Psychoanalysis as an Erotic Political Strategy of Translation. Turning Egoistic Affects into Socializing Representations

Abstract

The phenomenon of affectivization of the public sphere, described by Salvatore, De Luca Picione, Bochicchio, Mannino, Langher, Pergola, Velotti, and Venuleo (2021), sheds light on the contemporary Western sociopolitical crisis, strengthened by the weakening of social bonds, where the other is turned into an enemy. Thus, following Freud and Butler, I explore the underlying conditions of this phenomenon to consider new erotic political strategies that aim to heal the public sphere as the space and time of cohabitation. I propose that the Freudian theory of Repression could help understand why subjects that form a community lose the sense of reality as a shared semantic space. This disavowal of reality facilitates the affectivization of the public sphere, but it could also be read as the effect of the eviction of a particularly painful social representation into the unconscious. That is, according to Butler’s theory of subjectivation, the repudiation of dependency at the core of subjectivity.