“Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient”
– Tom Mcarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island
“Jamieson Webster’s new work reflects upon that aspect of hysteria—or conversion disorder—that has eluded the attention of most commentators: the indifference of the subject at the very moment that the symptom is most clearly enacted. This point of departure allows Webster to think about what the body contains but also what traverses the body at a level that is prior to speech, that is perhaps the condition of speech itself. This incisive and unsettling meditation gives us a form of psychoanalytic writing that tracks the transference as bodily transformation and impasse. It is written in and for our times, when the courage and difficulty of the slow labor of psychoanalysis provides a perspective that eludes the certitudes of dogma and the exhilarations of false promises. Webster’s book asks us to stay within the domain of difficult exchange where what registers and shifts at the level of the body lets us know more about what we can expect of life and what our own living carries of the lives of others. Beautifully written, theoretically brave, and disturbing in all the best ways”.
– Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/conversion-disorder/9780231184083
From the book:
Conversion disorder—a psychiatric term that names the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily manifestations—offers a way to rethink the present. With so many people suffering from unexplained bodily symptoms; with so many seeking recourse to pharmacological treatments or bodily modification; with young men and women seemingly willing to direct violence toward anybody, including themselves—a radical disordering in culture insists on the level of the body.
Part memoir, part clinical case, part theoretical investigation, this book searches for the body. Is it a psychopathological entity; a crossroads for the cultural, political, and biological in the form of care; or the foundation of psychoanalytic work on the question of sexuality? Jamieson Webster traces conversion’s shifting meanings—in religious, economic, and even chemical processes—revisiting the work of thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben, and Lacan. She provides an intimate account of her own conversion from patient to psychoanalyst, as well as her continuing struggle to apprehend the complexities of the patient’s body. When listening to dreams, symptoms, worries, or sexual impasses, the body becomes a defining trope that belies a vulnerable and urgent wish for transformation. Conversion Disorder names what is singular about the entanglement of the fractured body and the social world in order to imagine what kind of cure is possible.
Presented by The New School for Social Research and Philosophy Department and it is co-sponsored with the Ferenczi Center.
Please R.S.V.P.
The City University of New York, Graduate Center, is hosting its second Emotion Workshop. This semester, we are profiling the work of local scholars and visitors to New York. Topics relate to mind, social philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The workshop will be 1 day long. Participants should not feel obligated to attend every session, but we do ask you to RSVP (this is to make sure everyone is allowed Saturday building access). If you think there is a chance you will join us for any part of the day, please send your name to Sarah Arnaud, postdoc in the Philosophy Program and co-organizer: sarnaud@gc.cuny.edu
PROGRAM
10:00-10:15 Introduction
10:15-11:00 Jesse Prinz (CUNY, Philosophy), “Are emotions socially constructed?”
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-12:00 Rodrigo Díaz (Bern, Philosophy), “Folk emotion concepts”
12:00-12:45 Juliette Vazard (NYU / Institut Jean Nicod, Paris / University of Geneva), “Epistemic anxiety”
12:45-2:15 Break (lunch)
2:15-3:00 S. Arnaud & K. Pendoley (CUNY, Philosophy), “Intentionalism and the understanding of emotion experience”
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15-4:00 Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY, Philosophy), “Emotion, absorption, and experiential imagining”
4:00-4:45 Jordan Wylie (CUNY, Psychology), “Investigating the influences of emotion on object recognition”
4:45-6:00 Reception
Here is the tentative schedule for PoPRocks sessions this semester. We will be meeting, usually, on Thursday or Friday evenings from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm in the 2nd floor seminar room at the NYU philosophy department.
Th. 10/03 Luke Roelofs
Fr. 10/18 Josh Myers
CANCELLED Fr. 10/25 Sam Clarke
Th. 10/31 Simon Brown
Th. 11/14 Noga Gratvol
Fr. 11/22 Cristina Ballarini
Th. 12/12 Rodrigo Diaz
You can still sign up to present! Of course, the earlier you request, the easier it is to schedule a session.
PopRocks is a read-ahead, works-in-progress workshop for graduate students and postdocs in the philosophy of cognitive science and mind. We meet on Fridays to hear and discuss a paper, and try to keep a low-pressure, constructive environment. If that sounds useful to you please get in touch and sign up to present!
Feb 21 – Juliette Vazard
Mar 6 – Stephan Pohl
Mar 27 – David Udell
Apr 3 – Simon Brown
Apr 10 – David Barack
Apr 17 – Kathryn Pendoley
PopRocks is a read-ahead, works-in-progress workshop for graduate students and postdocs in the philosophy of cognitive science and mind. We meet on Fridays to hear and discuss a paper, and try to keep a low-pressure, constructive environment. If that sounds useful to you please get in touch and sign up to present!
Feb 21 – Juliette Vazard
Mar 6 – Stephan Pohl
Mar 27 – David Udell
Apr 3 – Simon Brown
Apr 10 – David Barack
Apr 17 – Kathryn Pendoley
For over a hundred years econometricians, epidemiologists, educational sociologists and other non-experimental scientists have used asymmetric correlational patterns to infer directed causal structures. It is odd, to say the least, that no philosophical theories of causation cast any light on why these techniques work. Why do the directed causal structures line up with the asymmetric correlational patterns? Judea Pearl says that the correspondence is a “gift from the gods”. Metaphysics owes us a better answer. I shall attempt to sketch the outline of one.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop
Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU
Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING
Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC
Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications
Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence
Mar 16 David Papineau, GC
Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC
Mar 30 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest
Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC
Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING
Apr 20 Michał Godziszewski, Munich
Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers
May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol
May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC
May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING
PopRocks is a read-ahead, works-in-progress workshop for graduate students and postdocs in the philosophy of cognitive science and mind. We meet on Fridays to hear and discuss a paper, and try to keep a low-pressure, constructive environment. If that sounds useful to you please get in touch and sign up to present!
Feb 21 – Juliette Vazard
Mar 6 – Stephan Pohl
Mar 27 – David Udell
Apr 3 – Simon Brown
Apr 10 – David Barack
Apr 17 – Kathryn Pendoley
PopRocks is a read-ahead, works-in-progress workshop for graduate students and postdocs in the philosophy of cognitive science and mind. We meet on Fridays to hear and discuss a paper, and try to keep a low-pressure, constructive environment. If that sounds useful to you please get in touch and sign up to present!
Feb 21 – Juliette Vazard
Mar 6 – Stephan Pohl
Mar 27 – David Udell
Apr 3 – Simon Brown
Apr 10 – David Barack
Apr 17 – Kathryn Pendoley
PopRocks is a read-ahead, works-in-progress workshop for graduate students and postdocs in the philosophy of cognitive science and mind. We meet on Fridays to hear and discuss a paper, and try to keep a low-pressure, constructive environment. If that sounds useful to you please get in touch and sign up to present!
Feb 21 – Juliette Vazard
Mar 6 – Stephan Pohl
Mar 27 – David Udell
Apr 3 – Simon Brown
Apr 10 – David Barack
Apr 17 – Kathryn Pendoley
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
Spring 2020 Schedule:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.
David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.