Watched Herzog’s Aguirre and Nosferatu. Really good!

day one in mamdani’s new york

I like to think about this in terms of the rhetorical figures that Barbara Johnson opposes to reification in her essay “Toys R Us” from “Persons and Things,” where she notes that apostrophe, prosopopeia, anthropomorphism, and personalization arise to challenge colonialism and capitalism.

“‘All reification is a forgetting.’ Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance.” Herbert Marcuse, “The Aesthetic Dimension.”

Final read of the year was J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company. I think it might be one of the very few English-language novels written by someone who was not part of the surrealist movement itself that I would describe as definitively surrealist.

In the last couple of days I’ve become so taken by the idea that I would like to reread all of Peanuts that I might try and track down printed copies of the collected works sometime soon.

I’ve found it to be absolutely necessary when assigning films in class to state plainly and clearly in prompts where I ask students to offer written reflections upon what they’ve watched that a thematic analysis is neither a description of plot nor a review of whether the film was good or bad.

I’m taking advantage of my Criterion subscription to watch the many films by Werner Herzog I’ve never actually seen before. Began with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Heart of Glass. Really enjoyed the former. Was less impressed by the latter. Will watch the Kinski collaborations next!

This spooky boy is keeping me company while I play 20-year-old Pokémon games

Scrying and pondering

Here’s a nice little post-Brexit reflection on J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come that I just found online. I really do think that this is a book that completely gets the psychopolitics of our present moment. www.4thestate.co.uk/2018/11/15/v...

George Perec on cats, from Species of Spaces (1974). Pictured with his own cat.

LeMonde said, not on our watch

I just spent the morning re-reading some R. D. Laing and am settling down now to watch Ken Loach and David Mercer’s 1970 film “Family Life,” which adapts Laing’s existentialist, anti-psychiatric analysis of schizophrenogenic family systems.

J.-B. Pontalis discusses the distinction Winnicott draws between the game and play, as well as between play and playing, in his preface to the French translation of Playing and Reality released in 1975.

Balibar and Wallerstein wrote about this in the 80s. The „New Racism“, they said, claims not that race itself is biological, but racism is.

Claude Cahun on the dreams of obedient and well-behaved children

“Out of love for whomever life has thrown at us, we alter ourselves to such an extent that if the ideal one ever came along, we’d be incomplete.”

“I’m going to explain my self-love to you… It’s fake. Pure stoicism, maybe some pride… In reality, I have a huge need for other people.”

A parable about a rebellious child

The day after Christmas and I am enjoying spending time with one of the gifts I received from my wife yesterday: the new re-release from Siglio Press of Claude Cahun’s subversive and transgressive work of gender-queer surrealist autobiography, Aveux non Avenus.

Enjoying my Christmas evening in Chicago watching the Boxing Day test in Melbourne!

The birth of Jesus according to the Gospel in Solentiname by Ernesto Cardenal and the Nicaraguan campesinos.

Bruno has found the gift we hid in his stocking

The birth of Jesus according to the Gospel in Solentiname by Ernesto Cardenal and the Nicaraguan campesinos.

Present Day, Present Time

Introducing @kholob.bsky.social to a movie that I just learned today she had never seen before (and which I have probably watched at least 100 times)!!!

A Christmas reminiscence, from George’s Perec’s “W, or, The Memory of Childhood.”

Went for a long walk with a friend who I haven’t seen for a while this afternoon and found this in a little free library on my way back home! 🥰🥰🥰

And on Bartleby!

I should confess, I think, that I am enjoying reading Perec because I feel interpellated by his prose. I am discovering myself to be the kind of subject that I am as I read his work (and as I meditate upon the clinical picture of Perec that Pontalis builds up in his own writing)!

From Georges Perec’s “A Man Asleep,” a haunting tale about depressive indifference, the loss of hope, and how the modern world kills life by rendering it boring and predictable.

Hello Bruno!

Georges Perec on bureaucracy and governance (the trappings of the official).

Saketopoulou puts it well: “My goal is to flesh out an epistemology of traumatophilia that may release analysts from the habit of seeing the imprint of trauma as something that can be eliminated… trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed: it is a cause of becoming.”

Instructive to the degree that it demonstrated the limits of the liberal political imaginary that governs those relationalist currents that develop out of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Honneth’s theory of recognition, I mean.

I once witnessed Jessica Benjamin short circuit at a conference after Saketopoulou presented her work on traumatophilia and traumatophobia as part of a critique of psychoanalysis’s privileging of the reparative gesture in anti-racist work. It was a really instructive moment.

I decided to watch the Netflix show where a young Freud helps to solve paranormal crimes with the aid of a sexy and hysterical medium and it is about as ridiculous as I expected it to be.

Pontalis on the discontinuity and contingency of memory, and on the continuity of the body (as well as the necessity of habit).

I enjoyed reading this excerpt from the book about conflicts between brothers written by Pontalis. I probably need to pick up the book itself! brooklynrail.org/2013/05/expr...

Jaspers on the contingencies that affect the practice of psychotherapy: state apparatuses, the presence or absence of religion, social conditions (class background), hegemonic cultural attitudes, and science (both “real” and “false”).

Picked up this little pamphlet by Karl Jaspers on psychotherapy at the psychoanalytic institute this morning, which they were giving away as part of their regular clearance of old tomes from their library.

I’m quite taken with Françoise Dolto’s transformation in her theoretical and clinical work of the Winnicottian idea of the infant’s “going-on-being” into the idea of the subject’s “going-on-desiring” and “going-on-becoming.”

I’ve been reading the screenplay Sartre wrote for John Huston’s film about Freud (edited and introduced by the psychoanalyst Pontalis, who claims it demonstrates Sartre’s re-evaluation of Freud’s work and sets the stage for Sartre’s study of Flaubert in The Family Idiot).

let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness

Are “experience near” and “experience distant” terms that belong *specifically* to self psychological discourse? I only ever see self psychologists (and relationalists who are informed by self psychology) use these terms in psychoanalytic writing and in clinical presentation.

Françoise Dolto also discusses, in a Lacanian and Winnicottian mode, the distinction between the body schema and body image that Gallagher describes in his work, and which Langer makes theoretical and clinical use of in their work with trans subjects.

I found a copy of Dr. Spock in a little free library this afternoon and decided to take it home with me as I figured it would be theoretically and clinically useful to have the Bible of mid-century American child-rearing ready to hand for the purpose of research.