Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy

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FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William[…]

Chaucer’s Comic Providence

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Published: 04/20/2023

Chaucer’s Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann’s conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as[…]

Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

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FORTHCOMING Fall 2023

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant in this volume. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 3: The Block of Fame

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Published: 01/14/2021

In The Block of Fame, Edmund Bergler, like the thirteenth fairy in the “Sleeping Beauty,“ uninvited because there wasn’t an extra place setting, crashes the psychoanalytic poetics of daydreaming with a curse. He charges that the overview, according to which art making rarefies daydreaming and delivers omnipotence, overlooks the underlying defense contract. We are hooked[…]

The Humid Condition: (More) Overheated Observations

Published: 03/05/2020

A Zibaldone for the Twitter age. An Anatomy of Mischievous Melancholy. A Commonplace book of uncommon opinions An avalanche of apposite apercus. An inventory of inappropriate malaproprisms. Buying raw milk from the back of a truck in Manhattan is a bit like a drug deal in Breaking Bad, except instead of guns and gangsters you[…]

Misinterest: Essays, Pensées, and Dreams

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Published: 06/27/2019

The term “interest” lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have “disinterested” and “uninteresting,” but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest’s missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of[…]

Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education

Published: 08/20/2019

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin[…]