BOOKS

This book is a transcreation of the famous, ancient Dao De Jing (a.k.a. Tao Te Ching) which hopes to bring new vitality to the text in two main ways.

First, a lengthy Introduction offers a theoretical and critical frame for the text in which the Dao is re-introduced as a ‘way of subversion,’ where the aim of the famous paradoxes and passages of the book is to re-direct thought and attention not toward a Supreme or Omnipotent Dao but toward creative and spontaneous gestures and paths not taken. Here, I compare and contrast Daoist thought with contemporary ‘Western’ critical theory and philosophy, including the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, as I explore key areas of thought discussed in the Dao De Jing, including the power of naming, active non-action, and yin/yang.

Second, the translation, itself, takes liberties with the text and follows a style far less parsimonious than all extant English translations of which I am aware. The intention in doing so is to use new or alternative literary devices (repetition, alliteration, free association, spontaneous exposition, and more) to elucidate the unique and complex messages of the book’s chapters in the spirit of the Dao as I understand it.

I call the book a “transcreation” because it is not a direct translation from the classical Chinese (which I cannot read). Like other translations that rely on English (and French) translations, such as Ursula Le Guin’s or Stephen Mithcell’s, mine is a “poetic translation” that has been complied through extensive research and comparison of scores of existing translations and commentaries on both the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi.

Readers of my transcreation of the Dao De Jing will find a completely fresh outlook on the text and, hopefully, a renewed interest and passion for its richness and generativity.  

M.H. Bowker’s Walls is a contemplative essay that is sometimes playful and sometimes grave. At first blush, its subject matter would appear simple. Walls considers (1) the psychic meaning of walls and (2) the meaning of psychic walls.

It turns out that these two subjects are intimately and interestingly related, such that meditating on one turns out to be fruitful in terms of our understanding of the other. Bowker treats walls literally and metaphorically, from the ‘wall’ between nature and civilization, to Kafka’s musings on the Great Wall of China, the to the walling off of a person’s interior world. There is even a place for Humpty Dumpty.

In each of its short chapters, Walls has been written with an intention of inclusivity. That is, no advanced prior knowledge or jargon-thought should be necessary for the reader to appreciate what may be found herein. This of course, implies that, very often, the reader and the author find themselves beginning from first principles, which is always far more difficult than people seem to believe.

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As If / Als Ob is not a book that offers simple conclusions. It is a book that stages a struggle: the struggle to remain a subject in a world that no longer provides reliable grounds for meaning, coherence, or moral certainty. Written in a hybrid form that moves between lyric meditation, philosophical analysis, psychoanalytic reflection, and autobiographical fragment, the book asks a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to live “as if” one were real, responsible, and grounded, when these grounds, themselves, are missing or broken?

The work begins from an intimate premise. Thought, feeling, and language are experienced not as stable possessions but as precarious “births”: seemings and beings that emerge through effort, pain, and uncertainty. Reality is not given but must be produced again and again. Bowker describes subjectivity as something that must be continuously assembled from resonance, memory, and symbolic improvisation. What feels real is what vibrates inwardly. What counts as real socially is what is authorized by institutions, norms, and collective agreement. Between these two forms of reality, the modern subject must learn to survive.

From this starting point, As If develops an extended meditation on seeming and being, not as opposites, but as intertwined modalities of existence. Sometimes seeming protects being. Sometimes it replaces it. Sometimes it becomes the only available form of survival. Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Winnicott, Laing, Deutsch, and Freud, the book shows how false selves, adaptive performances, and “as if” personalities arise not from deceit, but from necessity. They are emergency structures erected when authentic being is impossible.

Bowker interweaves clinical narratives, literary analysis, and philosophical interpretation to illuminate this fragile architecture of selfhood. We encounter patients who speak only in quotations, who inhabit horror films as psychic habitats, who survive through mimicry and simulation. We encounter figures—Kafka’s Georg Bendemann, Camus’ Jan, Levi’s Sonderkommando—whose lives unfold in ethical grey zones where ordinary judgment fails. These figures are not presented as case studies in pathology, but as witnesses to damaged forms of subjectivity that reveal something fundamental about modern life.

