PhilosophyPodcasts.Org – Details, episodes & analysis

Sharon Patricia Holland

an other

 

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

“With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume.” — Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century

“Sharon Patricia Holland’s an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland’s enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book.” — Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press

Stephanie Li

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.

Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a “majority minority” population and the growing diversification of America’s political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.

The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

 

Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness.

—

 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share.

—

 David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

 

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

Howard Kirschenbaum

The life and work of Carl Rogers

Twenty years after his death, PCCS Books celebrates the life and work of Carl Rogers with the long-awaited second edition of the much-acclaimed biography by Howard Kirschenbaum, On Becoming Carl Rogers. This completely re-written and re-titled edition extends to over 700 pages and includes a more detailed personal and professional history, an evaluation of the Wisconsin years and a full account of the last decade of Rogers' life.The years that followed the publication of the first edition of Carl Rogers' biography in 1979 turned out to be one of the most important periods of his career. Until now this work has not been widely known. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the first edition, Kirschenbaum has added deeper understanding of Rogers' contributions to psychology, the helping professions and society. On a personal level, access to recently revealed private papers tells us much more about Carl Rogers the man than was known to many of his closest associates.

Lauren Levine

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

Note: I had planned to interview Dr. Levine about her book.  Leading up to the date we had agreed on, I was struggling with what to talk to her about.  Timothy Williamson notes the gladitorial or adversarial nature of philosophical discussion.  I certainly had some critical commentary on Dr. Levine's book, but I also prefer to be reparative, as opposed to carpy-suspicious, as a reader (Sedgwick).  And it was my sense that in Dr. Levine's particular intellectual culture, sharp-edged criticism can be considered inappropriate, and even lead to cancellation (cf. Jon Mills's criticism of relational psychoanalysis). 

In an email to Dr. Levine, I indicated my dilemma as we approached the date.  After mentioning that I did indeed have some potentially inappropriate (for some cultures) questions about her book, I realized there was a huge open question: she would probably want to know what they were.  Not wanting to be patronizing--and hoping that perhaps she would actually say my questions were all perfectly fine--I listed them. 

But soon thereafter, I got an email from Dr. Levine saying Dr. Levine she did not, in fact, want to participate in the podcast interview about her book.

It felt Karenesque of her and it felt like I was being canceled for daring to be critical, to engage in critique.  As Jon Mills will testify, this seems to be a problem with Levine's intellectual community: a strategy of ostracizing or refusing to speak with people who want to ask challenging questions. Stephen Mitchell himself seemed never to criticize any psychoanalytic theorist.  His mission was to affirm every psychoanalytic theorist, to show they they improved in some slight way on every previous theorist.  {Although as Barry Farber has emphasized, his validating ways did not extend outside the rich, prestigious, supposedly intellectual faction which houses themselves in psychoanalytic institutes.  Mitchell ignored Carl Rogers (probably because he never read him or certainly never took him seriously).

For "relational psychoanalysts" if you are in their group, they flatter each other; if you are outside or want to ask challenging questions, they shun and cancel.  Contrast this with Judith Butler who stresses the importance of "checking in with other perspectives [and] responding thoroughly to reasonable questions." 

So in an experiment, I did a podcast about her book, without her, without the author.  I want to do these about books (for example, books in which the author is, say, deceased.  Or the author is alive but in prioritizing their time, is unable to speak with me.  This gave me my first opportunity.  In this podcast, I review the negative, possibly out-of-bounds (as culturally defined) thoughts I had regarding Dr. Levine's book.  I'm also re-producing the offending email:

BEGIN EMAIL On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 11:40 AM August Baker  wrote: Thank you for sharing your thoughts. As for me, after sending my email and before getting your reply, I was feeling increasingly uncertain about whether we had enough overlap or shared reality to have a productive talk.  Your email made me feel better about it, but I am still uncertain.     My last list was based on impressions, prior to a final review of the book.  I need to do a complete, close read of the book and propose a new list.    I tried to distinguish between "practitioner" vs. "academic," but I now think those were the wrong labels. And anyway as you point out, you are an academic as well as a practitioner.  I don't know how to label what I am talking about.  Perhaps I can best express the difference by paraphrasing one of my prior interviewees, Timothy Williamson.  He describes a particular cultural approach to how people should best talk to an author about a book.  I do not think it is the same cultural approach you have ("cultural" here referring here not so much to "practitioner" but to the culture of the intellectual school or paradigm you are a part of.  What to call that school?  I don't know.  Perhaps "early 21st century psychoanalysis.")     In Williamson's cultural milieu, discussion of a book is, he admits, something like gladiatorial combat, or like the adversarial system in litigation.  It is an interlocutor's role to give their most sharp-edged responses to an author.  The interlocutor argues against the author. "A feel-good slogan is that discussion should be constructive, not destructive. It sounds like a platitude, but imagine telling city planners that they should always build houses and never knock them down."   It's not about practitioner vs. academic. I was wrong in labeling it such.  It's not about Left vs. Right either.  I interview both Left and Right. It is one of the things I explicitly try to do: get a wide range of political standpoints. It's not about philosophy versus other fields either.  I don't know a good label for it, but perhaps we could call it "critical" versus "reparative."   Some authors have this "critical" approach.  They expect me and want me to give my most sharp-edged criticisms.  This is true whether I interview a Left-leaning philosopher like Martha Nussbaum or a Right-leaning economist like Deirdre McCloskey.   On the other hand, when I interview a psychoanalyst such as yourself--or such as Christopher Bollas whom I interviewed recently--I get myself into a more reparative frame of mind. It just seems to me a matter of being culturally sensitive.   The trouble is that with your book, I fear there is not enough overlap between us.  Your strength is your clinical vignettes; yet I am not a clinician, and the one thing I know about clinical work is that I don't know enough to talk intelligently about it.  On the other hand, there are many areas where you and I have a different worldview.  Yet I don't see a way to discuss those issues in a culturally-appropriate-enough way.   I can tell you a few of the ways that we are simply on different wavelengths.  There are many, but four come to mind immediately.    (1) politics. You write: "We are currently in the midst of a terrifying sociopolitical backlash by the radical right to suppress our stories, to silence and whitewash the white supremacy and racism embedded in our history and culture. We must face our legacy of chattel slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people on which our country was founded."   I discussed this with Peter Brooks in a podcast I am publishing online today.  I simply don't agree with you here.  In my fantasy, if I try to empathize with you, you (correctly) view yourself here as taking a strong, righteous political stance, and as a matter of personal integrity, you don't want to back down off of it.   From my perspective, and I think you will find this offensive (and hence, I don't think it is productive to talk about it) there is much more to the story of the U.S. than slavery and the slaughter of indigenous people, and what you are doing is taking recourse in paranoia and splitting.     For numbers 2 and 3, consider the following quotations:   "Julia and I begin to weave together a shared narrative history about her early life, especially with her mother ..." "the rewriting of the family narrative seemed to open psychic space ..." "creating a share narrative of his traumatic history" "Coming to terms with the “lack” in parenting and the pain it caused is allowing ... "he needed me to feel the depths of his pain, to not abandon him like his parents when he pushed me to the brink, 

