NEGATIVE PSYCHOANALYSIS: book discussion with Catherine Malabou, Todd McGowan, and Alenka Zupančič 

First off, I want to thank Julie for holding the space she is here. I liked her final response to Catherine's great question "Why present yourself in such a desperate way?" I think it is quite helpful to view depression as a position that is in many ways a "correct perception of reality" as opposed to something that needs to be corrected or even "rescued". I hope that there is some creativity or generatively from exploring this space as opposed to trying to escape it or avoid it. I also deeply appreciate the way Julie both structured her book based on conversations with three great theorists/philosophers of our time, that is quite unique and special. It is also a great pleasure to listen to McGowan, Zupancic and Malabou reflect on a question that they have maybe never received before, that is a deeply personal question, about whether they conceive of themselves as failures. I think this is very necessary to connect our intellectual drives to our personal drives. They are in the end connected and one drive, the death drive. What stands out to me in the response as a whole is this feeling that theory does not help the other, that there is a certain uselessness to theory. At the same time, the contradiction here is that this theory space does help people tremendously, even if perhaps this help is indirect, and we do not often connect with the very people that are being helped by theory. I know for me, in my work, I have seen first hand that many many people are seeing both the utility and the value of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. It is an absolutely necessary corrective to the positivist traditions which do not allow us to precisely explore the negative space without trying to escape or avoid it. Fantastic discussion. Thanks to McGowan, Zupancic and Malabou for engaging such a personal question, and thanks to Julie for organising the space, writing an innovative work, and provoking some of the best theorists of our time!

I relate much to the notion of being a living dead. My way of relating to it is that I had a certain point in my life where I felt like the person I was died - and the person I emerged as was a complete stranger. In my experience this kind of death is related to love. Not necessarily of a person but love of the thing we look for to fill our void - object a as Lacan would have named it. My moment of death was the total emptiness after the emotional realisation that the object did not fulfill my desire and in the end was just a phantasm. I live on but my desire has died with the person that I used to be. I feel like this death can also have a nostalgic component, like the life you loved is over and can never be the same again. Object a here takes the form of the past. Its the dispelling of an illusion and removal of magic from life.

Wow! It was a pleasure to see how you surprised them with your first question, it really shows far you've already got as a philosopher... It's a poty that Slavoj Zizek wasn't there I think he would understand your points perfectly

Great conversation. Alenka's point of reading your own former texts being like drinking your own spit was nice.

"the question of being or whatever"

Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine said "we're all gonna...nah, we're already dead/yeah yuh tryna tire me/i can see you in front of me/why dont you get from in front of me"

I love all these people so much. This was a great discussion.

beautiful! very nice!!! thank you very much!!!!

'Something that is very striking for me is the uselessness of philosophy'. Coming from Catherine Malabou 😯

9:09 "[I feel] like a priest without a God." I think that's perfect Julie, thanks for sharing such personal feelings-surely you know of Peter Rollins' pyrotheology effort, his Church of the Contradiction? Bonhoeffer's "religionless religion"? Zizek's radical atheism through the Christian revelation of shared lack/the split in God itself/the torn veil.. As you say so precisely of Todd's view later, "that we are _given_ nothing", emphasis on "given" as a most fundamentally generative gift-freedom through the death of the fetish of _the One who knows,_ which holds me hostage to fantasies of angels coming down to rescue me. As an analyst you must be well acquainted with this. I see it as literally giving freedom through a death. Is there mature life to speak of without passing first through the abyss of the Night? "Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death." (Romans 7:9-10) As Rollins puts it in, _How Not to Speak of God:_ "For too long the Church has been seen as an oasis in the desert-offering water to those who are thirsty. In contrast, the emerging community appears more as a desert in the oasis of life, offering silence, space and desolation amidst the sickly nourishment of Western capitalism. It is in this desert, as we wander together as nomads, that God is to be found."

What happens when a theoretician, teacher, and psychotherapist writes a book? To be sure, we get to study a rare blend of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and philosophy. As a theoretician, Julie engages us with Zupancic, McGowen, and Malaboue. As a psychotherapist, she gives us comprehensive coverage of how to work with our patients (even if that was not Julie's intention!). As a teacher, she integrates a vast amount of complex information and then communicates seamlessly to her students across the board!

I thought more on the concept of the living - dead - in this video and note a lack of neurodiversity in the concept of being in the cohort or population called by the process of ‘self identification ‘ I am the living dead’. It appears the living dead are a dissatisfied, joyless bunch prone to words like failure, nothingness and reading Hegel and treating capitalism as a transcendental signifier . But why? As a member of the living-dead oxymoron I am in the best of all possible world’s - for the living-dead and can get along well with the living-not-yet-dead and the dead-dead. I take a great pleasure from the poetics of the living dead as much the those still living. Thank you for these moments of pleasure. RIP.

