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Berlant is rightly suspicious of this attitude – so prevalent in arguments for gay marriage – since it encourages the dominant culture to bypass an examination of its own policies and to rely, instead, on a readymade mode of empathy which it merely needs to learn to apply to “marginalized groups” (110). Berlant pushes this argument further, intimating at the end of her chapter that the shared tropes of romantic narratives, psychoanalytical therapy, and commodity (self-help) culture also find analogues in the strategies of “liberals” who aim to heal “antagonism between dominant and subordinate peoples” through oddly conservative appeals: “the people you think of as Other only appear to threaten your stability and value by their difference they have feelings too You desire the same thing ‘they’ do, to feel unconflicted, to have intimacy” (110). The incoherence of this everyday common sense is pervasive throughout commodity culture: “Love induces stuckness and freedom love and its absences induce mental/emotional illness or amour fou love is therapy for what ails you love is the cause of what ails you” (102). Self-help discourse, for instance, “valoriz the promise of love” and “presumes that problems in love must be solved by way of internal adjustments,” thus “sustaining,” even in its most pessimistic forms, “the signs of utopian intimacy” in the everyday common sense of how love and desire are supposed to work (98-99).
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The consequences for this discursive-literary grid of love’s intelligibility is far reaching. Her readings show how this normative thinking is fraught insofar “as narratives and institutionalized forms of sexual life” continue to “organize identit” that encourage people to live “these longings as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that mark one’s lovers” (95). The critical analyses of the first two texts enable one, she claims, to re-imagine “romantic love” as a potential “placeholder for a less eloquent or institutionally proper longing” and of a “love plot” as a common method of translating or sublating “the aggression inherent in intimacy” from “violence and submission” into an admixture “of curiosity, attachment, and passion” which congeals - according to a dominant, naturalized logic of necessity and urgency - into “an identity or a promise” (95). These distinct analyses develop and support larger claims about the “romantic commodities” of “desire/fantasy” as they play out generally and (hetero)normatively in “popular narrative forms” and in “therapy culture, commodity culture, and liberal political culture” (88).
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To sketch out these conflicted yet damaging conventions and cultural scripts, Berlant analyzes an interesting assemblage of texts ( Bridges of Madison Country, Sula, and Ruby Sparks ). The reduction of life’s legitimate possibility to one plot is the source of romantic love’s terrorizing, coercive, shaming, manipulative, or just diminishing effects – on the imagination as well as on practice. But in the modern United States, and the places its media forms influence, to different degrees, the fantasy world of romance is used normatively – as a rule that legislates the boundary between a legitimate and valuable mode of living/loving and all the others. That these forms are conventions whose imaginary propriety serves a variety of religious and capitalist institutions does not mean that the desire for romantic love is an ignorant or false desire: indeed, these conventions express important needs to feel unconflicted and to possess some zone where intimacy can flourish.
THE LOVER DURAS UNIT INSTALL
As sites for theorizing and imaging desire, they manage ambivalence designate the individual as the unit of social transformation reduce the overwhelming world to an intensified space of personal relations establish dramas of love, sexuality, and reproduction as the dramas central to living and install the institutions of intimacy (most explicitly the married couple and the intergenerational family) as the proper sites for providing the life plot in which a subject has “a life” and a future. the conventional narratives and institutions of romance share with psychoanalysis many social and socializing functions. The thesis emerging from this comparison is quite compelling: In the latter half of Desire/Love (2012), Lauren Berlant addresses “the ways that fantasies of romantic love and of therapy posit norms of gender and sexuality as threats to people’s flourishing and yet are part of the problem for which they offer themselves as solutions” (87, emphasis added).