Meaningless Suffering

Traumatic Marginalisation and Ethical Responsibility

David Goodman, M. Mookie C. Manalili, David Goodman, M. Mookie C. Manalili

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032495354
• eBook ISBN: 9781003862925
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

Does suffering have meaning? The leading scholars and practitioners in Meaningless Suffering engage with this haunting human question through the lenses of psychoanalytic, phenomenological and ethical discourse, all the while holding contemporary social concerns in full view.

The authors seek to find ways of speaking about the lived realities and historical moments that make up our social narratives – from the murder of George Floyd to the bird watching incident in Central Park – in order to render visible the entangled forms of the effects of embodiment, ideology, race, social practice, and intersectionality. Meaningless Suffering is bookended by powerful pieces by Mari Ruti and Homi K. Bhabha and, in the intervening chapters, the reader traverses the ideas of Augustine, Judith Butler, Fanon, Foucault, Freud, Gendlin, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, and Wittgenstein to pass through the realms of classical thought, affect theory, phenomenology, linguistic studies, relational psychoanalysis, somatic studies, intersubjectivity theory, gender studies, critical theory, and philosophical hermeneutics.

This book is essential reading for postgraduate students, scholars, and practitioners working at the intersection of psychoanalysis, race, politics, and culture, as well as students of cultural studies, the humanities, politics, psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, and social work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Problematizing “Meaningful Suffering”
• 1. When the Cure Is that There Is No Cure: Melancholia, Mourning, Creativity
• 2. Open Wounds of Racial Terror: The Elaine Race Massacre
• 3. Reparation: Discussion of Roger Frie’s “Open Wounds of Racial Terror: The Elaine Race Massacre”
• 4. Ethical Labor: A Step Toward Reparations Within Psychoanalysis
• 5. Some Fanonian Insights on Racism’s Challenges to Psychoanalytical Practice
• 6. Unthought, Concealment, and the Problem of the Lacanian Unconscious
• 7. Confessions and Quantum Uncertainties: The Violence of Language, Organismic Cells, and the Incarnation of Words
• 8. Anti-Black Racism in the Anthropocene: A Lacanian Reading of a Birder and a Dog-lover in Central Park
• 9. Colonial Pathologies: Revisiting the Puerto Rican Syndrome
• 10. White Panic and the Rhetoric of Exposure: Confronting the Uncanny in our New Racial Times
• 11. Being-At-The-Intersections: Dwelling in Ambiguity, Vulnerability, and Responsibility
• 12. On Approaching Race, Class, and the Unconscious: A Case Study of Ataque de Nervios
• 13. An Intersectional Feminist Exploration of the Working Lives of Women During COVID-19: Approaching Dignified Work Through a Spirituality of Resistance Framework
• 14. Traumatic Racism
• Index