Incel – body and virtual capitalism

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By FATIMA VICENTE e TALES AB'SÁBER*

Lecture by Fátima Vicente commented by Tales Ab´Sáber

Fatima Vicente

Based on experience, it can be stated that technologies impact the configuration of social ties in this society, as well as enabling, diversifying and updating sexual practices. In other words, technologies produce ties and practices. The current scenario in which communication and information are digitalized produces a mutation in this production, triggered by the shift from mediation to mediatization. We will return to this later.

Digital technologies are closely related to the current situation of capitalism, in its monetized version, since such technology produced it through the rupture of the constitutive links of industrial capitalism. It was as profit began to exceed production, also due to that technology, that the need to enhance such an effect led to priority investment in nanotechnology, exacerbating neoliberalism in all its aspects.

The belief in individual freedom and competitiveness as a factor of prosperity, which had been instituted by neoliberalism, was elevated to another level, and being successful became the only way of life worth living. But success became increasingly rare, since prosperity, under these conditions, exponentially and constantly increases social inequalities. Thus, failure becomes something that must be avoided at all costs, since it is always imminent.

The hegemony of the economy in the neoliberal context conceals the fact that personal and social material achievements are historical, occurring in the context of political, social and interpersonal relations. Success is attributed to individual characteristics – increasingly seen as intrinsic and inherent – ​​and the principle of competitiveness offers a way out in situations where failure predominates, by attributing it to others, demonized the more vulnerable they are.

Citizens' freedom and competitiveness require and promote a fierce rejection of others and, to preserve them, minorities will be the preferred targets, since, without rights or the ability to create rights, they will lend themselves very well to attack and annihilation.

A news story[I] gives a sample of the consequences of this state of affairs. The article discusses violent actions spread by the hate speech of one of the radical groups that inhabit the internet, the “incels”: “men who are unable to have sexual and loving relationships and blame sexually active women and men for this.”

The violent act, in this case, is the random running over of many pedestrians, which took place in Toronto, which left a death toll of ten and which was later revealed to be an intentional act. Minassian, the driver of the van, had posted the following message on the internet, shortly before carrying out the attack: “The incel rebellion has already begun, let’s defeat all the incels.” chads e Stacys. All hail the gentleman Elliot Rodger!”[ii] He declares himself Incel and is a participant in a web discussion forum that brings together others in the same condition; the acronym operates as a password of recognition and distinguishes those who are inside and those who are outside. To those inside, Elliot Rodger, who is honored in this attack, is well known, and perhaps should be recognized as one of their patrons.

It was in 2014 that Elliot Rodger, then a young man of twenty-two, shot and stabbed six people to death and then killed himself. He frequently posted on social media expressing his frustration at being rejected by women. Rejection, it seems, was not only sexual, but also social.

He called the acts that would make him famous “Retribution Day” and considered them the only way to give meaning to his life, to take revenge on the society that had denied him love and sex. In these videos, Elliot advocates hatred of women. In one of them, he expresses his resentment for still being a virgin at 22 and for not having even kissed a girl. This situation seems to perplex him, since he considers himself “the ideal and magnificent gentleman”. This does not seem to have made it easier for him to understand the rejection he feels he is suffering. In a previously published photo, he added the caption “the closest thing to a living God”. The context does not allow us to assume that there is any irony in his statement.

Who is Elliot Rodger urging? Who is he talking to in these posts and statements? Who does he want to make himself known to? His posts seem to have a recipient as random as the stabbings and shootings he randomly distributed, as perhaps the shooting with which he killed himself was also random. His legacy seems to have been to establish himself as a reference for incels, perhaps also by chance.

Incels do not form an organized group outside the internet. They participate in discussion forums where, via chat, they express loneliness, insecurity and frustration due to their inability to relate to the women they supposedly desire. Supposedly, because the conversations spread hate and misogyny. Assault and rape are encouraged, which is considered – by assumption, since they are all virgins – more pleasurable than consensual sexual encounters.

As soon as Minassian was arrested, half an hour after his act, the news was already circulating on the forums, promoting debates according to their own rules: his action was applauded, as in other circumstances, the complaints of other participants, who expressed their desire to resort to suicide due to these difficulties, were met with an incitement not to fall alone. Homicide was encouraged. They “usually blamed their lack of sex life on women, feminism, their own appearance or inadequacy, their parents, sexually active men, modern culture.”

