’s disappeared (the homophobic fantasy of rendering gayness as
a secret life activity) whose consequences Lee Edelman (2004), John Ricco (2002) and
Martin Manalansan (2003) among others have quite differently been documenting.
Halperin’s question is about how to think about the anti-sociality of sex, its
fundamentally aggressive form. Is it possible to talk about sex without producing
the sexual subject as a kind of monster? This is his claim against popular culture
(which associates all sexual subjects, especially gay ones, with predatory sexuality);
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against Michael Warner (who can only explain his risky sex practices by calling his
unconscious a ‘‘monster’’); and against so many queer activists, who want to
separate out the immoral queers from the virtuous ones who practice safe sex, using
psychology or moralism to name the lack that releases the desire to have what
Halperin just says is better sex, better for being unprotected and flesh-to-flesh,
spontaneous, anti-social, and/or self-interruptive.
Halperin wants to dedramatize and de-demonize the sexual situation. What
can we say about sex that doesn’t read into its extreme practices some essential
truth; what can we say about sex that doesn’t mistake its high dramas for ordinary
realism? Sex is chancy, dangerous, he writes: but destructive, it only rarely is. The
epidemiological evidence shows that barebacking is not the core public sexual
practice of anyone – the percentages are in the low single digits. He uses the work of
Walt Odets and Kane Race to talk about risk reduction, rather than risk elimination:
because there is no sex that isn’t risky physically or emotionally. Most people, after
all, usually protect themselves against the unwonted consequences of sex that they
can protect themselves against. Peeling away the dangerous from the destructive,
the threatening from the death driven, he refutes the psychoanalytic and moral
idioms and redirects our gaze to something more formal, less saturated: sexuality as
abjection.
Besides being so very beautifully written, What Do Gay Men Want? is indis-
pensable for the queer genealogy of abjection that it provides, starting with the
Catholic theorist Marcel Jouhandeau’s De l’abjection and moving through Sartre,
Genet, Kristeva and Butler to some contemporary gay novels. For Jouhandeau,
homosexuality and sexuality are abject a priori, but his description allows for the
comic and the tender parts of self-loss that can be expressed in wanting what cannot
be fully intended by the sexual subject: ‘‘I am like someone whom another has got
hold of by the hair and who, not wishing to give out that appearance, pretends he is
being caressed’’ (72). He turns his experience of social abjection into a kind of ecstasy
that may have inspired Genet to see sexual suffering as a kind of ego-destructive
preparation for sainthood.
To Halperin abjection is, however, not merely the dramatic loss of subjectivity,
shame and self-disgust that any sexual subject feels or that any subject of biopolitical
negativity lives; nor just the production of self-abandonment that Kristeva describes
 266 L. Berlant

as dejection and ecstasy. There’s nothing necessarily transgressive about his version
of abjection either. He does point out that there is a politics to abjection: one of
the paradoxes of social negation is that ‘‘the more people despise you, the less
you owe them’’ (94). This view of freedom in social abjection inverts the Kleinian/
Sedgwickian model of sexuality as the scene of an enacted desire for creating a circuit
of reciprocity (see Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 2003, 36–44). Halperin’s despised subject
can alternatively shape sexuality in the violence of detaching from what could be seen
as a structure of reseduction (no, really, come back, I am good, I am loveable) that
can also, unfortunately, shape the abject sexual subject’s style of inducing reciprocity
in the world. But there is a difference between abjection as sexuality-in-general
and as a feature of a particular social identity. Halperin says that queer life is shaped
by the pulsating forces of these two modes of subjectification: we can ‘‘think of
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abjection not as the symptom of an unconscious drive to self-annihilation, but as

