Category Archives: Quick Thought

Psychoanalytic Politics, Ketamine, and the “Medical Model”

The Therapist (1937) by Rene Magritte

I recently attended a lecture entitled “Bridging Psychoanalytic and Psychedelic Therapies: Ethical Considerations” hosted by the UNC School of Social Work. It was sponsored by the North Carolina chapter of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work.

The lecture was light on both psychedelic and ethical considerations, focusing mostly on a “case” of long-term therapy — eight years — and, late in the presentation, the introduction of ketamine into the therapeutic relationship. In the case history, the introduction of ketamine is closely associated with what is suspected to be the impending conclusion of the relationship.

The respondent, a psychiatrist on the faculty at Duke University, expressed his worry about ketamine-assisted therapy like this: ketamine exposes therapists to the temptation of “magic,” or the allure of mysticism. We are in big trouble, he warned, if what we are left with is mysticism.

By magic, the Psychiatrist seemed to mean the “unknown” — the worry that ketamine will situate therapists in theoretical territory beyond the reach of standard psychoanalytic technique. But his concern about mysticism reveals something more. 

Mysticism is often anti-authoritarian. It is also, in my view, masturbatory. It does not lend itself to a relationship outside of the self.

The difference between psychoanalysis and, say, reading a book is that there is another person in the room. A therapy that collapses into mysticism loses that other person — and with them, the entire point of the treatment.

During the audience question period, the anti-authoritarian subtext became text. The predominant concern felt like this: Is ketamine like “AI” in the therapeutic space, reducing the importance — and authority — of psychoanalysts? 

What is ketamine figuring in this conversation between medicine and psychoanalysis?

Ketamine is becoming another chapter in a long history of attempts to alter the analysand’s consciousness (think hypnosis). The idea is that because psychoanalytic treatment is so beset by defenses, the time and effort involved in treatment could be signfucantly reduced by relaxing or altering consciousness. 

It is already quite clear that ketamine does alter consciousness, allowing repressed or traumatic or embarrassing materials to surface. But what is one to do with that material, especially if it is revealed outside the therapeutic “container”?

The so-called “medical model” clearly threatens psychoanalytic “practitioners” (a strange fact given the early wedding of medicine and psychoanalysis: e.g., Freud, Winnicott, and Laing were all medical doctors). If the mere appearance of unwanted material, combined with the specific neurological repair ketamine provides, resolves the underlying psychological issues — then why, indeed, is a therapist necessary?

This is where an unexpected ethical consideration surfaces, and it is not the one the lecture explicitly promised. The question it raises is: What is the analyst’s responsibility to the analysand?

Let us assume that one of the things ketamine does is alleviate psychological pain — more or less, and for good — thereby empowering patients to better live their everyday lives outside the doctor’s office.

Why isn’t a goal of psychoanalytic treatment to free analysands from psychoanalysts, by training them, through the treatment itself, to think psychoanalytically for themselves, outside the therapeutic container?

I asked a similar question of the presenter. It was taken in the most trivial way possible: Isn’t the goal to help the patient live without the analyst?

Practitioners may need ketamine treatment to think about the question I did ask: why must psychoanalysis end when the psychoanalytic relationship does?

The Psychiatrist dismissed my question as an instance of the “fetishization of Freud” (Freud was never himself analyzed). But I would describe my ongoing obsession with Freud as a desire to think psychoanalytically about my everyday life. 

The liberation of psychoanalysis from the “therapeutic container” is not mysticism. It is, or ought to be, psychoanalytic politics.

Several practitioners attending the lecture were explicitly curious about — and, it seemed to me, suspicious of — the presence of a theologian in their midst. With good reason, perhaps. 

Why would “patients” (like me) want to hear themselves spoken of as “cases,” as susceptible to falling off the wall of dissociation as Humpty Dumpty, as incapable of learning to think about their own lives in such a “specialized” way?

There is a reason psychoanalysts don’t run for office or have much to do with public policy.

What was presented at that lecture as an ethical consideration was, in fact, an institutional one. And, as far as I could tell, nobody in the room wanted to see the difference.

I left the lecture feeling depressed.

In fact, my experience of the lecture is best illustrated by what I witnessed beforehand.

I arrived early (as instructed) to park and register. The School of Social Work was locked. I only got into the building because a door was left ajar.

People started showing up for the lecture, but now all the doors to the School were locked. I let people in. In fact, the School’s representative mistook me for the lecturer.

Eventually, the Organizer of the event noticed the locked doors and propped one open: a very reasonable, and long-overdue, solution to the locked-door problem. Even so, the Organizer asked the School’s representative if “they had a better or different solution.”

What would that be, exactly?

Why I Unsubscribed from Andrew Sullivan’s *The Weekly Dish*

An AI-generated image based on the writing below. Another case (see here and here) of Andrew Sullivan lying about Trans* desire.

Today, I ended my paid subscription to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish. I did so because his anti-Trans* click-and rage-baiting is evil.

I. What Pragmatic Liberalism Means for Trans Rights

Politically, I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. By pragmatic, I generally mean that I think our politics should be attuned to what we human beings can and want to do to make our lives better. When politics refers more narrowly to a campaign to win electoral votes, I think pragmatism means championing progressive values that most Americans support.

For example, a recent poll by The Argument, edited by Jerusalem Demsas, shows that the vast majority of Americans support legislation making it illegal to discriminate against Trans* people in employment and housing.

That’s very good news! But there is less fortunate news in this same poll.

