Bio | dos Santos is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. He received his PhD in economics from University of London. dos Santos’ research involves Classical Political Economy; Banking and Monetary Theory; and the role of Finance in Economic Development. Much of his current work inquires into the distinctive social and macroeconomic content of contemporary financial practices and relations. He is interested in methodological issues in economic analysis, including the appropriate use and interpretation of mathematical formalisms.
“I wrote Political Freud as the result of many decades of thinking about psychoanalysis. I was struck by the one-sided way in which the new left and feminist movements rejected Freud, and by the way the culture in general turned against it, for example by uncritically accepting the claims of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and psychopharmacology.
Apart from its therapeutic potential Freudian thought is indispensable to understanding political events. It has given rise to a great tradition that I call Political Freud. This is the work of critical intellectuals and social movements committed to liberating people from oppression, both external and internal. The book treats several strands in this tradition including Black Liberation feminism, gay liberation, pacifism and movements against anti-Semitism.
The chapter on anti-Semitism came out of my experience as a Jew while other chapters came out of my experiences in the Civil Rights movement and in the New Left. One thing I discovered is that there is an important strand of Black Freudian thought involving such figures as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon. I also found that one of the best analyses of ‘9/11’ is psychoanalytic, by Judith Butler. I argue that the feminist rejection of Freudianism was connected to the neo-liberal capture of important segments of feminism, and I try to explain why Freudianism was so important to twentieth century American culture.”
Bio | Zaretsky is Professor of Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. He received his PhD from University of Maryland. His interests are in twentieth century cultural history, the theory and history of capitalism (especially its social and cultural dimensions), and the history of the family.
Other publications include the book The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (Oxford University Press, 2014), which focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascism and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta’s practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination; and Transatlantic Fascism (Duke University Press, 2010) which studies the global connections between Italian and Argentine fascism.
Federico Finchelstein (2015) — El mito del Fascismo: de Freud a Borges
Bio | Finchelstein is Professor and Chair of Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. he received his PhD at Cornell University. He is the author of five books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. Professor Finchelstein has published more than fifty academic articles and reviews on Fascism, Latin American Populism, the Cold War, Genocide and Antisemitism in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian publications.
Faculty in Liberal Studies shared thoughts about their recent work.
Dominic Pettman
Dominic Pettman, Chair of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, recently published the book Infinite Distraction (Polity Press, 2015). Pettman shared thoughts about this project (excerpted from the book’s preface):
“This book began its life as a humble Facebook update. In terms of media ecology and technological evolution, this is a bit like starting with a bird and ending up with a dinosaur. Despite being a Professor of Culture and Media – that is, a professional skeptic of technological promises and practices – I certainly surrender an inordinate amount of my time interacting online in social media spaces. For fellow critic Jonathan Crary, this is no doubt in part because I – like everyone else – am obliged to submit to ‘mandatory techniques of digital personalization and self-administration.’ But I would be lying if I pretended that mediated socialization doesn’t bring me many micro-pleasures, along with generous infusions of exasperation, boredom, and spleen. Moreover, I would have trouble denying the fact that for every intellectual observation I post or link to, I upload several more frivolous or trivial info-morsels, designed more to distract than instruct or edify. If accused of wasting time or procrastinating, I can certainly use my job as an alibi. ‘Know your enemy.’ But the truth is that having a critical-theoretical perspective on something does not necessarily make you immune to it. An intellectual understanding of a problem does not prevent an affective investment in the same (as we all know, from our romantic histories, as much as our credit card receipts).
In short, this book explores some of the more troubling effects of what we might call ‘the digitalization of distraction,’ along with its luminous shadow: attention. It therefore touches upon some of the specific technological, cultural, social, and political constellations which solicit these two intimately connected phenomena.”
Bio | Pettman is Professor of Culture and Media and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Eugene Lang College, and Chair of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. He received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. Pettman His work explores topics ranging from digital culture, new media, modern literature, visual culture, audio culture, popular and unpopular cultures, affect theory, libidinal economies, and the increasingly blurry boundaries between humans, animals, and machines.
“In this book, I argue against the idea that philosophical problems are timeless and ahistorical. I do this by giving a detailed case study of the historically contingent presuppositions underlying one contemporary philosophical debate (namely, the problem of color realism). My ultimate goal is to challenge the assumption that philosophical concepts are ‘autonomous’ in the sense of being independent of broader developments in our knowledge of the world. The concept of color has seemed like something timeless and ahistorical to many philosophers, such that if I can show that it rests upon historically contingent presuppositions, we should be open to the possibility of that being more generally true.”
Bio | Adams received his PhD from the University of Chicago. Adams’s work focuses on moral skepticism, the philosophy of color, and realism in art. He explores the relationship between variation in judgment or perception in different domains (moral, color, aesthetic) and the possibility of truth and knowledge in these domains. Currently he is working on a project about the significance of recording for how we make and appreciate music, with a special focus on the use of sampling in hip hop.
“We know that nonhuman species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds the normal background rate of evolution due to the activities of some humans, and that this mass extinction event is affecting ecological and political webs of many different kinds. But politics does not and should not proceed smoothly from the invocation of crisis to technical solution, and so what interests me in the book is what comes in between those two steps.
Biodiversity loss as a political project has often involved a politics that either diverts attention from the underlying causes, or incorporates it into forms of governance that are perhaps as debilitating as the systems they need to change. I wrote this book to understand how it came to be that people might be committed to ecological and interspecies justice, yet be alienated from environmentalism, and what role the evolution of biodiversity governance has played in that split.
More broadly, work in global environmental politics has, strangely enough, often not put much stock in the kinds of agency that nonhuman life exerts in the world. Understanding political agency as exclusively human seemed to me to foreclose the conceptual grounds on which environmental issues could in fact be understood and addressed, in a politics beyond the human.”
Bio |Youatt received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2007. Youatt is interested in questions of agency and power in human-nonhuman relations as they relate to political life and thought. His current research explores the intersection of interspecies relations and international relations in American borderlands.
