Masterful thinking – characterised by belief in what Freud called ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ – has left the Earth in environmental crisis and the university in ruins. This book turns to literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and film for the words, sentences, ideas, characters, gestures, tropes, states of mind and of body that might loosen the grip of an unfortunate mastery and open up other, more inventive forms of relation and connection. Reading, writing, watching films and listening to music can shake us into thinking beyond the limitations of what is given to us as contemporary reality. Re ... More

Masterful thinking – characterised by belief in what Freud called ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ – has left the Earth in environmental crisis and the university in ruins. This book turns to literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and film for the words, sentences, ideas, characters, gestures, tropes, states of mind and of body that might loosen the grip of an unfortunate mastery and open up other, more inventive forms of relation and connection. Reading, writing, watching films and listening to music can shake us into thinking beyond the limitations of what is given to us as contemporary reality. Readers can be strangely fortified, surprised, perturbed and taught new forms of relation by encounters with such figures as Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, the lady Necessity who haunts texts by Plato, Freud and Derrida, little girls written about by Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Browning, or filmed by Clio Barnard, a stray dog and a slow worm (among other animals), a Miltonic falling angel, as well as various ghosts named and unnamed. This kind of encounter, the book argues, is what gets fresh thinking started. The main contemporary figures orienting these attempts to revive hope and strength are Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. They are accompanied by Freud, philosophers including Plato, Hegel and Husserl, thinkers such as Leo Bersani, Adorno and Walter Benjamin, as well as writers on climate change and on the university.