An Interview with Avgi Saketopoulou

Roula Hajjar: Thank you so much, Avgi, for being with us. And for giving us your time. We want to orient the conversation slightly to help bring you into our thinking. You know, we're trainees. We're students. We're early career professionals. And there were a lot of us at the conference. We noticed it, and we think it was noticeable. Many of us are either in organizing spaces or have a history of organizing and activism in New York City. That is the audience we are considering: younger practitioners, students, trainees, people straddling the activist and intellectual, psychoanalytic spaces. With that backdrop in mind, I will situate us in this moment. We are witnessing the genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel. We're seeing Western governments assume a posture of unmasked fascism, and so we wonder, as students of psychoanalysis—as people who believe in the generative and transformative promise of psychoanalysis - what psychoanalysis has to offer as not only a way to interpret or facilitate analysis but also as a tool to act on and change the social, political, material reality. And, I think in this spirit, you know, I'll kick us off and ask: we were moved by the term “psychoanalyticopolitical” to describe the concept of exigent sadism. Can you say more about that choice?

Avgi Saketopoulou: Yes. But, can I ask? I realize I don't know much about your background or where you're coming from. It would be good to know a bit about that.

Safia Albaiti: Yeah. I'm Yemeni and Muslim. Before entering psychoanalysis, my entry point was through political loss through being active as a Socialist, anti-war organizing Palestine, but it also expanded from there. And so, this question of how psychoanalysis can be generative for explaining impasses, defeats, what we have as collectives, and how to articulate them…that's something that was my entry point into the discipline. So, I'm coming a bit full circle now, but differently. I'm not as much of an organizer right now. I'm a