They consider that there are men who are attractive and successful with women, whom they call chads and which provide unattainable, exclusive and enjoyable sexual experiences. Chads have a special jawline that makes them attractive, as well as large muscles. As for women, they are divided into Stacys e Beckis. Stacys are the object of desire, they are naturally blonde and have pronounced curves, but they are also unattainable, since they only date Chads.

The Beckis are objects of contempt and hatred, as they are indirectly responsible for the condition they suffer, since they are interested in thought and their own emancipation and give little importance to socially valued erotic attractions, that is, they are part of modern culture. To make matters worse, they are naturally dark-skinned. As for you, you believe that if any woman is interested in you, it will be to humiliate and diminish you, and due to a great conspiracy, if one of them is with you, they will always be cheating on you with someone else at the same time. What is at stake in this situation? How does technology impact this configuration?

The cybernetic environment has as a condition the transition from the discursive regime, mediated by language, to one mediated by data, which promotes a technological mutation affecting thought, the body, and the relationship with others, since language ceases to be the mediator of the social bond. This environment, called virtual, is configured in a new bios, through the “proprioceptive (synesthetic, optical) cloning of a physical reality” (Sodré, 2008, p.119) in which the digitalization of information and communication, that is, the compression into binary numerical references, do not depend on reading time nor do they depend on the effect of posteriority to achieve a meaning.

Or, one of the possible meanings that speech and writing can contemplate. The space-time coordinates of the experience change and the thought changes register, it ceases to be reflective.

What can be seen from the size of memes that men and women acquire for incels. chads, Stacys e Beckis are taken as icons, since the descriptions that correspond to them have the imaginary consistency typical of caricatures, since their elements do not change in meaning based on experience. This is also true for incels, regarding their own bodies and their potential. Underlying their complaints and self-deprecation is an equally static conception of themselves. They disregard themselves as potentially attractive sexual objects, due to their own appearance and subjectively resented inadequacy, but at no time does the possibility of placing themselves in an active position appear, with a view to modifying these factors. They are immobilized by the characteristics from which they suffer. The field of action seems to be inaccessible to them.

Considering the perspective related to the body, we can recognize, together with Le Breton, that, although cyberspace is an unfolding of the world, it is a world in which “the body is erased, in which the other exists at the interface of communication, but without a body, without a face, without any other touch than the touch of the computer keyboard, without any other gaze than the gaze of the screen” (Le Breton, 2013, p.146). However, precisely because of these conditions, the author states that “surfing the Internet and exchanges in chats provide Internet users, however, with ‘a disturbing sensation of presence’ (Dery, 1997, p.16, apoud Le Breton, iip153) because, “despite the subject’s reduced mobility, he knows a sensory mobility that society does not lavish on him with such abundance.” (iip143).

We can think that this also occurs in the context of discussion forums in which incels participate. There is no discussion or speech there, the social bond mediated by language does not operate, these voices do not create a bond. The body loses its space-time references. In this environment, messages are echoes and do not undergo the work of elaboration inherent to the polysemy of words, which implies the operation of negation, specific to the identity of thought, a condition possible only in the secondary process. This work, which implies the construction of the fantasy of desire, which feeds the dream and psychic reality in general, is only done when dependent on the presence of the other.

We know that, in each person's history, we have been dependent on a significant Other, capable of providing foreign aid.[iii], – to the helpless children. Help that provides satisfaction of needs and eroticizes the edges of the body, through the symbolic exchanges that parental care will provide. The edges are transformed into erogenous zones, which transmute needs into pleasures and desires. This is how a body becomes eroticized, its word comes to life and encounters and disagreements with the other are possible. From the beginning, the other is present, as is helplessness. And so they will remain, always necessary.

For it is in this way that the other also gains its density and thickness, especially those that sustain it as foreign to us, with something imponderable, which guarantees both its impossible accessibility and total transparency, and guarantees ours. Mediated by words, which find their resonance in shared language, we find and build the possible distance to the encounter with the other and the waiting time necessary for the manifestation of its presence. The erogenous edges will require permanent reactivation, which will be done through the daily intervention of the presence of the other, the similar, as the one whose gaze and listening, silence and speech, shares with us the experience of renewing these exchanges and activating these edges that link us.

