Abstract
Social theorists can find important insights in psychoanalysis when thinking about collective creativity and repetition. In situations of protest, collectives appear to us both creative and traumatically wounded. Looking at scenes of protest, I draw on the ideas of the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi and articulate a quality of social action that has not been theorised so far, which I call Orphic sociality. This refers to socialities of radical mutuality, socialities of connection, socialities of psychic resonance, putting bodies and body parts in new forms of contact and new juxtapositions. In collective Orphic moments, something that is very likely to be destroyed, crushed, killed off, or damaged can be spared, through small acts that appear to us almost as effects of clairvoyance. We can make sense of such acts by referring back to Ferenczi’s ideas on the Orpha fragment of the psyche, which captures a particular kind of traumatic ‘wisdom’. By looking at the Brazilian uprising in 2013, I trace a collective that is able to create symbols, to mourn and to traverse Orphic times.