On the Inconvenience of Other People Quotes

“To convert a rhetorical question into an actual one is to engage in a political action about what gets taken for granted: to refuse, to out, what is left unsaid.”
― Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

“In ambivalence, we want and we don’t want what we want. Or we want parts but not wholes and resent the added freight. Or we’re averse to what we’re attached to but can perform neither a reconciliation nor a cleavage. It can be a dramatic state but it’s also likely to be a mess of loose live wires that it’s hard to put a finger on. This complex of intensity within ambivalence extends from disrespect of populations as in misogyny and racism to scenes of love and political obsession. For any important object becomes a source of roiling, confused ideation about who’s powerful and who’s not, and what the potentials are for cohabitations of the world. Sometimes the internal clash comes from the inconvenience paradox of dependency itself, of needing people or a situation and hating to have that need. Then, being in relation, and forging attachments within it, both threatens and relieves us from our sovereign fantasies and states.”
― Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People