ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis speaks of the singularity of the subject’s unique regime of jouissance, which is the only material of the psychoanalytic clinic and that which orients the analysis. But in order for us to think politically about subjectivity, the body, and sexuality today, I argue we must make the passage to a patipolitical mode of thinking. Herein lies the universal symptom which all speaking beings must labour under. The paradigm of the patipolitical (from the Latin patior, “to suffer”), as I will try to elaborate, is a form of governance of suffering or more accurately of enjoyment. One which is built on the notion of the ambivalent, paradoxical, and traumatic realm of the sexual as a psychoanalytic and philosophical concept. There are three elements of patipolitics that I will briefly touch upon in this essay. Firstly, its genealogical origin in the bio- and necropolitical literature, secondly its focus on the future body and sex, and thirdly, the ambivalent and paradoxical question of suffering, the undecidable nature of sexual enjoyment. This is drawn from my forthcoming monograph Patipolitics.
