Panel: Geopolitical Discourses in the Americas
When: Saturday, March 15th, 10AM-12H30PM (PST)
Where: Online, via Zoom. Registration here.
ARGUMENT
Only a few weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump and his techno-feudalist oligarchy effectively transformed the United States of America into a far-right authoritarian regime, sending shockwaves across the globe with unmistakable signs of fascism. This alarming shift manifested in the accelerated erosion of social institutions, the seizure of media communications, the scapegoating of immigrants, the dismantling of international treaties and agreements, the slashing of social funding, and the ominous threats of international expansionism, among other measures. This new form of fascism does not don a public mask or adhere to a coherent ideology; its sole imperative is the relentless extraction of surplus value from the majority, cloaked in the rhetoric of nationalism and order.
Yet, the United States is not alone in this troubling trajectory within the Americas. Countries like Argentina and El Salvador are also succumbing to similar tendencies, as public discourse and geopolitical dynamics undergo profound shifts. To comprehend these developments, we might turn to Jacques Lacan’s theory of discourse, which posits that individual intrapsychic conditions interact within intersubjective relations to shape sociocultural and political realities. For Lacan, discourse is a form of social bonding, both shaped by and shaping language. It operates as a manifestation of the Real, driven by a compulsive repetition that materializes in the conditions of land, resources, and people. Rather than merely a tool for protest, Lacan’s theory offers a method to uncover and interrogate the logic that perpetuates these structural conditions.
To grasp the rise of fascism in the Americas, we must examine the conditions that led populations to “democratically” elect such rulers. Within the framework of late capitalism, the neoliberal discourse and the hegemony of the free market have generated paradoxical effects: the human subject is ensnared in a web of digitalization and overconsumption, while simultaneously grappling with the precarization of labor and an escalating environmental crisis. These contradictions create fertile ground for the rise of authoritarian figures who promise stability and protection.
Freud, in his seminal work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), elucidated the mechanisms of mass identification. He argued that a collective forms when individuals substitute a shared object—such as a leader—for their ego ideal, thereby identifying with one another through this common figure. Lacan expands on this notion, framing it as the search for a master—a protective father figure capable of instituting a law that provides coherence in times of crisis. Yet, the masses who yearn for such a leader are now confronting a harsh reality: the psychopathological characters they have elevated are not guardians of the people, but self-serving entities preoccupied with their own power and wealth.
Amid these dire circumstances, it is crucial to remember that no discourse can ever achieve totalitarian stability, as antagonism is inherent to its structure. In this panel, through the voices of psychoanalytic thinkers from across the Americas, we seek to interrogate the dominant discourses shaping the diverse regions of this vast continent. What narratives are driving these political shifts? How do they reflect the unconscious desires and fears of the masses? And, most importantly, how can we dismantle the structures that perpetuate these cycles of oppression and exploitation?
PARTICIPANTS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Mario Eduardo Costa Pereiro (Brazil) is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst vice-director of the Nucleo São Paulo of the Corpo Freudiano – School of Psychoanalysis. He is full Professor in Clinical Psychopathology at the Université de Provence / Aix-Marseille I / France, as well as an associate Professor in Psychopathology at UNICAMP (2008). Author of the books Pânico e Desamparo (São Paulo, Ed. Escuta, 1999), Psicopatologia dos Ataques de Pânico (São Paulo, Ed. Escuta, 2007) e Erótica do Sono (São Paulo, Aller Editora, 2021).
Patricia Gherovici (USA, Argentina) Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She teaches at the New School for Social Research. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism, and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference.
Am Johal (Canada) has previously been Director of SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, Co-Director of SFU’s Community Engaged Research Initiative and host of the podcast, Below the Radar. He also is affiliated with SFU with Graduate Liberal Studies, Labour Studies and the Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (2015), co-author with Matt Hern of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) and O My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology(2024).
David Pavon-Cuellar (Mexico) is Professor of Marxism, Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis at the State University of Michoacán (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Mexico). He is the author of several books, among them, Marxisme lacanien (Paris, Psychophores, (2009), From the Conscious Interior to an Exterior Unconscious: Lacan, Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology (London, Karnac, 2010), and Elementos políticos de marxismo lacaniano (Mexico, Paradiso, 2014), as well as co-editor, with Ian Parker, of Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy (London & New York, Routledge, 2013).
Daniel Scarfo (Argentina): Philopolymath and explorer of poetic lives and values. Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese (Yale University) and Licenciado in Sociology (University of Buenos Aires). Besides, he studied Comparative Literature (University of Puerto Rico) and Portuguese Studies (University of Lisbon). He also lived in Brazil and taught at universities in Argentina, Canada and the USA.
Daniel Tutt (USA) is a philosopher with a focus on psychoanalytic theory and Marxist thought. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the Palgrave Lacan Series and How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. He has taught philosophy at George Washington University, Marymount University and the Washington, DC jail and he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
Moderator: Hilda Fernandez (Canada, Mexico), PhD. practices Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Vancouver. A co-founder of the Lacan Salon in 2007, she continues to serve as its president and has led clinical seminars since 2015. She has a background on psychology, literature and geography and her doctoral dissertation articulates a critique of the hegemonic discourses of trauma and healing in public mental health systems. She believes that hegemonic discourses can be effectively disturbed beyond hysteria.
* Image by Sergio Hernandez. Caribe (2022) Mixed media on engrave wood.
