Andrew Asibong

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Andrew Asibong is a psycho-cultural theorist and psychotherapist, a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists, registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council. He was, until 2019, Reader in Film and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where he was also co-founder and co-director of Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC). His research is concerned with the emotional and political metamorphoses of subjectivity, kinship and community, particularly in relation to the aesthetic object and the moving image. He is especially interested in blankness and splitting as different responses to trauma, and draws on pseudo-fantastical or "weird" films and fictions, psychoanalytic theory and practice, and the ethics and politics of class, ‘race’, gender and stigma in his attempt to build a dynamic theory and practice of integrated psychosocial transformation. He has published articles on the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Gregg Araki, Jean Cocteau, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Georges Franju, François Ozon and Alain Resnais and on the writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq, Mohammed Dib, Hervé Guibert and (especially) Marie NDiaye. He is the author of François Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008, second edition 2016) and Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool University Press, 2013), and is editor of Sanity, Madness and the Family: A Retrospective (Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2018); co-editor of Marie NDiaye: l’étrangeté à l'œuvre (Septentrion, 2009); and co-editor of Flaubert, Beckett, NDiaye: The Aesthetics, Emotions and Politics of Failure (Brill, 2017). His debut novel Mameluke Bath was published by Open Books in the autumn of 2013. His new book, at the intersection of psychoanalysis, auto-ethnography, and screen media audience studies, is entitled Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me. It was published by Routledge in its "Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture" series in autumn 2021.

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Books by Andrew Asibong

Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me

Post-Traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me, 2021

This book explores how experiences of traumatic isolation and neglect – in childhood and in adult... more This book explores how experiences of traumatic isolation and neglect – in childhood and in adulthood, and at both the family and the state level – may create a desire in us to be parented by certain kinds of screen media that we unconsciously believe may be "watching over" us when nothing else seems to be. Andrew Asibong explores how viewers make psychical use of eerily moving images, observed in film and television and later taken into an already traumatised mind, in order to facilitate some form of reparation for a stolen experience of caregiving. It explores the possibility of a media-based "working through" of both the general traumas of early environmental failure and the particular traumas of viewers racialised as Black, eventually asking how politicised film groups in the age of Black Lives Matter might both heal from a troubled past and prepare for an uncertain future through the spontaneous discussion – in the here and now – of enlivening images of potentially deadly vulnerability.

Flaubert, Beckett, NDiaye: The Aesthetics, Emotions and Politics of Failure

Sanity, Madness and the Family by R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson - A Retrospective

Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2018

http://www.psychosocial-studies-association.org/volume-11-issue-1-april-2018/

Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition

This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the fiction and theatre of Ma... more This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the fiction and theatre of Marie NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt (2009), the Prix Femina (2001), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiaye’s world lurks an indefinable ‘blankness’ which makes it impossible for the reader to decode characters or narratives at the level of event or psychology. NDiaye’s texts explore social stigmata and familial disintegration with a violence unmatched by any of her contemporaries, but in doing so they remain as weirdly affectless and ‘unrecognizable’ as their dissociated protagonists. Considering each of NDiaye’s works in chronological order (including her theatre and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiaye’s portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides a provocative and original psychosocial framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hyper-French and hybrid cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern – and reluctantly postcolonial – ‘blank arts’.

Andrew Asibong

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