In “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency),” Lauren Berlant suggests that “the space opened up by slow death” can help us “recast some taxonomies of causality, subjectivity, and life-making embedded in normative notions of agency” (99). Here please working through Berlant’s theory of agency, as it is operative in our contemporary moment, and in relation to the case study of obesity / eating that she explores in this essay. You might, for instance, think about the model of sovereignty that she is working against, as well as her idea of interruptive or lateral agency. Or you might zoom in on the idea of “slow death” (or the attendant concept of “crisis ordinariness”) insofar as it engenders certain modes (and indeed certain fantasies) of agency. However you approach this task, note that I do not expect you to give anything like a comprehensive account of Berlant’s ideas about agency: Rather, I’d like you to focus in on a key term, passage, or idea in the essay and try to give an account of how it informs her particular intervention into ideas about human agency.
