A reservation is required for this program at rsvp@primolevicenter.org
Reception will follow.
Paola Mieli (Après-Coup)
Nationalism operates on a notion of identity that ideally and fictionally separates a community from what is defined as other, external, and foreign, and possibly an enemy. Yet, history indicates that the notion of identity- social, cultural, political – is by its very nature in flux. Inhabited by constant changes, it maintains an unstable equilibrium between tradition and transformation.
On this matter, psychoanalysis has much to offer. Distinguishing identification from identity, as well as the concept of subject from that of the individual, psychoanalysis has shown how the very process of identification brings to the fore the intrinsic vulnerability toward otherness which models us. This is the ground of the forms of hainamoration (hate/love relations) proper to speaking beings in their individual and collective manifestations – including the political ones, animated by censorship and racism. The product of a social contest that demands or constructs it, the notion of identity all too often becomes subservient to a normative fixity and policing activities. When deconstructed, identity claims often reveal their limits. At best, they are political and legal tools, but rarely actual instruments of knowledge.
Image: Man Ray, Noire et Blanche, 1926
Paola Mieli is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is the president of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York), a member of Le Cercle Freudien (Paris) and Espace Analytique (Paris), and the Co-Chair of the section of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry of the World Psychiatry Association (WPA). She is the author of numerous essays on psychoanalysis and culture.
