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

After a global pandemic and a series of extensive lockdowns to control the spread of the virus COVID-19, the question of boundaries, limits, frontiers and borders is more urgent than ever. The apocryphal story of psychoanalysis as a plague, supposedly uttered by Freud to Jung upon arriving in America, would now seem to be in poor taste. And yet, the theme of contagion moves beyond the pandemic highlighting other modes of spreading out across borders and frontiers, realigning the globe: from the viral videos of police violence that reignited public reckoning with the long history of racism in the United States, to populist contagion in many regions across the globe aiding the coming to power of new forms of authoritarianism, to finally, the wildfire transmission of paranoiac conspiracy theories and the compulsive doubting of the truth that affects the spread of information.  

This year’s conference aims to re-explore 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 perfect body, perhaps immortal or limitless, 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. The pandemic certainly changed our relationship to our neighbors, changing our work environments and our sense of participation in the general social fabric. 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, especially in light of renewed wars, like that in the Ukraine. 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.

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. 

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. 

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 one of the last divided capitals 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. What passage is possible?  

We call for papers concerning :

• Thoughts on the pandemic and borders. Viral load and viral spread. 
• 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)

• The problem with thinking 
• The living at the limit and/of psychoanalysis
• The practices of “limiting” or “overtaking”
• The spatiality of languages and the effect of translation
• Racism and homophobia: functions, practices, effects, limits
• Metaphors of interior and exterior
• Social phantasms of invasion, contagion and immunity
• The refusal of refugees 
• War and frontiers
• Identity, psychic defense, exclusion 
• Modes of authoritarian personalities
• Body decomposition and the social order
• The role of silence in psychoanalysis
• The production of truth in politics: what’s new in the age of fake-news, deep web, avatars and metaverse? 
• Social norms and psychic reactions to their loss. 
• The proof of limits in Gender experience
• The scientific discourse and its limits 
• The creation of the radical other in colonialism 

We also welcome papers, roundtables and other contributions that pay tribute to the work of Philippe Van Haute and his readings of Freudian psychoanalysis. Our dear friend Philippe, deceased last year, was a co-founder and central figure of ISPP.

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

Proposals for presentations can be sent up to April 30, 2023, to the email: sippcyprus2020@gmail.com . Please include an abstract (maximum of 500 words), a title, authorship, country, institution (if it is the case).Active members of SIPP-ISPP will be given preference in presenting papers and panels, while all are welcome to attend.