their desire for ‘intellectual fugitivity’ provides a false send of continuity and purpose, and the allure keeps them tethered to their attachments

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent).

“Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.

One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about the cluster of desires and affects we manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad. But some scenes of optimism are crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, patriotism, a career, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. To understand cruel optimism as an aesthetic of attachment requires embarking on an analysis of the modes of rhetorical indirection that manage the strange activity of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson’s work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of phantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because the dynamics of this scene are something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I will describe the shape of my transference with her thought.

In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” my key referent here, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophic address for what has become fetal personhood. In this scene, a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a fetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening. But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing [perspective] that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation (“you” are not here, “you” are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realizes something in the speaker, makes the speaker possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, a need to speak for, as, and to two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but vitalizing movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there). Of course psychoanalytically speaking, all intersubjectivity is impossible. But it isn’t impossible rhetorically. For Johnson, free indirect discourse offers a cognate kind of suspension but with less pernicious outcomes, at least when she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s practice of it. In a narrator’s part-merging with a character’s consciousness, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of “unfolding” to what she is reading, thinking she understands, judging, and being (“Bringing” 8). In sum, Johnsonian projection is about the often ruthless optimism in attachment and is often itself optimistic about the transferential openness that rhetorical forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this essay politicizes Freud’s observation that “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them” (244). It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression.1

For this essay’s purposes, the politically depressed position is manifested in the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work and that indeed become obstacles to the flourishing of the subjects whose optimism animates them (Sedgwick). My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world, even of relative wealth as in the u.s., are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject and that the irony—that the labor of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it—has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the “technologies of patience” or lag that keep these processes in place (Berlant, Queen 222). Cruel optimism about imminence thus grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise and to misrecognize that promise as an achievement. From works by John Ashbery, Charles Johnson, and Geoff Ryman, this essay derives three episodes of the suspension of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up the “impasse” as a name for the transitional moment between a habituated life and all of its others. What happens in this space of time helps to explain why exuberant attachments keep ticking, not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like threat or static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they’re dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.