When our friend Cordelia died, her voice was not present in the narrative that emerged to explain what had happened. Meeting for the first time at her memorial, we connected through our mutual sense of voids and occlusions in her story, knowing how her frustration at such narrative occlusion would have informed her grave distress.

Occlusion: ‘acts of obstruction – of categories, concepts, and ways of knowing.’ (Stoler, 2011).

In this paper we explore some perils of living, loving and reproducing in the context of a hyper-individualised, capitalised, neoliberal social order, where timeworn patriarchal narratives are freely co-opted to silence and control women undergoing periods of reliance on collective understanding and care, by subjecting their narratives to annihilating occlusions (Michael O’Loughlin).

Speaking together of, and in relation to, the poetry of Cordelia, our late friend and ‘sister’, we unmuzzle her silenced voice and bring her (now somewhat holographic) perspective to bear on our understanding of the serious businesses of life-giving, life-sustaining, and mutuality in care, joy, grief and loss, within the contemporary Anglo-Irish social context. Our own silenced parts also find voice in the process, via circuitous, artful, dialogic transgressions. Julia Kristeva, Bracha Ettinger, Donald Winnicott and Angela Carter are amongst those re-membered in our discussions, whose contributions scaffold our sense-making process. Intellectual insight necessitates emotional understanding to be able to meaningfully emerge. Our collaborative methodology invokes an old tradition of ‘matrixes’ of female knowledge-making (Jones, 2022), as we three work together to reverse engineer the occlusion for the benefit of those of us who survive, those who did not, and those who will.

Stoler, A.L. (2011) Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture; 23(1):121–156.

Jones, J.C. (2022). Matricultures and the Matrix of Life: An Interview with Max Dashu. The Radical Notion, Issue Six. [https://theradicalnotion.org/matricultures-and-the-matrix-of-life-an-interview-with-max-dashu/ Accessed 8/8/2025].

In Resistance Rose points out that the power both of great literature and of psychoanalysis is the power to unsettle “all idealized, official, rhetorics, whether of nationhood, race, religion or state—its powers of resistance, one might say”. Scholarly inquiry, is too often considered in terms of attaining benchmarks and demonstrating mastery. What if we sought to create an undercommons (Harney & Moten), a place for fugitive ideas, a place where the neo-liberal university-based logics of knowledge-making and achievement are upended…. a place where unknowing the known becomes a starting point for inquiry, and agency and imagination are privileged? Felman explores the core notion of truth seeking at the heart of psychoanalysis. She suggests that this impossibility is precisely what lends both analysis and pedagogy power. It is not in the formalization of therapy or pedagogy that possibility lies, but, rather, in the capacity to critique the process and to resist the omniscience of authority and interpretation. As she observes, “every true pedagogue is in effect an anti-pedagogue” because of the need to resist formalization and received truths. Felman argues that because teaching is fundamentally about grappling with the unthought knowns that produce resistance to new inquiry, pedagogy is inherently psychoanalytic. The new knowledge to which pedagogy gives access is not external knowledge, but rather “knowledge previously denied to consciousness”. Pedagogy, therefore, privileges ignorance as the starting point, and addresses the resistances that block truth seeking. I will describe The Knowledge Project. An invitation to my students to engage in an auto-ethnographic inquiry into their own evolving process, including engaging in an internal journey to engage resistances and become writers, and engaging in a broader socio-political process of embracing and enacting social-justice informed and decolonial practices …a challenging task considering the racial-capitalist, positivist, and metrics-based ideologies that underlie clinical psychology.

With my contribution I will refer to my academic experience of writing collaboratively with colleagues across different disciplines, countries and institutional affiliations across Europe and beyond. I will think-with authors located within Posthumanism (Braidotti, 2011, 2013, 2019), New Materialism (Bennet, 2010) and Post-qualitative theories and methodologies (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013), also drawing from psychoanalytical theories, particularly in relation to object-relation theories that position relationality at the centre of identity formation. Thinking with the work of M. Klein, Winnicott and W.Bion, we can see how collaborative writing can be considered and read as a transitional space for learning and for approaching education differently, particularly through the work of C. Bollas and his view of the evocative power of objects leading to the unconscious. In doing this, I will try to challenge the traditional view and practice of academic discourses (Bozalek, 2022), particularly in relation to academic writing (Gale & Wyatt, 2021), positioning my work in line with Richardson and St.Pierre’s (2005) view of academic writing as a creative and disruptive practice that destabilizes traditional, fixed academic structures in favour of rizhomatic and multiple experiences where the poetic and the playful replaces the objective and the quantifiable. Collaborative writing will be proposed also a ‘taking care of’, as a disruptive possibility beyond the traditional conception of neoliberal individual academic practices (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). A practice-research that is grounded on the value of ourselves as individuals beyond the professional domain that considers us solely as a means of production. In this way, academic collaborative writing will be proposed as a space for taking responsibility for each other in the field of education and of psychotherapy where embodied, lived and the personal stories holds a political and educational dimension, holding a vital and subversive power to destabilise dominant discourses (Haraway, 1988, 2016).

Political philosopher and activist Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi invites psychoanalysis to play a prominent role in imagining a future at a time of deepening socio-political crisis characterised by the rapid demise of the old order; the return of fascism; reactionary nostalgia; loss of legitimacy and ethical neutrality; leaders immersed in nihilistic vision; identarian obsession with the ‘chosen’ few; misogyny and xenophobia; and fear producing violent re-territorialisations offering a semblance of protection, and a rise of all sorts of fundamentalisms. As expected, Beradi ‘puts his trust’ in the unconscious as the place from which hope might arise. He also asks: beyond the therapeutic function, can psychoanalysis act upon the process of conscious subjectivisation? And might psychoanalysis need to be reframed, if we think of it not only as individual therapy but as a conscious shaping of social expectations, of the rhythm of collective breathing?

These questions are explored by considering how psychoanalysis might address the following; the dread of social and psychic annihilation; the role of memory and ‘amnesia’; the difference between ‘potency’ and ‘potentia’; the psychic cost of being entangled in increasingly deterministic mediatised psycho-social networks, and the cynical certainly that nothing can be done. Imagining a future engages psychoanalytic thinking in the direction of an active Imaginary of envisaging-encouraging new forms of solidarity, nomadic thinking, irregular becoming, pursuing singularity, and immanence; it travels in the direction of a new ethics of proximity, where co-affection and the materiality of bodies may disrupt the automation-necessity of the current Symbolic and see what arises in the empty space of non-impossibility and non-necessity. But most important, it reminds us that one of the greatest assets of psychoanalysis is not translating-subsuming symptoms into existing theoretical frameworks but staying with the trouble, not knowing, remaining stupid at the encounter with the unfamiliar and the unexpected.