In a recent clump of words about Trans* desire, Sullivan rightly points out that support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. According to Demsas’s poll, most Americans now support legislation to make use of public restrooms and participation in sports dependent on one’s birth sex and banning safe and reasonable healthcare that supports a minor’s desire to transition from one sex and/or gender to the other.

What this means pragmatically is that the next Democratic nominee for President should focus their campaign on ending discrimination against Trans* people in employment and housing.

Focus is not the same thing as “selling out.”

If Trans* rights and freedoms are important to you, then yes — winning elections is everything. That requires focusing on what the American public is willing to support.

Think about it: Can a Democrat veto legislation limiting the rights of supportive parents of Trans* children if they don’t win enough electoral votes to become President? Obviously, no.

Pragmatism, however, is not always about what is “true.” It is almost always about what works for a person or group of people. And this is where the liberal in my self-description as a pragmatic liberal comes in.

By liberal, I mean, to echo John Rawls, a form of political power based on reason and reasons that may, at least in principle, be accepted by all citizens as justification for a particular action. By reason, Rawls means “public reason” or “political reason,” and such reason excludes metaphysics or other “comprehensive doctrines.”

Religious reason, for example, is, in its own way, reasonable, but it is not a form of public reason. It is not public or political reason, reason all citizens are, in principle, capable of exercising because all the information we need to assess to make the case for some kind of action is not commonly available.

So, a Democratic candidate can make a pragmatic and reasonable case for making it illegal to discriminate against Trans* people in the workplace and in housing. Again, that is very good news!

II. Where Sullivan Gets It Right — and Where I Think He Lies

Sullivan makes a few pragmatic and reasonable points in his post.

As I noted above, support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. Sullivan is absolutely right about that. Sullivan is right about a second thing, too: “the real world keeps intervening.”

“Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic,” Sullivan writes. “I’ve lost some good friends. . . . [M]y social life has shrunk.” The real world is rejecting Sullivan’s unreasonable, unconscious fantasy of Trans* desire as justification for political action.

The real world is telling Sullivan it is unpersuaded by his fantasy of gay kids being forced to transition by evil, greedy doctors. Furthermore, it rejects the idea that because a majority of Americans support legislation banning Trans* discrimination in the workplace and in housing, Trans* people “already have [those protections].”

The real world, moreover, thinks it is unreasonable to ignore Trans* people. Pace Sullivan: “And so what sacred trans people say they want [Sullivan is opposed to sacralizing minorities, by which he seems to mean taking what minorities want for their own lives seriously] . . . is all that matters” (emphasis original).

What Trans* people are asking their fellow citizens to do is to listen honestly and openly to their testimonies. And it is in this context that Sullivan makes a third good point: some Trans* stories are not pretty.

III. The Fantasy of ‘Mike’ and the Real World

In his recent post, Sullivan describes a tragic figure named “Mike.” “Mike” represents Sullivan’s most potent fantasy: that of Trans* terrorists — doctors, parents, therapists — destroying (“castrating”) the lives of genuinely gay male kids.

My contention is not that “Mike” doesn’t regret transitioning, but rather that his regret does not establish that he was forced into transitioning. Frankly, Sullivan is, on this point, lying to us. There is simply no reasonable evidence that “Mike” was forced into or thoughtlessly and recklessly offered Trans* healthcare.

Surely, some people regret transitioning. I really feel for them. I am interested in hearing the facts of their cases.

Yet their stories do not amount to a reasonable basis for public policy decisions, because they are not representative cases. In fact, it is Sullivan who does “Mike” a great disservice by misleading the public about the facts of his specific case.

Of course, Sullivan is free to live in his own fantasy. But his picture of Trans* desire is simply not politically reasonable. It betrays the evidence that any of us can assess with our eyes and ears, provided that we have eyes to see and ears to hear as citizens.

Unfortunately, Sullivan is committed to the same mind-snapped-shut mentality that he attributes to his opponents.

Speaking of his opponents, Sullivan describes the structure of their brains as “a bunch of synapses.” This may be his way of calling them “bird-brained.” The epithet is rooted in ignorance. Bird brains are, if you will, bunches of synapses, and birds are extremely intelligent.

Close-mindedness, however, is something found in both stupid and smart people.

I think the only thing that will open Sullivan’s mind is another real-world intervention: a significant drop in his paid subscribers. If you have a paid subscription to The Weekly Dish, I humbly ask you to consider unsubscribing. Unsubscribing is even easier than subscribing.

Unsubscribe from Sullivan. And consider other opportunities to unsubscribe, too.

Placental Relations: Theology, Viability, and Roe v. Wade

– Author’s sketch and revision of an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul,” from the Rupertsberg Codex –

In Receptive Bodies, the late literary and queer scholar Leo Bersani takes up the work of Peter Sloterdijk, especially the first volume of his three-volume Microsphereology, Bubbles. Sloterdijk persuasively argues that our first relationship is not with our mother, exactly, but with a “non-object” he calls our With — that is, the placenta:

[I]n truth, obstetricians know that there are always two units which reach the outside in successful births. The child . . . never emerges from the cave alone. . . . In terms of its psychodynamic source, the individualism of the Modern Age is a placental nihilism (387).

A serious analysis of Sloterdijk’s Microsphereology, especially as it relates to psychoanalysis (e.g., 349ff), must wait for another time. What interests me here is his engagement with an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul.” My amateur sketch of it appears above — and I genuinely cannot explain what possessed me to draw my own version.

