In June 2013 , a chant electrified the broad avenues of Rio de Janeiro, uttered by crowds larger than a million people: ‘Vem! Vem! Vem pra rua vem!’ [‘Come! Come! Come to the streets, come!’]. An enormous crowd was making an enormous invocation. It seems that what was invoked was a social phantasy, or an image, or a dream, in which everyone, the entire city, is in the streets and in the squares. What lies hidden in this image? What does the crowd want, from itself and from others? Why did this chant ‘wrap’ itself around a city and around a country? And, most of all, what happened to our psychic states, while we were chanting and after we stopped chanting?
A common spectre haunts social and psychoanalytic theories: that of the ‘mob’, the irrational crowd , the destructive or regressed collective.1 In the following pages, I approach this spectre from the angle of a psychoanalytic theory of recognition . I also propose a psychosocial ethnography of the precision of the creativities of the collective, in relation to its traumatic wounds. The collective that assembles in these pages is one that is able to mourn, to create symbols, and to organise complicated scenes of re-enactment.
I write about different registers of the social , and most of all about the traumatic confusion between the register of redistribution and the register of recognition . Drawing insights from the trauma theory of psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi and his idea of the ‘confusion of tongues ’, the book engages the social confusions of tongues that entrap us in the scene of trauma and that bind us in alienation and submission. What is particular to this formulation of the problem of recognition is that it begins with a psychoanalytic understanding of psychic splitting.
In these pages, I trace the social life of psychic fragments . In this, Ferenczi’s voice is important because through a close look at his work we fill some of the phenomenological gap that exists in psychoanalysis around the problem of psychic splitting . In other words, we get closer to understanding what is being split in the psyche; what are the different ‘moves’ of the process of splitting ; and what is the life of the fragments resulting from such splitting . Not all these fragments map on to the three Freudian agencies of the psyche: id, ego and superego. Some complicate the Freudian image, and demand from us new names and new descriptions. After a metapsychological journey alongside fragments , we will ponder their social life. Some fragments act to perpetuate traumatic violence . Other fragments are tied into intricate acts of containment, or into sparing something from being crushed, dissolved, ruptured, killed. Importantly, this is not the same as merely stating that we are all fragmented subjects, and that the individual is a liberal fiction. Working in the psychoanalytic tradition, we can understand that fragments can ‘do’ different things, psychically and socially, and that these ‘doings’ need to be theorised.
Addressing social theorists, the book quietly asks: who’s afraid of metapsychology ? Addressing psychoanalysts, it inquires: who’s afraid of a revised metapsychology ? In dialogue with social and political theorists, I point to how a number of psychoanalytic ‘black boxes’ populate social theory: unconscious, desire, eros, drive.2 Without a model of the psyche, it remains difficult to bring together the psychic and the social dimensions of life.
In dialogue with psychoanalysts, I argue that many stories remain to be told about how violence travels across the social fabric; about how violent transmissions function to set the limits of our actions and our creativities; about the kind of psychic states that sustain an enchainment of violence that encompasses an entire society; about the forms of traumatic violence whose authors are institutions; about the State and its own voracious attachment to violence.
In these pages, a conception of memory assembles, bringing an important modification to Freudian metapsychology . With Ferenczi, we can ponder on a new system of memory , the system of memory of the id , which makes repetition, remembering and working-through look very different. What I propose is to think in terms of memory-wounds , a collection of scars , making up a scar-tissue , without which there is no ego.
One of the most curious fragments of the psyche resulting from traumatic splitting is ‘Orpha ’, as Ferenczi (1932a) calls it. A kind of ‘guardian angel’, it is responsible both for preserving life in situations of extreme violence and for omnipotent hallucinations meant to disguise violence and death. Starting from here, I speak of Orphic socialities , socialities of radical mutuality, socialities of psychic resonance, socialities of corporeal connection, placing bodies, body parts and organs in new forms of contact and new juxtapositions. I ask questions about the social operation of a psychic fragment that finds itself in a limbo between the death drive and the life drive. In a sense, this is pointing to a social and psychic complication: to an agency that, while involved in the preservation of life, can always flip into traumatic excess and deadly omnipotence.
Theories of recognition run the risk of turning into intricate sites of entrapment in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic , where the contours of the master and of the slave are eternalised, and so is the grammar of their encounter. To avoid this, some important theoretical work still needs to take place around the idea of recognition . The theory of recognition that I formulate here talks about the confusion between the registers of the social.3
As a psychoanalyst, I have deep confidence in the work that can be done in the consulting room, on the couch. But in the pages of this book, the ‘frame’ for mourning is relocated to the streets and squares. June 2013 in Brazil has shown that the wounded crowd can mourn in the streets and squares and that some important libidinal mutations take place when there is nobody organising the mourning in a tight choreography, and the sheer pressure of the traumatic mark becomes the main organising force of the scene.
Forgetting the Recent Past
There is a way in which this book is also a memory project in itself. Starting with 2014, a strange ‘veil’ started falling on the important events of 2013 in Brazil. June 2013 4 began to be more and more distant, to migrate to a corner of memory, or to be simply banished, forgotten, a kind of anti-event. In this book, I treat the forgetting of the recent past (including a ‘thick’ recent past with revolutionary qualities) as a symptom. That this should be the fate of such an ample and creative movement is a matter of great concern. We could argue that we are more theoretically prepared to consider the traumatic forgetting of the times of military dictatorship, with its tortures, forced disappearances and ideological impositions. A traumatic forgetfulness of the recent past , in times of democracy, appears to us as more difficult to disentangle. June 2013 is sliding out of the recent history of Brazil, precisely because of its immensity as a psychic collective event. Our journey here will thus be one of memorialisation as well, of trying to hold on to collective shapes that are threatening to turn themselves in phantasmas ,5 to disappear into the tear gas smoke, to slide under the veil of traumatic forgetfulness. This forgetfulness could be seen as happening at the intersection between the eternal present installed by the workings of neoliberal capitalism and the melancholia of the left which is holding on to an idealised, perfect, pure political object instead of engagi...