On the Inconvenience of Other People

In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues their exploration of our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.

Praise

“This book is as magisterial as it is nonpretentious. With attention to detail and a sensitivity to suffering, Lauren Berlant works within the textures of everyday life and language to think about and dislodge the many intractable, irritating, obstructive objects and structures that get in the way of living well. Berlant has left us with advice for reading and for living: use the contradictions introduced by objects, exploit their mutability, dwell in the gaps opened by their incoherence to think through the social world in its intersectional damage and complexity. A brilliant book, a singular and disconcerting style, a practice of solidarity.” — Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

“Lauren Berlant’s arguments are both politically challenging and deeply satisfying. They force you to reset your political compass in order to see and act in the world anew. It’s Berlant at their most brilliant, full of treasures to discover.” — Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly

“Building on their ongoing project of foregrounding and destabilizing our understanding of certain affective modes and how they structure relationality in trauma and precarity, Lauren Berlant offers brilliant readings that take on a classical concern: how do we live with others? On the Inconvenience of Other People is a rich, endlessly generative and melancholic work.” — Rebecca Wanzo, author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging