Derek Hook
Biographic Data
| ID | 451456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Derek Hook |
| GIVEN NAMES | Derek |
| FAMILY NAME | Hook |
| SIGNATURE | HOOK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0446-4334 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 354 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Fanon on Gaze and Voice in a Dying Colonialism
The prayer with which Frantz Fanon ends Black Skin White Masks (“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”) begs the question of how the relation between how these two registers of experience – bodily and enunciative subjectivity – might be secured. This is a crucial question given the alienating force of the colonial gaze to which Fanon has been subjected, a gaze which results in the bodily schema being “thingified,” in mind and body in…
Interpretation by way of the signifier: A response to Gregory Rizzolo’s “The significance of the interpretant in the field of speech”
Whiteness at the Abyss: A Lacanian Reading of ‘White Anxiety’
Fanon’s Humanism: An Interview with Nigel Gibson
Humanism is obviously a crucial facet of a humanistic psychology, and a new—or decolonial—humanism is likewise crucial for Frantz Fanon’s work, but these two areas of scholarship and practice have seldom been put into a sustained dialogue. As a way of beginning such a dialogue, Nigel Gibson, one of the foremost experts on the work of Frantz Fanon, speaks with Derek Hook and Leswin Laubscher about Fanon’s ideas of a new humanism, agency, action, a…
Whiteness at the abyss: Reflections on a Scene of Attack
This paper focusses on a series of online attacks that the author was subjected to after comments he had made in a closed lecture on the topic of ‘white anxiety’ were cut from the zoom recording and distributed widely online with the clear intent of causing outrage. The analysis of the material, which combines thematic, discourse analytic and personal reflections, yielded a series of core themes: 1) the role of the messages in consolidating an id…
Cyberflashing Lacan
We explore cyberflashing through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, including such notions as anxiety, the gaze, Law, castration and disavowal. Many instances of cyberflashing qualify as a perverse act, an act which is driven by anxiety, and which involves inducing anxiety or jouissance (libidinal enjoyment) in another. Our account helps explain the repetitive nature of such acts in the face of negative reactions and despite their frequent fail…
Thanatos: Is freud’s concept still relevant
Uncanny Teletherapy: Working with Extimacy
Responses to the question of teletherapy have multiplied over the past decades, yet many therapists are grappling with the challenges and opportunities of teletherapy for the first time in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. For many clinicians, teletherapy was, at least initially, unfamiliar and unsettling. Much of the literature construes teletherapy as a degradation of an original—incapable of providing the intimacy achieved and maintained in t…
On the Role of Speech In Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Lacan’s “Function and Field”
A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan’s “Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis” are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic te…
The desire of apartheid
This paper has two objectives. It aims, firstly, to provide an overview of the explanatory dilemmas that J.M. Coetzee highlights in his acclaimed essay “The mind of apartheid” in respect of existing theories of apartheid ideology. It then makes recourse, secondly, to a series of concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis so as to shed light on these dilemmas. Two questions seem to particularly vex Coetzee. Firstly, where should we seek to locate agency …
Apartheid and the unconscious: An Introduction
This special issue invited contributors to revisit J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” first published in Social Dynamics in 1991. Here, Coetzee asks what it might mean to come to terms with ap
Lacan on Depression and Melancholia
Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology
Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology
Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory
Fanon/Lacan: Sites of Intersection
Three questions motivate this paper's investigation of various intersections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Jacques Lacan. First, what hitherto under-explored references to Lacan's work are to be found in Fanon's earliest (recently translated) psychiatric work? Second, moving beyond the remit of explicit citation: what subtle conceptual parallels and affinities exist between the work of these two theorists? Third, what contemporary rearticu…
Affective archives as political impasse
Death-bound subjectivity: Fanon’s zone of nonbeing and the Lacanian death drive
Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means
Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historic…
White anxiety in (post)apartheid South Africa
Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics
What would it mean to view Frantz Fanon as first and foremost a psychiatrist? What presiding portrayals of Fanon would be challenged in doing so? This, the image of Fanon as primarily a psychiatrist, is a difficult image to hold in focus, especially given the competing attempts to appropriate Fanon to various rival conceptual domains (psychoanalysis, revolutionary Marxism, post-colonial theory, etc.). We also have to take into account the standar…
Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’
The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English.An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth …
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'Signification of the Phallus' to 'Metaphor of the Subject
Introduction: Lacanian praxis and social intervention
The deontology of a political psychoanalysis: An interview with Patricia Gherovici
Creating Subjectivities
