International Society for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (ISPP/SIPP)

University of Nicosia and University of Cyprus

Limits, Frontiers, Rims, and Borders

Cyprus, September 21st to 23rd, 2023

Proposal and Call for Papers (The call for papers is still being updated and further information will soon be published here)

Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been in an intimate, yet uneasy, relationship with philosophy: it’s a relationship of attraction, of rejection, of mutual compromises; in sum, a game of limits, of frontiers and borders. This year’s conference aims to explore such limits and borders between and within interiority and exteriority as well as between and within disciplines. At the same time, it aims to ‘go beyond’ the dichotomy of inside and outside, interrogate the existing topological models, and dwell in aporetic or erratic zones whose limitations and demarcations are paradoxical at best and where rims and edges have to be analyzed on their proper terms.

Borders can be visible or invisible, acknowledged or denied, but one must always contend, in one way or another, with the borders or limitations of one’s own being. The fantasy of a body without flaws still haunts us, and once again, ‘we believe we have it.’ This fantasy is often fueled by a desire to keep the other at a distance and it leads us into a frenetic quest for new walls. When the empty space seeks to be filled and sutured, any signs of possible otherness are eradicated.

Those tensions, this accumulation, appeal to a new reflection on limits. Could we begin differently, without obsessing so much over an eschatological view of history?

Whether it is about the changing forms of Lacanian topology or the ways we pursue its practical modalities, psychoanalysis has always been a study of what covers us, of ways of hiding, rejecting and agglutinating. In this sense, the Freudian reflections on the drives as frontiers that straddle the psychical and the somatic, the distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and the internalization of external authority in the face of distress, are fundamental.

Since Socrates, philosophy searches for another, which can become a masquerade for gaining an identity. Guarding itself against what it perceives as “external dangers,” philosophy continuously attempts to re-define the methods and tools it can embody. In Kant, the delimitation and the foundation of reason formed through the indication of empiricism which philosophy itself marked as an external territory.

All these games, from the analytic couch to the academic classroom, implicate a spatiality and are connected to the geopolitical issues of an epoch, its imagination and its spirit. Nowadays, when the nation-state tenses up, borders reappear and, with them, attempts at regulating our identities and our speech, a call for the redefinition of our “body” in relationship to the “foreign body” is urgently needed. The immigrant is a fantasy of a new topicality and we can wonder which sort of question is being veiled when it is so intrinsically linked to a different kind of clothing: the yellow life-jacket.

Smartphones allow us to forget the respective walls of censorship, to enter a virtual world where we can be perhaps less fearful, but where everything is also uncanny and provokes anxiety and outrage.

The movement that comes from the peripheries towards the centre might be considered, not as a barbaric invasion menacing the established bases of a democratic dream, but as the arrival of what has been denied to make the illusion of democracy possible. We are living through a kind of return to the Real. It does not follow from this that one should forget the diagnosis and propositions about modernity’s inevitable crisis, but that these lost illusions must drop their white masks and consider those who have never had the right of having illusions.

The psychoanalytical clinic opens itself to these new forms of suffering in a time of border crisis. In doing so, it doesn’t only bump up against the internal and invisible borders of cities divided by social violence, but also against one of the most subtle and dangerous instruments of colonization: thinking. Much of what takes place in psychoanalytic work is about freeing what thinking has aimed to colonize; and yet, we need to think, to theorize, in order to do this work. What is at stake is not the denial of traditional thinking, but the possibility of returning to it from the perspective of its pertinence for the kind of problems that have come from this new epoch. The geopolitical borders are, in this sense, also temporal ones.

We invite such reflections on the topic of limits, borders, and frontiers in a city that is itself a borderland: Nicosia, the capital of the island of Cyprus, is the last divided capital in the world. Inhabited since 2500BC, Nicosia is a frontier between linguistic, geopolitical, sociocultural and temporal borders. The so-called “green line” or “dead zone,” a no-man’s land that cuts across the Venetian walls surrounding the old city, remains frozen in time as it splits the Greek-Cypriot south from the Turkish-Cypriot north. This dystopian site is also, no doubt, a traumatic mise-en-scène, lurking behind barbed wire, timeless and displaced. At the same time, it is an imaginary site, a breeding ground for fantasies, projections and misrecognitions. How might we begin to transpose such dead zones, both within and without, into the realm of the symbolic even as they are destined to fall back into the kernel of the Real?

It is time to at least attempt to reflect anew on the notion of limits. If the other side of the border is not accessible to us, how are we to understand the enclosures we have constructed for ourselves? What passage is possible? 

We call for papers concerning :

• The unconscious and its spatiality
• Repetition and its limits
• Topological structures and effects in psychoanalysis and philosophy
• The performativity of transgression
• Sexuation, gender specificity and subjective constitution
• The Imaginary of frontiers

      ○ On a personal level (skin, clothing and their relation to the individual or collective)

      ○ On a political level (fantasies, jurisprudence, analysis of discourse)

      ●     Spatial notions : Frontiers, zones, limits, rims and their conceptual function

• The connection between thinking and space
• Embryology—an object of psychoanalytic or philosophical thinking?
• The meaning of criticism between psychoanalysis and philosophy
• The shifting notion of dispositif
• The practices of “limiting” or “overtaking”
• The spatiality of languages and the effect of translation
• Psychoanalysis and its redistributive effects regarding structures and the emergent
• The possible places of the Symbolic – and therefore, the variations of the Real
• Political economy and its connection with the unconscious
• Racism and homophobia: functions, practices, effects
• Metaphors of interior and exterior
• Distinction and dialectics between the same and the other
• The possibilities of art
• Social phantasms of invasion, contagion and immunity
• The refusal of refugees
• Defensive uses of identity

The meeting will offer plenary papers and discussions, panel presentations, as well as roundtables on books and publication of ISPP members and others pertaining to the conference theme or broader questions on the relations and limits between psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Active members of SIPP-ISPP will be given preference in presentig papers and panels, while all are welcome to attend.
The call for papers is still being updated and further information will soon be published here.