This lecture returns to the antisocial thesis in queer theory to explore the contentions about race, reparativity, and utopian thought that have come to characterize it. Organized as an extended deliberation on Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s recent book, Sex, or the Unbearable, the lecture reads their collaboration in broader terms than they offer, linking the institutional, analytic, and affective terrain in which their conversation moves. It opens by considering what they most share—a commitment to the value of negativity and nonsovereignty for social theory—before exploring the distinctly different sensibilities they offer, with Edelman insisting on a negativity born of the death drive and Berlant finding political sustenance in ordinary acts aimed at social change. Plotting these differences, the lecture ends by delineating what remains irresolvable about queer theory's antisocial debate.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University, where she teaches courses in feminist and queer theory, U.S. Studies, and critical race studies.