[image by Brian]

Goal for June: Read a book a day. Follow my reading list here.

A number of the books I’ve been reviewing — The Happiness Trip, Terra Madre, Food Not Lawns, etc. — are all published by Chelsea Green, an eco-friendly publisher that both publishes books on green topics AND publishes them greenly — on chlorine-free recycled paper using soy-based inks. Chelsea Green’s a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit working protect endangered forests and conserve natural resources.

Green reading tip: Support green publishers.

But the latest book I’ve read wasn’t pub’d by Chelsea Green; I borrowed Jessica Benjamin’s Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis from the USC library thinking it’d be helpful for my diss. Turns out, this is one of those books that maybe I should’ve quit on after the intro — which was informative. But what followed were a collection of 3 essays, with inviting sentences such as these:

The postconventional complementarity relies on the psychic capacity to symbolically bridge split oppositions as well as on preoedipal over-inclusiveness.

Oddly, I do actually really like Benjamin’s theory of intersubjectivity — basically the idea that, instead of always defining people as subjects (active) or objects (passive), we might conceive as identity as more fluid: “An intersubjective theory of the self is one that poses the question of how and whether the self can actually achieve a relationship to an outside other without, through identification, assimilating or being assimilated by it.”

I guess I like her other books better. This one gets too bogged down with trying to carve out a space for itself by namedropping all the other psychoanalytic theorists from Freud on….

Book read: Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis

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