At the philosophical center of the book stands Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and in particular Kant’s notion of reflective judgment: the capacity to orient oneself in the absence of rules. Bowker reads Kant alongside Primo Levi’s account of the “grey zone” of the concentration camps, arguing that both thinkers confront the same problem from different angles: how judgment must continue even when its foundations have collapsed. We must judge as if coherence were possible. We must act as if responsibility still matters. We must live as if dignity has not been extinguished, even or especially when history, institutions, and trauma suggest otherwise.

This “as if” is not a comforting fiction. It is a necessary illusion. Without it, experience fragments into chaos or submission. With it, subjectivity becomes possible, though always at risk. The book shows how this fragile structure can be used to preserve life or to destroy it. Kafka’s The Judgment becomes, in Bowker’s reading, a parable of how authority colonizes conscience. Judgment ceases to orient and begins to annihilate. The subject internalizes an external verdict and executes it upon himself.

Throughout, As If refuses academic detachment. The author’s own life appears briefly: not as confession, but as evidence. Memories of fear, madness, guilt, institutional violence, and maternal condemnation are woven into the argument. The voice that speaks is not that of an external observer, but of someone who has lived inside the structures being analyzed. The book is as much a record of survival as it is a theory of it.

Stylistically, the work resists genre. It moves from poetic incantation to rigorous exposition, from anecdote to abstraction, from humor to grief. It performs its argument formally: coherence emerges and dissolves, metaphors recur and mutate, philosophical concepts are refracted through lived experience. Reading As If is intended to feel less like receiving information than like inhabiting a mind in motion.

The concluding section returns to Helene Deutsch’s concept of the “as if” personality, showing how contemporary subjectivity is increasingly organized around performance without depth, fluency without attachment, coherence without foundation. The modern subject learns to appear human before learning to feel human. Social legibility replaces inner resonance. Simulation becomes identity. Yet Bowker does not simply condemn this condition. He shows how it arises from historical necessity and psychic injury. He asks whether illusion, carefully held, may still preserve something real.

Ultimately, As If / Als Ob is a book about how human beings continue to exist under conditions that should make existence impossible. It is about judgment without guarantees, morality without purity, identity without essence, and meaning without metaphysics. It is about the labor of appearing human when humanity has been structurally damaged.

This is a book for readers who are dissatisfied with both academic philosophy and popular self-help, who suspect that neither captures the depth of contemporary psychic life. It is for those interested in psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, literature, trauma studies, and radical ethics—but also for anyone who has ever felt that their reality depended on holding together something fragile and unprovable.

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Lawn Pig: A Critique of Nothingness is not a book about “nothingness” in the familiar philosophical sense. It is an excavation of a mistake—one that philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and political theory have repeated for centuries: the substitution of nothingness for loss.

Across nine tightly composed yet formally volatile movements or “Parts,” M.H. Bowker dismantles the consolations of abstraction. “Nothingness,” here, is revealed not as an ontological ground or metaphysical mystery but as a defensive construction—an anesthetic that allows us to avoid the psychic reality of deprivation, abandonment, environmental failure, and the disappearance of bodies that should have been there. What philosophy often elevates into structure or lack, this book drags back into experience.

Written in a hybrid form that fuses philosophical argument, psychoanalytic theory, musical notation, liturgical cadence, and dream narrative, Lawn Pig refuses the safety of genre. Its prose moves between disciplined conceptual critique and moments of lyrical, sometimes brutal, exposure. Winnicott, Lacan, Heidegger, Hegel, Hobbes, Ecclesiastes, Job, Beckett, Kafka, Stevens, Cage, and Freud are not cited to be honored but interrogated—tested against the lived fact of loss rather than allowed to float at the level of theory.

