In a time identified by the breakdown of fantasy, xenophobic malaise, and the salve of identity politics, philosopher Luce deLire and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster take us to the limits of ‘the self.’ They muse on anxiety’s collectivizing forces, the political instrumentalization of unsolvably fractured identities, and their permeation. They suggest a large scale embrace of personality hacking and sexual angst. Why are phenomena of personal dissolution oftentimes structured around political prohibition and the negotiation of sexualized proximity? What is ‘freedom’ beyond the negative freedom that restricts others from encroachment on one’s personal rights and property – philosophically, psychoanalytically? What do we even want from one another? We hope to introduce you to a surreal space beyond the impervious confines of anxiety and individuality. We will tell the tale of a woman who falls in love with a car, fathom the psychoanalytic fable of a shrimp that eats sand, and call for a (re)invention of anxiety and post-secular atheism. We hope you will join in on the journey and dissolve (together with) us and into one another.
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Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York. She has written for Artforum, Apology, Cabinet, The Guardian, Playboy, and The New York Times. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Stay, Illusion!, with Simon Critchley (Pantheon, 2013). She is currently working on The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan, with Marcus Coelen, and a new book, Conversion Disorder (Columbia, 2018).
