Gabriel Tupinambá - The political economy of the future

This two-part seminar investigates the relation between clinical psychoanalysis and the changing landscape of its historical conditions. Our objective is to introduce some basic concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis together with the challenges brought about by the stakes of our current historical predicament. In the first part of our study, we will consider a modern history of the future, using Reinhart Koselleck’s “semantics of historical time” in order to argue for a certain periodization of our experience of historical time between the XIXth and the XXIth centuries, suggesting that there is a socio-economic basis for what Christopher Lasch called the “era of decreasing expectations”. Here, our aim is to map the way that the economic and symbolic dimensions of Western modernity might have provided a set of conditions of possibility for the psychoanalytic experience - a practice which would therefore be affected by the change in these conditioning variables. We will focus, specially, on two relevant