Gated communities, heterotopia and a “rights” of privilege: A `heterotopology' of the South African security-park
This paper attempts a two-tiered analysis of what has come to be referred to as the `security-park', i.e., that South African variation of the `gated community' which combines Blakely and Snyder's [Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 1999] typically separable `lifestyle', `prestige' and `security zone' gated community types. The first part of this analysis reviews the existing literat…
What Is “Enjoyment as a Political Factor
The notion of “enjoyment as a political factor” is a key motif in Lacanian psychoanalytic social theory. This article explores the notion of enjoyment/jouissance—a type of “negative pleasure” or intense libidinal arousal—as an instrument of political analysis. Crucial here are a series of qualifications that refine an understanding of the concept. The article clarifies that enjoyment is: sexual (or libidinal) in nature; bodily rather than unconsc…
Monumental space and the uncanny
Psychoanalytic contributions to the political analysis of affect and identification
The focus of my comments in what follows – a response to Baldacchino’s ‘The eidetic of belonging’ – will be on qualifying and sharpening a prospective analytics of affect, such that we may attempt a meaningful political analysis of affect grounded within a given socio-symbolic domain, and linked to a series of subjective (psychical) operations
Genealogy, discourse, ‘effective history’: Foucault and the work of critique
The companion piece to an article on the shortcomings of much discourse analysis in psychology, this paper offers an exposition of Foucault's genealogical method as a mode of critique better able to accommodate those dimensions of discourse (history, materiality, the conditions of possibility underwriting ‘knowledge’) less facilitated by more textually focused or less historically sensitive models. Opening with a discussion of Foucault's ‘epistem…
Racism as Abjection: A Psychoanalytic Conceptualisation for a Post-Apartheid South Africa
Treating the analysis of racism as a key critical imperative of South African psychology, this article questions the adequacy of many of the social constructionist or discursive approaches to racism that have proved influential in critical South African social psychology of late (Dixon, 1996; 1997; Dixon Dixon, Foster, Durrheim, & Wilbraham, 1994; Duncan, 1993; 1996; Duncan, van Niekerk, de la Rey, & Seedat, 2001; Durrheim & Dixon, 2000; 2001; Fo…
Racism and jouissance: Evaluating the “racism as (the theft of) enjoyment” hypothesis
Retrieving Biko: A Black Consciousness critique of whiteness
There is an important history often neglected by genealogies of ‘critical whiteness studies’: Steve Biko's Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism. What would it mean to retrieve this criticism in the context of white anti-racism in the post-apartheid era? Said's (2003) contrapuntal method proves useful here as a juxtaposing device whereby the writings of a past figure can be critically harnessed, travelling across temporal and ideologic…
Pre‐discursive’ racism
This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre‐symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing ‘pre‐discursive’ forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti‐racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggestin…
Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means
Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historic…
Articulating Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies: Limitations and Possibilities
Future directions for a critical social psychology of racism/antiracism
A variety of possible future directions for a critical psychology of racism/antiracism may assist us in avoiding the trappings of conceptual/methodological homogeneity and disciplinary insularity. Greater reference to the literature of fiction, to the epistemological domain of the aesthetic, may benefit us given that it permits different positionings, imaginings and modes of self‐reflection than afforded within the strict truth‐conditions of main…
Image Analysis: An Interactive Approach to Compositional Elements
This article proposes an interactive approach to the analysis of compositional elements of still visuals. This approach stems from the argument that the rhetorical efficiency of images is related less to their content per se than to how this content is displayed and organised. As such, we start from the premise that images are “active,” performing the visual equivalent of speech-acts (i.e., “image-acts”) through which they construct the world and…
The Fallible Phallus: A Discourse Analysis of Male Sexuality in a South African Men's Interest Magazine
This article presents a discourse analysis of the constructions of male sexuality in the South African publication Men's Health. The focus of the analysis was a series of monthly featured articles on best sexual practices and behaviour. Since the magazine's content appears to confront men with, on the one hand, the construction of the ideal, potent phallus, and, on the other hand, the fallibility inherent in attempting to live up to this ideal, t…
Towards a critical social psychology of racism: Points of disruption
Weakening Habermas: The Undoing of Communicative Rationality
Habermas's elaboration of a procedural, discursive deliberative democracy extends from his faith in communicative action, in symmetrical communicative interactions played out in an arena of communicative rationality. Yet Habermas expects too much of his agents. His theory of communicative action, built upon the necessary possession of communicative rationality, requires individuals to have clear, unfettered access to their own reasoning, possessi…
Deconstruction, Psychopathology and Dialectics
This paper endeavours to ask how one might rethink essentialized and reified concepts of psychology and psychopathology as they are represented and experienced in the domain of ‘psychological culture’. Deconstruction, a critical mode of reading systems of meaning, and of unravelling the ways these systems work as texts, is the theoretical and methodological tool of choice for this task. The objective here is to critically engage with privileged n…
