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Ordinary Unhappiness

Patrick & Abby
Ordinary Unhappiness
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  • 102: Reparations, Responsibility, and Climate Justice feat. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
    Abby and Patrick welcome philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on the occasion of the new edition of his book Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Reconsidering Reparations is a magisterial work that ties together global history, data from economics and public health, philosophy, and more, and dramatically cuts through many of our moment’s thorniest debates over identity, responsibility, and political change. Together, Abby, Patrick, and Olúfẹ́mi contextualize and walk through the book’s core arguments and their implications for audiences both psychoanalytic and otherwise. Beginning with how a truly transatlantic history of the African slave trade and an awareness of how European colonialism as a properly global enterprise can together shed new light on both domestic inequalities within the United States and relations between the contemporary Global North and South, the three unpack how the accumulation of material advantages and disadvantages have, over time, resulted in landscapes of suffering that are simultaneously far-flung yet fundamentally interconnected. Historicizing and grounding the present in terms of what Táíwò terms “Global Racial Empire” renders uncanny the givenness of contemporary national borders, and throws into question many of our most foundational national narratives and even the givenness of the state form itself. Moreover, thinking seriously about history and oppression reveals what canonical philosophical accounts of the liberal social contract disavow, and what fantasies and concrete purposes so many contemporary invocations of meritocracy and justice as “fairness” serve. The conversation builds to Olúfẹ́mi’s “constructive view” of reparations, the centrality of climate justice to that program, and a series of crucial disambiguations and reconfigurations of prevailing notions of responsibility, accountability, guilt, liability, and more. Indeed, as the three describe, thinking about ourselves in terms of our ancestors, while understanding ourselves as ancestors, offers everyone a path forward, one that moves beyond the dead-ends of reflexive denialism and narcissistic injury to suggest new possibilities for identification, disidentification, and solidarity, and that powerfully clarifies goals, sustains motivation, and helps us imagine possibilities for change across social differences, geographical distances, and the span of time. Plus: “theory versus practice” versus “theory and practice”; the example and legacy of Frantz Fanon; the joys, perplexities, and embarrassments of being a philosophy nerd; and more. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2538-reconsidering-reparationsOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-captureOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/against-decolonisation/John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674000780 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674005426Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation (And Other Works, 1921-1945): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Love-Guilt-a
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  • 101: Mailbag: On Pain, Learning, and the Problem of Other Minds Teaser
    Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the second half of our their hundred-episode Mailbag spectacular, Abby, Patrick, and Dan field some overdetermined questions best kept snug behind the Patreon paywall. Among other things, the three take on what thinking psychoanalytically suggests about our relationships to technology, from the pleasing familiarity of effective User Interface design and frictionless movement in video games to the ways anxieties about the existence other human minds appears to be driving ever more people to prefer the projections and grandiose claims of interactions with so-called “artificial intelligence.” They then turn to another space where the questions of friction, the possibility of pain, the promise of growth, and the role of transference loom large: the classroom. In particular, they explore the ethical and interpersonal stakes of teaching psychoanalysis, and teaching in general, with an eye toward questions of repetition, narcissism, Trauma Studies as a discipline, traumatic experiences of learning, what is or isn’t “outside the classroom,” the balance between taking things personally and meeting students where they are, and whether and how pedagogy and learning alike resemble therapy in all its possibilities and pains. Plus: turtles tortoises, a round of Fuck Marry Kill (yes), Wolfenstein, and more.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
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  • 100: Mailbag: An Embarrassment of Riches
