Getting ready to teach Charles Taylor and José Casanova next week in my religion and unbelief class by re-reading their work on the secular, secularism, and secularization today ✌️✌️✌️

Toronto! Come to our book launch, Wednesday June 24, 6:30-8:30! There aren't any FIFA games happening so you should be able to take transit (we checked). @mattbernico.bsky.social is coming all the way from Scotland so you should come too. Make sure to RSVP at icscanada.edu/enough-is-enough

Looks like it’s time to bring back the #chroniclepitchbot again. “Is this decontextualized, historically inept, and badly substantiated report by tenured professors at high profile institutions stupid and violent? We asked the writers.” www.chronicle.com/article/insi...

I’m once again reading J. Z. Smith.

Does anyone know if there are any serious studies—whether they be historical, anthropological, or sociological—of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in Asia? I’m especially interested in studies that focus on China and Japan!

I’m thinking that this year instead of having a Surrealist Summer I’m going to have a Situationist Summer. Which means re-reading works by Situationists and reading some histories and studies of the movement.

“Worries: a mental illness characteristic of the age of capitalism. Spiritual (not material) hopelessness in poverty and in vagrant, mendicant monkhood… ‘Worries’ are the index of the sense of guilt induced by a despair that is communal, not individual and material, in origin.”

"Psychoanalysis without pragmatism can become moralistic and determinist in order to radically circumscribe possibility. But pragmatism without psychoanalysis can sound radically naive about the difficulty of wanting and overly idealistic in its experiments in becoming." (3/5)

“History and morality are written and read in the infrastructure of texts. The poetic word, polyvalent and overdetermined, adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified discourse and fully comes into being only in the margins of recognized culture.” Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, Novel”

Could anyone recommend me a good article-length piece about the historical development of the theory and practice of participant observation? I’m interested in learning more about its epistemological and political suppositions.

I decided to re-read “Towards a Third Cinema” by Solanas and Getino this afternoon.

The pope has been criticizing while simultaneously legitimizing #bigtech for a while. In Feb 26 the Vatican launched 2 equity stock indexes „aligned with catholic values“. Who is in? Tesla, apple, NVIDIA, alphabet, meta, amazon www.businessinsider.com/vatican-bank...

Pope Leo XIV presenting his encyclical on #AI together with Anthropic's Christopher Olah is comparable to Pope Leo XIII presenting his encyclical Rerum Novarum on capitalism together with Henry Ford

Gonna get a lot of mileage out of “Babel Syndrome”:

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries.

Magnifica Humanitas seems to be pretty good. Glad to see that ethical and moral concerns over AI are now enshrined within the social teaching of the Catholic Church since this gives them magisterial weight and lends them authority.

A very helpful essay by Greg Grandin on the liberationist teología del pueblo which has characterized the papacy of Francis and John. archive.is/2026.05.24-1...

“I am lost, quite lost in the middle of the desert… I have found a landscape that matches the landscape of my heart.” Angela Carter

“A critique of [our] symbols is a critique of our lives.” Angela Carter.

what agamben learned from ibn rushd

All curled up

This week I have really experienced how what Bion calls “attacks on linking” can take place even when they are mediated by digital platforms like Twitter or Bluesky. It’s been a very interesting thing to observe and to think about.

For my authoritarianism and psychoanalysis class this week we are reading “The Fundamentalist Mindset,” a work of self psychology by Kohut’s biographer and principal disciple that was very ambivalently received by historians and sociologists who work on fundamentalist religions.

Primary needs

Héloïse is making herself rather comfortable now that she is familiar with the apartment…

I bought myself a copy of the new English translation of Lacan’s early psychiatric and surrealist publications.

Going to spend my day reading about how the West German autonomist movement emerged in the 70s and 80s out of the new left and the (failed?) political activism of the extra-parliamentary opposition.

Adorno on the need for "a precise and undiluted knowledge of Freudian theory." From the paper "On The Meaning of Working Through The Past."

