On the Inconvenience of Other People
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Theorist Berlant (Cruel Optimism) (1957–2021) examines "the overcloseness of the world and how we live it" in this sharp collection. In a series of three "assays" plus a coda (an assay "tests things out, tries out various approaches..."), Berlant explores "alternative ways of being inconvenient and living with inconvenience" while "feel out how to create other kinds of social relation from within the world that needs disturbing." "Sex in the Event of Happiness" uses films to ask such questions as "How can a sex-positive person remain thoughtfully so given the pervasiveness of sexual violence?"—while "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times" investigates what the word we means in times of upheaval, as during the Covid-19 pandemic. References to Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Isherwood's A Single Man, and Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely help Berlant develop the concept of "inconvenience," explaining it as "the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation" and arguing that inconvenience can prompt "navigating and generating change from within the long broken and fractious middle of life." The author is as sharp as ever at drawing from postcolonial, queer, and affect theory. Fans of Berlant's bright, electrifying thinking will want to check this out.
