Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization Rodrigo Nunes,  Verso, 2021,  320 pp., paperback, ISBN: 9781788733830

Published online: 18 November 2024

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024

What can ecological thought offer to the sphere of social movements? This is the anchoring question the London-based Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes asks in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization, a monograph published by Verso in late-2021, just as a global pandemic crystallised an ever-increasing sense of political despair. The piece, still being toured by our colleague in several international events, has a peculiar use for us psychosocially informed psychoanalysts, and, as I will move to discuss here, something to say about how our own field organises itself too. In a sense, psychoanalysis, if thought of as a movement, can be considered an alive, working example of what Rodrigo Nunes proposes.

Nunes situates the fuelling grounds of his rigorous theoretical enquiry in his personal political experiences of organising as well as of incursions into organisations. Organising, a verb, takes us to the collective, always-unfinished act of forging a political landscape for change. Organisations, conversely, speak to a contour, something imagined and held together, leaving a common ground inside and establishing its further horizons and borders as outside. As main examples, Nunes returns to his own memories of the World Social Forum, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre (where we both lived), a Global South alternative to the pernicious World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland, in the early 2000s, and the international uprising he situates in 2011, effervescent mostly in the Occupy movement and its transnational reverberations that seeped into popular democratic parties such as Syriza, in Greece. Localising his effort are two imaginary lines, the first of organising, also known as horizontalism; and the second, of organisations, or