a strategic response to a specific social predicament – as a socially constituted affect
that can intensify the determination to survive, can conduce to sexual inventiveness,
and can lead to the creation of various devices for extracting heightened pleasure,
and even love, from experiences of pain, fear, rejection, humiliation, contempt,
shame, brutality, disgust, or condemnation’’ (93).
As sexuality as such, then, abjection joins a collection of things I would organize
under the rubric of self-abandon or self-interruption (as in any self-medicating
behaviors). Sex is one of those things that we seek to become grounded in and
disorganized by (as with nicotine, which calms and stimulates), and sex constitutes
an ordinary life suspension of selves that spread out in a way that’s conscious and
agentive without being entirely intentional. To Halperin, abjection is a name
for a kind of self-abandonment and abandon in sex that is not pathological,
but perverse – that is, a self-intensifying and dissipating aim whose alternative
intensity is itself always one of the objects of desire in the sexual event. Perverse
sexual directionlessness produces the sense that sex is always unsafe, and that’s what
makes it exciting. Non-sovereign subjectivity like this is what my next book, Cruel
Optimism, tracks, and Halperin is using some of that material in his book (see
Berlant 2007). But for him, thinking about gay men, abjection is also a tactical
response to gay men’s embodiment of social abomination; a name for a sexual
subjectivity organized more manifestly by risk than is the case for other more highly
valued normative ones whose risks have tended to be romanticized and heroized.
When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘‘You make me
feel safe,’’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compen-
sation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘‘You
make me feel safe’’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe,
where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or – simply
too close to having a desire. But some situations are riskier than others, as the
meanings of unsafe sex change according to who’s having the sex. Because queers are
still so widely despised, so not fully legal, so heavily symbolized as a threat to the
normal – in addition to the risk factors represented by HIV – the multiplication of
abjections that Halperin begins to catalog forces him into advocating a desire for
something he also says that he doesn’t want, which involves cleaning up abjection
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 267

a little. But it’s a sweet desire. In the end he enters a fantasy of cultivating freedom
from forced sexual abjection in order for gay men to enjoy a sexuality in which
abjection retains the pleasure of shifting across the radar of form and norm without
fraying the subject beyond recognition. In the shift from pathology to perversion,
in the embrace of abjection’s destructive pleasures as ego- but not life- threatening,
he sees sexuality constitutively as defended from all the distorting ideologies that also
shape it. When What Do Gay Men Want? moves from ‘‘held and killed’’ to ‘‘perverse
and loved’’ it holds out an image of sexuality as a foundation, though in a foundry.

My narcissism, yourself
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Bersani begins in a similar place, where sexuality undoes the subject. As for Halperin,
this undoing produces violence and death, but Bersani offers sexual pedagogy,
wanting us to learn to redirect sexual negativity toward a kind of sexual sweetness.
Bersani’s most radical claim begins in a conventional place: seeing the human subject
as constituted by a strong desire for control over the world and others in it, a desire
so strong that an ‘‘intractable murderousness’’ explains ‘‘our inability to love’’
reliably, unambivalently, or unaggressively (59–60). Sometimes he means ‘‘love’’ as
that force which makes an object within the aggressive field of desire, and sometimes
he means love in the vernacular romantic sense. In any case, a Hobbesian view of
sexuality here meets up with Freud and Lacan.
Bersani’s universal model of the murderous subject extends from a sense of that
subject’s absolute vulnerability: he writes as though persons sense inchoately
that they live constantly a hair’s-breadth away from unbearable ego-annihilation.
This version of the subject experiences the presence of the other as a threat in
extremis who generates anxiety about self-control and dissolves the subject’s feeling
of sovereignty. Bersani-subjects then try to destroy that which threatens their sense
of solidity and continuity. They do not usually experience the full range of
their affects, memory, history or cognition when they are animated by desire and
then faced with the other’s irreducible difference. In response to this conundrum they
engage in practices of extreme attachment/negation: his exemplary compensations
are imperialism, HIV positive sex-partner barebacking, and anyone’s drive to ensure
the right shape of mimetic sameness in their lover. Accordingly, his cases here vary
from: Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle (a beautiful, brilliant reading of annihilative
inaction as one style of destructive loving); a reading of Tim Dean’s work on ‘‘gift-
givers’’ and the porn film Breed Me; the Bush administration’s response to feeling
terror after 9-11; and then to Socrates’ ‘‘liquidifying’’ sexual exchanges (conversa-
tions) with Alcibiades.
Bersani would argue that it does not matter how historically and archivally
singular and incoherent this range of reference is, because he is not trying to give
a history of anything, and indeed he painstakingly brackets the details of any
potential historicism. He does this to train the sexual subjects reading this book to
read as formally, impersonally and abstractly as possible. To read formally enables
us to ‘‘enlist’’ sexuality and love for countering the normative world’s ultimately
 268 L. Berlant

