Burning Down the House

Avgi Saketopoulou’s lecture “Fighting Fire with Fire” left me wondering if there may be more than one way to burn

By Adam Blum

November 24, 2025: Correction. In the original version of this article, Dr. Blum misquoted Dr. Saketopoulou’s Avenali Lecture, which could create the erroneous impression that she was wondering whether she was inciting violence. Dr. Saketopoulou’s actual question (“Is this an incitement to violence?”) referred to a line in Carolina Mendonça’s performance “Zones of Resplendence.” The text has been clarified accordingly.

I started to realize what we were in for when, by way of framing her lecture “Fighting Fire with Fire: Aesthetics, Exigent Sadism, Insurgency” for the Avenali Lecture at UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities on October 6, the psychoanalyst and emerging public intellectual Avgi Saketopoulou warned us, not exactly playfully, that the lecture would “not be an episode of The Ezra Klein Show.”

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Instead, she explained, it would be an effort to help us loosen our narcissistic investments in liberal ideals that are, she believes, fundamentally a form of self-preservation—woefully inadequate to resist the march of fascism, for which she intended her lecture to “prepare” us; though as in Carolina Mendonça’s performance piece “Zones of Resplendence” (NSFW), to which Saketopoulou would devote the second half of her talk, the specifics of what we were being prepared for remained vague—perhaps deliberately so. (“Is this an incitement to violence?” Saketopoulou asked of one moment in Mendonça’s piece. “I don’t know.”)

What it would definitely not be is a collusion with those liberal (and psychoanalytic) darlings that apparently amount, in her account, to bringing not even a knife to a gunfight. The depressive position? Out. Discourse? Please. We really have to let that go, she counseled us. We will not be podcasting our way to revolution—or, as she puts it, “self-defense.”

What she was calling for, in effect, was a counterlibidinal force—an engagement with our own aggression, even our own flammability.

Watch Out …

So no Ezra. Fine by me, I thought. I was not especially in the mood for an episode of The Ezra Klein Show at Saketopoulou’s event—at least not with the usual fever pitch with which I typically anticipate every new episode. (In Ezra We Trust.) I had received, in recent weeks, an overdose of his show by way of my clinical practice. A long-time patient had used no fewer than four of his most recent twice-a-week sessions to meditate at length with me on a recent episode in which Ezra hosted his frequent guest, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to discuss the state of our union. I sensed my patient’s disappointment that I had not yet listened to the episode—and then still did not listen, despite the ample evidence of his urgent need to understand something about it, and to understand it with me.

I confessed that I had gone sour on Coates after his previous appearance on Ezra’s show. I had been disillusioned with the author and journalist whose first book, Between the World and Me, I had found not only incredibly moving but, in its own way, deeply psychoanalytic, or at least highly compatible with my understanding of psychoanalysis. (When Coates wrote of the “need to be always on guard” as “an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence,” I thought of Winnicott.)

So I was dismayed, during that recent episode, in support of Coates’s newest book, by his avowed lack of interest in almost all of the history of his book’s main subject. And while I was appreciative of his eventually conceding Ezra’s point that he had a responsibility, as a journalist, to take a broader view, I shared Ezra’s frustration that no such amendment would appear in his newest best-seller.

Readier than ever to take a break from my typical cultural digest—indeed, in the name of precisely such a break—I settled in for what I had come to expect from Saketopoulou’s singular genre of writing and speaking, a bracing and even shocking jolt to my habitual ways of thinking about our work that might loosen me up to consider a fresh approach. But what started to dawn on me when Saketopoulou announced what her lecture would not be—and what I am trying to more fully realize in the après-coup of the lecture as I write these words—is how ashamed I instantly became of being such a faithful listener of Ezra’s podcast.

As the lecture progressed, I felt increasingly ashamed, in fact, of practically everything I liked, everything I valued, everything I thought I had to contribute as a psychoanalytic thinker and practitioner—ashamed in relation to a field I thought Saketopoulou and I had been sharing, ashamed even of work she herself had inspired me to write.

