PULSE Book event with Silvia Lippi on The Decision of Desire

How can we understand what unconsciously drives our actions? And how can we shift from a desire entangled in toxic symptoms and compulsive repetition to a conscious decision about our desires?

The Decision of Desire is a bold reengagement with the notion of desire within psychoanalysis and the quandary of how to assume responsibility for desires. For if desire is always already that of the Other and unconscious, that is, a decision that escapes consciousness, how can we assume an ethical relation to it that avoids the vicious circle of disappointment, neurosis, and destruction?

An interpretive tour de force drawing on Lacan's psychoanalytic insights through a cross-disciplinary lens, engaging with the works of writers, poets, artists, and philosophers such as Bataille, Breton, Bertolucci, and Spinoza, The Decision of Desire proposes that each of us can seek out and reimagine our relation to the infinite aporias of desire and thereby detach from its destructive, repetitive forms in favor of joy and affirmation.

Bio

Silvia Lippi is a psychoanalyst trained as a philosopher, she is a hospital psychologist at the Établissement Public de Santé Barthélémy Durand in Étampes, and a researcher associate at Université Paris-Nanterre. She is the author of Soeurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe, Seuil, 2023 (with Patrice Maniglier), Rythme et mélancolie (Erès, 2019), Freud. La passione de l'ingovernabile (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2018), La décision du désir (Eres, 2013 Œdipe le Salon 2014 prize), Transgressions. Bataille, Lacan (Eres, 2008). She co-edited Marx, Lacan: l'acte révolutionnaire, l'acte analytique (Eres, 2013). Her works have been translated in Italian and English (The decision of desire, University of Minnesota Press, 2020). She has developed a psychoanalysis that is particularly attentive to psychotic experiences and the interpellations of contemporary minority groups.

Host or Publisher Pulsion - IIPPP