“Whenever by delight or else by pain,//That seizes any faculty of ours,//Wholly to that the soul collects itself,//It seemeth that no other power it heeds;//And this against that error is which thinks//One soul above another kindles in us.//And hence, whenever aught is heard or seen//Which keeps the soul intently bent upon it,//Time passes on, and we perceive it not.//Because one faculty is that which listens,//And other that which the soul keeps entire;//This is as if in bonds, and that is free.//Of this I had experience positive//In hearing and in gazing at that spirit.”

So the first image in this canto of sloth is the mind’s clinginess, its inability to move from one object to another. (To see beyond the page which lies before one’s face.) Whenever an experience is too intensely felt, “wholly to that the soul collects itself,” such that one gets lost in the nightmares of one’s traumas, the daydreams of a happy love. Dante is derelict in his duty to climb each of Purgatory’s nine rings, because his mind clings to past experiences, makes him forget the task at hand.

Dante takes this opportunity to critique earlier models of the soul which claim that the soul is partitioned based on its respective functions: a soul for listening, a second for looking, another for feeling, etc. The very fact that one is able to retain one’s previous senses would seem to indicate that there is one collective soul, rather than multiple souls each separated by function. Moreover, the soul can only ever receive one sense at a time, hence the soul’s singularity, its unity. The last line, “this is as if in bonds, and that is free,” notes that agency is not extended towards the external world, because one cannot choose but to listen; at the same time, agency does allow one to choose the internal events which one will recollect.

So, again, it seems that in Dante’s vision as in Heidegger’s, the incomplete soul reaches towards the external world, from which it gathers its strength, fortifies its inner domain with happy memories, as a bird builds its nest twig by twig. In Paradiso, the soul’s incompletion, its need to be fulfilled, is reprised through a visual motif. Suddenly, Dante is able to see images that would have otherwise been effulgent; a divine blessing has enhanced his very capacities for sense-reception. Brilliance and beauty are often coeval in Paradiso, and our contemporary idiom whereby genius works of art and observation are called “brilliant”–we might say, with Arendt, that they shine like pearls–indicates that close/philosophical reading is supposed to intensify our sensations.

Indeed, one often defines one’s sense-perception through visual motifs: one’s ignorances are expressed as a blindness, a lacuna, a blindspot, a myopia. One closes one’s eyes, one turns one’s back, to information which one does not wish to know; one magnifies another’s flaws, cannot find one’s own flaws mirrored in others. But, importantly, when Dante writes that the faculty which listens is bound in chains, we encounter a difference between sense perception in toto and the visual field. If one’s sensorium results from the body attuned to its environment, then one’s vision would comprise that aspect of the sensorium over which one has greatest control, while one’s auditory sense is least controllable. Eyelids are handy shutters, able to cover sight even when hands over ears cannot succeed in blocking out sound. It is perhaps for this reason that the inability to control one’s temptations is evoked most frequently with the siren’s song. Similarly, to be alarmed is to have one’s auditory sense invaded, to have that sense take over one’s sensorium.

Let’s linger for a moment on this theme of auditory as opposed to visual fields, and see what we can hear in this theme, particularly regarding the relation of our ears to time. The relation of past, present and future is often expressed through the visual field: we can say that our backs are turned to the past, so that we can look forward to the future; or, we can say that we are falling into our futures, able to see only whence we have come, blind to whither we go. But the visual metaphors of time are too one-dimensional. Let us instead think about the manifold ways that auditory and temporal perceptions are inter-related, in modalities that the visual field cannot express. When one looks onto the horizon, there is a flat canvas of already given data. But when one receives auditory data, there are much greater distortions in space: though you lean in to deliver your secrets, I cannot hear your whispers over the restaurant’s loud music; in an instant, my body can resound with a thunderclap that strikes a tree far in the distance. In other words, the audible field complicates the notion of what is present in ways that the visual field would regard as obvious. As I cower in fear in the face of love, it may be that I am still resounding with the faraway thunderclap of a former and ferocious lover, that I cannot yet hear the plaintive cry of a closer intimate, a more “present” and tender-hearted companion.

