The Knot of the Soul

Stefania Pandolfo’s work centers on subjectivity, imagination, memory and the experience of madness, with a focus on the Maghreb and Islam, and in conversation with psychoanalysis and Islamic thought. In recent years she has reflected on forms of the subject and ethics at the interface of psychical, political, and religious processes and discourses, in the confrontation with illness and social crisis—including the question of “Burning,” which is how migrancy is conceived of on the other side of the Mediterranean—and in the context of psychiatric hospital care and Islamic healing of the “maladies of the soul.” She is interested in the potentiality and political impasses of psychoanalysis today, as a practice of the unconscious, and in the insight that can be drawn from its encounter with forms and conceptualizations of alterity in other traditions of the psyche and the soul.

Professor Pandolfo is the author of Knot of the Soul. Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1997), and with Ann Lovell, Veena Das, and Sandra Laugier, Face aux désastres: Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (Paris: Editions d’Ithaque, 2013).