"A desire redoubled is love. But redoubled love becomes delusion." Lacan
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 …
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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"