At the book’s conceptual core is a sharp distinction: privation and lack are not the same as deprivation and loss. Nothingness belongs to language; nothing belongs to experience. And nothing, when it occurs, is catastrophic—not empty, not peaceful, not generative, but shattering. The infant without a body. The subject without a holding environment. The adult still haunted by the residue of that disappearance.

The figure of the “lawn pig”—absurd, obscene, useless, stubbornly present—functions as both emblem and irritant: a reminder that nothing does not behave like silence. It squeals. It repeats. It produces sound. The book’s most disturbing section, a recurring dream narrative of inescapable violence and failed authority, makes explicit what the theory insists upon: nothing is not an idea we contemplate, but a condition we survive, again and again, by irrational means.

“Lawn Pig” is the second volume in a duo (see: “Superatomic Guignols Untrammeled: A Critique of the Irrational”) that seeks not to destroy philosophy or psychoanalysis but to return them to psychic reality—to responsibility, to memory, to the body, to what should have been there and was not. It will resonate deeply with readers of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, experimental nonfiction, trauma theory, and radical literary form—especially those who suspect that something vital has been lost beneath the elegance of abstraction.

This is a book that does not soothe. It does not resolve. It insists. And once read, it is difficult to return to the idea of “nothingness” without hearing, somewhere underneath, the sound it was meant to silence.

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Génopsenseur: Genius / Censor / Psychopath is a radical hybrid text and uncompromising experimental work that treats thinking not as a stable activity but as a complex and volatile event: something that happens, collapses, reforms, and often destroys itself in the process. Written as a sustained monologue punctuated by pauses, reversals, stage directions, theoretical digressions, lyric eruptions, and analytic demonstrations, the book places the reader inside a mind attempting, again and again, to locate itself in a world that no longer holds still.

The text opens not with exposition but with disorientation: a speaker who does not know where he is, who must identify objects to reassure himself of reality, who wonders whether “world-feeling” itself has been lost. Rooms appear and dissolve. Places recur as memory-traces rather than coordinates. Environments are not containers but extensions of psychic life—“noplace environments” carried with the subject rather than inhabited. Throughout, the book stages consciousness as something always mid-formation, never finished, never secure.

Génopsenseur stages thought itself as a scene of instability. Written as a sustained monologue punctuated by interruptions, restarts, and stage directions, the book explores subjectivity as a precarious achievement: one that must be continually reconstructed in the face of internal censorship and psychic violence.

At the core of the work is its tripartite figure: genius / censor / psychopath. Not three distinct characters, but rather three inseparable functions of the same mind generate the work. Creativity produces insight, but censorship represses it; psychopathology emerges from the manifold contradictions between the two. Repression is treated not metaphorically but logically, exposing the paradox of a censor that must simultaneously (and impossibly) know and not know what it forbids.

Reading Génopsenseur feels at times like inhabiting consciousness mid-formation. The voice veers between lyric intensity and analytic rigor, between philosophical argument and disoriented perception. Moments of lucidity give way to drift; clarity produces its own collapse. The book’s preoccupations are “home,” displacement, “world-feeling,” and being seen by others.

Formally spare yet conceptually dense, Génopsenseur is more of a glimpse into a mental climate than a story or play. It is comical, intellectually ferocious, and emotionally open/exposed. It is a work for readers drawn to philosophy that risks breaking down in order to tell the truth.”

What follows from this formulation is not a theory offered from above, but a theory enacted. The book’s most sustained analytic section takes up the foundational psychoanalytic concept of repression and subjects it to relentless logical pressure. Freud’s metaphor of censorship is shown to harbor a contradiction: any censor must both know and not know the material it forbids, a paradox that generates infinite regress when modeled as an inner agent. Rather than resolving this through new structures or hypostatized psychic entities, Génopsenseur proposes a radically different orientation—an evental understanding of mind in which subjectivity, agency, repression, and creativity are not things but momentary achievements produced by converging series of events.

