Freud and Irigaray in Grey Gardens

Penis Envy as Male Phantasy

This post is part of the Bodies, Gender, and Domination OOPS Series. The American documentary Grey Gardens, directed by the Maysles brothers, is a celebrated landmark of its genre. The viewer enters the life of Edith “Big Edie” Beale and her daughter Edith “Little Edie” Beale. The peculiar couple lives in ...
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Freud and Irigaray in Grey Gardens

Psychoanalysis, Democracy, Desire

Anyone passingly familiar with the history of psychoanalysis knows that the field has occupied an embattled, marginalized, often indeterminate identity, and that its survival has often seemed precarious. Yet it is from this perch on the margins of culture and community that psychoanalysis speaks. By channeling a vortex of unconscious ...

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Psychoanalysis, Democracy, Desire

Donald Trump’s Reductio Ad Penis

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. “Look at those hands; are they small hands?” the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump said during the debate on March 3, 2016. Trump added, “And, he referred to my hands -- ‘if they’re small, something else ...
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Donald Trump’s Reductio Ad Penis

Dilemmas of Voluntary Servitude

This post is in relation to the Gender and Domination course in OOPS. My favorite paragraph in Etienne de La Boetie’s “The Discourse On Voluntary Servitude” that we read for the second class, is probably the beginning of Part II, which calls on the doctors on behalf of the mortally wounded in spirit, ...
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Dilemmas of Voluntary Servitude

Growing up under Different Skies

Reflections at the Einstein Forum

I stand before you with more questions and contradictions than answers. I have chosen to speak of growing up “under different skies” because that was my destiny. What I don’t know is whether such a biographical accident sheds a very different light on growing up or whether it ...

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Between Freud and Einstein

On the homology at the heart of modernist art

With this possibility of a coincidence in mind, we may dare to compare the two fundamental contributions given by Sigmund Freud in the field of the humanities and by Albert Einstein in the almost opposite world of the natural sciences. Let us remember the well-known formula on which Einstein’s relativity ...
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