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    Antisemitism and racism: ethical challenges for psychoanalysis

    Frosh, Stephen (2022) Antisemitism and racism: ethical challenges for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Horizons. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9798765104705. (In Press)

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    Abstract

    Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis advances a psychoanalytically informed examination of the relations between Jewishness, antisemitism and antiblack racism. Its starting point is a claim that the Jewish origins and implications of psychoanalysis fuel its capacity to interrogate racism of all kinds; in addition, the shared experience of exposure to (different kinds of) racism raises prospects for renewed alliances between Jewish and black communities. The book develops an argument that Jewish ‘relational ethics’ and consciousness of antisemitism can feed into psychoanalytic perspectives on racism generally. The discussion includes an exploration of the notion of ‘primitivity’ in psychoanalysis, arguing that this reflects both a colonial impulse (in which some ‘others’ are relegated to the position of the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’) and a potentially decolonising trajectory in which the civilised-primitive dichotomy is subverted by the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. Consideration is given to how racialised boundaries within psychoanalysis are made and can be overcome and a critique is offered of ‘Jewish whiteness’ as a block to alliances between racially minoritised communities. The warning voice of the Jewish Tunisian decolonial writer Albert Memmi is reflected upon through an account of two of his major works from just before and just after Tunisian independence, both of which reflect the fraught position he found himself in as a Jewish anti-colonialist. The book ends with a chapter that asks psychoanalysis to respond to some of the challenges emerging from the black and decolonial movements.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): psychoanalysis, Jewish ethics, antisemitism, racism
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Stephen Frosh
    Date Deposited: 09 Jan 2023 13:04
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 18:19
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/50326

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