I just heard the sad news that Donald F. Duclow, the scholar of Eckhart and Cusanus, has passed away. Don was always very supportive of my doctoral work and I enjoyed discussing medieval theology and mysticism with him whenever I ran into him at conferences. He’ll be missed!

This looks like a very interesting article! It promises to outline a critique of the ideal of “emotional regulation” that has become hegemonic in therapeutic and social work practice by identifying how it functions as a neoliberal technology of governance.

“My book will expose the men who violate the sanctity of forests and deserts; I intend to show that the world is an implacable hell for fugitives, that its police forces… and border patrols have made every error of justice irreparable.” Adolfo Bioy Casares, “The Invention of Morel”

Some articles on AI and authoritarianism (slop as the aesthetics of fascism and on the techno-material production of an authoritarian everyday): newsocialist.org.uk/transmission... rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Reading Freud today for the 1st meeting of an “Authoritarianism” class that I’m taking this semester at the institute. Other assigned texts are Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom,” “The Authoritarian Personality” by Adorno et al, and some self psychology I don’t really care about.

I just received the syllabus for the class on gender and sexuality I’ll be taking this semester at the psychoanalytic institute which is taught by our resident Laplanchian and queer theorist. Pretty excited for this one. Here are our introductory readings for class on Friday.

I found a copy of Carl Davidson’s syndicalist writings for the SDS online so I guess I’m going to read that today.

Just saw a post on twitter that began “Jürgen Habermas was anti-woke” and the idea that Habermas of all people would be conscripted into free-speech culture warrior discourse in this way is pretty damn funny.

Grok Amato my god

It’s almost movie time!!! We have our popcorn ready to go! 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

I’m not really likely to get a tattoo tbh. But if I ever did I would love it to be based on the figure of Lady Dialectic from Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury.

Another reason why I appreciate Enrique Dussel. It was through reading his work on trans-modernity and the new world philosophical dialogue that I first encountered Mohammed al-Jabri and Paulin J. Hountondji. I’ve found both really helpful to think with.

On my long path to a more complete understanding of the Marxian critique of political economy I found Enrique Dussel to be a very important interlocutor. His philosophical and theological analysis of Marx’s writings were very important for my critical-theoretical education.

Dussel’s decolonial reckoning with the limits of Habermas are very important. As a Marxist philosopher and liberation theologian he knew his Habermas well and forwarded a powerful immanent critique of his work grounded in the historical and political reality of the global south.

The thing about Habermas’s work on the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy is that it all falls apart if you read Negt and Kluge. Provided one recognize that as an immanent critique of Habermas it radicalizes his theses.

Oh. Habermas finally passed away. Mein herzliches Beileid. Er hat uns für immer verlassen.

Say whatever you will about Wendy Brown. I find her account of the way that the moralism of the (neo)liberal imaginary inhibits our capacity to think and do politics quite helpful. Pairs nicely with Raymond Guess’s Adornian critique of bourgeois ethics and individualism.

Another cool little free library find from earlier today: this book on Human Diversity by the evolutionary biologist, and committed Marxist, Richard C. Lewontin.

I’m still over on the other side since I have an intellectual community there and still enjoy the conversations we have. But recently my posts have been gaining more attention and my follower account has begun to blow up and I have no real idea why that’s happening. I don’t post any differently!

I imagine it must be comforting to believe that there ever was (or is) actually existing socialism. It means that socialism ceases to be something we need to struggle to realize (in theory and in praxis) in a way that sanctions a nostalgia for what has been “lost” or “stolen.”

I’ve never thought too hard about it before but I wonder whether the interest in libidinal economy and the politics of the family that led me to psychoanalysis may have been sparked by the work I did as a medievalist tracing the history of theological debates about the family of Jesus.

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

If you know someone in high school who might like to take an intensive college-level class on the critical study of religion and secularism at the University of Chicago this summer consider telling them about my three-week course “The Politics of Religion and Unbelief.”

“A new language is what responds to reality where a moral, epistemological jolt has occurred.” — Ingeborg Bachmann (from the first Frankfurt lecture)

If you know someone in high school who might like to take an intensive college-level class on the critical study of religion and secularism at the University of Chicago this summer consider telling them about my three-week course “The Politics of Religion and Unbelief.”

