Unfeeling Kerry

8:2 | © 2005 Lauren Berlant

1.

Only a sense of professional responsibility (I said I would do it)and political urgency (to aid a collective refusal of reactionaryhistorical foreclosure) compels me to keep my obligation to writethis piece, the prospect of which stimulates, mainly, politicaldepression in the form of failed anesthesia. I cannot not feelenough about all of this -- the election, the loss, the wholestupefying election season of framing options and desires in the

U.S. political sphere.1 The ego is supposed to protect you fromemotional overstimulation: but, as we know all too viscerally, this

is no longer the era of the ego but rather of the ego's exhaustion.2

To be exhausted is not to be empty or archaic but to be dragging-on tattered and barely holding shape, and therefore living adifferent, more unprotected kind of existence than that implied by

"sovereignty."3

2.

As the title predicts, this is an essay about being unfeeling, acondition which, in many senses, was a topic throughout theelection season, ranging from issues of candidate affect, thehumanity and inhumanity of policy, voter apathy, and the like. Butit is also an examination of the more general logic by which, in aseason of high passions, we produce a calculus of public affectand emotion, usually without knowing it, and in a way thatsuggests massive analytic disrepair in our conceptualization ofpolitical attachments. In this brief piece I give some examples ofpublic sphere attention to the insensate political emotions, fleshout motives for developing a richer lexicon of political anesthetics,and close gesturing toward futurity with a foggy utopianism.

3.

You will note that I do not sound all bloggy and ranty about thiselectoral event, tones that one finds in the emergent style of webwriting that is journalistic, at once seriously intellectual andstridently casual. I often cavil at this new critical frankness -- it istoo knowing, it has a hard time honoring analytically the obscurityand strangeness of an event: every event is already of course

clearly way x, and there is no time or space for enigmas of formor case, and even the supplèment has become unsurprising.Which is to say that I do sympathize with its desire fortransparency and for the sense of belonging manifested in theneed to know right away what people and their communitiesthink about x: this emergent tonality also speaks to anxieties aboutwanting a public for intellectuality as opposed to punditry. Whichis to say that reading the present as a recent past that might still bean opening for something, I feel a little hesitant and ineloquent,without in turn wanting to be a polemicist about it. Like Thoreauin his moment, I honestly do not know how to sound now apartfrom writing a mode into existence. So, this is a deliberate piecefeeling its way around a suspended space, an impasse.

4.

These days, the usual genre of analysis after the political event isthe post-mortem. The post-mortem, which mixes epitaph,eulogy, and autopsy, is in many ways an appropriate mode formeasuring the end of an event, involving as it does counter-factualfantasies, projections of blame, and musings about imaginableconsequences. In terms of this particular event, the election itselfwas plenty amortized in commentary (amortize: to liquefy, fromVulgar Latin admortire, to deaden). Commentary haunts theevent: the post-mortem is the revenge genre of the commentaryclass.

5.

Roland Barthes argues that a picture of someone who's dead--taken while they were alive -- forces the spectator into the futureanterieur, the will-have-been of the period before mourningwhen the unfolding of something alive was yet to occur; DrucillaCornell talks about this tense as the condition of imagining better

justice.4 But the post-mortem mainly looks back and blames. Ittries to derive lessons. It reeks of a cramped and moralizingpedagogy.

6.

Nothing has died, though, so the post-mortem itself has to beresisted as political commentary's pleasure genre. But what else isthere: the après coup? In Freud's account a traumatic event isbrought into being as a blockage only in light of somethingsubsequent, as though the import of an event is in the interferenceit runs on what precedes it, as though all activity were onlyapphrehensible as retroactivity. In other words, the present is therecent past; the future is the will-have-been. If an episode that

remains animated by our attention to it becomes-event, thencriticism generates the possibility of the possibility of an opening inwhat might become experience. Louis Marin makes a similarpoint about "the schematizing activity of the social and political

imagination which has not yet found its concept"5; Agamben holdsthe place open for a foundationless community of whatever,signaling a space for radical political optimism, pace the poor

exhausted Gramscian will6: a mode of being-with in proximity to afantasy whose foundations are in something collective and yetremain to be built.

7.

