Show Notes
Avgi Saketopoulou "Towards a Psychoanalytic Theory of Resistance: Exigent Sadism & The Revolutionary Impulse"
In this podcast we discuss the radical figure of the Marquis de Sade, the revolutionary potential of sadism, and how the meaning of the concept changed in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But what does it mean today to speak about sadism in the midst of the current genocide in Gaza? Saketopoulou proposes the sexual drive as an anarchic energy that can be mobilised for political purposes: revolutionary impulses against the current memory culture, proprietary relationships to the past, the policing of narratives around Gaza, and the pinkwashing of colonial violence.
We also discuss current psychoanalytic debates around trans life, considering the ongoing genocide against trans people in the United States, alongside broader questions about the legitimacy of armed struggle and resistance in the face of institutions such as ICE.
We talk about opacity and the “noise in the communication line,” following Édouard Glissant and Jean Laplanche. These entropic and anarchic energies, what Laplanche’s psychoanalysis calls the noise in the communication line of the other, point to a fundamental opacity at the heart of subjectivity. The sexual drive introduces something that cannot be fully understood or translated; yet this very opacity becomes a condition of possibility for subjectivation and for ethics, challenging the self-centering and narcissistic limits of empathy.
Saketopoulou suggests that we develop a different relationship to trauma, not as something that just can disappear. Trauma is also an unbound psychic energy that destabilizes the sovereignty of the ego, a wound that can also be a force that sets things into motion. Taking into account the complex relationship between violence and sexuality, revolutionary politics must confront power, sovereignty, and aggression directly, refusing the liberal management of suffering and recognizing that colonized people retain the right to resist by any means necessary.
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In this episode, we speak with Sunik Kim — Korean American musician, writer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Kim's music has been described as "a frenzied electronic orchestra that sits somewhere between free jazz, noise, and Korean shamanic music. Their writing, spanning subjects from Korean communism to Conlon Nancarrow, has appeared in The Wire, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, Tone Glow, and elsewhere. We discuss in detail their new essay "Zones of Illusion", tracing the connections between illusion, cognition, class, and the conditions under which sound — and thought — might still escape capture. Today, International Workers' Day 2026, Sunik Kim releases seven CDs of new music, three essays, including "Zones of Illusion", and a book. More details at sunikkim.com. Thanks to Fielding Hope.
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