By comparing the audible and visible fields, we complicate the extent to which our senses may be directed, the extent to which we can be attentive. Following its etymological root, that key-word a-ttention [a + tenere] refers to the act of reaching towards something in our sensible field. We might, again, in a Heideggerian vein, compare thought to hands: we use our thoughts to receive sense-data that are within the range of our reception, that are ready-to-hand, as we grasp the tools in our reach.

But this discourse on hands leads us to the next sensible field: touch. In terms of our agency over it, the faculty of touch is an intermediate between hearing and sight. We might, sometimes, choose what to hold close to us; at others, things strike us, such that we cannot block out the sudden, strong sensation. This intermediate level of control is expressed when Dante writes that “l’anima bene ad essa si raccoglie,” which we might translate literally as “that [strong sensation] to which the soul well collects itself.” (We should hear in this “gathers itself” a familiarity to Heidegger’s notion of the inner-dwelling, the gathering/clearing, of the soul.) We might more liberally translate this line as meaning that the soul wraps itself tightly around a strong sensation just as flesh collapses under the weight of an impact, thereby surrounding that which strikes it. Or, to paint this picture in another way: As infants, not yet able to speak, our first instinct is to grasp anything which presses into our palms.

In evoking our hands, the faculty of touch calls our attention to what we are able to bear, what can be carried. If our soul clings to something, firmly grasps it, then one can assume that we are unable to hold anything else, that our capacities for reception have been filled. And this at last brings us to the importance of this study, why we should dwell on the relevance of sense-intensity for understanding the faculty of close reading. Close reading is a way of generating focus, of avoiding distraction. And, when we say that we are dis-tracted, this literally means that we are unable to generate traction, that we cannot cling to a sensation: our bodies cannot pull in two separate directions simultaneously. Our senses compete more often than they collaborate: if our attention is called towards a voice in the distance, we might lose track of the target on which we were supposed to aim.

Because our senses can easily make us dis-tracted, it is important that we generate leverage with which to control and direct our senses. To achieve this leverage, we put phenomena on the same level, must make them apt for com-parisons, make them together equal, close enough for the one to dig into the other. And so focusing on a phenomenon in our visible domain requires our use of other visual data. It’s not merely a matter of looking under the microscope, at the top of a mountain, nor checking one’s back. A child has a toy, shaped like a picture-frame; the frame contains vertical panes which obstruct its image and which may be slid across the frame by means of a connected lever; as the child moves the panes across the frame, the image changes from a frog to a prince. In other words, there are parallel processes of reception and blockage in the event of clarity; any photographer with an adept understanding of lenses, of focal depth, understands this kind of clarity.

In promising to rid us of our distractions, the faculty of close reading thereby assumes a capacity for apt comparisons, but–more than this–close reading often assumes that we can regulate what occupies our attention, such that we are able either to eliminate extraneous phenomena, or to grow the strength of our perceptions, to magnify the perceptual load that we are able to bear. Both elements risk becoming false promises, insofar as there are extraneous phenomena which we are not ourselves able to eradicate, and insofar as one’s perceptual load may be forever and physically limited.

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In the words of Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “Time Warp,” let’s take a sudden “jump to the left,” a jump to queer theory itself. In recent works like The Queer Art of Failure and Cruel Optimism, the question of what actually is beautiful, of what constitutes possible forms of beauty, has risen in prominence. As much as I admire their work towards anti-homophobia, their advocacy of more pliable forms for gender and sexuality, I have the unfortunate stance of regarding these works as queer failures.

First, the Queer Art of Failure reads to me as being at times sophomoric and overstated, much like the widely propagated claim, attributed to Einstein, that “Everybody is a genius; but, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” In other words, The Queer Art of Failure has, at times, an optimistic tone, promising to elaborate more accurate metrics for judging our beauty and our genius, to return us fish to more familiar and appropriate waters than the contemporary climate has allowed. Take, for instance, Halberstam’s analysis of the film “Little Miss Sunshine,” where the protagonist Olive fails to win a beauty contest: “Miss Sunshine is in many ways a view from below, the perspective of the loser in a world that is interested only in winners. While Olive’s failure as a beauty pageant plays out…this failure…is so much better, so much more liberating than any success that could possibly be achieved in the context of a teen beauty contest.” It is hard not to read the last few words, “teen beauty contest,” in a disparaging tone. Moreover, it is precisely this emphasis in the passage’s finale which changes Halberstam’s meaning. Instead of an indictment of metrics in toto (because Olive’s performance seems to meet Halberstam’s own metrics), the passage seems to critique the specific metrics of the “teen beauty contest.”

