This working group is organized by Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics, a collective of researchers, students, political militants, philosophers and psychoanalysts interested in exploring problems of contemporary politics. We invite participants working in areas of psychoanalysis, populism, critical theory and other disciplines to join this working group. Our objective is to share research, diagnose significant issues, identify common problems and further build contributions on matters related to psychoanalysis contemporary politics.

The first two sessions will develop discussion, identify key questions and problems based around the readings and the third session will consist of a keynote by Samo Tomsic, a philosopher based in Berlin and the author of The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2013) as well as The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2020).

Statement of the problem:
In the ongoing debates on populism the notion of resentment underwent a proper renaissance. This paradigmatic anti-social affect confronts us with a fundamental paradox in the capitalist social bond: a social affect, aiming at dismantling and dissolving the social bonds, at violating and destroying the other, and in doing so, abolishing the very ties that hold society together. Resentment is the most proliferating affect in the political atmosphere marked by the contemporary amuck run of the capitalist system.
To this diagnostic it can be added that the wave of resentment is much more than a matter of individual emotions and psychologies. This “phenomenology of affects” must be complicated with a structural view, which understands resentment as a corporeal manifestation of the organized resistance of the capitalist system against political and economic transformations.

The ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis is tied to this structural view of today's "anti-social affective turn" in politics.