Beyond Binoculars
An interview with Nuar Alsadir
Rhoda Feng
Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press, 2022) is nominally about laughter and the ways that the Duchenne variant, the spontaneous outburst, unshells people’s pretenses. Yet it encompasses so much more. Practically every page is studded with sharp-as-a-tack insights about a motley of topics that a list poorly hints at: professional mourners; clown school and corpsing; the modernist dances of Merce Cunningham; the ignominious acts of former president Trump; the wisdom that comes from Alsadir’s daughters (to be beautiful is to be “most self”); her antipathy for adjectives; and much more. As such a list suggests, the book can’t be canalized into a single genre. A leitmotif that runs through the work is “binocular rivalry,” or the tendency to compartmentalize. Normally, we expend a fair amount of energy splitting things that are incongruous off from one another, but as soon as we let go of that impulse, the energy gets rerouted into something that’s experienced as jouissance, which “shits on the sticky trap of practical reason,” as Alsadir writes. Animal Joy is that rare work that suspends binocular rivalry in favor of a more supple, kaleidoscopic vision. (Radial, a close anagram for Alsadir, is another way of putting it.) One of the considerable pleasures of reading her book is in following the switchback movements of her prose as it zigs and zags in any number of surprising directions. It’s the book that I found myself returning to most often last year, either deliberately, seeking out reminders of what carefully sculpted language can do, or unwittingly, my mind arrowing from minor domestic crises—the sight of mice droppings, sharing a wall with a loud neighbor—back to her book’s many “tiny revolutions.” Trained as a psychoanalyst, Alsadir is also the author of two poetry collections, More Shadow Than Bird (Salt, 2012) and Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017). When I spoke with her over Zoom, she proved as thoughtful in conversation as in her writing, choosing her words with care, inviting me to share my thoughts on humor, and briefly introducing me to her dog, who at one point seemed to intuit that Alsadir was not in analyst mode and leaped up onto the couch to join her. The below transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The most useful thing is trusting the mind and believing that there’s meaning that can be unveiled rather than always trying to make meaning.
Q: One connection between jokes and dreams is that they get us to perceive two incongruous things, which is a theory of humor that goes all the way back to Aristotle. You note that for Freud “dream images work through condensation and displacement,” which is also how jokes often work. Yet a joke can hit its mark, whereas dreams are often nebulous and not very interesting to other people. Is a dream a joke that hasn’t landed?
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud talks about how “joke-work” is analogous to “dream-work.” What he goes into specifically is the way that in dreams, the manifest content—what you see in the dream, say a horse—gets detached from the latent content, or the meaning that’s attached to it. If the latent content is distressing in any way, it only passes the censor if it’s hidden. Freud uses that model of how dreams work as the model for how many unconscious processes work. The point of a dream is to keep you asleep; the physiological aim is restoration. The censor is trying to keep everything out of the dream that could disturb you. A joke allows aggression to be expressed, but in a way that is disguised to keep social dynamics and relationships functioning on autopilot tracks. The way it does so is by repressing the distressing affect and having what goes into the joke seem neutral, even though, if it missed its mark, it would clearly be hostile. That’s where you get that expression, “Can’t you take a joke?” Of course, when somebody doesn’t take a joke, it’s usually because it’s not really a joke—it’s hostility that is too large for the joke’s envelope. And so, the person who calls it out is then pushed back into the structure that has failed with the comment “can’t you take a joke,” which is, you know, accept this as a kind of communication that it really isn’t so we can all go back to sleep.
Q: Just as there are different kinds of jokes or not-jokes, there are different kinds of laughter. I’m thinking especially of Samuel Beckett’s description of three kinds of laughter in his novel Watt: the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. “The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. The mirthless laugh is ... the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs […] at that which is unhappy.”
I love that you bring that in because the model scientists use of Duchenne and non-Duchenne laughter is very binary. In reality, laughter doesn't simply fit into one category or another because you can laugh spontaneously at something that's funny and isn't necessarily intellectual. Also, what’s interesting about curating laughter, as people who hire professional laughers do, is that they come to understand that laugh sounds carry certain communications. It's not just the general communication of laughter for its duration in a moment of space and time that transmits meaning, but also the individual laugh sounds within the laughter, the way we have words within speech. There is also the music, which carries meaning which is nonverbal; maybe laughs are closer to music in that way.
