Psychoanalysis—a cultural science born in Vienna—is often miscategorized as »bourgeois science«, but its methodology, aim, and intention all point to its origins as a form of »folk knowledge,« insofar as its wisdom comes directly from the expressions and acts of everyday persons in Vienna. With the help of psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Willy Apollon, this project mobilizes a renewed understanding of Freud’s critique of the bourgeois subject to link psychoanalysis to methodologies critical of normative understandings of both humanism and its subject, such as recent work and methods in Black Studies. Through a critique of the metaphorical figure of the »crossroad« as it has been deployed in Critical Philosophy since Kant, this work stays with and meditates on various crossroads in this genealogical critique of the subject of Wissenschaft and its deployment of Bildung.

Jacob Reimer is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. His research interests include psychoanalysis, comparative modernisms, continental philosophy, Jewish Studies, and Black Studies. Within his research, Jacob employs psychoanalytic methodology to reinvestigate the debates and critiques of the subject as they existed in both German-speaking modernity and within various ethnic groups in the United States––most notably within Black Studies. Jacob was most recently the Critical Theory Emphasis graduate representative at UC Irvine. Prior to his studies at UC Irvine, Jacob received a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MA in Kulturwissenschaft from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where his thesis focused on the play, humor, and its relationship to the death drive in the figura of the child in Freud’s work. Alongside working as an instructor at UC Irvine, Jacob has also begun a 5-year psychoanalytic training at GIFRIC in Quebec, City.