Daniel Tutt
My research and writing is concerned with psychoanalysis and politics, new directions in Marxist thought, the family, social reproduction debates and the legacy of anti-Oedipal politics, contemporary and historical liberalism and Nietzsche/anism and the social power of the intellectual.
Supervisors: Alain Badiou and Laurence Rickels
Supervisors: Alain Badiou and Laurence Rickels
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The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche’s philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas.
The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed.
How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche’s damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it.
key moments of Islamic history. What emerges is a lively story punctuated by
epistemic debates over the status of universality, the ethical underpinnings
and proper place of justice within a given society, and the role of the state
in its administration.
To receive a copy of Justice in Islam: New Ethical Perspectives visit (https://iiit.org/en/book/justice-in-islam-new-ethical-perspectives).
Objective. This paper critically examines the theoretical presuppositions that drove the Anti-Oedipus series, with particular focus on the first volume, and asks whether the repertoire of concepts developed in this work remain relevant to the contemporary left.
Method. After an investigation that focuses on the movement away from a Marxist-centered praxis and understanding of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus, an analysis of the conception of the ''Oedipal form'' is presented and critiqued with reference to a wide range of post-Lacanian political thinkers.
Results. Anti-Oedipus has made a tremendous influence on the theoretical understanding of today's anti-capitalist left. Its concepts have been adopted in two main ways on the contemporary left: a radical abolitionist politics of opacity and a new form of left-accelerationist utopian socialism.
Interpretations. These two tendencies of political thought are critically analyzed and diagnosed as inadequate to facing the political and social challenges of our time, but they remain nonetheless important intellectual tendencies for understanding the ideological makeup of today's left.
Homo animal tam familial est quam politicum
Man is an animal that is as familial as it is political
Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation (pp. ix-xix) by Daniel Tutt
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2022 The Palgrave Lacan Series
ISBN 978-3-030-94069-0 ISBN 978-3-030-94070-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94070-6
Link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-3-030-94070-6%2F1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR237DedMIt_PwYgwTseqDpfn0H47MBhSFpPq4acNHfYThQ8UsYJHaEARjc
The central argument of the book is that Nietzsche’s philosophy does have a center, and that the left learns a great deal from Nietzsche when we read him as driven by a highly sophisticated reactionary political vision that informs all his major concepts and ideas.
The most important Nietzschean concepts — from perspectivism, ressentiment, eternal return to the pathos of distance — are analyzed in the historical context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, and several case-studies of prominent left-Nietzscheans from Jack London, Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Brown to Huey Newton are discussed.
How to Read Like a Parasite makes a persuasive case for how we can overcome Nietzsche’s damaging influence on the left, showing us how to read and understand his work without becoming victims of it.
key moments of Islamic history. What emerges is a lively story punctuated by
epistemic debates over the status of universality, the ethical underpinnings
and proper place of justice within a given society, and the role of the state
in its administration.
To receive a copy of Justice in Islam: New Ethical Perspectives visit (https://iiit.org/en/book/justice-in-islam-new-ethical-perspectives).
Objective. This paper critically examines the theoretical presuppositions that drove the Anti-Oedipus series, with particular focus on the first volume, and asks whether the repertoire of concepts developed in this work remain relevant to the contemporary left.
Method. After an investigation that focuses on the movement away from a Marxist-centered praxis and understanding of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus, an analysis of the conception of the ''Oedipal form'' is presented and critiqued with reference to a wide range of post-Lacanian political thinkers.
Results. Anti-Oedipus has made a tremendous influence on the theoretical understanding of today's anti-capitalist left. Its concepts have been adopted in two main ways on the contemporary left: a radical abolitionist politics of opacity and a new form of left-accelerationist utopian socialism.
Interpretations. These two tendencies of political thought are critically analyzed and diagnosed as inadequate to facing the political and social challenges of our time, but they remain nonetheless important intellectual tendencies for understanding the ideological makeup of today's left.
Homo animal tam familial est quam politicum
Man is an animal that is as familial as it is political
Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation (pp. ix-xix) by Daniel Tutt
Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2022 The Palgrave Lacan Series
ISBN 978-3-030-94069-0 ISBN 978-3-030-94070-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94070-6
Link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-3-030-94070-6%2F1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR237DedMIt_PwYgwTseqDpfn0H47MBhSFpPq4acNHfYThQ8UsYJHaEARjc
Time: Wednesday, February 28th, 12:30pm
Location: Georgetown University, ICC 450
**Open to the public. Food provided
The Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Arabic Department Graduate Association are very pleased to present the Arabic and Islamic Studies Graduate Colloquium, a forum in which graduate students have the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects, hold academic workshops, and participate in roundtable discussions. The Colloquium aims at encouraging discussions among graduate students and professors over their research and its contribution to the scholarship in the field. It is also open to discuss works-in-progress by more advanced scholars.
Colloquium Description:
In this colloquium, we will explore the broader implications of scholarly efforts to interpret subjectivity in Muslim societies and to deconstruct Islamic scripture through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis. We will review the literature in this wider field by noting two general tendencies: the first is an effort to derive a theory of Muslim subjectivity modeled off of Freud’s late work on Judaism in Moses and Monotheism, which seeks broader claims about alterity, desire and authority within Muslim societies through a more detached, textual analysis.
The other tendency is a more postcolonial method of reading psychoanalysis as a heuristic for understanding the transition to modernity within Muslim societies. This method presents more localized and culturally specific applications of psychoanalytic frameworks to particular regions and time periods.