This evental ontology is not presented as abstraction alone. It is lived in the prose. Genius appears as moments of extraordinary associative capacity, where categories dissolve and meanings collide. The censor emerges as sudden cuts, redactions, shifts in tone, analytic intrusions, and self-sabotaging clarifications.

Psychopathology surfaces not as spectacle but as necessity: the price of knowing too much, too fast, too fluidly, without the stabilizing comforts of shared structures. Each function arises, does its work, and vanishes, only to be recreated moments later under slightly altered conditions.

Stylistically, the book moves with remarkable range. Lyric passages describing rooms, weather, memory, and drift give way to dense philosophical argument; footnotes coexist with jokes, insults, and sudden tenderness. The voice may sound omniscient one moment, then lost, embarrassed, or furious the next. References to Wallace Stevens, Sartre, Camus, Freud, Whitehead, Lacan, and others are not remembered reverently but tested, dismantled, and reassembled in real time. Thought here is not cumulative but recursive, circling back through its own failures with increasing urgency.

Despite its rigor, Génopsenseur is often darkly funny. The intelligence on display is sharp enough to turn against itself, exposing vanity, shame, and the absurdity of intellectual posturing. Yet the book is also deeply intimate. Beneath the theoretical scaffolding lies a persistent concern with attachment, recognition, exile, and the terror of not being held in mind by others. The question of “home”—psychic, linguistic, relational—haunts every page.

Génopsenseur is not a book that explains itself cleanly, nor does it aspire to consensus. It is a work that insists on difficulty as an ethical stance, refusing simplification where simplification would falsify experience. Readers drawn to experimental philosophy, psychoanalysis, avant-garde literature, and works that blur the boundary between thinking and breakdown will find here not an argument to accept, but a climate to enter—one in which consciousness is shown doing what it always does: forming, censoring, fracturing, and trying, against all odds, to speak.

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Annotations of a Failure is an experimental, polyphonic work that unfolds as a staged confrontation between the author, his deceased mother, his schizophrenic brother R—, and an entity called the Annotation: a figure that functions simultaneously as footnote, critic, superego, and literary afterlife. Not exactly memoir, nor play, nor philosophical treatise, the book performs failure as a lived condition rather than a result to be overcome.

Structured in eleven acts, the text moves through dialogue, lyric fragments, critical glosses, and dramatic stage directions that are never merely theatrical. Each voice speaks from a different psychic position, and none is granted authority. The mother appears at once intimate and persecutory, tender and annihilating; R— speaks from the unstable brilliance of psychosis, offering insight that is inseparable from danger; the author oscillates between analytic rigor and collapse; Annotation interrupts, reframes, corrects, and exposes, refusing the comfort of narrative continuity. The result is not synthesis but tension sustained over time.

The reading experience is intimate, volatile, and self-interrupting. Language hesitates, revises itself, contradicts itself, and then insists again. Philosophical reflection collides with familial memory; lyrical passages coexist with scholastic commentary; stage directions bleed into confession. The book does not seek to explain anxiety, love, guilt, sin, or dependency from a safe conceptual distance. Instead, it treats them as forces that constitute subjectivity itself—forces that cannot be resolved without falsification.

At the center of the work is a sustained meditation on anxiety and writing: anxiety as the cost of becoming an “I,” writing as both an attempt to survive that cost and an act that inevitably compounds it. Drawing on psychoanalysis, theology, philosophy, and poetry, the book interrogates the fantasy of selfhood, the violence implicit in individuation, and the guilt bound up with asserting one’s own existence in relation to beloved others. Failure, in this sense, is not incompetence or lack of achievement; it is fidelity to experience that cannot be rendered coherent without betrayal.