self-destructive reliance on ego inflation for maintaining any optimism about

sociality (77).
The transformative concept he puts forth involves seeing the potential extension
of the ego into the other not as an annihilative threat to sovereignty but as the
ego’s dissemination. He wants us to detach from imagining change, dependency,
reflexivity and partiality only as loss. We would see it instead as a lovely condition
of spreading attachment not to biographical persons but to the idea of types or
qualities potentially animate in other persons as such. I love the kind of thing you are.
This model takes up the paradigm of selves extending themselves partly into each
other that Bersani has been developing since the 1990s as an alternative model of the
self’s endurance in, and not destruction by, sexualized negativity. ‘‘I call this love
impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the
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unique personality vital to modern notions of individualism’’ (85).

His cases do not much overlap, therefore, except conceptually. Gay men gift each
other with intimate proximity and the risk of HIV infection in collective sex;
unconsummated lovers refuse to have their intimacy framed by an event; the teacher
and student find each other in a practice of relatedness like the maternal one that
demands that the student both mirror and develop otherwise from the teacher;
an almost ego-sacrificial refusal of biographical recognition in love on behalf of
the electrifying contacts of pleasure (50–2). He would have us recognize that we
are not just wanting proximity to our objects because of who they deeply are
for us. What we want them for is also something abstract about them, their
‘‘universal singularity,’’ a quality in them that we cannot dominate, that we want to
be near, but that does not constitute everything about them. In other words, we
are attracted to a singular kind of thing in the other that we want both to defeat
and protect.
Ambivalence is not such a big category for Bersani, but it should be, because
Bersani-subjects are always amidst contradictory aims. Instead, having distinguished
destructive from solidaristic narcissism, he wants to substitute the reparative logic
for the desperately self-defeating, destructive one. ‘‘If we were able to relate to others
according to this model of impersonal narcissism, what is different about others
(their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the
more profound (if less fully realized, or completed) part of themselves which is our
sameness . . . .the nonthreatening supplement of sameness’’ (86)
At a certain level of abstraction, it’s hard to argue with Bersani’s formulation,
which is very much like Agamben’s (equally Plato-inspired) formulation of the
lover’s being loved for his being such, being singular, in The Coming Community
(1993). Bersani sees historical difference as mere difference, a mere shell over that
singularity. Surface variation aside, the lover could see the ego as the gift that
could keep on giving, extending its solidity into the vast middle of the world without
having to undergo the dynamic of inflation and deflation that has tortured
individuals and nations across time and space. In this Bersani’s solution to seeing
sexuality as not only sadistic is formally identical to Halperin’s: in the spreading out of
the subject, in the ego’s melting pleasure in merging with the virtual being of the other,
there is no worry about threats to sovereignty but a kind of hale ‘‘Bring it on!’’ (80).
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 269

Trying to force sameness and to control difference disappears here. Appreciation,

