Samo Tomšič

Humboldt University of Berlin

From the Orderly World to the Polluted Unworld

2 March 2021, 18h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Online seminar (Zoom link here)

Abstract

The topic of the talk will be pollution, which will be examined from the perspective of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The presentation will take its inspiration from Alexandre Koyré’s thesis that the early modern scientific revolution comprised a radical break with the notion of the world. It will then move on to the decomposition of reality that characterises the modern epistemic and economic regime. The main focus will be on the problematic of surplus, which, in the regime of knowledge, social production, and libidinal economy, bringst to the point the ongoing pollution of reality, both through real waste and through what we might call “objective fictions”. On this backdrop, the presentation will aim at strengthening the link between the psychoanalytic “critique of epistemic economy” and the Marxian critique of political economy. One possible intersection can be seen in the idea that modern science and modern economy, understood as accumulative regimes, are underpinned by a common “extractivitst metaphysics”. The talk will strive to contextualise these notions.