We must therefore put an end to ourselves, because we must put an end to everything that is based on the idea of being something, in order to be more sure that we are not something else – lest we start to wander outside the ontological stakes that mark the boundaries of the politically possible. We must put an end to all discourses that imagine that by assigning us an identity they are assigning us a place – and that, because they have defined the limits of that place, take away the right to police individuals who would not stand on it, who would not adapt to it, who would not conform to it. No, we will not be good workers, good voters, good fathers and good mothers, good sons and good daughters. No, we will not be perfect representatives of the category in which our identity is supposed to place us, like coloured blocks in a child’s game. If we have to be something, be it a problem, a difficulty, an embarrassment or even a scandal – a grain of sand in the well-oiled wheel of what we must call precisely identity management, that is to say, the comprehensive management of bodies subordinated to categories of the same and of the own.

How to Get Rid of Yourself

6 pm
Anti-Workshop of Self Care
Organized by the Reading Group of Criticial Psychology

Members of the Critical Psychology Reading Group will present a psychological view on self-help literature, analyze examples of self-help measures in practice and reflect on the concept of “self” in Psychology. We will try to indicate what these considerations mean for Psychology as a science and practice.

7 pm
More Alienation, Please! Notes Towards a Postcritical Néontology
Laurent de Sutter (VU Brussels), chaired by Mladen Dolar (Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana)

The idea that alienation would designate a process of extraction of the self through unwanted means (personal manipulation, political brainwashing, capitalistic enticement, etc.) has become one of the most salient features of contemporary self-help. Taking care of the self, according to self-help coach and manuals, is taking care of the process by which we tend to be alienated – and to resist it by the pure force of our will, a little bit of exercise, reading the Stoics and a yearly subscription to the program of said coach. From this alone, it should become evident that the self that we are supposedly so longing for is nothing but a scam – a trap in which to fall when we forget that there is nothing desirable in the idea of “having” a self. “Being,” as the ontological category that designates the anchoring of such a self, rather than being a place of truth and emancipation, is, and has always been, the contrary: the space of a politics of imprisonment – ontology has always been about submission, rules, authorities and limits. In other words, ontology has always been critical. What we need, then, is not a more authentic being or truer self, but the opposite: inauthentic “having” and betrayals of any possible self – as the condition of a politics that can literally be said emancipatory, as in Roman law. “Emancipation” is exactly how, in latin, we might want to translate “alienation.” In order to desire the former, we need the latter.