Here is the original, from the Rupertsberg Codex:

According to Sloterdijk, pregnancy for Hildegard

repeats the creation of Adam: physically as the function of a solid from a liquid [cheese or dough are in the figures’ baskets] through concrescence, psycho-pneumatically as the inspiration of the soul through the descent of the spirit orb from the angelic space into the fetal body. According to the traditional view, the latter takes place around the middle of pregnancy — that is, at a point equated in earlier doctrines of female wisdom with the beginning of palpable movement in the womb (367).

This “middle of pregnancy” — roughly 20 to 24 weeks, give or take — is also the point at which modern medicine teaches us that fetal lung development has progressed far enough that survival outside the womb becomes possible, with significant NICU support. The fetus, in the middle of pregnancy, receives lungs/breath/soul. That is, by the way, an idea that stretches back at least to Aristotle.

This brings me to Roe v. Wade (1973) and its companion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which together regulated abortion access in America for five decades before being overturned — wrongly and foolishly, in my opinion — by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022).

Here is the argument I want to make: Roe was indeed an instance of judicial overreach. The irony is that its overreach favored the so-called “pro-life” position.

The Roe Court honestly confronted the originalist reading of the Constitution and concluded, in the words of legal scholar Katie Watson, “that fetuses don’t fit within the Constitution’s use of the word ‘person,’ and the opinion doesn’t paint the fetus as a character or personify it as an active agent” (Scarlet A, 42). As Watson observes on page 82, according to the Roe Court, “Constitutional personhood only begins at birth.”

The 14th Amendment says “born.” It means born. A strict originalist has no textual basis for fetal constitutional personhood — none.

And yet the Roe Court ruled that the Constitution allows states to ban abortions. The Court made up “viability” as a legal threshold — the point at which states may restrict or even ban abortion in order to protect what it called “potential life.” That threshold is similar to the one Hildegard (and Aristotle) identified as the moment of ensoulment: roughly the middle of pregnancy, when breath and life become possible outside the womb.

Roe is judicial overreach — but it was overreach grounded in “pro-life” logic. While Roe protects a woman’s right to abortion because she is an unambiguous constitutional person (conservatives clutch your pearls!) and the fetus is not — it doesn’t go so far as to assert that the fetus is pure “bare life,” or life outside the protection of the law.

Roe is a compromise — a significant one — and one that, as Watson argues, tracks with what women actually do. The vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester, long before viability. Later abortions are almost always the result of medical necessity or devastating fetal diagnosis. Roe and Casey reflect reality.

Now consider Dobbs. Its reasoning is, if anything, more extra-legal than Roe‘s. The Dobbs Court rejected a constitutional right to abortion on the grounds that the word “abortion” does not appear in the Constitution, but then justified state bans on abortion in order to protect “potential life,” an extra-legal concept they didn’t even try to define in the spirit of the actual text of the Constitution, but left it to the states to define.

Frankly, the Dobbs Court was not being more faithful to the Constitution. It was simply being faithful to a different set of extra-legal values, without acknowledging it.

If you are a genuine originalist, the honest conclusion is fucking shocking: the Constitution, as written and as historically understood, offers the fetus no protection whatsoever.

Not at viability.

Not at any point before birth.

The “born” language of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous.

I think Roe‘s extra-legal reasoning is preferable to that of Dobbs because it is manifestly less cruel.

Roe, like Dobbs, went beyond the strict text of the Constitution. But Roe at least tethered its extra-legal reasoning to something real, both constitutionally and historically. Almost all abortions occur well before viability. However, once the fetus reaches the threshold of ensoulment or viability, it becomes a potential person, a potential citizen that our society has an obvious interest in reasonably protecting.

Dobbs replaced the Roe Court’s wisdom with conservative Christian metaphysics. And we are all, especially girls and women, living with the consequences. The only thing worse may be a radical leftist vision of absolutely no legal constraints on abortion, damning the mother to the hell of individualism 

It’s Giving (Momma) Bear: On the Way Out of Goals, Passion, and Misery

We seem to know that goals make us miserable. But we keep setting them anyway, like clockwork—because we don’t know how to live without them. Jenny Craig is counting on that.

FX’s hit series The Bear helpfully illustrates why we are not wrong to think that goals are the literalization of our passions, and that our passions are the sources of our misery. Passion makes us miserable because it immunizes us against receiving (the touch of) O/others. 

But The Bear also reveals something else: maternal love—unexpected, unconditional—can free us from passion’s grip.

In season 3, episode 9 of The Bear, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) makes a distinction between passions and goals (You can watch the entire scene here):

Well, dreams are a son of a bitch, aren’t they? I went to this lecture series, U of Chicago. . . . Anyway, dreams, they always. . . start from a place of passion, right?

And, by the way, when I say dreams, I mean goals, not like when you’re, you know, asleep and you’re stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool, and your fucking teeth keep floating up out of your head. And you look down, and you have a fucking tattoo of a bulldog on your cock.

Anyway, so I’m at this lecture, and it’s called The Day Tomorrow Began, right? It’s all about these breakthroughs in, like, science and fucking culture and whatever . . . . Crazy fucking shit, let me tell you. Like carbon dating . . . .  It’s inspiring, really.

Because it’s kind of like, if you really nurture these dreams, these goals, no matter how batshit crazy they sound—and trust me. There are, like, 15 more of these breakthroughs—positively fucking idiotic, right?

But you can make an impact, right? You can actually change the fucking world, as long as you have a place like the university to, you know, take care of you, to let you do your thing, let you drive, right?

And, uh, keep you financed. I just remember the whole time thinking, “Whew, not everything can be that. . . .”

Jimmy’s lecture mirrors a dream of floating teeth and bulldog-tatted cocks, but its warning about passion is clear enough.

