Library Talk | The Unwritten Enlightenment | Leon Brenner and Nathan Gorelick

IPU Library Talk host Leon Brenner in conversation with Nathan Gorelick, author of "The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious".
Nathan Gorelick is a term assistant professor of English at Barnard College. His teaching and research take place at the intersections between literature, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique from the eighteenth century to the present. He has published widely on these topics in relation to diverse subjects including psychedelic drugs, the psychology of ecological collapse, the objectal turn in Continental philosophy, the Haitian Revolution, the unconscious foundations of Islamophobia, and contemporary Islamic politics. He has completed the six-year cycle of the Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, Canada, and he is a member of the New York Circle of the Freudian School of Québec. Previously, he was an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University, and he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Leon S. Brenner is a lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin. He is a member of the APPI, LOB, and a founder of Lacanian Affinities Berlin (laLAB) and Unconscious Berlin. His latest book on the subject of the psychoanalysis of autism is called The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, where he presents a novel account of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective.
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[@chomotchomelian]

All-around brilliance. Thanks for this intro to Nathan's work. I haven't got his book yet hooked?!

[@adamaenosh6728]

So refreshing to hear someone state in no uncertain terms that psychoanalysis' current fashion of reactionary attitudes towards the existence of transgender people is an incorrect reading. If anyone has sources for a comprehensive argumentation along those lines, I would love to be directed to it. I find it disgusting how it is trendy right now in Lacanian circles to go on polemics against 'identity politics', which equate the rightfully criticised ideologies of identity with the actual existence of human beings, who precisely are causing a problem to reactionaries by failing to exist within the identity categories imposed on them. Then, neoliberalism conditions those people's safety from violence on their willingness to adopt identitarian discourses produced by institutions that will only protect those bodies made legible to them. And instead of doing the obvious thing which is to criticise the institutional structures that produce identity politics, psychoanalytic polemicists direct their criticism towards the courageous political efforts of vulnerable people. As if transgender people owed anyone to become fluent in Lacanese before they deserve not to be murdered on the street. In the end, psychoanalysis belies its own status as just one more of these ideological institutions that expects loyalty to its discourse, when it ought to be so much more than that.

[@chomotchomelian]

💯 ❤