One of the book’s defining refusals is its rejection of consolatory arcs. There is no recovery narrative, no redemptive closure, no stable vantage point from which the past can be mastered. Thought emerges from fracture rather than resolution; love wounds as much as it sustains; and writing appears as an ethically compromised practice—necessary, obsessive, and never innocent. Even insight is treated with suspicion, as something that risks hardening into false mastery.

Formally, Annotations of a Failure is as much about interruption as it is about speech. The annotative voice undermines the fantasy of transparency; the dramatic structure exposes the theatricality of confession; the oscillation between poetry and analysis resists genre as a means of containment. What remains is not clarity but proximity: to damaged attachment, to inherited guilt, to the unresolvable tensions between self-love and love of others.

This is a book for readers interested in experimental literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and hybrid forms that refuse to separate thinking from living. It does not ask to be consumed easily or admired from a distance. It asks instead to be endured, argued with, and inhabited as an annotation not only of failure, but of the conditions under which a self attempts, again and again, to speak the truth. The dialogue moves from the naming of failure and anxiety, through sin, self-division, love (philautia), and familial haunting, toward a final social confrontation with others and the world.

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It is difficult to summarize the work undertaken in Superatomic Guignols Untrammeled. It is both a study and a performance of the irrational, combining philosophical inquiry with linguistic hyper-experimentation.

The work immediately abandons traditional syntactic norms, aiming to embody its subject matter, “a critique of the irrational,” through nearly indefinable (yet still comprehensible) gestures at irrational thought.

Although written in a deliberately fragmented and free-associative style, thus resisting conventional ‘outlines’ of thought, it is possible to offer a structural overview of the text, in the spirit of orientation rather than explanation.

1. A Beginning and a House
   Explores the tension between beginnings as fundamental and beginnings as precarious.
2. Limits
   Considers the boundaries imposed by rational frameworks and the creative ruptures necessary to transcend them.
3. Further Reflections on Things Related
   A meditation on the associative and disjunctive nature of irrational thought, where alignment is arbitrary and meaning emerges impossibly.
4. Value Choice
   Examines the paradox of valuing irrationality, where decisions must arise from unarticulated, subjective impulses rather than systematic reasoning.
5. Thinkers and Think-errs
   Contrasts the imaginative genius of irrational creation with the fallacies of distorted reasoning.
6. Auto Da-Fé
   Confronts the self’s exposure to the “ferocious light” of existence, where identity faces a trial of “sheer reality.”
7. Objective (Sub- or Pseudo-Rationality) and Subjective (Ir-Rationality)
   Distinguishes the subjective, creative potential of irrationality from the stifling missteps of pseudo-rational systems.
8. Like an Irrational Number, Opera
   Considers irrationality as a continuous, undefinable process, likened to the infinite operation of irrational numbers.
9. Way Out
   Proposes feelings as an alternative compass, guiding action and understanding when reason falters or disintegrates.
10. When a Person
    Explores the intersection of irrationality and personhood, where contradictions and incoherence define the essence of being a human person.
11. Benediction
    A reflection emphasizing shared mystery and the ineffable unity within subjective divergence.
12. Watch Where What
    Examines the descent of rational systems into incoherence, using rain as a metaphor for collapsing structures and the innumerable.
13. To Whom Is It Just
    Ponders the relativity of rationality, situating it as a judgment dependent on the observer’s position and context.
14. After Lisbon
    Reflects on historical shocks, like the infamous Lisbon earthquake, as moments where subjective irrationality transforms non-rational devastation into creative agency.
15. Divinity Was the Way
    Traces the historical transition from divine containment of irrationality to its present, surprisingly precarious existence.
16. No One Knows
    Acknowledges the unknowable origins and mechanics of imagination, suggesting shared irrationality as a grounding for human connection.
17. Our Obsession
    Critiques the obsession with rationality as a pursuit of control and the misapprehension of irrationality as liberation.
18. Of a Self That Is
    Explores the porous boundaries of selfhood, where identity is negotiated between individuality and collective belonging.
19. Of Psychoanalysis We May Say
    Positions psychoanalysis as a domain of the irrational, revealing its centrality in understanding the incomprehensible.
20. A Meager Mundo
    Warns of the impoverishment of a world stripped of imagination, emphasizing irrationality as the source of vitality and meaning.
21. A Cicada is Crying
    Concludes with a poetic vision of irrationality’s presence in daily life.