Coupled with this optimism is an anarchic flair, whereby The Queer Art of Failure seems to encourage the abolition of any and all metrics. (A misguided and literally hopeless aim which is common in some leftist circles–the kind of “progressive” milieu that prefers circles to any other, hierarchical shape with a beginning and an end.) “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers…In this book forgetting becomes a way of resisting the heroic and grand logics of recall and unleashes new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.” Children are therefore evoked in reference to their infancy, their absence of memory and of clear labels, which render them unable to speak. If we ceased speaking so much about who’s better than whom, we would be able to escape from a toxic culture of competition and critique: escape into a liberated, anarchic world with no memory and therefore no politics. (Though children are often, themselves, competitive and cruel.)

Ultimately, Halberstam inadequately juggles these two attitudes, critical and a-normative, insofar as the anarchic and optimistic perspectives are not able to be sustained contemporaneously: either there exist better, more accurate metrics or there exist no metrics at all. However, at its best moments, which are unfortunately few in number, The Queer Art of Failure advocates for modes of living that can only be achieved once one has accepted one’s failure, once one is able to walk firmly in one’s ugliness. “And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life…To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy.” I think that this last trend is the most pertinent to the gross task of living, but perhaps is least appealing to an audience that seeks promises of liberation, that wants through reading to achieve revelatory moments of self-understanding/self-improvement. To avoid “toxic positivity,” we are forced, then, to accept both that there are existing standards which matter, and that we may fail to meet them; we need to embrace a certain amount of hopelessness.

In stating this critique, my intention is in no way to detract from Halberstam’s political project. Contemporary societies of control ought to become more hospitable, ought to do more to affirm those who live within them. Those who have been raised in contemporary control societies are constantly measured and tested, which is why the Einstein adage about fish climbing trees is so popular, even as it is banal. It appeals to the hopes of those who have performed poorly on such tests. I agree with Halberstam that the many diagnostic systems of our current era are certainly biased; but, pure rebellion against diagnostic systems–as Halberstam, at times, seems to advocate–can be dangerous: as an example, schizophrenia is not the joy-ride that Deleuze, Guattari and R.D. Laing once described in their anti-Oedipal, anti-diagnostic movement.

We find a similar critique of “toxic positivity” in Cruel Optimism, where Lauren Berlant advocates for the virtues of giving up. In this piece, Berlant’s talent lies in taking a narrative that would normally resound with a conservative ethos–minorities and the poor ought to despair of ever reaching achieving “the good life”–and disjoining it from what would normally be its “meritocratic,” neo-conservative premises, i.e. white supremacy. In a panel discussing the book, Berlant explains that their initial impetus for writing came from hearing epidemiologists say that morbid obesity would be overcome if everyone walked an average of ten more blocks a day; Cruel Optimism‘s purpose was to describe the environmental structure which made those ten blocks tantalizingly close and yet out of reach.

In other words, Berlant accepts that, in America, there are bodies which are disproportionately overweight; however, Berlant does not accept what are common political expedients, which would argue either [1] that these bodies are responsible for their weight (the white supremacist perspective); or [2] that the issue is solely a problem of inappropriate aesthetic/hygienic standards, that beyond fat-phobia there is no prevalent issue with Americans’ weight (the centrist/pacifist perspective); or [3] that accruing such weight is a legitimate form of political protest (the radical anarchic perspective). As a result, the only option left, the politically inexpedient one, is to maintain the argument that obesity is in fact a problem, for which these bodies are not responsible. This is an important distinction, because the politically expedient answers ignore how capitalist society has impersonally and imperceptibly imposed on workers the conditions of labor and consumption which create widespread obesity. Importantly, Berlant notes these conditions to an extent beyond the commonly acknowledged process whereby vegetal produce has become more expensive than mass-produced products. Unlike many corporations, Berlant does not sugar-coat the issue.

