The Philosophy and Literature Forum in collaboration with the Forum for Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature propose a panel on the “Psycho-Philosophies of Anarchy” to address the contemporary struggle between anarcho-capitalism and a progressive “anarchism to come.” Inspired by Catherine Malabou’s recent work on the significance of anarchism as resistance to domination and social fragmentation, the three papers we have chosen use literary and theoretical texts to launch a robust conversation on the future of the subject. The three papers respectively delineate what Malabou calls the “non-governability” of the “anarchism to come,” via the experiences of justice as beauty, feminine pleasure, and psychic trauma.

Klaus Mladek’s paper “Justice and Anarcho-Capitalism as Religion” sets the tone for the panel by addressing the anarchist turn in capitalism via what Malabou calls “the infinite uberization of life,” where authoritarianism and the deregulated sharing economy coexist. Referring to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Jean-Luc Nancy's concepts of justice, Mladek’s paper seeks to draw clear distinctions between revolutionary anarchism (grounded in collaborative commons, the council system, mutual aid and self-regulated social formations) and market driven techno-anarchism. For Jean-Luc Nancy, justice is akin to the experience of the beautiful in Kant’s sense. It enacts a rupture with the existing order through the encounter with contingency/the open and the enduring engagement with objects (and the world) in the form of "purposiveness without purpose." The paper argues that in the psycho-philosophy of anarchism, freedom will not be confused with consumer choice, justice will not be equated with charity, and individualist anarchism will be opposed by an-archic purposiveness. The future of the psycho-philosophy of anarchism then lies in thinking a non-teleological concept of purposiveness. This would engage with the immanent lawfulness of the object, and its necessary grounding in sensus communis. Mladek argues that today's monarchical CEO model of government, the techno-utopian accelerationism and capitalist eschatology are not only segregationist and a religious cult, but reduce communicability and purposiveness to whimsical, non-communicable decrees and measures.

Continuing in this vein of specifying the ethical challenge posed by anarcho-capitalism to ethical being in the world, Maïté Marciano’s paper “Indifference as Anarchic Resistance: Female Pleasure and the Unraveling of Power in Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol.V.Stein” uses Catherine Malabou’s reflections in Pleasure Erased, on the anarchism of the clitoris to examine the relationship between indifference, anarchy, and sexuality in Marguerite Duras's The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein. In contrast to Jacques Lacan who famously interpreted this novel in a short text titled Homage to Marguerite Duras in relation to fantasy, desire, and several tertiary knots, Marciano’s paper highlights the affect-less indifference that marks Lol Stein. Drawing from Malabou's Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought and her concept of the non-governable, Marciano demonstrates how Lol's indifference functions as a form of anarchy distinct from destructive plasticity (Malabou’s signature concept) which offers some form of resistance. Marciano’s paper draws upon archival research, to demonstrate how Duras employs “indifference” to undermine power structures in order to develop what she terms as "unperson subjectivities." Marciano argues that these subjectivities exist outside conventional personhood while sharing an experience of marginalization. The paper concludes by broadly specifying the stakes of this analysis to our understanding of how indifference can operate as a mode of anarchic resistance when it is intertwined with female pleasure and sexuality.

In her presentation, “The Non-Translational Trauma and the Anarchic Repetition,” Yoon Jeong Oh makes a singular contribution to the psycho-politics of trauma. In this paper on trauma in the novels of Han Kang, Oh interprets psychical trauma as a form of anarchy that resists control due to its utter indifference to the representational logic that serves governability. Thus, the subject of trauma, she argues, performs a type of anarchy that is effectively “radical equality.” In writing trauma, Oh suggests, literature must task itself not to fall back in victimization, but aim to preserve the radicality in anarchic repetition. Oh’s paper investigates how the language of trauma evades being captured in the realm of representation by turning the untranslatable into the non-translational that is perfectly alien to interpretation or even articulation. Looking at anarchic practice in Human Acts and The White Book by Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel Prize laureate, Oh’s paper examines how trauma writing repeats the impossible and resists being reduced to the “there-has-been” in the networks of state narratives.

Together, these three papers serve to deepen the critique of contemporary anarcho-capitalism by engaging philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature to specify the possibility of an anarchic subject to come.