Divisions and Their Remainders
Date: Saturday September 14 2024
Time: 10am – 1:30pm
Location: Carmelite Community Centre, 56 Aungier Street, Dublin 2 D02 T258
Cost: Free & Open to All
Tickets via Eventbrite
By ICLO Society of the NLS
#IrelandEvents #DublinCityEvents #ThingstodoinDublin #DublinSeminars #DublinScience&Tech Seminars #celebration #event #opening #divisions #remainders
About the Event
- ICLO-NLS Opening Event
- Multidisciplinary conversation
- Free and Open to all / coffee break included
- In Person only.
- Email: register@nulliclo-nls.org
Divisions and their Remainders
Argument – ICLO Opening Event 2024/25
Our title is “Divisions and their Remainders,” where the subject of the unconscious – that’s all of us – is constituted by fundamental division, founded on a Spaltung, whereby an identity of the subject is an impossibility. The remainder of this operation involves a centrifugal disquiet or disturbance which when localised ‘outside’ and attributed to the stranger, foreigner or migrant, gives rise to discrimination and indeed racism. On the other hand, there are identifications: the group, the ideal, the politics, the leader, the cause, the nation, etc., and in that we find bodies inhabited and captured by the very discourses we claim to master regarding local and geo-political social-operations -war-migration-famine-economics-homelessness-deprivation… in one word jouissance.
Psychoanalysis of the Lacanian orientation notes a second impossibility, not unrelated to the first one. That of a Weltanschauung, whereby a well ‘treated’ civilization would be without its discontents. Right now in Ireland, questions of migration, identitarian politics of the group, and matters of segregation and racism have come very much to the fore, once more, in discourse here. Satirists level the accusation that the political classes derive jouissance/ enjoyment from the objectification of migrants, – making of them a political football – as bodies arrive, undocumented, in flocks across these borders in increasing numbers. Headlines from 2002 are being reused… yet the political classes insist that their policies around so-called ‘illegal migration’ are robust and working,- blaming the migrants themselves as well as the neighbour for lack of border controls, all the while insisting that a ‘sinister fringe’ of alt right agitators are attempting to destabilise our democracy… (Albeit that the recent local election results do not bear this out, notwithstanding recent results in Europe generally.) Division it seems suits political ends…
Groupings of residents in various areas have formed; protesting and expressing their concerns that undocumented migrants are being (inappropriately) placed in temporary accommodation, hotels and tent-encampments in their area… And conversely there is a broad liberalism which seeks a push to inclusion, integration – some might contend assimilation, on the basis of an egalitarian social-cohesion, which would potentially round-out difference.
It seems there are some difficulties in settling on what form of liberty, fraternity and equality we ought to be desirous…If not a quasi-utopic Weltanschauung, then what can psychoanalysis propose? We ask this question in our title “Divisions and their Remainders”. Can the point of absolute difference (and this is not the same as diversity) that analytic discourse points to in the primary operation of the advent of the subject become recognised in finding a way to include the subject one by one? And not just in the sense of the ciphering of counting bodies, and statistics: documentation, asylum, deportation or integration – but to treat the remainder or surplus of the operation in a way that offers a reduction of that which is the excessive consequence of discourse itself.
Raphael Montague – Organising Committee
Guest Speakers
Keire Murphy is a Senior Policy Officer with the Irish National Contact Point of the European Migration Network, which is based in the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin. She has worked on topics ranging from migration decision-making, attitudes to migrants, and access to housing for refugees. Keire has a double Masters in Public Policy and Human Development, specialised in Migration Studies and an LLB in Law and French from Trinity College Dublin. She previously worked with the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund in Geneva, as well as NGOs in The Netherlands, France, and Lebanon focusing on refugee integration and research.
David O’Connor is an Adult Education Tutor teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and ESOL Literacy at City of Dublin Education and Training Board, where he works with learners from various backgrounds, all of whom (so far) have been migrants born outside the Republic of Ireland, and many of whom are or have been in the asylum system. David has a Masters in American Literature from UCD and reviews books – mostly contemporary Irish fiction – and has published pieces online for The Dublin Review of Books and The Stinging Fly. David is interested in the parts of stories that people do not wish to hear.
Laura Tarafas is a Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. She has international clinical experience in working with clients from diverse cultural background and completed a PhD in Cross-Cultural Clinical Psychology in France. She is currently working at SPIRASI, the Irish National Centre for Survivors of Torture, as well as in private practice in Dublin. Laura is originally from Hungary.
With ICLO members Sheila Power, Raphael Montague, Nefeli Paraskevi Papadaki, Claire Hawkes, Ros Mc Carthy, Florencia Shanahan
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