Facing the Drive

On the Inconvenience of Other People marks the culmination of Lauren Berlant’s engagement with nonsovereignty. Though that notion develops continuously across the stages of Berlant’s career, it fully emerges as a keyword only in the series of three short dialogues that Lauren and I published in 2014 as Sex, or the Unbearable.1 Notwithstanding the differing intellectual investments inflecting our takes on nonsovereignty, we share in that book an attunement to its role in shaping the affective experiences of the social and psychic subject. As we jointly write in the preface, “To encounter ourselves as nonsovereign . . . is to encounter relationality itself, in the psychic, social, and political senses of the term. For that reason, this book attends to those moments when negativity disturbs the presumption of sovereignty by way of an ‘encounter,’ specifically, an encounter with the estrangement and intimacy of being in relation” (Berlant and Edelman, viii).

Berlant returns to this problematic in On the Inconvenience of Other People, even glossing the condition described by that title as “experiencing nonsovereign relationality” (x). The introduction makes clear just how far that condition reaches for Berlant: “We cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other. This is to say: to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in . . . To attend to inconvenience is to attend to our constant exposure to stimulations that need to be processed” (7). On the Inconvenience of Other People unfolds through a series of aesthetic cases that engage this continuous pressure of otherness and the routinized experience of social friction in what Berlant calls “the catastrophic ordinary.” In doing so, it investigates “the complexities of staying attached to life” (170) for the “imperfect and flailing subject” forced “to generate alternative forms of getting through episodes and existence” (120).

The book, in its foundational gesture, traces those complexities to the “the pressure of adapting to ‘other people,’” a pressure experienced as disrupting “the sovereign fantasy . . . of being in control” (3). In that framework inconvenience corresponds to relation’s affront to the subject’s autonomy insofar as it imposes a demand that the subject is unable to refuse: a demand for reaction, response, adjustment to the breach of its self-enclosure. Inconvenience thus designates, according to Berlant, “a subjectivity that is always subjectivity-in-brokenness, if brokenness means a subjectivity that is not just shaped but constituted by the external world’s force” (171). This constellation of inconvenience and brokenness, in the terms Berlant proposes, “registers one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence” (3), of porousness to the world, insofar as “inconvenience disturbs the vision of yourself . . . that supports your sovereign fantasy” (3). But as if on command, at the moment it invokes the “pressures of coexistence” that threaten to puncture sovereignty’s balloon, the text betrays the coexistence of its own contradictory pressures. On the one hand, it argues that “wounded sovereignty,” seen as “parallel to . . . wounded narcissism” (3), follows from the fact that “nonsovereign relationality—the inconvenience of other people—is inevitably a feature of the sensual ordinary of the world” (x). On the other hand, the account of this “wounded sovereignty” leading “inevitably” to inconvenience gives way to a framing of such fantasy as “geopolitically specific” to the “liberal colonial state and the citizenship subjectivity shaped by it” (3). Thus, all relationality entails inconvenience by disturbing our sovereign fantasy, but that sovereign fantasy is also described as specific to particular subjects.

Is the “we,” then, who “cannot be in any [emphasis mine] relation without being inconvenient to each other” confined to the “citizenship subjectivity” of the “liberal colonial state”? Is some other relational mode available to the “others” of this “we”? That prospect, however briefly proposed—a nod to “US scholars of indigeneity” (3) and it disappears—foregrounds Berlant’s attachment to Aristotelean multiplicity, to open-ended variation, over structural imperative, even at the moment of articulating the structural imperative of inconvenience. To the extent that Berlant turns to inconvenience as a lever to shift or displace imperatives, this gesture toward those not shaped by the need to defend a “sovereign fantasy” establishes a ground from which to challenge the a priori status of structures tout court, even at the cost of challenging the structural basis of inconvenience. Reading the sovereign fantasy as “an effect of an ideology of settler-state control over personal and political territories of action,” Berlant can affirm that “sovereign fantasy is not hardwired into personality” (3). But insofar as it localizes that fantasy as an effect of the “liberal colonial state,” the text resists its own attachment to the universality of inconvenience, “at whatever scale” and “whatever tone it takes” (3), and to inconvenience’s intractability. Let this tension serve, for the moment, to anticipate the ambivalence, the enabling ambivalence, of the text’s relation to nonsovereignty, which, I will argue, it manages to impress into the service of a “politicized affect theory” (134) only insofar as it introduces a “sovereign fantasy” of its own.

