On the Threshold: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies

Abstract

When I was invited to organise and chair a series of talks on psychoanalysis and cultural theory at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, my first reaction was to reach for my address book and suggest better qualified alternatives. Then I hesitated. After all, wasn’t the folk hero of this Thatcherite age the ill-starred brickie Yosser Hughes in the television series Boys from the Blackstuff , for whom one of life’s great mysteries was that ignorance or incompetence should be a bar to employment? ‘I can do that,’ he’d have said, ‘Gi’us the job’. Hastily translating that into an academic justification, I recalled a question I had come across in Shoshana Felman’s essay on ‘Psychoanalysis and education’: ‘How can I interpret out of the dynamic ignorance I analytically encounter, both in others and in myself? How can I turn ignorance into an instrument of teaching?’ 1

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