(2)  Parenting.  I appreciate your narrative of your personal struggle with your son.  It gives me goosebump, and I admire and respect your parenting and your writing about it.  On the other hand, I have a very different perspective, having worked much with parents who, to my understanding, were great parents but for whom their narratives did not turn out so well.  Their children did not flourish, and they need to deal with that pain, as well as the stigma that I think is implicit in your own view. Namely, that if the parent does parenting right, the kid will turn out well and happy. This is the flip-side of the other psychoanalytic worldview, which I also bristle at, namely that if the adult is unhappy, look to the childhood and especially the parenting.     (3)  the importance of narrative.  I personally think that narrative is over-emphasized.  See my podcast with Peter Brooks.   Essentially, summing up (2) and (3), when you write to a psychoanalytic audience, is it not true that you can simply assume as a default that psychoanalysis cures by re-parenting?  That the basic story one learns in analysis is "I was a beautiful soul, but X was very bad."?   All psychoanalysts will agree that that is not the whole story, but nonetheless it is the strongest current, and exceptions seem to me to be of the sort that prove the rule.   That's fine, but many people outside of psychoanalysis do NOT share this view.  And it seems suspicious that tales of cure so often follow the same path, especially when we know that we should be suspicious of narratives.   (4) Regarding the relational school, I have two issues (again, neither of which seems suitable or appropriate for us to talk about),    (a) there is an understandable but irksome tendency to write its own narrative in an self-serving and insular way.  Barry Farber, for example, argues convincingly that much of the supposed revolutionary thoughts of relational psychoanalysis were anticipated by none other than Carl Rogers.  Yet Rogers is never given his due.  There is an intellectual arrogance to relational writing, as though Rogers were too much a lightweight to credit.   (b) Relational writing seems to neglect analytic hate in Winnicott's sense.  Relational analysts show a great deal of hate, but this doesn't seem to be talked about much.  It is talked about a little, but again as the exception that proves the rule.   I do not think that any of these four are appropriate for our conversation.  They are what I would talk about perhaps if I were adopting Williamson's cultural approach.     I will do a final read-through of your book to see if I can find some common ground for us for a productive conversation.   --August   END EMAIL       ENDORSEMENTS   As you can see below, others--indeed, those supposed to know--feel very differently than I:

‘In this exquisite new book, Lauren Levine captures the finely nuanced tapestry that emerges when an analytic dyad takes shape; the interweaving of two different narratives of self that come together, engage with each other, distance each other and ultimately form the subject matter of the analysis that unfolds. With brilliant clarity, and detailed and forthrightly honest clinical examples, Levine demonstrates how the collision of the patient’s and the analyst’s preferred life stories demands the analyst’s, at times painful emotional honesty, in re-opening dissociated pockets of enlivening engagement and creativity.’ Jody Messler Davies, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies

‘In this powerful and creative volume, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, Lauren Levine explores the healing power of stories as they touch our vulnerabilities, our strengths and resilience, intrapsychic and sociocultural traumas. Levine beautifully explores the transformative value of sharing our stories with a listening, witnessing other, bearing witness to our wounds, our shame, and our collective sins.’ Galit Atlas, author of Emotional Inheritance; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis

‘Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis is a wonder, a collection of essays whose honesty, integrity and authenticity challenge us and teach us, making us more vulnerable and hence more alive than we were before reading. It provides a relational blueprint to the intricacies of our deepest fears and fantasies about the psychoanalytic process as well as an openness to the insidious impact of racism and sociopolitical trauma. It is extremely rare that such a broad range of the human experience is taken on by any author; it is a rarity indeed for it to be done with such brilliance, thoughtfulness and creative care. This is a most welcome book, which should be read and re-read for the often painful aliveness it brings to the therapeutic encounter.’ Steve Tuber, author of Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in Clinical Context

‘In this moving and incisive work, Lauren Levine reminds us that storytelling has both dangerous and curative dimensions. We often use stories to evade our own traumas and hide from self-awareness the gaps in our personal narratives. This has also been true of the field, in terms of the stories psychoanalysts feel comfortable engaging in our various models of the psyche. With an emphasis on the sharing of stories as the key to transformative mental healing, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation offers a powerful introduction to the insights of a relational psychoanalysis that can address the racial and cultural traumas of the 21st century.’ --Michelle Stephens, founding executive director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University 

‘Lauren Levine explores the creative potential of what might be called story living. She captures how shared stories build relational and political transformations. But only, as Levine carefully details, when patient and analyst together confront personal inhibitions and cultural prohibitions that render stories normotic and deadening. Levine theorizes and clinically animates the ways in which we not only “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as per Didion, but also how we tell stories to change the order of living.’ Ken Corbett, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

‘Lauren Levine’s highly creative work, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, marks the evolution of relational theory as a space of increasingly wonderful complexity. Her clinical and theoretical approach stresses the role of imagination and novel forms of clinical interaction. In this work, weaving film, poetry and dance into compelling psychoanalytic stories, we see both clinical and theoretical movement and expansion.’ Adrienne Harris, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and New School for Social Research

BOOK BLURB

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, this book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.

