Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast Podcast Por New Books Network arte de portada

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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 Interviews with Columbia University Press authors.New Books Network Arte Ciencia Historia y Crítica Literaria Mundial
Episodios
  • Noëlle McAfee, "Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics" (Columbia UP, 2019)

    Noëlle McAfee, "Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics" (Columbia UP, 2019)
    Jul 11 2025
    In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy. Democracy, as you may dimly recall, demands the capacity to bear difference, tolerate loss, and to speak into the unknown. Meanwhile we have come to live in a world where, if my clinical practice and personal life are any indication, people often prefer writing to speaking. Patients who want to make a schedule change--never a neutral event in psychoanalysis—write me. I say, addressing the resistance, “This is a talking cure. Get your money’s worth. Speak!” Among intimates, bad news is something I too often read about. I surmise that in speaking desire or conveying pain, a fantasized recipient is sought, an ideal listener, who, like a blow up doll lover can be invoked, controlled and then deflated at will. Circling back to difference and loss, ideas that do not mirror our already existing thoughts find themselves batted out of the park to an elsewhere not worth enunciating. Cultivating a protective bubble—such a heartbreak right? It seems there is something about democracy that frightens the shit out of us. Deploying the work of Winnicott, Klein, Green and Kristeva, Mcafee reminds us of our original loss—what she calls “plenum”. That loss, to the degree it is recognized, initiates our undoing. Mother’s other—be it her lover, her piano lessons, a visit to the dentist for a cavity—tears a hole in our emotional shield. In her wake, we cling to seemingly strong leaders, a father, or failing that potent ideologies reeking of misogyny, all the while hoping for compensation for an unfathomable loss. Embedded within democracy lies the demand that we see other than ourselves. This demand challenges the thin-skinned among us. And all of us are thin-skinned from time to time. How to manage? Mcafee adds her voice to the popular chorus of those practicing applied psychoanalysis and suggests we embrace mourning. It is an inarguable position yet also nice work if you can get it! Of course, with the original disaster elided, like sleepwalkers in our night fog, we will helplessly seek it out; worse, we will make it manifest, with a vengeance. What is not remembered gets repeated. Trapped in America, as I am, one wonders about democracy. What might lure us to revisit the sight of the disaster, “the thing itself’,” to quote Adrienne Rich, “and not the myth?”
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    58 m
  • Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser, "Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Joel Alden Schlosser, "Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Jun 26 2025
    Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all―human as well as nonhuman―earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life (Columbia UP, 2024) provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.
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    56 m
  • Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, "Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, "Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective" (Columbia UP, 2025)
    Jun 11 2025
    In the last third of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between totalizing doctrines—nationalist, Marxist, and religious—and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence and a widespread sense of malaise, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, injustice, failed development, and successive defeats by Israel. The foundational account of these responses, Contemporary Arab Thought illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab also connects Arab debates to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions. Since its first publication in 2009, this book has stood as the foremost account of contemporary Arab debates on culture, philosophy, modernity, tradition, identity, and liberation. It is widely used in Middle Eastern studies courses, and it has become a classic in the field of Arab intellectual history. Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (Columbia UP, 2025) now features an extensive new introduction that reconsiders post-1967 Arab intellectual history in light of the 2011 uprisings and the upheavals that have occurred over the intervening years. Kassab critically reflects on the book’s arguments and the responses it has provoked, and she surveys the new preoccupations that have emerged in Arab debates since 2011. As crises again overtake the Middle East, this landmark work continues to offer indispensable insight into the richness of contemporary Arab thought. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab is associate professor of philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Her books include Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates (Columbia, 2019). The Arabic edition of Contemporary Arab Thought received the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
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    29 m
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