Crisis Ordinary, Lauren Berlant, and Counter-Politics

Optimism is cruel when it promises and yet does not deliver happiness. In the postwar proliferation of neoliberal economic order, the sense of crisis saturates everyday life and the bourgeois promise of a ‘good life’ is no longer attainable. Nevertheless, the fantasy of a ‘good life’ binds the subject to the life that exhausts him/her. The subject does not relinquish the attachment to that fantasy, for the sense of proximity engendered through that attachment serves to form a significant affective foundation for some form of sustainable everyday life. Such is the double bind of cruel optimism, which Lauren Berlant explores in her Cruel Optimism (2011). This essay explicates key notions and thoughts Lauren Berlant extends in Cruel Optimism and a few other works, and attempts to read some aspects of contemporary Korean society through Berlant’s thoughts as an hermeneutic tool. While critically testing and assessing Berlant’s work, this essay also turns to her multi-faceted understanding of “lateral agency” as a possible path for reinventing subjectivity and renegotiating citizenship. Ultimately, I suggest literature as a minoritarian site where a collective cultivation of lateral agency can take place for an affective counter-politics against the ongoing crisis and the double bind of cruel optimism.