a kind of lightness, motivates the fidelity to attachment.
Which is to say that Bersani believes that a fundamental rehardwiring can take
place as an effect of cognitive nudging, if that movement shifts things around in the
holding space of sex, conversation and collaboration. If we attach our already
flourishing pleasure to the thatness of our intimate other, we can train ourselves
toward trusting the feeling of freedom in sovereign loss in the presence of the other,
because it’s a loss that does not vanquish the drive to induce sameness. This fantasy
of substitution strikes me as wishful and willful: we have all been affected by ideas
and by people, but attachments multiply affects without forcing detachment from
prior positionings, especially if we see attachments mainly as aggressive and tightly
binding. The multiplication of attachment styles of affective binding can just as
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easily induce a greater internal tension, more creative defenses, disavowals and
delusions, and so on. But – speaking of inflation – the consequences Bersani sees of
not cultivating impersonal narcissism are enormous. At the heart of Intimacies is the
political, polemical context of the time of its writing. He sees not only the death of
gay generations but the destruction of the world in the inflation of the ego against its
own solidity and that of its objects. In his own terms, at stake is no less than enabling
the power of love to defeat the power of evil (76).
The most interesting and weird parts of Intimacies are therefore its pages of
political ranting, which amount to a tonally inflated Civilization and Its Discontents
for the era of the US war in Iraq. ‘‘We live in a period dominated by what Laplanche
has called the psychotic enclaves of good and evil,’’ he writes (61). For Laplanche,
a ‘‘psychotic enclave’’ involves traumatic material passed across generations that
is never worked through, and remains encrusted in the subject as a formative but
disassociated affective zone. But Bersani is not so interested in the problem of
historical causality or the mechanisms for the dissemination of a transpersonal
unconscious. What interests him is the scale of inflation and mimesis that has
allowed the state as sovereign subject to enlist the body politic to enact affectively
what the state has otherwise induced through the sheer force of ideology, capital and
weaponry. The Bersanian version of the Bushian state is not a generalized subject
structured by drives, motives and aims: it is structured by a narcissistic jouissance of
nonsexual sadism that denies the ego its cognitive, rational function while allowing it
to expand to a degree of defensive grandiosity that takes the shape of imperial
energy. A Hobbesian model of the sexualized sovereign with an appetite for control
merges here with a fairy tale about the imperial state’s swollen and irrational ego.
Added to this is a view about how the state’s self-inflated sovereignty produces
a masochistic body politic. ‘‘Only the rulers (political, financial, religious) have
sufficiently powerful ego-interests to sustain their ‘sadism’ without endangering it
through narcissistic exaltation’’ or crazy big-headedness (68). Yet for the sovereignty
of the national ego to remain strong it must create a vulnerability economy to
displace its own exposure: he claims that the Bush state projected this energy onto
the enigmatic sources of terror (the affect that justifies waging a war against a bad
feeling).3 But Bersani’s main focus is on the ways that the US body politic itself
has been forced to replay traumatically the circuit of terror, vulnerability and ego
 270 L. Berlant

compensation whose outcome is ultimately the body politic’s very destruction. ‘‘For
the others (the overwhelming majority), the national or racial ego must be
narcissistically celebrated to the point of a self-destructive exaltation – in psycho-
analytic terms, a masochistic jouissance’’ (68). In this view, the body politic sacrifices
its rational ego interests to mirror affectively but self-destructively the state’s inflated
psychodrama. In patriotic oneness the people lose their separateness and therefore
their capacity to force the state’s obligation to the body politic’s flourishing.
Therefore, in finding a way to be meaningful to the state by taking on its affective
surplus, the people direct their agency toward a politically pacifying patriotism,
taking up a position much like that of the abjected person Halperin describes who
learns to enjoy his hair being pulled in the face of no alternative. But the body politic
does not experience its inflation as its destruction because absorbed in the noise
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of defensive compensation. Bush-era patriotism involves the body politic’s moral

inflation and hygienic distinction over disrespectful and disgusting threatening
others. The imperial nation then becomes doubly so: the state’s inflated sovereign
force and the people’s affective imperialism join to create and degrade the objects
whose threat (the terror it induces) is treated as self-evidence of the need to destroy
not only them but their hosts (the axis of evil, the world that would harbor secrets).
Paranoid images of hidden enclaves appear to justify the global security state, which
must find ever more sources for propping up the representation of the sovereign
remnants.
As in almost all psychoanalytic models of mass agency, this aspect of Intimacies
seems wishful, but not because of coarsely inflated analogizing, the usual reason. It is
one thing to fight for an end to a particular culture’s normative attachment to
emotional recognition in love: such a conceptually driven transformation of affective
intuition is central to the aspirations of queer politics and theory, as I’ve suggested
above. But the prospect of mutual recognition just does not work for the
government’s relation to the people it is said to represent. There is no evidence
that this government, or any one, really cares that much about or requires the body
politic’s affective compliance with its imperial demands. This government was happy
to create its own realities and proceeded regardless of its capacity to capture
popularity. Instead, it relied on the historical fidelity of the body politic to
repeating the history of its own political affiliations, whether or not they involved
active identificatory participation or aversion to caring, the two great practices
of sovereignty allowed the body politic by liberal ideology. The Bush doctrine
of preemptive sovereignty was: we will govern you whether or not you comply.
We therefore can’t tell a thing about a collective, state-shaped popular mentality
from either the appearance or disappearance of collective affective and emotional
activism. One cannot even tell much about a normative collective affectsphere from
the appearance of a metonymic multitude in varieties of political performance
from demonstration to opinion polls to the voting booth. An image of the
multitude converted to an affective and emotional monoculture is the kind of thing
orchestrated by the media and other liberal vehicles for representing consent. Trying
to account for the mass non-refusal of the neoliberal imperial machine, Bersani
participates in that misguided project too. Sometimes, as melodrama and neorealism
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 271

