For this Sunday Papers event we will  be reflecting on and thinking with a video of a talk from The Red Clinic.   

The Red Clinic has kindly agreed to our using this talk in this way.  

The paper is presented by Avgi Saketopoulou, with Lisa Duggan, Noëlle McAfee, and Lara Sheehi as respondents.  

The invitation is to watch the talk ahead of the meeting - it is 3 hours in length so watching ahead allows for time to work with the talk and to do so at your own pace.  

You might bring some thoughts to share, some notes, your own written response, a desire to be in dialogue with what you have heard.  

We will then meet to share responses to the talk and the respondents.  

Lenya Samani will share her response to get us started.  

If you wish to prepare a response please let us know and we can include it.  trsorganisingcommittee@protonmail.com


About this event - from the Red Therapy website: 

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 in the video:

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.