Yuri Di Liberto

Yuri Di Liberto is a philosopher. He received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Calabria in 2020 and was Visiting Researcher in the United States at the University of New Mexico. He has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ruhr University Bochum and at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. He is the author of books and articles on the relationships between philosophy, psychoanalysis, political economy, and critical thought, with particular focus on contemporary issues. Yuri’s interdisciplinary epistemology aims at understanding material events and social phenomena by integrating insights from diverse disciplines.

In 2022, he was awarded the Essay Prize of the Review of Capital as Power for his article ‘Hype: The Capitalist Degree of Induced Participation’ and in 2023 with the Lotte-Köhler Prize for Psychoanalytic Developmental, Cultural, and Social Psychology. In his book Asymmetry: Class Struggle at the End of a World (in Italian, 2022), he investigates the social and historical consequences of climate change and the recent pandemic. He also authored the books: Being and Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Antinomies of the Object (in English, 2019) and Il pieno e il vuoto: Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze e il tessuto del reale (in Italian, 2017).

The project explores the possibility of explaining social, historical, and discursive phenomena as effects of macroscopic processes occurring on a larger scale. Social and discursive changes are explored as outcomes of tipping points occurring in macroscale processes. For example, the historical phenomenon of witch-hunts correlates significantly with changes in economic and climate parameters, while the probability of violent uprisings is now understood to be linked to fluctuations in commodity prices. The agency of such processes is proto-subjective or pre-personal, allowing them to be described as instances of ‘processes without subjects’, to use Althusser’s terminology.

Without diminishing the significance of individual and first-person narratives, the project aims to refocus attention on the agency exerted by macroscale processes and events on social actors. The events under examination vary in nature, yet global-scale destructive phenomena such as climate change and economic crises serve as compelling examples to illustrate how local patterns often result from higher-scale dynamics. In other words, they show the existence of entanglements between materiality and discourse.