As for what happened last fall, keeping the event open toalternative descriptions and therefore futures involves tracking thecircuits of ongoing, if ambivalent, attachment to the possibility offeeling political optimism. For me, before the election theoptimistic part of this ambivalence had little to do with JohnKerry. It was attached to the fantasy of interfering with thereproduction and expansion of the Republican instance of theneoliberal mandate. I planned on being exuberant about that, for aminute. In the electoral interregnum, optimism that had been felt asan adrenalin rush toward a specific horizon of activity mainlyquiets down, spreads out to other pulsations. When the eventitself was played out on 3 November what ceased was a littlething, really. One might have forgotten to breathe; one didn'tknow what to look at. Actually the symptom was suspended,almost subsensually, in being stunned but knowing but stillstunned: disbelief.

8.

Disbelief can be a political emotion, but not in the usual sense,since it is not oriented toward opinion. It is, rather, the scene ofstopping and looking around while full of unacted-on sensationrelated to refusing a consensual real: an emotional space-time foradjustment, adjudication. Ordinarily, uncommitted emotions likethis, which veer away from commitments to an object choice in anavailable political world, are deemed apolitical, even blockages tothe political: and to the degree that the negative political affectsaccompany non-participation in voting or political opinion culture,one can see why this convention of reading detachment indispassionateness persists. But what dispassion stands in for hereare the whole cluster of defensive emotions that manifest asubject's relation to the political in modalities of coolness anddistance easily misrecognized as apathy but running the wholegamut in registers of political depression. And we know what the

tell-tale signs of that are: dramatic and undramatic versions ofhopelessness, helplessness, dread, anxiety, stress, worry, lack ofinterest, and so on. Seen this way, the register of political affectI'm describing expresses mixed feelings, contradiction,ambivalence, and above all, incoherence. Not emotions ofrevolution, but convolution.

9.

Political subjects, political discourses, and opinion itself arefundamentally incoherent and bound up in the non-rational.Intellectuals have a hard time bearing that fact, because they are

trained to persuade by making better arguments.7 The left inparticular has long pumped itself up on the superiority of itsarguments. But in the war of attrition against the neoliberalcultural, imperial, and economic project, better arguments canonly go so far. The right didn't grow its hegemonic bloc by makingbetter arguments -- far from it. We might even say, along with

Jonathan Schell, that they faked better arguments.8 But this iswhere from my place in the impasse the real and the fake are notexcellent analytic tools for getting at the reproduction of theauthority that contemporary reactionary ideology offers.

10.

The Republican right paired an economic and imperial project

with what Jameson calls a "fantasy bribe"9: in this case the bribewas fantasy itself, the opportunity to keep fantasizing about thenormative good life, authorized by the right-wing promise tomaintain a vague scene and sense of normalcy (sharpened at oneend by homophobia and, at the other, by the fear of economicand terrorist disaster). As usual, the intimate domains (sexualityand family) represented what must not change while everythingelse is revealed in its infinite vulnerability. I am aware that the rightcomprises many different vectors of passionate interest: I amspeaking here not of ideologues but their others, the majority ofpeople for whom political activity is mainly casual, a sometimething.

11.

Not dealing with the non-rational at the heart of the politicalblocks us from speaking to the importance of people's fantasies ofthe good life, however inconsistent and ungrounded in theprobable they might be; and makes it harder to note that theparticular fantasies they phrase may not express the motives thatbring them to an attachment. The lure of normalcy in particular, Iwould argue, is the way an attachment to it produces a general

sense of unconflictednesss in the social world, despite thestructural fractures that shape the ordinary as a deeply anxiousand fragile phenomenal and mental space. But a mode ofbelonging in general that one can effect through a general mentaland physical commitment produces the normatively social as avague space of unspecific pleasure that stands in as a home forliving on...for lots of people.

12.

My speculation is that, among other things, people voted to stayin proximity to a fantasy of the good life whose actual or potentialappearance in their own lives was not really a factor in theirdecision. I am not arguing, though, that irrational forces madepeople choose Bush while the rational would have had himejected from office. To vote to stay in proximity to a fantasy andfantasizing is to do formally what people do all the time in making

their object-choices.10 This is why Tom Frank's language ofvoting for or against one's interest is just so off--as though onecould think fully about interest actuarially. Fantasy is interest-based, a motive to reproduce a scene that organizes one's senseof what it means to have a life. It involves placeholder attachments(that's what object choice always amounts to) that enable people

to be close to a rhythm of feeling with which they identify.11

13.

