On the Inconvenience of Other People argues that coexistence is not a smooth ethical ideal but a constant pressure of adjustment, receptivity and nonsovereign relation. Lauren Berlant begins from Sartre’s phrase “Hell is other people,” but redirects it: most others are not hell, they are inconvenient, meaning they interrupt the fantasy that the self is autonomous, stable or fully in control. Inconvenience names the affective friction of being with others: a glance, a smell, a brush of bodies, a demand, a memory, a political threat, a structural hierarchy, or the simple fact that another being must be taken in and dealt with. The book reads sex, democracy and life itself as scenes where people desire relation but also resist the costs of relation. This makes inconvenience both ordinary and political. At low intensity, it appears as irritation, awkwardness, ambivalence or fatigue; at high intensity, it registers the violence of racism, misogyny, state power, inequality and social abandonment. Berlant’s key move is to show that sovereignty is a fantasy: no one lives outside dependency, proximity, vulnerability or the demands of others. The book’s strongest contribution is to turn inconvenience into a theory of social life as ambivalent attachment, where the things we want—sex, democracy, community, repair, a better world—also disturb us, exhaust us and require difficult forms of endurance. Rather than resolving ambivalence, Berlant asks how we might stay with it, slow it down and use it to build less violent infrastructures of coexistence. The conclusion is that living together requires bearing the unbearable without turning away from the ordinary frictions through which politics, intimacy and survival are made.