Harriet Atkinson, "Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53" (Manchester UP, 2024)

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy. Democracy, as you may dimly recall, demands the capacity to bear difference, tolerate loss, and to speak into the unknown. Meanwhile we have come to live in a world where, if my clinical practice and personal life are any indication, people often prefer writing to speaking. Patients who want to make a schedule change--never a neutral event in psychoanalysis—write me. I say, addressing the resistance, “This is a talking cure. Get your money’s worth. Speak!” Among intimates, bad news is something I too often read about. I surmise that in speaking desire or conveying pain, a fantasized recipient is sought, an ideal listener, who, like a blow up doll lover can be invoked, controlled and then deflated at will. Circling back to difference and loss, ideas that do not mirror our already existing thoughts find themselves batted out of the park to an elsewhere not worth enunciating. Cultivating a protective bubble—such a heartbreak right?  It seems there is something about democracy that frightens the shit out of us. Deploying the work of Winnicott, Klein, Green and Kristeva, Mcafee reminds us of our original loss—what she calls “plenum”. That loss, to the degree it is recognized, initiates our undoing. Mother’s other—be it her lover, her piano lessons, a visit to the dentist for a cavity—tears a hole in our emotional shield. In her wake, we cling to seemingly strong leaders, a father, or failing that potent ideologies reeking of misogyny, all the while hoping for compensation for an unfathomable loss. Embedded within democracy lies the demand that we see other than ourselves. This demand challenges the thin-skinned among us. And all of us are thin-skinned from time to time. How to manage? Mcafee adds her voice to the popular chorus of those practicing applied psychoanalysis and suggests we embrace mourning. It is an inarguable position yet also nice work if you can get it! Of course, with the original disaster elided, like sleepwalkers in our night fog, we will helplessly seek it out; worse, we will make it manifest, with a vengeance. What is not remembered gets repeated. Trapped in America, as I am, one wonders about democracy. What might lure us to revisit the sight of the disaster, “the thing itself’,” to quote Adrienne Rich, “and not the myth?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Touko 202057min

Did Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral? What is character work and how do characters with roots in ancient crease help us understand 21st-century politics? While many scholars of politics focus on plots, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young and Elke Zuern encourage us to look at the characters – particularly the simplified packaging of the intentions, capacities, and actions of public figures. In Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jasper and his colleagues show how political figures often allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions. Democracies need to understand where characters -- heroes, villains, victims, and minions – come from in order to keep their influence within proper bounds. Although part of a Western rhetorical tradition, character work is often done through dress, posters, facial expressions, statues, paintings, photos, and music. In the podcast, Jasper discusses Trump’s conveying of ancient rhetorical symbols through Twitter, the gendered nature of “strength” or “heroism,” and the uncomfortable use of stereotypes that shape group “characters.” Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

22 Touko 202041min

In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition (Routledge 2020) Professor Nancy J. Chodorow gives name and shape to an American middle group between the ego psychological and interpersonal approaches: The American Independent Tradition or intersubjective ego psychology. Through her careful exegesis of theoreticians like Hans Loewald, Erik Erikson and her contemporaries Warren Poland and James McLaughlin she is able to distill an analytic attitude in which the patient’s individuality takes front and center. We get a measured account of how her thinking about the American Independent Tradition evolved over the last two decades, about its "Americanness" and about a powerful approach to technique in which the patient becomes a centred unit by being centred upon. Turning outward from the consulting room, the in-depth study of psychoanalytic theory is framed by a focus on a larger context, the connection between individuality and society. Chodorow advocates for a return to an interest in the social and social sciences in psychoanalytic thinking. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

