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