I am going to focus on one aspect of the discussion - which to me felt like four like-minded people sharing their like-minded idea and ensuring nothing Other came into the discussion space. Thus the therapeutic clinic is reduced to psychoanalysis and the works of Lacan/Freud or Freud/Lacan. The death drive is turned into a binary relationship to the pleasure principle and its complex meaning is reduced to a simple formula. Freud only offered normal everyday pain, suffering, happiness, and joy as the cure - aganst pathological suffering. Which is lost in this discussion. the death drive as a search for the oceanic feeling of the mother's womb is also ignored. But I don't wish to enter into debates on ontological death, Afro-pessimism, and Frans Fanon's work of desubjectivtation as a form of living death for the post-colonial subjects - but look at her claim in a more simple way. Julie's big claim is she is a member of the living dead - which we can treat either as the poetic and of a shock value, a psychopathological state or as she argues the reality of a world that exists with a failed psychoanalysis and thus the negative in the title of the book, is made sense of. What I notice about this claim is that it expreeses a narcissistic and omnippent power over the real. Death is taken into her power - she rules over death - death has lost its power over the end of her life - as she claims the status of being dead and being alive. In a sense, she offers the possibility of the Christian covenanet - life after death with god. I am therefore not wasting my time on the truth status of her premise but looking at the denial of death expressed in her claim. What I might translate her statement as meaning is I am not the life I really want to be and thus I treat this life as a living death. The aim is not to ask her to be positive - a possible trap set by her statment. But to offer a way of thinking that is different from her claim. What I do recognize is that with this type of claim - she is recognized - she stands out and is given attnetion - she is valued. One other way to grasp this thinking - I am the living dead - claim is in terms of a different psychoanalytical tradition both in Franve and the UK. In France this was called encrption - something that is painful and cannot be turned into knowledge but is traumatic - is buried in the unconscious - locked away - and never faced - it manifests itself in the feeling' of being dead - as there is something of a rotten dead 'internal object' creating depressive states. The stories of Edgar Alan Poe have this theme in many ways; such as the story The Tell-Tale Heart. In this video - if there is some semblance of reality in the conversation - we are offered a classical example of the intellectual defense - via the intellectualization of everything - specifically therapy which isn't a clinical practice but a pile of books they have read - but only by certain safe authors. Thus she, psychoanalysis, and philosophy - all express this failure and meaninglessness as forms of the living dead and the word of nothingness. Only one area of emotional life is treated outside the dead zone - their children. When I am asked about my views on the living dead and life after death - I prefer to talk about death, after life as we have such great knowledge about death and nothing about life after death or the living dead.

Notes to myself, not useful for others to read. 5:56 Floored. I have said these exact words about myself. I especially resent the position of the (American) therapists who would have me restructure my ethics to accommodate doxatic positivity.

your book is my bible now

39:40 Interesting that the "hating the book you just wrote" could be seen as a kind of "productive" negativity, if the repulsion from the last book is what necessitates the production of a "better" work. I would be tempted to even say that the ideal position of any writer (perhaps any artist too) to prior work is rejection. David Foster Wallace unfortunately experienced the contrary of this I think. He spent 8 years after the publication of Infinite Jest struggling to write his next novel, The Pale King, which he never finished. Of course I would not say it was this alone that led to his suicide, and I wouldn't speculate on someone's personal matters, but I can imagine that the dread of following-up an opus like Infinite Jest could result in torment, and equally, following-up a book you thought was terrible could be less daunting. But anyway, thank you for this great video. It's refreshing to see philosophers talk so candidly, and for all four of you to speak so openly is laudable

How can I buy your book in Spain?

It’s fitting that capitalism which demands a faux positivity would make the book itself so fucking expensive

Искала искала вас, а вы канал на английском языке только обновляете. Прослушала ваше интервью на радио Вести 6 лет назад. Вы сильно себе противоречите, 6 лет назад другое говорили. Ваша фраза тогда «веселое издевательство» и то, что вы считаете странным брать деньги от людей за помощь, удивили. Теперь уже не стало странным брать деньги за помощь, да? И ваша теория про амбивалентность уже не работает. Или это было для России

I strongly recommend this presentation and book: Lacan on Depression and Melancholia (2023); ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6yAe_Qk1tkA.htmlsi=sLHUiAenrUC5BrX- 17:12 "As Stijn was talking, this idea that there's no hope, no belief that the other will help me, one also there finds the CERTAINTY OF THE CONVICTION that one is worthless and of course that takes it all the way back to to Freud talking about in Melancholy. We find this glamorous; a very loud ... confession of one's own worthlessness which are not there for the other to go "Oh no you're okay"! The other is irrelevant in those pronouncements ... and there's a kind of non-dialectical aspect to that insistence of worthlessness." Also, why did you use the word psychoanalysis to refer to all types of psychoanalysis? I'm shocked that none of your guests tried to point this out to you. Did they at least try to point this out to you when you were in correspondence with them prior to publication?