AUTHOR BLURB

Lauren Levine is joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She teaches and presents both nationally and internationally, and has published articles about sociocultural, racial and relational trauma, resilience, and creativity. Dr. Levine is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where she is codirector of the One Year Program in Relational Studies. She is visiting faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and supervisor at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. Dr. Levine is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

Thoughts on a degree-granting "program" at BU, called "Mental health counseling and behavioral medicine."  I took some classes there but eventually quit because it was so ridiculous.   What is "mental health counseling"?  U.S. states wanted to regulate who could become a psychotherapist, and, given the incredible demand, a variety of academic departments wanted to be able to offer degrees that would pass legislative muster.  

Medicine was first, but also nursing.  Then schools of social work: the MSW degree suffices.  Then psychology departments created something called a PsyD, different from a PhD.  There is also pastoral counseling I believe.  Finally, there was this little field called "counseling" which was essentially career counseling, then school counseling.  Historically, it is part of the broad attempt by the middle class and managerial class to maintain order, and maintain their privileged status.  Counseling attempted to get people into jobs.  Then to keep students non-delinquent.

Well, career counseling departments wanted also to take advantage of the huge demand for psychotherapy.  So they got legislative permission to create this new "mental health counseling" program.  Soon, of course, mental health counseling dominated and over-ran career counseling.  Career counseling now consists of one course in the BU program, and it is a course that is demeaned: take it in the summer, take it over some weekends.  The BU MHCBM program apologizes for having to offer it.

What is "behavioral medicine"?  Somehow "behavior medicine" became part of the title of BU's program, but it represents only one course in the curriculum too.  A hypothesis is that it was thought that "behavioral medicine" would make the program seem more appropriately housed on the medical school campus.  Behavioral medicine teaches how counselors can assist physicians: helping physicians by taking over the work of getting people to stay on their doctor-prescribed plans (adhere to the prescribed regimen).

At BU, there are two Mental-health counseling programs: this one in the medical school campus and the other in the Charles River campus.

The version at the medical school is scientistic and run by some limited individuals, philistines.  The worldview is one of neoliberalism.  It is more than just whether people have jobs or are non-delinquent.  People are diseased if they do not cope with--are unhappy in--neoliberal society.  People need to learn to submit to authority more happily; they need to learn to follow rules.  

And the program itself embodies this worldview in parallel process.  Faculty do not themselves set the curriculum; they defer to a higher power known as CACREP, which is an accreditation service.  Whenever therer is a difficult choice, the reply is that "this is required for our accreditation."  When accreditation is not specific enough, the faculty then bring in "consultants."  When in doubt, hire a consultant to deflect any responsibility from yourself. 

Students are treated like they are in the military.  The program is more hierarchical than anything I have been a part of.  The faculty members insist on being called "doctor," and it is forbidden to treat them as anything other than Gods.  (It must be that some of the faculty have backgrounds in the military.  Or they think that they are following a medical school model of trying to break people down arbitrarily, a sort of right of passage showing one's ability to tolerate BOHICA.) 

Criticism is wholly discouraged.  One should only find the positive in whatever one's classmates say.  One should never challenge the faculty.  Any failure is judged to be a lack of the "comportment" required to be a counselor.  (The most important thing for becoming a psychotherapist in this neoliberal world is to be someone who will happily sacrifice their integrity for the sake of arbitrary rules.  You can't say they are wrong: cf. the requirement to follow insurance rules).

Faculty teach and model a polite exterior ... comportment ... professionalism ... regulated narcissism and s/m hate.  Plus there's the de rigeur "we are professional helpers; the problem with our profession is only that we tend to give too much; we have to mutually remind ourselves to remember to practice self-care!"

 

Laurie Craigen, Rachel Levy-Bell, Steve Brady, Thom Fields, Rory Berger-Greenstein, Navolta.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

 

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
“I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”
 
Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
 
Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.

