In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant radically reconfigures the relationship between desire and survival within the affective economies of late capitalism, demonstrating how subjects remain attached to structures that actively obstruct the very flourishing they promise to secure. Within this framework, optimism does not signify a positive emotional disposition; rather, it functions as an affective technology of attachment through which individuals orient themselves toward imagined scenes of stability — social mobility, romantic reciprocity, liberal citizenship, or professional security — even when these conditions have become historically and materially unattainable. The concept of “cruel optimism” therefore emerges as a critical grammar of contemporary precarity, particularly visible within neoliberal societies where subjects continue to invest desire in institutions incapable of sustaining the fantasy of the “good life.” Berlant develops this argument through concepts such as the impasse, understood as a suspended temporality in which ordinary life persists under conditions of permanent structural crisis. A paradigmatic illustration appears in her analysis of the erosion of the post-Fordist social contract, wherein labour no longer guarantees ontological or economic stability yet continues to operate as the normative horizon of legitimate subjectivity. Consequently, Berlant demonstrates that affect does not exist outside political economy, but rather constitutes one of its central mechanisms of reproduction. The enduring theoretical significance of the text lies in its capacity to reveal that contemporary survival depends paradoxically upon attachments whose persistence reproduces the very impossibility of inhabiting a fully liveable life.