Berlant writes in an age when there are rampant addictions; moreover, a post-Reagan age where the failures and abuses of the war on drugs have made painfully clear that holding addicts responsible for their addictions is not liable to produce any meaningful change, that pathologizing drug use may serve to remove focus from the alienating conditions which encourage (perhaps even demand) it. It is hard not to read “cruel optimism” as a synonym for addiction, especially when Berlant defines the term by writing: “cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”

Berlant elaborates that cruel optimism is a category which extends far beyond what would most immediately be perceived as addictions: “What’s 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/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form 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 from 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 invested her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.” In other words, the cruel optimist is plagued by a false hope, by a promise that “maybe this time I will be noticed,” by the idea that the good/high life is just around the corner.

Indeed, the parallels between addiction and the phenomenon of cruel optimism are further evoked when Berlant regards overeating as a kind of “self-medication:” “This analysis thinks about agency and causality as dispersed environmental mechanisms[ ]that create the dramatic consequences of endemic overweight[. ]My focus here will be on eating as a kind of self-medication through self-interruption[. ]Working life exhausts practical sovereignty, the exercise of the will as one faces the scene of the contingencies of survival[. ]Eating can be seen as a form of ballast against wearing out, but also as a counter-dissipation, in that, like other small pleasures, it can produce an experience of self-abeyance, of floating sideways.”

And with this analysis of what Berlant elsewhere calls “lateral agency,” we reach the intersection between the intensity of experience and close reading. Close reading assumes a moment of agency, of sovereignty over one’s sensorium; however, it assumes also that this event requires significant emotional/mental energies/resources. The image of compulsive eating as a form of “counter-dissipation,” “self-abeyance,” or “floating sideways,” assumes that eating takes what would be a sudden, unbearable spike in sensation and flattens it to become a more prolonged, more bearable phenomenon. The horizontal motif behind lateral agency evokes a kind of procrastination, a deferral, a handing off of one’s chores and decision-making until some later point in time, a time when hopefully one will have more energy and be better equipped for the task at hand. This reading of Berlant is bolstered by the definition of cruel optimism where: “The object of cruel optimism here appears as the thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safe-keeping[. ]In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.”

In defending those who overeat, who die slowly, killing their health in order to stay alive, Berlant pinpoints that there is an unseen reserve on which we rely for decision-making and that people who overeat have had this reserve diminished. This unseen reserve is evocative for any queer theorist who wishes to identify the ways that our attachments, especially our under-analyzed or -utilized attachments, sustain us. While overeaters are defended from claims of responsibility by the absence of such inner reservoirs of sovereignty–because “working life exhausts practical sovereignty, the exercise of the will as one faces the scene of the contingencies of survival”–capitalists are critiqued for their misuse of sovereignty. It is hard not to read the following as a diatribe against capitalist indolence: “the buzz of other people’s labor in the vineyards is the condition of the privilege of being bored with life and three-quarters detached, absorbed in a process of circulating in a vaguely lateral way. [emphasis mine]” So here lateral agency is an inappropriate deferral, merely passing the buck, while in other contexts it is a necessary part of living.

The double use of lateral agency highlights that Berlant is ambivalent in their assignments of agency and responsibility. At times agency is part of a valid political critique, at others it is cruelly optimistic to assume that the indigent are responsible for their pains. The desire at hand is not merely to throw up one’s hands and argue that nothing is possible. The desire is to place responsibility at the forefront of those who would otherwise deny it, the neoliberals who would argue that the marginalized ought to take care of themselves. It is for this reason (I believe) that Berlant separates cruel optimism from melancholia, insofar as melancholia is traditionally tied to bourgeois indolence, and insofar as Berlant intends to portray what are more apparently marginalized groups as the subjects of cruel optimism.