Dreams, “like when you’re, you know, asleep,” are “a place of passion.” Goals “start from a place of passion,” from your dreams. Your dreams (re)surface your passions. In your dreams, your “teeth” come out of your head to speak your mind, and your “dog” is free to sniff out a place to piss on the world. 

Goals (i.e., teeth and bulldogs) are forms of passion. And they ain’t pleasant. They’re “a son of a bitch,” “crazy fucking shit,” and “positively fucking idiotic.”

The idiotic—or passionate—person hasn’t lost their mind. Their teeth are speaking it. What they’ve lost is their head—their, I say, pleasure.

Passion sacrifices pleasure. As the late Leo Bersani writes, “Passion is an obstacle to pleasure” (Receptive Bodies, vii). 

Passion blocks your pleasure by immunizing you against the reception of O/others—for example, the university you need to “take care of you,” the investors you need to “keep you financed,” the business partner, family members, and/or girlfriend you need to run a successful restaurant and experience something like a good life. 

Your goals get realized—if they do—in spite of you. More importantly, goals immunize you against yourself. 

Season 4 Spoiler Alert! “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

In season 4 of The Bear, we learn that being a world-class chef is more than Carm (Jeremy Allen White) can bear (You can watch the final scene of season 4 here and here):

I—I think I have put a lot of stuff in the way, of not dealing with other stuff. . . . And I think I’m trying to run into that. All right. So, I’m not blocked by it anymore. I’m not scared of it anymore. I’m not sprinting from it anymore.

. . . . 

I don’t know what I’m like, Richie. . . . Like, outside of the kitchen.

We know what Carm is like inside the kitchen. He is like his mother inside the kitchen (I only recently completed watching season 2 of The Bear because episode 6, “Ma Does Seven Fishes,” caused me so much anxiety that I could not bear to finish watching it). 

Carm’s curiosity about what he’s like outside the kitchen is also inspired by his mother, who is now in a similar position. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) offers her apology for years of parental neglect just outside of their family home’s kitchen (You can watch the scene here):

I’m trying to make things better. And I am–I’m here asking if I can be part of your life again because I miss you. And I– I know I never said it enough–I know I didn’t–but I love you, Carmen.

You’re my baby bear. I know. And I love you. And I’m so sorry. I just didn’t say it enough. I just didn’t.

Donna’s unexpected apology—her unexpected expression of sincere maternal love—somehow moves Carm to think about his pleasure, about who he may be outside of the kitchen.

Maternal love redeems us from our passions, and it opens us to ourselves. Lots of love to you, dear reader, in 2026. 

Narrating Adolescence

Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days, photos from 1980s NYC.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) and Matt Richtel’s How We Grow Up (2025) are stories about adolescence. I will be talking through each book in the next episode of the New Thoughts Podcast, but here are a few, quick thoughts (subject to significant future revision) about adolescence—as it is narrated by Haidt and Richtel. 

Haidt and Richtel likely experienced happy childhoods. If they didn’t, they have become the type of adults capable of imagining such a childhood (a huge achievement either way!). Their growing up stories are about evolution, cells, hormones, social media, mental health, adventure, play, and (mostly) second chances (tragically, not everyone survives growing up).

At least two substantive threads link the books together: biological determinism (by which I mean that they seem to think that, if left undisturbed, a genetic process will unfold, a second birth, making us who we are) and social media. They both agree that adolescence is a fraught period of time when our genetic composition unfolds in surprising and obviously highly consequential ways.

Haidt and Ritchel (and the best existing evidence) agree: social media fucks up our unfolding. The solution, Haidt argues, is two-fold: much, much less social media, holding off exposure to it (ideally) until we are 18—or (more realistically) until we are 16—combined with opportunities for risky, less adult rule-based play.

Richtel’s narrative is appealing because he starts out with a philosophical question: What is adolescence? He then introduces us to the history of adolescence (not a thing until the 18th-century) and to the history of adolescent studies, beginning with Stanley Hall (1904).

Tracing the development of adolescent studies from Hall to modern neuroscience, Richtel further introduces what he considers the “outdated” theories of psychoanalysis. He cites Anna Freud’s description of how this momentous time feels to tweens and teens:

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . .  to fight his [sic] impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity . . .  (How We Grow Up, 39, emphasis added).

Haidt’s narrative is mostly about Gen Z. They are the first to go through puberty with the smartphone and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Haidt focuses on the mental health decline of adolescents caused by social media—especially the devastating impact of Instagram on tween and teen girl mental health (tween and teen boys have not fared better, but for different reasons)—from 2010 onward. His story is historically rich and complicated, starting out in the 1980s with rise of “safetyism” in parenting.

It’s an important development, as the parental imposition of the phantasm of danger on the real world traps kids inside the home, or under the eye, if you will, of their parents. And thereby fucking up their genetic unfolding.

With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, further developed in 2008 to download social media apps, the virtual world breaks into the inner lives of increasingly real world averse kids. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter evolve to include the “like” (FB) and “retweet” (Twitter) buttons, making these apps nearly irresistible to developing young minds.

The real world, however, is also turbulent with change. Physical strength, for example, has become less relevant in the real world. Nowadays, the information complex real world requires skills like emotional regulation, negotiation, and empathy.

Brains kill the villain (Musical trivia! In what musical does a sensitive prince found in a book teach this?). Girls are doing much better in the real world.

Boys find a type of “salvation” in the virtual world of video games and porn. The evidence is clear: more and more boys are failing to castaway (Richtel) or to launch (Haidt) into the world as competent adult males, lovers, and citizens.

