War, civil wars, and periods of latency 

In selecting war as the theme for this year's seminar, we are building upon the efforts of previous years to identify ways of combining the complementary contributions of political science, socio-historical analysis, and psychoanalysis. Rather than analysing historical configurations of war directly or studying violence as a simple effect of the destructive impulse considered an anthropological constant, we aim to explore how taking the field of affects and impulses into account informs the analysis of warlike violence phenomena.

Thus, the question concerns the categories used in these different disciplines, such as repetition and re-presentation, forgetting and repression, negation or denial, hatred, love and barbarism, enjoyment and indifference, the imaginary, fantasy and surrealism, latency and memory. Ultimately, we must consider the relevance of the category of death drive.

Although the social sciences — at least those concerned with the subjectivity of social actors — and psychoanalysis both analyse individual phenomena to inform their interpretations, their epistemologies differ. This is particularly true of proponents of singularising knowledge, who are often wary of using concepts, whereas psychoanalysis is based on a long-established conceptual corpus.

This raises the ongoing challenge at the heart of this seminar: how can these different levels be articulated without juxtaposing or uncontrollably hybridising them?

Historians may therefore be asked how they draw on universalising theories, such as those working with concepts of the unconscious, repetition, repression and latency in history, in their analysis of war, hate and genocidal violence. How do they deal with murderous delusions? More broadly, we would like to ask social scientists how they deal with the 'unknown' aspects of their objects of analysis. Indeed, their analyses often concern functions or processes that are unknown to the people involved. What is the relationship between this 'unknown' and the unconscious, given that the dynamic unconscious cannot be reduced to the non-conscious?

Building on this, we might consider the role of emotional and/or instinctual dimensions in the phenomena of war and hatred of the other. Beyond Pierre Bourdieu, who assigns sociologists the task of ensuring 'the controlled return of the repressed', how is the psychological dimension of repression integrated into analyses of the outbreak of warlike brutality? If paradigms such as 'frustration-aggression' are employed in explanations, what roles do frustration, displeasure, and unresolved tensions play in the outbreak of violence? What value do historians and sociologists attach to the Freudian thesis in Civilisation and its Discontents, taken up by Elias, which states that civilisation's growth comes at the cost of sacrificing individual pleasure for very relative gains, deepening social inequalities, and ultimately risking a general explosion of revolution and war?

Psychoanalysts should therefore be asked to clarify the place they assign to the singularity of social configurations in their proposed understanding. How do they conceive of the collective dimension of destructive dynamics? What do they consider to be original? What status does 'the other' — the family, the community, the social and the political — acquire in the resistance that the drive encounters? More broadly, how do they articulate their theory of the psyche with institutions, particularly new forms such as totalitarianism and democracy?

Furthermore, how do psychoanalysts ground their 'mythology' (that of the drives, in Freud's words) in the political specificity of the experiences they address? In this context, under what conditions could the concept of the death drive be applicable? How do psychoanalysts understand the state's role in overseeing individual drives, sometimes inciting and sometimes repressing them, to produce an order where collective satisfaction has little or nothing to do with individual pleasure?

Underpinning these questions is the issue of 'fictionalisation' for each discipline and, consequently, language. By fictionalising the other as an absolute enemy, radical hostility often involves 'derealisation' (negationism or 'inventionism'). However imaginary or delusional these representations may be, they produce real effects. More broadly, violence often arises from the breakdown of shared representations of reality.

Photo : Lev Radin, Washington, DC-January 6, 2021: Rioters clash with police trying to enter Capitol building through the front doors, Shutterstock