Q: Many sections in the book relay your experience in clown school. You write, “Both psychoanalysis and the art of clowning—though in radically different ways—create a path toward the unconscious, making it easier to access the unsocialized self.” What do you make of the relationship between performance and psychoanalysis? One of the more popular ideas about psychoanalysis is that, as an analyst, you’re supposed to be hidden. But your book is venturesome in so many ways and seems to suggest that analysis and performance are not so opposed.
I think the idea that an analyst is not supposed to reveal much about themselves is complicated for a few reasons. One is that we’re always revealing a lot about ourselves, even if it isn’t factual. Just by being physically present, you’re revealing a lot about yourself, or by the way your mind moves. Much of what I do as an analyst involves using myself as my instrument, so I can’t really separate from myself when I’m doing analytic work. I think that when I work best, I’m bringing myself fully to the process. I have to be most myself to do it well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean revealing facts about my life or giving my opinions. Sometimes I even think that my analysands know me as well, if not better than, people who know me in the world.
Q: You’ve mentioned in interviews that you wrote this book after you lost much of your material on another computer that wasn’t backed up. Was it liberating to have to start from scratch?
It was a gift, though at the time it was obviously stressful. I’d written sections of the book, especially the kind of work one does when one is reading someone else’s idea and trying to incorporate it into one’s own thinking. A lot of what I had [on the old computer] was more classically subject based or research based and might have produced a more technical nonfiction book. After I lost the material, I was able to revisit it without actually writing out other people’s ideas, but just bringing them in as you would when speaking to a friend. I wanted the book to be a more creative book with my first-person presence inside of it. I was able to shift the entire project. I don’t know that I would have done that if I hadn’t lost the material. Sometimes I have a reluctance to throw out work if I’ve put a lot into it, but I think I’ve developed a new approach to writing by losing the earlier work. Although I now understand I didn’t really lose the work: I lost the writing, but I was able to use the work in a new way, in new writing.
Q: Rather than being inset with chapter headings, your book is comprised of cascading notes, anecdotes, aphoristic statements. The section breaks are marked by choreography symbols, which I’m totally unfamiliar with. You’ve said that you think of this book as “choreographed rather than organized.” Can you elaborate?
They symbols are called labanotation, named after the choreographer [Rudolf von] Laban. Essentially what I was trying to do was to think about the way in which the mind was moving between sections and to graft that onto the body and then choose the symbol that represented that movement. It’s fitting that you asked this question after the question about losing the book—the work towards the book—because when I was thinking about it more as a creative project, one of the things I was thinking about was how it might be more like a dance, something the audience is willing to enjoy for the performance without worrying about meaning. The plot of dance, according to Bronislava Nijinska, Nijinsky’s sister, is movement. I used to be a dancer, and one of the approaches I wanted to experiment with was to both deliver meaning and have the book be an artistic project that one could approach bodily, as one would a dance or an art form. Could those two things come together? I already knew from my analytic work that you can know someone intimately by knowing how their mind moves. Couldn’t that apply to other kinds of knowledge as well? I love ideas. Ideas for me are evocative and they move me the way poetry moves me. Earlier in my life, at times, I felt a little embarrassed by my love of ideas and the nerdiness and the pleasure I get from ideas—but with this book I wanted to free myself to go into that completely and own it. I thought bringing together those different forms would give me a way of doing that without talking about doing it, enacting rather than taking as my subject the attempt.
Q: Did you study dance before becoming a psychoanalyst? How did you choose to become a psychoanalyst?
