Facing the Drive: Berlant, Freud, Non/Sovereignty

Abstract: "Facing the Drive: Berlant, Freud, (Non)Sovereignty" reads Lauren Berlant's On the Inconvenience of Other People as a revisionary response to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Despite Berlant's explicit argument for the necessary dissolution of sovereign fantasy, Edelman argues that the fantasy of sovereignty returns in the text's inability to face the destitutions of the drive. Tracing the contradictions engendered by the Berlant's attempt to put the "inconvenience drive" in the service of a politicized affect theory, this essay examines how the negativity Berlant wants to qualify, or refute, returns in the tensions that open up between political decision and (non)sovereignty.