In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore 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.
ISBN-13: 9781478018452
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 09-20-2022
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.53(d)
Series: Writing Matters!
Lauren Berlant (1957–2021) was George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author and coauthor of many books, including The Queen of America Goes to Washington City; The Female Complaint; Cruel Optimism; Sex, or the Unbearable; and The Hundreds, all also published by Duke University Press.
What People are Saying About This
The Force of Nonviolence - Judith Butler
“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.”
Assembly - Michael Hardt
“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.”
The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging - Rebecca Wanzo
“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.”
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Table of Contents
Note to the Reader vii
Preface. What Now? ix
Introduction. Intentions 1
1. Sex. Sex in the Event of Happiness 31
2. Democracy. The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times 75
3. Life. On Being in Life without Wanting the World: No World Poetics, or, Elliptical Life 117
Coda. My Dark Places 149
Acknowledgments 175
Notes 177
Bibliography 205
Index 231
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