reintroductions

quotes from desire/love by lauren berlant

"theory, as gayatri spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: i am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. i am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought. but generally i am still compelled by the descriptions that are here, and from this distance, i am confused to say that, when i read this book, i still learn from it. when it comes to gender and sexuality there are no introductions, even if that is what this book seeks to be. there are only reintroductions, after all, reencounters that produce incitements to loosen, discard, or grasp more tightly to some anchors in the attunement that fantasy offers."

"desire describes a state of attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that is generated by the gap between an object's specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it. this gap produces a number of further convolutions. desire visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. your style of addressing those objects gives shape to the drama with which they allow you to reencounter yourself.

by contrast, love is the embracing dream in which desire is reciprocated: rather than being isolated, love provides an image of an expanded self, the normative version of which is the two-as-one intimacy of the couple form. in the idealized image of their relation, desire will lead to love, which will make a world for desire's endurance."

"even in its most conventional form, as 'love,' desire produces paradox. it is a primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history; yet it is also the impulse that most destabilizes people, putting them into plots beyond their control as it joins diverse lives and makes situations. . . desire also measures fields of difference and distance. it both constructs and collapses distinctions between public and private: it reorganizes worlds. this is one reason why desire is so often represented as political: in bringing people into public or collective life, desire makes scenes where social conventions of power and value play themselves out in plots about obstacles to and opportunities for erotic fulfillment."

"the zoning of desire is less personal, more normative, too. consider, for example, erogenous zones, red light districts, master bedrooms, 'private parts.' moreover, a relation of desire creates a 'space' in which its trajectories and complexities are repeatedly experienced and represented."

"'identity' might be defined as a kind of singularity that an individual is said to have: paradoxically, identity is also the individual's point of intersection with membership in particular populations or collectivities."

"gilles deleuze, from a different angle, calls this subject of data a 'dividual,' to emphasize that individuality itself is a cluster of qualities that don't express the totality of a person but rather her value as data to the reproduction of the normative world."

"we will think about sexuality as a structure of self-encounter and encounter with the world; about modern ideologies and institutions of intimacy that have installed sexuality as the truth of what a person is; that promote a narrowed version of heterosexuality as a proper cultural norm, and regulate deviations from it; and that nonetheless yield some carefully demarcated space to some kinds of non-normative sexuality, such as gay and lesbian."

"the minute an object comes under analytic scrutiny, it bobs and weaves, becomes unstable, mysterious, and recalcitrant, seeming more like a fantasy than the palpable object it had seemed to be when the thinker/lover first risked engagement."