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...

Jane Russo in her study of Lacanianism in Argentina and Brazil reminds us that a global approach to the history of the psy-disciplines challenges the presumption that the hegemony of neuroscience and neurological psychiatry in the US means that psychoanalysis has been (or ought to be) superseded.

I watched Pedro Almodovar’s “Labyrinth of Passion” since I’ve spent this week reading about the imbrication of Pop Art and Lacanianism in Argentina and Spain. I enjoyed it. It gave me some idea of what La Movida entailed and the cultural role psychoanalytic discourse played in it

Why is she dressed up as a fashionable aristocrat instead of a revolutionary Jacobin or one of the sans-cullottes?

“Lying in a forest, Green and virgin, The black lady at that time Holds her beating heart Between her legs, Round and carnal, Waiting For the lost visitor To sally forth from the thickness Of her phantasmal night.” A surrealist and Kleinian poem by the Argentine psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-Rivière

Watching Alexander Kluge in conversation with Hans Magnus Ellenberger examine whether one can write a poem about the capitalist economy, where they discuss the solid, liquid, and gaseous form that money takes, and am mourning the critical-theoretical spirit we have just lost.

I bought this recently. I’m trying to read more Lefebvre.

This is my new friend Héloïse who moved into the apartment today! 😽😽😽

First Habermas, now Kluge. It feels like an era is coming to an end…

Three attempts to bring queer theory and psychoanalysis into critical conversation in order to transform the disciplinary practice of psychotherapy that I’m reading today for my class on gender and sexuality at the institute.

I found these in a little free library while walking back from campus just now.

I visited Bernard McGinn today and he very kindly gifted me some folders with material dedicated to German mysticism that he has collected over the years. They contain articles, book chapters, primary sources, unpublished translations and lectures, as well as notes and summaries.

Graduate student union materials I’m lending to the Divinity School for an exhibit in Swift Hall this quarter celebrating student life for the centennial anniversary of the founding of the school. I have over 10 years worth of badges from different campaigns.

I came across a "creed" that I wrote for a seminar on critical education in the university classroom several years ago. I decided to post it on my substack. I think it's *very* idealist. But I don't disavow my somewhat naive desire for a pedagogy oriented toward social justice!

Getting ready to head out to the On Cinema live show 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

I really do need to properly read Dardot and Laval! As well as Boltanski and Chiapello! I want to better understand the post-Marxist account of neoliberalism developed in France since I’m pretty familiar with the American narratives (Wendy Brown and Michael Hardt).

This has just been published in “Theory & Society” (formerly) considered THE top #sociology /theory journal, after Springer Nature redid the board, installing Steven Pinker among them. Shame shame shame

A contribution to the Foucauldian effort to articulate a genealogy of neoliberalism that describes how the postwar “therapeutic ethos” that was championed by the New Left was repurposed by the Right in order to normalize the ideology of the free market & the individual as entrepreneur.

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!