Saketopoulou avec Lacan

At this year's Division 39 conference, Avgi Saketopoulou staged an intervention-not the kind typically spoken about in clinical sessions, but rather an intervention on the institutional level of psychoanalysis. She challenged relational psychoanalysis’ false promise of centering repair, especially repair initiated by an oppressor within a system that disavows and thus perpetuates ongoing oppression. Saketopoulou spoke to the ethics of “exigent sadism,” as she developed in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), and applied the concept to a broader analytic and psychopolitical context. The exigent sadist-here perhaps an analytic candidate in an institute that forecloses even the possibility of its own sadistic unconscious-takes the risk to go beyond the lure of ego identity and evokes the overwhelm of the institutional other. While institutional authorities, in familiar moves, might seek to pathologize exigent sadists, Saketopoulou evokes the urgent ethical necessity of action- especially in the face of speaking to and acting against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, which institutes and systems in the United States continue to attempt to silence.

In this context, I propose that the Lacanian concept and praxis of scansion-the sometimes sudden but generative end to a session- can be re-envisioned and utilized in the service of exigent sadism. The word scansion is derived from the French verb “scander,” or the practice in poetry of dividing up a line (Fink, 1997). Lacan (1998) also parallels it in his Seminar II to an application of the Zegarnik effect, such as when the interruption of a musical bar creates in a listener the push to resolve or else create something not yet heard in the break.

These are unlikely bedfellows, for sure. It is an understatement to say that Laplanche, from whose metapsychology Saketopoulou developed her theory, was no fan of scansion. In fact, Laplanche split from Lacan's teaching and direction due to his opposition to the use of scansio