Review of The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred by Todd McGowan, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 240.    Author’s note: This review was written contemporaneously with the murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of police in Memphis, Tennessee.

Review of Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children and Adolescents edited by Mary Brady, Routledge, 2022, 235 pp.

Review of Colonial Trauma: A Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria by Karima Lazali, Polity, 2021, pp. 272

Review of  Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax by Alenka Zupančič, Fordham, 2023, 88 pp.

Review of Psychosis and Extreme States: An Ethic for Treatment by Bret Fimiani, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 249 pp.

Review of The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice, by Karen Maroda, Routledge , 2022, 226 pp.

Review of On Freud, by Elvio Fachinelli, The MIT Press, 2022, 152 pp.

Review of Growing Through the Erotic Transference: An Analysand’s Journey, Frances H. Moore, Routledge, 2023 84 pp.  

Review of Disorganization and Sex by Jamieson Webster, Divided Publishing , 2022, 240 pp.

Review of Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, by Léon Rozitchner, BRILL , 2022, 524 pp.

Review of Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy – Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations by Rupert Read, Routledge, 2020 404 pp.   

Review of Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society by Duane Rousselle, Atropos Press, 2021 154 pp.   

Review of Deconstruction of Sex by Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh, Duke University Press 2021 120 pp.

Review of Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering, and Satisfaction by Darian Leader, Routledge, 2021 138 pp.

Review of  Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations by Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs, Routledge, 2021 286 pp.

Review of A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2020, Pp. 286

Review of Milner, Jean-Claude. A Search for Clarity: Science and Philosophy in Lacan’s Oeuvre (Translated by Ed Pluth). Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. 160

Review of Tombras, Christos. Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan. Palgrave, 2021. Pp. 232.

Dear Sir, I was honoured to see my Discourse Ontology (2019) reviewed in the pages of your Journal (Pluth, 2021). As Pluth notes, Lacan was keen to avoid any kind of idealinguisterie, and I would find it very difficult to disagree on this. In fact, I also say so myself, for instance when I speak of Lacan’s “increasingly intense polemic against traditional metaphysics and ontology … [and…

Review of Benvenuto, Sergio. Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 198

Review of Lieber, Emma. The Writing Cure. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 160.

Dear Calum Neill, Thank you for reading my book, even though, as you point out, you don’t know me, or know why I wrote it. Given that premise of non-knowledge, what we have at our disposal is writing, and reading. And so I would like to respond to your review as a reader, to attempt to point to some of the assumptions and ideologies undergirding your writing (and reading), and as a way …

Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context – Subjectivity, History and Autobiography by Ian Parker London and New York, 2020, 208pp.

Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis Jamieson Webster (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) 312 pp., £32.00 (hardcover), £32.00 (e-book)

Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis by Warren S. Poland With a preface by Nancy Chodorow. Edited and introduced by William F. Cornell Routledge 2018

Review of Lorenzo Chiesa: The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016, 251+xxiii pp.)

As the contemporary moment witnesses unprecedented levels of neoliberal horrors, Robert Pfaller makes the utterly compelling and refreshing argument that pleasure may be our strongest weapon of opposition. With uncompromising philosophical rigor, Pfaller brilliantly elucidates how under-appreciated psychoanalytic insights pave a path for combatting the hegemony of asceticism, in which societies zestfully pursue prohibitions and limitations to their pleasures. Such passionate concessions not only limit our capacity for experiencing pleasure, but also interfere with our ability to resist the increasingly repressive encroachments that threaten our social and political wellbeing.

Since its inception political theory, insofar as it has been concerned with the subject in democracy, has treated the subject as citizen. The subject of citizenship in democracy is an abstraction: the legal identity conferred by belonging to a political community ascribing rights and status, a symbolic fiction. Citizenship coincides with belonging to a nation governed by state institutions, the nation itself a symbolic fiction. Yet even as a symbolic inscription that occludes the body that is its ground, citizenship is bolstered by imaginary fantasies and real dynamics: by identification with race, tribe, or ethnicity and with speakers of a common language and believers in a common religion; by being born in a territory and by inheriting a history. Participation in “the body politic” implicates an extra-political, extra-symbolic content to citizenship.