Works in Progress is a new monthly workshop where our candidates and faculty can present their work jointly in the institute. Coming together is the heart of our mission, as it creates a space of difference in whcih new ideas can emerge. These workshops are disigned with this aspiration in mind. By resisting the individualistic pull and participating in this space, we coudl create a potentiality where things can happen organically in the presence of others, rekindling our thinking and the life of our community.
Melissa Wright
Psychoanalysis Against the Law: Freud, Kelsen, and the Impolitics of the Unconscious
This essay revisits the archive surrounding Hans Kelsen’s encounter with Sigmund Freud to explore the relation between psychoanalysis and law. Kelsen drew on Freud’s Group Psychology in his career-long project to articulate a normative foundation for the state distinct from both sociology and Schmittian decisionism. Though Freud publicly resisted Kelsen’s normativity, their disagreement went on to shape Freud’s crystallization of the concept of the superego. Tracing this divergence
through later theorizations of the impolitical from Roberto Esposito, Étienne Balibar, Sergio Benvenuto, and others, this essay argues that psychoanalysis is not a resource for legitimating the State but a confrontation with the contradictory imperatives of the superego that unsettles the political’s claim to authority. At stake in revisiting Freud and Kelsen’s encounter is not only the lasting intellectual impact of a brief historical episode, but the contemporary question of the unconscious in the face of authoritarian populism and the erosion of the rule of the law.
Andjela Samardzic
Say more, Oedipus: On blind jouissance or jouissance of blindness
Thinking the present world-labile, excessive, machinic – we are summoned anew to reconsider the ethical conditions of being. Antiquity understood truth-telling as the highest norm of existence. Antonia Birnbaum, a German philosopher, renews this lineage by insisting that truth becomes speakable through courage- courage that may lead into solitude, yet enables a transformation of life and self. Within this horizon, psychoanalysis becomes a question once more. What is its relation to courage – and to truth – today?
Also, has analysis begun to echo a Creon-like decree, a sovereign law that forecloses dissent and consolidates its own authority under the guise of ethical necessity? What would a courageous analytic act look like today – one capable of speaking the truth of the unconscious and reopening, however delicately, the field of the possible?