Exigent Sadism: A Psychoanalyticopolitical Concept by Avgi Saketopoulou

Red Clinic online event 23rd June 2024 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 remarka