The brilliant Avgi Saketopoulou has developed a new psychoanalytic political concept she is calling “exigent sadism.” At an online event Sunday June 23 at the Red Clinic in London, I will be engaging her new work, which I see to be a way to move to a new position beyond Melanie Klein’s depressive position.

From the announcement:

This presentation fleshes out the psychoanalyticopolitical implications of exigent sadism, applying pressure to a most valued concept in psychoanalytic and political theories: reparation. Repair promises to address injury, but because it is de-sexualized, Avgi Saketopoulou argues, it too often works to bind us, instead, to relationships – personal, social, and institutional -, that harm us. Enthralled by dialogue, however stale or non-dialogic it may be, the reparative keeps us tied to our circumstance. Magnetizing us by the health-conferring prestige of staying in relation (the depressive position) the reparative operates as psychoanalysis’s most potent moralizing, power-wielding tools.

Exigent sadism offers analytic thinking about the ethical necessity of divesting from harmful relationships/institutions. To draw out this concept, Saketopoulou leans on the Marquis de Sade, Jean Laplanche, and Fred Moten to suggest that psychoanalysis’s remarkable (and unrealized) insurgent potential decays when we turn away from the libidinal-which is how the reparative operates. Holocaust exceptionalism is one such powerful example and will be discussed in this context. And, traveling through Melanie Klein and David Eng’s critique of repair, this talk pushes further: to show the role that exigent sadism can play in resisting the ruse that our objects -individuals or institutions-, can save us. The ongoing student protests in response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine illuminate these ideas in stark and powerful ways. Ethical sadism is thus a critical tool for the transformations that our institutions in general, and psychoanalysis in particular, so formidably resist – and which as individuals, too, we are so often afraid to risk.

Discussants:

Lisa Duggan

Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU.

Noëlle McAfee

Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Emory University.

Lara Sheehi

Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

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