Page "Lauren Berlant" Paragraph 1

She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought ( Habermas ) that attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation.

This work also sees sentimentality, trauma, and related public modes not as the opposite of rationality but in line with other visceral, yet cultivated ways of knowing and being attached to the world.