Political invariants: eris, polis, eros and psyche

Abstract

This article will review a series of figures that we have termed “political invariants”, with which we attempt to contribute to the problematization of a construction herein, of their relevance to ‘the political’. These figures, EROS (desire) and ERIS (discord), will be tangentially applied to two closely related spheres: the public space of the city (polis) and the intimate space of the soul (psyche), and shall also be examined from the perspective of a double polarity: memory (the indelible trace of conflict) and the conquest of the unconscious as a condition of any and all possibility of freedom (stimulated by the force of desire). As such, our investigation shall take up a retrospective as well as a prospective, or forward-looking, movement bringing together in that instance the terrain of ‘the political’ with the terrain of the psychic, and from there, ‘what remains’ and ‘what can’ be in the configuration of the links between these figures and the community.