This collection of essays offers some novel reflections on the nature of the crowd, the collective, and the subject’s relation to the social link. Prompted mainly by Freud’s Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, the authors analyze crucial issues ranging from La Boétie’s late Renaissance theory of voluntary servitude to the early 20th-century Europe’s collapsed empires and revolutionary uprisings, to progressive South Africans’ turn to segregationism, to Bolsonaro’s adoption of Nazi rhetoric.

For the past twenty-five years, Gisèle Chaboudez has been rigorously interpreting and writing on Lacan’s concept of the sexual non-relation. For millennia the sexual law that universally defines “man as the one who has and woman as the one who is what he has” has masked and compensated for the absence of sexual relation, while generating a myriad of subjective and social effects. The feminine side of sexuation, which can be occupied by any gender, introduces the logic of the Not-all, creating the possibility for two jouissances to be shared in a singular and inventive way.