Without Mastery

Sarah Wood is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer. She is author of Derrida’s Writing and Difference (2009) and Robert Browning: A Literary Life (2001), as well as editor of a number of theory journal special issues such as Home and Family (1995), Hotel Psychoanalysis (2004), Deconstruction and Poetry (2011) and Ext: Writing Extinction (2019). She has given keynotes, symposium papers and published numerous essays on literature, criticism, theory, philosophy and culture, engaging with the writings of Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Freud, Fred Moten and many others to discern and transmit radical practices of writing and reading. She alighted from academia in 2018 as Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent.

• Through the Reader; Inventing the Reader; Try Thinking As If Perhaps; A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction; Close to the Earth; Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth; Edit; Reading Matters; Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing); Nightshift; Too Late To Begin?

From the first word that isn’t a beginning word to the last word that isn’t a concluding word Sarah Wood’s gripping text journeys us through ourselves in our time. Forcing us beyond a puffed-up and thin-skinned narcissism that supposes human beings the admirable centre of everything, and finding ourselves again, uncleansed, as a force that distinguishes itself, above all, in destructiveness. This is an (un)timely work of a well versed (in)sister. It is serious without being pious, and critical without being aloof. It is writing worth reading for.