bemusedbibliophile:

Unlearning is extremely painful, because you’re giving up your object. And I believe in pedagogy—I’m fundamentally a teacher. But I think teaching is really difficult, because the things you’re trying to get people to unlearn are things they hold close, and that are forms of life for them that structure their sense of continuity. Because learning and unlearning happen at the same time, there ought to be a lot of grace in the space of pedagogy.

Cruel Optimism is about how people will stay in relation to their object even if it destroys them, because they can’t bear giving up the pleasure of knowing the world in a particular way. So yes, unlearning is very painful because it means you have to experience a kind of complexity about moving through the world that you didn’t have before. And that’s very abstract, but it’s not abstract when you’re losing something.

Lauren Berlant in conversation with Bea Malsky, “Pleasure Won: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant,” The Point Magazine (x)