Part of the Psychoanalysis and Politics series Crises and Transmission

This talk proposes that hate speech merits political consideration beyond society’s usual efforts to either banish or restrict, or alternatively, (as in the US context) to impose few restrictions on it. Hate thrives in the context of power relations, at times antagonizing such inequities, and further burdening the already oppressed; other times, hate disrupts closed systems by insisting on symbolic and real equality and inclusiveness. We’ll apply Winnicottian clinical and theoretical considerations of hate (and by inference, hate speech) for the birth of subject relations to broader societal relations and democratic ethics. We will ask how we might think about the movement from hate speech to “free” speech” — or a “speech of desire” — both as part of the work of analysis and a goal for the public sphere. We will further explore how Winnicott’s interrelated conceptions of hate, destruction, and breakdown may speak to political calls, emanating from both the political right and the left, for drastic structural change, while also catalyzing the remembrance of and reckoning with traumatic, archaic repressed truths.

Jill Gentile, PhD is faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She is an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and also sits on several other editorial boards. Her work on hate speech was recently awarded the Maurice Burke Prize by the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. She was awarded the 2017 Gradiva Award for her essay, “What is Special about Speech?” Her book Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, with Michael Macrone (Karnac, 2016) explores psychoanalysis as a praxis of emancipatory democracy through the lenses of freedom of speech and the feminine.

Register via the webpage to take part in our dialogues. Discounted tickets are available for artists, freelancers, and students. psa-pol.org/crises/hate-speech…