    Abby, Patrick, and Dan mark one hundred episodes of Ordinary Unhappiness! They start by looking back on the show’s run so far, and what they’ve gotten from engaging with psychoanalysis as a living body of knowledge, as a corpus of classic texts, as a way of seeing the world, and more. They then turn to the episode’s primary focus: a mailbag chock full of questions, fantasies, and desires from Ordinary Unhappiness listeners who have made the show possible. These include questions about therapeutic modalities fast and slow, the history of psychoanalytic theories about autism, the place of queerness in contemporary psychoanalysis, and more. But the three biggest topics Ordinary Unhappiness listeners want to learn more about are about drugs (especially psychedelics), the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the work of Jacques Lacan. In classic Ordinary Unhappiness style, all this leads the hosts to recommend a ton of reading suggestions, admit to the things about which they do not know (but want to learn), and to promise a follow-up episode for Patreon supporters, where Abby, Patrick, and Dan will tackle those questions and topics that were a little too spicy – or let’s say “overdetermined” – for a public episode. Enjoy – and thanks for listening!For the reading list, please visit our Patreon page. It's too long to include here!patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessHave you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappinessTwitter: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music
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  • 99: Wild Analysis: The White Lotus feat Sam Adler-Bell Teaser
    Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessAbby and Patrick are joined by returning guest Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast and columnist at New York magazine, to talk about the HBO series The White Lotus. From plotlines involving taboos like patriarchy, incest, and family violence to themes of alienation, class antagonism, and desire, the show’s last season offers plentiful grist for the psychoanalytic mill, and Abby, Patrick, and Sam tackle all these with gusto (and plenty of spoilers). In addition to discussing the text on its own terms, they reflect on its popularity as a social symptom that implicates collective fantasies and anxieties about friendship, sexuality, money, religion, and more. As the three explore, contextualizing the show in political and ideological terms reveals not just the idiosyncratic preoccupations of The White Lotus’s creator, Mike White, but the paradoxes of how American audiences and the prestige TV shows we love navigate questions of desire, identity, cultural and sexual difference, and the repressions that underwrite them. Know Your Enemy: A Podcast About the American Right: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy  Sam Adler-Bell, “The Movie Industry’s Confused ‘Eat the Rich’ Fantasy”: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/the-movie-industrys-confused-eat-the-rich-fantasy.htmlNeil Websdale, Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/familicidal-hearts-9780199325849Imogen Binnie, Nevada: https://bookshop.org/p/books/nevada-imogen-binnie/17839995 Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you’ve traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847  A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
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  • 98: From Boundaries to Attachment: The Uses and Abuses of Pop Psychology feat. Lily Scherlis
    Abby and Patrick are joined by writer and artist Lily Scherlis for a provocative reflection on the ideological subtexts, historical contexts, and real-world value of some of our moment’s most bandied-about concepts and terms. Beginning with her 2023 essay for Parapraxis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else,” the interview spotlights Scherlis’s nuanced yet relentless interrogation of how the vocabularies of research psychology have proliferated across popular culture and have become ubiquitous in the workplace, in bestsellers, on social media, and in our most intimate interactions. What exactly are “boundaries,” when did having (or not having) them become such an issue, and how does their invocation function? Touching on themes and topics across Scherlis’s body of work, from CBT and DBT to the legacy of Dale Carnegie and beyond, the conversation builds to a consideration of the case of attachment theory. Unpacking the history, key concepts, and findings of this interdisciplinary field of study, Abby, Patrick, and Lily explore how its terms and categories have become so central to a cottage industry of online quizzes and therapeutic interventions. How do ideas of self-improvement and self-help relate to economic shifts in modes of production, material realities of employment precarity, and our felt sense of being together – and being alienated? What work do these terms do in the abstract, and what work are we as subjects expected to do in learning and using them? And how can we square our skepticism vis-à-vis such models and vocabularies with the traction they can give us when it comes to understanding ourselves, tolerating distress, navigating a difficult world, potentially changing our circumstances, and connecting with one another?Selected texts cited:Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues: How Boundaries became the Rule for Mental Health – and Everything Else”Lily Scherlis, “Skill Issues: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Its Discontents”Lily Scherlis, “Going Soft: Future Proofing the American Worker”Danielle Carr, “Don’t Be So Attached to Attachment Theory”Robert Karen, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Ability to LoveHeidi Keller. The Myth of Attachment Theory A Critical Understanding for Multicultural SocietiesRuth O'Shaughnessy, Rudi Dallos, Katherine Berry, and Karen Bateson. Attachment Theory: The BasicsA podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media:  Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 Provided by Fruits Music
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About Ordinary Unhappiness

A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now, featuring Abby Kluchin & Patrick Blanchfield
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