On the Role of Speech In Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Lacan’s “Function and Field”
A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan’s “Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis” are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic te…
White anxiety in (post)apartheid South Africa
Discourse Analysis: Terminable or Interminable
The title of this commentary reflects two questions, the first flippant, the second which speaks to the theoretical expansion of discourse analysis. The first question: Will the proliferation of pa
Screened history: Nostalgia as defensive formation
This paper re-considers the much-lauded transformative potential of nostalgia, and proposes that an adequately psychological engagement with nostalgia is necessary if the critical capacities of this phenomenon are to be adequately assessed.In order to do this, the paper identifies parallels between the concept of nostalgia and a series of psychoanalytic concepts (the imaginary, fetishism, fantasy, affect, screen-memories and retroaction).Such a c…
White Privilege, Psychoanalytic Ethics, and the Limitations of Political Silence
The moral and philosophical interrogation of white privilege remains an imperative in post-apartheid South Africa. Whereas the critique of whiteness involves both philosophical and psychological scrutiny, subsequent calls for white political silence and withdrawal have yet to be subjected to adequate psychological analysis. This paper offers such an analysis by questioning, firstly, the idea of appropriate emotions for white South Africans (shame…
Unbehagen and the subject: An interview with Slavoj Žižek
This article is an edited transcript of an interview with Slavoj Žižek conducted by Stephen Frosh and Maria Aristodemou at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on the 18 June 2008. The focus of the interview was Slavoj Žižek's engagement with psychoanalysis
The ‘real’ of racializing embodiment
Manganyi's ( 1981 ) analysis of racializing embodiment represents an important, historically neglected contribution to psychoanalytic social psychology. Influenced as much by Fanon's anti‐colonial and psycho‐existential concerns as by phenomenology and the imperatives of the Black Consciousness struggle against apartheid, Manganyi's work represents an unusually politically committed form of social psychology. I introduce and elaborate upon Mangan…
Discourses of Order and Their Disruption: The Texts of the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission
This paper asserts that selected texts of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission possess a powerful political potential in their ability to challenge and refute historical relations of racialised power in South Africa. The prospective political efficacy of these texts is seen as residing in their critical ability to subvert and challenge the predominant understandings, discourses and representations of Apartheid, or the ‘old’, Sout…
Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis has come to represent something of a `growth industry' in both research and critical psychology. Despite the apparent indebtedness of many such methods of discourse analysis to Foucault, there exists no strictly Foucauldian method of analysing discourse. Through a close reading of Foucault's `The Order of Discourse' (1981a), this paper re-characterizes the concept of discourse from a firmly Foucauldian perspective. Whilst not a…
The 'Disorders of Discourse
There can be little doubt that discourse analysis has come to represent something of a ‘growth industry’ in the critical social sciences. Indeed, there has been, together with a proliferation of the various models of the process of discourse analysis (cf. Bannister 1995; Fairclough 1995; Parker 1992; Potter & Wetherell 1987) a veritable explosion of discursive analytic work. This almost unfettered expansion of discursive analytic work has led alm…
Deconstruction, Psychopathology and Dialectics
This paper endeavours to ask how one might rethink essentialized and reified concepts of psychology and psychopathology as they are represented and experienced in the domain of ‘psychological culture’. Deconstruction, a critical mode of reading systems of meaning, and of unravelling the ways these systems work as texts, is the theoretical and methodological tool of choice for this task. The objective here is to critically engage with privileged n…
Gated communities, heterotopia and a “rights” of privilege: A `heterotopology' of the South African security-park
This paper attempts a two-tiered analysis of what has come to be referred to as the `security-park', i.e., that South African variation of the `gated community' which combines Blakely and Snyder's [Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 1999] typically separable `lifestyle', `prestige' and `security zone' gated community types. The first part of this analysis reviews the existing literat…
Analogues of Power: Reading Psychotherapy through the Sovereignty –Discipline–Government Complex
This paper draws on Foucault’s multifaceted understanding of modern power, the sovereignty–discipline–government complex, as a means of re-conceptualizing, and finding critical analogues for, what is perhaps psychology’s most characteristic formof applied practice: psychotherapy. One of the chief assets of this model is that it enables one to think the dynamic interchange between capillary and modern state forms of power. An explication of this p…
Reading Geldenhuys: Constructing and Deconstructing the Norwood Killer
This article takes the form of an autocritique, plotting the progression and ultimate dissolution of a developmental psychopathology research project on Kobus Geldenhuys, the notorious Norwood serial killer. The topic is introduced with a detailed case study, which gives way to a classical psychoanalytic interpretation, that is, an engagement that explores Geldenhuys's psychopathology through the interlocking accounts of the zonal stages, the Oed…