20 Touko 20201h 6min

John D. Caputo has a long career as one of the preeminent postmodern philosophers in America. The author of such books as Radical Hermeneutics, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and The Weakness of God, Caputo now reflects on his spiritual journey from a Catholic altar boy in 1950s Philadelphia to a philosopher after the death of God. Part spiritual autobiography, part homily on what he calls the “nihilism of grace,” Hoping Against Hope (Fortress Press, 2015) calls believers and nonbelievers alike to participate in the “praxis of the kingdom of God,” which Caputo says we must pursue “without why.” Caputo’s conversation partners in this volume include Lyotard, Derrida, and Hegel, but also earlier versions of himself: Jackie, a young altar boy, and Brother Paul, a novice in a religious order. Caputo traces his own journey from faith through skepticism to hope, after the “death of God.” In the end, Caputo doesn’t want to do away with religion; he wants to redeem religion and to reinvent religion for a postmodern time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Touko 20201h 13min

How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the relationship between the rise of digital sampling, technology, and music. The book draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies to explore the impact of specific technologies, such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, programming languages, and studio practices, on artists and producers. The analysis also thinks through the evolution of digital sampling across a variety of genres, including pop, folk, and hop-hop. Drawing on a wealth of examples, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music, the history of technology, and the history of contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

14 Touko 202046min

How should we understand our cities? In Why Cities Look the Way They Do (Polity, 2019), Richard Williams, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh explores the processes that shape the city foregrounding images over the idea that cities are designed or planned. The processes include the impact and influence of money, war, gender and sexuality, along with power and work. The book has a wealth of examples from cities across the world, from the megacities of Brazil, the financial hub of London, the sexual and computing spaces of San Francisco, to the aftermath of war in Belgrade. The range of examples, along with the focus on processes, make the book essential reading across the humanities and for anyone interested in contemporary urban life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

11 Touko 202036min

In the contemporary philosophical landscape, a variety of materialist ontologies have appeared, all wrestling with various political and philosophical questions in light of a post-God ontology. Entering into this discussion is Adrian Johnston, with his 3-volume ​Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism​, an attempt to develop a systematic and thoroughly atheistic material ontology of the subject. The first volume, subtitled ​The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013) looks at three recent French theorists, Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillasoux, arguing that all three ultimately fail to maintain a consistent atheism, regularly relying on various supramaterial elements to hold their systems together. In doing so, the book attempts to clear the ground for a consistently materialist ontology to be pursued in the latter two volumes. Adrian Johnston is chair and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of close to a dozen books, including among others ​Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern 2005) and ​Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh 2014). He is also a co-editor of Northwestern University Press’ book series ​"Diaeresis​," of which this trilogy is a contribution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

11 Touko 20201h 19min

In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country. Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2019) seems like a book written to explain precisely this moment. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between “the city” and its laboring poor? Inaugurating a paradigm shift in how we think of cities and urban space, the author Sheetal Chhabria argues that cities are not naturally occurring spaces or innocent administrative categories marked by lines on a map: instead they are spaced produced by constant labors of inclusion and exclusion which serve to keep capital flowing while stigmatizing the laboring poor. The book shows how “the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people” took precedence starting in the late 19th century, thereby “positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded” rather than as constitutive parts of city space. This argument is crucial. It shows that the injustices faced by the laboring poor are not mistakes or signs of incomplete or failed urbanism. Those injustices are instead the very essence of what it means to mark a space as a “city.” Combining theoretical acuity and empirical depth with an abiding concern for economic justice, the book takes us on a journey through colonial Bombay as it lurched from crisis to crisis at the turn of the 20th century: poverty, famine, plague, and political unrest. In this volatile climate, it was the continual appeals to the “health of the city” which served to render class warfare subterranean, to generate consensus on anti-poor measures across the colonial divide, and to invent a stigmatized object called “the slum” which could be used as a perpetual foil to the city, making the results of deep capitalist inequality (poverty, unsanitary dwellings, hunger) appear instead like vestiges of an incompletely capitalist society which could then be further commercialized. This book is a must read for everyone interested in urban, housing, and economic justice, as well as for scholars of South Asia concerned with the subcontinent’s enduring inequalities. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

8 Touko 202038min