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Expertise Summary
Dr Wright's general areas of research interest include Psychoanalysis (particularly Freud, Lacan, and Zizek), French Critical Theory (particularly Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari), Continental Philosophy (particularly poststructuralism and the critique of humanism), and the intersections between Political and Postcolonial Theory (Agamben, Hardt & Negri, Spivak, Fanon etc.). More specific research themes include the relationships between clinical psychoanalysis and the wider culture of mainstream psychiatry and psychology as well as the impacts of technology on notions of the unconscious.
Teaching Summary
Dr Wright's teaching has largely been in the areas of critical theory, cultural studies and aspects of communications theory. This year, he has come back from a semester of research leave as Head of… read more
Research Summary
Dr Colin Wright is currently working on a book entitled Toxic Positivity: A Lacanian Critique of Happiness and Wellbeing. This draws on Lacanian theory but also contemporary Lacanian clinical… read more
Selected Publications
WRIGHT, C., 2006. Philosophy, Rhetoric, Ideology: Towards a Sophistic Democracy Auckland: Magnolia Press.
DEMARIA, C. and WRIGHT, C., eds., 2006. Post-conflict Cultures: Rituals of representation London: Zoilus Press.
WRIGHT, C., 2006. Power, Conflict, Visuality: Ironic Iteration in the Anti-Iraq War Movement Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici. 100-101, 115-133
Dr Wright's teaching has largely been in the areas of critical theory, cultural studies and aspects of communications theory. This year, he has come back from a semester of research leave as Head of Department so will only be teaching the following module:
Self, Sign and Society: a final year undergraduate module which challenges conventional ways of thinking about identity, language and community by exploring the impacts of structuralism and poststructuralism on cultural, social and political theory.
Current Research
Dr Colin Wright is currently working on a book entitled Toxic Positivity: A Lacanian Critique of Happiness and Wellbeing. This draws on Lacanian theory but also contemporary Lacanian clinical practice in order to criticise the rise of positive psychology and so-called Happiness Studies, as well as the related 'Wellbeing' agenda which is impacting on notions of health and what constitutes 'cure'. His overall claim is that the politics of health become increasingly important in our 'biopolitical' era, and that Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly its clinical practice, represents an important ethical and political alternative to dominant consumer models of 'happiness' and neoliberal 'flourishing'.
Past Research
Dr Wright's past research has centred around Lacanian psychoanalysis, philosophy and the politics of conflict.
His most recent edited collection (with Roger Litten), entitled Returning to Lacan's Seminar XVII (Lacanian Press: 2022) brought together twelve practicing psychoanalysts and members of the New Lacanian School who each commented, from a contemporary perspective, on each session of Jacques Lacan's 1969-70 seminar.
A previous edited collection (with Diana Caine) is entitled Perversion Now! (Palgrave: 2017). This also collected contributions from leading Lacanian theorists and practitioners from several countries on the cultural, ethical, and political shifts around the notion of perversion since Freud's era.
Emerging from a conference he organised in 2013, Dr Wright was guest editor of a special issue of the journal Subjectivity (Vol.8, Issue 2, 2015) which explored the links between addiction and capitalism.
The monograph Badiou in Jamaica: The Politics of Conflict (Re.Press: 2013) foregrounded the theme of conflict in Alain Badiou's work, running from his early Maoism through to his revitalisation of the Idea of Communism, but it also applied this re-reading of his work to the history of conflict in pre- and post-Independence Jamaica, focusing in particular on the Rastafari movement and reggae.
A conference and special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory on 'Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman' in 2010 allowed Dr Wright to explore how and why a certain reading of particularly Freudian psychoanalysis has been explicitly sidelined in most work in the field of posthumanism. It also raised the issue of the relationship between psychoanalysis and technology that he is continuing to explore in his current 'digital unconscious' project.
Psychoanalysis was also the focus of another single authored monograph Psychoanalysis (Critical, Cultural and Communications Press: 2008) which provided an introduction to Freud and post-Freudians such as Jung, Klein, and Lacan as well as to feminist critiques.
Emerging from his PhD, the monograph Philosophy, Rhetoric, Ideology: Towards a Sophistic Democracy (Magnolia: 2006) explored the ideological impact of classical and renaissance rhetorical theory on the discourses of philosophy, literature and politics. Drawing primarily on poststructuralist and post-Marxist theories, it outlined a sophistic understanding of democracy based on disensus rather than on consensus.
Dr Wright also co-edited (with Cristina Demaria), Post-Conflict Cultures: Rituals of Representation (Zoilus: 2006), which examined representations of conflict in five areas: the media, visual cultures, politics and the law, ethnicity and gender, and history and literature.
Future Research
Dr Wright is in the early planning stages of a monograph exploring the broad relationship between psychoanalysis and technology, focusing in particular on what he is calling the 'digital unconscious'. This project will investigate Lacan's complex indebtedness to cybernetics, game theory and information theory as early as the 1950s, as well as the subsequent cultural and clinical impact of cybernetics on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, leading, today, to the emergence of neuropsychoanalysis. His aim is to distinguish between a deeply neoliberal model of the 'digital unconscious' that views the human subject as a re-programmable machine on the one hand, and the 'unconscious structured like a language' on which Lacan insisted on the other.