Psychoanalysis and politics: social fantasy and collective identity

• Grant number: 22/02335-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: November 28, 2022
• End date: November 27, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Daniel Omar Perez
• Grantee: Alexandre Augusto Garcia Starnino
• Supervisor: Erika Maria Parlato de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 19/00407-0 - The logic of the phantasm in Jacques Lacan: intersections between the clinic and the politician, BP.DR

Abstract

The research project in question aims to establish a theoretical intersection between Psychoanalysis and Politics based on a central investigation around the constitution of collective identities and the fundamental relationship with the social fantasies produced. Our problem in a broad sense is inserted in the relations of integration between the singular, particular phenomenon and the hegemonic, collective, social phenomenon. In conjunction with previous studies, the investigation is established in a broad inflection with Political Philosophy and contemporary Discourse Theories that articulate the themes of identity, discourse, fantasy and identification in a unified conceptual matrix to Psychoanalytical Theory - mainly authors such as Slavoj Zizek, Yannis Stavrakakis, Vladimir Safatle and, above all, Ernesto Laclau. The research is divided into three stages: (a) First, a "return to Freud" is proposed, mainly from The Psychology of the Masses...(1921), in which the psychoanalyst points out the notion of identification, we can say, in his political determination. (b) Next, from two central nuclei of Jacques Lacan's theory, namely "the problem of identity and dentification" (1961/62) and "the logic of the fantasme" (1966/67), we will seekto justify the specificity in Lacan's notion of an empty signifier, rethought by Laclau (2013) as "the status of a fundamental political concept" implied in the "constitution and nature of the formation of collective identities". (c) Finally, we intend to advance in the composition of collective identities and the social fantasies produced from specific cases and the articulation of formalizations. We seek, as a result of this work, to contribute to the reflection and to the political, philosophical and psychoanalytical debate in what concerns to the political, social, gender, sexual, ethnic and cultural identities in their most varied forms. (AU)