In the context of virtual reality, personal history will undergo a transformation as the individual interfaces with this other reality and the conditions of possibility of encountering others change. The individual becomes switchable and, as Sodré describes, “from an existential point of view, being 'switchable' means being firstly capable of connecting productively (at all levels of work relations), and then, being-for-consumption, that is, being a collector of sensations. This implies a constant impulse to move (even if only mentally) in search of fun and novelty.

In the cybernetic network, the euphoria of digital movement, of apparently unlimited “access” to data sources, implies mental and emotional “entanglement” that hides real bodily immobility.” (Sodré, ii, p. 162). The interface with the network becomes a prosthesis that defines the individual and gives him consistency. The other becomes dispensable. Erogenous edges are activated in this new space.

However, if in the virtual world, due to media compression, speed makes temporality instantaneous and is paired with the sensation of near ubiquity that the individual will come to experience, the body will be free from the weight of the constraints inherent to material space. The dissolution of personal identity, enhanced by the experience of presenting oneself through forged identities, which go beyond the limits suffered in 'real life', will be a possibility in these circumstances.

The apparent spatial ubiquity and temporal instantaneity suggest a reach – of information, access, etc. – that is exciting, but whose effectiveness in historical material reality is null. The previously mentioned breadth is hardly achievable outside the virtual world because, for a large majority, the resources at their disposal leave them almost immobilized in a system of distribution of places and privileges in an unequal society.

And if in the virtual world their actions are effective over the historical constraints of their own identity, in shared reality those limits are once again valid. Sometimes abruptly, an effect that has been successfully explored in many comedies, when the encounter with the “real” body and person causes the body and person announced in the virtual space to collapse into ridicule. The extent of this collapse and the humiliating effect that such ridicule has on those involved usually do not deserve much consideration. Except when their actions attract attention due to more of violence that they demonstrate.

When faced with their own bodily awkwardness, when their desires are not vectorized into action towards the object, they find themselves in the limbo of the dissolution of their real identity, which is present in historical material reality, in confrontation with the lost virtual condition.

 The helplessness they experience presents itself as vulnerability and threatens them. Actions are actualized, without mediation, in cruelty, oriented towards others and towards themselves. Embarrassed by a peculiar anguish, an anguish that is perhaps shattering, the individual age, and gives that anguish a destiny through the exercise of the power conferred by valued social referents.

The vulnerable other is the target and the risk of vulnerability itself is overcome by annihilating this other. Often by attaching to this body a prosthesis accepted within the scope of historical material reality, such as knives, firearms and others. In Minassian's case, the car serves as a prosthesis for the helpless body.

Historically, the automobile was the greatest representative of the industrial face of capitalism, and its non-ownership distinguished pedestrians as failures and inferiors, and it was the symbol of personal and social success for a long time. This is no longer the case today, which may be an indication that the incel configuration is somewhat out of step with time and space. Just as the expression “the ideal and magnificent gentleman” that designates Elliot Rodger for those who revere him as a patron saint. Could this be an indication of a mutation that did not work out?

The strong presence on social media and violent political actions carried out by new groups calling themselves “Male Tribalists”[iv] seem to indicate that a new mutation is taking shape, in which weapons and acts are directed directly against specific, non-random political institutions and positions. Let's hope it doesn't come to fruition!

Tales Ab'Saber

Dear Fatima,

You clearly state the production of personal, sexual, fantasy and political formations related to the Other and to the other, as forms that are articulated and respond to the historical and technical way in which contemporary capitalism is produced.

With the failure of the time of industry, of the territory of politics, of the measure of nations and of the horizon of modern progress, in the time of the global financial redesign of capital, and the destruction of all social contract of commitment and “metaphysics” of rights, people are loose in the constant storm of the image, in the almost instinctual reorganization of territories imagined to exist on the internet, whether for the pathological singularity of suffering, as you demonstrated, or for the attempt to reinvent common imaginary ballast, “ancestry” – movements that can generate territories of criticism, or of collective destruction of the weak and minorities, neofascism, to defend themselves from a time in permanent crisis, a hegemonic cultural vanishing point of money and unrealizable consumption, and a new global irresponsibility of capital over the mass of life on earth.

