Making sense of our historical conjuncture requires understanding the unconscious as a political force. The resurgence of fascism and the enduring afterlives of colonialism highlight the need to explain political motivations beyond manifest interests alone. Historical research and activist practice alike suggest that social transformation depends on the remaking of political subjectivities.
This interdisciplinary workshop explores how psychoanalysis has shaped understandings of politics, political practice, and forms of subject formation, while remaining historically and politically contested.
Psychoanalysis is at the core of such understandings of politics. But just as psychoanalysis has always maintained a tense relation to the discipline of history, its politics have been complex and have never been tied to a single political project. The interdisciplinary workshop explores some of these dimensions. It is conceived as a forum for discussing work in progress.
It can be argued that the politics of psychoanalysis become discernible on at least three levels, and some of these will be reflected in the workshop’s contributions. Psychoanalytic theory offers a way to explain politics, as it did especially from the interwar period until the “long” moment of decolonization, 1930–1970. Psychoanalytic theory also informs politics: political movements aimed for the remaking of selves and thus the “dis-alienation” of relations in society, as in revolutionary psychiatry and libidinal politics. And psychoanalytic categories not merely describe but also prescribe forms of being and relating, thus both opening and limiting forms of political agency on a foundational level, that of subject formation.