Saketopoulou avec Lacan

Celeste PIETRUSZA

At this year’s Division 39 conference, Avgi Saketopoulou staged an intervention–not the kind typically spoken about in clinical sessions, but rather an intervention on the institutional level of psychoanalysis. She challenged relational psychoanalysis’ false promise of centering repair, especially repair initiated by an oppressor within a system that disavows and thus perpetuates ongoing oppression. Saketopoulou spoke to the ethics of “exigent sadism,” as she developed in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), and applied the concept to a broader analytic and psychopolitical context. The exigent sadist–here perhaps an analytic candidate in an institute that forecloses even the possibility of its own sadistic unconscious–takes the risk to go beyond the lure of ego identity and evokes the overwhelm of the institutional other. While institutional authorities, in familiar moves, might seek to pathologize exigent sadists, Saketopoulou evokes the urgent ethical necessity of action–especially in the face of speaking to and acting against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, which institutes and systems in the United States continue to attempt to silence.

In this context, I propose that the Lacanian concept and praxis of scansion–the sometimes sudden but generative end to a session–can be re-envisioned and utilized in the service of exigent sadism. The word scansion is derived from the French verb “scander,” or the practice in poetry of dividing up a line (Fink, 1997). Lacan (1998) also parallels it in his Seminar II to an application of the Zegarnik effect, such as when the interruption of a musical bar creates in a listener the push to resolve or else create something not yet heard in the break.

These are unlikely bedfellows, for sure. It is an understatement to say that Laplanche, from whose metapsychology Saketopoulou developed her theory, was no fan of scansion. In fact, Laplanche split from Lacan’s teaching and direction due to his opposition to the use of scansion as an act of castration (Laplanche et al., 2000). To read Saketopoulou with Lacan can introduce, into Laplanchian psychoanalysis, in lieu of rupture and repair, the operations of the “cut.”

From my vantage point, first trained outside the relational perspective, hearing Saketopoulou’s intervention against repair on a psychoanalytic mainstage was a relief, a way to cut through and out of some of the double-binds of interpretation that can cover over a more radical unconscious that Patricia Gherovici has described as “the last activist” (Seltman, 2016). Furthermore, the spirit of questions that Saketopoulou was asked by audience members and continues to look toward answering–why sadism? And now what?--are ones that I find generative through and beyond her work.

But, to return here, why evoke Lacan? Though, in an aside, Saketopoulou mentioned that she does not go much into Lacan, her writing and call to action nonetheless follows a trajectory of social and political psychoanalytical thought instantiated by Lacan’s lectures during the uprisings of 1960s France (Turkle, 2024). Saketopoulou’s use of Sade also reveals the darker perversity of the institutional romance of some Platonic “Good.” In Kant with Sade, Lacan (2006) looks at how Sade’s writings reveal the operations of a modern society’s extreme commitments to the dictates of pleasure, at times beyond reason, distilling Kant’s famous imperative to a point where the duty to one’s desire and one’s duty overlap. Sade’s world, which Saketopoulou delves into, is one of a denial of optimism and an insistence on the danger of naive conceptualizations of “the good.” In a Lacanian reading of Kant, it is not the idea of a universal moral Good that creates the capacity for respect for the other but rather a recognition of the most depraved of our fantasies. Respect for the subjectivity of others’ fantasies here occurs only through recognition and distance from one’s own fantasy.

In the system of an institute or institution in the U.S., however, where administrators, bureaucrats, and others in positions of power disavow colonial–and thus also analytic–rage through silencing and pathologizing of speech around genocide in Palestine, what room is there to cut, to create distance from the neoliberal fantasy, so to say? Some further description of the operations of scansion is called for here. In contemporary Lacanian practice, refined in the States by analysts such as Bruce Fink (1997), scansion is crucial when an analysand uses the time of the 50-minute clock hour as a defense against rather than an occasion for the free association of the unconscious. Scansion thus works to interrupt the fantasied relationship between the analyst and analysand and open a question about the unconscious. The analysand senses the analyst wants something more…but what? The surprise of what might, in another context, be described as a rupture has the capacity to open through an analyst effect a space of suspension and non-resolution (Pietrusza & Hook, 2016).

In conversation with Matt Lovett (personal communication, July 31, 2024), I began to wonder if an exigent sadist might carry a poetic knife of Lacanian scansion in their kinky kit. To read Saketopoulou with Lacan could mean to see the exigent sadist as occupying the analyst’s discourse through their severing of ties with the institute. In other words, it is the exigent sadist who severs ties to castrate, to leave the institutional other to tarry with its unconscious. This ethical position speaks, endures, and persists from a space of what Lacanians describe as the sexual nonrapport or non-existence of the sexual relationship, full speech, and plentitude that can only exist through the recognition of lack.

