In this interview, Brazilian philosopher and psychoanalyst Gabriel Tupinambá, a member of the Subset of Theoretical Practice (SPT) and the Social Strategy Coordinator at the Alameda Institute, answers questions from Ege Çoban about his intellectual journey from cinema to philosophy and psychoanalysis, the influence of his background as an intellectual from the ‘periphery,’ his views on organization, his reception of Badiou’s work, and his take on Lacan in “The Desire of Psychoanalysis.”
Ege Çoban: As elsewhere, our readers are also considerably interested in intellectual biographies. Can you us tell the story of your intellectual journey from your beginnings in cinema to your interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis?
I can definitely tell a story, at least – a funny version of this journey. I say this because when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I was considering becoming a priest or a monk! I can’t recall if I believed in God or not (I have the impression I changed my mind every week), but I do remember that a friend in school wrote me a little note saying she was impressed that I was so engaged with questions concerning God even though I was an atheist. So, weirdly enough, I might have wanted to become priest… to impress girls? Given the blatant paradoxes this would entail, I quickly moved to the second best way I could think of to talk to both God and girls, which was poetry – and I originally did my undergraduate studies in literature, before I eventually dropped out.
It was only after this that I decided to study cinema, but even then I wasn’t really a film buff. I did have, however, a ton of experience working around an overbearing, invisible and all-seeing eye, so it is very likely that the choice for cinema was yet an attempt to continue working through my tribulations with sex and God! I do believe that working on all these short films, for about three or four years, functioned as a practical critique of the beliefs of my adolescence: it exposed me to the actual costs and the collective labor necessary for constructing the closed and enchanted film world and conditioned the existence of any “view from nowhere” on the very intricate work that goes into turning multiple partial shots into a single coherent filmic perspective. It also consolidated a passion for complex collective endeavors that submit the technical division of labor to a purpose beyond any instrumental function – something I still believe separates cinema from any other art-form and that helps to explain why it was such a crucial part of communist experiments in the XXth century.
After directing a bunch of rather terrible short films – and realizing I had more talent dealing with the collective production process than with the actual aesthetic issues of filmmaking – I gave up on my already unlikely career as a film director. I think that, in a way, cinema was split into different threads after this: the production side of it motivating my interest in political organization, the question of the reality of appearances influenced by interest in philosophy, while dynamics of the gaze and desire was better approached through psychoanalysis.
Philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics became then the three main threads of my intellectual, professional and practical life: I did my MA and PhD studying the relations between Hegel, Lacan and Marx, in very Zizekian fashion; my political engagement was also very influenced by a psychoanalytic sensibility and by my engagement with the recent recuperation of “the idea of communism” by philosophers such as Badiou, Rancière, etc; and, finally, as I started working as a clinician, I also tried to understand what type of political struggle was inherent to my professional category – something that, due to Lacanian psychoanalysis’ weird epistemological status, ended up requiring some philosophizing to understand.
Ege Çoban: Brazil has been an important country for its contributions to the social sciences and critical theory (even if works on the influential ‘peripherisation thesis’ are yet to be translated). Can you describe if and how coming from Brazil has effected your theoretical sensibilities?
One part that is missing from the above story – though that absence is in itself telling – is that I was born into an upward-moving middle class white family. My parents both came from poor immigrant families, but my father was a successful businessman and I grew up in a very protected and siloed social environment amongst the nouveau riches. Today I think that, due to my parents’ difficult past, they never managed to fully fit in culturally with the upper classes, but they also did not appreciate that much the place they came from, so my sister and I grew up quite isolated. If this did mean I was a very alienated child and teenager, it also meant that I never really got used to most of the social rituals and shared values that serve to justify and ease us into our social standings. So that turned out to be a good thing, as this sort of “social idiocy” made me a bit more attentive to the complexity of the social world once I was out of that little familial bubble.
However, so much of my life had been made easier by the color of my skin, my gender and the fact I was raised in a rich family that it took me a long time to be faced with the need to make a proper political decision. I think it was the time I spent studying abroad that ultimately confronted me with the need to make a choice: either to invest my time and energy in an academic career that would probably preserve my lifestyle, get me some recognition and potentially lead me away from Brazil, at the expense of feeling absolutely disconnected from reality, or focus my efforts on putting whatever resources I had, intellectual or otherwise, at the service of what seemed to give life any real meaning and purpose. It is not like this was a conscious decision though: I was miserable living in London, I never had more freedom in my life, but I felt like nothing mattered, it was terrible – in a way I had already decided that being as close as possible to the contradictions of my life was more worthwhile than seeking a life that would drive these out of sight. Until this realization hit me, I had only a sort of moral sensibility to other people’s suffering and to social inequality, something that did not require from me anything more than a personal ethics and a great capacity to repress what I actually saw around me. So it was only after I came back to Rio that I was certain that I wanted to get politically organized. Anyway, all of this concerns a sort of personal journey – and I would say most of the ways it affected my theoretical sensibilities were negative, that is, as habits of thought and forms of understanding myself and others that get in the way of actual useful ideas and political strategizing. Things I have to constantly work through one way or another in order to stop obsessing over my own issues and focus on concrete political concerns.