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“Matthew H. Bowker’s Critical Thinking and the Subject of Inquiry inspires readers, learners, and teachers to engage with the book’s central thesis that a crisis in critical thinking impedes our personal, social, and political development as subjects with agency. Bowker innovatively reformulates the critical thinking process as one where teachers and learners move from a skills-based method toward a facilitative approach that engages the person’s autonomy as a subject, not a passive object, of our surroundings. The goals of the work are further aided by insightful discussions—spanning the periods of ancient Greece to the mid-and-late twentieth century—of a variety thinkers and their problematics, all of whom provide rich cues for becoming better critical thinkers. In Bowker’s work, readers, learners, and teachers are provided with a rich armamentarium for dynamically continuing their engagement with the psychological, political, and epistemological horizons of our world.”

— Jack Fong, Professor of Sociology, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

“Matthew H. Bowker’s book on critical thinking is probably the best work written on this deservedly fashionable topic. Unlike so many others, Bowker understands that critical thinking has to have something important to think about. The book’s second part, which covers Plato, Montaigne, Camus, Kafka, and others, illustrates what it means to think critically in a particular intellectual and cultural context. Of special interest is Bowker’s recognition that emotional states matter. Narcissists can’t learn. To learn requires that one first admit one’s ignorance. Authority and the pressures of conformity also impair critical thinking. Not just an introduction to critical thinking, Bowker’s is a tour de force from which the highly educated to the self-educated will benefit.”

— C. Fred Alford, Professor of Government and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emeritus,
University of Maryland, College Park

“Critical thinking is a nearly ubiquitous term in education, but the best means of understanding and teaching critical thinking are unclear or elusive. Matthew H. Bowker has given us a psychologically grounded, realistic, and ultimately hopeful portrait of critical thinking as a capacity available to anyone who is willing to undertake the challenge of developing it. Bowker’s book is essential reading for students (both young and old), teachers at all levels, and anyone aspiring to find better ways of living within the challenges of our present moment.”

— David W. McIvor, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, Colorado State University

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“In this honest, probing, and inspiring book, Dr. Matthew H. Bowker sheds light on a life of greater authenticity, bravery, and freedom. The Power of Being a Subject will be of interest to anyone yearning to transform legacies of trauma and suffering, escape from unconscious internal and societal forces and self-defeating patterns, and live a more creative and empathic life.”

— Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, Psychoanalyst, American Institute of Psychoanalysis and Object Relations Institute

“This is fascinating study of subjectivity and its relation to one’s self. It is also a powerful and moving account of Bowker’s own struggle with subjectivity and its impact on both his personal and professional life. An intense and scholarly inquiry into this critical idea and what its pursuit means for our day-to-day lives, Bowker’s book is a must read.”

— James M. Glass, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park

“Dr. Bowker’s book is perhaps best described as an intimate ‘travelogue,’ something akin to an innerscape version of Mark Twain’s remote journeys. Weaving ideas with personal reflections, Dr. Bowker takes an honest claim to the title of ‘poet-philosopher’ or ‘philosopher-poet.'”

— Dan Livney, PsyD, Psychologist in private practice

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‘A timely, deeply thoughtful collection of psychoanalytically framed accounts of the meaning of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of democracy’s inability to effectively manage it for so many citizens. These well-organized analytic reflections are worth reading over and over again. Thanks to the editors Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby for exhibiting the under-appreciated explanatory compatibility of psychoanalytic theory and democratic theory for coping with catastrophic events.’