Also writing on de Sade through his novel Juliette, Jamieson Webster (2016) has described the “one virtue” of sadism as “the truth of its refusal to console the miserable.” The exigent sadist who challenges, enacts, and overwhelms the institution thus may expose the distortions of the institution’s own perverse and deadly jouissance that subjugates the desire of others in relation to it. In this context, as Saketopoulou spoke to in her keynote, to leave institutes and institutions that, under the ruse of “professionalism,” refuse to acknowledge their effects, particularly on brown, Black, queer, and other marginalized bodies, can in itself be an analytic act. To fall away from a master or university discourse that disavows and perpetuates the silencing of speech around Palestine is thus an ethical position, one that endures and persists.

Yet, to follow through with a question that respondents and participants asked and considered in Saketopoulou’s Red Clinic lecture “Exigent Sadism: A psychopolitical concept” (2024), what can happen, how can we come together or theorize the possibilities outside the institutions? As the path through for the exigent sadistwww may evoke affects of shame or an experience of Kristevan abjection, how can we not disappear in the overwhelm or go into exile? Here, Saketopoulou’s situatedness in the realm of queer theory can point the way.

In line with Lacanian queer theorists such as Leo Bersani, who writes on the disruptive work of the sexual negative, Saketopoulou speaks to how exigent sadism operates in an anti-identitarian relational mode beyond uncritical forms of dominance and submission. This “enlarged sadism,” as she describes, can be extended beyond Lacanian subjective constitution, I believe, to a collective politics of desire. In the context of Palestinian liberation, Hussein Omar writes with Bersani’s work to dismantle the operations of pinkwashing campaigns that attempt to link LGBTQ+ identity with Zionism. Instead, Omar (2024) looks toward a more radical form of becoming in the context of queer activism, writing that “[e]ven as Zionism may contain within it the kernel of an unconscious desire for its own dismantling, it is incumbent upon queer people who dream of Palestine’s liberation to excavate not only just their own histories” but also “the choices they made but have now forgotten, and thereby critique their own psychic investments in that project.” While the inroads here vis a vis Lacanian theory, much like with Deleuze, are through masochism, what they share with Saketopoulou’s exigent sadism is their capacity for the space for subjects to resist attempts at meaning-making, though a project of dismantling and re-excavation.

In these projects of collective liberation, a plurality of exigent sadists can push sadism far beyond what could be imagined by its namesake, the Marquis, who in many ways, as Simone de Beauvoir describes, remained complicit with the authority he hated. To work with Saketopoulou’s call for exigent sadism is not, as Saketopolou’s evocation of de Beauvoir puts forth–to burn Sade, but rather, to decenter him. For to go beyond analytic speech to analytic action means Sade can also no longer triumphantly be used to pull a proverbial Plato with his libertines, elevate them like Diotima without anticipating that they might crash the whole Symposium, break wine glasses, and overturn the party.

Citations

Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book II: The ego in Freud’s theory and the technique of psychoanalysis, 19541955. (J. Forrester, Trans.) New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, J, (2006). Kant with Sade. (B. Fink, Trans.) In Ecrits (pp. 645-668). W. W. Norton & Company.

Laplanche, J., Osborne, P. & Fletcher, J. (2000). Jean Laplanche: The other within – Rethinking psychoanalysis. Radical Philosophy, 102, 31–41.

Omar, H. (2024). Homo Zion: How pinkwashing erases colonial history. Parapraxis. https://www.parapraxismagazine. com/articles/homo-zion

Red Clinic. (2024, June 24). Exigent Sadism: A Psychoanalyticopolitical Concept by Avgi Saketopoulou. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apLgfikXifY&t=6206s Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: New York University Press. Seltman, C. (February 8, 2016). The unconscious is the last activist. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-unconscious-is-the-last-activist/ Turkle, S. (2024). Psychoanalytic politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution. (2nd ed.). The MIT Press. Webster, J. (2016). A short lecture on Adorno’s “Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality.” Public Seminar. Retrieved from: https://publicseminar.org/2016/03/a-short-lecture-onadornos-juliette-or-enlightenment-and-morality/

Contributor

Celeste Pietrusza, Ph.D is an analytically-informed psychotherapist in private practice in New York and California.  She works in conjunction with the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn.  For Celeste, writing, like clinical work, is not possible without community.  She thanks Nat Newton for their encouragement and support on this essay and the editors of this issue, Roula Hajjar and Safia Albaiti, for the invitation to contribute and suggestions along the way.