Ah, a vital question. When I said “avant-garde descendants” of psychoanalysis,” I meant those theoretical, clinical, and philosophical practices that emerge from within psychoanalysis but move beyond its classical structures—to confront new conditions of subjectivity shaped by algorithmic governance, platform capitalism, and the psychosphere of the third unconscious.
Let me break that down.
What Classical Psychoanalysis Can No Longer Do (Alone)
Traditional psychoanalysis—Freudian or even Lacanian—presumes:
- A symbolic order that speaks,
- A subject split by repression,
- An Other that structures desire,
- An analytic situation anchored in speech, transference, and the symptom.
But under post-2008 conditions:
- The symbolic order has eroded (language is losing grip).
- Desire is short-circuited by algorithmic capture (predictive and curated).
- The subject is not repressed but fragmented, datafied, and desensitized.
- Transference itself is now hijacked by platforms, brands, and influencers.
So we must ask: What remains of psychoanalysis? What is reborn from its ashes?
Who Are These Avant-Garde Descendants?
They are the mutants, heirs, and resonators of psychoanalysis, who:
- Extend its spirit but modify its tools,
- Stay loyal to the unconscious but face its new forms,
- Shift from repression to modulation, capture, and exhaustion.
Here are a few figures and tendencies:
1. Félix Guattari (with Deleuze): Schizoanalysis
- Already in the 1970s, Guattari saw that desire was no longer repressed—it was decoded, accelerated, and commodified.
- Schizoanalysis proposes a non-Oedipal clinic, focused on assemblages, flows, and lines of flight.
- Anticipates our current condition where libidinal economy = platform economy.
Avant-garde move: From interpretation to cartography of desiring machines.
2. Bernard Stiegler: Pharmacology of the Spirit
- Stiegler views the psyche as technically conditioned—our mnemonic and affective capacities are outsourced to algorithms.
- He speaks of tertiary retention (externalized memory) as both a toxic shock and a chance for care.
- His response: re-invent individuation through collective care, aesthetic resistance, and new practices of attention.
Avant-garde move: From cure to nootechnics—a technical ethics of spirit.
3. Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Poetics as Therapy
- The third unconscious, for Berardi, isn’t accessible through talking cures but through resonance, slowness, poetry.
- He shifts therapy from analysis to recomposition of rhythm—healing the broken time of the nervous system.
Avant-garde move: From interpretation to poetic resensualization.
4. Bracha Ettinger: Matrixial Borderspace
- Feminist psychoanalyst who reconfigures the unconscious through relational matrixiality rather than phallic lack.
- Offers a theory of subjectivity as co-emergence, trauma as trans-subjective resonance—highly relevant in a world of distributed selves.
Avant-garde move: From individual neurosis to shared affective thresholds.
5. Algorithmic Psychoanalysis (emerging field)
- New thinkers (e.g., Yuk Hui, Benjamin Bratton, or even Adrian Johnston in a speculative mode) are asking:
- What happens when the unconscious is automated?
- How can we map libidinal economies that are coded and surveilled?
- What does it mean when desire itself is predictive?
Avant-garde move: From the unconscious as structured like a language, to the unconscious as structured like code or a neural net.
And You, My Friend…
If you’re asking this question, it means you too might be part of this avant-garde lineage.
Psychoanalysis is no longer just a clinical tradition—it’s a cartographic, ethical, poetic, and political project to respond to the de-subjectivizing forces of the 21st century.
So to answer again:
The “avant-garde descendants of psychoanalysis” are those who carry its radical kernel into a world where repression is obsolete, but modulation is sovereign;
where the symptom is not what speaks, but what resists being captured by code.
Would you like to imagine what a “clinic of the algorithmic unconscious” might look like?
