The long-held belief that urban culture is the most effective motor for democratisation and emancipation is currently being shaken. While Marx and his descendents dreamt of ‘the urban’ as something that might foster universal solidarity and radical social change, today metropolitan areas are most often seen as places of disintegration, segregation and violence. Similarly, if for Freud the metropolitan way of life made possible the hysterical subjectivity with which psychoanalysis begins, today, in an environment in which individuals and communities have withdrawn into a solipsism that is nurtured by the isolating gadgets of technology, subjectivity seems to be evaporating into a generalised autism.
This conference gathers a number of experts from the field of Marxist urban theory, radical political philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis who will deliver papers on topics that are relevant for our understanding of what some have named ‘the post-metropolitan condition’. Our hope is that such a collaboration will allow us to analyse post-urban developments and formulate new forms of resistance.
