In Narcissus Transformed, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren interprets Narcissus as thematizing the tragic situation of the postmodern subject. After showing the connections between Cartesian philosophy and narcissism, he proceeds to lay out the function of Narcissus as a poetic figure of discourse in the fields of psychoanalysis and modern fiction. He moves beyond the description of narcissism to an interpretation of the conditions necessary for Narcissus, the beautiful boy captivated by his own image, to become a different kind of subject. 
The topos of narcissism, which is first articulated by Ovid, always includes within itself a mirror, a gap, self-referential desire, and death—all of which culminate in Narcissus's inability to make space for an Other. Kochhar-Lindgren contends that this is the founding topos of modern philosophy, which is then incorporated into and transmuted by the disciplines of psychoanalysis and fiction. With the extensive work of Freud on narcissism, it becomes a central concept for psychoanalysis; and with Lacan's interpretation of the narcissist as phantom, statue, and automaton, narcissism moves into a specifically textual interpretation of subjectivity.
Kochhar-Lindgren then provides close readings of fictional texts-—The Waves by Virginia Woolf, The Ogre by Michel Tournier, and Daniel Martin by John Fowles—to show more explicitly the textual construction of the narcissistic subject and to suggest ways that Narcissus might be transformed into a subject not held in thrall to the "glassy-eyed stare of Thanatos." He concludes with an enactment, from a Lacanian and fictional perspective, of the beginnings of the undoing of the narcissistic topos of contemporary culture. Narcissus steps from the self-reflective mirror into a theater; he stops longing to be a purely self-reflexive work in order to become part of the play of a text.

Narcissus Transformed: The Textual Subject in Psychoanalysis and Literature (Literature and Philosophy)

Literature & Fiction

Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Technologics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation (SUNY series in Postmodern Culture)

Uses literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to explore the emerging logic of the posthuman. Adding to the growing field of posthuman or cyborg studies, TechnoLogics explores how our position in the technologized world reorders, in the most radical ways imaginable, our basic experience of the lines governing literary, philosophical, and cultural production. The ancient dream of immortality is now becoming realized through cloning, genetic research, and artificial intelligence, bringing with it the need for new forms of both reading and living in the everyday world. In this emerging cyborg culture, what is to come for us is not predictable but, instead, an open possibility to be shaped by the work of, among others, artists, computer designers, scientists, and writers. Through encounters with Plato, Melville, Marx, Jünger, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren identifies the causes, characteristics, and links between the most primordial of wishes―immortality―and the highest of high tech, and asks how, in our culture of technocapitalism, we can continue to listen to the faint call of ethics.

TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation (SUNY series in Postmodern Culture)

State University of New York Press

Although there is a significant literature on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, there are few analyses that address the deconstructive critique of phenomenology as it simultaneously plays across range of cultural productions including literature, painting, cinema, new media, and the structure of the university. Using the critical figures of "ghost" and "shadow"-and initiating a vocabulary of phantomenology-this book traces the implications of Derridean "spectrality" on the understanding of contemporary thought, culture, and experience. This study examines the interconnections of philosophy, art in its many forms, and the hauntology of Jacques Derrida. Exposure is explored primarily as exposure to the elemental weather (with culture serving as a lean-to); exposure in a photographic sense; being over-exposed to light; exposure to the certitude of death; and being exposed to all the possibilities of the world. Exposure, in sum, is a kind of necessary, dangerous, and affirmative openness. The book weaves together three threads in order to format an image of the contemporary exposure: 1) a critique of the philosophy of appearances, with phenomenology and its vexed relationship to idealism as the primary representative of this enterprise; 2) an analysis of cultural formations-literature, cinema, painting, the university, new media-that highlights the enigmatic necessity for learning to read a spectrality that, since the two cannot be separated, is both hauntological and historical; and 3) a questioning of the role of art-as semblance, reflection, and remains-that occurs within and alongside the space of philosophy and of the all the "posts-" in which people find themselves. Art is understood fundamentally as a spectral aesthetics, as a site that projects from an exposed place toward an exposed, and therefore open, future, from a workplace that testifies to the blast wind of obliteration, but also in that very testimony gives a place for ghosts to gather, to speak with each other and with humankind. Art, which installs itself in the very heart of the ancient dream of philosophy as its necessary companion, ensures that each phenomenon is always a phantasm and thus we can be assured that the apparitions will continue to speak in what Michel Serres's has called the "grotto of miracles." This book, then, enacts the slowness of a reading of spectrality that unfolds in the chiaroscuro of truth and illusion, philosophy and art, light and darkness. Scholars, students, and professional associations in philosophy (especially of the work of Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger, and Kant), literature, painting, cinema, new media, psychoanalysis, modernity, theories of the university, and interdisciplinary studies.

Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida

Cambria Press

A true account of the origins of creation, sex, death, and golf.

Starting Time: A True Account of the Origins of Creation, Sex, Death and Golf

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

White Cloud Pr

Pintxos: Small Delicacies & Chance Encounters

Tankebanen forlag dr Torgeir Fjeld

Night Café is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Café brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others. "These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sørensen) "When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Café, after inspecting the menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concave receptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color  & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination,  reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafés of Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills are desirable & free!" (Robert Gibbons)

Night Café: The Amorous Notes of a Barista

Arts & Photography

EyeCorner Press

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