— Michael A. Diamond, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Organization Studies, University of Missouri, Columbia

‘Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby assemble a cast of sharp analysts to sift illuminatingly through the wreckage wrought as much by responses to Covid-19 as by the malady itself … Getting Lost is a valuable kickstart to post-mortems on the political consequences of the psychological dimension of the crisis.’

— Kurt Jacobsen, University of Chicago and co-editor of Free Associations

‘The paradoxical nature of the Covid pandemic – creating longing for connection while thwarting it, unleashing the communal terror of an illness that had to be borne alone if we were all to survive – ripples through and shapes the world we live in now. This intriguing book seeks to make sense of its interpsychic, relational, and societal impacts. At a time of “world wrenching stress in public life” when our “individual and shared capacity for holding is collapsing,” these writers offer us a necessary form of containment, an opportunity to grieve for the elusive return to normal, and a reimagining of the challenges of public and private life in the context of that grief.’

— Barbara Wren, Consultant Psychologist, Director of Barbara Wren Psychology, and author of True Tales of Organisational Life

‘For counsellors, psychotherapists and teachers seeing the post-COVID malaise reflected in the behaviour of clients and students, the book is a compelling if unsettling read. Getting Lost provides a valuable framework for counsellors and psychotherapists seeking to understand the lingering impact of the pandemic on our capacity to relate to one another, offering an illuminating but rather pathological account of personal and collective withdrawal in a post-COVID, post-truth world.’

— Therapy Today, John Marsden MBACP (Accred), March 2026, Volume 37, Issue 2

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Elements of this book, Oblation: Essays, Parables, Paradoxes, defy reason. They do so for good reason. Much of what we do, much of what we think, is oblation: sacrifice, offering, to something or someone. The root of “oblation” is “to draw near” or “to dwell in.” It refers to what is brought unto the altar, literal or proverbial — the profoundest oblation being what binds us together, our very souls, our dearest loves, indistinguishable from ourselves, our Isaacs on our Mount Moriahs.

The natures of our oblations characterize our relationships to objects great and small, e.g., Lords and loved ones, groups and masses of signifiers. Oblative transactions promise meaning, yet we are full of uncertainty. What is it that cries out for oblation? How do we hear its voice? Are we, in fact, called, or do we, on the contrary, offer every bit gratuit? Why, as Albert Camus famously remarked, do “the stage sets collapse” as we offer ourselves to life’s routine?

In Oblation, M.H. Bowker considers these questions in a series of essays touching upon figures such as Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Baron van Münchhausen, and Jacques Lacan, unraveling themes of loss, hatred, and the Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Interspersed with brief parables and paradoxes, Bowker’s essays push us to wonder who or what we are offering ourselves and others to – and how we get away with this.

Le fantasie esistono a due livelli di esperienza: privata o pubblica. Una fantasia pubblica è condivisa, rivela il senso del nostro legame sociale, che a sua volta definisce il tipo di società in cui viviamo. Questo volume propone un’analisi della fantasia del mondo distrutto e delle tendenze culturali e politiche che si organizzano intorno all’idea che il mondo nel quale viviamo sia un posto pericoloso, dominato da odio e distruzione, nel quale il compito principale del soggetto sia sopravvivere e lottare contro forze ostili. La convinzione di essere alla mercé di minacce esistenziali si esprime attraverso narrazioni, immagini e dialoghi investiti da desiderio e paura. Attingendo a un vasto orizzonte psicoanalitico, che da Freud e dal suo concetto della colpa passa per la perdita del kleiniano ‘oggetto buono’ e per il ‘difetto fondamentale’ di Balint, gli autori accompagnano il lettore in un viaggio nella fantasia del mondo distrutto e nei suoi risvolti sociali e politici, servendosi di esempi tratti dalla letteratura del Novecento, dalle serie televisive e da recenti fatti di cronaca.