In the afterward of her translation of the novel Babylon Kay Boyle imagines a conversation with René Crevel about the relationship between surrealist revolt, anti-imperialism, communism, and the synthesis of reality and fantasy within an “absolute love” that shatters the everyday.

More reading for class. These four papers offer accounts of eroticism and power dynamics within the transference from an American relationalist perspective. They are all rather critical of a cultural attitude they describe as “Western” or “Judaeo-Christian.”

Two articles assigned for my class tonight on authoritarianism & psychoanalysis which evoke the critical theory of Adorno, Loewenthal, and Guterman. Unfortunately, they are actually works of “resistance liberalism” grounded in the work of Hannah Arendt, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley and Amos Oz.

I’ve been sort of sitting on this news a little bit but I will be a teaching fellow in the Divinity School and the College at the University of Chicago starting in the fall. I’ll be teaching humanities and social science in the undergrad core as well as my class “Magicians, Mystics, and Mentalists”

Here I am introducing the utopian politics of the West German extra-parliamentary opposition while discussing the need for a critical-theoretical and Freudo-Marxist social psychology at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute’s inaugural Writing Salon last Friday night.

Bernard Burgoyne offers a very helpful summary of the “Socratic” conception of the dialectics of psychoanalysis that Lacan worked out with the assistance of the mathematician Jacques Riguet.

Last night a classmate asked me to recommend some work that could help them learn more about psychoanalysis and critical theory in Germany. I told them to watch Rosa von Praunheim and Martin Dannecker’s “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives”

I borrowed out this cultural history of Australian psychoanalysis from the library this afternoon (which is of great interest to this aspiring psychoanalyst from Australia who came to Freud far from the Antipodes)!

Here’s the abstract for a paper I’ve proposed to present at the annual meeting of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education taking place in Chicago later this year. The paper is based on my research into West German psychoanalysis and the book critiquing Mitscherlich I’ve been translating

The Surrealist poet and art critic Nicolas Calas begins his essay "Myth, Thermidorians, and Solipsists" for the January 1980 edition of Artforum with a summary of the work of Sade, Marx, Lukacs, Marcuse, and Barthes.

Read: "What Universities Can Be: Strategizing amid the Crisis in Higher Education," a virtual roundtable, made freely available: buff.ly/EJZuGXb

“Individuals are increasingly held responsible for the management of their own fate and that of their families through a kind of calculation of the future consequences of present actions - a bringing of the future into the present and making it calculable and, in our dreams at least, manageable.”

In a conversation this morning I recommended Bruce Lincoln’s “Holy Terrors” to a student keen to learn about the relationship between religion and politics. His theses on religion and violence aren’t as good as his theses on method or comparison. But I think they’re fairly solid!

“The libidinal achievements demanded of an individual behaving as healthy… are such as can be performed only at the cost of the profoundest mutilation, of internalized castration in extroverts, beside which the old renunciation of identification with the father is child’s play.”

In “The Gospel in Solentiname” Ernesto Cardenal and the campesinos discuss the revolutionary significance of Christ’s resurrection and its relation to the work of liberation.

With books

Bernard McGinn’s heavily annotated and much read personal copy of Michel de Certeau’s article on Nicholas of Cusa alongside my copy of volume two of The Mystic Fable which includes a corrected and unabridged translation of the original French.

I finished with classes at the psychoanalytic institute for the day and am going to spend the afternoon re-reading an old favorite for a seminar I’m attending next week!

Thinking a lot today about the conflict between political theologies of liberation and of conservative reaction within Christianity and I am struck by the two competing ways that American Christianity is imagining the figure of Christ as criminal in relation to empire, domination and ethical duty.

More material I received today from Bernard McGinn. There’s folders with literature about Nicholas of Cusa, as well as plenty of late medieval, reformation, and Baroque German Mysticism.

Reading “The Seven Madmen” and I can definitely appreciate how a study of Roberto Arlt might convince someone to become a psychoanalyst!

Here’s a *deeply* partisan history of psychoanalysis in Argentina written by the Lacanian Roberto P. Neuburger who has made many of his publications available on his personal website. robertoneuburger.wordpress.com/a-psychoanal...