This book grew out of dialogue with a diverse set of intellectually stimulating and nourishing colleagues, mentors, friends, and family members for which I am tremendously grateful. I would like specifically to thank Mark C. Taylor and Wayne Proudfoot, for the extraordinary guidance and feedback; Kevin Kelly, whose perspicuous exposition of Freudian metapsychology helped lay the foundation for this project; Fred Neuhouser, for his valuable comments on a longer paper that eventually became
chapters 1 and
2, but also for directing me to the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where I was an Affiliate Scholar for two years; Lisa Cerami, who helped me work through some of the more impenetrable passages in Adorno; Joshua Dubler, a sounding board of unusual warmth and clarity; Yonatan Brafman and Liane Carlson, for the continuing education; Andrea Sun-Mee Jones, who is in many ways responsible for the existence of this project; that remarkable organization that is the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and in particular Jeremy Cohan, Chris Crawford, Greg Gabrellas, Scott Jenkins, Ben Koditschek, Christie Offenbacher, and Allan Scholom for their leadership; Gil Anidjar, Fabian Arzuaga (and the Social Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago), Courtney Bender, Alison Brown, Ashleigh Campi, Shanna Carlson, Bernard Faure, Daragh Grant, Jack Hawley, Phillip Henry, Andy Junker, Jonathan Lear, Mark Loeffler, Birte Löschenkohl, Moishe Postone, Jonathan Schorsch, and Simon Taylor for discussing various chapters with me; and Isaac Balbus, Jared Holley, Gabriel Levine, and Eric Santner, all of whom read the entire manuscript at critical moments in its development and whose lucid feedback gave me the confidence to move forward.
I presented a portion of this book’s introduction at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Annual Meeting in January 2015 as an APsaA Fellow, and I would like to thank Charles Amrhein, Rosemary Johnson, and Lynne Zeavin for coordinating the fellowship and Bruce Reis and Paul Schwaber for responding to my presentation. Parts of
chapters 1 and
2 were presented at the Hans W. Loewald Conference in February 2014 at the New School; thanks go to Ryan Gustafson and Hunter Robinson for organizing the conference, Brian Kloppenberg and Aleksandra Wagner for responding to my paper, and Elliot Jurist for organizing the special issue of
Psychoanalytic Psychology in which the proceedings were published.
More generally, thanks to the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Julia Clark-Spohn, Meryl Marcus, Deborah Neibel, and the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago for their support, and to all fellow Fellows for their friendship and collegiality. Thanks also to Amy Allen, Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, the two anonymous readers, and the team at Columbia University Press for the excellent feedback, encouragement, and patient attention to my many questions and requests.
To my parents, Hon and Jo Fong, my sister, Christina Fong, and my mother-in-law, Rosemary Easter, who are all unjustifiably supportive of my work, I owe a debt that far transcends the bounds of this project. Finally, not a day goes by where I do not feel an overwhelming appreciation for the love and support of my wife, Alison Easter, who is kind enough to welcome unsolicited ramblings about the conditions under which it possible to say “I,” and my kids, Jaya and Ziggy, baffled as they justifiably are that their second-favorite grown-up disappears for large swaths of time in order to drink coffee and stare blankly at a laptop.
* * *
A very early version of
chapter 5 appeared as “Death Drive Sublimation: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Technological Development” in
Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 18, no. 4 (December 2013): 352–67. Bits of
chapters 1 and
2 appeared as “Hans Loewald and the Death Drive” in
Psychoanalytic Psychology 31, no. 4 (October 2014): 525–36. I am grateful to these journals for their permission to reprint materials here.