The Psychoanalyticopolitics of Exigent Sadism: Cost, Expenditure, Repair
A BSA Sociology, Psychoanalysis & the Psychosocial Study Group Seminar Series
3 March 2025 (15:00-16:00 GMT)
Online
About the Series
The Sociology, Psychoanalysis & the Psychosocial Study Group are hosting a seminar series on violence. This is a particularly apposite focus for a study group that can bring psychoanalytic insights to bear on social and political concerns, particularly now while colonial and neocolonial terror claims the lives of thousands.
The seminar series will be held online and will take place on the first Monday of each month from November – March (inclusive) (excluding January 2025). More events will be added for later dates in 2025.
About the Event
Speaker: Avgi Saketopolou
Speaker Bio: Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and a member of the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche.
Abstract: This presentation fleshes out the psychoanalyticopolitical implications of an ethics of sadism, applying pressure to our trust in reparation. Repair, Saketopoulou argues, too often binds us to relationships - personal, social, and institutional -, that harm us. Injecting a renewed dynamism and complexity to thinking sadism, Saketopoulou offers analytic thinking about the ethical necessity of divesting from harmful relationships/institutions. Psychoanalysis’s remarkable (and unrealized) insurgent potential decays when we turn away from the libidinal-and Holocaust exceptionalism and student protests in response to the Palestinian genocide offer powerful examples. Exigent sadism is 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.
Registration
This event is free to attend however registration is required.