You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Seeking to frame the debate around academic freedom in terms of freedom of thought, this article begins with an exploration of the hazards of fascist ideology and the psychodynamics of persuadability. Attention is paid to the perverse lure of certainty and the apparent willingness of many people to accede to an instrumentalized unconscious. Through the writings of Butler and Athanasiou, an antithesis to the dispossession of an instrumentalized unconscious is explored in terms of radical performativity and critical relationality, modalities which have the potential to undo what Elizabeth Povinelli termed “the cunning of recognition.” The limitations of psychoanalysis due to its historical antecedents in colonialism and racialized capitalism are explored, and an argument for a genealogically and sociohistorically constituted psychoanalysis is entertained. Following Derrida's imagining of the university as truth-seeker, aspects of the history of U.S. higher education are explored to illustrate the continuous struggle between sovereign power and capitalist logic and the possibility of education as the practice of freedom. The essay concludes with an exploration of the intersection between psychoanalysis and critical pedagogy, posing the question of whether analytic institutes and universities might become vehicles for an encounter with alterity that could potentially sow the seeds for a revolutionary unconscious.