Much like sovereign fantasy itself, Berlant’s gesture toward modes of relation not bound by the logic of sovereign fantasy establishes a boundary between self and other whose traversal entails inconvenience and thus affirms inconvenience as structurally bound to subjectivity. As Berlant writes, “inconvenience stands for the fact that attachment is never easy and always, in the end, . . . a threat to one’s grandiosity, one’s own organization of reception and defense” (170). In this way the inconvenience of otherness reflects the breach of a self-construction like the formal structure of the ego as modeled on the bounded human form. Thus, Freud can describe the ego as “first and foremost a bodily ego,” as “not merely a surface entity, but . . . the projection of a surface” (1923, 25). In its status as a membrane or barrier that gives rise to “surface-differentiation” (25), this ego formalizes consciousness precisely as the consciousness of self and other while preserving the primitive pleasure-ego that nurtures the sense of sovereignty. If, as Berlant asserts, “to attend to inconvenience is to attend to our constant exposure to stimulations that need to be processed” (7), then those stimulations are border-crossings that shape and threaten sovereignty.

Deployed by Berlant in its psychological sense, “stimulations” refers, as the OED notes, to any event that excites a nerve impulse and occasions a response. So defined, it collocates, to quote Berlant, “the pressure of the proximity of many different kinds of tension, positively and negatively valenced” (xi). The apparent differences among these tensions in terms of how they are valenced, though, should not distract from the fact that all of them are experienced as “inconvenience,” a word defined by the OED as “something that interferes with ease or comfort, or causes trouble; a disadvantage, a discomfort.” Berlant thus predicates our affective economy on otherness as inherently disturbing even while maintaining that the subject as such is driven to pursue such disturbance. Calling this imperative the “inconvenience drive,” Berlant proceeds to define it as the “drive to keep taking in and living with objects,” so that, paradoxically, as Berlant expresses it, “‘inconvenience’ . . . is more like ‘attachment’” (6).

This assertion demands our attention, as does the desire that calls it forth. After all, in the very same paragraph we read that “attachment . . . is what draws you out into the world” and “inconvenience is the adjustment from taking things in” (6). This describes, to be sure, a logical dynamic between attachment and inconvenience, marking their forces respectively as centrifugal and centripetal, but it hardly makes them “like” one another in any conventional sense. It does, however, show the extent to which the theory of an inconvenience drive (“the drive to keep taking in . . . objects”) mediates between attachment as the outward pull that the object-world exerts and inconvenience as the internal accommodation to the pressures that the object-world produces. Once inconvenience is read as a drive, it ceases to name the adjustment to such stimulations as the subject takes in and becomes, instead, the imperative of taking in as such. In other words, it comes to identify the subject’s attachment to inconvenience. As a drive, inconvenience now functions like a foreign entity within the subject, one on which the subject as such depends and from which it cannot be detached, compelling it in ways that evince its nonsovereign relation to itself.

Why, we might ask, at the moment when Berlant announces the text’s central claim (“My proposal in this book is that there is an inconvenience drive” [6]) should the text be driven to assert this conflation of inconvenience and attachment? Why should inconvenience move from being the consequence of attachment, the subject’s internal “adjustment” necessitated by the process of “taking things in,” to being a version of attachment itself, “the drive to keep taking in”? And what does it mean that the drive attaching the subject to inconvenience, which necessitates the attempt to resignify inconvenience as attachment, attests to a structural imperative, a drive, whose aim is unpleasure? To ask such questions and to frame them thus is already to suggest one answer: that Berlant’s account of the subject’s ambivalent relation to relationality, explicitly rooted as it is in the dynamics of pressure, tension, and defense, responds to Freud’s energetics as described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I would put it even more bluntly: Berlant 2023 should be read as an ambivalent revision of that text undertaken for the sake of what Berlant describes as “a politicized affect theory” (134).

In describing inconvenience as “our constant exposure to stimulations that need to be processed,” Berlant deploys the language of Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He describes, for example, in chapter IV, the “living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation” (26). As a result of that stimulation, he writes, “the surface turned toward the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli” (26). The survival of the organism, that is, depends on an act of self-differentiation: the desensitization or deadening of an outer surface or membrane that operates thereafter as a surge-protector against the dangerous influx of energy. The subject, for Freud, like the organism, more than just managing inconvenience, actually takes shape through encounters with it; thus, Freud notes in his second topology that the ego emerges as the surface of the id after, as he writes, it “has been modified by the direct influence of the external world” (1923, 25). Significantly for my argument, he goes on to observe: “the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id” (25).

