Stubborn Shadows

A plea for a measure of opacity: Psychoanalysis in an age of transparency Annual Birkbeck Counselling Association Lecture December 2018

“…But one of the hidden aims of contemporary transparency practices, as Simek (2015) points out, is precisely to insist on a mode of disclosure that does conclude; that does indeed 'wear its meaning on its sleeve'; a meaning whose honesty and integrity is so self-evident that it appears to require no interpretation at all. So when Glissant makes a trenchant claim for what he calls 'the right to opacity', I think he is claiming the right to oppose these reductive, homogenizing discourses of transparency by insisting on slow, critical and imaginative readings that respect, sustain and foster the fundamental unknowability of the self and others: 'I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me' says Glissant (1997) 'without reproach for my opacity for him ' (p. 193).…”