And I believe it was only after I got politically organized that Brazil became a more productive source of insights. When approached with a critical and political point of view, this country empirically confirms, time and time again, that the periphery of capitalism is a sort of laboratory of the future – the so called “peripherization” thesis proposed by Chico de Oliveira and Paulo Arantes, and that you alluded to before. Now, the issue is that this is not simply a thesis that claims that we can see things more clearly from the periphery – there is no enlightenment around here either! It is rather that the obscure “Brazilian matter”, as the Marxist literary critic Roberto Schwarz calls it, places us before a sort of permanent practical and theoretical enigma. It is as if history bit more than it could chew when elites decided to make this continental territory into a single country – so this sort of stillborn nation, for that very same reason, became even more plastic and welcoming to the needs of capital and its polymorphic patterns of accumulation. Quite paradoxical! And it is the tarrying with this “dark matter” that expresses itself through strange social, economic and political dynamics that often offer us glimpses of equally enigmatic phenomena that later plague so called “advanced” capitalist nations. This is certainly not a singular characteristic of Brazil – which leads to the most productive political aspect of living and thinking through Brazil’s impasses, which is the type of solidarity that such enigmas allow for with the struggle and point of view of other militants and movements from equally (or even more) peripheral countries.
Ege Çoban: You have been working on the question of organization for a long time, starting from articles such as “Freeing Thought from Thinkers: A Case Study” to more recent texts like “Contribution to the Critique of Political Organization: Outline of An Ongoing Research Project” written by the Subset of Theoretical Practice collective, of which you are a member. Could you tell us about the origins of the STP and how your approach to this issue have changed over the years?
The question of collective organization emerged as a central issue in my theoretical investigations and political practice as a sort of stumbling block. Early in my MA studies, some friends and I decided to study Lacan together. We kept a small study group going for many years, it was called “Pensée”. We were already coming to Lacan at that point with a lot of other influences – the Slovene School specially – and thus with some political questions in mind and this certainly played an important role in how we read Lacan’s writings. For example, we had a tendency to focus a lot on what Lacan thought about collective logic in his early works – as in his classic text “Logical Time” – and we spent a lot of time trying to understand his later institutional experiments – such as the journal “Scilicet”, the structure of “cartels” etc, things Lacan developed when he founded his own psychoanalytic School. Not only that, but we also decided to implement similar devices in our own study group – like different protocols for reading, writing and critiquing one another. I think after three or four years we wrote about a thousand pages of notes on more than ten of Lacan’s key texts. And, besides these notes, we also wrote some basic “propositions” – in a very French, minimal and dense style – on how to structure a radical research collective (such as the one we thought we were).
Well, around the same time we were coming up with these ideas, I joined a socialist Party in Rio de Janeiro and I was trying to establish a sort of center for theoretical formation of militants in Rio. So I used Pensée‘s propositions – which were all about mixing how one studies theory with how one organizes these study groups – as a basis to write the original project of what would later become the Circle of Studies of Idea and Ideology. As a quick side note: it was called a “Circle” both to recuperate the self-teaching groups of Soviet times, but also to arrogantly propose we would continue the “Cercle D’Epistemologie” project of the Lacanian-maoists of the sixties in France!
Still, CSII was meant, originally, to be a place of study, a sort of Party School. And that didn’t work at all. First of all, because I was so ridiculously naive and arrogant politically, that I had no idea of the sort of mess I had gotten myself into, thinking that a current-based socialist Party would just love to have an unexperienced newcomer organizing a bunch of classes on new communist theories and ideas, revising and criticizing Leftist political practices. Due to my lack of experience, to the very young militant crowd we initially attracted and to the original proposal of acting as a Party instrument, CSII did not side with any particular political group and so, evidently, everyone was deeply suspicious of the project from the get go. We managed to remain inside the Party, slowly learning how to navigate these tensions, for about two years, when we finally decided we had to become an autonomous collective – though lasting connections with militants and groups inside that Party were formed and lasted for long after that.
