Diversity or Exclusion? Psychoanalysis ‘Explains’

In this article I am not going to offer the kind of ‘integration’ of different considerations of ‘race, caste, class’ suggested by the title of the panel from which this piece derives.1 It is too big a task and in any case leaves out a lot of other intersectional factors such as gender, sex, sexuality, religion, disability. What can be done, perhaps is to begin to think through the ways in which these and other elements of social positioning produce specific textures of force, violence, care, minoritisation, destructiveness and possibility. For example, the COVID pandemic must be seen as intricately bound up with the structures of inequality and oppression that continue to work the world, and in which psychoanalysis is mired without always reflecting on that fact. We have seen in the pandemic how some lives have been made to matter more than others, how some populations are disposable in the interests of economic and political concerns that derive from failures of care and in some countries - Brazil is an exemplar - a masculinist denialism that has the flavour of murderous psychopathy.

The question this raises, to my mind, is not so much the tolerance of difference or the encouragement of a deepened acceptance of diversity, desirable though these things clearly are. It is rather whether it is possible to construct and sustain an ethic that resists oppression and extends grievability to all who suffer, asserting the primacy of relations of care in establishing what it means to be a human subject as well as a humane one (Butler, 2020). If we can think our way through this, it will be along the lines of psychoanalysis' insistence that all subjects have their own reality, their singularity, and that this makes them grievable, so their lives matter. In doing this, psychoanalysis needs to reflect back on its own practices of exclusion - discrimination by class, sexuality and race have all featured over the years and continue to do so - something it has started