One real world way to solve for failure to launch is, according to Haidt’s story, more male mentors for boys. Research suggests that boys need male teachers in their extended family, neighborhoods, and in their schools to help them castaway or to launch, to discover their unique adult male voices.

Normative or traditional psychoanalytic theory supports the idea that “normal” development, leaving home, for boys entails identifying with their fathers. The point is: only a male can save males.

From 2010 on, boys and girls arrive at the same, hellish spot—though by different pathways. The X is revealed in certain empty emergency rooms (an overstatement, of course).

Less risky play (i.e., minimally supervised play in the world with other tweens and teens) means fewer thrilling experiences the brain needs to develop well—and fewer broken bones. Interestingly, Richtel points out that between 900-1500 C.E., broken bones = the experience of growing up—and, until very recently, such injuries were common, especially for boys.

Real world averse, boys are ending up in a place traditionally more populated by girls: the world of internalized discontent (boys have more traditionally acted out). Social media apps are causing skyrocketing rates of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness among both tween and teen boys and girls. Emergency rooms are filling up as a consequence of internalized or mental health wounds.

All that makes sense to me—and while the situation is bleak, especially for cis straight white boys from lower-income households (a social fact backed by a bunch of data)—it is well within the reach of our collective power to co-create a world in which all our kids can thrive.

One way to redeem the hellscape of contemporary tween and teen mental health is not mentioned (but there is still hope, as I have not yet finished Richtel’s book): non-exclusionary feminism for tweens and teens.

While Richtel cites Anna Freud’s description of how adolescence feels—he makes nothing , so far, of what Freud identifies as the longing of (male?) tweens and teens to have “heart-to-heart talks” with the maternal figure(s) in their lives. Freud’s idea does not seem “outdated” to me.

In fact, given that women are finding success in a rapidly changing real world—a world that is often actually harmful to them—does it not make sense to create social pathways by which both girls and boys can learn from inclusionary feminists—and perhaps even learn to identify with various maternal figures with whom they can fashion “heart-to-heart talks”?

Excitable Truth? On Speaking the Truth in Love

– Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. Three gelatin silver prints, 148 x 121 cm each –

“But on rising from the table where [Foucault] had inwardly decreed this end [to the writing of History of Sexuality 2 and 3], he knocked over a glass that broke, and just then it seemed to him that the time of satisfaction was ended; it had not lasted but a few seconds.”

– Mark Jordan, citing Mathieu Lindon, Ce qu’aimer veut dire (2011), in Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (2015), 200 –

“Philosophy [and, in my view, Theology] is always a breaking of the mirror.”

– Alain Badiou, Conditions, 25 –

The author of Ephesians (most scholars don’t think it’s a Pauline letter) writes, “But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up . . . “ (4:15, NRSV).

Riffing on Judith Butler’s analysis of speech in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), in which Butler continues their engagement with J.L. Austin’s theory of language, I ask, What kind of speech act is “speaking the truth in love”?

Is speaking the truth in love (a) an example of a performative speech act (a type of illocutionary speech act), a form of speech that immediately does what it announces (e.g., “I pronounce you husband and husband”)? Or, is speaking the truth in love (b) an example of a perlocutionary speech act, a type of speech that, as a result of being spoken, sets in motion a chain of consequences (e.g., “Get out, get out before I kill you!”)?

In other words, when we read, “But speaking the truth in love, we grow up . . .” are we to think that (a) we grow up at the very moment we speak the truth in love, that in the act of speaking the truth in love we become a body possessed by the mind of Messiah? Or, are we to think that (b) we grow up into Christ as a consequence of speaking the truth in love, that the future or promise of speaking the truth in love is growing into a body ruled by the mind of Messiah?

Perhaps the answer is (c): none of the above.

The Greek is (for me!) a bit tricky, but it is helpful to have it before our eyes: “[1] Alētheuontes de en agapē [2] auxēsōmen eis auton ta panta, hos estin hē kephalē, Christos.”

What we take Ephesians 4:15 to mean is, I think, determined by the words 1) Alētheuontes and 2) auxēsōmen.

  1. Alētheuontes = speaking the truth, and it is a present active participle. It means that speaking the truth in love is a way of life that is ongoing.
  •  Auxēsōmen = must/should/might grow into, and it is an aorist subjunctive verb, first person plural. It means that growth is a possible outcome of beginning to (I take the aorist here as indicating a “point of entry” into some action) speak the truth in love.

If my analysis is correct, it would seem that “speaking the truth in love” is neither a performative nor a perlocutionary speech act. It does not do what it says in the moment of its saying. Moreover, there is no guarantee that in saying it, that in speaking the truth in love, we will grow into a body ruled by Messiah. The author hopes that growth will follow the act of speaking the truth in love.

There is another possibility, answer (d): speaking the truth in love is neither a performative nor a perlocutionary speech act, but it is intended to become a perlocutionary speech act.  

Ephesians 4 begins with the author neither asking nor demanding that their readers “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Instead, they “beg” their readers to do so (vv 1-3). The author does not have the necessary status to make either a performative or a perlocutionary statement. The outcome of either kind of speech act depends on a convincing citation of law, tradition, context, and so on.

The force of the author’s statement depends entirely on the character of its readers. If they are the subjects of messianic desire, then they will forsake deceitful living and speak the truth in love, growing into the body of the Messiah and thereby maintaining “the unity of the Spirit in the body of peace.”