But we also had a second failure early one – a much more productive one, which also came more endogenously. CSII was meant to serve as a center for militant discussion of communist ideas, but early on it became clear that only certain militants could come to the meetings due to transportation costs, to work hours, due to feeling that sort of environment was not meant for them, due to political pressure from their different groups and a bunch of other reasons. It was simply inconsistent to speak about egalitarian ideas and not to anything about the unequal access to our own space. So still in this initial phase we decided to flip things around: instead of organizing ourselves in order to study, we decided to focus our study in finding better ways to organize. I think thats when CSII was actually collectively born – because this inversion was not the product of any particular person’s ideas, it came directly from the impasses that we had collectively experienced trying to set up that space. That was around 2012.
It is also worth noting that our solution to the second problem also offered a new route for dealing with the first one, concerning the tensions within Leftist organizations and amongst them. I think this was our first collective theoretical hypothesis, born out of practical impasses: we realized that organizational questions cut diagonally across ideological divides within the Left – thus offering a way to navigate these tensions by shifting the focus from questions of abstract principles and theories to the concrete dynamics and collective experimentation. After we became an autonomous collective, we put this principle to the test, and it was pretty incredible to see that CSII could serve as a useful space for militants coming from communist parties, trade unions, anarchist groups, militants who were traumatized by their previous political spaces, newcomers to politics, etc – and this openness was clearly related to our capacity to perform this perspective shift.
All of this to say that the first text you mentioned – “Freeing Thought From Thinkers” – was actually an attempt to systematize the political experience of CSII after years of practical engagement with the question of collective organization. Other texts were written – by me and other comrades – but this one was the first translated to English, I think. It is a relevant text for me because it kind of demarcates the end of a first theoretical phase in CSII: from 2011 to 2015, we used to seek for ideas for organizing and thinking politically specially in the works of the philosophers associated with the recuperation of the “idea of communism” – Zizek, Badiou, Rancière, etc. And they are very central to this text, where I was really trying to push their work as far as I could, trying to see if they could help us really account for our collective practice and strategy. I think the conclusion we came to was that, even if there were crucial insights in these works, these thinkers couldn’t help us develop a new theory of organization. Thus we needed to start developing our own theoretical account of what made CSII possible and useful politically – and that was how the Subset of Theoretical Practice was born: as a “subset” of CSII. Its main objective was studying our own practice and its method was borrowed from the study techniques of Pensée, bringing together each person’s private research interest in view of developing a collective research program.
Between 2016 and 2020, STP worked as a research group inside of the Circle. But by 2020, CSII was going through a crisis: our focus had always been the internal critique of Leftist practices, and a very hands-on and experimental approach to organizational ideas, but with the rise of the extreme-right in Brazil people tended to prefer to use their scarce free time to engage in more combative political groups and even those who remained within CSII didn’t have time and energy to continue. We also came to the assessment that the particular organizational form of CSII had exhausted itself – so the issue wasn’t just external pressure from a new conjuncture, but our own incapacity to adapt to new conditions. And so we decided to dissolve the collective in January 2021.
STP, however, continued its work – and started gathering militants and thinkers coming from different political movements and experiences, both in Brazil and abroad. This radically expanded our task, since we were no longer trying to theorize the practical results of CSII’s experience, but a much broader set of political experiments, brought together by our new political composition. I think this moment is captured in the other text you mentioned, titled “Contribution to the Critique of Political Organization”. I feel it was a transitional period because we were also a bit adrift theoretically, caught between philosophical debates and more political driven questions, still trying to find a way to cohere around a research project that contemplated the political history we were bringing together and the sort of work we wanted to do in the future with other political organizations.
Finally, I would say that after a couple of years within this new arrangement, perhaps around early 2023, a new shift took place, as we managed to finally establish the basic tenets of an actual systemic approach to politics that we now want to properly construct and systematize. Texts such as “Working Through Political Organization” and the “Atlas of Experimental Politics” belong to this current period – as well as a new relation to political organizations around the world: we originally started holding meetings to discuss ongoing political processes with different militants and, very recently, set up in Rio de Janeiro, in partnership with the Alameda Institute, a place where we host monthly “militant enquiries” with political groups, where we test STP’s ideas.
Ege Çoban: One of the most interesting parts of your research is in relation to Badiou, in the STP you guys have developed an interest in ‘objective phenomenology’ through a reading of his Logics of Worlds, which has led to “A Primer on Political Phenomenology” written by Yuan Yao and yourself. What is it in Badiou and Logics of Worlds do you find useful for your own theoretical development?
