I just discovered this cool little essay that Gary Indiana wrote about Unica Zürn. Not surprised he was a fan! “For many sensitive souls, the possibilities of self-reinvention are exhausted long before any sort of natural death. Unica Zürn was one of these.” www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

This, from Adorno‘s Minima Moralia, is one of my favourite paragraphs of all time

It is not lost on me that with my last name and with my interest in surrealism and Lacanianism that one might imagine me to be decidedly French in temperament. But I am sad to say that I am completely and even painfully Anglo-Australian and have studied too much German to ever be so!

Unica Zürn, Oracles et spectacles, 1967.

“Expression with its pleasure component is a displaced pain and a deliverance.” Hans Bellmer, “Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious.”

Here are Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller’s account of the department of psychoanalysis at Vincennes, as well as the critique of the same department by Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard.

"I think it's 'better' to know the truth about one's self and the universe in which I exist. But I do not wish to imply that it is 'nicer' or 'pleasanter.'" W.R. Bion, preface to “Seven Servants”

Just began working on organizing the blog & converting to shareable PDFs, & it’s going to be a big project! For life reasons, it’s going to be harder for me to keep going now, so any support would be crazy appreciated! & thanks for reading & sharing Substudies! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Peter Cornell on Freud as archaeologist, as detective, as novelist, as hydraulic engineer, as flâneur…

I need to sit down and read Oliver Davies and Tim Dean’s “Hatred of Sex.” At this moment in my psychoanalytic career I would definitely appreciate a critique of the (neo)liberal sexual politics of American relationalism and queer theory that draws upon both Ranciere and Laplanche!

I stumbled upon these two papers by the psychotherapist SJ Langer this afternoon which build upon Lacan and Winnicott (as well as Merleau-Ponty) to develop a theory of a trans body image in genderqueer subjects. I found them to be very interesting and helpful reads!

I’m reading these four papers today for a class on relational psychoanalytic approaches to gender and sexuality tomorrow morning. Actually I’ve read each paper before so I’m motivated to do so again as *relational* interventions for a class introducing relational clinical praxis as well as theory.

In this aside on the concept of the real, Negt and Kluge discuss the difference between Copernican and Ptolemaic subjectivity in a way that I think maps nicely onto Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic conception of the same.

Out of curiosity I decided to see if Negt and Kluge refer to the work of Jean Piaget. He is cited once in “History & Obstinacy,” in an aside within a discussion of social birth and the politics of the body.

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

All things considered, it feels good to be reading these object relational approaches to immigration while also watching Mira Nair’s adaption of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” for a class on the psychoanalysis of race and ethnicity on Friday!

I still have *a lot* of Schattenfroh left to read but I’m going to take a break from it to dive into Cornell’s “The Ways of Paradise.” I couldn’t resist after opening the novel up to a random page in the bookstore and discovering a series of notes on Breton’s automatic poetry.

Going to start reading Sadie Plant’s history of the Situationist International today. Then I plan to read Dominique Routhier’s more recent history. I’m curious to see how a founding member of the CCRU and a critic of the “cybernetic hypothesis” differently historicize the SI.

During a nocturnal vision, according to Pope Gregory the Great, “the whole world, gathered together, as it were, under one beam of the sun, was presented before the eyes of St. Benedict.” Here’s one medieval and three early-modern depictions of one of my favorite hagiographical episodes!

I sometimes worry that the exvangelical commitment to secular enlightenment can manifest as a kind of Protestantism that is as severe and as punishing as that of the convert Catholic who fails to recognize how their newfound traditionalism is just their old evangelicalism in another guise…

I think that at the end of the day, however one feels about “reflexive impotence” in one’s students and in one’s colleagues, a teacher who begins to teach with the conviction that their students are unable to learn, reason, think, or feel a certain way has failed their students and themselves.

I’ve been enjoying this episode and the opportunity it afforded me to return to the work of Mark Fisher. I think one thing I appreciated on this re-read is the *nostalgia* for the disciplinary society evident in Fisher’s critique of the society of control in his writing on education/-

As anticipated, the end of daylight saving time has totally disrupted my sleep schedule so I’ve been watching Peter Watkins La Commune (Paris, 1871) since early in the morning. It’s good stuff and has me thinking about Negt and Kluge’s work on the public sphere and (proletarian) experience.

