Programme of Events 2025-26

Teams access

This talk by IAS Visiting Fellow Mario Telò will explore neurodiversity in relation to psychoanalysis, and in particular Laplanche’s notion of “implantation.” It considers the court case of Aldo Braibanti, a gay Italian Marxist intellectual, obsessed with entomology, who was convicted of “grooming” (plagio) in the 60s and spent 6 years in jail, during which he wrote a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (a play he chose because of the connection of this character’s name with entolomological classification). Not just Braibanti’s sexuality, but also his autism was targeted by the conviction verdict. The talk takes as a starting point Robert Kennedy’s recent statement that “autism destroys the family”—in which family equals the world—to interrogate the relation between worlding and cognition. It connects neurodiversity with a critique of a certain notion of the commons symbolized by ancient sentimental images of communities of bees and ants, using trophallaxis—a form of food implantation practiced by insects—as a model of non-neurotypical relationality. This talk brings together psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, Black art and critical theory, and Bataille’s theorization of formlessness to theorize cognitive unworlding through classical reception.