These observations are essential for understanding what it means to speak the truth in love. For too many Christians, this passage means: You are free to say the nastiest things to others so long as you do it gently and with a smile. Bless their hearts!

Ephesians 4:15 is often read as blessing hubris–this even though the author begs the readers to adopt a position of weakness and humility at the outset (vv 1-3). Weakness and humility are the preconditions for speaking the truth in love.

To understand why weakness and humility are preconditions for speaking the truth . . . in love, let us briefly consider Alain Badiou’s elaboration of the Truth in Conditions. “I propose to call ‘religion,’” Badiou writes, “everything that presupposes that there is a continuity between truths and the circulation of meaning” (24). Furthermore, Badiou contends that “any truth that accepts a position of dependency with regard to narrative and revelation is still gripped by mystery, whereas philosophy [and, in my view, theology] only exists in its desire to tear down mystery’s veil” (36). Moreover, “Philosophy [and, in my view, theology,] commences . . . only with a desacralization: it establishes a regime of discourse that is its own inherent and earthly legitimation . . . the authority of profound utterance [being] interpreted by argumentative secularization” (36, emphasis original).

Why, though, is religion as the “continuity of truths and the circulation of meaning” and mystery (related as it is to veiling meaning) opposed to the Truth, while secularization is amenable to it?

All too briefly, Badiou defines the Truth as an empty or operational category out of which truths are seized. Truth is not the same as presence; it is not present; thus, it cannot be associated with “the circulation of meaning” (23).

The Truth is precisely what is not present in a text, play, film, and so forth. Philosophy—and, in my view, theology—is the practice of seizing truths out of the void of Truth, of trying to say what is impossible to say.

Philosophy—and, in my view, theology—is “subtractive in that it cuts holes in sense, or causes an interruption in the circulation of sense, so that it comes that truths are said all together” (24, emphasis mine). Yet, the truth is not a “mystery,” veiled and unknowable. We can “know” the Truth as truths that cause knowledge to fail (46).

Truth is necessarily fiction. Thus, power cannot make Truth persuasive. Hence the significance for philosophy, and, in my view, theology, of address. “Addressed to all so that all may be in seizing the existence of truths, it is like a political strategy with no stake in power” (23). A disciple is one persuaded by such an address; a disciple is the subject of the address, “one who knows that [they do] not form a public or constitute an audience but support a transmission” (28).

My all too hasty reading of Badiou on Truth in Conditions brings us back to Ephesians 4. Recall that the author begins from a standpoint of weakness and humility. They address the reader with a Truth that is truths. Take note of the one that is seven ones in Ephesians 4: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God (vv 4-5). The Truth exists for all those who are subjects of its truths—hence the author cannot guarantee if their admonition will inspire growth into the one body that is not one—and not whole. If the body were whole, there would be no need for the address.

So, what does all this potentially mean? What truth may we seize from this address and so address to others?

My answer: The Truth is fiction, so it must be shared with a sense of irony (i.e., in agapē — and why I think agapē should be interpreted as an already ironized form of desire is a topic for another day).

Put another way, Truth is just not that serious. Truth is (un)serious. Unity then, or growth in love, or growing into the one body that is not one, involves trying things out, imagining things differently: an open mind. It does not require belief in any doctrine or even belief, a force of will that purports to make the Truth present.

“The modern sophist,” Badiou writes, “attempts to replace the idea of truth with the idea of the rule” (6). I have argued elsewhere that the (modern) cleric attempts to “replace the idea of truth with the idea of the” norm.

“But speaking the truth in love” entails living without such assurances. It is more like sending a postcard: we hope the exposed truths make it to the listed address, to the all to which it is (un)intentionally addressed—”so that all may be in seizing the existence of truths.”

What is life due?

– Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document 3, 1973–79, perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon –

In one National Geographic presentation on migration, gazelles run across the screen as the narrator says something like, migration is life. Movement, multitasking, scanning the horizon for prey or for predators–even as they eat or sleep–is animal life.

We recently traveled to Chicago, and our son was especially interested in the “L” system. As we walked to the train, I shared with him that city life involves a lot of flexibility. A young man immediately made my point.

Inexplicably, the young man decided to stop and take a call midway up the stairs leading to the train, reducing two lanes of pedestrian traffic to one. If he had cared to notice, he would have seen that people were building up behind him, unable to pass without colliding with the people walking freely down the stairs in the opposite direction.

A lady passed the young man before turning around to stare at him violently, as if to scream “WTF?!” in the young man’s face. He did not notice her.

We were next. We passed quickly and quietly around the young man. However, the man walking behind us, struggling to carry many bags, let himself be heard: “Bro! What the fuck are you doing?! Take your fucking call at the top of the stairs—you’re blocking everyone from the station!”

We laughed. We kept moving, eventually boarding the Brown Line.

When we exited at Sedgwick and started walking back to our hotel, we noticed a group of teenagers entering the crosswalk early. A passing white truck almost hit them. The driver of the truck stopped just past the intersection, and he yelled, “Are you ok?!”—and in a way that clearly conveyed that he thought the young men were not ok, as in not mentally well.

The young men got it. They yelled back, even more mockingly, “Are you ok?!” And this went on until one of the young men made a gun with his fingers and the sounds pop, pop, pop before saying to the man in his white truck, “You better get moving.”

Inflexibility, getting stuck in the moment, is the (potential) death of you. We kept moving.

Ben Rhodes recently argued, “Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.” What Rhodes calls “short-termism” is not exactly a lack of movement. “We are all living in the disorienting present,” Rhodes writes, “swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound.” 