I think I need to preface by answer by saying that (1) there was never a consensus within STP that Badiou’s work is necessary for us or that it provides us with a general orientation and (2) a lot of people in STP still don’t care much for it! Myself, I am a hardcore Badiouian – but for that very reason I have three types of problems with his work:
(A) problems with those aspects of his philosophy I consider to be a product of his own personal bias and that are therefore ultimately incompatible with his own theory – I would highlight here his musings on sexuality and gender, or some of his conclusions regarding what “politics at the distance of the State” must mean, etc. I think these are personal biases that got generalized into pseudo-theoretical positions by being packaged with the rest of his project;
(B) problems with contingent aspects of his work, that are not in themselves problematic, but rather limiting or anachronistic, such as his annoying choice to focus almost all of his examples and interlocutions (with key and important exceptions, of course) on French thinkers, artists, mathematicians, etc, and some particular effects of his writing and didactic style – there is nothing inherently wrong with these things, and they can’t be substituted by a perfectly universal and plural approach, but these things also get in the way of the reception and comprehension of what is crucial about his work, leading to a bunch of issues that are often only remedied by pitting these contingent factors against the formal starkness of the constructions;
(C) problems concerning how to extend his work and approach to encompass issues and domains that he did not directly address – these are, of course, the best problems, and I think there are very few philosophers who have been so generous as to grant people access to the “engine room” of their theory, so that we can tweak it and update it, the way that he has by effectively placing mathematical formalism at the center of his conceptual constructions. Because of this, if one can find new mathematical results that are consistent with the formal theories he immediately used and if one can apply his same general interpretative framework to these new statements, no one, not even him, can really claim these additions are not actually part of the same project – Badiou has relinquished the theoretical monopoly by placing the concept under the care of the “matheme”.
Again, this might be just my personal opinion, given that Badiou’s thinking is very dear to me, but I believe that – consciously or not – STP has provided one of the best critiques of Badiou’s philosophical work to this day. It is very much possible to interpret our work as a sort of “materialist” take on Badiou. However, we can’t take the analogy with Marx’s “materialist reversal” of Hegel too far here, because Badiou is not an idealist, far from it. His limitations have more to do with the focus of his work – and, frankly, if I were a French professor with the chance to contribute to the remaking of Western philosophy, I too would focus on the questions of being, appearance, truth, the absolute, etc! – so that any critique of these limitations must therefore not “invert” but “expand” his ideas in order to demonstrate that something important and consistent with his system has nevertheless remained outside its reach, for reasons stemming from problems of type A, B and C, described above. Perhaps its better to say that our critique of Badiou has do with with the development of a “metapolitical” view that is, at the same time, more concrete and intrinsic to actual contemporary politics than his and paradoxically, for that reason, also more compatible with his own philosophical system. I’m boasting a bit, but I’m very proud of STP for this, even if I don’t think it is the only way to understand what we are trying to do – nor even the most productive way to approach our research program, in fact.
With this long proviso, let me get to the influence of Badiou on STP. I think the answer comes in two parts. First of all, there is a thread in this story that precedes any specific engagement with the formal machinery of Logics of Worlds – a longer arch that involves the fact that a lot of people in CSII eventually came to realize that the organizational theory we were looking for was much closer to Badiou’s own approach to politics than we originally thought.
A lot of us – me included! – were actually quite averse to his work early on. But this change of mind has nothing to do with the concepts of fidelity and event, the sort of thing people usually focus on: what became increasingly clear to us at CSII was Badiou’s underlying commitment to the idea that the social world, once filtered through political organization, becomes bigger and clearer – and that this is, somehow, a function of the particular collective construction we create together. This might seem perhaps trivial to some, but to me it remains the fundamental cornerstone of Badiou’s contribution, as it implies, deep down, an inversion between social science and political thinking, between analyzing the conjuncture and acting politically, between – ultimately –political economy and political organization, that I think is often not explored or even understood. In very simple terms, we don’t know the social world first and then we find out what politics to invest in and how to organize. Instead, political organization is the means through which we can tell apart what are merely veridical statements about social situations and what actually holds any truth in social life – which is not to say that, for example, Marx’s critique of political economy is not an integral part of political struggle: it is rather that it must be understood as a particular theoretical expression of some of the results of a long historical cycle of confrontations with capital, struggles which forced its determinations to appear precisely because we were also forcing the world to show that it could be otherwise.
