Jack Halberstam reviews Living on After Failure

Irving Goh. Living on After Failure: Affective Structures of Modern Life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2025. 224 pp.

Review by Jack Halberstam

25 June 2026

I wrote a book on failure, The Queer Art of Failure, over a decade ago, when some people still believed in alternative futures and in various forms of utopia, worlds to come, and noncatastrophic outcomes for human life. Some believed, in short, in potentiality, or as Paul Preciado called it in Testo Junkie, “potencia gaudendi.”[1] It was in this context that I proposed failure as a queer modality that, oddly, held utopian potential. In my book I proposed that in a society like the US, where success equates to reproductive normativity and the accumulation of capital, often at the expense of others, it may be possible to think of failure as a form of critique. Rather than seeing wealth and normal embodiment as achievements, I suggested, failure points to these categories as historically and structurally guaranteed to some and denied to others. Now, some fifteen years later, the real danger of this mode of capitalism has become clear—the winners of hypercapitalism win even when they lose, they literally cannot fail. The Trump era demonstrates what is wrong with zero-sum models of success—as wealth transforms into super-wealth, as politics becomes a blood sport in which the wealthy control every branch of government, as the media transforms into sound bites on social media platforms, as journalism is forced into a supposedly neutral both-sides endeavor, as education gets dismissed as an irrelevant arena solely for the training of elites, as authoritarian rule targets trans bodies, failing, losing, and their consequences get folded into the algorithms designed to let the winners keep winning. The logic of success and failure barely holds anymore. The rich fail and win anyway (Elon Musk lost massive numbers of sales in the aftermath of his exploits in DOGE, but he came away with a one trillion dollar pay package from Tesla anyway). Failure is not what it used to be.

In his new book, Living on After Failure, Irving Goh offers a devastating account of failure as a force that “structures our existence” (p. 2). Not an experience or an event, not an action or an outcome, not a cause nor an effect, failure, Goh proposes, is more a structure of feeling, in the Raymond Williams sense: it is a zone of inactivity where the social and the personal overlap and get expressed through and as a genre. Failure, he claims, must be thought of as failure, not as a resting place on the way to success, not as a moral lesson, not as enlightenment. Failure lacks use value and names an impasse or zone of inoperativity. Culling terms and theoretical maneuvers mainly from French deconstructive theory—Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, among others—Goh reads a set of novels and memoirs in which the negativity of failure blocks the urge in the protagonists to find a way through. Accordingly, in novels by Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, Kate Zambreno and in essays by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Goh takes us nowhere and leaves us there. Along the way, he explores the inutility of flopping, drifting, collapsing, suiciding, and sleeping.

Living on After Failure is both rigorous and compelling. Like Lee Edelman, Goh resists all temptations to offer solutions, find escape routes, or to rely on hope. But Goh’s archive is different from Edelman’s, and while Edelman often examines canonical, gay male-authored texts, to great effect, all of the texts that Goh works with in this book—save one by Edouard Leve—are authored by women. And yet, Goh has little to say about gender, sexuality, race, and class and the difference they make in the form, meaning, or affective experience of failure. What he calls the “dark care of the self” is mostly concerned with the self that wants to die by suicide, but it can also describe the nonactions of the protagonist in Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) (p. 85). Just to give one example of the difference that difference makes, Goh gestures towards a passage in Moshfegh’s novel where the protagonist dreams, from her prone position, of getting up and going to Coney Island, walking into the freezing ocean, and drifting off. This idea of drifting, a motion without a destination, allows Goh to segue to his next theme of aimless movement. But this episode in Moshfegh is remarkably similar to a passage towards the end of Torrey Peters’s novel, Detransition, Baby (2021), where Reese, a trans woman who has recently experienced a series of losses, also travels to Coney Island and also enters the icy waters of the Atlantic and also drifts there waiting for the cold waters to either take her or wake her. In Moshfegh, the fantasy is one of what Goh calls the “dark care of the self,” or self-obliteration, but in Peters’s novel, Reese, who is ambivalent about her action and its purpose, is plucked from the water by well-intentioned rescuers who see the trans woman not as drifting but as trying to kill herself. We do not ultimately know whether either the narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Reese is trying to kill themselves. We do know that even in their fictional worlds, these women occupy different relations to despair, drifting, failure, and repair. And while Moshfegh’s wealthy do-nothing narrator flops around unmolested in her existential failure, Reese’s failures solicit reparative efforts from the world even when she does not ask for them. Reese must be rescued and will not be believed when she insists that she did not want to kill herself. As she tries to explain that she was just doing a polar plunge, she realizes: “transness is not the most direct route to non-suicidal credibility.”[2] Here we can see that even suicide is a luxury, and while it would be nice to believe that failure is in us, sadly, right now, we can see that failure is all around us and the price of failure will also be charged to those who have been cast as its best representatives.

[1] Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York, 2013), p. 42.

[2] Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby: A Novel (New York, 2021), p. 326.