In Freud’s energetics of mental functioning, sensations of pleasure and pain reflect “the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind, but is not in any way ‘bound’” (1920, 8), where binding denotes the attachment of stimuli to representational forms through which the ego succeeds in mastering them and reducing their mobile energy. This reflects the priority accorded to the pleasure principle’s regulation of internal tensions, where “unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution” (8). Since the principle of constancy seeks to keep “the quantity of excitation . . . low” (9), the primal response to inconvenience as the “exposure to stimulations” is flight or withdrawal. And since relation as such increases the quantity of excitation, unpleasure inheres in every relation, however it may be valenced.

Freud makes this point most forcefully in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, declaring that “hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli” (1915). The clinician Nigel Walker usefully clarifies what this means: “For Freud a stimulus (‘Reiz’) is something that the organism tries to escape, as the amoeba tries to withdraw itself from the point of a pin. His definition excluded the idea of a stimulus as something which is sought. A banana is a stimulus to a monkey not because he is attracted to it but because he tries to abolish the stimulus of its sight and smell, combined with his hunger, by trying to eat it” (70). Berlant, however, by defining attachment as “what draws you out into the world,” contravenes the Freudian resistance to thinking the stimulus as something pursued, even while confirming the negative relation of the subject to the stimulus by linking attachment to the inconvenience drive that compels us to take objects in. Inconvenience, for Berlant, is the motor, not just the effect, of relationality, even if the encounter it drives us toward “generates a pressure that is hard to manage, let alone bear” (6). In this, the inconvenience drive reinterprets the reality principle, which “seeks to bring the external world to bear upon the id” with the goal of assuring the ego’s self-preservation through the “postponement of satisfaction” and the “temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (1920, 10).

For Freud, of course, the road to pleasure is always a dead end: the organism finds its own path to death or death is imposed from without. The unpleasure endured temporarily during the reality principle’s detour anticipates the organism’s ultimate pleasure: to discharge its energy without reserve and to “return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (62). Nothing, however, could be further from the project of Berlant’s inconvenience drive, the explicit aim of which is “to keep taking in and living with objects” (6; emphasis mine). If that drive is also an unpleasure drive, a drive to encounter what poses “a threat to . . . [our] organization of reception and defense” (170), then Berlant can challenge the pleasure principle without needing to acknowledge a death drive. Instead, the inconvenience drive can take its place as a death-drive-lite: one that turns from the inflated drama as which Berlant would read the death drive to the ordinariness of the inconvenience drive and its “transitional forms that slow and extend ways to live inconveniently with each other” (xi).

But doing so requires resisting the temptation to defend against inconvenience, however “overwhelming” or “unbearable” (Berlant, xi) it may be. Berlant’s turn away from the death drive, therefore, puts death in the service of life. “Once you let in the deaths,” Berlant writes, “all that follows is life” (xi). Letting in death while refusing the death drive: that’s what is hard to pull off. It means renouncing our “organization,” the ground of our sovereign “grandiosity,” (170) by unlearning and “loosen[ing] the objects and structures that otherwise seem intractable” (xi)—objects and structures among which our selfhood is certainly far from the least. Freud’s text may posit the life instincts, whose attachments hold things together, in intractable opposition to the death drive, whose destructiveness pulls things apart, but Berlant’s text proposes inconvenience as the “drive to stay attached to life” (124) precisely insofar as it dis-integrates what only seems intractable.

