The 25th Annual Symposium of
The International Research Group of Psycho-Societal Analysis

Inter University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 25–29 May 2026

Theme: Destruction-Lust – The Uncanny, Death Drive, and Aggression
Current political developments are unsettling the post-Cold War assumption that liberal capitalism had neutralized the antagonistic forces structuring modern history. Or, “the end of history” has come to an end, to phrase it more colloquially. On the analytical end, the reappearance of authoritarian and fascist formations raises questions that seem to somewhat exceed the analytical tools and frameworks developed to understand the 20th century. New movements operate within novel technological and socio-economic constellations (i.e. algorithmically mediated publics, platform capitalism, autonomous weapons infrastructures, post-industrial labor relations, neoliberal governance regimes and so on). At the same time, their affective intensity and destructive orientation suggest the persistence of deeper psycho-societal dynamics.


Under the theme Destruction-Lust, this year’s conference seeks to draw on key concepts of the psychoanalytical tradition to interrogate these authoritarian and fascist dynamics through the intersecting lenses of aggression, the death drive, and the uncanny.


On the first conceptual axis of the conference, we seek to focus on the death drive as a paradox at the heart of subjectivity: a tendency toward tension reduction that culminates in the dissolution of the organism itself. Freud’s elaboration of the Death Drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as its civilizational extension in Civilization and Its Discontents, foregrounds the structural entanglement of aggression with processes of socialization. Early Frankfurt School appropriations – most prominently in Dialectic of Enlightenment – translated this insight into a critique of modern rationality, arguing that the drive toward mastery and control simultaneously produce its negation: barbarism.1 However, later psychoanalytic developments destabilize any unified concept of the Death Drive. Laplanche’s interpretation of the death drive as a heterogeneous “monstrum” underscores its composite character and its proximity to the enigmatic otherness inhabiting the psyche. His analysis of masochistic enjoyment (i.e. pleasure in unpleasure, jouissance) locates aggression within phantasmatic identifications that blur the positions of victim and perpetrator. Such identifications resonate with the authoritarian appeal of submission to power, suggesting that destructive enjoyment may be mediated by fantasies of potency derived from domination as well as from self-abnegation. Amy Allen’s recent reconstruction of Frankfurt School theory argues that the marginalization of the death drive within later recognition-theoretical frameworks risks obscuring the constitutive role of power, mastery, and aggression in social life. By discussing foundational texts on the death drive we seek to question: If and how this category can help us understand contemporary authoritarian and fascist politics.
The second conceptual axis of the conference is the uncanny (Unheimlich), a concept that provides a complementary perspective on destructive affect. Freud’s account situates the uncanny at the intersection of repression and repetition, where familiar elements return in estranged form and unsettle the boundaries between self and other, life and death, animate and inanimate. Here, too, we find modern interpretations, with Mark Fisher’s reworking of the weird and the eerie as an account that expands this framework beyond classical psychoanalysis*. Where Freud highlights the intersection of repression and repetition, Fisher emphasizes the ontological dislocation and the perception of agency where none should exist – or its absence where it should. The uncanny thus indexes a disturbance in symbolic coordinates, revealing latent anxieties and desires embedded within cultural and technological environments. The concept also captures ambivalent attractions to the unknown, including exoticization and magical thinking, which oscillate between fascination and fear. On this background, we come to ask: How do we come to see a lust for destruction as connected to the uncanny? Where do we come to understand an oscillation between fascination and fear at the heart of politics and/or digital technologies?


By drawing back on these theoretical frameworks, we might come to reconsider contemporary empirical phenomena. This hunch is pointing in different directions: Research on the “need for chaos” identify a political disposition oriented toward the collapse of existing social orders without a coherent alternative vision, suggesting the social diffusion of destructive desire under conditions of precarity and inequality. Fascist movements might be understood as to mobilize phantasms of predation and persecution that structure collective identifications and legitimize aggression. Simultaneously, algorithmic media infrastructures capture and intensify libidinal investment, binding subjects to hyperreal objects and producing uncanny experiences associated with generative technologies and digitally mediated sociality. The resurgence of magical thinking and the rejection of epistemic authority further indicate the return of archaic belief structures within technologically advanced societies. To only name a few.


On this background, we seek to explore how the triad of destruction-lust, death drive, and the uncanny can and/or cannot illuminate the interaction between psychic economy and socio-political transformation in the context of contemporary fascist tendencies. Central questions that we would suggest discussing include: Which conceptual resources from psychoanalysis and critical theory remain analytically productive, and where do they require revision? How do phantasmatic identifications and aggressive enjoyment contribute to the mass psychological appeal of authoritarian politics? In what ways do technological infrastructures reshape libidinal economies and uncanny experiences? And what political implications follow from theoretical accounts that foreground destructive impulses as constitutive rather than aberrant features of social life?
In addition to the plenary sessions on Destruction-Lust, participants bring their own empirical material for the interpretation groups. This material does not need to be related to the conference theme, but may be worked with in the light of it.

*In contrast to accelerationist interpretations, such as Nick Land’s, reframing fascism not as the eruption of repressed barbarism but as an expression of repression itself, thereby complicating narratives of civilizational regression.

For more information about the 2026 conference, please contact Executive Committee representative Andreas Hjort Bundgaard andreashjortbundgaard@gmail.com