Your work makes all this clear, I agree with you – we are critical and socialist psychoanalysts, and this is the material time – and I appreciated your reading of the incel symptomatic, which is a singular and particular fact, in my view, of the same structure of hallucinosis and broader destructiveness, of the ideological falsifications, also supported by the network, of the broader group of “anti-communist Christian heteronormative families”, anti-erotic in this way, in the Brazilian case, Bolsonarists, neo-fascists, well authorized by a pact with the broader power to destroy someone.

The incel is a more isolated and magical form of neo-fascist political paranoia, in a smaller identification group of anti-erotic subjectivation for violence, and the neo-fascist is a family and church incel, driven by a mass communication system, so to speak.

Their paranoia against their own negatives – communists, globalists, ecologists, feminists, Indians, teachers, artists, blacks and the poor in general, the “cultural Marxists”… – has the same structure of narcissistic protection, in an order of their own symbolic territory, their structured hallucinosis of reality as Bion said, a new modality of historical defense in very new technical circumstances, with the agency of the right to destroy the other as an ordering principle of the politically engaged ego, one of the new logics of random reorganization in the virtual space of religious modes of mind, so to speak, to recall Freud.

Paranoia as politics, supported by an active identification group on the internet, for a particular struggle against the idea of ​​humanity as a common project. All without the emotional perspective – a depressive position, Kleinians would say – of democracy, the presence of the Other as a value of the self itself, on the horizon. These terms serve the incel and the familiar neofascist.

I just wanted to put three perspectives, sets of ideas, to the discussion you so ingeniously constructed in your work:

(i) Capitalism has always maintained masses of people who are excluded by law and reduced to the total market as the only possible form of existence. The liberation of the peasant masses in England in the 1650s, for the creation of the great enclosure and for the liberation of the proletariat of London, Birmingham and Manchester, as Marx showed, with children working up to 16 hours and sleeping in the factories of the XNUMXth century, having in the Puritan family of the time, in a process that would lead to the historical strength of the father's authority, the only possible protection against the total historical launch into the world of the market, is one of the classic stories of this submission of life without appeal or destiny in the system of capitalist accumulation.

Not to mention the “liberation” of enslaved Africans, for 350 years, to work in the plantation/slave/American racism style, for production, parallel to and other development of the central industry, of global mercantile capital, as truly rich as that industrial one.

The ruin of the lives of the human masses, on another scale of course, under Capital, only did not exist when there was some organization of possible territories of struggle for the construction of a horizon of rights, a modernizing class struggle, within the socialist limit, and which counted on the mediation of territories and national history, shared symbolic data, as a continent of historical reading, and of the common desire, for such a process.

Also, in that world of domination, the market and its fetishistic imaginary enjoyment, already observed by Walter Benjamin in operation in the 19th century, always strongly seduced towards the preservation of capital – what the old Marxists called ideology – and the family form, petite bourgeois/bourgeois, was the mediator of socialization and inscription in the ideology, of classes, and in national and world history. From the point of view of a sociology of rational transformation, emancipation, the working children of petite bourgeois families would support the political struggle for rights, from their countries, with the modern world transformation as their horizon.

These are the forms that contemporary capitalism does without. All of them. It has found effective ways of dissolving them – and this has been going on for a long time, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Guy Debord, have all spoken about this throughout the 20th century… – by potentially socializing directly through the mobile and multiple continents of the image, aggregated and immanent to the commodity, to the circulation and accumulation of money, as a new total cultural nature.

In other words, to be human it is enough to generate any income and produce any consumption, and almost nothing else…; at the same time, on the networks we are all generating any income and producing any consumption, permanently, because there all that matters is merchandise… Dissolving modern mediations and measurements, and the collective class consciousness guided by a common illusion of a better world, of a universal historical perspective, individuals are free to invent traditions in the image and better territories of enjoyment and positioning in the world market, of the exploitation of all against all, the only universal reality that matters: that of the commodity form and its fetish, a world of images in permanent pulsation.

