Nima Bassiri | Duke University (original) (raw)

Books by Nima Bassiri

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (University of Chicago Press), 2024

Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about ment... more Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Papers by Nima Bassiri

Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth cent... more Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth century was largely defined as a stable and static form of selfidentity, this chapter turns to the late writings and lectures of Michel Foucault and his account of "spirituality," or the ethical practices of conversion and transformation. While Foucault posits that spirituality was a hallmark of ancient ethical traditions, he proposes nonetheless that vestiges of a self-transformative ethics continue to be evident in two particular post-eighteenth-century doctrines of thoughtnamely, Marxism and psychoanalysis, which tacitly espoused a political and medical form of spirituality, respectively. This chapter considers the modern perseverance of the notion of spirituality in the context of radical political and medical doctrines.

In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', ed... more In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Routledge, 2016).

Modern Intellectual History, 2017

In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between hist... more In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it. The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.

On the Formation of the Neural Subject, 2016

Plasticity and Pathology, 2016

Preface pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phenomena in the history and th... more Preface pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phenomena in the history and theory of the human sciences. To grasp the significance of these phenomena we need an open and multidisciplinary approach. WE WOULD LIKE to thank Alan Tansman, director of the Townsend Center, for his intellectual and material support for this project, which is part of a broader initiative on "Thinking the Self." We would also like to thank Anthony Cascardi, dean of arts and humanities, and Carla Hesse, dean of social science, as well as the Department of Rhetoric for generously funding the original workshop. We are indebted to Teresa Stojkov, associate director of the Townsend Center, for all her help making this edited collection a reality.

Jens Clausen writes, "Melding brain and machine makes the latter an integral part of the individu... more Jens Clausen writes, "Melding brain and machine makes the latter an integral part of the individual. This could be seen to challenge our notions of personhood and moral agency." See Jens Clausen, "Man, machine, and in between," Nature 457, no. 26 (February 2009): 1080. 11 Andrew Clarke and David Chalmers have proposed that in solving a problem or carrying out any kind of epistemic act, there is no essential difference between carrying out that act through the internal processing of the brain versus an actively externalist processing that would rely on physical techniques, practices, and the general machinery of the environment. In a sense, they propose that the mind is itself prosthesized into and as the environment and that the brain can ground, or merely facilitate such a protraction. See "The Extended Mind,"

Journal of the History of Ideas, 2013

This article examines the work of eighteenth-century Scottish physician Robert Whytt. With a phil... more This article examines the work of eighteenth-century Scottish physician Robert Whytt. With a philosophical sensibility, Whytt produced a theory of the nerves that viewed the nervous system as an organic unity, one that continuously integrated man’s vital motions and rational capacities. With Whytt, the human had become “nervous” through and through, that is, neurologically self-unified to the point that nervous illness itself became a contingency that folded back into the nervous norm. The article examines Whytt’s writings along with some of the conceptual challenges surrounding the nature of the brain and nerves that historically converged in his work.

Critical Inquiry, 2013

Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and ... more Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and within the context of certain psychiatric and neuroscientific circles, psychoanalysis has become a topic of renewed interest, whose future has appeared to be in need of defending. Publications appearing as early as the mid-1980s have sought either tacitly or quite openly to resuscitate and defend the potential legitimacy of psychoanalytic theory and practice. 1 Neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, a longtime participant in this discussion (and recipient of the 2000 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Program in Literature at Duke University. I am grateful to organizers and participants at these events as well as to the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for their comments. I am especially grateful to a small group of scholars and faculty at Wesleyan University who read and offered some of the first and most encouraging feedback on the earliest draft of this paper. The completion of this article was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 1. Some examples include Arnold M. Cooper, "Will Neurobiology Influence Psychoanalysis?"

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences , 2022

Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth cent... more Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth century was largely defined as a stable and static form of selfidentity, this chapter turns to the late writings and lectures of Michel Foucault and his account of "spirituality," or the ethical practices of conversion and transformation. While Foucault posits that spirituality was a hallmark of ancient ethical traditions, he proposes nonetheless that vestiges of a self-transformative ethics continue to be evident in two particular post-eighteenth-century doctrines of thoughtnamely, Marxism and psychoanalysis, which tacitly espoused a political and medical form of spirituality, respectively. This chapter considers the modern perseverance of the notion of spirituality in the context of radical political and medical doctrines.

Modern Intellectual History, 2019

In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between hist... more In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it. The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.

In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos an... more In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Routledge, 2016).

In 'Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject', eds. David Bates and Nima ... more In 'Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject', eds. David Bates and Nima Bassiri (Fordham 2016).

http://somatosphere.net/commonplaces

Critical Inquiry 40:1 (83-108), 2013

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (University of Chicago Press), 2024

Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about ment... more Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth cent... more Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth century was largely defined as a stable and static form of selfidentity, this chapter turns to the late writings and lectures of Michel Foucault and his account of "spirituality," or the ethical practices of conversion and transformation. While Foucault posits that spirituality was a hallmark of ancient ethical traditions, he proposes nonetheless that vestiges of a self-transformative ethics continue to be evident in two particular post-eighteenth-century doctrines of thoughtnamely, Marxism and psychoanalysis, which tacitly espoused a political and medical form of spirituality, respectively. This chapter considers the modern perseverance of the notion of spirituality in the context of radical political and medical doctrines.

In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', ed... more In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Routledge, 2016).

Modern Intellectual History, 2017

In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between hist... more In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it. The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.

