![]() And it identifies such nonsovereignty as fundamentally problematic, caught up as it so often is in patterns of personal and social self-sabotage.įrom the perspective of a theological framework of law and gospel, we might interpret Berlant’s observations about ‘cruel optimism’ as an incisive non-religious analysis of certain experiential outcomes of the fact that human existence unfolds under a condition that Christians call ‘sin’. The phenomenon of ‘cruel optimism’ exhibits the affective reality of what Berlant calls ‘nonsovereignty’ - the fact that appeals to conscious agency often have so little power to explain what ‘makes bodies move’. Describing ‘cruel optimism’, Berlant is thus observing and analyzing a particular way in which human beings participate irrationally and compulsively in the generation of their own suffering. Later she describes cruel optimism similarly as naming situations where ‘the loss of what’s not working’ in a person’s life is experienced as ‘more unbearable than the having of it.’ A relation of cruel optimism can obtain in relation to all sorts of objects: ‘It might involve food, or a kind of love it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project’, and it can also ‘rest on something simpler … like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being’. She defines cruel optimism as ‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’, and as the situation that obtains ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.’ She gives the example of punishing attachment to the expectation ‘that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way’, no matter how often it does not actually work out that way. ![]() Affect theorist Lauren Berlant has written about a phenomenon of experience that she calls ‘cruel optimism’. It will be helpful at this stage to give a concrete example of how affective pedagogy might work out in practice. It is through this labelling and this excavating that ‘the sinner is discovered to himself’ 3:20), he says that the purpose of the law is to ‘reveal sin’ ( revelare peccatum). To label and excavate these experiences through the encounter with divine law, in particular, is a significant part of what Luther is talking about when, interpreting the Pauline claim that ‘through the law comes the knowledge of sin’ (Rom. In this sense, the distinction between the law and the gospel provides a discursive diagnostic instrument for interpreting affects that bodies already feel, and for bringing greater awareness, through a kind of process of excavation, to forces and feelings that are present in the body but which have hitherto been shrouded, misinterpreted, or numbed. ![]() of the affective pedagogy effected by the Spirit through the instruments of the law and the gospel is to label and make sense of existing problematic and painful affects, and to create space for accepting and interpreting key dimensions of our experience of ourselves and the world that would otherwise be less understandable and less subject to conscious awareness. The following comes from Chapter 4, “Grace in Experience”, pp. In addition to being a theological tour de force, the book offers numerous outstanding reflections on how theology might explain the experiences of everyday life. There’s so much to love in Simeon Zahl’s latest monograph, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience.
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