Works in Progress 2/26

Charlie Stephenson​
Bartleby the Gooner
Gooning is a contemporary subculture built around excessive engagement with internet pornography. Non-psychoanalytic writing on the emergent identity category of “the gooner” has often posited these subjects as emblematic of the most troubling features of contemporary life. In a Substack post typical of the genre, the writer P.E. Moskowitz observes that the “whole world…feels like a form of gooning now—catharsis for the sake of it, catharsis that breeds nihilism, catharsis that dehumanizes, catharsis that disenables any productive form of pleasure in the future.” Viewing the phenomenon through the work of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, however, allows us to ask what the gooners might have to teach us about trauma, infantile sexuality, and the metapsychology of moral panics.
Loryn Hatch
Title and description forthcoming

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