What's worth slowing down and attending to here is how politicalfantasy can be read as a form of self-medication, lightening or atleast interrupting the instrumentalities of the everyday. A candidateis not merely a commodity, but even commodities are vehicles forimagining the lightening of life. To talk about political affects andtheir relation to normatively identifiable emotions is to negotiatethe blurry quality of people's conscious lifeworld fantasies, a bluror slurring that ought to make it less surprising that many voters'opinions do not seem to motivate their votes. Now the questionbecomes: why choose the Right's style of belonging-in-general toa pretty abstract emotional nation, and not some other? I will bepresuming that "values" is not the answer to this, as only a smallpercentage of Bush voters said it was: but that something lessprecise made his continuity in office seem palatable to multiplemillions of people.

14.

To advance on this ground I turn to November 3 2005 when,scouring the web like a pig for truffles, seeking a post-electionexplanation of how to be in a body politic now, I tripped over

Davey D., writing on the website Rock and Rap Confidential,from the part of the Hip Hop community that had mobilized forthe election.

I would be lying if I said last night's election resultswere not a big disappointment. It's not so much thatI thought John Kerry would be the answer, but aKerry win and a Bush defeat would've helped themomentum and further ignited the excitement andpassions held by many within the Hip Hopcommunity who went to the polls. . .. When we lookback at this election the fundamental question wehave to grapple with is, was it enough to simply hate

Bush if you weren't feeling Kerry?12

15.

Let's start with a simple meditation on what Davey D. might havemeant. He posits a question that resonates throughout the pre-election and post-election analyses, a question about Kerry beingwooden, stiff, without the common touch, out of touch. Thischarge works in contrast to the "excitement and passions" thatcome from being engaged in social change activity as a relativelymore anonymous player. Davey D.'s common assessment ofKerry absorbed many different and incoherent suspicions abouthim, especially that the candidate was what the right said he was,a waffler, a weakling when it came to the hard work of politicalcourage. If someone is ambivalent about himself, how can you"feel" him in the best sense? It's as though what Kerry radiatedwere his defenses, which were then felt as defenses against him,which led to people not trusting him.

16.

Or perhaps Davey D. was referring not to the sense that Kerrywas weak but that he was covered with shame about something.This was the filmmaker Erroll Morris's view. Morris made manycommercials for Kerry's campaign, featuring Republicans whowere switching from Bush to the Democrats. These ads wereextremely clear-toned and emotional at the same time: emotionsof betrayal and loss and anxiety about the now insecure future thatwould be brought about by a second Bush term runs throughoutthem. Kerry is barely there in the ads: he's clearly a placeholderfigure for the whatever United States a non-Bush administrationwould be. But the inarticulateness around that future he embodieddidn't matter: it was an alternative future and could be imagined

with relief.13 Relief can be a political emotion, even when it's

empty as a program.

17.

Morris thought that Kerry should be a shoo-in given this

emotional climate.14 But, he argues, Kerry's shame was over hisopposition to Vietnam: he wanted to run as a hero in the war butnot as a hero because of what he did later. He rigidified his splitinto a series of disavowing phrases about fighting for his country.People could feel that he was being shoddy with his own history,which neutralized the value of his having been right. When onesees the films of the young Kerry testifying in front of Congress,one sees him in the future anterieur, as someone who will havebeen courageous in his life. But that person is dead. Morris arguesthat Kerry was ashamed at the second, post-military part of hisbravery. His ambivalence about a key part of his couragerevealed him as not at home in himself. Therefore people were notat home with him: they couldn't imitate his relaxedness in himself,because whether or not he had it, he didn't emanate it.

18.

This structure of political mimesis, in which a public is encouragedto identify with and to imitate a candidate's performance of self-comfort, would be bizarre if it were also not always central to thegrain of emotional authenticity (true-to-oneselfness) that issupposed to be at the heart of modern fakeness. In both of theseinstances the citizen wanted to have the candidate justify theiraffective intensity, with some intensity of his own: the citizen waslooking for affective continuity. Now this is a usual part of politicalfantasy mobilized by parties as they symbolize candidates. But it ismore than that too: already the New York Times is advocating forHillary Clinton's run by publishing people's fantasies of what theywould say to her to make her someone whom they couldmisrecognize as being, at heart, emotionally, like them, even if

their politics aren't identical.15 At the heart of this article is a sensethat Clinton is "evolving" her positions, and therefore open toinfluence. In the face of a possibility like this, people's desires togive their wisdom, to become unanonymous, to make a directimpact, seem to flood out. In lieu of the unmediated contact thebottom line for any successful political figure is that she be strongenough to be at ease with her positions, that she enact apolitical vernacular that weirdly, in performing a self-relation,reveals how she would recognize a citizen. In the contemporarypolitical world the vernacular is rooted in emotional authenticity,fealty to oneself, projected generally. Kerry did not radiate this;neither will Clinton, if she acknowledges evolving her fundamental

political being. (Bush never acknowledges evolving his positions,because he maintains a sense of consistency according to theends, not the process, of politics.)

