On the Inconvenience of Other People

by Lauren Berlant

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Sociology, Psychology, Essays, Feminism

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2022

About the author

Lauren Berlant was an English Professor at the University of Chicago, where they taught since 1984. Berlant received their Ph.D. from Cornell University. They wrote and taught on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

Reviews

[Andrew]

This was a tough read, for several reasons, and not least because of the pervasive knowledge that this will be, clearly unexpectedly, Berlant’s last book.

With that said, the first part of the intro had me punching the air, a feeling that will be familiar to those who have read Cruel Optimism. “Yes, yes, that is how it feels! That feeling is important! We do need to understand this to craft an effective politics!” And then…the endless list of citations of the Usual Suspects, many times more words spent on Foucault’s word-choice than on the actual world, close readings of a weird collection of media that mostly all just suggests Berlant stopped watching tv and movies sometime around 2006, an attempt to situate that work among scholars who largely seem interested in situating their work among other scholars, who largely seem interested in situating their work among other scholars…and you get the picture.

In some ways, Berlant in this mode reads as a kind of obverse to latter-day Sara Ahmed, where a revelatory point about a previously unreflective idiom or everyday action is driven into the ground again and again and again so many times that one is desperate for more depth and analysis. Here, a grenade of a point about inconvenience and attachment and, most tellingly, inconvenience as a possible positive affect, and the political effects of that, is lobbed into the fray, and then in the ensuing silence, we watch that flash fade away slowly but surely under the smothering cover of some shit from a fucking Todd Solondz movie and what kind of Foucault word we should call our current world versus our dream world.

In the end, I’ll still deeply miss Berlant because if nothing else, there are five to ten pages right at the start that really fucking make you think, and that’s a rare thing.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

took me long enough. this book is brilliant as berlant always was. it’s weird to read a book and miss an author after their death because of how intimate their writing is, but i felt that the whole time i read this. berlant’s books always offer so many little bits to chew on that you kind of just take with you into the world and work out in your own experiences. i just cannot recommend reading them enough.

[Kaye Lundy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hot take: critiques of society and social awareness that apply to everyone should be actually intelligible to those same people.

The only reason why I did not give this book a 1 is that the idea that it is generally founded on is good, i.e. the idea that all relationships disturb our equilibrium, costing us time and energy in a way that may be uncomfortable. I think that this is an important idea to keep in mind, especially when trying to hash out the question of what we owe each other as human beings.

That being said. The writing was aneurysm-inducing. I spent four years in college reading stuff like this- hell, I took a semester in METAPHYSICS for God's sake, and I still can't figure out half of what this text says. No book on philosophy or society or any other hippie-dippie topic is useful if it is not explained clearly and concisely, which this was not. Respectfully, there are probably much better books out there that get the same point across without requiring half as much Tylenol.

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

low key just kind of a frustrating book. the intro is really promising at times but the readings in the following 3 chapters and the coda are sort of tendentious. berlant wants these ambivalent object/scenes to offer "loosening" but in the process seems too assured that politics *doesn't* offer that--that politics is a genre of *assuredness.* dwelling on disassociation is worthwhile, but I don't think dwelling *in* it is. the part on Spahr probably the best part of the book but also Spahr kind of has the political sentimentality that Berlant abhors. there's still stuff to work with here--invonvenience is a helpful way of getting at transindividuality; affective infrastructure still a concept close to my heart; nonsovereign relationality is a helpful horizon. but living in the ellipsis doesn't offer so much to me.

[Aasritha · Rating 2 out of 5]

1) thought this book was abt being a hater
2) someone has said all of this before
3) did you really use nirbhaya in your last chapter and not fact check anything
4) it’s giving white woman virtue signaling/performance

[Declan · Rating 3 out of 5]

normally i don't mind dense theory but holy shit! respectfully! the self is a part of the other, and when we other others we other ourselves. and also life is uncomfortable but that's just living and we are uncomfortable (experiencing inconvenience) we can more accurately figure out our desires for ourselves, each other, society, etc.

nothing i didn't know, but i have been living in the lauren berlant cinematic universe for about two years, so it was nice to see the source text (QE)

