Psychoanalysis and Forms of the Political
VIII Meeting of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
November 23-27, 2015
University of São Paulo
Federal University of Minas Gerais
Inhotim Center of Contemporary Art
Call for papers
Deadline for submissions:
September 1, 2015
Abstracts for proposed papers should be sent to
sipp-issp@yahoo.com
Politics does not only allow itself to be thought as a structured reflection about forms of collective identity in their ostensible autonomy. If psychoanalysis has repercussions for political thought, this is to the extent that it leads us to a new conception of conflict, of difference, and of singularity, that has implications for the economy of relations between the subject and society. For, from its origin, psychoanalysis has never been restricted to being a clinic of mental suffering. Freudian social theory already contained elements that were not entirely clarified regarding the libidinal economy of the political experience of modern societies. Whether in its pursuit of unveiling the drive dynamics of power and the nature of nature of the identifications that chain us to authority or through its treatment of the political source of the transferential relation, whether in its attentiveness to the fantasies securing social cohesion as well as the discontents that are produced as a byproduct of the process of civilization, psychoanalysis has always elucidated the necessity of thinking the subject while taking account of the social dimension of suffering and the expectations of social creation. Thus, this path opened up by Freud will be a constant reference in the philosophical experience that has followed from it. The Frankfurt school’s reflections regarding the drive structure of political regression, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of the relationship between desire and capitalism, Lyotard’s account of libidinal economy, as well as Michel Foucault’s attention to the disciplinary apparatuses of our era and the consolidation of neoliberal biopolitics, cannot be understood without taking into account the field inaugurated by Freudian thought, despite the sometimes conflicted—although no less decisive—relationships that these authors maintained to psychoanalysis.
Politics of psychoanalysis
In this respect, a colloquium that proposes to discuss “Psychoanalysis and the Forms of the Political” leads us necessarily to the theme of the intrinsic character of the politics of psychoanalysis. And at the same time, towards areclaiming of the current state of questions relating to the power dynamics examined by psychoanalytic production, as well as towards a reflection opened up by the sectors of contemporary political philosophy based on the repercussions of psychoanalytic problematics present in the works of Laclau, J. Butler, Badiou, Lefort, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth, among others. Doubtless, this broad scope obliges us to integrate the “psychoanalysis of power” with archeological studies and critiques of institutions, discourses, and ideologies. Its interfaces and repercussions on the diversity of fields, experiences and cultural and social apparatuses are still awaiting a philosophical critique capable of clarifying them For the effects and challenges of analytic discourse (as it appears) in the domain of the different modalities of the expression of the political in current times have not yet been linked, in our present moment, to the theoretical rigor, the clinical experience, and the institutional history of psychoanalysis. What’s more, this discussion leads us to reassess the meaning of several moments in which psychoanalytic production took up the question of politics. A special importance must be granted to Freud’s construction of the category of discontent and its repercussions on reflections relating to social critique as well as to its contributions to the constructions of awareness of the specificity of the forms of suffering in the twentieth century. Moreover, it is important to remember
that the perspective opened up by psychoanalysis is not limited to its critical or prophylactic dimension. At many moments, psychoanalysis has unleashed reflections about the potentiality for thinking about renewed forms of the political and its links. Reflections on groups in Lacan and Bion, the question of a stateless collective identity in Freud, sexual politics in Reich, all of these moments attest to this capacity of psychoanalysis to confront the problem of the forms of relationships that comprise the political. Perhaps we currently find ourselves in a moment in which
philosophically oriented social critique can finally allow itself to enter into conversation with psychoanalysis. Since the 1950s, social philosophy has needed to confront reflection about the nature of capitalism and its systems of rationality. Among the many of those moments in which reason and social critique were articulated together, psychoanalysis was called in, either as providing support for this critique or to be accused of being situated as yet one more disciplinary mode for the perpetuation of the hegemonic forms of life within capitalism. This has always produced a difficult dialogue between psychoanalysis and social philosophy that can now be recovered at another level.
Politics and Aesthetics
And last but not least, it is also up to us to explore the aesthetic dimension of psychoanalytic research, for the reflection on form brings us to the point where politics and art come together. Aesthetic invention, as both idea and experience, is strongly linked to the domain of the political, whether as a way of celebrating its conquests or as a means for critiquing its tendencies, effects, and configurations. Aesthetic form and political form are not indifferent to one another, but have a particular capacity of induction, such that desire et language, transformations of desire and transformations of language combine and cross each other as in a chiasmus. Thus a reflection on psychoanalysis and the forms of the political should not neglect the political force of psychoanalytic texts about aesthetic production.
Singularity and Difference
This being so, the objective of this meeting concerns the discussion of the current state of psychoanalysis with attention to its reflection on forms of the political, while taking into account the distinctive element that it brings at the level of political organizations. The consideration of aesthetic invention will be the means by which we will try to show how psychoanalysis includes, in an effective way, the singularity at the center of political thought.
Proposed Themes:
- Freud’s sociological texts and their current status
- Modernity and theologico-political power
- Collective identity as a problem. Historical, juridical and social processes of recognition and emancipation of new identity configurations: sexualities, transnationalities, muti-parentalities
- Social Normativity and Discontent
- The rise of biopolitical practices and the imperalism of the evaluative protocols in the domain of the politics of mental health
- Capitalism and its discontents.
- The normative effects of scientific discourse and the resulting segrationalism in itsalliance with capitalist discourse.
- Neoliberalism, its disciplinary and controlling structures.
- The invention of the neoliberal subject and its psychic economy.
- The new neoliberal economy of suffering.
- Psychoanalysis and the fantasmatic nature of authority
- The political body and its phantasms
- The real and revolution
- The critique of the drive vicissitudes of capitalism and the dynamic of subjectification.
- Political subject and event
- Language and Politics
- Place and effects of psychoanalytic discourse at the level of public politics.
The creation of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (ISPP) answers to a number of requirements that are mutually dependent : recognizing the convergence of research that started independently in different places not only at the occasion of conferences in Brazil, England, France, the Netherlands and the United States, but also through exchanges that were linked to joint PhD-projects that illustrate in different ways the intellectual fecundity that characterizes this field. The society wants to bring together practising psychoanalysts that are also philosophers – because of their previous education or because of their professional activities – and philosophers that find in the problematics that were initiated by Sigmund Freud and his successors a possible source for the renewal of contemporary thinking.
The international confrontation of problematics in this field showed us for more than ten years that certain countries - that means certain intellectual contexts - initiated already very early on forms and methods that allow to put into perspective a great number of varying relations between psychoanalysis and philosophy and, which is not simply equivalent, between philosophy and psychoanalysis. Similarly in some countries there exist intense relations between psychoanalytic clinical practice, academic research and medical practice. Hence, it is through the content of certain themes that were developed at the occasion of punctual meetings and conferences that we started to recognize the legitimacy and necessity of founding a more coherent organization that would support our field of research.
The ISPP aims at developing and facilitating academic exchanges of PhD-students and post-doctoral researchers and it wants to benefit from the confrontation of problematics that becomes possible because of the fact that it’s interlocutors are based in very different places such as Sao Paolo, Tokyo and Nijmegen, Leuven, New York, Mexico and Paris. This is not just an external circumstance, but an indication of the fact that the history of our contemporary societies shapes the different relations between psychoanalysis and philosophy from within. The ISPP is a bi-lingual society (English-French) that is also open to other languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese.
www.sipp-ispp.org