But Riva is not in an absolute heap, destroyed by discomposure. Riva, her face half covered, is probably weeping. Why? She looks happy because she’s still and her face tilts up and because her tail seems intimately to brush Riva on the floor in the background. In the painting, Zora, the dog, blind in one eye and barred by the cone she wears from touching where it’s tender, looks into the air and seems happy. The painting here and also on the paperback edition’s cover is Riva Lehrer’s If Body: Riva and Zora in Middle Age.
Note on the Cover Image: If Body: Riva and Zora in Middle Age Image: Riva Lehrer, Riva and Zora in Middle Age, 2006, gouache on paper, 36"x24". Republished with permission from Cruel Optimism (2011). The following note on a painting by Riva Lehrer speaks to these concerns in Berlant's characteristically attentive, insightful, and capacious prose, which had such a profound influence on so many.
The work argues that trauma, injury, and the vitalizing social comedy of getting through things together are not exceptions to the ordinary but the disturbance we’re inside of as we make, refuse to reproduce, and move through, worlds.”
#RIVA RIVA SONG MEANING HOW TO#
Lauren Berlant once summarised the questions guiding their work as follows: “Why and how do people stay attached to fantasies of a life that are also wearing them out? How is it possible to unlearn visceral responses that reproduce supremacist and privileged imaginaries of sovereign comfort and freedom? How to use the pleasures of attachment to make sustainable alter-worlds in the present that involve creative solidarity and critical judgment? What’s the relation between critique and transformative social vision? In these scenes of relation, state, juridical, and institutional practices tangle with more informal social conventions and movements. Lauren Berlant considers what our bodies, attachments, and solidarities make possible in the midst of structural cruelty.
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