For Rhodes, distraction is a type of stuckness “in . . . currents we don’t control,” the movement of other people’s, (in Rhodes’s article, Trump’s), desire.

I see it the other way around. Distraction is the solution to presentism.

We tend to think that the opposite of distraction is attention. But attention is a form of distraction.

As we walked around Chicago, I often reminded my son to “pay attention.” I meant for him to focus less on the objects of his desire, the cute Labubu in the store window, my mother at the jewelry counter, getting to the bathroom or on/off the elevator, and to attend to the world around him, to the people and cars moving toward him and to details, like what floor the elevator had stopped on.

The meaning of “pay attention,” to pay attention its due, was dramatically revealed when my son accidentally hit an old woman’s cain with his foot, nearly sending her to the ground. He didn’t notice her cain because he was focused on an object of his desire.

Staying focused is a form of traction rather than a form of attention, a type of distraction. Animals tend to die when they are focused, when they are not paying attention, when they are attracted to the delicious grass, the person with a nice gyatt, the phone call, the teenagers in the crosswalk, and so on.

I was walking around Brussels when I noticed an attractive young man and his friends standing on the sidewalk. He noticed my loud stare (I know, a bad habit!), and he smiled before asking me something innocent. Before I knew it, he had tripped me and stole my wallet (talk about being caught in currents!). For whatever reason, when I asked him to give my wallet back–he obliged (perhaps he was just practicing to rob people or he though it unethical to rob gay men or he noticed my wallet was empty or he had made his point about staring, about traction . . . )!

I learn the hard way. When I first moved to Chicago, I owned a car (I know dad, you owned a car!)–and I quickly learned why city folk fervently pray for parking spaces. In this instance, my prayers were not answered, and I decided to park in a prohibited space.

I reasoned that it would only take me sixtyish seconds to use the bank’s ATM. On that day, I learned that it takes less than a minute to have your car towed. The upside of this is experience (one of 2 dramatic times I got towed in Chicago. The second time, keyed and covered in syrup[!], the car was towed to a 103rd street!) is that I got to explore lower, lower Wacker Drive, the location where a few scenes of Dark Knight and Transformers: Age of Extinction were filmed–and of one of the city’s impound lots.

Traction costs a lot, too.

The question now arises: should we always resist traction for the pragmatics of distraction? Or, if collective life requires the suspension of one’s own desire, is there a time to forsake attention for the pleasures of traction or focus?

In the rural Idaho town where I grew up, it was not uncommon for farmers to pull off the side of the road, one truck on each side, and talk for a good while. On many early mornings my dad joins a group of men at the local gas station to talk about only God knows (I surely don’t want to know!).

In the country, one is not often punished for this kind of decadence. No one dies for focusing on friends or neighbors–and no one gets their car towed for parking incorrectly or even unwisely.

I thought of this on our recent visit to New York City (if you have not seen the musicals Operation Mincemeat or Death Becomes Her [so, so much better than the movie!], you must! Go now!). We were walking along the edge of Times Square, and I noticed a man on the ground, in a position that suggested he was sleeping. “Tourist-looking” people were sitting on the bench near him, looking unconcerned.

Even though his position on the ground caused me concern, I irrationally assumed others would have already taken action if the man was not well. I kept moving.

I should have stopped; I should have focused on the man, if even just long enough inquire about his well-being or to ask someone else to do so.

Rural Studies research makes the valuable point that rural spaces exist in cities. The reverse is also true: city spaces exist in rural towns.

The division between the city and the country can be translated as city = space that requires distraction (i.e., vigilance, forward think, reality principle) while rural = space that allows for the indulgence of traction (i.e., talking to strangers, walking in the street, and so on).

Collective life, of whatever size, requires an ethics or practice of distraction. Yet, if our collective life is just, it will make space for individual pleasures, space for stopping, caring, helping, loving, creating, spontaneity-ing, moments discomfiting, focusing–in a word, pleasuring–possible.

I grant that we must pay attention to live together; we must keep on the move, facing multiple directions at once. If living together is what we really want, we must pay attention its due. Yet, we seem to “know” that collective life is not always what we really want. We seem to “know” that life is not always worth its due.

Hence the relief of letting go, of finding ourselves temporarily “dropped back into the immense design of things” (Willa Cather). It feels good to give into our anti-social impulses–and justice allows it, for a time.

Traction isn’t free. Nonetheless, we more often than not experience the cost of it as worth every dime. Thus, making America distracted again is an urgent political task.

Weird Delight

Francisco de Pájaro, Art Is Trash, London 2013

I recently received The Book of Delights by Ross Gay from a dear friend. I started reading it (delight!) while waiting for my car to get serviced–and it inspired the recognition of this delight:

I am delighted by a spot in the middle of a major intersection near my home where various items gather. Auto parts, rocks, shards of glass, and the like find their way to the exact center of this intersection. The stuff there is so perfectly centered that cars turning or passing through don’t run them over or otherwise disturb them.

It’s all the rage in sophisticated circles to go on about de-centering this or that. Well, I am delighted by these weird, radically centered things of the world that few people notice and cannot (easily/safely) be reached.

I am further delighted by the thought of walking out into the middle of the intersection–not so much to investigate the items gathered there but rather to become one of them.

Will I be so perfectly centered in the road that people will ignore and not disturb me? Perhaps such radical centering requires a lot of practice or luck or . . . ?

Friendship/Communion

I recently visited a friend who is in hospice care.

I listened as she shared memories of her ministry. She recalled being tasked with presiding over communion after her Association had declined to accept an Open and Affirming church into its communion.  

