Preface  vii

1. Sex without Optimism  1

2. What Survives  35

3. Living with Negativity  63

Afterwords  119

Appendix. "Break It Down" / Lydia Davis  127

Acknowledgments  135

References  137

Index  141

"In Sex, or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman give a gripping and compelling seminar on reading, on the everyday dramas of unbecoming, undoing, opening up and breaking down, and on love and sex. Relationality, they argue and demonstrate, is always a risk because in all encounters and conversations, and certainly in this one, the subject is misrecognized, unheard, and never in control. The risk, they show here, is always worth taking."—Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

"Sex, or the Unbearable will supersede the unenlivening debate that has, in recent years, opposed optimists and pessimists in the queer academic community. This important and original book, a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, reformulates the terms of the debate as a serious and profound reflection on negativity. Berlant and Edelman's penetrating and courageous encounter significantly raises the level of debate in contemporary cultural studies."—Leo Bersani, Emeritus Professor of French, University of California, Berkeley

"The good news is that theory is alive. In a dialogue characterized by precision and generosity, two key theorists of sex, affect, aesthetics, and politics imagine the possibilities for the critical transformation of the social world. The bad news is that, for these brilliant, searching anti-pastoralists, none of the old fixes—psychic reparation or political hope—will do. Which is to say: there is no bad news. Sex, or the Unbearable testifies to the political significance of negativity and to the ongoing force of epistemology in queer studies."—Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

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