Lauren Berlant’s legacy in contemporary political theory

Losing Lauren Berlant in 2021 was depressing. For weeks I would wake abruptly in the early morning only to cry: my world—our world—had become profoundly impoverished with Lauren’s passing. Mourning with friends from the University of Chicago, where Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English, helped to communalize the experience. So did returning to their vast archive of work, which spans eight books (two co-authored), dozens of articles and chapters, and many interviews and recorded lectures over more than thirty years. To differing degrees, for all the contributors to this Critical Exchange, working through Berlant’s ideas and concepts was also a way of working through their loss and what it means for our discipline, especially as political theorists were becoming more aware of Berlant’s scholarship following the prescient intervention of Cruel Optimism (2011).