Social Discipline

Avgi Saketopoulou
"Towards a Psychoanalytic Theory of Resistance: Exigent Sadism & The Revolutionary Impulse"

In this podcast we discuss the radical figure of the Marquis de Sade, the revolutionary potential of sadism, and how the meaning of the concept changed in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But what does it mean today to speak about sadism in the midst of the current genocide in Gaza? Saketopoulou proposes the sexual drive as an anarchic energy that can be mobilised for political purposes: revolutionary impulses against the current memory culture, proprietary relationships to the past, the policing of narratives around Gaza, and the pinkwashing of colonial violence.

We also discuss current psychoanalytic debates around trans life, considering the ongoing genocide against trans people in the United States, alongside broader questions about the legitimacy of armed struggle and resistance in the face of institutions such as ICE.

We talk about opacity and the “noise in the communication line,” following Édouard Glissant and Jean Laplanche. These entropic and anarchic energies, what Laplanche’s psychoanalysis calls the noise in the communication line of the other, point to a fundamental opacity at the heart of subjectivity. The sexual drive introduces something that cannot be fully understood or translated; yet this very opacity becomes a condition of possibility for subjectivation and for ethics, challenging the self-centering and narcissistic limits of empathy.

Saketopoulou suggests that we develop a different relationship to trauma, not as something that just can disappear. Trauma is also an unbound psychic energy that destabilizes the sovereignty of the ego, a wound that can also be a force that sets things into motion. Taking into account the complex relationship between violence and sexuality, revolutionary politics must confront power, sovereignty, and aggression directly, refusing the liberal management of suffering and recognizing that colonized people retain the right to resist by any means necessary.

Is Berlin Over? In this conversation, Diederichsen offers clues for understanding the current developments of contemporary fascism and its attack on the bohemia and critical artistic expressions, and how this manifests specifically in Berlin and within the broader German context.
By exploring the period between 2005 and 2015, and the ways in which culture was mobilized as a form of soft power, we can trace how a limit was reached during that decade, particularly when decolonial critiques began to pose a threat to Germany’s Staatsräson, its unconditional support for the security of the State of Israel. We discuss the complex history of the Antideutsch movement and how, in recent years, it has gained access to institutions. We also examine the idea of “access to tools,” connecting the Whole Earth Catalog to communes and alternative lifestyles, Silicon Valley, and the convergence of cybernetics with Eastern religions, from the ambition to conquer outer space to the exploration of inner worlds, and their contemporary manifestations in digital technologies. Finally, we address the possible end(s) of contemporary art and forms of technological entropy generated by streaming platforms.

The Escalation of Struggles: Social Reproduction & Formal Subsumption

Alessandra Mezzadri discusses how formal subsumption can be understood through the diverse and rich perspectives of social reproduction, drawing in particular on the Italian Marxist Feminist tradition, to which the concept of the social factory owes a great deal.

Through a feminist reading of her fieldwork in India, and in dialogue with the work of Jairus Banaji, she shows how the Global South reveals the ways in which formal subsumption continues to function through multiple, heterogeneous forms of labour.

Rather than understanding these processes as producing paralysis and political powerlessness, she suggests that they may also open up new forms of antagonism, creating the conditions for the escalation of new struggles.

What can LARP teach us about pedagogy, community, and collective world-making? artist, researcher, curator and mentor in Game Design, Carina Erdmann joins Miguel Prado & Mattin to talk games as art, hacking everyday platforms, the politics of play, and why we might need to train our social muscles for futures that don’t yet exist. This conversation moves through conspiracy as collective thinking, the limits of empathy, and the careful work of attunement in collaborative play. Along the way, we touch on opacity and prefigurative practices, communal living experiments like the ones exercised at PAF, and what it means to rehearse for a revolution in these bleak conditions.

We’re incredibly honoured to be joined by Ray Brassier, a hugely formative thinker for both of us and one of the most important philosophers of the past 20 years. We talk about his upcoming book Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx and, the contemporary condition of The Wretched of the Earth. Ray also gives an absolutely brilliant takedown of Nick Land and the speculative inhuman. Hope you enjoy it.