I studied dance from childhood, but dropped it in college for complicated reasons, having to do with scheduling and the time it took to travel to the classes. I was a neuroscience major in college and premed and didn’t know about psychoanalysis. I knew about psychiatry and had looked into the possibility of becoming a psychiatrist, but what I was exposed to wasn’t interesting to me. And I didn’t want to be a neurologist or another kind of doctor, so I ended up dropping the major near the end of college, majoring in English, writing a thesis and studying creative writing. At that point, I had decided I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t until after I finished college and was moving deeper into the goal of becoming a writer that I started to miss the brain and consciousness and thinking about a lot of what I was thinking about when I was a neuroscience major. I was learning about psychoanalysis more through literary theory, and that eventually led me to study psychoanalysis. I started at the New York Psychoanalytic’s Scholars Program to help me with a project I was writing, but knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to become a clinician.
Q: What has been most useful to you about psychoanalysis as a critical tool?
The most useful thing is trusting the mind and believing that there’s meaning that can be unveiled rather than always trying to make meaning. In an analytic session, it’s when a person says, “I have no idea where I’m going with this,” but they keep going that they land on revelation. It’s the same for me as a writer: if I push my writing beyond my conscious goal and just keep going, having no idea where I’m headed, I usually land somewhere I probably couldn’t have willed myself to go.
Q: Right. You have this great quote from James Baldwin at the end of your book: “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
I’m teaching a nonfiction craft course at NYU in the MFA program called What’s Known Is Dead and I used that Baldwin quotation in the course description. Yesterday, I asked my students yesterday to take a moment and write in their notebooks what they didn’t want anyone to find out or what they wouldn’t want to reveal in their writing. Sometimes it’s owning and exposing, even if only to yourself, what you know you're afraid of revealing that liberates you to discover the thing you don’t know that you don’t want to know (because it’s unconscious, which means it would be impossible to approach directly). It’s hard to move in any direction if you have inhibitions or if there’s forbidden territory. That Baldwin quotation is a good description of the work that I value most. When I read books, I like to feel that the writer is exploring something unknown, that there’s some drive behind that exploration, that there’s a person with that drive, and I’m invited along for the journey.
Q: Speaking of language, you write that adjectives “are the canned laughter of language.” They’re “greasy” and “other-directed”; they “constitute us because they are linked to coded expressions.” Is this aversion to adjectives something you’ve always had, or something you slowly developed through writing poetry?
I think I developed it. Maybe I had an aversion to language that is coded in the sense that when you hear it, you know what you’re supposed to think, as with cliches. Maybe this comes from childhood, my being from an immigrant family with parents who spoke multiple languages. I didn’t always know how that process of indexing worked and wasn’t always part of the interpretive group that knew exactly where to take things. Sometimes when I listened to and thought about the words, I would misinterpret what was meant. I was interpreting what was being said accurately but misinterpreting the coded communication.
Q: In one section, you write about the discomfiting experience of hearing part of your speech at a panel projected back to you at a very high volume. “Once externalized, objectified, a person’s voice ceases to be their own and becomes a component of concrete reality, which perhaps explains why hearing your recorded voice played back can be disturbing.” Do you feel there’s something similar going on when you write a book and send it out into the world? Or is that experience different from spitting into a glass and “drinking your own saliva”?
I think it’s really similar. I quote Slavoj Žižek on drinking your own saliva in my last book, Fourth Person Singular. He says, all day long, we’re swallowing the saliva inside our mouths, but if someone asks you to spit into a glass and drink it, it’s repulsive. Then, as I was doing research for this book, I discovered that Martha Nussbaum said the same thing in 2001. This is my sense of humor; I thought it would be funny to use the example again in this book, but quote Nussbaum because I suspect that Žižek may have taken it from her without citing her, although I never really looked into whether or not that was true. When I used the example in Fourth Person Singular, I described my dog peeing on something and then going back to sniff the spot with pleasure and likened this to the lyric, which, once out in the world in published form, can feel a lot like having to drink your own saliva from a glass. There isn’t often that animalistic pleasure—for me, at least—in encountering my work in the world. It’s more like seeing your own blood—something from your interior in the external world, what some call “the abject.” It can make you queasy at the ontological level.
