e v e n t s
PSA<>POL
INTERVIEWS,
PANELS & BIOS
KEYNOTE INTERVIEW:
SILVIA LIPPI
w/ CHRIS CHAMBERLIN
KEYNOTE INTERVIEW:
ERIC SANTNER
w/ JASON ROYAL
PANELS
FOUNDING MYTHS
This panel will explore myths of foundation and the foundations of political thought and action in the register of myth. What is a myth? What is the relationship between myth, ideology, fantasy, and delusion? Beginning with Freud’s myth of the primal father and the patriarchal-fraternal organization of society, we will discuss the myth’s diagnostic/ descriptive effects as well as its effects on clinical and political praxis. If Freud’s myth elucidated the patriarchal-fraternal social link, are there other myths that might allow for the elaboration of sororal or other new forms of social organization? What are the ethics of myth-making? Are these ethics different from the ethics of living, the bearing out of myth’s endless variants?
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MATTHEW OYER (moderator)
NATHAN GORELICK
SILVIA LIPPI
FRED MOTEN
DAVID PAVÓN-CUÉLLAR​
THE POLITICS OF
SELF-AUTHORIZATION
This roundtable will ask what forms of collectivity make possible, and are made possible by, the end of analysis. What does an analyst’s self-authorization have to do with the social link? How does the end of analysis convert something of the collective? How can we think about the institutionalization of psychoanalysis alongside these questions, and what do they have to do with politics more broadly?​
EMMA LIEBER (moderator)
MARISA BERWALD
FERNANDO CASTRILLÓN
JORDAN OSSERMAN​​
FASCISM &
THE REPUDIATION
OF FEMININITY
Fascism is intertwined with the history of psychoanalysis and its diaspora, and psychoanalytic scholarship has attempted to account for the dynamics of fascist leadership and its followers. In the present-day U.S. context, however, this turn to psychoanalytic concepts to explain the rise of Trump and the extreme right has risked psychologizing the material and political dimensions.
This panel will begin with Freud’s naming of the “great riddle of sex,” the “repudiation of femininity,” to explore the relationship between collective and singular fascist fantasies and the fascination with and violent disciplining of sexual and gender differences. With the rise of the alt-right in the U.S., how can analysts speak to the aesthetic and libidinal attraction to fascist ideology, and what are the limits to applying theory to the political? What is it about gender and sex that seduce contemporary agitators toward a misogynistic and transphobic culture that often transmits itself through humor, online memes, and ironic performance? ​
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LOREN DENT (moderator)
DAGMAR HERZOG
SOPHIE LEWIS
AVGI SAKETOPOULOU​​
PSYCHOANALYSIS'
PALESTINE PROBLEM
Drawing from Lacan's essay on logical time and three brief clinical vignettes, Safia Albaiti will examine the impossible return of the Syrian revolution and the fall of the Assad regime in winter 2024, during Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and a global fascist deadlock. Within this very late recovery of Arab speech and political subjectivity, amidst a collapse of speech and political subjectivity in the West, she will question and critique the distance of the lozenge between politics and psychoanalysis.
​Roula Hajjar will further trouble Mladen Dolar’s conclusions about the threshold beyond which psychoanalysis does not traverse, by engaging the work of Nasser Aburahme on Palestinian refusal: political and politicizing acts that keep the Zionist settler colonial project from closure and progression into settler futurity. Such acts expose the always-unfinished work of repression and bring the colonized, now-liberated, subject to a Fanonian return to the past, in order to creatively orient to the future. What can Palestine say about Psychoanalysis’ use to the colonized subject? Can Psychoanalysis make use of interventions that trouble the threshold without ceasing to be psychoanalysis? ​
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Jordan Dunn will explore the question of a Jewish identity that is not founded on the project of Zionism.
SAFIA ALBAITI
JORDAN DUNN
ROULA HAJJAR