From Kanye to Ye: The Legacy of Unconditional Love, with a foreword by Tommy J. Curry, can be described as a theoretical biography of Ye. In particular, the book focuses on the period from 2016 to 2021 (The Shaky-Ass Years) in an effort to think psychoanalytically about Ye’s complex subjectivity, his struggle with bipolar disorder, the thin line between the personal and the political when it comes to celebrity culture, and his aesthetic productions — be they in the form of music, video, or fashion — which are also ethical and political projects/objects.
From Kanye to Ye approaches its subject first through a review of the psychoanalytic literature on manic depression and bipolar disorder and then turns its attention to Ye’s nervous breakdown in 2016 — first framed as a “temporary psychosis” and then as “bipolar disorder” — in the context of the release of The Life of Pablo album and its accompanying Saint Pablo Tour. The book then considers the U.S. media’s psychological pathologization of Ye, particularly as a Black man, and his own reconstruction of his manic depression. Beshara also address Ye’s identification with Trump and the significance of his use of the MAGA hat as a creative form of cultural appropriation. The book concludes by briefly surveying Ye’s conscious turn to Gospel music and his failed Presidential campaign in an effort to pay more attention to his latest magnum opus, named for his mother, Donda — specifically, the three public listening parties. The effort throughout the book is to take what Ye is saying seriously as opposed to dismissing him using stigmatizing terms, and in Beshara’s terms, to specifically align his desire with Donda’s in an attempt to see Ye from her point of view, that is, through the legacy of unconditional love.