Manifesto for infrastructural thinking: Living with psychoanalysis in a glitch

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is a manifesto for an infrastructural turn in psychoanalysis, proposing to look at institutions ‘slantwise’. It theorises psychoanalytic infrastructural thinking, pondering on its qualities as a particular kind of orientation to action, and showing its capacity to consider multiple transferences and ambivalence, as well as new fantasies on gain, accumulation and redistribution. It articulates the relationship between infrastructural thinking and a postural theory of the subject, centred on considering inclinations, orientations, and disorientations in relation to objects. Drawing on ethnographic and archival material, it constructs a ‘scene’ for observing infrastructural thinking at work, in psychoanalytic free clinics in Brazil, in the 1970s, and up to our times. It looks at the infrastructural creativities of the free clinics, which promise to renew the relationship of psychoanalysis with itself and with its others. Exploring the intersection of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, it traces the work of infrastructural thinking in postural moments, glitches, disorientations, or slips of the tongue.