19.

It would be easy to disrespect the visceral confidence of voterswho say things like "I didn't feel Kerry." Feelings aren't supposedto matter: it is judgment about power that's supposed to matter. In"Making Affect Safe for Democracy," Patchen Markell notes thateven Habermas has had to rethink his aversion to a democraticpractice organized around political feeling by positing the

importance of ambivalence to political identifications16: butambivalence doesn't translate in the political world, which is oneof the few spaces we have where idealism is solicited, not merelytolerated.

20.

Indeed the whole construction of the political sphere as a spacefor cultivating emotions to which we aspire is rooted in liberalAmerican traditions. Another reason it pays to attend to theirrationality of political attachment is the contiuity of the currentreactionary formation with the tradition of U.S. liberalism. Thosewith a tendency toward the right wing sensorium are the heirs ofthe sentimental politico-religious tradition embodied in HarrietBeecher Stowe's exhortation that good people must "feel right"about the world they try to bring into being. Stowe'scompassionate normativity vocalized the available reformistlanguage for a reframing of the terms of fundamental socialenfranchisement: slaves feel pain, they have souls, so they shouldbe free the ways whites are.

21.

But the elevation of feeling over other motives for transformativesocial practice has created new orthodoxies of self-regard in thepolitical sphere, where right feeling is now not an aspirationalvehicle to bring law into line with ethics, but rather justifies thelaw's antinomianism with respect to itself. Why don't more peoplereject that contradiction, since it's everywhere visible? Here's myguess. Compassion is a project of cultivated connectednessmasked as a natural outflowing emotion. Like other forms ofassurance, in the religious sense, it has always been fake (a hopelived as a truth) and always forced the hand of the shamed andthe uncertain. What the right does now is not all that different thanwhat the left has done, where moral styles deployed politically areconcerned. But this time there are few obstacles to force

compromises in the right's power and so its assurance canbecome pure arrogance.

22.

Additionally, Bush's style is not in the hot genres of left-Democratic melodrama. He may be a compassionateconservative, but his compassion is cool. Kevin Phillips locatesthis style in the "false populism" of the CEO class that came to

power in the Reagan era.17 Folksy, vulgar, canny but notgeniuses, this class could see itself as an insurgency against oldmoney, chilly elitism, and also the liberal equation of life withsuffering that demands amelioration by the "haves" and the "havemores." Bush's tendency to paint his goals as crises also works toposition his administration as a scrappy quick response team thatsees a problem, does what's necessary, then explains procedures

later, if at all.18 Who has time for feelings in the face of a crisis?And for whom does the assured Christian need to demonstratehis feeling? (Talk about privatization!)

23.

E.L. Doctorow's impassioned "splenetic" 19 against Bush, "The

Unfeeling President," hits it right on the head.20 In this widelycirculated piece, Doctorow scathes against Bush for hiding hisinhumanity under a shield of pleasant vernacularity. This is a manwho cannot mourn the dead, writes Doctorow: "He hasn't themind for it. . . . you study him, look into his eyes, and know hedissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of hisbeing because he has no capacity for it." You can tell that thisvenal, greedy, loser is faking caring. He is not compassionate, heis a jokester; he wears power lightly because (cynically) he is agreedy bastard and (possibly also) a fanatic who feels his deepestobligations to the God and justice at a sacred scale. Doctorowcontrasts him to Eisenhower, who could feel in advance the painof the soldiers he has sent to die; Doctorow is enraged that Bush,this light and insubstantial man, who is not deep with feeling,cannot even mourn with or after he has produced so much globaland national suffering.

24.

