Abstract This paper interprets Chris Kraus’s novel Torpor (2006) as an experiment in what could be coined an ‘anthropology of unhappiness’. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism and Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness as a normative ideal, the analysis presents Sylvie and Jerome as individuals shaped by 20th century trauma, historical awareness, and the exhaustion of the modernist legacy. Their relationship presents the torpor – biological, affective and historical – as a dominant structure of feeling that emerges from Holocaust memory, psychoanalytic impasse and the decline of futurity at the so-called end of history. Through autofiction, Kraus produces a form of life writing that aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s idea of literature as symptomatology: like Sade and Masoch, she portrays subjectivity not as a pathology, but as a diagnostic force. Although torpor appears to be the antithesis of becoming, Kraus also explores how deterritorialized forms of torpor can generate a paradoxical vitality that is aligned with necropolitics. The novel’s feminist rejection of reproductive futurism mirrors Judith Butler’s reinterpretation of Antigone and resonates with queer temporalities that challenge chrononormativity. Ultimately, Torpor charts a transition from melancholic attachment to a new, post-romantic structure of feeling – an affective regime in which unhappiness becomes epistemological and ‘Krausism’ emerges as a 20th century mode of life and thought.
Martin Bartelmus (Thu,) studied this question.