Son[i]a #378 Suely Rolnik

Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, writer and academic. She is the author of books such as Spheres of Insurrection and Molecular Revolution in Brazil, co-written with Félix Guattari, with whom she collaborated profusely from her years of exile in France. Her research weaves together different disciplinary frameworks, creating  nodes that connect psychoanalytic theory, political activism, and artistic practice, and strives to locate, resonate, and grow seeds for futures that are quivering in suspension, waiting to be brought to life. Suely urges us to “occupy the factory of the unconscious” as a way of mending the separation between affects and the spirit. The idea, she says, is to decolonise desire,  synchronizing the power of life with the effects of the forces of the world on our bodies, accepting that under today’s neoliberal system, the basis of factory of the unconscious is precisely to bring about this separation.

In this podcast we talk to Suely Rolnik about micropolitics and macropolitics, about the common and the subjective. We talk about air and about the present, and about how difficult it has become to inspire and to conspire. We abandon the idea of the apocalypse but also that of paradise. We turn our attention to spiders, pausing to observe their strong and flexible threads, and we consider creating provisional spiderwebs to allow the emergence of other worlds. For this weaving, Suely borrows and tells us about Guarani terms such as ñe'é, which means word and also soul.