For those who enjoy video essays that are actually thoughtful I enjoyed this recent piece by Dan Olson at Folding Ideas which analyzes the film Jarhead and its (terrible) sequels to show how a critique of the ideology of soldiering is repurposed for propaganda. youtu.be/i5m-RHS1fU0?...

I had my final collage class at the Hyde Park Art Center today. Its been a blast and ive learned a lot! Here’s the piece I made this afternoon. I used some magazines from Germany and Austria from the 1910s-1940s that I had recently picked up from the library (who were throwing them away).

I just found the January edition of Le Monde diplomatique in a little free library. The first article I saw when I grabbed it out to take a look was a piece about whether psychoanalysis Is bourgeois! 😭😭😭 There are also has extracts from Lordon and Lucbert’s new book on the concept of the drives.

We’re reading portions of Mark Solms’s new book The Only Cure for our final class on neuropsychoanalysis this week. Curious to see how it compares to the other works by Solms I’ve already read that primarily address a popular and non-scientific audience, like The Hidden Spring!

Bruno got up on top of the Loebs again this afternoon!

I found this sequence about psychoanalysis’s re-entrance into West German psychiatry from the chapter on scientific development as a political process in the monograph by Brückner, Leithäuser, and Kriesel that I have been translating to be pretty funny (and quite significant).

A collage I worked on this afternoon (with some help from my cat).

If I truly cared about “public outreach” as an intellectual, or about my professional identity as a trained medievalist, I would probably try to work up for publication some thoughts about any austin’s new video about kingdom come: deliverance (which I recommend you watch) youtu.be/54BEkazHfdM?...

One of the last bits of writing Freud produced (which really ought to be better known). I’m particularly struck by the suggestion that identification with the clitoris should replace penis-envy and claim that “mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego”

I found this interview with Dwight Hopkins, attempting to make sense of his explicit MAGA turn and efforts to justify his embrace of the entrepreneurial logic of venture capitalism through the invocation of his relationship to James Cone, to be very clarifying. politicaltheology.com/from-james-c...

More art by Ralph Steadman

The cover for the English version of the Italian Kleinian Franco Fornari’s “The Psychoanalysis of War” by the gonzo artist Ralph Steadman goes incredibly hard!

Here is Alfred Lorenzer’s account of how psychoanalysis ought to be conceived as a discipline *between* sociology and neurology rather than as purely one or the other. He argues that one must not “make it lose its major feature, it’s potential for [the] contradiction” of both.

AAR/SBL folks: We're very excited about our CFP for the Science, Technology, and Religion unit this year! Have a look and consider submitting something by the March 6 deadline! @aarweb.bsky.social @sblsite.bsky.social

Here’s a brief clip from the beginning of a documentary (in French) about the experimental school at Bonneuil-sur-Marne where Maud Mannoni, student of Lacan and Winnicott, carried out her anti-psychiatric work with autistic and psychotic children. youtu.be/MOLagYtFwdM?...

Another article by Briggs on the French understanding of autism.

Here are two articles about pediatric, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic, and anti-psychiatric work with autistic children in France that discuss some of my favorite theorists: Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Fernand Deligny.

Here are the two collages I made in class today!

Seen in Hyde Park

My cat Bruno has chosen to keep my Loebs and I company while I work at my desk this morning.

Is this anything?

Seeing people on twitter react to Judith Butler receiving the Fanon prize by claiming they don’t deserve it because they’re a Zionist. Anyone more in the know than I care to offer an explanation for where that accusation comes from? I ask this as someone familiar with Butler’s anti-Zionist writing.

Here’s a paper about teaching I really like. It describes intellectual development as a work of mourning. It argues that at each stage of a student’s journey they must be helped to mourn the certainty (about themselves and about the world) that is lost as their epistemic horizons expand.

I stopped by the Lumen Christi Institute this afternoon to pick up my complementary copy of Bernard McGinn’s latest book about commentaries on the Gospel of John. Looking forward to discussing it in April at their faculty seminar!