Reviewed by:

• On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant
• Ana Schwartz (bio)

Where does history end and personality begin? This isn't exactly Lauren Berlant's question in On the Inconvenience of Other People. But for those of us reading from the field of early American studies, it's a question we may find occasion to return to, if we've asked it to ourselves quietly before. That we tend not to ask it explicitly in our work is, like our own individual personalities' tussles with history, not exactly our fault. Methodologically, our field indirectly still seems to be wrestling with its own historical foundation in hagiographic intellectual history, its prior ambition to vindicate the mind and its personal expressions against historical forces, to keep drawing, as Emerson expressively put it, new circles. The mood of this historiography is earnest. Everyone it narrates is sincere. There are few [End Page 204] protagonists here who aren't white. Since then, the field has reinvested in something like historical materialism, has begun seeking more comprehensively to recover the material conditions and their ideological consequences that together shaped the history we've inherited. We've widened our scope. "Everyone" now includes those not so richly documented in the sources earlier critics had used to write their accounts of the past. And because those underrepresented in the archive faced concomitant material predations and dispossessions, we often find it powerful to generalize about the mood and material expression of resistance that these individuals shared.

The challenge here, though—and it's one we're beginning to take on better in the twenty-first century—is to begin to understand historical individuals experientially, to appreciate better the contours of their lived histories within those unchosen conditions. The answers may not always be pleasant. The parties we have spent our lives understanding may turn out to be less individually heroic than we have wanted to believe them to be. And where, to extend my lease on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's most searing critique of our desires in historicist recovery projects, would be the heroism for us in that? This is a rhetorical question, mostly, but it's also a screen for an earnest inquiry. The place where history ends and personality begins might also be the weird surprise-filled place where we see the leap beyond historical circumscription that, for some famous figures of the past, bound the otherwise unglamorous individual with partially circumstantial heroism. And there of course were many who didn't make that leap. There we might see better how hard such a leap was, and why some failed in making it. We might learn other things, too, that we don't expect. I learned to think about this question from Ajay Batra, who learned it, I think, from reading Cedric Robinson. But we can all learn to think about it from reading Berlant, who is a thrilling guide in pursuing this question, and this is so not least because of their commitment to the possibility that the most potent place to look for what we might, archly, call a frontier between personality and history is in the unheroic, itchy, sometimes devastating, but often just profoundly ambivalent episodes of quotidian life.

Berlant's chapters are few: three plus an intro and a coda. They are also hard to read. They're tough in at least two regards. First, their sentences are extremely rich. This isn't exactly a surprise, but they're harder to read in this book than they were in Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011). The sentences [End Page 205] often require testing, rereading backward, or cross-referencing pronouns over here with nouns over there. This is true for the short sentences as well as the long ones. Not all critics can write like this, and surely literary and cultural studies would decelerate profoundly if we all tried. Berlant explains the reason for this prose style in their introduction, and here is my best synthetic paraphrase: Real life is full of seemingly ineffable nuance, nowhere more so than in the strangeness of other persons...

审阅者：

• 《论他人的不便》作者：Lauren Berlant
• 安娜·施瓦茨（简介）

历史在哪里结束，个性从哪里开始？这并不完全是劳伦·伯兰特在《论他人的不便》中提出的问题。但对于我们这些阅读早期美国研究领域的人来说，如果我们以前悄悄地问过自己的话，我们可能会找到机会回到这个问题。我们倾向于在工作中不明确地提出这个问题，就像我们自己的个性与历史的斗争一样，这并不完全是我们的错。从方法论上来说，我们的领域似乎仍然在间接地与自己在传记思想史中的历史基础、其先前的野心进行斗争，以证明思想及其个人表达反对历史力量，并继续绘制，正如爱默生明确指出的那样，新的圈子。这部史学的心情是严肃的。它所叙述的每个人都是真诚的。这里的[完第204页]主角很少不是白人。从那时起，该领域重新投资于历史唯物主义之类的东西，开始寻求更全面地恢复共同塑造了我们所继承的历史的物质条件及其意识形态后果。我们扩大了范围。 “每个人”现在包括那些在早期批评者用来描述过去的资料中记录不那么丰富的人。由于那些在档案中代表性不足的人面临着随之而来的物质掠夺和剥夺，我们经常发现概括这些人所共有的抵抗情绪和物质表达是很有用的。

然而，这里的挑战——这是我们在二十一世纪开始更好地应对的挑战——是开始从经验上理解历史人物，更好地欣赏他们在那些未选择的条件下生活的历史的轮廓。答案可能并不总是令人愉快。我们一生所理解的政党可能并没有我们想象的那么英雄。延长我对莎朗·马库斯和斯蒂芬·贝斯特对我们历史主义复兴项目的愿望的最尖锐的批评的租约，对我们来说是英雄主义吗？这主要是一个反问句，但它也是一个认真询问的屏幕。历史结束和个性开始的地方也可能是一个充满奇怪惊喜的地方，在那里我们看到超越历史界限的飞跃，对于过去的一些著名人物来说，历史界限将原本平淡无奇的个人与部分偶然的英雄主义联系在一起。当然，还有很多人没有实现这一飞跃。在那里，我们可能会更好地看到这样的飞跃有多么困难，以及为什么有些人未能实现这一目标。我们也可能学到其他我们意想不到的东西。我从阿贾伊·巴特拉 (Ajay Batra) 那里学会了思考这个问题，我认为他是通过阅读塞德里克·罗宾逊 (Cedric Robinson) 学到的。但我们都可以从阅读伯兰特的作品中学会思考这个问题，伯兰特是追寻这个问题的一位令人兴奋的向导，这尤其是因为他们致力于这样一种可能性，那就是寻找我们可能找到的最有效的地方，狡猾地，人格与历史之间的边界存在于日常生活中非英雄的、令人痒痒的、有时是毁灭性的、但常常是极其矛盾的事件中。

伯兰特的章节很少：三章加上一个引子和一个尾声。它们也很难阅读。他们至少在两个方面很强硬。首先，他们的句子极其丰富。这并不奇怪，但这些内容在本书中比在《残酷乐观》（Duke UP，2011）中更难读。[End Page 205]的句子通常需要测试、向后重读或交叉引用这里的代词和那里的名词。对于短句子和长句子都是如此。并不是所有的批评家都能这样写，如果我们都尝试的话，文学和文化研究肯定会大大减速。伯兰特在引言中解释了这种散文风格的原因，这是我最好的综合释义：现实生活充满了看似难以言喻的细微差别，尤其是在其他人的陌生感中……