Whatever else they do, conversion experiences always also smuggle in the old in the guise of the new (how do you keep the past alive? By making it new).

So we may need to think of conversion also as conservation; as the conservation that has to be denied.

why might we want to be converted, to neoliberal reason, or to anything else? Why might that be our preferred form of change, or of changing things?

It is a reconfiguring rather than a radical transformation. Indeed, conversion is in the service of sustaining the very thing that is supposedly being replaced.

If we can’t convert our sexuality, what can we do with or about it? (Freud, as we shall see, did believe that we could convert our sexual desire into all sorts of other things: but with a view to sustaining our pleasure.)

Conversion, that is to say – in its psychoanalytic version – is a way of not having to change. It is the way the individual sustains the desires that sustain her. So, on the Freudian model, one of the reasons we are so fearful of the conversions to radical Islam – or of any other religious or cultic conversions – is not because they turn people

‘The conversion that Socrates is calling for in Book VII of The Republic is not one of faith,’ the philosopher Nancy Bauer writes in an essay, On Philosophical Authority: It is a turning from mindlessness to thoughtfulness, from dogmatism to self-scrutiny, from habit to deliberateness. To become invested in this kind of conversion is not to adopt a

How do you know whether the convert is acting, or whether his public performance is consistent with his private life? Symptoms are gestures, and gestures are always gesturing at something, or someone. Desiring, in the Freudian story, requires acting.

a kind of contemporary conversion, that is undoing the possibility of politics, which she thinks of as democratic politics and refers to as ‘the sovereignty of the people’. There has been what she calls ‘the conversion of political processes, subjects, categories, and principles to economic ones’; and now that speech has become, as a consequence of