Redes, odio y síntoma de época

El anonimato como escudo que potencia la violencia

“Porque No!”
Mix Media on cardboard
Mila R. Haynes

Se sabe que en las redes el insulto se ha vuelto gratis. Muchísimxs usuarixs se permiten, con la trampa del seudónimo o sin él, insultar a su eventual autor de un modo hiriente y obsceno, a veces sin saber qué se está rebatiendo o haciéndolo de un modo tan vago y genérico que ya no se trata de una respuesta. Más bien el insulto es algo que yacía y permanecía en espera hasta encontrar a su destinatario. Como si estuviera desde antes, esperando al autor del texto, para excretar el odio. Para transformar al autor en un objeto sobre el que se ejerce un sadismo de baja intensidad.

Obviamente no me refiero aquí al que responde desde sus propios argumentos y formula una diferencia crítica. En este caso, el que actúa así no suele apelar al insulto.

Este funcionamiento en redes, es una nueva modalidad de la pulsión destructiva y la agresividad más primaria, donde el otro es un mero recipiente del odio.

Este odio va in crescendo porque el ejecutor del odio es un consumidor-consumido. Cada vez necesita repetir su gesto insultante porque siempre falta un plus para quedar satisfecho del todo.

Por ello su odio exige una práctica permanente, exige textos donde depositar la excrecencia al modo de una firma.

La sabiduría social recomienda no prestar atención a la presencia sistemática de humores resentidos en el funcionamiento de las redes.

Sin embargo, es un síntoma de época que merece ser atendido. Podrían ​argüirse las graves situaciones de la realidad: hambre, precios, inflación, impotencia o la complicidad de los gobernantes en la situación, etc. Sin embargo en muchos casos, estas lamentables situaciones, funcionan más que como causas, como los pretextos que habilitan al insulto.

No se trata de los célebres trolls, ni del ataque de las derechas, sino de un mundo aparentemente progresista o peronista o nacional-popular el que ahora aparece encarnando, en diferentes estilos, con una nueva modalidad: el insulto personal justificado ideológicamente.

¿Debemos ser indiferentes y naturalizar la violencia simbólica en las redes como si la misma no tuviera consecuencias?

¿No intervienen estos ejercicios retóricos del rencor en las construcciones ideológicas de quienes los ejercen?

¿Esta presencia del insulto al otro, con el pretexto de expresar una diferencia, no es una emergencia de la “vida fascista” en el corazón de la vida cotidiana?

¿Se puede pertenecer a un campo ideológico transformador si se usa un modo de denigrar a los otros tal que vuelve evidente el deseo de dañar?

Este goce en la crueldad es una sublimación simbólica de la violencia de la opresión, camuflada bajo el modo de un debate intenso que culmina, en muchas ocasiones, con la ” eliminación” digital del contrincante.

Hay que insistir en que no se trata ni de los saludables debates, ni de las necesarias confrontaciones apasionadas.

Sino del agazapado insultador serial que da testimonio de cómo en el capitalismo, los vínculos sociales tienden a erosionarse incluso, a través de aquellos que serían críticos con las injusticias de la realidad social.

Sin embargo, hacen parte de la voluntad destructiva del capital. Constituyen un modo de captar el nombre del que se insulta y despojarlo de su dignidad simbólica para usarlo como un medio de goce.

Por Jorge Alemán Psicoanalista y Escritor

Singularities in Psychoanalysis

Singularities-in-Psychoanalysis
Singularities in Psychoanalysis

Singularities in Psychoanalysis: In the domestic landscape of the “internet of things,” one thing is clear: it is not so much the smart TV, the biometric wristwatch, or your car’s new AI that constitutes one in a series of internet objects.

You are the thing. You are the data that Big Data categorizes and sells back to you. Instagram is the hypermodern mirror stage.

Look at yourself online; online looks back at you; you buy yourself online.

Around the same time that social media began to escalate, popular culture found a new word, snowflake.

Special Snowflake Syndrome, Generation Snowflake, and eventually just snowflake, named the old problem of the One and the Many.

One day the world Woke and looked outside to see that it was snowing.

The snowflake meme, starting from the common idea that “no two snowflakes are alike,” collected various social connotations: unique, special, individual, but also fragile, easily triggered, too liberal, and then even the conservative alt-right.

The special snowflake must be kept in a language freezer, a safe space. As if the heat of jouissance produced by the speaking being, the collision of language and the body, could melt it in an instant.

Singularities in Psychoanalysis – “There is such a thing as One”

Psychoanalysis, which studies the One, the Many, the Other, and the Letter, has something to say about the contemporary online snowflakestorm.

We cannot call it special or even essential, because the word at stake is pursued in other disciplines that approach the real: physics, mathematics, art, writing.

Our word for this issue of The Lacanian Review, one that is vital for keeping the speaking body out of the freezer, is singularity.

You will notice that we have pluralized it too: singularities. Singularities are not unique, they are not individual, they are not exceptions, and they are certainly not special.

They have less to do with being something and more to do with something of the One.

So let’s open this volume with Lacan’s formulation, ‘There is such a thing as One’ (Yad’l’Un), to see if we can pass through the malaise of our special social syndromes.

Written by: Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff | Brooklyn, NY, USA

Psychoanalysts Madrid

Self-Discipline and Pandemic

Worldwide, Spanish and more specific Madrid government, appeal to our sense of responsibility once and again, to each other’s care, to impose ourselves the pertinent self-discipline. It cannot be any other way, that is how it is thought by the common sense. The same is for anyone who asks for a psychoanalyst in Madrid and in any other part of the world. In fact the formula it is imposed just by it is prudence and soundness. The difficulty is that there are three problems that the democratic parties cannot address. At least by now, it becomes structurally impossible to face them, even beyond the psychoanalysis, although perhaps workable with a psychoanalyst.

The First one, already pointed by Kant, and showed once and again by all the ones that asks for a Psychoanalyst in Madrid, as it is happening in my private practise, is that the subject is working by a sensitivity always dragged by his or her personal interests, and easily distracted from the imperatives of the practical reason. It is from here where the fastidious and truthful Peron´s formula comes: man is good, but watched, much better.

Secondly, Freud´s lucid observation, that one who creates psychoanalysis more than a century ago: Modern civilizations progress and advance to an all the time increasing stronger pressure towards the dead drive. We, Madrid psychoanalysts, see this the same way than Freud did far away. Any pleasure offer can possibly include and oversight which gives way to the dead drive. There are thousands of people that do not believe in the State public word, not in Madrid, nor in Spain, perhaps neither in Europe nor other Continents. It is not that they are deniers, but in their very guts, there is something like “this does have nothing to do with them”, even in a way that confines with the magic thinking of believing that they are immunized. Although they cannot give an account of all of this, we have testimony of it so many times in our psychoanalysis private practice.

The inevitably Third point is made up by the very own capitalism conditions, the demand to dwell in an absolute present, without any possibility of future historic perspective, and the famous “carpe diem” success, more listened as more catastrophic the situation is. That’s the reason why our world is tinged with such an apocalyptic atmosphere, and I repeat myself, not just in Madrid, but I believe, worldwide. The disorder in which the capitalist western civilization is being driven into, demands not to ignore a question coming from the crossroad itself, can the democratic and popular governments build up a new non-repressive authority? And yet, enough firm as to give a new consistency to the sovereignty exercise?  

(Words taken and translated from Jorge Aleman speech)