It is hard to disagree with this essay. Its claim that presidents formthe "national soul" that will now be deformed marks his genre asthe jeremiad (a pre-post mortem). What he can't see, what's toopainful for him to see, I think, is why Bush's shallow emanationswould be an object of desire. Why would a man who is activelydisinvested in feeling the pain of others seem like a good idea for

a leader? Let me summarize: in this election the object choice wasnot a candidate, or parties, or policies. Many people expressedambivalence about what was available for the choosing. Theobject choice was a desire to promote the tendency of x torepresent a feeling produced by a fantasy of a better good life.This President does not address the political as a realm ofinequality and suffering. He phrases it as a space good people livein who have a generally virtuous orientation toward a life that

"feels right" both in terms of normalcy and democracy.21 It is anextremely hazy place that he clarifies only under political duress.In the history of sentimental politics, people who identify withfeeling right see politics as a degraded space they must passthrough to transcend it, to return politics to ethics. This liberaltradition couched social change in radical aspirations beyond theinstrumentality of capital and the potential comforts of a strictlyproperty-based fantasy of the good life. Bush enacts the samestructure of disgust at the political. But suffering is not the motorof his politics. Security is: the security of a global capitalistdemocracy abroad, the security of a privatized world at home.What the left sees as depth -- compassion with suffering -- is noton that agenda. On that agenda what's deep -- e.g. potentiallyrevolutionary -- is a commitment to feeling right about feelinggood, and whatever violence happens in its name, so be it.

***********

25.

What will it have meant to think about the configuration of a newvernacular style as a prime neoliberal achievement? My argumentis that the left does not have to become more moral, less liberal,less secular, for this is not a matter of content, exactly. The newordinariness emits a casualness about power and a suspension ofjudgment: shamelessness. Bush is always being asked about hislegacy and he replies, constantly, that he will leave it for history todecide. He lives in the future anterior, the will-have-been: this arcof projection is central to political attachment in moments even ofthe most banal, formal change. It emanates the tone of morbidexcitement motivating Deborah Kerr at the end of Tea andSympathy: "When you speak of this in future years...and youwill...be kind." Otherwise, Kerr imagines, she will merely be seenas a stage someone had to go through: an event whose meaningwill have to do with her only insofar as she was a stage that wassurpassed. Kerr-y was like his namesake, a little abject about hisfate in the judgment of history or the public: he was still fighting thepower he was seeking while standing for nothing outside of that

mode of power's archaic conventions. He was seeming to expressunease with his own power. What the progressive style needs toassimilate to the public body is an equal shamelessness aboutmaking the U.S. world accountable to more progressive practicesof justice and equality; an ease in the face of the hysterical andsmug conventionality of the middle and right wing media andpublicity machine. A politics without embarrassment. It needs anew vernacular style, derived from pride in the political culture ofsocialist and progressive justice out of which the newphenomenology will emerge. Aspirational as opposed to nostalgicsolidarity, built on a version of interdependence that is notassociated with weakness but a collective ethical experience anda foggy vision of a world beyond secret and explicit violence andhyperexploitation. Such developments ought to provide the leftwith the emotional base for the risks to come. Better that than onemore season of the politics of the merely less bad, about whichno-body ought to feel good.

Thanks to Tom Dumm, Jodi Dean and Adam Weg for their glad-handing and spanking.

NOTES

1 By "stupefying" I refer to the antithesis within the term -- thelanguorous or benumbed sense and the not-quite sublime sense ofawe. One might note that the conflictual sensations embeddedhere are less benumbed than those in, for example, Susan Buck-Morss's discussion of the anaesthetic consequences of sensualoverstimulation in modernist mass society. See Dreamworld andCatastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West(Cambridge: MIT 2000), pp. 257-270. Her account convergeswith Simmel's sense of the benumbed and the blas� in "Themetropolitan mind and modern life." In my account we havepassed into another aesthetic era: as the ego loses even thephantasm of sovereign ground through the vanquishing of upwardmobility, social security, and other phantasms of life-buildingtoward the deferred enjoyment of capitalist ideology, the masssubject seems to be fighting back to unbenumb the senses. Thisessay puts forth some reactionary aspects of the newvernacularity but will not suffice fully to make that argument.

2 Following Lacan, Teresa Brennan, in History After Lacan(London: Routledge, 1993), identifies calls capitalist modernity"the ego's era."

3 The current rage for sovereignty as a category describing thestate, the citizen, and the subject has opened up a mess ofanalogical thinking about fantasies of autonomous force that, whilewell-describing new imperial developments that create cracks inthe nation-state-law partnership, do not well-describe at all theconditions of the reproduction of life for most people, mostplaces, but especially under regimes of capitalist speed-up. I referto Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell(Chicago 2005) and Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics" (PublicCulture 15 1 Winter 2003) as my primary examples of the waysfantastic representations of state-associated biopower activity(sovereignty under orchestrated regimes of emergency) cannotgrasp the disjunctures experienced by ordinary people withineveryday life. Elsewhere I argue that the exhaustion of practicalsovereignty is a central experience of the reproduction of lifeunder contemporary regimes of capitalist speed-up; the subject ofpractical sovereignty self-medicates to survive the moment that,exhausted, her egoic agency can no longer move through.Meanwhile, as the sovereign subject loses the material base towhich it is phenomenologically accustomed, the neoliberal stateinvites identification with its own performance of imperialautonomy as though through identification there's a transfer ofprivilege. See "Slow Death: Sovereignty, Labor, Obesity"(forthcoming).

