Colloque - La solitude dans la foule : Finding the Other: Thoughts on Recognition and the Stranger Within

Mieke Bal

L'invention de l'Europe par les langues et les cultures (chaire annuelle 2022-2023)

Collège de France

Année 2022-2023

Colloque - La solitude dans la foule : Finding the Other: Thoughts on Recognition and the Stranger Within

In an age of hyperconnectivity, walls appear to be everywhere. Politically, we encounter them in the shape of laws, official documents, or border crossings that regulate the movements of strangers. But we lean on them for psychological reasons too: walls keep us safe on the inside, allowing us, for example, to expel unwanted parts of ourselves onto others who then become the objects of our collective scorn. In this lecture, I focus on three characters whose lives are dominated by walls: the migrant, the Covid-19 survivor, and the conspiracy theorist. Traversing the terrains of shame, melancholia, and paranoia, I diagnose a shared experience of outsider-ness, permeated by an alienated loneliness. I explore, also, the paradoxical utility of walls and how they allow us to think, to metabolize our own strangeness, and—hopefully—to find the Other.

Wahbie Long, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Psychology and Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. With a B2 rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa, he has held fellowships at Harvard and Durham, and is a past recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for the History of Psychology. Widely published on the history, theory, and indigenization of psychology, his latest book is Nation on the Couch: Inside South Africa's Mind (MF Books, 2021), which draws on psychoanalytic theory to understand social problems in South Africa.