PULSE Book Event woth Nuar Alsadir

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. This talk will explore laughter’s many capacities, including the ways in which it can function as a form of unconscious communication in the consulting room. Because of the positive associations most people have to laughter, its meaning often flies beneath the social—and, often, analytic—radar.

Nuar Alsadir’s most recent book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press/Fitzcarraldo Editions), was a TIME Magazine must-read of 2022 and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2022. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, Alsadir works as a psychoanalyst in private practice and teaches in New York University's graduate MFA program. She is currently writing a book on boredom forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions and Graywolf Press.

Host or Publisher Pulsion - IIPPP