Alex Byrne

Trouble with gender: Sex facts, gender fictions

Sex used to rule. Now gender identity is on the throne. Sex survives as a cheap imitation of its former self: assigned at birth, on a spectrum, socially constructed, and definitely not binary. Apparently quite a few of us fall outside the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. But gender identity is said to be universal – we all have one. Humanity used to be cleaved into two sexes, whereas now the crucial division depends on whether our gender identity aligns with our body. If it does, we are cisgender; if it does not, we are transgender. The dethroning of sex has meant the threat of execution for formerly noble words such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’.

In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves. 

The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered ‘Is sex binary?’, ‘Why are men and women different?’, ‘What is a woman?’ or, simply, ‘Where can I go to know more about these controversies?’

Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.

Slavoj Žižek 

Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom.

The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them.

Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom?

Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Žižek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times.

  Table of Contents Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Move your Buridan's Ass!

Part I: Freedom As Such

Chapter 1: Freedom and its Discontents
i) Freedom versus Liberty
ii) Regulating Violations
iii) Freedom, Knowledge, Necessity
iv) Freedom to say NO

Chapter 2: Is There Such a Thing as Freedom of the Will?
i) Determinism and its Ragaries
ii) Rewriting the Past
iii) Beyond the Transcendental
iv) Pascalean Wager

Chapter 3: Indivisible Remainder and the Death of Death
i) The Standpoint of the Absolute
ii) The Death of God
iii) Suicide as a Political Act
iv)The Failed Negation of Negation

Appendices I
1 Potestas versus Superdeterminism
2 Sublation as Dislocation
3 Inventing Anna, Inventing Madeleine
4 The Political Implications of Non-Representational Art

Part II: Human Freedom

Chapter 4: Marx Invented not Only Symptom but Also Drive
i) Instead of...
ii) Progress and Apathy
iii) Dialectical Materialism
iv) Yes, but...
v) How Marx Invented Drive

Chapter 5: The Path to Anarcho-Feudalism
i) The Blue Pill Called Metaverse
ii) From Cultural Capitalism to Crypto-Currencies
iii) Savage Verticality Versus Uncontrollable Horizontality

Chapter 6: The State and Counter-Revolution
i) When the Social Link Disintegrates
ii) The Limit of the Spontaneous Order
iii) The State is Here to Stay
iv) Do not give up on your Communist Desire!

Appendices II
5 “Generalized Foreclosure”? No, Thanks!
6 Shamelessly Ashamed
7 A Muddle Instead of a Movie
8 How to Love a Homeland in our Global Era

Finale: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse
i) De-Nazifying… Ukraine, Kosovo, Europe
ii) The End of Nature
iii) DON'T Be True to Yourself!
iv) Whose Servant Is a Master?

Bence Nanay

Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience

Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution, and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn't show up in--in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind.

This book is written for an interdisciplinary audience. As it aims to combine philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand mental imagery, the author has not presupposed any prior knowledge in any of these disciplines, so any reader can follow the arguments.

Clancy Martin 

How not to kill yourself: A portrait of the suicidal mind.

FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous blend of memoir and philosophy that examines why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there’s always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and philosophy professor, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.”

“A deep meditation that searches through Martin’s past looking for answers about why he is the way he is, while also examining the role suicide has played in our culture for centuries, how it has evolved, and how philosophers have examined it.” —Esquire

“A rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is.” —The New York Times

“If you’re going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know.”

The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn’t die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations.

In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.

The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.

 

Clancy Martin, a Canadian, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and at Ashoka University in Delhi, India. He divides his time between Kansas City and India. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, and has five children: Zelly, Margaret, Portia Ratna and Kali, and an unruly labradoodle, Simha. A Guggenheim Fellow, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He writes fiction, nonfiction and philosophy. He is a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and Vice magazine, and has published academic and popular articles, essays and Op-Ed pieces in such diverse places as New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, New Republic, 1843/The Economist, Lapham's Quarterly, The Atlantic, Ethics, The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Elle, Details, Men's Journal, The London Times, The London Review of Books, De Repubblicca, and many others. He is a contributor to the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. His work has been optioned for television/film development by Sony, HBO, Anonymous Content and other production companies. His most recent work is on suicide, failed suicide and suicidal ideation. He is a recovering alcoholic, and has written and been interviewed extensively about alcoholism, addiction and suicide.