Shame—that strangely social emotion, binding even as it burns—may have been precisely the intended effect: as a powerful analytic agent, no one wielding it more indiscriminately or effectively, I caught myself thinking, than the self-styled fascist-in-chief she opposes. Or maybe what I am calling shame is simply the disorientation that follows having one’s narcissistic investments effectively loosened, an almost unbearable freedom that urgently demands to glom onto some other form of organization; the very workings of ego-ideal transference that Freud diagnosed as mass hypnosis in Group Psychology, to which Saketopoulou referred directly in her remarks.

… You Might Get What You’re After

Days later, curiously unable to sleep, I could think of no other way to settle myself than to give a transcript of the Ta-Nehisi Coates episode a read. Klein (I’ll stop calling him Ezra now) had invited Coates on this time after Coates published an essay critical of his colleague and friend for a column he felt was whitewashing Charlie Kirk, following his murder, to make Kirk appear to be a model of the very spirit of debate. Klein, in an act of philosophical consistency, invited Coates to come on the show to talk things out.

What ensued was nothing short of a mutual articulation and elaboration of distinct but overlapping worldviews, animated by a spirit of discourse that, like a pilot light, refuses to go out. Klein wanted to reflect on the political movements of recent years to discover what got us here and what might usher in a broader coalition for a brighter future through the coming elections. Coates’s eye was more on the arc of history—the centuries of this country’s history—and the need to stand up for what one thinks is right, even if one is unlikely to see the fruits of that labor in one’s own lifetime.

I believe psychoanalysis has something crucial to contribute to both these efforts, but I will focus on the latter. To provide a kind of care that ultimately supports and enables somebody living their life according to their own code—standing up for what they believe is right—seems to me entirely compatible with a psychoanalytic ethos, if not the very heart of it, and would have also seemed compatible to me with what we might call a Laplanchean attitude toward “analyzing”—as in, breaking down—constricting, calcified, narcissistic structures in order to allow the drive to irrigate new paths, to shape new futures. It had been this aspect of Laplanche’s work, in fact, and Saketopoulou’s translations of it, that led me to her own work on “the aesthetic” in the first place, exemplified in her account (in Sexuality Beyond Consent) of her seemingly unlimited “drive” (to attend performances of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play) without having to understand it, staying near the urgent truth of an aesthetic experience before we know how it will play out, before we know what if any good it will do us.

This capacity for unbinding was precisely the subject of the introduction to Saketopoulou’s lecture by Stephen Best, faculty director of the Townsend Center. That speaker invoked a study of professors who were asked to assign numerical scores to statements along the lines of, “The primary way to understand American history is through the lens of white supremacy.” The study found, Best reported, that the stronger the conviction, the less likely the respondent was to say they would speak up about it. Best concluded his introduction by hoping, as I did, that Saketopoulou might help us find a way out of this suppression—to find the courage to speak our minds, that elusive activity enshrined in the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis.

But what I heard from Saketopoulou was not a preparation to speak our minds, to do what we think is right, but a preparation to do what she thinks is right. The verdicts to all of the most agonizing and fraught trials of our era—wars, gender, free speech—had apparently become settled science offstage, as if in an unspoken prologue to her remarks, encouraging the groupthink examined in the studies Best was citing.

This is exactly her point, of course: that only a force equal to coercion can meet the fascist coercion of the moment—fire with fire, like with like. What alternative would there be, according to this logic? But if Saketopoulou offers that logic to fuel a new form of psychoanalytic (even sadistic) exigency, she may also provoke a new form of resistance. To do what one thinks is right, one has to be able to think; and human beings think dialogically, discursively, which breathes best when it involves other people. As with oxygen, an excess of discourse can extinguish the spark needed to flare into the flame of conscience; but without it, no spark of conscience can take hold. Even as Saketopoulou’s provocation frees us from the paralysis of our own moral self-regard, it risks leaving us vulnerable to a new moral conformity in which uncritical agreement and blind allegiance are the only options left.

And You May Ask Yourself ...

