Feminist movements are not only guided by ideals of normative justice, but are vital responses to traumas deeply rooted in the obscurity of singular histories. They are potent — they are desirable — because they have an unconscious meaning. Feminism therefore challenges psychoanalysis, opening a precious opportunity to create new concepts, ideas, and clinical tools in psychoanalysis and in theory in general. Sororal psychoanalysis is a joyful attempt at taking up this challenge. In their 2023 book Soeurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe [Sisters, A Plea for a Feminist Psychoanalysis], psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi and philosopher Patrice Maniglier introduce a sororal psychoanalysis that aims to overcome the oppositions between the psychic and the social, the intimate and the political, the unconscious and the collective, and to contribute to imagining a world rid of the imaginaries of masculine domination. Theirs is an attempt to redefine the field after #MeToo – not to deconstruct psychoanalysis, but to reconstruct it by listening to what is being said by those who challenge its phallogocentric, homophobic, heternormative biases. To start psychoanalysis anew is ultimately to attempt to do something with the unconscious, i.e., what is meant to remain unknown and can therefore never be anticipated.
This event will focus on unconscious sisterhood, a concept Lippi and Maniglier introduce to describe a type of social link that is opposed to the phallic model of brotherhood. Unconscious sisterhood is not limited to the relations between persons already identified as women; it rather originates directly from various traumas that form what Lippi and Maniglier term a ‘shared symptom’. In elaborating these concepts, our speakers will explore a definition of womanhood that is radically political and relational — one critical of Lacan’s notorious definition of woman as mystic, which condemns women to remain silent, isolated, and apolitical.
The unlikely guide in this enterprise? Valerie Solanas: a woman, a lesbian, a ‘schizo’, a criminal who called for a world where men would have been exterminated, and a woman who tried to imagine a world made only by women, that is, constituted only of relations between women — a world of sisters.
2024
