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.
You can attend a workshop I'm pleased to offer on the topic of "Islam and Psychoanalysis" at Georgetown University. Here are the details and a link to the suggested reading: Daniel Tutt: “Islam and Psychoanalysis” Time:Wednesday, February 28th, 12:30pm Location: Georgetown University, ICC 450 **Open to the public. Food provided The Department of Arabic and Islamic …
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Review of The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father: Between Omnipotence and Emasculation by Bülent Somay
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 …
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Since I have been away from writing essays and blogs for some time, it might be of interest to readers that I share the abstract of my dissertation that I have been working on, and have just finished. This is my penultimate draft and I plan to defend it this August. Overall, I feel good …
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The political philosopher Charles Taylor made an excellent observation recently when he pointed out that in those instances when multiculturalism fails to in its effort to promote a set of neutral and universal values int eh public sphere, it is often Islam that causesis often the cultural exc. The banning of the veil is an example …
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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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The Other, for Whitman was a wholly (holy) Other to oneself. To embrace this wholly Other other was the highest ethical act of self-love. While the faint torch of Whitman's gestalt love for the All is carried forward by obscurantist New Age spiritualists, millennials are certainly faced with the challenge of narcissism - but not as a choice they take onto themselves. Rather, millennial narcissism shows signs of revolt against a mode of subjectivity that is imposed upon them.
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 …
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In the literature on psychoanalysis and Islam there are two general paradigms of the subject. These two paradigms are primarily limited because they limit the question of subjectivization to the phenomenon of Islamism, violence, and fundamentalism, and they remain caught within a certain desire to impose a model of secularism that is rooted in a …
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Aristotle argued that greatness is always rooted in an excessive melancholia. What he meant was that individuals who posses an extraordinary insight into their own self always ipso facto suffer from that excess of knowledge. This excess of knowledge, what Lacan might call jouissance can either lead to a deep self-loathing, and longing for an …
