신자유주의적 현재와 로렌벌랜트의 정동 이론

초록

This essay suggests Lauren Berlant’s highly politicized affect theory, as has been explicated in Cruel Optimism (2011), can be used as a powerful route through which to analyze the historical conditions of the ongoing present of everyday crisis in the neoliberal era. With an aim to illustrate affective aspects of the neoliberal crisis that elude traditional critical theory, this essay overviews Berlant’s insights and fleshes out her aesthetic methodology by explicating a few crucial notions of Berlant’s such as crisis ordinary, lateral agency, and ambient citizenship. The uniqueness of Berlant’s vision lies in her focused attention to the affective movements and responses of the precarious or vulnerable populations in the extensive and expansive crisis of our historical present. Instead of holding on to the traditional notion of ‘sovereign’ political subject, Berlant offers an extensive and nuanced study of the unconscious or involuntary responses to the neoliberal precarity on the part of subject, who tries to adjust to the ongoing crisis by remaining attached to the norms of the present state despite their destructive effects that exhaust and exploit the subject. Using “cruel optimism” as the key note in the affective landscape of the neoliberal present, Berlant explores the manifestation of lateral agency as an affective gesture of both desperation and resistance borne out of the impasse that became a normative state of existence. Emphasizing and understanding the difficulty of undoing the attachment to what we do not only believe but also ‘feel’ to be normative despite its injustices (and the double bind of cruel optimism it involves) is a significant theoretical contribution Berlant made, from which a possibility of a resistant politics of affect can also be envisioned.

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