Now, this reading of Badiou was not the product of siting down with his books and just reaching these conclusions. In fact, after (trying) to read Being and Event and some of his other works for the first time, I developed the same type of generic criticisms that most of his detractors (and supporters) usually state: “where is political economy? Where is negativity? What about the death drive? What about naturalism? Where are the conditions of possibility for subjectivity?”, etc. It was only because we first experienced, with CSII, that there was something about political organization that remained incredibly under-theorized and that was in fact a crucial part of militancy that was usually obscured by precisely this sort of questioning – reducing all the challenges of collective freedom to political economic effects, to some metaphysical concept of the negative, to metapsychology, to some underlying cognitive effect, etc – that we started looking for new ways to name and address this political excess, the way collective organizations exist beyond those who are organized, even though it depends on them. And without this practical problem I would never have changed my mind about the value of Badiou’s work – and I would never have found the energy to actually study it and try to actually work through the mathematical side of it all. So I think it is important to highlight that, first, there was a political problem motivating the original interest in Badiou’s work and this problem concerned a materialist account of the subjective nature of political organization, its capacity to serve as a robust point of view of the social world that is irreducible to the point of view of individual cognitive agents, etc.
Taking note of this first moment is crucial because otherwise STP’s use of “objective phenomenology” will make no sense. When we started going through Logics of Worlds together, and we realized that the formal tools Badiou was employing were able to capture very basic traits of Marx’s theory of value – and, furthermore, that if we looked into other aspects of topos theory, beyond those used by Badiou, we could also expand the correlation with Marx to include many other details of Capital’s constructions – this was not just good “scientific” news, in the sense that topos theory is therefore a good candidate to formalize economic theory. Recall the previous point: Badiou’s philosophy is not interested in providing a theoretical description of the concrete world or reality, it is presenting a very underdetermined but rational description of the skeleton of situations and worlds to be filled with concreteness by equally concrete subjectivized processes. It is a project committed through and through to the idea that political processes think their worlds better than pure theory – and this implies that we cannot simply access what matters politically by adopting some sort of “scientific” or impartial view. So when we realized that crucial categories of the critique of political economy could be reconstructed within a formal and conceptual apparatus that was compatible with this even more fundamental claim concerning the special role of political organization this meant that we could actually develop a common grammar capable of moving between political economy and political organization with the same formal and conceptual homogeneity that Badiou manages to move from a description of situations and worlds to the description of generic procedures. So I think this was the core of the insight that motivated so much of our work leading up to the Primer on Political Phenomenology.
So, to sum up, I would say Logics of Worlds – and the way it brings together category theory and a brilliant reinterpretation of phenomenology to match it – was relevant to us, first, because it was compatible with the core intuition concerning the subjective dimension of political organization and, second, because while maintaining this profound connection between experimentation, thinking and truth, it provided perhaps the most robust way to synthesize Marx’s categories we have seen, with a real increase in clarity, conceptual distinctiveness of different moments in the construction and (this is recent) an amazing level of integration of the processes described by all three volumes of Capital. But the value of the second aspect is infinitely increased by its compatibility with the first aspect, because it further attests to the fact that a political theory that is committed to the idea that political organizations offer a distinct point of view into social reality is not a political theory that is restricting its reach for the sake of focusing on immediate action or on a personalized view of capitalist forces, it is actually a theory that can provide further clarity even to the most abstract constructions – it actually makes for better and rigorous political theory.
Later on we would also realize that Marx’s categories, when reframed with this formalism, would also help us to work through its differences and similarities with other social logics – so that posed new and interesting problems, again expanding Badiou’s work beyond his own reach. And we also realized that we could go much deeper in our exploration of the different aspects of political organization that are not addressed in Badiou’s work because he is not trying to work through a particular organizational form but just describe the most generic and underdetermined dimension of any political process. We are also not trying to describe or prescribe a particular type of organization, but our view is still more restricted than his in other ways.
Ege Çoban: In a recent article for e-flux, you define the STP approach as ‘organizational trinitarianism,’ a position that takes the problems of composition, interaction and intelligibility as three sides of the same social dynamic. What would be the conditions of possibility for an organisation that would be able to navigate these facets simultaneously?
This question follows nicely from the previous one. One of the really incredible aspects of topos theory is how it brings together algebra, logic and topology – that is, operative, implicative and spatial sciences – into a sort of productive equivalence: order structures define how we parse out the parts of a space and all of this corresponds to the logical properties of this context’s language. This equivalence is a crucial feature of Badiou’s objective phenomenology, because it allows him to show that the “joints” of things out there – how they are divided and combined – can lead to corresponding local logical structures.