The tension becomes especially pressing for analysts, whose work depends not on directing where newly loosened energies should go, but on creating space for desire before it knows its object, to keep thinking going where certainty would settle. Psychoanalysis (especially Laplanche’s translation of it) does not predetermine what the patient will do with newly available energies, does not control the burn, but rather remains answerable to the drive’s unpredictability. For this reason, it can be difficult to reconcile this particular “preparation” with a genuinely (especially Laplanchean) psychoanalytic ethos, an orientation toward clinical practice in which what follows from analytic unbinding can never be known in advance. For the first time I can remember, I struggled to detect that clinical sensibility in Saketopoulou’s remarks (though I strongly suspect it remains in her practice; this was, after all, an academic setting) despite passing references to her being, indeed, a psychoanalyst.

But in that vacuum, the spark of a new idea began to kindle in me. The lecture may not have cured me of my attachment to my favorite podcast, but it did help me to realize what my patient was trying to show me. I think he wanted to dwell so long on that episode of The Ezra Klein Show because he sensed in it the contours of something he needed me to hear—something he was, and is, not free to say, but needs to convey nonetheless: that I need not be so narcissistically invested in my visions of his future that I can’t recognize, let alone admire, the integrity of his own viewpoint—his commitment, like Coates’s, to act in the present on behalf of futures one may not see, even if that viewpoint operates at a different temporality and scope than some of my own preoccupations.

Perhaps I should regard this development in my countertransference as the result of a strange but powerful form of supervision from Saketopoulou—less a form of instruction than an internal convulsion. Her subject, after all, was the “aesthetic,” a category which—if broad enough to include “genocide,” according to her—would certainly include her lecture itself. The aesthetic, particularly in its more Dionysian forms, she suggested, affects us viscerally, bodily, muscularly. Like Laplanche’s idea of a “splinter,” or Bion’s notion of a beta-element, it is more easily understood as the edge of a physical phenomenon than a purely psychical one.

This is where I’m most with her; it’s what many analysts, I have learned, think music is so good for, engagement at the bodily level without recourse to language, a form of conduction that channels the voltage of trauma into the energy of expression and movement. When Saketopoulou suggested that Mendonça was “conducting her trauma” through her performance piece, I vibrated in resonance. She then relayed what I think was supposed to be a kind of musical joke: Toward the end of her piece, Mendonça plays the first part of Tina Turner’s conciliatory “I Don’t Wanna Fight” only to cut it off midway, thwarting an expectation of rapprochement and resolution. (Look beyond the lyric and the joke pulls a U-turn; dismissing a career-reviving anthem by a chronically abused black woman as she reclaims her power and legacy is not a great look for the revolution.)

Perhaps, not unlike Bion’s injunction to forego memory and desire—which is, of course, impossible—Saketopoulou’s lecture was attempting not to tell us what to do, or what to think, but to affect us at the level of the body, at the level of music, whatever that may require at the level of the mind (including not a little contempt for the very traditions and institutions that facilitate her saying it to us). She wouldn’t have to be interested in discourse, in other words, to prepare the audience to become more conductive, more susceptible—not in the sense of being enlightened by certain podcast hosts, but in the sense of becoming more capable of being affected, more affectable by the mercurial perversity of the drive, as it courses through the human body and the body politic alike.

In that scenario, Saketopoulou is not just being coy by eliding exactly what she is preparing us to do, but may, following Laplanche, genuinely, actively, not know what course the liberated drive may chart. Not know and not care. Her project would be to channel her own drive into what she believes is not only a private psychoanalytic but a kind of public service, an extension of the analytic task of unbinding psychic energies to the culture at large, leaving the rest to us to translate for ourselves.

So maybe her “preparation” worked on me, whether she’d like it or not; she (and Ezra, as usual) helped me better discern my own perspective. It left me vibrating in a new key, with an urgent need to get creative. If that’s a demonstration, a performance, of fighting fire with fire, a preparation of the body for the power of the drive, then we may be left with a song left to sing, and someone to sing it to, if and when the smoke eventually clears.

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Adam Blum, PsyD, is coauthor of Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). His recent work includes “Potential Time: The Music of Potential Space” (Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2026), “Fucking Free” (Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2026), and “The Eros Tour” (Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2025). He is in private practice in San Francisco.

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