Race, Power, and the Psyche:Violence at the Corridors of Psychoanalysis

Black death remains a lateral exigency in its most capricious and predictable disclosures: policing and punishment. Neither loss of the mythical subject nor the seemingly prosaic matrix of race and power account for the mundanity of antiblack violence. A requisite, spectacularized initiation where psycho-politics indexes the symbolic’s presumed usurpation of the real, Blackness appears as a prohibition to any affirmative claim of a right to life. The intimacy of this carceral abyss sediments as psyche wherein jouissance, in relation to pleasure and policing, functions as predictive rather than simply a posteriori. Foundational to myriad forms of law rendering notions of guilt as gratuitous and irrelevant, the danger of the metonymic traversing of algorithms, codes, data systems, and languages into the accoutrements of contemporary policing cement the constructed Black body from a mythic revisionist past into metaphysical reality. Specifically, conditioning to antiblack violence, in and through various modes of jouissance, inflects strategies that the clinical and political spheres deem liberatory. Reading the development of Lacan, and Jacques-Alain Miller’s, paradigms of jouissance with one of the newest policing technologies developed as a counterinsurgency and disciplining apparatus, predictive policing, race, and (anti)blackness in particular, are rendered as modes of divination. Selamawit D. Terrefe specializes in Global Black Studies, Critical Theory, psycho-politics, and violence as an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at Tulane University and as the 2022-2024 Williams College Faculty Fellow for the Mellon ‘Just Futures’ project. Previously, Terrefe was a postdoctoral fellow in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen, and has presented internationally at workshops such as the Tate Modern in London and the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. She is currently completing her manuscript, Impossible Blackness: Violence and the Psychic Life of Slavery, and has publications in The Feminist Wire, Theory and Event, Rhizomes, Critical Philosophy of Race, Psychoanalysis and History, and forthcoming in Political Theology, Philosophy Today, Society and Space, and for the Palgrave Lacan volume, Afropessimism, Antiblackness, and Lacan.Selamawit D. Terrefe, Race, Power, and the Psyche: Violence at the Corridors of Psychoanalysis, lecture, ICI Berlin, 23 May 2023, video recording, mp4, 35:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230523

Regulation of the transcription factor CdnL promotes adaptation to nutrient stress in <i>Caulobacter</i>

In response to nutrient deprivation, bacteria activate a conserved stress response pathway called the stringent response (SR). During SR activation inCaulobacter crescentus, SpoT synthesizes the secondary messengers guanosine 5'-diphosphate 3'-diphosphate and guanosine 5'-triphosphate 3'-diphosphate (collectively known as (p)ppGpp), which affect transcription by binding RNA polymerase (RNAP) to down-regulate anabolic genes. (p)ppGpp also impacts the expression of anabolic genes by controlling the levels and activities of their transcriptional regulators. InCaulobacter, a major regulator of anabolic genes is the transcription factor CdnL. If and how CdnL is controlled during the SR and why that might be functionally important are unclear. In this study, we show that CdnL is down-regulated posttranslationally during starvation in a manner dependent on SpoT and the ClpXP protease. Artificial stabilization of CdnL during starvation causes misregulation of ribosomal and metabolic genes. Functionally, we demonstrate that the combined action of SR transcriptional regulators and CdnL clearance allows for rapid adaptation to nutrient repletion. Moreover, cells that are unable to clear CdnL during starvation are outcompeted by wild-type cells when subjected to nutrient fluctuations. We hypothesize that clearance of CdnL during the SR, in conjunction with direct binding of (p)ppGpp and DksA to RNAP, is critical for altering the transcriptome in order to permit cell survival during nutrient stress