eli nova rose
April 25, 2025

I worked with Lauren Berlant in grad school from about 2006 to 2014. And when they died, it was such a loss. Now I have these memories I don’t know what to do with.

1. just a thing

One time I got sick at a workshop dinner and Lauren drove me home, putting my bike in the back seat of their car, a Prius. When I was getting my bike out of the car, it left a gnarly grease stain on the cushion. I was mortified; I started to scrub it.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lauren said, “it’s just a thing.”

2. unconscious

Once, across from the used bookstore on 57th Street, Lauren told me something optimistic that I couldn’t understand and wanted to disagree with.

When I protested, they retorted, “I’m talking to your unconscious.”

Now I wonder what I was saying to their unconscious.

3. fort/da

I wrote something about how Lauren’s theory of the subject centers around Freud’s fort/da, a child’s game of peekaboo with an object that describes the comedy of loss, what’s trapped and yet promising about social situations. Fort/da is a little kid throwing away a toy, observing that it’s gone, and then getting it back, and then repeating that, forever. And I thought I found something nonbinary and extremely generative in that comedy.

Afterwards — it was the last time I talked to Lauren — we texted about my kid Faye’s latest version of fort/da.

“She throws herself on the ground by jumping off something, yells IT HURTS, and then repeats a thousand times,” I explained.

“It’s like the joy of surviving a nightmare,” Lauren replied.

4. I’m OK

In 2017 my partner Talia and I met Lauren in a park in Chicago, as we were in transit from Los Angeles to Cleveland, baby in tow. As Lauren approached and sat down on the grass with us, I asked how they were doing.

“I’m OK,” they said, and hesitated for an instant, and then explained that they had just received this devastating rare cancer diagnosis.

I think a lot about this way of being OK that keeps composure in such a moment, the emotional strength it must take to do that.

And the brief moment of hesitation before they disclosed anything, that little pause — they were so aware of the high stakes of disclosure.

5. pragmatism

I spent years failing at finding a job in academia and Lauren, always the optimist, constantly sent me job listings that came their way.

One time I wrote back that, while I wasn’t optimistic about myself, I appreciated their optimism on my behalf.

They said, “It’s not even optimism, it’s just pragmatism: I want you to live!”

I was so depressed professionally in those days; I must have needed to lean on other people’s attachment to existence. In the bad moments, it can feel like other people want us to live first, and then we relearn the habit from them.

6. violence and knowledge

Here’s Lauren’s comment on the first seminar paper I wrote for them, which was about the violence of academic writing and the celebrity culture around academic “stars.”

I can’t tell, still, whether your claims are, ultimately, that to be not reproducing the violence of class distinction, academic knowledge in the humanities needs to be written in a register you already have a sense for. Do you believe in plain speech, straightforward argument? Are there examples of academic writing modes that you respect? Do you think it’s possible for a collectivity to be excited about a thought that opens things up without it being shorthanded through the author’s name or “branded,” becoming a metasign of value added, and if that happens, does that degrade the thought inevitably or merely instantiate the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor? Also, how do you account for the fact that most thought in any vernacular doesn’t utilize logical argument but manifests positions, often incoherently?

I don’t think I ever really answered those questions; I just went off to write about something else.

7. impressionist reading

Metacommentary: It often feels like no one really reads Lauren Berlant. People evidently absorb the affect of the texts, the fantasy of reading it, and a few keywords and sentences, and they get an “impressionist understanding” as Erin Maglaque puts it, and somehow most of the depth and precision of it just vanishes into an ocean of affects and sensations.

I guess it speaks to other people’s unconscious too, which is and isn’t quite what Lauren would have wanted.

8. metapedagogy

Lauren became one of my dissertation advisors — I’m not quite sure how it happened. They supported me writing some edgy critical (and in hindsight, kind of problematic) stuff about graduate pedagogy in my department; that was the first step in it. But it was always a lot — like being in class with them was a lot, their aura and reputation were a lot, and sometimes their comments on my writing were a lot to process (even though they always came with a bunch of praise). Lauren could be very open and yet very guarded — it’s probably impossible to be that successful, that well-connected, without having some strong boundaries and compartments, particularly with the students — and I think I wanted, explicitly, to have teachers who were less hierarchical and authoritarian, unlike the old guard.

