Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 23
July 22, 2022
A World of One’s Own (Part Six)
In moments of tense solitude, Zambreno turns to blogging. (The one she manifests whilst living in Akron, Ohio, is titled: Frances Farmer is my Sister.) Blogging always feels like touching at a distance. The attraction of an “invisible community.” I do not feel like I have one at present. Though I blog, I do so […]
July 21, 2022
A World of One’s Own (Part Five)
I’m struggling with the power relations of patient and carer. For the most part, those designated my “carers” are my friends — at least in the nomenclature of social workers, offering “carer support” to anyone who is living with and around someone who is unwell. Friends have routinely made it clear how they too struggle […]
July 20, 2022
Sense, Sensation, Sensuality: Sex and the Body without Organs
The other night I heard about a birthday party, a public party, thrown by someone I didn’t know. Friends considered it, but were too tired after weeks of hard work. I wasn’t sure I had the energy either, but always reluctant for the fun to be over, as if to go home is to admit […]
July 19, 2022
Deleuze and the Temporalities of Mental Illness
The psychiatrist begins to talk about causality. Many therapies, like the Laingian psychodynamic approach undertaken recently, focus so much on the past, unpacking it to explore the present. But the past need not define the present in any way. If anything, this exacerbates depression, which can so often lead us to catastrophise events we cannot […]
July 18, 2022
ポスト資本主義の欲望 Japanese Translation of Postcapitalist Desire
Following the recent translation of Postcapitalist Desire into Italian, a Japanese translation by Kantaro Ohashi is also now on the way, due for release on August 3rd via Sayusha. (There’s a Spanish one in the works too, I believe.) I’ve only seen it available to buy from Amazon so far, but support your local bookshops. […]
A World of One’s Own (Part Four)
Today I feel restless, jittery. I had a desire to go to the Laing Art Gallery, which I have passed so many times but never entered. This impulse is arrested, just as I decide to write it down. I receive a call from a psychiatrist who wants to see me at home as soon as […]
July 17, 2022
A World of One’s Own (Part Three)
Woolf speaks generally about the women of her time in A Room of One’s Own, but still the personal circumstances of her own inner experiences, the illnesses that linger, the madness. Mrs Dalloway, after all, is hardly an affirmation of the bourgeois life, in which all women may take a small amount of charge and […]
July 16, 2022
A World of One’s Own (Part Two)
The beauty of Woolf’s essay-lectures lies in her drifting, in the stream of her consciousness — the only river, it seems, that she can languish next to undisturbed; the one she often disappears into, stones in her pocket; the river later disastrously actualised as a kind of objective correlative. It is intriguing that many seem […]
July 15, 2022
A World of One’s Own (Part One)
“Having a room of one’s own is a desire, but also a control.” A seemingly throwaway remark toward the end of Gilles Deleuze’s preface to The Policing of Families, the 1977 work by Jacques Donzelot, but one that nonetheless seems scathing. What is it to find a room of one’s own in a house of […]
July 14, 2022
Mind and Matter: A Note on Acid Communism
I confess my time in Laingian psychoanalysis to the doctor from the crisis team. He feels like a sergeant, deployed from a psychiatric armoury. Unlike everyone I have so far seen — a succession of well-meaning strangers armed only with strategies and platitudes for distraction and weathering, often contradictory — he can write scripts. He […]
