Psychoanalysis as Political Theory: Exigent Sadism and Libidinal Divestment

RSVP HERE. 

This presentation fleshes out some distinctively psychoanalytic offerings to political theorizing. To do so, it challenges a psychoanalytic concept – reparation – that has become highly valued and ostensibly “innocent” outside psychoanalysis. Repair is limited and limiting, Avgi Saketopoulou argues, because it is de-sexualized. Reparation, thus, too often works to bind us to relationships – personal, social, and institutional – that harm us. Enthralled by dialogue, however stale or non-dialogic it may be, the reparative can keep us tied to our circumstance.

This is where “exigent sadism” – a concept introduced in Sexuality Beyond Consent and stretched further here – comes in.  The psychoanalyticopolitical concept of exigent sadism offers some theoretical architecture regarding the ethical necessity of divesting from harmful relationships/institutions. Leaning on the Marquis de Sade, Jean Laplanche, and Fred Moten, Saketopoulou shows that psychoanalysis’s remarkable and unrealized insurgent potential decays when we turn away from the libidinal—which is how the reparative operates.

Traveling through Melanie Klein’s introduction of reparation and David Eng’s important critique of it, this talk pushes further: to show the role that exigent sadism can play in resisting the ruse that our objects – whether individuals or institutions — can save us. The crackdowns on student protests in response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine illuminate these ideas in stark and powerful ways and will be discussed in this context. Ethical sadism is a critical tool for the transformations that our institutions so formidably resist – and which as individuals, too, we are so often afraid to risk.