Weaponized Joy

Finished reading Lara and Stephen Sheehi's Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2021) yesterday, and wrote up a little recap and review: This book is a few things, but what immediately stands out is its archiving of testimony. Testimonies less of patients - although there are a few here - than of clinicians, the practitioners of psychoanalysis who, in issuing the ‘talking cure’, have to do so under conditions of brutal, unspeakable violence: a violence that, as I write, continues to murder and maim Palestinians in the most horrific genocide this side of the 21st century. Symptomatic is the fact that Gazan voices remain largely absent from this book, on account of the authors having been barred from entry by Israeli authorities. This gaping testimonial void, acknowledged and apologised for, speaks, nonetheless to just those very conditions whose effects and responses are charted out in the writing: those of trauma, occupation, and silencing:

I finished reading Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School not too long ago, and since there is almost nothing I can find that's been written about it, here's a small review. Published in 1969, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense has by now garnered a small handful of dedicated studies, each of which continues to plumb the depths of that strange yet magnificent book (cf. the work of James Williams, Sean Bowden, Piotrek Świątkowski, and Mehdi Parsa). Guillaume Collett’s contribution, The Psychoanalysis of Sense , is distinguished by its focus on Deleuze’s engagement with psychoanalysis (as advertised!), as well as doing the one thing which has been desperately needed for a while now: reading the book back to front. For, as any reader of the Logic of Sense knows, its already brutal level of difficulty is compounded by the book’s organizational schema, composed as a series of loosely overlapping chapters (or ‘series’), who