Josh Cohen

"Focusing on some of the best known characters in all of literature - chosen to trace the arc from childhood to old age - a brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature shows how our inner lives become at once stranger and more familiar when seen through the prism of fiction. In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual profession, Josh Cohen illuminates a new way to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll's Alice or Harper Lee's Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education instanced in Jane Eyre or Sandy Stringer in The Prime of Miss Jane Brody; the need for adolescent rebellion dramatized by John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe's Young Werther and Sally Rooney's Frances have in common, or not, as they experience first love; how Jay Gatsby helps us to understand ambition, Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke the vicissitudes of marriage, and Mrs. Dalloway the inexorability of disappointment. As for old age and death, he explores what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynn Robinson's Gilead or Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. From maddening jealousy to unbearable grief, from transcendent love to bottomless hatred, How to Live, What to Do invites us to ponder deep questions about the human experience - about the ties that bind us all"--

In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature

How to Live. What to Do

Why We Have to Stop

Not Working

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.

Losers

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?

Why We Remain in the Dark

The Private Life

'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.

How inactivity can be a necessary and creative condition to a life worth living.

From a talented and original thinker comes this passionate critique of the intrusiveness of modern culture which advocates an exploration and cultivation of our unconscious - of who we really are - in a world where everything we do is deemed public knowledge

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.

How To Read Freud

A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature—from how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. “So beautiful ... a fantastic book.” —Zadie Smith, best-selling author of White Teeth In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Harper Lee’s Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in Jane Eyre and as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe’s Young Werther and Sally Rooney’s Frances have—and don’t have—in common as they experience first love; how Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Featuring: • Alice—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass • Scout Finch—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird • Jane Eyre—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre • John Grimes—James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain • Ruth—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go • Vladimir Petrovitch—Ivan Turgenev, First Love • Frances—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends • Jay Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby • Esther Greenwood—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar • Clarissa Dalloway—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway • And more!

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.

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

Art, Religion, Philosophy

Interrupting Auschwitz

Neel Mukherjee

Olivia Laing

Helen Macdonald

Jackie Kay

Kamila Shamsie

Marina Warner

David Herd

Rachel Holmes

Alex Preston

Ian Duhig

Caroline Bergvall

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. All profits go to the Gatwick Detainee Welfare Group and Kent Help for Refugees.

Refugee Tales: Volume II

How to Read is a personal master-class in reading, bringing you face to face with the work of some of the most influential and challenging writers in history

How to Read Freud

Josh Cohen argues that Auschwitz is a key problem for how we think and therefore we cannot be assured that Auschwitz will not repeat itself.

Josh Cohen

Books

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