Reading Gherasim Luca’s “The Inventor of Love” this afternoon and I can definitely see why Deleuze was so fascinated by his poetry!

A thoughtful critique of neuropsychoanalysis that describes how Solms attempts to map and adjust Freud to the affective neuroscientific model of the mind that he finds scientifically compelling, and why this hermeneutic strategy fails to demonstrate that psychoanalysis actually “needs” that model.

I think what I find most remarkable about this important work of mid-century academic medievalism isn’t how White shows that Americans imagined themselves to be medieval, but how they imagine the Middle Ages to be American.

James Ensor

Here’s Friedrich A. Kittler on Heidegger, television, and on finding the gods in the “heroic” German football team during the World Cup rather than in the theater.

“The object offered objectively to an object is a magical process of communication… whereby for a given moment the object is divested of its nature as a mediating symbol in erotic practices… putting us in the delirious state of fetish worshippers where the symbol supersedes what it symbolizes.”

The “Contra Paulum” draft is cool. I not only took note of how Adorno and Horkheimer align Tillich with Neo-Thomist positivism. I also took note of how they align *themselves* with the fanaticism of the dialectical theology of Barthes (characterized by its relentless nay-saying)!

This is a solid article that takes Theleweit’s work on male fantasy seriously. Worth a read!

Gherasim Luca’s surrealist theory of the objectively offered object. “Taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms and illuminate the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.”

John Forrester in “The Seductions of Psychoanalysis” published an interesting reflection about how he translated Lacan’s French into English that I think speaks to this complaint of mine!

I think I would like to read more about St. Charles Borromeo who (apparently) during the canonization process was found to lack body fat and a *penis*

Found some good graffiti in the library stacks this morning! “Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird.”

“And yet, how I do feel myself supported by and in agreement with your inquiries, in their content and in their style. Does not the ‘transitional object…’ indicate the site at which, precociously, that distinction of desire in relation to need is marked?” Lacan in a letter to Winnicott

👀👀👀

I’m stepping back into my disciplinary past as a medievalist and historian of religion to read Carlos Eire’s new book on levitation and other miraculous phenomena for a seminar organized by the Lumen Christi Institute (the local para-academic Catholic organization with ties to the university).

Here’s the description that Krzysztof Fijałkowski gives of Gherasim Luca’s position within the Romanian surrealist movement,whose revolutionary project, as Luca and Trost announce in their Dialectic of dialectics, was to realize “the unlimited eroticization of the proletariat.”

Okay so I dropped by the university library this morning and borrowed out some prose poetry by Gherasim Luca to read!

The “Dialectic of dialectics,” composed by Gherasim Luca and Dolphi Trost in 1945, is one of the wildest surrealist manifestos. It’s very worth reading for its attempt to theorize a non-Oedipean desire (1/2)

“If human beings would learn to stop insisting on their distinction from animals, perhaps they would no longer need to humble themselves so before the angels.” —Adorno (1944)

In Television, Lacan describes his particular understanding of the psychoanalytic vocation by evoking his particular understanding of sainthood (as abjection, as refuse, as unrighteous).

It’s amazing—and distressing—how many works by Lacan, like Radiophonie, are only available to the English reader in pirate translations that are clearly produced by people with a poor grasp of French (or who try to preserve French syntax in order to produce unreadable English)!

I haven’t listened to this yet but I did read some of the pieces written by Bordiga that are discussed in this episode this afternoon and I found them to be pretty rad. Especially this short piece on the Mexican celebration of the day of the dead and on the solar economy of Incan communism!

An exchange between Joel Kovel and Ian Craib in Radical Philosophy on the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism. www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marx...

I enjoyed reading this theoretical exchange between two self psychological proponents of neuropsychoanalysis and Jaak Panskepp because it was helpful to see Panskepp critique some of the ways that analysts have attempted to reconcile his work with that of Freud.

watch to the end lmfao