Q: In the book, you write about the Winnicottian idea of the “True Self” and the “False Self,” which is connected to the idea of, as your daughter put it, the “homemade” and “store-bought.” Do you think that the pandemic—and especially the way that it has forced many of us to communicate virtually—has further entrenched these categories, or allowed people to move more freely between them?
Being on Zoom is obviously very different from being in person. There are layers of communication that can be transmitted in person that are harder or impossible to pick up on Zoom. At the same time, when I see people for sessions in person, they’re coming into my space, where I have control. I’m setting the frame and in power in a way that isn’t the case over Zoom, because people are Zooming in from their own space, a space they’ve chosen to call in from, and it’s equalizing. Their False Selves can relax a bit.
Q: For the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, you write, thinking is “called into existence to cope with thoughts.” Thinking, you write, “occurs as a way of coping with the thoughts that crystallize from frustrated feelings”—what the philosopher Emil Cioran called “thwarted sensations.” What is the difference between thinking and knowing, or thought and knowledge?
Bion’s idea is basically that if you’re feeling satisfied, e.g., if the breast or bottle appears and the milk flows, you are free to feel and there’s no need to think. The need to think arises as a way of coping with the recognition, which he calls the thought, that your feeling has been thwarted. This makes me think about the intellectual life. Is there some way in which being an intellectual is a way of coping with thwarted sensations or feelings? What would happen if, during a seminar, or after a seminar, everyone went dancing? When I was a child, I went to a school that was somewhat experimental. In first through third grades, I was in one huge classroom with designated areas where we’d do math or language arts, and in the middle would be places where we could do gymnastics, run around, or enlist other parts of our being on whim. You didn’t have to separate physical activity from intellectual work; they came together in one open space, which was like a loft space with no walls. We understood what the different areas were designated for without physical barriers. Maybe in contemporary life we wouldn’t separate thought and feeling and thinking so much if they weren’t separated in the way our lives are organized—as with ontological design, the idea that we design our world and our world, in turn, designs us. Another advantage to quarantine was that things were able to come together a bit more—you could exercise while listening to a seminar, be physical while doing intellectual work. You didn’t have to present yourself as being at work in a designated way.
Q: I’m also interested in the converse of that. Where do you think thoughtlessness comes from? Would someone like Donald Trump, whom you write about in your book, be an avatar of nonthinking? Or perhaps, to borrow a punchy phrase from Hannah Arendt, the “impotence of bigness”?
We’d have to think of a specific example with Trump, but I wonder whether he would be an example of nonthinking or nonfeeling? One thing I write about in the book is that, in the same way that you have Duchenne laughter and non-Duchenne laughter—where the former is body driven and the latter is intellect driven, social—I think there’s a similar distinction with empathy. There’s Duchenne-driven empathy, where your mirror neurons are firing, you feel someone else's feeling inside yourself as though it were your own, and there’s intellect-driven empathy, where you think, “Oh, that’s too bad,” or you have to put yourself in another person’s shoes in order to understand their position. But have you displaced them and bumped them out of their shoes so that you can take their place in order for you to empathize? Do you have to be in those shoes for it to be a position that you feel into? I think it would be really helpful if politicians were able to have more Duchenne experiences in relation to other people’s positions that would expand their subject positions as opposed to having to colonize someone else’s position in order to relate to it.
Q: Maybe we should send them to clown school, since that seems to have worked out well in your case. Have you found other techniques or other spaces where you’re able to access a Duchenne state of being?
With poetry, I feel tapped into that sense of being moved and expanding my subject position. Good art does that, too. Sometimes in an analytic session, something happens between the analyst and the analysand that is expansive. I’ve felt that as an analyst and also in my own analysis as the analysand.
Q: Your book ends with a “shrewdness of thinkers and feelers,” which lists books, films, essays, letters, radio broadcasts that have inspired your thinking. What are you reading now?
If I reach right next to me, next week, I’m teaching Édouard Louis’s History of Violence and I just started Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. I read or reread over winter break many different creative nonfiction books to try to figure out what I wanted to teach in my course. I’ve mostly been reading books that figure something out in the course of being written. They’re not idea driven or argument driven or plot driven or thesis driven, but exploratory and follow the mind free associatively.