[B. Lee-Harrison Aultman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's power resides, or resonates, as its ability to formalize what is not-yet named into a critical sensibility. I would go so far as to argue that it proposes different ways of life. And that alone would make a book of theory incredible. Every reader should prepare themself for a thoroughgoing, affectively intelligent, and carefully chosen vernacular that redescribes what Berlant (they/them) describes as so many "transitional infrastructures." It is a much needed intervention and ballast for a new critical theory. New, but not for its own sake. Berlant weaves together disparate strands of social thought from across disciplinary boundaries. Queer Marxisms, varying tenses of Afropessimism, idioms of Feminist Psychoanalysis, and the world-crafting ideas of Affect combine in unpredictable, sometimes shocking, ways. Berlant intended this book, which is sadly their last, to offer a glimpse into what is possible in the "long meanwhile" that they had characterized as the "impasse" in Cruel Optimism (2011, Duke). It is rare to describe a book about social and critical theory as a "page turner." But it was, and still is. It is divided into three thematic parts: Sex/Happiness, Democracy/Belonging, and Life/World. I find myself returning to key passages about infrastructures of transformation in a time troubled by notions of change itself. I found myself drawn to their critiques of public sphere discourse in the lineage of Jürgen Habermas, and talk about "the commons." But I have found most poignant of all their insights into depressive moods and, as one radical exemplar, suicidality, but not all. They are concerned with redescribing these scenes as wanting a life without the world that attends it. In this vein Berlant develops the idiom of dissociative infrastructures. These place inhabitable divisions between a life and world. A life is what we, in our differently impeded or privileged ways, make of the material conditions that the world, in all its overcloseness, can crowd out.

In short, Berlant is offering readers a new mode of thinking, of writing, and of reading. That's to say a new method for inhabiting the world. The hope is that we might all be better equipped to bear the inconvenience of each other's necessary proximity. That in bearing such close relations we might rethink the power of our relationality. And that in bearing what might otherwise feel unbearable we are able to fashion our lives in ways resembling a collective, a solidarity, or communion. There is a relation of cruel optimism here. But, if I have read them correctly, even that relation is temporary. The impasse can persist for only as long as our critical imaginations remain dormant.

We must be inconvenienced to think-with: new lexicons, new forms of life, and other people with whom we share the world, in albeit unevenly distributed allocations and access.

[rena ୨ৎ]

i really love berlant’s prose in a strange way, because it is so difficult for me to follow sometimes but also so revelatory. i felt about this book the same way that many felt: dumbfounded (in the best way) at the introduction, and then just sort of slugging through the rest of it. the ideas that they propose at the beginning of this text feel so large and significant, and while i wouldn’t say i was disinterested in the rest of the book, i did feel like i wished they had circled back to their original claims a little bit more.

[Rebecca Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for my political emotion seminar. Revisiting parts of this for a project I'm thinking through on utopia / heterotopia. Highly recommend -- one of Berlant's best works, and much more conversationally written than cruel optimism is.

[Micaela]

"Is We ever more than a heuristic coupled with a desire?"

[Aya Nassar]

As I expected, chapter two was my favourite.

[oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intro was genius - thought the book generally floundered when it strayed into “critical” rather than “theoretical” mode unfortunately.

[Clayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

One gets the feeling that Berlant holds so many intersecting theories, frameworks, and deconstructions at once while trying to express them all to the reader in a coherent way, and there’s me on the other side holding on for dear life.

She weaves intricate webs of referential meaning that is often difficult to follow, but only because it’s so much to hold at once, and she's insistent on staying with the friction of weaving without smoothing. And clearly her brain was so capable of holding the background information necessary for the task-- that I just find myself in awe.

It wasn’t always a pleasure to read. It was a struggle with many nuggets of exhausted and satisfying passages.

My favorite large chunk was the 3rd chapter on dissociation.

[Pooja · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.7

i wanted to like this more! the fundamental ideas that berlant pushes forward, such as the inconvenience drive, its relation to sovereignty, and her conceptualization of the commons through affect theory, are interesting. however, her methodology here was quite frustrating. i found the case selection to be a bit strange (to the detriment of her arguments), and there were many moments in which this book felt disjointed from the original premise. the introduction and first chapter, in my opinion, were much stronger than the remaining essays she included.

[Owen Ley · Rating 2 out of 5]

FINALLY done this omfg. written in the most insufferable new age academic language possible. for passages i didn’t understand i pretended they were made up words for a nonsensical creative fiction piece which made it more fun. multiple lines i had to reread a few times because of how outrageous they sounded even read some aloud to some oomfs lol. whole lot of words to not really say much soz. were some interesting ideas in the intro about nonsovereignty and some random gems scattered throughout, made me think about relationships differently. but most of it was just essays dissecting random movies/books/media and attributing a whole lotta meaning to them

[Ainsley Jeffery · Rating 2 out of 5]

The space between and the spaces among involve distances created by the disturbance of being close without being joined, and without mistaking the other’s flesh for one’s own or any object in the world or object world as identical to oneself. Nonsovereignty is not, here, the dissolution of an expected boundary. It’s the original experience of an affect, of being receptive, of being.