On the Formation of the Neural Subject, 2016

Plasticity and Pathology, 2016

Preface pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phenomena in the history and th... more Preface pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phenomena in the history and theory of the human sciences. To grasp the significance of these phenomena we need an open and multidisciplinary approach. WE WOULD LIKE to thank Alan Tansman, director of the Townsend Center, for his intellectual and material support for this project, which is part of a broader initiative on "Thinking the Self." We would also like to thank Anthony Cascardi, dean of arts and humanities, and Carla Hesse, dean of social science, as well as the Department of Rhetoric for generously funding the original workshop. We are indebted to Teresa Stojkov, associate director of the Townsend Center, for all her help making this edited collection a reality.

Jens Clausen writes, "Melding brain and machine makes the latter an integral part of the individu... more Jens Clausen writes, "Melding brain and machine makes the latter an integral part of the individual. This could be seen to challenge our notions of personhood and moral agency." See Jens Clausen, "Man, machine, and in between," Nature 457, no. 26 (February 2009): 1080. 11 Andrew Clarke and David Chalmers have proposed that in solving a problem or carrying out any kind of epistemic act, there is no essential difference between carrying out that act through the internal processing of the brain versus an actively externalist processing that would rely on physical techniques, practices, and the general machinery of the environment. In a sense, they propose that the mind is itself prosthesized into and as the environment and that the brain can ground, or merely facilitate such a protraction. See "The Extended Mind,"

Journal of the History of Ideas, 2013

This article examines the work of eighteenth-century Scottish physician Robert Whytt. With a phil... more This article examines the work of eighteenth-century Scottish physician Robert Whytt. With a philosophical sensibility, Whytt produced a theory of the nerves that viewed the nervous system as an organic unity, one that continuously integrated man’s vital motions and rational capacities. With Whytt, the human had become “nervous” through and through, that is, neurologically self-unified to the point that nervous illness itself became a contingency that folded back into the nervous norm. The article examines Whytt’s writings along with some of the conceptual challenges surrounding the nature of the brain and nerves that historically converged in his work.

Critical Inquiry, 2013

Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and ... more Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and within the context of certain psychiatric and neuroscientific circles, psychoanalysis has become a topic of renewed interest, whose future has appeared to be in need of defending. Publications appearing as early as the mid-1980s have sought either tacitly or quite openly to resuscitate and defend the potential legitimacy of psychoanalytic theory and practice. 1 Neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, a longtime participant in this discussion (and recipient of the 2000 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Program in Literature at Duke University. I am grateful to organizers and participants at these events as well as to the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for their comments. I am especially grateful to a small group of scholars and faculty at Wesleyan University who read and offered some of the first and most encouraging feedback on the earliest draft of this paper. The completion of this article was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 1. Some examples include Arnold M. Cooper, "Will Neurobiology Influence Psychoanalysis?"

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences , 2022

Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth cent... more Prompted by scholarship which has proposed that Western selfhood beginning in the nineteenth century was largely defined as a stable and static form of selfidentity, this chapter turns to the late writings and lectures of Michel Foucault and his account of "spirituality," or the ethical practices of conversion and transformation. While Foucault posits that spirituality was a hallmark of ancient ethical traditions, he proposes nonetheless that vestiges of a self-transformative ethics continue to be evident in two particular post-eighteenth-century doctrines of thoughtnamely, Marxism and psychoanalysis, which tacitly espoused a political and medical form of spirituality, respectively. This chapter considers the modern perseverance of the notion of spirituality in the context of radical political and medical doctrines.

Modern Intellectual History, 2019

In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between hist... more In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it. The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.

In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos an... more In 'Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn', eds. Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Routledge, 2016).

In 'Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject', eds. David Bates and Nima ... more In 'Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject', eds. David Bates and Nima Bassiri (Fordham 2016).

http://somatosphere.net/commonplaces

Critical Inquiry 40:1 (83-108), 2013

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

This article reexamines the controversial doctrine of the pineal gland in Cartesian psychophysiol... more This article reexamines the controversial doctrine of the pineal gland in Cartesian psychophysiology. It argues initially that Descartes' combined metaphysics and natural philosophy yield a distinctly human subject who is rational, willful, but also a living and embodied being in the world, formed in the union and through the dynamics of the interaction between the soul and the body. However, Descartes only identified one site at which this union was staged: the brain, and more precisely, the pineal gland, the small bulb of nervous tissue at the brain's center. The pineal gland was charged with the incredible task of ensuring the interactive mutuality between the soul and body, while also maintaining the necessary ontological incommensurability between them. This article reconsiders the theoretical obligations placed on the pineal gland as the site of the soul-body union, and looks at how the gland was consequently forced to adopt a very precarious ontological status. The article ultimately questions how successfully the Cartesian human could be localized in the pineal gland, while briefly considering the broader historical consequences of the ensuing equivalence of the self and brain.

This years Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art will take place in Los Angeles hosted by Otis College... more This years Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art will take place in Los Angeles hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in association with MA Politics and Aesthetics at California Institute of the Arts. The final faculty list consists of Founding Director Warren Neidich, Co-director Barry Schwabsky, Alva Noë, Andrew Culp, Arne De Boever, Benjamin H. Bratton, Bruce Wexler, Candice Lin, Ed Finn, Eleanor Kaufman, Florencia Portocarrero, Graham Harman, Hamza Walker, Jason Smith, Jennifer Teets, Johanna Drucker, John C. Welchman, Juli Carson, Mary Kelly, Kenneth Reinhard, N. Katherine Hayles, Nima Bassiri, Renee Petropoulos, Reza Negarestani, Sanford Kwinter, and Suparna Choudhury.