Towards a Negative Metabolism

Introducing Metabola, a new digital journal for psychoanalysis, theory, and contemporary culture

Diagram from the International Atlas of Clouds and of States of the Sky (1930) Office National Meteorologique, Paris

Introducing Metabola

The title of this new project - Metabola - finds its inspiration in the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche. Reference to a psychoanalyst should alert you to the fact that Metabola is, at least partly, to do with psychoanalysis.

However, the current position of psychoanalysis is one caught between two contrasting interpretations of its purpose and scope. The situation is perhaps akin to the one described by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks - as an interregnum in which a “great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”¹

Symptoms. Prime among these being the veritable retreat of psychoanalytic institutions into the safety of their clinical and academic boundaries, leaving vast intellectual and cultural terrains un-, or under-explored. The great tragedy for psychoanalysis is that this territory now amounts to everything that is not, by definition, a clinical vignette.

To be clear, whilst valuable, the clinical discourse can only ever be self-reflexive - an approach that tends to insulate psychoanalysis within the confines of the clinical setting, reinforcing its self-referential and affirming tendencies.

Yet, psychoanalysis is clearly more than its clinical application. On the other side is a broader, more expansive vision of psychoanalysis, one that Laplanche’s work invites us to consider. This perspective sees psychoanalysis as more than a therapeutic method; it is also a tool for engaging with culture, society, and the unresolved, unmetabolised aspects of contemporary life.

Why Metabola?

Admittedly, Metabola is not a helpful or attractive word.

Appearing in Laplanche’s 1978-79² seminar, the term metabola (or métabole in French) figures as a schema for unconscious material becoming available to consciousness - that is to say, as a kind of psychic metabolism:

For me, the metabola is an abstract rhetorical figure, a figure of substitution. By this, I mean movements of both metaphor and metonymy³

This metabolic approach - which will later be incorporated into Laplanche’s translational model - draws on a schema that itself metabolises and departs from Lacan’s model of the signifier/signified. Crucially, every movement of substitution - every metabola - also leaves traces of what remains unintegrated or unmetabolised. These traces—the unresolved residues of signification—are both the hallmarks of the unconscious and the starting point for psychoanalytic inquiry.

If psychoanalysis is - as Laplanche thought - at its core an interpretive method, without curative aims, then this journal too positions itself as methodical rather than definitive. It engages with culture critically, with the aim not to resolve but to sustain tensions, challenging the structures that make up our quotidian reality and exposing the metabolic processes beneath them.

The Journal

At its core, Metabola operates in the spirit of what another French psychoanalyst - André Green - called déliaison: a work of unbinding, undoing the binding(s) (liaison), that have come before:

The analyst, starting from the traces that remain available to their gaze and listening, does not read the text; they unbind it. They break the supporting structure to uncover, beneath the processes of binding, the unbinding that the binding has concealed.⁴

While traditional academic publishing often prioritises coherence and resolution, this journal resists such closure. Instead, we embrace partiality, fragmentation, and ongoing critique.

This is not an academic journal, nor a space constrained by the institutional demands of academia. However, it also does not reject the rigour of academic thought. The work featured here may flirt with academic themes or dwell in its peripheries, but it remains resolutely extra-academic. By doing so, Metabola hopes to maintain a productive tension between academic and non-academic approaches, opening a space for work that refuses domestication.

A Shared, Evolving Space

We see Metabola as an experiment in cultural metabolism. It is a platform for essays, reviews, video essays, and other formats that critically engage with contemporary culture. Priority will be given to short-form writing between 700–1200 words—pieces that remain nimble and provisional, allowing ideas to stay in motion rather than calcify - there is no expectation that any of the work featured here has found its definite expression.

In maintaining this openness, we encourage a collaborative spirit of critique among contributors, acknowledging that disagreement and internal splits are, by this point, not just inevitable, but vital for psychoanalytic discourse. Psychoanalysis itself thrives on such tensions, and so will this publication.

Ultimately, Metabola seeks to process the as-yet-unmetabolised fragments of contemporary culture. Culture, as Lacan said, “discharges us from the function of thinking.”⁵ Questioning everything, we move toward what might be called a “negative metabolism” for our current moment. Whether through its digital presence or other, less conventional spaces, the journal is committed to thinking beyond established boundaries.

Introducing Metabola, a space for unbinding.

1. The original quotation is taken from Volume 1 of the Prison Notebooks:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

2. Found in, Jean Laplanche (1981) Problématiques IV. L’inconscient et le ça

3. Taken from a 1992 interview with Fernando Urribarri, published in Après Lacan. Le retour à la Clinique (2017)

4. Andre Green (1971) La déliaison, which appears in the journal, Littérature.

5. Jacques Lacan (2008) My Teaching, Its Nature and Ends, in My Teaching (2008)