A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your
flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present Lauren Berlant describes the
cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s as the social-democratic promise of the
postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to
unachievable fantasies of the good life-with its promises of upward mobility job security
political and social equality and durable intimacy-despite evidence that liberal-capitalist
societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their
lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively
before it is understood in any other way Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to
the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity contingency and crisis. She
suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality and she
explains why trauma theory-with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters
the ordinary-is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time once crisis
itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.
