This talk is located in a shattered, yet intelligible zone defined by being in life without wanting the world–a state traversing misery and detachment that, the talk claims, is well-known to historically structurally subordinated people (people of color, of non-normative sexuality, proletarianized laborers . . .). Reading with Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely), the novel and film of A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood, 1964; Tom Ford, 2009), and Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), it describes life at the limit of optimism in terms of a dissociative poetics.

Lauren Berlant teaches English at the University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) and The Female Complaint (2008) — has morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary US and Europe. Her interest in affect, aesthetics, and politics is also expressed in the edited volumes Intimacy (2000), Compassion(2004), and On the Case (Critical Inquiry, 2007). Her most recent sexuality books are Desire/Love (2012) and, with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014). Her current projects are to do with modes of comic and of recessive affective performance in relation to critical theory, political emotion, and imaginaries of the social.

Martin Holbraad’s main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and revolutionary politics. Author of Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012), Holbraad currently directs a major comparative project on the anthropology of revolutions.

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology, University College London and Co-Director of Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research Group (CROC).

Despina Kakoudaki’s work focuses on literature, film, visual and cultural studies, and the history of technology. Her forthcoming book, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People, traces our fascination with mechanical and constructed people, such as robots, cyborgs, androids and automata.

Despina Kakoudaki is Associate Professor of Literature at American University.

Offering an intellectual history of the phases of Marx’s thought from his dissertation on Greek philosophy to The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Gopal Balakrishnan seeks to explain why the emergent syntheses of this early Marx broke down in the aftermath of the failures of the revolutions of 1848.

Gopal Balakrishnan is Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC.

Warren Montag’s research has two foci: French and Italian thought of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Althusser; and Literature and Philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. His recent book concerns the emergence of a necro-economics from French economic thinkers to Adam Smith (and beyond, from Malthus to Von Mises).

Warren Montag is Brown Family Professor of Literature, English Department at Occidental College.

Rebecca Karl’s current work includes a forthcoming book entitled The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and the Economic in Twentieth Century China; this book examines the intersections between philosophical and economic questions as they emerge and re-emerge over the course of China’s twentieth century. Ongoing work includes a project on histories of economic concepts in China tentatively entitled, Worlds of Chinese Economic Thought

Rebecca Karl is Professor of Chinese History at New York University.

Mayanthi Fernando works on religion, politics, and the secular. Her first book on the Islamic revival and French secularity will be out in 2014. Her new project examines the nexus of sex, religion, and secularism, and in particular the French state’s regulation of Muslim women’s sexual and religious intimacies.

Mayanthi Fernando is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz

Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media & cultural studies with science & technologies studies. She has written on digital networks and feminism, information politics, knowledge production, and digital engagement. She currently explores algorithmic living and practices of data sharing.

Aristea Fotopoulou is Research Fellow, University of Sussex, UK; and 2014 Visiting Scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center, UC Santa Cruz.

Gildas Hamel’s current work is on the economy, society and religion of ancient Israel and Graeco-Roman Judaea. His research focuses on taxes, forms of labor, the competition of various groups for resources and political power, and the evolution of religious structures, including the appearance of monotheism and new notions of time.

Gildas Hamel is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the History Department.