Stupidity and Psychoanalysis

A wonderful collection of essays that highlights the central role that stupidity has played in psychoanalytic theory and practice--from the nature and function of such psychoanalytic concepts as the signifier, the symptom, the death drive, and jouissance, to the psychoanalytic understanding of humor, knowledge, being, and sexuality. While reading the essays collected herein, one will marvel at just how stupid we have been not to have realized stupidity's significance for psychoanalysis sooner. A truly critical intervention. --Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall University Can stupidity be avoided? Should it be? Can and should psychoanalysis make the subject less stupid? In attempting to answer these questions the present volume is anything but naïve or indifferent. Rather contributors maintain that psychoanalysis renews stupidity within moral and political contemporary debates. Stupidity has a long record of being dismissed and overlooked especially since the function of western philosophy is born out of the desire to eradicate it. Here the mastery of the philosopher is to signify truth. However, this book very originally argues that stupidity is not mere intellectual disability. In this collection internationally renowned psychoanalysts, philosophers, literary critics all put to work ""the importance of being stupid"" as not in praise of a position that can turn out to be tragic but rather as an acknowledgement of an experience constitutive of our very being-- our être parlant which requires to be critically addressed. --Isabelle Alfandary, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Sorbonne Nouvelle University Cindy Zeiher has provided us here with an erudite collection of irreverent reflections on a topic of no small importance! In these pages, the reader will find Freud glowingly characterized as the world's first Professor of Stupidity, and psychoanalysis as at times a foolosophical enterprise that takes human stupidity as its main object of study. Thought by some to be excessively cerebral, Lacan nevertheless invites us--analysands and analysts alike--to dwell and even revel in stupidity. In this collection, the contributors evince studied stupidity by allowing themselves to remain dupes of the unconscious. --Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst, author of A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique Lacan contends that the human animal as the ""animal that supposes to know"" remains structurally if not biologically afflicted by stupidity. In this broad sense, we are all not sapiens but folie-sophers. Famously, he also claims that the alleged non-stupid err the most. Dumb or dumber, it would seem. Is psychoanalysis then a question of fatalistically accepting this false choice and opt for ready-at-hand dumbness, trying not to know too much? Or is it instead a renewed Socratic method that turns such generic dumbness into wise ignorance, as a pacifying sublation achieved by the few who, erring the most, still somehow manage to know best? Problematising such clichéd alternative, in Psychoanalysis and Stupidity, Cindy Zeiher sapiently brings together a wide-ranging and entertaining collection of pungent essays whose provisional endpoint might be: Dumb and dumber, dialectically, or both are worse! --Lorenzo Chiesa, Newcastle University and European Graduate School