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.