Lacan has remarked that modesty is the most important virtue. Lacan thinks modesty as an affect that keeps one’s desire or symptom protected behind a veil. Yet when the veil is lifted through the gaze of the other, the subject undergoes shame. Where there is shame, the extimate part of one’s being, precisely their desire is exposed to the other. Shame thus awakens the subject to being riveted to oneself, to a foreign self inside oneself.
Todd Phillip's Joker is a film about class war in utero. The film sets the stage for a coming political world in which the class war in Gotham has been named and elevated to the undeniable antagonism that situates the injustice of society. The film is also a psychobiography of an antihero's journey into this …
The following is an interview I conducted with Lacanian psychoanalyst Thomas Svolos for The New Polis where I serve as Contributing Editor.
In my dissertation, I made an argument that the decisionism of Badiou, Zizek, Laclau and other so-called 'post-Marxist' theorists is derived from an intra-theoretical debate amongst left-Heideggerians, specifically against the pervasive authenticity politics and existentialist politics of the time. I argue that Lacan's 'ontology of lack' was the alternative formula that enabled these thinkers to …
Continue reading "Whither the critique of political economy in post-Marxism?"
“a something, a greater than which cannot be conceived.” St. Anselm Amidst the fanfare and excitement over Lady Bird, a lingering debate about the film is whether the family of Lady Bird really "lived in poverty." Some people want to suggest that her position was really just lower middle class striving, a more ordinary American family struggling …
Continue reading "Something Bigger: Lady Bird and the Divinity of the Name"
One of the more admirable aspects of Colette Soler's work is her allegiance to theological concepts, which we should remember, Lacan himself took very seriously. In Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan's Thought, theological and philosophical concepts such as sin, guilt, God, and the ethics of virtue--all of which were crucial to Lacan's understanding of …
As part of the clinical Wednesday series with the DC Lacanian Forum, I gave my third presentation to the group, this time on the theme of identification. I begin with an analysis of identification in Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and look at Borch-Jacobsen's critique of Freud in his controversial The …
Continue reading "Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Audio Lecture"
Political philosophy has considered its project of thinking to be ‘emancipatory’ since the enlightenment. Emancipation is a term that refers to the idea of a total freedom from ignorance, from animality, or from a state of ‘self-imposed tutelage’ – as Kant would say in What is Enlightenment. Today, the question of emancipation has taken new …
Continue reading "Identification and emancipation: unary trait or unary trace?"
My first post as a blogger for the new webzine Queen Mob's Teahouse is here. I wrote about the affect of shame in Lacan. This is a fun and creative collective for poets and writers of all different stripes. The brainchild of Berfrois, another website I have written for over the years.
The widely read essay by A.O. Scott, "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture" argues pretty convincingly that the changing heroes and anti-heroes of contemporary television provide a glimpse into a larger shift in contemporary life, a shift that now means adulthood as we have come to know it, is conceptually untenable. The essay received a critique for …
Continue reading "Mourning, Psychoanalysis, and the Death of Adulthood"
Interview with American philosopher and social theorist Frank Smecker on his new book, Night of the World: Traversing the Ideology of Objectivity published by Zero Books.
I recently interviewed the philosopher Simon Critchely on his new book, (co-written with his wife and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster) entitled, The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing for the online magazine Berfrois. There's a lot this book opens up not only for Shakespeare studies, but also for psychoanalysis. The idea that mosts interests me in …
Continue reading "From Shame to Love: The Politics of Hamlet. Interview with Simon Critchley"
"This world is a veil. And the face you wear is not your own." Preacher Joe TheriotIn one of the most telling lines in True Detective, Cohle says to Hart, "you're obsessed, just not with your work." Not only is this deeply funny for its brutal honesty and for the quick-witted retort of Cohle, it …
Continue reading "The Hysteric-Obsessional Dialectic in True Detective"
The Name of the Father is an incredibly vast and important concept in Lacan's teaching. Due to the difficulty and the immensity of the concept, I have my work cut out for me, so I have decided to approach the concept from two angles: the way that the Name-of-the-Father intersects with the three-part Oedipal dialectic developed in Seminar V, and how the transition from the Name to the Names applies to clinical settings.
Film theorist and philosopher Todd McGowan recently spoke with me about his new book, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. For however much we throw the word "accessible" around in academic discussions as the strength of a philosophy book, McGowan's accessibility really is quite stunning. In one chapter he compared the …
Continue reading "Enjoying What We Don’t Have: Interview with Philosopher Todd McGowan"
We used to read the news like a Dadaist — piecing together the seemingly random series of signifiers to reveal an underlying or deeper truth. In this disarray and slanted piecing together of phrases, certain slips make themselves apparent like a series of cracks in the Real, bringing into relief the symptoms behind the news …
Continue reading "Captured in the Image: Cynicism and Culture Jamming"
In analysis, one of the most frustrating questions an analyst can ask is: "Yes, I know that's what you are saying, but is it really that way, or is what you are saying more of a wish?" Or, I know that you think you are over this, or that you have identified the way this …
Continue reading "On Shame, or the Proof of the Other’s Inexistence"
In a blog that I deeply respect, Marginal Utility, Rob Horning writes of Theory Cults and particularly about how the "Cult of Lacan" functioned in his comparitive-literature seminars during graduate school. Horning dismisses Lacan as a religio-based prophet who was ultimately a narcissistic intellectual incapable of real emotional relations. As a result, he claims that Lacan over-compensated …
In this post, I want to share my experience in psychoanalysis. Some things have been truly surprising. Concepts that were once elusive become apparent in a way that is sudden and palpable. I won’t share too much about the specifics of my analyst or get into the details of the content of what we exchange …
Continue reading "10 Things I’ve Learned from Psychoanalysis"
The biggest section in American bookstores is usually the self-help section. We’re addicted to our symptoms and we're told by the industry of self-help techniques and motivational books that we can find self-betterment if we follow the latest best-seller that offers the secret code for living a free life. We find inner solace in yoga, …
Continue reading "Singularity, Psychoanalysis, and the Self-Help Industry"