Their melancholy, critical essay about feminism and pedagogical intimacy was one of the first things I read about teaching that really made any sense to me — ironically it was about the death of their feminist teacher. It probably took years for that text to really sink in, but I loved that essay so much the first time I read it. It made me understand how I might be able to be close to my teacher in some ways, distant in others. I didn’t realize it might be preparation for losing them too.

Eventually they told me something very meta about this, like, some grad students just want an impersonal advising relationship, and some want to be personally close, and you don’t give all of them the same things. But I wanted the friendship — inasmuch as that became possible over time, I definitely wanted the friendship.

(I was always a kid who was friends with my teachers — this was already true for me in primary school.)

9. rejection

I remember being really mad at Lauren once, really just once, when I desperately needed a job, and they encouraged me to apply for a gender studies TA gig, and then rejected my application. It’s not your area of expertise, they said, and I’m hiring someone else who works in gender studies.

I felt so betrayed and angry, and finally we had coffee a couple of months later, and kind of talked it out. I really wished I had the kind of advisor who would support me institutionally, which was not what happened.

10. the books

I couldn’t read Lauren’s books until I was no longer a grad student. It was already a lot just to converse, to read together, and so on, and I wasn’t sure I could absorb the books.

It turns out that I love the books a lot, though — I found them easier to read from having known the author.

11. writing in public

We used to run into each other at the same South Side coffeeshops — we both really loved coffeeshops, something about their atmosphere, the quiet publicity of it — and sometimes, more often as time went on, we would just sit together at the same table, not talking, just writing quietly.

12. so different

Once I was asking Lauren how they were doing when they were sick, and they wrote back with this thought about how I had changed from the depressive and hypercritical kid I had been at age 24:

I think about you a lot

And the tenderness with which you reach out

So different from what it was like when we met

Isn’t it a funny thing – that we would have friends who would see us change over time? And not scorn it?

13. babies

LB was pretty nonchalant when I said I was getting married, but became highly enthusiastic when Talia and I had a baby, sending gifts and generally displaying an adorable enthusiasm like some sort of tenured fairy godmother or honorary aunt.

14. working

Lauren worked so hard — materially speaking, they had all the institutional arrangements to facilitate nonstop reading, teaching and writing; and they didn’t have kids; and they were so deeply invested in their work; and worked late at night and early in the morning.

It must have taken a lot to work so hard, for so long.

15. a little bit of psychoanalysis

Lauren taught me to take seriously ambivalence as an object of inquiry. I sometimes felt that their concept of ambivalence could have been pushed even farther, but they were very attuned to psychoanalytic accounts of conflicting attachments overlaid with fantasy and intersubjective systems. They told me that psychic splitting (like putting all the mistakes on your partner to preserve your own self-idealizations) was a “fucking nightmare,” and they were one of the first people who ever talked to me about going to couples’ counseling, which I appreciated.

16. reciprocity

I love this formula without totally understanding it: Feminism promised reciprocity but reciprocity has no rules.

Anthropologists always say reciprocity does have rules, but I think Lauren was thinking about non-actuarial kinds of exchange, more like “staying attuned to each other throughout a long, uncertain, unsteady, singular encounter with the Other.”

17. seeing the sun

Here’s another late chat we had:

Me: We’re submerged in the ordinary — Faye says “I see the sun, can you see the sun?” — and I hope you can see the sun too!

Lauren: I never stop seeing the sun.

18. seminar

I met Lauren in the first place because a critical theory dude told me to take their seminar, saying they were known to be absolutely brilliant. The first day, Lauren read a really dense high-speed lecture about Deleuze that seemed calculated to weed out anyone who wasn’t seriously interested. It was a bit overwhelming, and the other students could be intimidating too. I was a little bit skeptical. I was skeptical of everything in those days.