We will review the work of Fethi Benslama and his controversial theological interpretation, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (2001) as well as more recent work that frames the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in explicitly postcolonial terms such as Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud (2017), the work of anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo and Bülent Somay’s work, The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father (2014).
Joseph Massad’s chapter Psychoanalysis, “Islam, ” and the Other of Liberalism in his Islam and Liberalism (2015) is an excellent orientation to the topic. In it, Massad identifies some key conceptual tensions and political problems raised by psychoanalysis and Islam. While Massad does not close down the field as entirely problematic, he does convincingly show the way in which interventions have effectively reduced their analysis of Muslim subjectivity to ‘Islam’ and over-determined the phenomenon of Islamism and sought forms of imperialism under the banner of a particular western, and mostly French, cosmopolitanism.
essential division at the core of its own being and because the
subject objectifies the other, it runs into something in the other
that is other than a unified subject: a maze of its own making,
projected onto the site where the other is supposed to reside. How the subject gets out of this maze is through the Father function -- the now pluralized "Names-of-the-Father" is what covers over the split in the subject and introduces the subject to language, culture, and civilization -- i.e. to the symbolic. Thus, the proper Lacanian father is a pluralized father-as-function, who is no longer the father of "No!" but rather, the father is a function that says "Yes" to the
joining together of a signifier and jouissance. The father is the
other that validates the invention of a new jouissance.
Recommended Reading:
Seminar III: The Psychoses 1955 - 1956 trans. by Russell Grigg pgs.
285 - 310 and 206 - 222.
Seminar IV: The Object Relation trans. by Jacques Alain Miller see
Sections 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8
On the Names of the Father (recently trans. by Bruce Fink): see
section: Introduction to Names-of-the-Father pgs. 53 - 93.
To elaborate upon the role of virtue and ethics in their thought, I analyze Stephen Crane’s classic American novel, The Red Badge of Courage, where the virtue of courage is developed through the young protagonist Henry Fleming, a timid private fighting in the Union Army during the Civil War. Both Badiou and Deleuze reference this novel as presenting the best example of the event although they do not elaborate upon this point. While there are few, if any contemporary philosophical analyses of this novel, it reveals a remarkable theoretical framework of courage and the virtues, developed in a sequence of battles and skirmishes from the perspective of the young protagonist Fleming. I diagram the four-part process of the subject in the novel and I demonstrate how the action of the novel provides a heuristic model for a process-based and dialectical theory of courage. I then apply these four-part sequences to Badiou’s and Deleuze’s theory of time, the subject and ethics.
From this touchstone point of the novel, I argue that Badiou’s “Promethean Ethics” and Deleuze’s “Ethics of the Crack” present two distinct models for thinking the invention of a revolutionary subject and the inhabitation of a new outplace beyond the time and laws of the state or the social. I argue that the question of the invention of the ‘outplace’ is pertinent to thinking impossible ethical subjects of late capitalism today from the precariat, to the heroin junkie, to the slum dweller. Secondly, I argue that the concept of virtue is relevant to both thinkers because in the psychoanalytic process of sublimation, the subject requires the cultivation of virtue (fidelity in the case of Badiou and prudence in the case of Deleuze) in order to manage self-loss and the fragmentation of the ego. More generally, I suggest that continental philosophy does indeed have a stake in the tradition of virtue ethics despite its non-principled and antinomian orientation.
Also on: Study Group on Psychoanalysis and Politics, Dialogues on Theory on twitter: https://twitter.com/torsion_groups/status/1476176670889582593,
and Youtube: youtu.be/5n4VSdM4QYw
We are joined by Dr. Vincenzo Di Nicola to discuss modern psychiatry and his work on trauma, family therapy and the philosophical underpinnings of psychiatry. We discuss the prevalence of trauma discourse, the philosophy of Alain Badiou, why social dynamics are often ignored by modern psychiatry and psychology, and we examine the history of the "anti-psychiatry movement" with special focus on R.D. Laing, Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon.
Vincenzo Di Nicola is an Italian-Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist and family therapist, and philosopher of mind. Di Nicola is a tenured Full Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal, where he founded and directs the postgraduate course on Psychiatry and the Humanities, and Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The George Washington University, where he gave The 4th Annual Stokes Endowment Lecture in 2013.
*
D Tutt (Interviewer), V Di Nicola, “Psychiatry Today: An Interview with Vincenzo Di Nicola,” Jouissance Vampires Podcast, December 29, 2021. Also on: Study Group on Psychoanalysis and Politics, Dialogues on Theory –
on twitter: https://twitter.com/torsion_groups/status/1476176670889582593,
and Youtube: youtu.be/5n4VSdM4QYw.
I sat down with French philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem who the late David Graeber praised as one of the most important philosophers living today. In this interview, we discuss Kacem’s reading habits, what inspires him in the world of thought, how he derived his philosophical concepts, what qualifies as truly radical in our age and why he broke up with his former mentor Alain Badiou. Kacem is, similar to Giorgio Agamben, a major critic of the way the ruling class is managing the pandemic and he is not shy to share his views. In this wide-ranging conversation, we catch a glimpse of a deeply inventive and creative mind, and we get advice for how to do philosophy outside of conventional institutions.
This interview was conducted on Thursday December 9th, 2021, by Daniel Tutt. Translation and interpretation assistance provided by Saad Boutayeb. A podcast of this discussion, including a post-interview conversation with Kacem, has been released with English translations by the Jouissance Vampires podcast.
The first two sessions will develop discussion, identify key questions and problems based around the readings and the third session will consist of a keynote by Samo Tomsic, a philosopher based in Berlin and the author of The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2013) as well as The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2020).