Just completely unfamiliar to me. I had added this to my 25 in 2025 list after readibng a short passage in 2024, but the entire piece together did not resonate. Deeply Heideggerian in its tradition. So many cultural examples but none connected with me.

[Ethan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe it was because this was the sole piece of "entertainment" I brought along with me on a 5-day hiking trip to Scotland with my mother but I struggled to get through this. Really small font size and nothing interesting or sensible to say after the introduction.

[Xinyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's not and should not be easy to read but this inconvenience of reading lends a form to thinking with Berlant and imagining a dissociative way of living without wanting. when textures of being become object/scenes, how do we make sense out of the scenes made?

[宗儒 李 · Rating 3 out of 5]

好難讀懂⋯

[Yuyue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lauren Berlant’s works often strike me in an affective sense. They move me, unsettle me and disorganise me a bit, or a lot, in a way that not that many, if any, academic books can. To quote themselves ‘When I say a book breaks me this is what I mean: I am changed by it, startled and thrilled that something has become unbound in me. I become the loosened object, in proximity to an uncomfortable enigma but not a fate.’ (p.171)

So, I like this book not so much because or not only because it has analytical merits, which it certainly does, but also because it speaks to me in some visceral and enigmatic way, and this encounter happened when I need to be spoken to, at a moment when I increasingly realised that this ‘me‘ is but an unstable and ever-changing subject in the midst of all sorts of intense academic, personal and relational transformations. In other words, the book has effectively become one of my objects of attachment. (But that attachment may itself be risky if not cruel, and is, if anything, equally prone to overdetermination)

But okay, as much as a lot of my love for Berlant or this book is not entirely rational, I did manage to write down some points of why I like it

The gist of this book, as much as I find it difficult to grasp, seems to be about inconvenience in a number of different senses: as an existential truth (that we have to depend on others rather than sustain a fantasy of sovereignty, no matter how difficult that is going to be), as the nature of any forms of relationality (that being with other is by definition non-sovereign, it is something that both drives us and impedes us in volatile and unexpected ways) and as a ground for justification for discrimination against ossified political differences (that some population are considered an inconvenience for the smooth operation of the society and therefore othered and excluded). I guess the latter one is not really new for me, as here inconvenience can simply be used interchangeably with concepts such as abject. But I was most stricken by the formal, namely an explicit focus on those aspects of 'being with others' that are incoherent, ambiguous, and nonsovereign, being that desire, love, democracy, or community, emphasising them to be the very necessity of human ontology rather than shying away from them.  

Ambivalence as the inevitable affective response to the inconvenience of other people, and to overdeterminations that dictate singular affect. It also, in Berlant's view, bears the potential for forging forms of solidarity based on how people are similarly governed affectively.

Infrastructure as the binding of the social and the structural. Forms and scenes of life that exist in animated solidity and always exceed representation.

In terms of ethics, the book gestures towards unlearning, recognising that 'objects are looser than they appear'(p.25) while also developing new ways to loosen your objects, as a third way other than holding onto it tightly or getting rid of it completely.

Methodologically, Berlant grounds their thesis on lengthy analyses of obscure films and texts. To be entirely honest, this is usually my least favourite part of Berlant’s work, or indeed any queer theory that originates from more of a humanities/literature tradition.

Stylistically, this book is almost peak Berlantian: dense, long and rhythmic prose, crisp and unexpected combination of phrases and concepts, animated deployment of the strange verbs that somehow make sense and make scenes: lubricate, metabolise, etc. As an example of this, p. 27: 'When I say I love you, it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive, or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really - or in my fantasies of it, anyway.'

They deliberately reject using parentheses which, in their view, implies ‘a hierarchies among knowledge’ (p.29). Reading Berlant is therefore mostly frustrating, but at times illuminating - it is an intensive experience like no other.

I’m also not entirely sure how well the concept of inconvenience works in terms of bringing the three quite disparate chapters together into a cohesive whole, although Berlant would probably argue that that’s exactly the point: the promise of a coherent theoretical framework is itself a fantasy. (Indeed, they state that their writing had always been ‘modular in that way, built through sections that allow a problem-cluster to be both established and transformed through its contact with specific object/scenes or cases (p. 11)’) But still, considering that the three chapters were written over a period of ten years if not longer, this might have resulted in many concepts being either unrelated (the linkage between inconvenience and infrastructure is weak at best) or too related (what’s the difference between a cruel attachment and an inconvenient attachment? Is this old wine in new bottles? )

But again, just like what she said ‘she did what she could do at the time‘ (p.29).

[Kate]

This was incredibly hard to read (related: I’ve never seen Last Tango).

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read. Another banger from Berlant.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

a subtle serve