remind us, affective inflation is a measure of masochistic mirroring, in which modes

of social and political legitimacy not easily available to subjects are nonetheless
embodied in performances of emotional bigness. Sometimes, though, people perform
sovereignty in very different ways. Such gestures can be smaller and more formal: not
directed toward becoming mimetically indistinguishable from the sovereign or the
dominant monoculture, not directed toward sanctifying extremities of abjection, they
can register a being’s mere rejection of not mattering.

A final surround
Here is another fairy tale. One day perhaps you will discover that you have stopped
having sex with others, probably for forever. But even then, you will not have
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stopped having sexuality, nor stopped managing distance and intimacy, touching
and being touched, and fantasy. You will not have stopped succumbing to the
aggressive drive to order some things and disorder others that accompanies the
bodily and psychic will to induce reciprocity on the world. When you do stop
enacting that kind of inflation, people will say that you are depressed. They will say,
Keep trying, even in the face of not mattering! Would reading Halperin or Bersani on
the pleasures of sacrificed sovereignty and ego dissemination provide other ways of
flourishing for those from whom the world has already so largely detached, and then
who detach back? Not all history comes from the subject, and not all subjects are
trying to make worlds or to induce reciprocity on worlds that that are not there for
them. I love these books, but I’m just asking.
It’s important to remember that some subjects of biopolitical negation, some
of the racialized, sexualized, overembodied, poor, migrant, sarcopolitical subjects
associated with appetitive incompetence and lack of self-control, feel unlicensed
to sustain the ego swelling whose privilege has been poisoning the privileged classes
for so long. Whiteness, US citizenship, masculinity, cultural capital, and class-based
meritocratic and intimate expectations – these things prop up not only the tendency
to inflate but the likelihood of getting bailouts when the risks and exposures of
self-expansion are unprofitable. For Bersani, the good kind of impersonality and
the sweet narcissistic projections of sexuality are ethical insofar as they involve
performing being-with someone (or a people) without blotting them out with your
ego swelling, and involve seeking out the other’s likeness to you as well as their
difference, sometimes sweetly, other times aversively. In saying this he is not saying
that obliterative narcissism wouldn’t exist in the transformed imaginary but that
we can also change the dynamic between obliterative and self-extensive narcissism
by cultivating attention to the latter and by organizing our practices of intimacy
around loving the alterity of the object of attachment. But this assumes all ego
swelling compensates for the same threats, or that it doesn’t matter whether the
sanction for self-inflation is an inheritance, an aspiration, or more negation.
Halperin is less of a moralist and more sensitive to the piling on of different
threats that overdetermine the experience of dominated populations. His book is
therefore less prescriptive: it wants to create an opening for people to embrace being
caught by the hair of their appetites while being responsible to the contradictions
 272 L. Berlant

between what sustains and threatens life. For so many of the precarious now,
it comes down to this: which will win out, if anything does: affective flourishing or
life itself? Despite the vast majority of their examples, which are intense even when
they’re just ordinary, Bersani and Halperin want to lighten up the practice of
enacting the need for all or nothing in any of these domains, the all or nothing that
they still see in the promise of sex to show us a way to live.

Notes on contributor
Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of
Chicago. Her trilogy on national sentimentality – The Anatomy of National Fantasy
(1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) and The Female
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Complaint (2008) – is now morphing into a quartet on affective democracy, with her
forthcoming book, Cruel Optimism.

Notes
1. Here of course I am summarizing a century’s worth of work on the relation of propertied
to subjective privacy. A good short account of this psychic and material compartmenta-
lization can be found in Terry Eagleton, ‘‘Capitalism and Form’’ (2002). The concept of
distributed sensibilities comes from Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics (2006).
2. I learned about the life drive from a conversation between Cathy Caruth (‘‘Parting
Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival,’’ 2001) and Peggy Phelan (‘‘Converging Glances:
A Response to Cathy Caruth’s ’Parting Words’,’’ 2001).
3. On what it means to wage a war against a feeling, see Lauren Berlant, ‘‘Epistemology of
State Emotion’’ (2004).

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