Belonging and its Discontents

"I am interested in the relations between individuals and collectives: in how we inhabit the groups we are part of, the communities we identify with, and through these identifications become who we are; in how we are forced and/or choose to belong, and in what the power-desire knots of belonging do to us. This lecture is about my own difficult belonging in the territory I was born in: Israel-Palestine. The difficulty was there from the start, but of late it has evolved into an identity crisis. The state of exception that Walter Benjamin speaks of has taken over. The middle-east is engulfed in cruel wars of extinction and many of us feel lost: who are we, who are our people? I hope we could think together about the life and death paradoxes of belonging, and how we might think beyond the forms of belonging and collective identification that brought us here."
(Eyal Rozmarin)

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph. D, is a psychoanalyst and writer. He was born in Israel-Palestine and now lives in New York. He writes at the intersection of the psychological and the social-political, about subjects, collectives, and the forces that pull them together and apart. He is Co-Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Rozmarin teaches at the White Institute and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. His upcoming book is titled: Belonging and its Discontents.