Freud's Moses: Axis of individual and joint research around a decolonial and/or post-colonialist psychoanalysis and philosophy

• Grant number: 21/02078-3
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Young Investigators Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: May 31, 2030
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Alessandra Affortunati Martins
• Grantee: Alessandra Affortunati Martins
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Aléxia Cruz Bretas ; Aline Souza Martins ; Ana Carolina Minozzo ; Andréa Máris Campos Guerra ; Érico Andrade Marques de Oliveira ; Esther Leslie ; Jessica Kellen Rodrigues ; Léa Carneiro Silveira ; Maria Cristina Longo Cardoso Dias ; Miriam Debieux Rosa ; Olgária Chain Féres Matos ; Omar David Moreno Cárdenas ; Suely Aires Pontes

Abstract

The research intends to evaluate an extensive philosophical and psychoanalytic literature with the objective of rethinking, in the light of post-colonialist and/or decolonial studies, some support´s axes of these areas of studies that have been shown to be insufficient to the emancipatory principles that, it is supposed, should guide them in contemporary societies. In the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis, the landmark of post-colonial and/or decolonial discussion took place with analyses by Frantz Fanon and, in Brazil, with theoretical elaborations by Lélia Gonzalez and others. However, it is possible to identify, already in Freud himself, an extremely potent bundle of ideas around which is concentrated a series of layers to be unfolded from post-colonialist and/or decolonial readings of psychoanalysis and philosophy: such ideas are locate in the characterization of his Moses, as presented in Moses and monotheism. In 2003 "Freud and the non-Europeans" was published as a debate between Edward Said, Jacqueline Rose and Christopher Bollas about Freud's Moses. There, Said shows that there is a tear in the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis that would allow non-colonialist studies from a re-reading of Freud and, by extension, from psychoanalysis with a Western-European bias as a whole. In previous research, I tried to partially accomplish this effort, but due to the numerous layers to be explored and teased, this research proposes to advance these studies, now bringing together a series of researchers capable of approaching the subject in depth and through different prisms. The institutional link for conducting the research also plays an important role: the Edward Said Chair (UNIFESP), which brings together several scholars and collaborators who are specialists in the subject to be explored. In addition to performing his clinical work, the psychoanalyst fulfills the function of historian of memories and affections, entangled with the different events that form the history of civilizations. Hegel conceived of history as the unfolding of the Spirit in time, establishing an inextricable alliance between universality and particularity. With this, the requirement to incorporate a concrete dimension of temporality in the chain of thought is inaugurated; however, this historical dimension will only gain its true weight in the transition from German idealism to the materialist-historical-dialectical method. Such research method takes material relations, of economic character, as well as conflicts between social classes, as dynamic factors of transformations of political-social and productive forces. There is an inversion: it is not the ideas that form the social field, but the concrete bases of production and conflicts of interest between classes that build a superstructure. To the economic materiality - production structures and their social organization - and to the social superstructures it would be possible to add another layer of comparable weight in the composition of the material character that determines the structural configuration of society: affective vibrations, which, as Freud showed, impregnate even words and ideas - representations. There is a parallel between affects that unfold in palpable human relationships and mark the soul life and work that are the soil of the different social superstructures. This research is based on the Freudo-Marxist field, taking as a reference several authors who inherited this interconnection as an axis of their investigations. With the task of thinking historically shaped political-social and affective dynamics, it is a matter of establishing space-time readings (historical, geopolitical and cultural) to extract structural modulations of power from them that have in their subsoil traumas, oppression, discrimination, exploitations of the work and body. Such modulations are based on ideologies and values that need to be analyzed. (AU)