Effects of the Artwork 6, with Derek Hook

This episode’s interview is with Derek Hook, who studies and practices psychoanalysis and is Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan, among many other works and important edited volumes on Lacan’s Écrits and Lacan and Race, among others. To respond to the prompt for this series of Penumbr(a)cast, on a life-changing or at least impactful artwork, following Freud’s powerful experience with Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture, Dr. Hook points to an image from photojournalism in 1994, where three members of a neo-Nazi group in South Africa are arrested and killed at the end of apartheid during the Bophuthatswana crisis. Hook's experience with this image prompts a fascinating discussion on his trajectory discovering psychoanalysis, white privilege, racism, and embodiment, and to his recent work of reading Lacan in conversation with Afropessimism.

Many thanks as always to Kellen Corrallo for his work on sound editing.