Racism as Abjection: A Psychoanalytic Conceptualisation for a Post-Apartheid South Africa
Treating the analysis of racism as a key critical imperative of South African psychology, this article questions the adequacy of many of the social constructionist or discursive approaches to racism that have proved influential in critical South African social psychology of late (Dixon, 1996; 1997; Dixon Dixon, Foster, Durrheim, & Wilbraham, 1994; Duncan, 1993; 1996; Duncan, van Niekerk, de la Rey, & Seedat, 2001; Durrheim & Dixon, 2000; 2001; Fo…
A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial
Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. What might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? One answer is that of a reciprocal form of critique, the ret…
Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’
This article is one of the four commentaries published as Commentaries on Hook, ‘Genealogy, discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the work of critique’ \n in the journal, Qualitative Research in Psychology [Taylor and Francis © Edward Arnold (publishers) Ltd.]. The definitive version is available at; http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp026cm
Genealogy, discourse, ‘effective history’: Foucault and the work of critique
The companion piece to an article on the shortcomings of much discourse analysis in psychology, this paper offers an exposition of Foucault's genealogical method as a mode of critique better able to accommodate those dimensions of discourse (history, materiality, the conditions of possibility underwriting ‘knowledge’) less facilitated by more textually focused or less historically sensitive models. Opening with a discussion of Foucault's ‘epistem…
Future directions for a critical social psychology of racism/antiracism
A variety of possible future directions for a critical psychology of racism/antiracism may assist us in avoiding the trappings of conceptual/methodological homogeneity and disciplinary insularity. Greater reference to the literature of fiction, to the epistemological domain of the aesthetic, may benefit us given that it permits different positionings, imaginings and modes of self‐reflection than afforded within the strict truth‐conditions of main…
Towards a critical social psychology of racism: Points of disruption
Monumental space and the uncanny
Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction
Pre‐discursive’ racism
This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre‐symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing ‘pre‐discursive’ forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti‐racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggestin…
Weakening Habermas: The Undoing of Communicative Rationality
Habermas's elaboration of a procedural, discursive deliberative democracy extends from his faith in communicative action, in symmetrical communicative interactions played out in an arena of communicative rationality. Yet Habermas expects too much of his agents. His theory of communicative action, built upon the necessary possession of communicative rationality, requires individuals to have clear, unfettered access to their own reasoning, possessi…
Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis has come to represent something of a `growth industry' in both research and critical psychology. Despite the apparent indebtedness of many such methods of discourse analysis to Foucault, there exists no strictly Foucauldian method of analysing discourse. Through a close reading of Foucault's `The Order of Discourse' (1981a), this paper re-characterizes the concept of discourse from a firmly Foucauldian perspective. Whilst not a…
Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power
Despite that many of the later writings of Michel Foucault speak directly to the subject of psychology, the discipline has yet to absorb the full impact of his critical analyses. Foucault's importance in this respect is at least twofold: he develops a powerful critique of the uses of psychological knowledge and practice in modern disciplinary society, and he offers a trenchant series of methodological injunctions, an 'analytics of power', that ma…
Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power (Critical Theory and Practice in Psychology and the Human Sciences)
This book introduces and applies Foucault's most important concepts and procedures, and does so specifically for a psychology readership."--Jacket
Postcolonial Psychoanalysis
J.M. Coetzee's undervalued paper `The Mind of Apartheid' provides a novel means of identifying the preoccupations of a `postcolonial psychoanalysis'. Such an approach to critique offers a tentative psychical-political diagnostics which pertains not only to the affective and discursive dynamics of the colonial sphere as a whole, but also to the subject-/desire-positioning enforced by the pathological colonial relation. Not reducible to the level o…
The other’s book
Perspectives on “Lacanian Subjectivities”
Fantasmatic Transactions: On the Persistence of Apartheid Ideology
Psychoanalysis and social psychology: Historical connections and contemporary applications
This special issue brings together contributions that draw attention to the historical connections between psychoanalysis and social psychology and that highlight the role that psychoanalytic ideas still have for social psychological practice. It draws attention to the long‐standing relationship psychoanalysis has had with social psychology, one that is obscured in most undergraduate textbooks. When the contribution of psychoanalysis to the devel…
Psychology (56 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Philosophy (53 works) · Epistemology (51 works) · Psychoanalysis (45 works) · Politics (30 works) · Political science (29 works) · Aesthetics (26 works) · Law (26 works) · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics (25 works)