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

Parenthood and Disability. Love effects: terrible and necessary.

Parenthood-and-Disability

Parenthood and Disability

Interview with Céline Delbecq, by Céline Aulit

Céline Aulit — Your new play “A cheval sur le dos des oiseaux” (“Riding on the backs of birds”) addresses the question of parenthood and disability very delicately. Carine does not quite remember how Logan ended up in her life.

What is certain is “that with him she received the whole world” as she says in the play. How did you come up with the idea of dealing with this delicate subject?

Céline Delbecq — It was the issue of the relegation of precarious people to disabled careers that initially interested me. I came across a study by Alice Romainville (Observatory of Inequalities in Belgium) which told us that most of the students enrolled in the specialized schools were from a precarious environment. It alerted me.

I wanted to delve into the complexity of this issue. I imagined one of these children becoming an adult.

Her relationship with Logan quickly took hold. Perhaps to question the possible outcome of the cycle of poverty. I didn’t make her aware, but Carine’s projections on Logan capture everything she is going to have to fight against.

From where they are, it is almost crazy to imagine Logan could become a doctor. And yet, she insists on it: “He should have a chance like everyone else.”

It is to prevent her own story from being replayed that she finds the strength to fight. She knows in her body that when one is relegated to special education, one does not become a doctor.

For herself, she would not fight, because she has integrated the discourse of society (she actually thinks she is a good-for-nothing), but in this eight and a half months old child, she sees other possibilities…

No doubt also that, as she is in a fusional relationship with her son, she sees in her son’s future a way out of her own situation. It might be strange, but at no point did I tell myself that I was writing a story of a woman with a disability.

Sure, Carine is “stupid”, by the numbers (by an IQ test), but she has her own intelligence, she adapts, finds solutions. Basically, what I think is that the IQ tests are stupid, unsuitable to certain realities, to Carine…

Parenthood and Disability

C.A. — Carine comes from a precarious environment and in her head, she is ten years old. When she gives birth, she is afraid that her child will be taken away because everyone has told her that she could not take care of him.

And indeed, it is on the edge. The lady in the centre often comes to visit this unlikely little couple.

She worries and tries to give Carine some advice to bring her role of a mother into the picture. But Carine “does what she believes is best”.

“He’s my little one, after all, I’m the one who knows.” These passages are striking because they reveal the tightrope walking exercise – that parenting always is – which is exacerbated in this context of precariousness.

This begs the question of what she can pass on to her child despite not meeting certain standards.

C.D. — I don’t know if she is really ten years old in her head, but that is the feeling we get when we start to listen to her.

Ten years, we will learn, is the age at which she was placed in a group home, the age at which she was separated from her parents.

For me, this sense of childhood we detect is related with this separation. It is an unconscious way for her of remaining loyal, of not completely severing the bond with her parents.

Indeed, the difference between Carine and any other mother is that she is constantly “under surveillance”, since the story she lived through put her under guardianship. She is no longer the subject of her own story.

The mistakes all parents can (and do) make do not have the same weight when she makes them. There is always the threat of having her child taken away from her.

What can Carine pass on to her child in this particular situation? It is not easy to answer. I would say no more and no less than what love produces on a being, which has both terrible and necessary effects.

She is like all mothers : sometimes monstrous, sometimes indispensable. I have my own idea about her ability or inability to rise her son on her own, but I prefer to let each reader/viewer judge for themselves.

One thing, however, is certain and indisputable : she loves this child.

C.A. — More than once in your play you use the expression “making a family”. What would that mean in this context of fusional relationship? “Being a mom, is something”, says Carine.

Could we say that this new status offers a gap with the child that lies dormant in her?

C.D. — To her, “making a family” necessarily resonates with her own story and the fact that half of her siblings (she is the eldest of eight children) grew up in a group home.

She already “made family” with three brothers and sisters with whom she was placed. I think that what “makes family” for her is what “makes shelter”. Eventually, Logan, too, makes her shelter.

She says that since he was born, she drinks less, she is able to get up, thinks less of her misfortunes, has no longer dark thoughts. Caring for a child gives her (at last) a responsibility.

She takes her place as a subject. The motherhood gives her a role, even a certain power, she who has always been the crushed one.

So yes, this responsibility offers a gap with the child that lies dormant in her. From now on, there is an other…

Mila Ruiz, Psychoanalisis madrid