Seminar Series: The Task of Eros

Emma Ingala, Rosaura Martínez-Ruiz, Angie Voela

Eros is a political task, singular or collective but always political. Eros is also the task of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis opens a path to healing, but this should not be understood as the simple removal of symptoms; rather as the emancipatory effect of a radically hospitable listening practice that could subvert the consequences of violence and civilization's discontent. In this context, the task of Eros could effect a transformation, turning the victim into an activist, the patient into an agent, and oppression into revolution.

The prominence of the Freudian death drive in psychoanalysis and certain interdisciplinary strands of European Philosophy seems to have overshadowed the optimism about the scope of Eros in the psychoanalytic project, and has attracted justified criticism from other schools of thought (e.g. process philosophy, feminism, the affective turn in humanities and social sciences, etc.). In many interpretations, the prominence of the death drive is based on the perceived dualism between the life drive and the death drive which forgets to see the two as equal parts of an active economy. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud does not in any case describe an opposition between these two drives, but rather an economy aimed at leveling life tension: “the life process of the individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical tensions, that is to say, to death, whereas union with the living substance of a different individual increases these tensions, introducing what may be described as fresh ‘vital differences’ which must then be lived off” (Freud, SE 18: 55).

Eros is the force that drives an organism towards the world, forcing it out of its Nirvana state and obliging it to come into contact with otherness, that is, with the other who alters it. The encounter with alterity leads to an elevation of tension, a tension that needs to be dislodged or discharged. Each encounter also produces a memory trace, a lasting ‘breach’ through which to discharge the present excitement and future ones. Each time, cohabitation, being with the other, produces a complex fabric of satisfaction pathways that defers the release of tension. In the process, the death drive, a psychic tendency that seeks immediate discharge, is diverted and the thanatic satisfaction is put off.

The task of Eros is then the search for a deferred discharge, in contrast to an immediate or short-circuit one. The more ‘psychic text’ is written and the more complex it is, the more death and destruction are left for later. In other words, the task of Eros is to delay the dissolution of life, between an upsurge of tension in the face of otherness and its economized liberation. Let us not forget that Eros is a tendency and not an organization; an open horizon; an infinite movement and not a substance. And so, erotic efforts must be ongoing and tireless. Eros must be a commitment to the future, an eternal future and not a destination. An erotic life can only be understood as cohabitation, since, from this perspective, it is the tension facing alterity that keeps us alive, in the in(finite) search for a discharge that only biological death could achieve.

In the midst of attacks and dispossessions against vulnerable people, in the Middle East for example, or the intensification of authoritarian tendencies around the globe, such as the electoral success of the extreme right in Argentina, and the recent criminalization of protest in some of the so-called “advanced” democracies, we believe is urgent to turn to a profound reflection on the possibilities of Eros, again, as a political task. What is still to be done against such destructive warlike drives? What needs to be challenged today? Could we enable and deepen dialogues between academics and other social change actors with the goal of fostering joint research agendas and constructing concrete solidarities?

‘The task of Eros’ is a two-year interdisciplinary seminar series dedicated to exploring Eros as a psycho-political concept and practice. Following the insights of Rosaura Martínez Ruiz’s Eros: Beyond the Death Drive, its aim is to bring Eros to the foreground of contemporary debates and interventions on living (and letting live) a livable life. We invite you to respond to or be inspired by the positioning statement above.

Themes we would like to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

-Eros as a starting point for a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy;

- Eros in times of genocide;

- Eros in times of authoritarianisms;

- Gender, politics and Eros;

-Re-reading/re-thinking the concept of Eros in continental psychoanalysis and philosophy;

-Eros as an ongoing praxis in various socio-political and cultural contexts;

-Eros and the clinical experience;

-Eros and the analyst/activist;

-The relationship between Eros and Thanatos: subversive, infinite practices;

-Eros and freedom;

-Eros in the Arts and Humanities.

Eros Seminar Series Inaugural Lecture:

Monique David-Ménard, “Eros with the Beyond the pleasure Principle”

25 October 2024, 17:00 (Central European Time), 9:00am (Ciudad de México), 16:00 (United Kingdom), 11:00am (Eastern Time, US and Canada) via Zoom

https://adelphi-hipaa.zoom.us/j/5868161669?omn=93733855331

Meeting ID: 586 816 1669

Organised by Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Rosaura Martínez (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and Angie Voela (University of East London)

Even when Freud introduces the death drive, he never loses sight of the question of pleasure or of the pleasure principle. Throughout the paradoxes that link Eros and Thanatos, it is never a question of plunging into a metaphysical or transcendental negativity of desire and sexualities. Rather, psychoanalysis, as a practice and thought, is a strategy that creates the conditions for addressing and transforming the catastrophic risks inherent in the pleasure principle, without framing pleasure in terms of an ethics, be it Epicurean or Spinozist.

More info about the Eros Seminar Series in the following link:

https://www.ucm.es/encrusex/eros-seminar-series

Second Lecture:

María del Rosario Acosta, "Trauma and the Breakdown of All Grammars: Listening to the Wound as Voice"

21 February 2025, 18:00 (Central European Time), 11:00am (Ciudad de México), 17:00 (United Kingdom), via Zoom

https://cuaieed-unam.zoom.us/j/86310633553

Meeting ID: 863 1063 3553

Organised by Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Rosaura Martínez (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and Angie Voela (University of East London)

In my paper for the Eros Seminar Series, I would like to focus on a reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle that is attentive to the kind of breakdown that trauma produces in its survivors. Only then can we truly understand the power of "eros," which I will link to the (political, psychoanalytic, and especially aesthetic) power of listening. Trauma, as described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, confronts us with a kind of damage whose experience is ineffable because it is profoundly paradoxical. It is paradoxical not only because it resists being conceptualized as an experience (thus exposing the limits of our capacity for processing and, accordingly, for listening and remembering), but also because sense itself as a possibility -the possibility of "making sense" of what has happened- is broken by its occurrence (which is in fact both the absence of its occurrence and, simultaneously and paradoxically, its compulsive repetition). My work on Freud (cf. my various publications on what I've called "grammars of listening") has aimed to develop a broader understanding of the damage associated with trauma, which in turn sheds light on the kinds of challenges that trauma poses to the question of listening in contexts of traumatic violence. These, I argue, are challenges that may go unnoticed when trauma is approached from other perspectives, and that a philosophical gaze can help us not only to identify but also to understand in depth. My basic intention in my talk will be to outline and analyze these challenges by reading Freud as a "phenomenologist" of trauma. Freud's account of traumatic experience is crucial precisely because it seems to test the limits of any phenomenology - and thus, as I will suggest, to reveal the collapse of any grammars that might be thought to be available for its elucidation. My claim, then, is that in considering contexts of traumatic violence, a philosophical reading of Freud can lead us to a deeper understanding of the radicality of traumatic damage; moreover, since his analyses bring out the singularity of this experience-and its paradoxical experiential structure-they allow us to gauge the extent of the challenges it poses to our usual understandings of experience, memory, and history-and thus, most importantly, to the kind of listening required to construct memory and history at the site of trauma.