This denial of intractability props up the politics of the text. It permits Berlant to find in ambivalence, in the inconvenience or unpleasure inhabiting our most fervently desired relations, the promise of movement, multiplicity, and difference that would allow for transformation. “This book,” Berlant writes, “proposes to return ambivalence to its dynamic etymology, as being strongly mixed, drawn in many directions” (27). The word “drawn” here expresses the force of a drive whose multidirectionality is capable of shifting a “stuck or poisonous relation to objects” (27) from one that seems intractable to one now seen as contingent. Structure and intractability are terms Berlant often thinks together, focusing on “the notion of structure as calcified, as a thing” (96) and exploring that reification as generating a sense of intractability as a sort of perspective illusion that gives the semblance of immobility to something actually in flux. Consider this quintessentially Berlantian formulation: “an infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually presume—an intractable principle of continuity across time—but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement seen as solid from a distance” (25). Despite the negative valence with which Berlant will usually freight it, though, intractability inspires a certain degree of ambivalence in the text. We see this, for instance, when Berlant explains that, in spite of occasional moments of feeling that On the Inconvenience of Other People was “insufficient, mere writing[,] . . . the need to stay with the intractable questions about impaired sociality and structural resistances to transforming, and not repairing, the violent reductions that often follow strong ambivalence was enough to fuel my optimism about the generative effects of thinking on affective and purposive judgment” (16). Here structure lines up with maintaining the violent erasure of ambivalence, with defending continuity and stability against internal complexification, while intractability pertains to the questions with which Berlant feels “the need to stay”: “intractable questions” of intractability or structural resistance to change.

The questions described as intractable, though, cast doubt on intractability, especially in the form of “structural resistances” to “transforming . . . violent reductions.” By putting into play the ambivalence those reductions would erase, by calling on ambivalence’s capacity to draw the object “in many directions,” Berlant attempts a “transformation from within relations to the object” (28) with the goal, as the text describes it, “of disturbing life-disaffirming limits” (16). Precisely insofar as ambivalence informs our relation to objects as such, while the inconvenience drive compels us continuously to take those objects in, the aim for Berlant “is not to replace inconvenient objects with better ones, but to loosen up the object” (27), which is also to say, “to unlearn the very structural perspectives” determining our “encounter with its inconvenience” (29).

This brings into sharper focus the book’s refusal of structural necessity, a political investment that animates every movement of the text. As Berlant affirms: “My commitment in this book is to generate a nonreproductive theory that uses the glitch of the present in crisis to displace the protocols and norms that got us here” (28). The “unlearn[ing]” of “structural perspectives,” though, like the “loosen[ing] up” of the object, presupposes that we first have managed to “attach to the inconvenience of unlearning” (28). And this, as Berlant informs us, demands a “painful transitional commitment” (28), which is also to say that it demands a commitment, an attachment, to pain: specifically, to the pain of “unlearning the anchoring perspective” that shapes how we understand the world and ourselves alike. If we can never detach from our object but can ever only “loosen” it—if we can only, that is, learn to see it as an assemblage drawn in many directions at once—then Berlant leaves no doubt as to why this is so: “You can never simply lose your object if it’s providing a foundational world infrastructure for you. You can’t decide not to be racist, not to be misogynist, not to be ambivalent about your anchors or fixations. But you can use the contradictions the object prompts to loosen and reconfigure it, exploiting the elasticity of its contradictions, the incoherence of the forces that overdetermine it” (28). Thus, according to Berlant, by leveraging the ambivalence inspired by the object’s putative solidity, one can “generate a sense of the impasse and its potential transformation into next actions” (134).

This leveraging is already a “next action,” though, one that is both the predicate for and the product of an unlearning. After all, to “use” the object’s contradictions in order “to loosen and reconfigure it,” a loosening of the subject must already have occurred; something in its relation to the ambivalence that was always present in its attachments must now be available to attach the subject to “unlearning its anchoring perspective,” even if that anchoring perspective provided “a foundational world infrastructure.” Berlant insists that whatever it is that makes this loosening possible, it isn’t a matter of decision: “You can’t decide not to be racist, not to be misogynist, not to be ambivalent about your anchors and fixations.” But one of these three things is fundamentally different from the others. Though we can’t decide “not to be ambivalent about our anchors and fixations”—precisely insofar as we are anchored in or fixed to that ambivalence—we can, nonetheless, Berlant asserts, use that ambivalence to unlearn the perspective we experienced as “anchoring.” To revise Beyond the Pleasure Principle for a politicized affect theory, then, Berlant must imagine a subject who “avoid[s] becoming stuck in a drama of the intractable” (133), a subject capable of “loosening the object, and . . . [of] changing the encounter with its inconvenience” (29), by exploiting the very ambivalence to which, by virtue of the inconvenience drive, that subject is intractably attached.

