Lateral Aesthetics (Edited Collection)
In her essay "Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency," cultural theorist Lauren Berlant contrasts "lateral agency" with the sovereign agency of the neoliberal subject. Where sovereign agency builds, intends, and extends the self via a purposive and propulsive will, lateral agency floats, spreads, and spaces out, interrupting the breakneck pace of capitalist production and suspending the self's forward motion. For Berlant, lateral agency symptomizes the exhaustion and attrition of the individual's will, at the same time as it expresses a kind of pleasure in practices of self-abeyance.