The neurotic turn: Multi-disciplinary correspondences on neurosis

 

Deadline for Abstract - Mid-April 2016 (but we need commitments to this project a.s.a.p so we can work on structuring of book and promotion). 

Our aim in this upcoming book on neurosis is to take 'neurosis' out of its  diagnostic context in which it was created (psychology) and give it a more material, exotic and expansive character. For architect Prof Eyal Weizman 'space' is explored as a medium of power/resistance and the city is projected as an object of investigation and a site of intervention. Following this, flows of force, matter and organization act as systems of capture, liberation and uniformity. Such 'flows' can appear to be neurotic, can assimilate further people to do or think further things etc.

Sergio Benvunuto uses neurosis and Wittgenstein to explain how mathematics is entangled in a language which keeps constructing itself (against any platonic, realist programmes of mathematics). Worlds apart in the domain of sociology Prof Engin Isin talks about 'cycles of neurosis' found in social mediations of global catastrophes, predictions and prophesies.

For epistemology, the social sciences and for research studies 'neurosis' has also been seen as a paradigm in which we live; neurotically checking our messages, getting our mobile phones out when we are left alone, being perpetually plugged in to various 'immediate' mediations of public affairs. Could we not come to the conclusion that events, situations and cultural epochs have a neurotic quality within them as opposed to defining this neurosis in the subject as a cognitive disfunction due to irreconcilable subjective experiences/personal distress?

A different characteristic of 'neurosis' can be used to critique earlier forms of knowledge-making: pushing Friedrich Nietzsche's 'perspectivism' to its extreme - instead of our ostensibly 'neutral' and 'objective' institutions of knowledge we may actually concede in saying we have a neurosis for 'the truth-of-the-matter, the 'will-to-truth', the neurotic desire for internal dialogues in the heads of our most rigorous philosophers or - as Bruno Latour has stated - we have "actors mediating knowledge through political, financial and personal factors". 

Another aim of the book is to preserve - as well as re-establish -  the term neurosis (contrary to the DSM) arguing that its spectre still haunts clinical psychology and our contemporary being-in-the-world (Heidegger). 

Please email cwjohns AT hotmail.co.uk for further inquiries or sending manuscripts/proposals.