But as it is clear from Logics of Worlds, Badiou is trying to provide a very general framework for objective phenomenology, something that is still very removed from the description of specifically social worlds. In our attempt to mobilize his ideas and bring them closer to a concrete theory of organization, we turned to the work of soviet thinker Alexander Bogdanov. Like Badiou, Bogdanov also proposes a grammar that is meant to describe both economic structures and political organization, both in small and larger scales. Unlike Badiou, however, he does this by leaning on the natural science of his day. When trying to square Badiou’s theory of political processes with Bogdanov’s more dynamic take on organizations, we came up with this third approach – which we called “organizational trinitarianism” (informally inspired by the term “computational trinitarianism” – to offer a more processual take to the objective phenomenology of collective organization. This approach claims that the way parts of an organization are composed (topology-like approach) conditions how it interacts with other organizations (algebraic-like structures) which in turn conditions what is made intelligible about its environment (the logic of it all). Composition, interaction and intelligibility are mutually conditioning – which is not the same as to say they are equivalent descriptions, exactly.
This theoretical proposition gave us a more formal way to discuss collective organization that brought Badiou and Bogdanov closer together – and that had immediate heuristic purchase. I don’t think the question is so much how to build organizations that navigate these dimensions, since our ambitious claim is that any organization is already structured in this way. Adopting the organizational point of view is to analyze any collective process as being constituted in this way, which should help us recognize the rationality of radically different collective processes. One could understand organizational trinitarianism as an expansion of Marx’s famous “social being determines social consciousness”: it strives to offer a perspective that clarifies social and political phenomena, rather than steer them – this remains a political problem for each real political process to tarry with.
In this sense, a better question would be under which conditions can a given political organization recognize the political import and rationality of other political processes – a condition for larger political movements to form, composing powerful alliances and solidarity networks. And organizational trinitarianism claims that the intelligibility of the political import of other organizations depends on how a given group is structured. Ideally, the more heterogeneous an organization is, the easier it would be for it to interact with different organizations while preserving some degree of intelligibility of its own prescriptions and strategic vision.
This is an important point because it helps to clarify what I said before about STP proposing a metapolitical view that is less removed from actual politics than Badiou’s. Very briefly, we could say that while for Badiou the point of view that unites different political processes is not itself political – its the point of view of eternity, which is better approached by philosophy – for STP it constitutes a practical communist concern, the very strategic problem of composing together different organizations and regional movements. We can even explain this in terms of the peripherization thesis, mentioned before: the way STP theorizes this is by distinguishing the periphery as the place where different social logics are not “aligned” – the logics of value, property and community do not form a single coherent normative frame – unlike the center, where these social modes align to form what we call “modernity”. Badiou, in this respect, is a modern thinker: he believes that the conditions for political composition naturally follow from the existence of real political processes, they are, by their very nature, potentially connected, while STP claims that, under peripheral conditions, composition is not a given – eternity needs to be constructed, so to speak. So while we side with Badiou when claiming that what type of organization is needed is a problem that each political process needs to solve internally, through experimentation, we do not think, like he seems to, that the political task is therefore over: the properly communist problem of how to adopt “the point of view of the movement as a whole”, already proposed in the Communist Manifesto, remains a political problem that requires us to build both theoretical and practical means for political organizations to compose with others even though their interests and world-views are not immediately or naturally aligned, due to the very nature of the capitalist social space today.
Ege Çoban: From Laplanche to Milner, internal criticism of Lacanian thought has become an established tradition. How would you situate your own book “The Desire of Psychoanalysis” with respect to similar previous attempts by other thinkers?
I haven’t thought about this very much, but let me try to schematize some of the ways I’ve seen Lacanian psychoanalysis be criticized.
(A) There are the outright critiques trying to discredit Lacan as a charlatan, etc – that Borch-Jacobsen book, “Absolute Master” might be an example, perhaps, but there are a lot of texts and comments by different psychoanalysts and psychologists just pointing out Lacan is incoherent or obscure, etc.
(B) There are the ones that critique Lacan for remaining stuck to a conservative paradigm, its a more political type of critique – I’d say “Anti-OEdipus” fits here, as Deleuze and Guatarri depart from a political stance and then conclude Lacan’s theory falls short in some way, there are also Marxist critiques of Lacan that also focus on the complicity of Lacanian psychoanalysis and patriarchy and bourgeois ideology.
(C) Then there are those critiques that are more internal to psychoanalysis itself, that either refuse Lacan’s perspective because it does not lead to a good clinical practice or by pointing out that there are key clinical phenomena it cannot account for and that would require us to dismiss most of it due to these counter-examples – I think Laplace’s work fits here.
(D) There are also more implicit critiques, almost indirect ones, that often take the form of defenses of Lacan, but which require such diverse presentations or systematizations of his work in order to argue for its rigor or legitimacy that, ultimately, they suggest Lacan wasn’t clear or rigorous enough – I would place Jean-Claude Milner’s work here, since he is as Lacanian as they come, but his work adopts very different resources in order to express what are still Lacanian propositions. Zizek’s critiques of Lacan seem to take this form as well, since he is not so much breaking with Lacan’s ideas as claiming their theoretical basis is more Hegelian than it looks, etc.
(E) Finally, there are critiques of limitations of Lacan’s theory, in the sense that the general framework is preserved, but one is looking to expand it somehow to allow for new developments – there is a lot of material that circulates in Lacanian seminars and schools that goes in this direction, and Miller’s work often sits in this category as well, as does classic works by Maleval, Porge, Allouch, Christian Dunker and others, who try to make concepts more precise, expand their reach and so so.
I think The Desire of Psychoanalysis adopts a slightly different strategy than any of these. Like option A, it does strive to put Lacan’s persona into question, but, unlike it, it separates Lacan from Lacanian thinking. Like option B, it does try to make psychoanalysis more amenable to radical politics, but, unlike it, it does not propose an immediate mixture of politics and psychoanalysis. Like option C, it does claim that severe changes to Lacan’s theoretical framework are needed, due to unwanted metaphysical commitments it holds, but, unlike it, it is not trying to create a separate psychoanalytic orientation. Like option D, it seeks to provide another account of the Lacanian clinical experience, but, unlike it, it does not disguise it as a mere theoretical exegesis. And like option E, it does seek to address itself to practitioners with tools that should expand the reach of Lacanian thinking, but, unlike it, it does not try to do so by focusing on new clinical phenomena that would externally challenge us. This sort of diagonal is made possible by a different type of commitment, that I do not think usually motivates a lot of the literature on Lacan, which is a commitment to the “really existing” practice and its basic material conditions. It is meant to be a book that takes the perspective of a regular clinician who is concerned with the continuation and expansion of the Lacanian practice and who recognizes that, in order for this practice to survive, we need to be able to revise both our theory, our technical presuppositions and our internal politics.
Because of that, I’ve had an interesting experience promoting the book and talking to people: it seems to appeal to a wide audience – composed of people who take all of the critical positions I described above – but it also seems to disappoint everyone, since it doesn’t really spouse any of these critical approaches. I think its core audience remains young analysts in training who believe there is something special about a clinical practice oriented by Lacan’s basic insights, but who feel in a myriad of ways the different shortcomings of our analytic community.
Ege Çoban: One of your most discussed maneuvers in that book is the regionalization of the ‘logic of the signifier’. That is to say, against Miller’s definition of the logic of the signifier as “logic of the origin of logic”, you argue for a delimited understanding of it under the boundaries of the clinical setting. What are the consequences of this delimitation for the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics?
The idea of regionalization is the product of my interpretation of an interesting aspect of Badiou’s work. It is more or less explicitly at stake in his critique of psychoanalysis in the classic “Mark and Lack” paper, but I do believe its a critical operator that is central to his whole way of philosophizing. It think it actually helps to set his work apart from the whole paradigm of critical philosophy, as it provides an alternative foundation for radical thinking. I would describe this operator in two steps:
1) Firstly, it substitutes the idea of treating some theory, ideological frame or state of affairs as a totality that we can only show to be incomplete, faulty or problematic by unearthing hidden presuppositions. In the critical paradigm, the world is a sort of absolute totality and when we try to show it does not include something we need to move out of the totality, which then creates a paradox (what is this outside?) and most solutions to this impasse imply some inconsistent theory of totality (every whole has an exception, etc). Instead of taking this route, the operation of regionalization places a totality inside a larger realm – which implies that totalities are relative rather than absolute domains – and claims that, from the point of view of that larger totality, we can see how the previous one was restricted in this or that way. This goes back to our previous discussion regarding the function of politics as a lens to analyze the world, because this larger totality is the engaged totality that is visible from the point of view of a political process. So the unfolding of new developments produces the collateral effect of showing that whatever was deemed a totality was in fact a partial and restricted construction.
2) The second aspect of regionalization is that this process, unlike that of critical philosophy, is not an intellectual one. No one can through the sheer power of intellectual acrobatics, step outside the limits of their world unless there is an actual place to stand on outside of it. So rather than start from the critique of a totality, we must start from the concrete construction of new places from which to look at this totality – that is, we must start from concrete political, artistic, scientific, amorous processes, which then serve as a basis for us to interpret the limitations of the world, regionalizing its parameters, etc.
So regionalization is a way to condense the theory of generic procedures and its relation to philosophy – and it shows that, for Badiou, construction precedes critique, which is the name of a relation between two totalities, and not some radical operation in its own right.
