âMy new book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, argues that critics have an obligation to produce concepts as transformational infrastructures so that you can see how to get from here to there. In this book, I also work with Foucaultâs concept of the heterotopia. The heterotopian makes these folds of life, like a really good conversation you have with somebody, or you start to take walks every day, or you decide to do a different thing in your classroom. All these things become heterotopic potentialities because they create a fold of a different kind of life right next to the one youâre already living. And one of the hardest things to recognise â and this is about ambivalence â is that you are creating new spaces from within the old spaces without replacing them. This is the problem of âboth/and:â you donât stop being in the world, but you also make other possibilities. And eventually those folds can become the reference if you allow them to take on some weight or if you can gather the resources with other people to make them. This is also how I would answer your previous question of not repeating the world but creating another one. Unlearning attachments is just incre-dibly slow and difficult and you cannot just will it. I mean, you can will your desire for it and you can make yourself ready. But the undoing of your viscera takes forever even as you get so embarrassed by your own mind and ideation. Itâs like: âIâm not thinking that; it is thinking itself. And I have to own that because itâs in me, but itâs not real. Itâs not what I identify with or want to build. What do I do with all that stuff?â Iâm interested in a non-reproductive theory of the social, but I recognise that the transitional moments are there forever.â
â Lauren Berlant, in interviewÂ
