In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, CommunitiesJoy James
£ 15.99
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities
Joy James
Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live.
Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
978-1-7398431-0-6
1 b&w illustration
21.6 x 13.9 cm
364 pp.
Paperback
December 2022
About the author
The political theorist Joy James teaches at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The New Abolitionists (SUNY Press, 2005) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), James is also author of Resisting State Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Transcending the Talented Tenth (Routledge, 1997), Seeking the Beloved Community (SUNY Press, 2013), New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner (Common Notions, 2023), and the forthcoming Contextualizing Angela Davis.
Endorsements (3)
To take the path of Revolutionary Love is to take a risk. It means walking the razor’s edge. This is not a politics of the heart, not a politics of charity. No need for self-love or self-pity—it’s enough to know where you stand, to embody that moment ‘just before hate’ and, with the energy of despair, to ward off the worst.
Houria Bouteldja
Rooted in community-activism and the ways in which ‘history is always instructive’, Joy James is clear that she is ‘always thinking about and in the community.’ In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love is a beautiful and effective articulation and representation of those commitments.
Kathryn Sophia Belle
Rich, rigorous, poetic, and accessible, this is a book I will return to again and again for guidance and affirmation, a reminder of the interconnectedness of all who resist oppression, of all who despair, of all who live for Revolutionary Love.
Dominique: The Case of an AdolescentFrançoise Doltotrans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
£ 13.99
Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent
Françoise Dolto
trans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst.
Jamieson Webster
While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study of French society in the 1960s.
Foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz.
978-1-7395161-9-2
13 b&w illustrations
21.6 x 13.9 cm
264 pp.
Paperback
July 2025
About the author
Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.
Photo: Alécio de Andrade
About the translators (3)
Ivan Kats (1926–2008), naturalised American, worked as a translator, editor, teacher, publisher and journalist in France and the United States. He graduated with an MA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1969. In 1970 he founded the Obor Foundation, dedicated to the publication and dissemination of books to book-poor countries, which he directed until his retirement in 1996.
Lionel Bailly is a practising psychoanalyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale, an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, he is honorary professor at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He led the Sainte-Anne Hospital Centre’s biopsychopathology unit before moving to London in 2000. Bailly is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009).
Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalyst (member, British Psychoanalytical Society) and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She translated Françoise Dolto’s The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge 2022) and has edited two books on Lacanian theory. She works in the NHS and in private practice, and teaches and supervises psychodynamic/psychoanalytic practitioners.