A lecture by Felix Bernstein and psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman at our offices in the Westin Bonaventure on February, 28th 2025.

In Not for Nothing, Bernstein & Seltman think through new ways to break into old conundrums by posing impossible questions. Can we mourn the loss of an object we never had? We don’t know. But in the meantime we can go after its avatars, invent scales and meters to size it up, trace its contours, and hallucinate its textures. We welcome the fabrication of new defenses, perversions, and compromises — to seize upon our most cherished and obscene objects.

Felix Bernstein stages psychofictional scenes as lectures, essays, satire, and melodrama, using errant bodies of imagery and discourse to bore holes through crusty ideals. He is the author of Burn Book (Nightboat, 2016) and Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry (Insert Blanc Press, 2015), which the New York Times noted for its “blistering cultural criticism.” His writing has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Poetry Magazine, Spike Arts Magazine, Bomb, Mousse, May Revue, Bookforum and Texte Zur Kunst.

Cassandra Seltman is a psychoanalyst and writer in New York City. She teaches at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and in the master’s program at Hunter College. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Flash Art, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, and May Revue.