Obscenity and its segregative effects: bodies without discourse?

Franco Masi — 2025-11-11T18:57:56Z

Abstract:

This article examines “The Waldo Moment” Black Mirror, Season Two, Episode Three (Brooker, 2013) to conceptualize contemporary forms of social bonding through a psychoanalytic lens. It argues that political adhesion no longer revolves around the Ideal-ego paradigm but around modalities of jouissance that masquerade as authenticity: insult, obscenity, and the spectacularization of speech. Through the TV debate scene, the screen-van harassment, and the proposal to turn Waldo into a “global platform,” the paper shows how influence becomes quantifiable (views, likes, virality) and how the “advantage” of having no past shields a virtual candidate from biographical challenge. Waldo functions as an object that elicits identification without symbolic mediation, offering a “voice” to the disenchanted and the marginalized, yet fostering communities constituted by rejection rather than shared projects. Drawing on Freud and on discussions of classificatory “epidemics” and segregation, the paper concludes that current forms of influence tend to yield fragile bonds and segregative effects, where the other is positioned as that which must be excluded rather than as a partner in dialogue.

Keywords: psychoanalysis | identifications | jouissance | enunciation | segregation

- Volumen 15 | Nº 3 - November 2025

Journal de Etica y Cine

Obscenity and its segregative effects: bodies without discourse?