But who is this subject that is able to shift from attachment to an anchoring perspective to attachment to its unlearning? Is it the subject in need of unanchoring itself or the subject already unanchored? Mustn’t the subject be sufficiently unanchored from its anchoring perspective in the first place to attach to the project of unlearning it? Or mustn’t the perspective in which it is anchored already incline it toward that unlearning, such that even unlearning that perspective keeps the subject attached to it still? Lauren might respond that the subject moves in many directions at once and that this movement, this ambivalence, which overdetermines both the subject and its object, obviates the question’s intention of trying to pin the subject down. But even so, some act, some gesture experienced in the register of sovereignty—experienced, that is, as a willed transformation of our anchoring attachments—must first mobilize our ambivalence for the subject to commence the “painful transitional commitment to unlearning.” For to speak of it as a commitment requires some vestigial notion of agency that preserves the sovereign fantasy in the work of self-transformation, notwithstanding the fact that such work may depend on a catalyst from without.

In Berlant’s case, that catalyst took the form of an intellectual encounter: “I learned to attach to the inconvenience of unlearning from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s demand for an ethics of epistemological discomfort involving the unlearning of Euro-American monoculturalism” (28). Reflecting on the concept of unlearning, though, nearly a decade after proposing it, Spivak acknowledges having considered it, at the time, as “a kind of political decision” (Danius, 24), thus linking it with the sovereign fantasy of “being in control” (Berlant, 3), that is bound up—dare I say intractably?—with both political decision and “politicized affect theory.” Take, for example, this passage in which Berlant addresses the process of unlearning our “structuring perspectives” and loosening the object: “How to do this? There are many ways to unlearn the object, of which the perspective of unlearning is one that moves throughout this text. This cluster of assays is another formal example of how to do that: to think at once about the many moving parts that would need to shift for a form of thought to come into being and to elaborate their substance, to become a theorist of a process that coordinates without calculating the implications of that shift. A third would be breaking the object, as in chapter 2; refusing its performativity, as in chapter 3; slackening it, as in the coda” (29). Each of these strategies, as a strategy, entails a conscious assertion of will, whether “to think,” “to elaborate,” “to be a theorist,” or to engage in an act of “breaking,” “refusing,” or “slackening” the object. “You can’t decide not to be” X, Berlant writes, “but you can use the contradictions” of X to “loosen and reconfigure” your object. What remains unsaid is the prior necessity of attaching to this use of those contradictions, the prior necessity of making a “painful commitment,” which is also a political commitment: the commitment we can hardly fail to catch in the following announcement by Berlant, the tone of which seems to oscillate between ordinary persistence and heroic grandiosity: “for the engaged critic, the unbearable must be borne” (xi).

But there’s the rub. From where if not from “a kind of decision” does the critic engage, attach, or commit to the necessity of bearing the unbearable? How can this ethical imperative square with the radical thought of nonsovereignty? On one level, of course, we could read Berlant’s claim as suggesting that truly to confront that thought means accepting the intractable antagonism of our coexistence with others insofar as it “forces us to face how profoundly nonsovereign we are” (9). But in the same way that engaging to bear the unbearable preserves the trace of sovereignty, where sovereignty, for Berlant, consists in asserting “ownership and control” (73), so being forced to “face” our nonsovereignty, to own it or own up to it, betrays the persistence of sovereign fantasy in the very figure of “fac[ing].” Berlant appears to acknowledge as much when this trope recurs near the end of the book in relation to nonsovereignty: “The unbearable object/scene is never fully faced, if by ‘faced’ we mean incorporated, understood, mastered” (152). And yet, in the paragraph that precedes this claim, while describing what a theoretical investment in “critical infrastructuralism” can accomplish, Berlant reiterates the earlier formula: “What emerges are other ways to process inconvenience, the evidence that you were never sovereign—evidence the world forces you to face and a fact about which much genuine and confusing ambivalence ensues” (151).