4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections onPhotography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill andWang, 1982) pp. 92-97; Drucilla Cornell, "Dismembered Selvesand Wandering Wombs," in Wendy Brown and Janet E. Halley,Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2002), p. 346.

5 Quoted in Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities:Utopia, the Nation, and Spatial Histories of Modernity(Berkeley: U California Press, 2002), p. 45.

6 Giorgio Agamben posits the "whatever" community as thatbrought into being by placeholder commitments that gainsubstance through repetition, not referentiality and history. SeeThe Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993).

7 For the longer genealogy of these generalizations about politicalemotion in the contemporary U.S., my "The Epistemology ofState Emotion" in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat

State Emotion" in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 46-78. For acurrently influential argument that progressives would win if theyphrased their positions via more rhetorically effective arguments,see George Lakoff, Don'tThink of an Elephant: Know YourValues and Frame the Debate -- The Essential Guide forProgressives (Chelsea Green, 2004) and Thomas Frank.,What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won theHeart of America" (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

8 Jonathan Schell, "Creating Uncivil Society," (6 April 2005)http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2306

9 Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture"Social Text 1 (Winter 1975): 7.

10 See Jacques Lacan, "The Function of the Written inPsychoanalysis" in, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Loveand Knowledge, 1972-1973: Encore, the Seminar of JacquesLacan Book XX. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink.(New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 26-37; Renata Salecl,Perversions of Love and Hate (New York: Verso, 2000);Klaus Theweleit, Object-Choice: (All You Need is love. . .),trans. Malcolm R. Green (Verso 1994); Slavoj Zizek, TheSublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).

11 This is Freud's argument about the subject's negotiation of thedrives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; in a very differentregister Stuart Hall suggests unenumerated and internallycontradictory object choice as something like what the motivatedthe petty bourgeoisie to support Margaret Thatcher; in yet adifferent register this is what Carolyn Steedman argues made herworking class mother a conservative -- she identified with otherpeople's belonging or performance of self-sovereignty. SeeSigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in StandardEdition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, 18, trans.and Ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth), 7-64; Stuart Hall, in"Blue Election, Election Blues," in The Hard Road to Renewal:Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (Rutgers1987).

12 Davey D., "The Election Aftermath: Hip Hop Where Do WeGo From Here?", Rock & Rap Confidential; November 2,2004; www.rockrap.com

13 Morris's ads are available at

13 Morris's ads are available athttp://www.errolmorris.com/html/election/og/election04_main.html

14 Errol Morris, "Where is the Rest of Him?" New York Times,18 January 2005.

15 Michael Slackman, "Fantasy Politics: If I had Hillary Clinton'sEar. . .," New York Times 5 December 2004.

16 Patchen Markell, "Making Affect Safe for Democracy? OnConstitutional Patriotism," Political Theory 2000, 28: 38-63.

17 Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: The PoliticalHistory of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books,2002), 408-09.

18 Jim VandeHei, "Bush Paints his Goals as Crises," WashingtonPost 8 January 2005, p. A01.

19 The genre "splenetic" was used by Tony Kushner in "AnUnmannerly Pre-Election Day Splenetic" available onwww.southerncrissreview.org. As far as I know he is the first toconvert this medieval personality type into a genre, which comesnot from the intestines (viscera) but the spleen, while performingmuch the same bile.

20 E. L. Doctorow, "The Unfeeling President," The EastHampton Star 9 September 2004.

21 For a different take on this see Daniel Gilbert, "Four MoreYears of Happiness," The New York Times 20 January 2005.

Lauren Berlant is Professor of English at the University ofChicago. The thought animating this essay comes from herbook project, Cruel Optimism: Political Depression andSocial Belonging in the United States. She is editor ofIntimacy (Chicago 2000) and most recently Compassion:The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004).She is also co-editor of Critical Inquiry. She can bereached at l-berlant@uchicago.edu.

Copyright © 2005, Lauren Berlant and The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress