In “Freud and the Political,” Mladen Dolar rehearses the dual arguments so frequently made about Freud’s relationship to politics: either that there is conceptually no room for politics in psychoanalysis, or that—insofar as psychoanalysis theorizes the individual as bound up in and formed by the social Other—“politics are universally and ubiquitously present in Freud’s work.”

However, this binary screens a far more interesting proposition: that psychoanalysis and politics are necessarily in relation to each other; and that this relation is impossible. Psychoanalysis <> Politics will start with this proposition. 

Through in-depth interviews, roundtable discussions and other encounters exploring a constellation of questions—about group psychology, ideology, authorization, institutional life, statehood, and alternative forms of collectivity—this conference will inquire into the impossible relationship (conceptually, historically, and on the contemporary scene) between psychoanalysis and the political: asking not so much how the one can be applied to the other (psychoanalysis to politics or vice versa) but how each is conflictually implicated in the other.

In attempting to stage the questions that we ask, we will also work with untraditional conference structures that privilege and foster in-the-moment (vs. previously prepared) thinking and speech, thus putting the psychoanalytic procedure into the collective space—in order perhaps to witness something of the encounter between psychoanalysis and the political in real time.