And here my agreements with Berlant end. I want to rescue an idea of agency from its common use in victim-blaming; further, I do not at all buy Berlant’s definition that melancholia “is the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has invested her ego continuity.” (Hence the strikethrough on the above excerpt.) According to Berlant, cruel optimism looks (stupidly) to the future, whereas melancholia is stuck in the past. “As an affective concept, [trauma] bridges: a sense of belatedness having to catch up to the event; a sense of the double-take in relation to what happened in the event…a sense of being frozen out of the future…” However, on a sociological and theoretical level, the gaps between addiction and inadequate mourning are hard to maintain. For example, Berlant even compares cruel optimism to a lab animal in a behaviorist experiment, where this animal continues to press a button that once offered food, “and is compelled to the place of pain by the possibility that shock will convert to food.” The lab rat is addicted to pressing the button, but one could easily gloss the button-pressing as an inadequate form of mourning, a melancholic rejection of the fact that the food will cease to come. The melancholic is stuck in the past, yes, but views this past also as its future, insofar as possibility is what “compel[s] to the place of pain.”

If we return to the definitions of mourning and melancholia offered by Melanie Klein and Freud we find a common theme: introjection. A brief plot summary for introjection: After the divorce, the subject swallows the loved object into its subconscious, where either the loved object continues to berate oneself, or one enjoys the pleasure of berating one’s object. This relation is a highly ambivalent one, insofar as the attachment is both desired and destructive. The melancholic is unable to detach from the loved object, even as the conflict between self and internalized object continues to wreak havoc in one’s psyche. In other words, the traditional narrative of melancholia is highly similar to Berlant’s definition of cruel optimism as a sustaining and also destructive attachment.

I offer this detailed critique of both Berlant and Halberstam because I find that contemporary theory is quick to divorce itself from normativity in a way that does not succeed in diminishing the effects of norms on our behaviors, but only makes these norms more cryptic. Halberstam and Berlant are both proponents of a recent and wide movement in favor of what one may call “experimental” studies in the humanities. By labelling an investigation as “experimental,” one wants to stress the fact that one does not have pre-programmed results in mind, that there is a possibility for surprise in one’s methodology. However, such an ad hoc method advocates novelty at the cost of clarity and control. It’s the problem with Proust’s strategy to multiply eyes instead of develop them. It’s the problem behind Halberstam’s claim that “forgetting becomes a way of resisting the heroic and grand logics of recall and unleashes new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.” Novelty sacrifices wisdom; forgetfulness is an imprecise reading. The actual experimental method–when successful–is able to conduct careful, longitudinal studies; is able to preserve controls and constants; is not simply an explosion of unkempt possibilities.

The difficulty lies in the fact that, even as these works mark insights, they are unable to recognize the input from predecessors, or to edit their own voices. (We have here the academic dilemma of whether to assign readings or to write oneself.) Queer theory is often trapped in self-reference where there are strident voices without clear authority. Cruel Optimism comes on the heels of Queer Optimism. This bickering extends also to those cited authors who will most quickly be returned in a search for queer theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler and Lee Edelman are often required, but highly ambivalent touch-points. It substantially risks evoking concerns over who is speaking, in ways that prevent one from hearing the words spoken.

The oldest reference in either Berlant’s or Halberstam’s works is Karl Marx, and the vast majority of references are from the past fifty years. As a result, [I assume] they remain unaware of the fact that their studies in failure are remarkably similar to the Kierkegaardian oeuvre, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness Unto Death and especially Either/Or, all of which stress despair as a virtue rather than a vice. (Bringing us back to Giotto and Belacqua.) In Either/Or, Kierkegaard describes an aesthete who becomes addicted to his pleasures, in search of greater sensations to curb a cresendo-ing desire, until one’s desire consumes oneself just as Nero engulfed his own Rome in flames. To prevent such an ending, one has to realize that ending now, has to feel its full effects, its pains, its sorrow. Kierkegaard prescribes for us all a good dash of despair, which becomes the point of acknowledging one’s limits, of giving up desire for the sake of the reality principle. We can even read Kierkegaard’s writing as a queer investigation, insofar as Kierkegaard found himself caught between the heteronormative impulse to marry Regina Olsen, or to remain asexual, to become a man of the cloth.

