A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What makes a sexual desire "perverse," or particular sexual relations (such as incestuous ones) undesirable or even unthinkable? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free.

- 1.: Mill's Pig: An Introduction
- 2.: "A Tear is an Intellectual Thing"
- 3.: Jealous Thoughts
- 4.: Jealous Afterthoughts
- 5.: Odi et Amo: On Hating the Ones We Love
- 6.: Boring from Within: Endogenous vs. Reactive Boredom
- 7.: Pride and Identity
- 8.: Plato's Homoerotic Symposium
- 9.: Freud and Perversion
- 10.: What is Wrong with Incest?
- 11.: Fantasy and Memory: The Aetiological Role of Thoughts According to Freud
- 12.: "Does the Professor Talk to God?": Learning from Little Hans
- 13.: Levi-Strauss and Shamanism
- 14.: "Getting Behind the Demons"
- 15.: Life-Lies and Pipe Dreams: Self-Deception in Ibsen's The Wild Duck and O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh
- References
- Index