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The Importance of Disappointment
Why disappointment? In common usage, and in the dictionary, we talk about disappointment as what happens, what we feel, when something we expect, intend, or hope for or desire does not materialise. One...
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Self-awareness and reflexive technologies
What is it to be self-aware? Why is it a good thing? One of the strengths of the relational realist conception of reflexivity is that it doesn’t conceptualise this capacity in terms of self-awareness....
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Getting out of the mess of life
The title of this post comes from Ian Craib’s wonderful book The Importance of Disappointment, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. His concern is with a contemporary inability, pervasive to the...
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Notes for a realist (mis)reading of Erving Goffman 1.1
In this series of posts I’ll be performing a realist (mis)reading of Erving Goffman, a theorist of social life I find fascinating and problematic in equal measure. By (mis)reading, I mean that I intend...
View ArticleCruel optimism and living for the present
Over the last few days a number of theoretical issues have fallen into place for me as I (belatedly) read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. The book explores objects of attachments which are self...
View ArticleMagical voluntarism: I got this
‘Magical voluntarism’ is such a useful phrase from the late Mark Fisher. It’s defined by his student Matt Colquhoun on loc 859 of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher as “the imaginary...
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Every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience
In the last few days I’ve returned to the philosophical pessimist Emil Mihai Cioran, who I initially started reading during the first lockdown only to find his work a bit too cutting for my current...
View ArticleTheorising as a psychodynamic process
I’ve often been preoccupied by the question of why people are drawn to certain theoretical approaches. While it would be mistaken to reduce this into the psychodynamic, I nonetheless agree with Craib...
View ArticleThe myth of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person
From The Importance of Disappointment by Ian Craib loc 724: Psychoanalysis carries some idea of a cure (even though many practising analysts might dispute this) and of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person,...
View ArticleA Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the...
In Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, the notion of contextual incongruity plays a crucial role as a driver of meta-reflexivity. In contrast to contextual continuity (a stable environment) and...
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