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Sex, or the Unbearable

Lauren Berlant

€ 27.68

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Description for Sex, or the Unbearable Paperback. Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis' story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), this title explores what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Series: Theory Q. Num Pages: 168 pages, 6 photographs. BIC Classification: JFSK; JHBA; VFVC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 231 x 139 x 9. Weight in Grams: 248.
Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.

Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia ... Read more

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Product Details

Publisher

Duke University Press

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2013

Series

Theory Q

Condition

New

Weight

252g

Number of Pages

168

Place of Publication

North Carolina, United States

ISBN

9780822355946

SKU

V9780822355946

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days

Ref

99-1

About Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Cruel Optimism, The Female Complaint, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, all also published by Duke University Press. Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He is the author of L'impossible ... Read more

Reviews for Sex, or the Unbearable

“What’s lovely about this exchange is that Berlant and Edelman’s mutually locked horns don’t make us feel as though a cleverer person has already figured things out and we’re simply not smart or qualified enough to piece together the unspoken counterarguments they would have to our doubts.”
Colin Low
Against the Hype
"This collaboration between Berlant and ... Read moreEdelman has a feel for the ecology of thinking as it passes between two points. Like holding one’s breath under water or passing a balloon back and forth without its touching the floor, these conversations illuminate the sense of timing with which ideas respond to and are shaped by each other."
Michael D. Snediker
Theory & Event
"Berlant and Edelman’s three-act dialogue is wonderfully intriguing, especially in regard to how the dialogue itself bears witness to the intellectual process of ‘thinking through’ in the dialogic form."
Marcie Bianco
Lambda Literary Review
“Berlant and Edelman take debates around the antisocial thesis as a point of departure to theorize the importance of relationality, loss and repair, sovereignty, and negativity in the politics and ethics of queer theory. Despite the overlapping topics of interest that have marked their respective works, their varying theoretical approaches make for a smart, enlivening, and productive conversation in Sex, or the Unbearable.”
Fiona I. B. Ngô
American Studies
“While Berlant and Edelman do not address popular romances, their work can be informative to the work of romance scholars in tackling issues of the place of sex and the erotic, especially within some romance tropes, such as discovery of a new sexual orientation plots in queer romances, or submissive-for-you plots in many erotic romances of all orientations.”
Amanda Jo Hobson
Journal of Popular Romance Studies
“Among the book’s major attractions is its inventive dialogic form, and Berlant and Edelman’s masterful close readings of diverse media. The authors alternate named passages, riffing on each others’ ideas and including their moments of complex ambiguous affect, including responses to the other of misappropriation, frustration, delight and surprise, so often elided in collaborative critical theory. This dialogic form and its auto-analysis is one of the great intellectual joys of the book, a fascinating and inventive device well-suited to a discussion of the complex investments subjects have in relationality, including sex, conversation, and pedagogy.”
Jessica Durham
Colloquy
“These two authors offer an intense and highly insightful account of interactions between two subjects that, I suggest, could be fruitfully applied to understanding encounters in organizations. They show some of the complexities of relationality: it is violent, pleasurable, productive, a scene of fantasy and misrecognition, all these and more.”
Nancy Harding
Gender, Work & Organization
“As an overall project, Sex, or the Unbearable pushes forward the debate on queer negativity and antisociality, whilst also contributing to contemporary queer, feminist and cultural theory’s wider critiques of academic knowledge production and the political utility of academic scholarship.”
Kathryn Medien and Jacob Breslow
Sexualities
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Sex, or the Unbearable

Lauren Berlant

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