But now what is the work being done when I insert Kierkegaard into this contemporary discussion, when Kierkegaard is often regarded naively or correctly as exemplary of a conservative white Christian ethos, and when I myself am often regarded naively or correctly as exemplary of a conservative white Christian’s desideratum? Upon starting this piece, I at first felt that it was not worth writing, because my mere act of writing would be a violence that would override any possible accuracy in my remarks. I then thought that my concerns about being violent were inappropriately projected, insofar as there would be little violence enacted more than one’s own fantasy of courageous rebellion, little relevance in addressing such a small, self-enclosed circle of academics, until I came across this adulatory article, re-published on the occasion of Lauren Berlant’s death today.

The article made it apparent that any critique would be both relevant and inappropriate, given that Berlant’s work has garnered acclaim from a powerful if not sizable audience, and given that any audience would not be desirous of criticism at such a time. What would be the violence of criticizing this thinker so recently deceased? What would be the violence of choosing not to criticize Berlant on the grounds that one should not speak ill of the (recently) deceased, and therefore risk succumbing to precisely that “sentimentality” which Berlant regarded as politically obstructive?

This investigation into despair is made only further relevant by the respective covers of The Queer Art of Failure and Cruel Optimism, which feature states of death or near-death despair. Does the work of acknowledging death and failure serve as an adherence to the reality principle, severing us from our quixotic quests for wish fulfillment, our cruel forms of optimism? Or does such work only drain one’s already limited resources for agency, providing yet another interaction which lacks joy in what are already mundane, mechanized lives? Is it that the presence of reality in its dull grays and rainy days provides us with the reserves to live and experience differently? Does marrying failure or divorcing oneself from optimism furnish a valid mode of handling trauma, or of expanding one’s capacities for sense perception? These strategies could possibly serve to eliminate needless doubt over whether one is indeed suffering, or whether there is more that one could do; but, such bleak surroundings could also be a form of taxation, could prevent our access to important and sustaining forms of beauty.

I find the crux of my dilemma with queer theory in the following excerpt from Cruel Optimism: “To admit your surprising attachments, to trace your transformation over the course of a long life sentence, is sentience–that’s what I’ve learned. The pain of paying attention pays me back in the form of eloquence: a sound pleasure.” The play between “sentence” and “sentience,” the “paying attention” which “pays,” and the double entendre in the adjective “sound” which means both considerable and auditory–Berlant is playing with words, and in a way that is intended to represent the very pleasure of wordplay, “of eloquence: a sound pleasure.” Berlant plays so well, in fact, that we might miss how self-congratulatory the remark is. But I find myself unable to bear self-congratulation. So instead I hear at first my own alternate translation: “I have worked my butt off, trying to write/speak well, and have therefore earned the right to be heard. So you ought to listen to me.” In other words, my ears prick up at the potential for classist rhetoric, any time that professors claim to be more deserving of speech than the lay people who work to sustain them, or any time that an educated group complains at the inability of the uneducated to listen to, or learn from, them. Again, as Berlant states: “It is usual to think of critical theory as dark, not as an optimistic genre, not only because, traditionally, it’s suspicious: but also since it creates so much exhausting anxiety about the value of even the ‘thinkiest’ thought.”

And so we return to the dilemma at hand: what is that “‘thinkiest’ thought?” How do we get there? Moreover, are we supposed to? Or are we to accept the queer twist of fate, which makes of thought a small bandage for a wound far too wide? Berlant’s work reminds us that our knowledge of what pleases and sustains us is often far from complete. So if one were to remark that Berlant’s work itself fails to provide answers that please, perhaps that is because we are still at the first steps of a journey that Berlant has helped to pave. Or maybe this is just my own melancholic introjection of an absent interlocutor. Maybe we are better off working in other endeavors–with a few flowers and well-wrought urns, beauties that we can feel, can read so quickly and easily. Maybe we have had enough talk. After all, what is “close reading”?