Lauren Berlant
"Capitalism, Compassion, and the Children: Post-Fordist Affect in Rosetta and La Promesse"

Thursday, March 29, 4:30 pm
Margaret Morrison, Room 103
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:

"On the Desire to be Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in Rosetta and La Promesse" looks at the affective experience of contemporary regimes of global capital and the effect of economic precarity on the reproduction of fantasies about "the good life," using some films written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardienne. It focuses on why and how it is that concrete conventional ideas of the good life are reproduced as fantasy norms in succeeding generations, even though the enjoyment promised rarely materializes in ordinary lives. These stories focus on how children manage the worlds and fantasies of their parents; on the effects of the attrition of white European economic privilege; on sexuality as an ongoing resource for fantasy and optimism despite the apparent odds. They look at the obstacles and improvisations of intimacy forced by economic pressure; and the nostalgia for something like a family to be an anchor amidst the chaos.

Profile:

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. Developing an account of the centrality of affect and emotion to the public sphere since The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), she has now completed a trilogy on U.S. national sentimentality, with The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), and The Female Complaint:  the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008).  She has also edited a number of volumes, including Intimacy (2000), Our Monica, Ourselves (2001), Compassion (2004), and the forthcoming On the Case (2007).