The panel “Ecologies of Enjoyment: Psychoanalysis and the Environment” takes its cue from the concept of “extimacy” first proposed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan with the goal of sketching out its salience for psychoanalytic ecology. The structure implied in the notion of extimacy signals that the duality of system—environment eludes the polarity between interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside, thus mapping out the conceptual, affective, sensorial, political-economic, and libidinal space of an essentially lamellar ecology. Against this conceptual backdrop, the panel proposes to address the following series of interrelated topics: the affective and sensory modalities of the modernism/postmodernism divide; the extimate affectivity of generative AI and its implications for the formation of the social bond; the extimacy of nature and the modes of social exclusion amid ecological instability and crisis; the roles of moral sensoria and sense-work in indigenous ecologies; and the role of smell and hunger in the constitution of a lamellar ecology.

Lidija Šumah ∆ (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Free-Floating Intensities: Affectivity and Its Afterlife

According to Fredric Jameson, modernism breaks with the monad-like concept of the subject as a vessel expressing its internal affective states through an outward projection, thus freeing the subject from the psychopathologies of the bourgeois ego. The postmodern era is then marked by the disappearance or “waning of affect” in the sense of intimate, essentially internal states, and its transposition into the exterior of free-floating and impersonal sense-configurations. No longer rooted in the subject's inner life, affects are experienced as part of an external space, i.e., as diffused affective externalities that surround and permeate the subject without any palpable connection to her personal psychopathology. The talk sketches out the conceptual value of this shift from anxiety and alienation as characteristic of modernity to postmodern affective neutrality and dispersion for a psychoanalytic ecology of enjoyment.
Keywords: affect, psychoanalysis, intensity, enjoyment

Nina Cvar (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

The Affect of 'Extimacy' and the Impact of Generative AI

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) which produces synthetic media outputs computationally, that is, as external to human influence yet created by humans, have further complicated the concept of what it means to be human. In this blurring of the boundaries between human agency and machine-generated output a dynamic interplay between the intimate and the external, the internal and the foreign, is revealed. Due to the architecture of deep learning models (including large language models), the affect of the Other is generated through a complex interaction of data, linguistic patterns, and user prompts. Although these systems themselves do not "know" the Other and lack a referent, thereby remaining non-relational to the world, they simulate responses based on linguistic, cultural, and social patterns they have been trained to interpret. As a result, their output is a highly articulate interpretation of data, devoid of any (real) referential framework of external reality. Nevertheless, they still construct a functioning representational reality and evoke what I term the affect of extimacy. The talk examines the implications of the proposed notion of affective extimacy for the production of the social bond.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, AI, affect

Ilan Kapoor (York University, UK)

Extimate Nature: Putting the Excluded First Amid Ecological Instability and Crisis

The bourgeoning field of psychoanalytic political ecology tends to emphasize two key features: the instability of — or extimacy in — the social and natural world, rendering impossible notions of social unity or natural harmony; and the priority of the Excluded, viewed as symptomatic of — extimate to — the ills of global capitalism: those upon which the System vitally depends yet repudiates. This paper focuses on the crucial linkage between these two extimate elements — socionature’s volatility and subaltern politics — asking what it might entail in our age of ecological crisis. What political-ecological structures would need to be in place for addressing ecological turbulence while also tackling the socioeconomic antagonisms that produce the Excluded? How might the social and environmental commons have to be regulated to better ensure that the subaltern does not pay the highest price in order that the wealthiest pay the lowest? And rather than leading to greater egalitarian justice, might an extimate and denatured world produce its opposite: greater violence and exclusion?
Keywords: nature, capitalism, exclusion, psychoanalysis