And they are also free to carry out their own destruction, and that of others, as a particular, privatized way of carrying out the more or less general destruction of the whole, establishing their own nature, outsourced in the network, so to speak, of the fascist destruction of time. In this way, each one creates their own system of paranoia and destruction that best suits them, tries to derive some pleasure from delirium, or from the political market of delirium, and legitimizes their violence towards the other with the specular group of the immediate image, from which they enjoy, apart from the reproduction of the world as it is, carrying out the violence of the whole upon each one of us – configuring a “fascism” different from the cycle of world wars from 1914 to 1945, and the first historical fascism, which exterminated in that specific way, of the State, and its national competition of imperialism.

(ii) When we consider very strongly the historical and cultural determination, with the technological effects of the organization of subjectivity functioning as new and strong productivity, we are far from the first epistemological character of psychoanalysis, which was centered on proto-fantasies of management and hallucinatory historical repetition of humanity, the fundamental terms of subjectivation.

The inner dialectic of the subject of the unconscious, centered on the metaphysics of the economic principle of pleasure, organized every mediated relationship with reality with the structuring fantasy, universal political proto-fantasy, prehistoric/historical, of Oedipus, as we know. Your text speaks of subjectivation and ways of suffering and dying constituted directly with the technical social mediators of time, and does not speak of Oedipus… quite rightly.

Because the multiplication of forms of subjective management, through the network and the market, with the propositional devices of desire and “experience” there, present to the subject since childhood, or always, and the failure of the “humanist” or human presence, if you will, preconceived by psychoanalysis, of father and mother in the life of a child, is a historical reality. It is no coincidence that already in the 1940s Winnicott needed to explain to the world what a mother was like… The social reality of the divided society, of war and industry, was causing the age-old human reception, the mother, to fail… And even more so the father, already a cultural figure, so to speak…

In other words, incels have no father or mother. At least in terms of the classical symbolic territories of psychoanalysis, and their symbolic arrangements known as symptom form. They do, in fact, have the group of general paranoid arrangements, the collective and concrete imaginary feeding of the delusion/reality system itself, the realization of a jouissance sustained in a group – worldwide – of reiteration and redundancy, in the image, rapid and constant, and in the participation in the image, of a reality itself, sexual and political, which was constituted in these general social devices.

And, as time generally proclaims, they can destroy. What I also want to say is that our first theory does not have a sufficient “dialectical window” to consider, with a psychoanalytic theoretical basis, this direct management of history, technique and ideology of the subject of the unconscious. We lack a truly well-thought-out dialectical historical materialist theory of the subject of the unconscious.

Moreover, Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Guy Debord, and even the figure of Pasolini’s “consumer fascist” worked on this stronger and more decisive injunction, a critique of historical power and its forms to the same extent as the critique of subjective formations, of psychoanalysis. All of them, not by chance European Marxists, emphasized the “historical”, class and technical character of the unconscious. Freud, after all, never criticized the forms of alienation and control inherent in market life and the commodity form over people, which, if we want to think about contemporary suffering, is absolutely unthinkable.

Freud criticized the modern alienation of the sexual, as Michel Foucault said, in the face of law, desire and death. His main object of criticism was the statute of sexual repression and religion. And what about when the world of desire in the global computer networks, which move everything, no longer knows the law in the image and no longer respects life or death globally?

His work is a critique of the subject with a critique of the ways contemporary capital manages desire, fantasy and particular reality, sustained in a network, by groups that are themselves constituted in the image, consumer markets and imaginary/real production system. The groups generate their own political-cultural industry, and win, enjoy or die in it. Thus, the forms of personal solutions are strongly influenced by the historical forms of life propositions. History and technology have entered strongly into people's subjective lives, as Marxist thinkers who thought with psychoanalysis said, but as psychoanalysts did not say, by not thinking about capital and its technology at least until the other day.

For all these reasons, more than ten years ago I wrote an essay on the ways of recognizing and dealing with measurements of the ideological and technical power of time, in the clinic itself, calling this universe of theoretical problems the “cultural or dialectical self”. About how the subject is modulated by the whole technique/power, and how to talk about it with him.[v]

I also wrote a paper on the managed subjective dissolution of expanding hyper-capitalism – when it still thought it was “growing”, in the 2000s, and deluded the world with “infinite democratic development”… – in the global nightclub of synthetic drugs and electronic music, whose body proposed by the technical device, unlike the incels, was a body in jouissance in permanent action, infinite pulsation in the drug scientifically designed for experimentation, in music without political imaginary and in the utopian collectivity of the global nightclub, already then simply eliding – technically and historically – the subject of the sleep/dream/awakening structure.[vi]

The clubbers, drug addicts, big consumers and erotics that I studied in Berlin wanted to collectively suspend sleep and dreams, moving on to the technically managed act of endlessly celebrating the world as it was… And, ultimately, dying there, celebrating the emptiness of the device. That was my general conclusion.