Ambivalence indeed. Despite theorizing the inconvenience drive, Berlant resists the nonsovereignty inherent in the drive’s intractability: the nonsovereignty that comes from within, not without, and troubles a political revision of Freud predicated on acts of commitment, will, engagement, and self-possession. The heterotopian potential toward which Berlant would deploy inconvenience requires an impossible subject: one sovereignly able to face the nonsovereignty no subject, as subject, could face; one for whom, as Berlant observes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “opening up to receptivity is his sovereign act” (90). By relying on such a “sovereign act” and the sovereign subject performing it, Berlant’s politicized affect theory remains bound to self-awareness so that even self-dispossession, which compels us “to shatter what we know” (92) and against which sovereignty defends, “does not feel like loss” (92), as Berlant remarks. To the contrary: “This positive version of dispossession makes the world bearable,” we’re told, because Emerson “enables nonsovereignty to feel like a relief from the reproduction of heavy selves” (95). But nonsovereignty, the undoing of those heavy selves by the drive that always eludes us, can only feel like relief to a consciousness weighed down by those illusory selves and, therefore, freed by their dispossession. Identifying the set of questions to which her book intends to respond, Berlant writes in the introduction: “If there is an inconvenience drive, can consciousness of it become a resource for building solidarity and alliance across ambivalence . . . ? Is it possible to turn ambivalence from the atmosphere of negativity it currently brings with it into a genuinely conflicted experience that allows us to face up to the phenomenality of self-disturbance in the space of coexistence . . . ?” (8). The reference to “self-disturbance” here only seems to invoke the divided subject’s inability to “face up” to its inevitable noncoincidence with its face; for the sentence quickly reframes “self-disturbance” as a disturbance of the self provoked by something encountered outside it: by the unpleasure always correlative to “coexist[ing]” with others.

Where Lacan sees the pressure of the drive as betraying, for Lacan, the insistence of the Real—a Real that finds its expression in his own revision of the Freudian death drive—Berlant resists the threat to the subject that comes from within, maintaining, instead, that “consciousness” can become a “resource for building solidarity.” Twice, therefore, the text cordons off inconvenience from the Lacanian Real. “Seen as an affect, inconvenience is not the Real interfering with the Sovereign Balloon at its most parade-inflated” (18), Berlant insists. And elsewhere, even more bluntly, Berlant, dismissing the “think[ing] of negativity as the substance of the real” (10), asserts a filiation with those who seek “more satisfying dynamics of proximity” (11): “I join thinkers who represent the contemporary as a zone of life in which the dour realism of an ongoing near-survival scramble is enmeshed with the creative and life-insistent energy that improvises and makes counterinfrastructures for revising what’s possible in life. They produce transitional figures for violently unequal normative experience that both make it vivid and refuse to reproduce its worst-case scenarios as the Real” (12). The emphasis on making or poiesis here, weds “creative and life-insistent energy” with a willful refusal of the Real. The poetry for Berlant is the politics and the politics, a commitment to poetry: a commitment, that is, to “revising what’s possible” by “producing transitional figures” that “make vivid” the normative violence of life in its non-worst-case scenarios. “Loosening” is one of the figural names Berlant gives this political poiesis that displaces the intractability of the object by opening it to movement through trope. As for the subject intractably attached to that object, it can identify itself with inconvenience, with the violation of its self-enclosure, provided that the ego of the subject can register breaking as becoming. Here’s how Berlant describes it: “When the object breaks into you there’s no erasing it. . . . Instead, there’s relating to it, using it, genre flailing around it, making it do things apart from the force of its first effects. There’s staying in proximity and thinking about what else the atmosphere can do. When I say a book breaks me, this is what it means: I am changed by it, startled and thrilled that something has become unbound in me. I become the loosened object” (171).

Something has become unbound. We return here to Freud’s energetics where unbound energy is the threat against which the ego must defend. Berlant’s tropological revisionism seems to renounce the need for defense; its subject not only submits to, but also seeks out, the stimulations that unbind it. But Berlant’s identification with that unbinding reinscribes both sovereignty and defense at once: the unbinding that startles morphs into a thrill only if the ego succeeds in rebinding it as the image of itself: “I become the loosened object.” If this, as I argue, should be read as Berlant’s revision of the well-known Freudian dictum, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” then it’s useful to recall what Jacques Lacan had to say about that phrase: “The goal is one of integration and harmony, I might even add of reconciliation.” To which he then adds: “But if we ignore the self’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself that man is faced with—in other words, the very truth Freud discovered—we will . . . make of it . . . what both the spirit and the letter of Freud’s work most repudiate” (435). In other words, we will make of it an ego psychology still attached to the fantasy of sovereignty—of self-ownership and control—even at the moment of affirming a commitment to nonsovereignty as self-dispossession. That’s what it means to “face” the drive in On the Inconvenience of Other People, which is also to say, as we’re obliged to acknowledge in concluding, what it means not to.

Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. His most recent books are No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004); Sex, or the Unbearable (2014), coauthored with Lauren Berlant; and Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (2022).