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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader is one of a dying breed It is no overstatement to say that psychoanalysis is not only out of fashion and widely scorned but largely dismissed as an outdated discipline borne of a personality cult; Leader himself has described analysts today as ‘mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust’   What makes his position rarer still is that he is also a celebrated author; in the course of eight books Leader has established himself as an elegant and erudite voice of Lacanian theory in academic yet popular books commenting on love, the sexes, the history of psychoanalysis, the mind and the body Much fêted by the artworld he has also written numerous essays on the work of leading British artists such as Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn – many of whom he counts as friends – and is often presented ‘in conversation’ with artists   A remarkable feature of Leader’s writing is the seeming ease with which he can make complex and strange psychoanalytic concepts accessible to a general audience This arises in part from the clarity of his prose but also from his ability to illustrate his concepts with examples taken from cinema, art, literature, the public canonical case studies and the privacy of the session – moving between high and low culture whilst avoiding the pitfalls of that method, now so in vogue in our post-cultural theory era   This is no attempt at a showy parlour game of pop-deconstruction, but is a method merited because, as Leader explains, ‘What matters here is not the treatment of any one genre but rather fidelity to questions’ It is in this way that readers are able to find his writings on the psyche and the arts educational in the best sense: they provoke us to consider more carefully, move beyond appearances and question further Whatever the topic, we are invited to pursue Leader’s primary concern: the uniquely human capacity for meaning, and the questioning of it   In recent years, in What is Madness? and the newly released Strictly Bipolar, he has emerged as a savage critic of ‘Big Pharma’, a campaigning

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

Issue No. 11

Climate Science

McKenzie Wark

feature

Issue No. 11

Welcome to the Anthropocene, that planetary tempo in which all the metabolic rhythms of the world start dancing to...

Interview

May 2014

Interview with Conrad Shawcross

Patrick Sykes

Interview

May 2014

Though an intimidating sixteen feet tall, the industrial robot in Conrad Shawcross’s flat doesn’t look at all out of...

Essay

March 2019

Dreaming Reasonably: on Jenny George

Rachael Allen

Essay

March 2019

In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent, a group of women go spelunking and become trapped deep underground...

 

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