Julia Borossa

Love of the Soldier: Citizenship, Belonging and Exclusion in Beau Travail

This paper examines belonging and non-belonging as set out in Claire Denis’sBeau Travail, in the context of the Enlightenment ideal of citizenship and the historical development of the Foreign Legion. Inclusion and exclusion are also treated in terms of the Oedipal family formation of psychoanalysis, in order to further question just who it is that belongs and why. The characters of Galoup, Sentain and Forestier are used to illustrate the ambiguities that arise from such questioning.

Ferenczi's ethics for our time: the possibility of being alongside.

Ferenczi’s practice and therapeutic ethics as exemplified in the Clinical Diary reveal a profound sensitivity to the questions of authority and freedom. This paper will engage with the ways in which these questions have been taken up elsewhere and have become central to post-war extensions of the psychoanalytic field, such as group analysis. A particular comparison will be made with group analytic notions of leadership and horizontal ways of relating, that is, how to be alongside one another. It will be suggested that the translatability of Ferenczi for our time reveals the adaptability of psychoanalysis to different and changing socio-political contexts.

The extensibility of psychoanalysis in Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas el Abd and Bahaa Taher's Love in Exile

Whilst key Freudian texts have long been translated into Arabic and explicitly psychoanalytic themes have circulated in Arab literary, medical and journalistic discourse at least since the 1940s, there seems to have been very little expansion of psychoanalysis as a practice in the Middle East. This article discusses the question of psychoanalysis’s extensibility beyond its western roots and its potentiality as a discourse addressing human suffering in non-Eurocentric ways. The question of literature’s hospitality to psychoanalysis is raised in parallel, via a discussion of two recent Egyptian novels: Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd and Bahaa Taher’s Love in Exile. The analysis turns on the themes of authority and freedom, which for psychoanalysis are deeply bound up with the constraining power of the superego.

Suffering, Transience and Immortal Longings: Salomé between Nietzsche and Freud

This essay explores Lou Salomé’s intellectual friendships with Nietzsche and Freud, with particular respect to the psychological implications of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and Freud’s quite different acceptance of transience. The essay conjectures that it is Salomé who serves as a significant mediation between the later phase of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Freud’s development of a metapsychology reliant on the hypothesis of a death drive.

Histories of Violence: Outrage, Identification and Analytic Work

What is violence? This may appear a deceptively simple question especially if it is conceived as just physical harm but as psychoanalysis so adeptly shows, violence reaches inwards. Do the effects of violence dehumanise or do they touch upon something central to the human condition? What enables the movement from outrage to identification with respect to accounts of violence in the clinic? This chapter engages in a reflection on the psychic, social and material facts of violence through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis. Novels, films and memoirs are examined alongside published clinical material to explore the unmaking and remaking of human bonds, the limits and possibilities of connectedness under extreme circumstances.

Liberalism and Islam in Discourse

Published at a historic juncture where the lines of confrontation and/or mutual exclusion between ‘liberalism’ and ‘Islam’ seem to be drawn more sharply than ever, Massad’s Islam in Liberalism presents itself as thought provoking and frustrating in equal measure, and to my mind it is precisely in this that its undeniable importance lies. Its readers will not be lead to any conciliatory palliative whereby a new kind of universal ethics of co-existence may become thinkable. Rather than being presented with answers, it is likely that they will be left with a series of questions, and if the provocations raised by these questions are taken seriously, they may well branch out towards new avenues of enquiry or perhaps even new paths of activism. It is to be noted that for Massad as well, this book is part of a much larger intellectual project, explicitly situated in the lineage of Said’s Orientalism. The two terms at the heart of Massad’s text remain in quotation marks, as it were, as the main thread of the argument concerns precisely the ways in which ‘liberalism’ and ‘Islam’ come to be constituted through a series of discourses that situate them in an oppositional complementarity, showing how ‘the emergence of ‘Europe’ was predicated on a series of projections, disavowals, displacements, and expulsions in order to produce a coherent self cleansed of others to which this self was opposed in its very constitution’ (11). Strikingly, the book avoids defining either of the terms, but rather, with an implicitly deconstructive methodology, is intent on demonstrating how ‘Islam’ is deployed in a wide-ranging set of discursive and institutional contexts. In an avowedly reductive shorthand we may risk naming these as democratic, feminist, queer and psychoanalytic, all shown in the four core chapters of the book, to be beholden to a constrictive ‘liberal’ agenda allied to an inescapably Eurocentric construction of the human universal dependent on what it either cannot acknowledge or else seeks to remake in its own image. Massad’s main strategic position rests on a careful, albeit at times ungenerous reading of texts for their contradictions and lacunae, alongside their manifest intentions. However, the concluding chapter ‘Forget Semitism!’ allows for the emergence of the ethical dimensions of the project. I will be returning to this last point at the end. My own productive frustrations with respect to a reading of Islam in Liberalism led me to two interrelated areas of questioning. The first has to do with the matter of judgement (taking a stand) as opposed to the rightly critiqued notion of tolerance, and the second with the conditions under which a different space for an inclusive subjectivity may emerge, one that is not dependent on the kind of conceptual violence done by ‘liberalism’ to its excluded others which Massad is so adept at pointing out. It is certainly true, as Caroline Rooney and I have argued previously in relation to Massad’s work, with a nod to his Foucaldian frame of reference, that if the categories created to oppress can also be used to liberate, and vice versa, the categories created to liberate can also be used to oppress. It also follows, as psychoanalysis would maintain, that it is futile to seek to absolutely separate out the positions of victim and perpetrator, as they are psychically interrelated. Yet, it does not follow from this

A correspondence of life and letters: 'Why War?':

or Letters?’ I ask. Rhetorical, unresolvable, the question (and this is what interests me) becomes one of the quintessential problems or paradoxes of psychoanalysis, the one which has held my attention, in diverse articulations, almost from the moment I started to think seriously about Freud’s legacy. ’Life or Letters?’ Choose life? And with life, the immediacy of affect (love, hate, compassion, grief, fear, ambition, greed, mercy), the urgency of action, its effectiveness or lack thereof (giving a hug, slapping a cheek, turning the other one, stabbing a chest, throwing a stone, placing a flower into the barrel of a gun, distributing food parcels, dropping a bomb, marching for