“SUBJECT AND MASSES” – 3rd Webinar

On Friday 9th April at 18.00 CET continues the series of meetings “Subject and masses. Psychoanalysis and the politics of the unconscious”.

Guests of the third webinar two international speakers:

Fernando Castrillón with a speech entitled “No Leader / No Masse: virtuality and contemporary group life in the shadow of Freud”;

Benjamin Fong with a speech entitled “From a community of citizens to a network of users: group life in the 21st century ”.

They will talk about it with Sergio Benvenuto (discussant) and Raffaele Bracalenti (moderator).

A century later Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, digital commodity capitalism and hyper-modernity have served to undermine the position and properties of both leader and masses, with a ubiquitous screen-mediated virtuality that requires a reformulation of Freud’s initial ideas on the subject.

With Castrillòn’s speech we will examine the “virtual” nature of the contemporary “leader”, a social-media composite best exemplified by the figure of Trump.

With Fong’s speech we will talk about the future of capitalism, starting from the affirmation of the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck argues that in the neoliberal period “communities of citizens” have been replaced with “networks of users”, implying that neoliberalism has refashioned the meanings of both group and individual.”