Antoine Paccoud

👏 Congrats to Dr. Madalina MEZAROS who successfully defended her PhD thesis "Property, Policy, & Place: #Housing #Inequality & #Gentrification Dynamics in #Luxembourg"

👩‍🎓 @madalinamez.bsky.social was awarded a #PhD degree in #Geography from @uni.lu

🙏 Kudos to supervisor @douccap.bsky.social & jury!

📢 Upcoming Seminar at LISER
Join us on 16 October 2025 for an engaging seminar with Prof. Dr. Desiree Fields (UC Berkeley).

📍 Location: LISER, Maison des Sciences Humaines, Belval
🗓️ Date & Time: 16 October 2025, 11:00 – 12:30

🔗 Learn more & register here: www.liser.lu/events/RSSUD...

Leerstand in der Hauptstadt: Lydie Polfer auf Konfrontationskurs - Reporter.lu Lydie Polfer lehnt ein Gebäuderegister für die Hauptstadt ab. Damit stößt die DP-Politikerin nicht nur ihren Parteikollegen Claude Meisch vor den Kopf. Ihre Haltung torpediert die Regierungspläne zur ...

Lydie Polfer lehnt ein Gebäuderegister für die Hauptstadt ab. Damit stößt die DP-Politikerin nicht nur ihren Parteikollegen Claude Meisch vor den Kopf. Ihre Haltung torpediert die Regierungspläne zur Einführung einer Leerstandsteuer – und könnte noch andere Folgen haben.

Sadism as a slogan

Not sure the sadism is performative!

Perverse practices are constructed and repeated so as to give back to the Other (America) that which it is thought to be missing, the object a at the heart of the subject (greatness). A double imaginary move to legitimise cruelty and the pleasure it provides.

Sadism, the perverse subjective structure that is an essential infrastructure to the maintenance and legitimation of capitalist domination:

…I don’t care about ameliorating my own wellbeing as long as ‘the others’ get only what they ‘deserve’…

Anyone up for some fieldwork to see if these 146 properties are still vacant?

Un peu de travail de terrain pour voir si ces 146 biens sont toujours inoccupés ?

leerstandsmelder.de/region/luxem...

Anyone up for some fieldwork to see if these 146 properties are still vacant?

Un peu de travail de terrain pour voir si ces 146 biens sont toujours inoccupés ?

leerstandsmelder.de/region/luxem...

…

I'm glad people are starting to use the word 'sadism'.

because that is what this is.

📣 BOOK "The Political Economy of Housing: The Case of Turkey" authored by LISER researcher @sila-demirors.bsky.social

ℹ️ Prof. Demirörs explores the analytical & historical process of how #housing, becomes an instrument of speculative finance to feed itself.

🔗 brill.com/display/titl...

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The political economy of housing: the case of Turkey Published in International Journal of Housing Policy (Vol. 25, No. 3, 2025)

🔎 Discover a NEW book review forum in the summer issue of IJHP

📘 Review by Prof. Zacarés @harveymurenow.bsky.social :
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

📘 Review by Prof. Berry:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

💡 Prof. Demirörs' response: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Lovely day in Luxembourg then Dudelange then across border into France today with @douccap.bsky.social & @madalinamez.bsky.social learnt so much 😊

There is a kind of mysticism in perversion: the greater the renunciation, the greater and the more secure the gains […] pleasure ceases to motivate the will and is abjured, disavowed, "renounced," the better to be recovered as a reward or consequence, and as a law.

It has itself become an idea or ideal. Pleasure is now a form of behavior related to repetition, accompanying and following repetition, which has itself become an awesome, independent force.

Beneath the sound and fury of sadism and masochism the terrible force of repetition is at work […] Instead of repetition being governed by the idea of experiencing or reexperiencing pleasure, repetition runs wild and becomes independent of all previous pleasure.

C’est comme dans une théologie noire où le plaisir cesse d’être le motif de la volonté, est essentiellement abjuré, dénié, « renoncé », mais pour mieux être retrouvé comme récompense ou résultat, et comme loi.

Deleuze, Sacher Masoch

Et c’est le plaisir qui est devenu conduite à l’égard de la répétition, c’est lui qui accompagne et suit maintenant la répétition comme terrible puissance indépendante […] Il y a un mysticisme du pervers : le pervers retrouve d’autant plus et d’autant mieux, qu’il a plus abandonné.

Sous les tam-tams sadique et masochiste, il y a bien la répétition comme puissance terrible […] Au lieu que la répétition soit commandée par l’idée d’un plaisir à retrouver ou à obtenir, voilà que la répétition se déchaîne, est devenue indépendante de tout plaisir préalable.

@madalinamez.bsky.social , @douccap.bsky.social and I in the Luxembourg papers for our recent @urbanstudiesjournal.com paper

Nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade […] He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be.

Coldness & Cruelty

Rien n’est plus étranger au sadique qu’une intention de persuader ou de convaincre […] Il s’agit de tout autre chose. Il s’agit de montrer que le raisonnement est lui-même une violence, qu’il est du côté des violents, avec toute sa rigueur, toute sa sérénité, tout son calme.

Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch

“One can find the form of social alienation in action in all the reterritorializations of capitalism, inasmuch as they keep the flows from escaping the system, and maintain labor in the axiomatic framework of property”.

Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 320

“If we have been able to speak of the intrinsically perverted nature of psychoanalysis, this is due to the fact that perversion in general is the artificial reterritorialization of the flows of desire, whose machines on the contrary are indices of deterritorialized production.”

D&G Anti-Oedipus 314

Ça peut parfois être productif :)

A politician, on the other hand, is free of any such demands. One need merely possess a good dose of cunning, neurotic ambition and will to power, coupled with brutality, in order to take over the highest positions of human society when suitable chaotic social conditions arise.”

Reich, MPF

“A medical student who wants to be admitted to the medical profession must offer satisfactory proof of his practical and theoretical knowledge of medicine [..] Every shoemaker, cabinet-maker, turner, mechanic, electrician, stone mason, construction worker, etc., has to fulfil strict requirements…

“Dictatorship is capable only of suppressing the natural functions of life or of exploiting them for its narrow purposes; it can never promote and protect these functions or perform them itself. In doing so, it would destroy itself”

Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism