Psychoanalysis and… kicks off a series of events connecting psychoanalysis, culture, and society, with a critical enquiry on comedy. Alfie Bown (King’s College London) will join us to talk about his new book Post-Comedy, about humor, and about the (im)possibility of joking in a time of polarization and divisive capitalism.

Alfie Bown is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at King’s College London. His books include The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022) and Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024). He runs the pamphlet house Everyday Analysis and also writes journalism for many publications, from The Guardian to The Paris Review.

A few words on Post-Comedy

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humor and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore? This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive contemporary capitalism. 

You can read more about the book here 

About the Psychoanalysis and… series

From literary to film studies, from political sciences and cultural analysis to queer and postcolonial perspectives, psychoanalysis has long provided a wealth of concepts and analytical perspectives to address issues at the core of our changing societies and culture. Not only has the psychoanalytic work put furth by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, or Wilfred Bion addressed the subject constitutive role of society and culture, but also the work of Teresa de Lauretis, Homi K. Bhabha, and Slavoj Žižek has engaged with psychoanalysis as a means to contest and rethink our fields of knowledge and academic boundaries.

The psychoanalysis and… series aim at continuing with this boundary breaking—a breaking of academic, artistic, activist, social boundaries—by organizing talks, symposia, and roundtable discussions in which psychoanalysis is brought to the arena of our changing contemporary world. Different schools of psychoanalysis, different academic disciplines, and different artistic and activist perspectives will be drawn into a conversation aimed at rethinking the world around us. For this, we invite scholars, researchers, students, but also artist, activists, and anyone interested in the different topics that will be addressed in the series to join us in our different events.