Psycho-Politics And Cultural Desires


Book Description

A cultural studies textbook that deals with issues of methodology, as well as mapping out the history and theories and ideas in cultural studies. The book examines the work of Raymond Williams, Lacan and Hoggart, among Others, And Explores Notions Of Subculture, Psychoanalysis, Marxist thought, narrative, autobiography, fiction, subjectivity, language, history and representation. The book focuses on the past, present and future of cultural studies, with the aim of providing readers with a clear overview of the central ideas within the area, developing current debates and possible future avenues.







Psychopolitics


Book Description

For thousands of years, political leaders have unified communities by aligning them against common enemies. However, today more than ever, the search for “common” enemies results in anything but unanimity. Scapegoats like Saddam Hussein, for example, led to a stark polarization in the United States. Renowned neuropsychiatrist and psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian proposes that the only authentic enemy is the one responsible for both everyday frustrations and global dangers, such as climate change—ourselves. Oughourlian, who pioneered an “interdividual” psychology with René Girard, reveals how all people are bound together in a dynamic, contingent process of imitation, and shows that the same patterns of irrational mimetic desire that bring individuals together and push them apart also explain the behavior of nations.




Psycho-Politics between the World Wars


Book Description

This book is about the psycho-political visions and programmes in early-twentieth century Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Amidst the political and social unrest that followed the First World War, psychiatrists attempted to use their clinical insights to understand, diagnose, and treat society at large. The book uses a variety of published and unpublished sources to retrace major debates, protagonists, and networks involved in the redrawing of the boundaries of psychiatry’s sphere of authority. The book is based on three interconnected case studies: the overt pathologisation of the 1918/19 revolution led by right-wing German psychiatrists; the project of medical expansionism under the label of ‘applied psychiatry’ in inter-war Vienna; and the attempt to unite and implement different approaches to psychiatric prophylaxis in the movement for mental hygiene. By exploring these histories, the book also sheds light on the emergence of ideas that still shape the field to the present day and shows the close connection between utopian promises and the worst abuses of psychiatry.




Culture in Bits


Book Description

Cultural Studies seems to have lost its way somewhere between today's preoccupation with the empirical and the theory revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. Assessing the work of key theorists across the history of cultural studies--Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Angela McRobbie--Culture In Bits argues that the trend towards a more politicized practice is in fact not political enough; theory, and deconstruction in particular, can offer a more radical and a more political engagement.Pinpointing the ambiguities that both constitute and disturb cultural studies and outlining a radical agenda for its future, Culture in Bits is vital reading for all interested in cultural practice and theory.




Psychopolitics


Book Description

Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.




Small City on a Big Couch


Book Description

This book psychoanalyzes a small Mexican city to figure out how the city makes sense of both herself and her many Others in the face of constant change. It puts the city on the couch and works through her past and present relationships, analyzing issues surrounding sexuality, the compulsion to repeat, transferences and desires.




Ontological Terror


Book Description

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.




Pedagogical Alliances between Indigenous and Non-Dualistic Cultures


Book Description

Pedagogical Alliances Between Indigenous and Non-Dualistic Cultures examines Indigenous education for authentic intercultural education. It critically reviews various Indigenous cultural and educational perspectives in Western education contexts, addresses relevant meta-cultural concerns, argues for pedagogical alliances cross non-dualistic cultures/religions, and articulates metaphysical approaches to the alliances. Throughout the book, the author argues that methodological enhancement of Indigenous culture can be made by proposing new values that emerge from authentic intercultural interaction, which is transcendental to the binary oppositions of Indigenous and Western education. To do so, the author discovers pedagogical and methodological vulnerabilities of Indigenous culture in Western education systems, and proposes its pedagogical alliances with non-dualistic cultures (such as Buddhist mindful pedagogy, Confucius virtues pedagogy, and Hindu contemplative pedagogy) to overcome the frame of Indigenous and Western cultures for Indigenous education and to strengthen both Indigenous and non-dualistic education. This is the first book to address the issue of why non-Indigenous cultures other than Western cultures have not been considered in Indigenous and multicultural education. As such it is an invaluable text for education academics and post-graduate students specialising in Indigenous education, cross-cultural education, inclusive pedagogy and intercultural education.




Femininity and Psychoanalysis


Book Description

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes. This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger. Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.