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'A PROBING EXPLORATION OF THE CREATIVE AND IMAGINATIVE
POSSIBILITIES OF INACTIVITY' FINANCIAL TIMES 'To do nothing at all
is the most difficult thing in the world.' Oscar Wilde More than
ever before, we live in a culture that excoriates inactivity and
demonizes idleness. Work, connectivity and a constant flow of
information are the cultural norms, and a permanent busyness
pervades even our quietest moments. Little wonder so many of us are
burning out. In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind
activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can
induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of
imaginative freedom and creativity. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen
explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity, and considers
four faces of inertia - the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer and
the slacker. Drawing on his personal experiences and on stories
from his consulting room, while punctuating his discussions with
portraits of figures associated with the different forms of
inactivity - Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Emily Dickinson and David
Foster Wallace - Cohen gets to the heart of the apathy so many of
us feel when faced with the demands of contemporary life, and asks
how we might live a different and more fulfilled existence.
Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate
and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry...
After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his
country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds
unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home... A student
protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government
crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK
asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the second
volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of
those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves
indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in
which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely
heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and
listening becomes an act of welcome.
In this engaging introduction, Josh Cohen argues that Freud shows
above all that any thought, word or action, however apparently
trivial, can invite close reading. Indeed, it may be just this
insight that provokes so much opposition to psychoanalysis. By
reading short extracts from across Freud's work, addressing the
neuroses, the unconscious, words, death and (of course) sex, How to
Read Freud brings out the paradoxical core of psychoanalytic
thinking: that our innermost truths only ever manifest themselves
as distortions. Read attentively, our dreams, errors, jokes and
symptoms - in short, our everyday lives - reveal us as masters of
disguise, as unrecognizable to ourselves as to others.
The war over private life spreads inexorably. Some seek to expose,
invade and steal it, others to protect, conceal and withhold it.
Either way, the assumption is that privacy is a possession to be
won or lost. But what if what we call private life is the one
element in us that we can't possess? Could it be that we're so
intent on taking hold of the privacy of others, or keeping hold of
our own only because we're powerless to do either? In this
groundbreaking book, Josh Cohen uses his experience as a
psychoanalyst, literature professor and human being to explore the
concept of 'private life' as the presence in us of someone else, an
uncanny stranger both unrecognisable and eerily familiar, who can
be neither owned nor controlled. Drawing on a dizzying array of
characters and concerns, from John Milton and Henry James to Katie
Price and Snoopy, from philosophy and the Bible to pornography and
late-night TV, The Private Life weaves a richly personal tapestry
of ideas and experience. In a culture that floods our lives with
light, it asks: how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark?
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Losers (Paperback)
Josh Cohen
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R184
R150
Discovery Miles 1 500
Save R34 (18%)
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You are a loser. This isn't a personal slight, but an impersonal
truth of the species, writes Josh Cohen in this essay about love,
literature and politics. Today, no figure in more ridiculed and
reviled than the loser. In the wake of recent political upsets, the
bruised liberal dreams of winning it all back. Meanwhile a swollen
self-help industry continues to grow with a single, seductive
promise: read this, and join the ranks of the winners. But being a
loser isn't a personal failing; it's an essential part of being
human. In this remarkable essay, at once political, philosophical
and very funny, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen teaches us to take pride
in embracing our inner loser.
Josh Cohen: Radiohead for Solo Piano is a beautifully produced
collection of some of Radiohead's best-loved songs, arranged for
intermediate to advanced piano solo (with lyrics) by YouTube
pianist Josh Cohen. These exclusive transcriptions were made
popular by Cohen's YouTube channel and the book includes a playing
guide and introduction from the arranger. This band-approved book
features a specially designed cover and mono prints throughout from
Radiohead artist Stanley Donwood.
What can Alice in Wonderland teach us about childhood? Could
reading Conversations with Friends guide us through first love?
Does Esther Greenwood's glittering success and subsequent collapse
in The Bell Jar help us understand ambition? And, finally, what can
we learn about death from Virginia Woolf? Literature matters. Not
only does it provide escapism and entertainment, but it also holds
a mirror up to our lives to show us aspects of ourselves we may not
have seen or understood. From jealousy to grief, fierce love to
deep hatred, our inner lives become both stranger and more familiar
when we explore them through fiction. Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst
and Professor of Modern Literary Theory, delves deep into the inner
lives of the most memorable and vivid characters in literature. His
analysis of figures such as Jay Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway offers
insights into the greatest questions about the human experience,
ones that we can all learn from. He walks us through the different
stages of existence, from childhood to old age, showing that
literature is much more than a refuge from the banality and rigour
of everyday life - through the experiences of its characters, it
can show us ways to be wiser, more open and more self-aware.
'This is a really beautiful book...It's a genuinely therapeutic
read - it takes your particular sorrows and by sharing them seems
to halve them' Nick Laird 'By the end of this wonderful book, we
have learned to read its title not as a prescription but as a set
of questions. Neither novels nor psychoanalysis promise to finally
answer those questions. Instead, they invite us to look and listen
- and to live in a way that lets us keep asking' TLS From the
truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations
of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a
practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen
has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life
struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So
what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us
about how to live meaningfully? In How to Live. What to Do, Cohen
plots a course through the various stages of our lives, discovering
in each the surprising and profound insights literature has to
offer. Beginning with the playful mindset of Wonderland's Alice, we
discover the resilience of Jane Eyre, the rebellious rage of
Baldwin's Johnny Grimes and the catastrophic ambitions of Jay
Gatsby, the turbulence of first love for Sally Rooney's Frances,
the sorrows of marriage for Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke, and the
regrets and comforts of middle age for Rabbit Angstrom.
Hitler, wrote Theodor Adorno, imposed "a new categorical imperative
on humankind...to arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz
will not repeat itself." Interrupting Auschwitz argues that what
gives this imperative its philosophical force and ethical urgency
is the very impossibility of fulfilling it. But rather than being
cause for despair, this failure offers a renewed conception of the
tasks of thought and action. Precisely because the imperative
cannot be fulfilled, it places thought in a state of perpetual
incompletion, whereby our responsibility is never at an end and
redemption is always interrupted. Josh Cohen argues that both
Adorno's own writings on art after Auschwitz and Emmanuel Levinas'
interpretations of Judaism reveal both thinkers as impelled by this
logic of interruption, by a passionate refusal to bring thought to
a point of completion. The analysis of their motifs of art and
religion are brought together in a final chapter on the
poet-philosopher Edmond Jabes.
Hitler, wrote Theodor Adorno, imposed a new categorical imperative
on humankind...to arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz
will not repeat itself. Interrupting Auschwitz argues that what
gives this imperative its philosophical force and ethical urgency
is the very impossibility of fulfilling it. But rather than being
cause for despair, this failure offers a renewed conception of the
tasks of thought and action. Precisely because the imperative
cannot be fulfilled, it places thought in a state of perpetual
incompletion, whereby our responsibility is never at an end and
redemption is always interrupted.Josh Cohen argues that both
Adorno's own writings on art after Auschwitz and Emmanuel Levinas'
interpretations of Judaism reveal both thinkers as impelled by this
logic of interruption, by a passionate refusal to bring thought to
a point of completion. The analysis of their motifs of art and
religion are brought together in a final chapter on the
poet-philosopher Edmond JabFs.PHILOSOPHY
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