ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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."

-- Publishers Weekly

"In Inconvenience, that pedagogy is sly, confiding, and digressive. . . . On the Inconvenience of Other People is, finally, a book in all its feels—from happiness to a death wish—all at once. And it’s the last work of a scholar whose theory felt personal, and whose death was mourned far beyond those who knew Berlant: a perfect encapsulation of intimacy within publicity and the publicity of intimacy, a monument to their very work."

-- Hannah Zeavin Bookforum

"A coherent and helpful addition to the ideas, now influential throughout the culture, that Berlant wrought in 2011’s Cruel Optimism."

-- Jo Livingstone 4Columns

"Offers moments of stunning clarity with the kinds of pithy declarative revelations that can easily spiral a reader toward an entirely new outlook on life. Their writing is a paragon of world-breaking and world-making insight."

-- Megan Volpert Popmatters

"Berlant was anything but ordinary. They wanted their writing to draw the reader into the unpredictability of their own mind. . . . Berlant asked the reader to remain in the thought with them, accepting its formlessness and volatility. Writing was a race against life. . . . The breathlessness was left intact in the prose. If the result is that one sometimes comes away from Berlant’s books with only an impressionistic understanding, that might be an appropriate response to a theorist of vibes."

-- Erin Maglaque London Review of Books

"A book about proceeding in brokenness, On The Inconvenience of Other People is simultaneously an experiment, if not a map, on how to do theory in a damaged world."

-- Lilly Markaki LSE Review of Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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