“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.” - Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence
“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.” - Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly
“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.” - Rebecca Wanzo, author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging
"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
"On the Inconvenience of Other People invites the reader to sit with the desire for and inconvenience of sociality and its transformations both in the private and the political. It is very worthwhile to accept this invitation." - Olivia Poppe, Rezens.tfm
"The works above are, in intimate ways, rooted in humankind’s inherent intertwinement with the worlds and the words of poetry." - Jessi Maceachern, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
"Berlant offers brilliant insights about the progressive and regressive forces that produce, promote, and frustrate individuals' (perceived) freedoms. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." - Choice
"As a last book, On the Inconvenience of Other People is very pleasingly Berlantian: witty, difficult, and theoretical, with attention paid to the ordinary, fantasy, attachment, and sex through a close reading practice that feels like it turns the texts inside out. The line to the book from their previous publications is clear. You and I are left with the rich, pleasurable, inconvenient archive of thought and feeling that is Berlant’s work." - Daryl Maude, Qui Parle
"Lauren Berlant, from a philosophical angle, basically tries to unpack the phrase from Sarte that hell is other people — and thinking about that phrase through the lens of inconvenience. And one of the things that Berlant argues very eloquently is that inconvenience is, itself, political because it registers along this spectrum of political affects and feelings. But it also invites an awareness of political expectations, rights, privileges, freedoms, et cetera." - Sheila Liming, The Ezra Klein Show
"On the Inconvenience of Other People is a testament to how critical engagement with the world can be frustrating but also generative and point to 'the copresence of an otherwise' (16) and may be proof that there is a future after Lauren Berlant’s death. Although their last publication, the book is anything but final; rather, it is a road map or an invitation to imagine breaking and making the world anew." - Simone Pfleger, Seminar
"The book is rich in both content and form throughout all its sections, with Berlant cleverly interweaving different but nuanced social dynamics to invite the readers into the complexities of the world we live in. . . . A great literary and philosophical masterpiece to open us to the contradictory nature of human existence in a world of mighty opposites, where there is no straight way to life."
- Joseph Mwita Kisito, Feminism & Psychology
"One of the quiet pleasures of such a book is its invitation to recognize more expansively the network of teachers who have enabled each of us—to repurpose one of Berlant’s lovelier formulas—to write beyond our own historically moth-worn personalities and the clumsy limits of our individual ordinariness." - Ana Schwartz, Early American Literature
"Drawing on an immense wealth of knowledge from queer theory, affect theory, and postcolonial studies, Berlant is able to provide an unpretentious and brilliantly insightful theory of relationality. The frequently tragic and emotional breakdowns depicted in the literary and filmic case studies are handled with mastery and care to unearth techniques for breaking down the world of conventions. As affecting as that work on breaks is, the monograph is most affecting when it feels out the process of building new infrastructures of relationality from the remnants of those breaks. The intimacy in Berlant’s voice, and in the theoretical approach here, serve to make inconvenience feel like an almost magical condition."
- Nicholas Adler, SubStance
"Individuals who are interested in affect, sex and desire, democracy and other approaches to collective life, and theories of publics/publicity and the commons will find a rich archive of material to work with in this book. Readers who are new to Berlant’s work can dive right in. Berlant has left us with the resources for living among life’s darkness, complexity, and inconveniences. A gift, a project, an invitation to 'keep . . . showing up' (172)." - Kaitlyn Patia, The Comparatist
"As they put it in the very first pages of their book, 'Mostly, people are inconvenient, which is to say that they have to be dealt with. "They" includes you.' Berlant’s book spirals out from this impishly simple claim along several lines, confidently blending affect studies, queer theory, and media criticism to present a nuanced portrait of all the myriad possibilities our inconvenient attachments to the world and everything in it bear. The result is a book that appeals to literary scholars, critical theorists, and social critics alike that, in a style characteristic of the late Berlant, mingles play and considered thoughtfulness."
- Weston Leo Richey, E3W Review of Books
"This work provides clear examples of the problem or even the impossibility of maintaining the pretense of ordered subjectivity imagined as guaranteed in liberal democracy as well as the necessity of navigating the harm by confronting our nonsovereignty." - Jake Sanders, European Journal of American Studies
