Untying an Electric Re-Invention

Epilogue

Having spoken without notes or text at the opening of the conference, my speech is lost to time. There is no record of it to pass along. But I do recall foregrounding the invitation to spontaneous speech, as mentioned above. As is probably clear from some of the accounts presented here, the invitation was met amply. This conference took on a life of its own: As a group, we’ve come to understand that, whatever thought and planning we put into an event (along with inevitable oversights!), this is only a starting point for the event to follow its own course. And that any event—if we’ve done our work properly—will do so in unexpected ways.

In my memory, Psychoanalysis <> Politics had a certain electricity to it: 90 bodies in a room that could accommodate, well, just about 90 bodies, called together so that … something could happen. A number of our invited participants, along with audience members, have contributed to this special issue, contributions for which we’re very grateful. I also want to thank all of those panelists and speakers, and audience members, who have not written here and whose words from last February are also lost, because they too spoke spontaneously, thus contributing their respective “charges” to the overall effect. (For participants, please see their names and biographies here.)

The electricity of the event—with its potential to power something, and also perhaps to singe some edges along the way—is something I think we’re pleased with. As analysts, how can we work with the aim of allowing our patients to live more fully, if our events don’t live more fully, through spontaneous speech and the aliveness that comes out of it? We’re looking at the conference as a genre, one that can be played with, to see what it can do, what it can support. We continue to learn a lot about the form as we try it out.

The accounts above of the eruption from some of the conference’s audience members bring to mind Eric Santner, whom I interviewed at the conference, where he spoke about the thread running throughout his life’s work, culminating in his book, Untying Things Together (2022)—a phrase that both astounds and tickles me in its just-rightness regarding psychoanalytic work. In that book, Santner writes about his concept of “creatureliness”: a “mode of exposure not simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate—and ultimately exciting—lack of foundation of the historical forms of life in which it takes place,” forms of life that therefore call to be “created and de-created” (Santner, 2022, p. 3). Psychoanalysis may be one of these forms of life. Whether by the horrors and injustice of Palestine down to the younger generation’s critique of psychoanalysis’ relationship to politics: psychoanalysis and we psychoanalysts inevitably will be confronted with our creatureliness and lack. Turning away would be unthinkable, un-psychoanalytic. Thus can there be any response other than re-invention?

To be continued.