(iii) It would be appropriate to think, epistemologically, as Freud liked to do, about this contemporary, technical, historical, productive variation in social acts and practices of life and enjoyment, of criticism of subjectivation concomitant with the criticism of dehumanization, an arcane system of life of capitalism, as Marx in fact always pointed out.

Theoretically, or philosophically, what negativity is this of ours, or, from where we speak, what humanity, power, or desire, what territory and what illusion of the human allows us to evaluate the incel psychic death, for example, considered by him as life, at the same time that we name the conditions of technical and ideological practices of violence, historical, that move him?

What negative modernity is this of ours, what is it committed to, that instead of being fascists on the world wide web and enjoying it, we are psychoanalysts who think with Freud – and with Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and Roberto Schwarz – about the ways of suffering and being subject, of internal and external violence, of the true production of violence, internal and external. What is the political nature of our place, dialectical, radical and negative, as opposed, utopianly, to all saturation of desire for a historical form of power, imprinted on technology itself?

These are just a few questions that your living work has raised for me, and I wanted to share them with you. [vii]

*Fatima Vicente is a professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis at the Instituto Sedes Sapientiae.

*Tales Ab´Sáber He is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Unifesp. He is the author of, among other books, The Anthropophagic Soldier (Hedra). [https://amzn.to/4ay2e2g]

References


Bezerra Jr, Benilton. Project for a Scientific Psychology – Freud and Neuroscience. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2013.

Chaui, Marilena. “Neoliberal violence”, in About Violence; organizers Ericka Marie Itokazu, Luciana Chaui-Berlink. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2017. (Writings of Marilena Chaui, vol.5)

Stinky, Pierre. Name, Figure and Memory: language in the psychoanalytic situation. Translated by Martha Gambini and Claudia Berliner. New York: Escuta, 1991.

freud, s. Incomplete Works of Sigmund Freud – Culture, Society and Religion: Culture and Its Discontents and Other Writings. Translation Maria Rita Salzano Moraes; Revision Pedro Heliodoro Tavares. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, n/d.

Le Breton, David. Farewell to the Body: Anthropology and Society. Translated by Marina Appenzeller. 6th ed. Campinas, SP: Papirus, 2013.

Teixeira, Antônio; Ferrari, Ilka; Calmon, Analícea. “Semiology of Temporality and Spatiality” in Lacanian Psychopathology 1: Semiology. Antonio Teixeira and Heloisa Caldas (orgs.). Belo Horizonte: Authentic Publishing, 2017.

Sodre, Muniz. Anthropology of the Mirror: A Theory of Linear and Networked Communication. Petrópolis, RJ: Voices, 2008.

Website: BBC News Brazil, 27/04/2018 “Who are the 'incels' – involuntary celibates, – the group to which the Toronto driver belonged. Seen on Facebook, on the date.

Notes


[I] Da BBC News Brazil, dated April 27, 2018 and which remains in circulation on Facebook.

[ii] In English Minassian's words are: “All heil the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger1”. It does not seem a coincidence that the verb chosen for the greeting “Hail” (Salve or Ave) is the literal translation from German “Heil“traditionally associated with Nazi salutes”Sieg Heil"and "Heil hitler”. (I owe this note to Ignacio del Valle, translator of this text into Spanish.

[iii]As Freud calls it in the Project.

[iv] Actions broadcast in real time, such as the invasion of the Capitol on 06/01/21.

[v] Cultural self, subject of the unconscious and history, São Paulo, Electric Fish Essays, 2016.

[vi] The music of infinite time, Sao Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2012.

[vii] Fátima Vicente's article was originally presented at the XIII Latin American Congress of Psychotherapy. Tales Ab'Sáber's comment was sent to the author in a letter about it.


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