From Optimism to Failure..... A small step (1)

The Queer Art of Failure struck me as a true companion piece to Cruel Optimism.  

One is a pessimistic book about optimism, while the other is a joyful book about failure; one is about a desperate, suffocating form of straightness, while the other embraces a happy form of queerness. 

While the book is not directly dedicated to Berlant, it very much reads as an ongoing dialogue with her and her work. And the acknowledgments to the book certainly seem to confirm this, when Halberstam suggests that the book is partly a product of the joy he experienced when listening to Berlant's summarising an episode of South Park. 

The Queer Art is, indeed, permeated with joy; it seems to be surfing on an an eruption of laughter that ripples through the book. 

One of the central points of the book is that laughter itself can be a starting point for theory. (In other words: it is a book about affect, but it also asks: which affects uphold a theoretical project?)