In the context of psychoanalysis, what I tried to do was to take on Badiou’s early critique of Miller – which did not claim the logic of the signifier was bogus, but that due to psychoanalysis’s obscure relation to its own limitations, was improperly generalized to serve as a general theory of the subject. What Badiou did not do – and here, once more, I think the book is trying to stick closer to the actual practice than Badiou’s own philosophy is trying to, leading to a slightly different approach – was to properly define what this analytic domain is. Most of my book is an attempt to show that psychoanalysis relies on an artificial closure that we produce within clinical practice and to show that a clear definition of our limits as analysts does not weaken Lacan’s theory, but rather clarifies it, opening up to potential new developments. After all, if something has no limits or limitations, it cannot transpose them, it cannot bring about anything new. If we know everything, then we cannot learn anything. Regionalization is a type of critical operator that makes more sense for practically-minded or militant people, while regular critique – striving to show that every position has some blindspot that only “the right questions” can unearth – places the theorist and the intellectual in a very central position, as if without their special type of questioning, we could not bring about anything new, which is clearly bogus.
So the first reason behind using this type of critical strategy is to try to situate the limits of psychoanalysis for itself, to open up the space for a new understanding of concepts and a clearer sense of our own current limitations. The second reason is because the definition of a domain also opens up the space for the existence of other forms of thinking that do not directly concern us – and that, consequently, might be of great use for us analysts. I do not think there is any necessary connection between psychoanalysis and actual politics, at least no connection greater than that between politics and any other field or human practice. So regionalizing psychoanalytic theory, to me, means first of all rediscovering the proper referent of our concepts, which in turn clarifies that we have very few resources to talk about how these referents are constituted, how our clinical domain is properly constituted, and this hopefully opens up new and interesting challenges both internal to psychoanalysis and external to it, concerning its relation to other fields of thought, such as radical politics.
One last remark that I think is worth making, and which concerns the second condition for the successful operation of regionalization, which is the construction of a larger domain: my book is absolutely indebted to a broader movement of psychoanalysts which, even if invisibly to most, already share the diagnosis that Lacanian psychoanalysis must transform itself in order to preserve its core ideas, and that already experiment, on a daily basis, with ways to do so. This – together with the broader political movement that I am part of, and on which I already spoke at length above – constitutes this larger totality from which I propose to analyze the particular stakes of psychoanalysis today.
Ege Çoban: You are currently working in collaboration with the Alameda Institute, could you tell us about the activities and goals of this organization?
Alameda Institute is a research institute – based in the UK and in Brazil – focused on the themes of catastrophe and transition, both broadly construed: catastrophe as a sort of general state of crisis, or multiple crises, and transition both as ecological as well as socialist transition. Alameda’s methodology is to foster research projects that address these issues while keeping some dialogue with political organizations, so that researchers remain grounded on political experience and those political processes can also benefit from the research results. I currently work as head of Social Strategy at Alameda: my job is to facilitate this bridge between researchers and political movements. It is actually my main job today – I have reduced the number of days I do clinical work to open space to work for Alameda, which has been a great experience, allowing me to work closely with different political movements and amazing intellectuals.
Alameda is also currently in partnership with STP in Rio de Janeiro, where it is funding the Common Space of Organizations (CSO), a space where members of STP discuss our work with the public and invite political organizations to talk about their political experience. It has been a great opportunity to test the actual traction of STP’s ideas and approach in concrete political contexts, and though CSO started late 2023, it has already influenced a lot of the ideas STP is working on now.
Ege Çoban: And finally, can you tell us what you are currently working on? Can we expect new works in the near future?
I think the main thing coming along is STP’s first book, which we are midway through writing. We are in talks with different publishers, but nothing final yet. The idea of the book is to condense the results of our research up to this point and to do it in such a way that it can serve as a sort of “textbook” for people interested in forming spaces such as CSO and using it as a basic material for discussion and interlocution with different political movements.
Other than that, I am currently preparing the Brazilian edition of The Desire of Psychoanalysis – it is now out in English and Russian, and soon in Spanish too – and slowly putting together my next research project focused on psychoanalysis. The issue is that I haven’t had much desire to write about psychoanalysis these days, I’m much more excited about the prospect of helping to put together a political front inside of psychoanalysis, focused on pressuring institutions to bring about organizational change in how training and work conditions are dealt with. But I’ve also been collecting sparse notes on what could be a follow up to this first book, but nothing serious yet.
I think generally speaking this has been my focus right now, even in the case of STP. I do think this is the right time to publish our own book, but I am more excited about the prospect of expanding the collective and integrating it even further with the experience of CSO – I think it will be a couple of years before there is enough of a new collective construction to warrant stopping, looking back and trying to systematize it into a theoretical account for publication, I dunno.