19. maxims

What I got from Lauren, in the form of maxims:

20. so ironic

I found this scathing yet deadpan Lauren comment on my dissertation:

Sometime you should read something on irony/parody (linda hutcheon/wayne booth, on and on)

Like whoa, the feeling of spending years writing my very metacritical dissertation only to get told that it’s funny I never read anything about irony…

21. theory practice

I got this teaching advice from LB the first time I taught a class — it’s about what to do in class discussions.

When someone notices something, you say, did anyone else notice something like that? And you start collecting like patterns re gender, space, etc. Then you might be on the board making a chart, or you might say, we’re calling that pattern “gendered”; or that pattern “unconscious” or that pattern “lame”. How do we know, what are the cues that a pattern is x? Then there will be arguments, or you make arguments–“for the sake of argument” what if I said, well one likeness is gender, but another is that they’re all students. was there anyone in the room who didn’t look x (principle of difference)? so then you get in to patterning, attention, training for power, etc. Or so one way of thinking about this is gender, and another is safety. How do we find evidence in actions and atmospheres about the force of either principle guiding action?

In other words, you’re tracking patterns and then you’re making patterns, and then you’re suggesting differences, and putting them next to each other, and then you’re pulling back and summarizing and referring to the reading or last class or what that student said last time. You can break them up into small groups and ask them to perform exercises in storytelling and curiosity. They listen to each other and then ask questions and then the storyteller has to see whether their story changes if their data is reorganized around that question.

Whatever you do try not to nod and move on, it’s really defeating. say I want to think about that and I’ll return to it. say, hmm, this makes me wonder about x, did anyone notice x? Build on the first thing and go meta when you have to, like let’s gather a few scenes, who wants to start?

The advice that helped me the most become a teacher is to interview what people say or make a brainstorming place for a topic that people can converge in, and then try to remember to summarize it in the middle when you feel it’s getting diffuse. You develop a sense over time how to let things go and reign them in.

How fun! Theory practice!

Yesterday, our little kid (now six) brought home an assignment from kindergarten: you had to go around your house together, noticing all the patterns you could see. I was amazed that we found so many — the repeating bricks and tiles, the wavy lines in a glass jar, the octaves of a piano, the texture of a paper towel.

22. dream

In July 2022, I had this dream:

I dreamt I got to see Lauren Berlant again, and in the dream they were as vivacious as ever, and as thoughtful, laughing, sometimes incredulous, sometimes stentorian, better connected to the world than I am, and implausibly decked out in a floral skirt. I think Lauren would have turned 65 this year, but instead they’ve been gone just a year now since Wednesday, and it’s so strange, now that I think about it, how the mind recognizes these bleak anniversaries without knowing it.

23. conventional femininity

I remember Lauren being merrily incredulous once because they had gone to some old-school university Women’s Board meeting and had put on a skirt (possibly also heels) for the occasion. A reflexive moment that summed up something about their relationship to hyperconventional femininity — a form to be inhabited only briefly under extreme duress.

24. fun

I found an email I wrote in 2007 that had a few different points, the last of which was this (all lower case):

(3.) would you be interested in joining my committee? i’d like to work with you more on pedagogy and i’ve learned a bunch so far and i think it would be fun. if you want to.

So I guess I do know how I came to work with Lauren: I asked.

25. the personal

Lauren wanted to be remembered as an intellectual, period. I’m not sure they would have wanted all these personal reminiscences.

But I didn’t find that it was ever easy to separate the personal and the intellectual.

I can’t find the words to tell you, exactly, what it all comes down to.

I’ve tried to show you, instead, a few fragments and scenes of a long conversation that made a teeny little world, something weirdly world-making for me.

A note about pronouns: I used “they/them” here as I always found that to be an interesting latter-day invitation from Lauren, even though obviously it was always “she” back in the day. I think Lauren would have been one of the original they/she people, if that had been an option in the 20th century.

eli nova rose » writing