That’s all history now. That church was eventually welcomed and is now thriving in that Association.

But the image of her presiding in this moment of sadness for many LGBTQ Christians and their allies (and she is one) worked on my unconscious:

Remembrances of Communions Past:

  • In college, I read Henry Nouwen’s Can You Drink The Cup? I preached a sermon inspired by it, “Sharing Our Lives,” to my rural hometown church. After hearing it, a friend observed, “I don’t think you know it, but you just came out to your church.” Looking at the text of my sermon now, I get it. I described lifting the cup as coming out and sharing (i.e., intimate connection) as a lifestyle. I even read a story from the book, Holy Homosexuals. I don’t have Nouwen’s book in my library today. As a college senior, I was invited to speak at a gay youth support group. I remember giving the book to a high school student. I wonder what the book did for him?
  • One of the first things I did when I moved to Chicago (and mostly out . . . though I had not yet explicitly told my family!) was force myself to begin exploring the city. I jumped on a bus, and I headed downtown. I made it to Michigan Avenue (on the south side of the river) and chickened out. I ducked into Subway(!) and sat down to read Leonardo Boff’s Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments. Boff describes the old aluminum mug he and his ten siblings drank from: “It has shared everything. It has always been there. It is the ongoing mystery of life and mortal existence. The mug endures, old but still shiny . . . . We must drink in other people before we can love them. Eyes that drink in people speak the language of the heart.”

Several times, as others spoke to her, our eyes connected. I felt her love, and I smiled lovingly–and we looked, I am sure, lovingly sad.

On the last day of a challenging ecclesial assignment, I received my friend’s ordination gift in the mail: a beautiful communion chalice (pictured). Before leaving my friend’s bedside, I told her I would use her chalice whenever I preside over communion.

I’ll lift the cup up and share, through Messiah, communion with her.

May it be so.

Does the resurrection of the dead make sense?

Sir Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7

Quick thought(s) on the sense of resurrection, the interruption of sentient animal thriving, and the experience of life:

Resurrection: an unnatural event (i.e., an act of God or a miracle) whereby sentient animals are returned to significant striving/thriving (i.e., to purposeful living) after the experience of dying and remaining dead for more than one day.

The resurrection of the dead is surely an irrational/unnatural idea. Yet, I think it does make sense as an expression of sentient animal desire for uninterrupted thriving.

Sentient animals strive significantly; that is, they engage in long-term projects, like family building (see, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility–or my reading of the relevant philosophical arguments, though for a different reason, here). Significant striving is purposeful living. Purpose is an enjoyable characteristic of sentient animals’ thriving.

Thriving is a source of pleasure, although pain may be a temporary feature of it. Child-birth, for example, is typically painful–but the aim of family-building requires it. The aim of thriving may require a brief interruption of it.

Long-term or incurable pain impedes thriving. Thriving does not require it. Thus, sentient animals rightly avoid the experience of such pain.

Pain is caused by either natural or social causes. Pain is caused by, for example, certain genetic abnormalities that are unrelated to social factors, like environmental pollution. Pain not attributable to social causes is necessarily a form of harm because it is not the fault of any sentient animal or group of animals and impedes thriving.

Pain attributable to social causes can also be a form of harm. For example, the attainment of academic or artistic achievement may require the short-term experience of pain. Its cause is social/cultural–but it is not directly caused either by the neglect or intent of a sentient animal or group of animals. Nonetheless, it does temporarily impede thriving.

Pain is unjust when its cause, due to neglect or intent, is attributable to another sentient animal or group of sentient animals (i.e., society). It seriously impedes sentient animal thriving. Its duration is irrelevant, as it is pain unrelated to the aim of thriving.

Death interrupts animal thriving. Thus, it is also a source of pain. As such, death is either a very serious harm or, when it is directly linked to social factors, it is an injustice.

The desire for resurrection does not make sense if death is morally neutral–simply a natural fact. If life is not an unqualified good to us, then why would we want more of it?

As an obviously serious interruption of animal thriving, death harms sentient animal life. The resurrection of the dead makes more sense if life is a good that death interrupts. Resurrection makes sense as an expression of desire for uninterrupted animal thriving.

Animal thriving is good. It is the embodiment of justice. Thriving is what sentient animals want. Death gets in the way of it.

Resurrection is, by definition, an act of God. And while you may be willing to grant that resurrection makes sense as an expression of desire to cure the suffering caused by death, namely the interruption of sentient animal thriving—you are likely not as eager to entertain the idea that it is reasonable to think that a divine being will, in fact, overturn death.

Surely, logical argument will fail to convince us of the reasonableness of divine intervention in the natural order of things (i.e., death interrupts thriving). Widespread agreement to the main premises of such an argument—for example, the reality of a divine being—is not likely. Moreover, appeals to authority (i.e., “It’s the word of God!”) will fail us. Thriving entails the freedom to think for ourselves.

But what of our experience of life?

Our experience of life is a source of information when logic or reason cannot help us. Experience, for example, of the tenacity or exuberance of life—the way in which nature is constantly churning out life from death—is not proof of the resurrection—but such experience (and desire for more time to live, to carry out one’s projects) is intimately related to the shared reality of sentient animal life.

It seems feasible for us to use our shared physical senses to observe/feel that life is not easily knocked down—and when it is, it tends to get back up again. Even nature seems to point beyond itself–to something it cannot achieve on its own.

Reason and experience take us to the banks of the Jordan. Death is not good for us. While we may recognize a shared desire to thrive, we can’t be certain of future thriving. But if we are willing to look, there seem to be promising signs of future thriving within and before us.