Philosopher and Media Producer
Of all the different directions Freudian-Marxism took during the twentieth century, Norman O. Brown, the American philosopher, stands out as presenting a particularly compelling version. The first thing to note about Brown is that his project is distinctively American. His thought falls in line with the transcendentalists and with a certain strand of American idealism. He is widely influenced …
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"
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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Is what Freud did to Judaism in Moses and Monotheism taking place in the work of Fethi Benslama, a leading Lacanian Islamic studies scholar today?
Those of us that work on psychoanalysis and theory are often hacks. My primary foray into the field has been around applying psychoanalysis to politics, ethics, and theory more generally. It's well known that there exists a conflict amongst practicing analysts, especially amongst the clinical Lacanians about what Zizek has done to Lacan. Their main …
Continue reading "10 Things I’ve Learned from Psychoanalysis"
I'm reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia on the heels of a lot of work on Hölderlin, my favorite German schizophrenic next to Nietzsche. Of course it's incredible. This text is talked about a lot, but maybe not very well understood. Is it relevant today as we face #OccupyWallStreet, the crumbling of dictatorships and plutocracies, rhizomatic …
Continue reading "Desire is Productive: Why Deleuze & Guattari Love Henry Miller"
