Rajan-Su Neg

Cruel Optimism

The affirmative’s intent to "improve" upon the status quo places subjects into a continuous cycle of cruel optimism.  The affirmative leads to believe that we can improve. This sets the subject up for inevitable failure creating a destructive cycle of loss

Berlant 6 ~[Lauren, professor of English at U of Chicago, "Cruel Optimism" A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17-3~]

"Cruel optimism" names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility.
AND
attachment, I will describe the shape of my transference with her thought.

There is no return, the affirmative’s impacts have already happened and will continue to happen. The affirmatives futile attempt to repair or solve does nothing but destroy agency resulting in social death.

Dibley 12 ~[Ben, researcher and writer based in Sydney, research associate at the Institute for Culture and Society, The University of Western Sydney. "Nature is us: The Anthropocene and species-being" Transformations no. 21 http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_21/article_07.shtml-http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_21/article_07.shtml)

The Anthropocene is here to stay. There is no return to a benevolent Holocene
AND
of the strange planet to which capital has abducted us" (7). 

Our advocacy is to reject the affirmative and embrace slow death as a mechanism to rethink and reform our embracement of sovereignty calculative thought, and desire.

Berlant 7 ~[Lauren, prof. of English at University of Chicago, Critical Inquiry, "Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency) 33, summer~]

Because of these convolutions and variations sovereignty is an inadequate concept for talking about human
AND
full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; embodying, alongside embodiment.14