Alenka Zupančič

Disavowal

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us

Stijn Vanheule (approximate pronunciation "Stayin' VonHoil)

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy

A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers

An expert’s guide to humanizing psychosis through communication offers key insights for family and friends to support loved ones during mental health crises.

Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other—stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are?

Drawing on his work in psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them.

Peter Singer

Consider the turkey

Why this holiday season is a great time to rethink the traditional turkey feast.

Maria Balaska

Anxiety and wonder

On being human

Description
At times, we find ourselves unexpectedly immersed in a mood that lacks any clear object or identifiable cause. These uncanny moments tend to be hastily dismissed as inconsequential, left without explanation. Maria Balaska examines two such cases: wonder and anxiety – what it means to prepare for them, what life may look like after experiencing them, and what insights we can take from those experiences.

For Kierkegaard anxiety is a door to freedom, for Heidegger wonder is a distress that opens us to the truth of Being, and for Wittgenstein wonder and anxiety are deeply connected to the ethical. Drawing on themes from these thinkers and bringing them into dialogue, Balaska argues that in our encounters with nothing we encounter the very potential of our existence. Most importantly, we confront what is most inconspicuous and fundamental about the human condition and what makes it possible to encounter anything at all: our distinct capacity for making sense of things.

Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction

1. What Makes Us Anxious?

2. Anxiety and the Origin of Human Existence

3. Wonder and the Origin of Philosophy

4. The Paradox of Anxiety and Wonder

5. After Anxiety and Wonder

Notes
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews
Review
“In this astute analysis of anxiety and wonder, Maria Balaska argues that understanding ourselves requires more than natural causal explanations and resists psychopathological approaches to overpowering experiences. With Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Lacan, she insightfully elucidates the deeply human desires to feel at home in the world and find meaning in it-and the possibility of their fulfilment.” ―Kate Kirkpatrick, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, UK

“Maria Balaska presents the best treatment to date of wonder and anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Focused on the objectlessness of both experiences – what Kierkegaard calls the ambiguous power of spirit and Heidegger terms “the nothing” – the book draws as well on Freud, Lacan, Plato, and Wittgenstein to argue that living authentically means embracing the liberating power of one's mortal open-endedness. Capacious, insightful, and written in lucid prose, Prof. Balaska's text will enrich both lay and professional readers.'” ―Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, German Studies and Philosophy, Stanford University, USA

“Maria Balaska facilitates a conversation between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lacan and Wittgenstein that presents philosophy as embodying an anxious wonder at our capacity to make sense of things. She thereby deepens our understanding of all four thinkers, and illuminates not only the distinctive nature of philosophy, but its ineliminable role in the perennial human task of making sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.” ―Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK

“This is an excellent book … A must-read for specialists interested in how continental philosophy can contribute to the thriving discourse on the experience and place of anxiety and wonder in our lives.” ―Philosophical Investigations

About the Author
Maria Balaska is a Research Fellow at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the author of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning, and Astonishment (2019) and editor of Cora Diamond on Ethics (2020).

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic (May 2, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1350302937
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1350302938

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Liberalism

By revealed preference, Prof. McCloskey is our favorite scholar to talk with. This is our third conversation with her. Today, we discuss two working papers on liberalism.

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.