Avgi Saketopoulou is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities. She is a psychoanalyst, scholar, and faculty member in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at NYU. 

Saketopoulou's work engages with issues of sexuality, gender, race, and the complex aftermath of trauma. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, and co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity. She has twice won the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association's annual prize for best paper — most recently in 2022, for "Anti-Racist Racism: Trauma, Traumatism, Traumatophilia.”

In her Avenali Lecture, Saketopoulou asks, how can those who oppose fascism conceptually, but who are really more preoccupied with their self-preservation, be inspired to participate in revolutionary actions? She offers theory with teeth: theory that is not just made for thinking, but also, and especially, for action — and specifically for the action of resistance.

Saketopoulou argues for a complex appreciation of sadism, and for the urgency of a form of sadism she calls exigent. She turns to Carolina Mendonça’s “Zones of Resplendence,” a performance piece that expands our perspectives on violence by showing how the Dionysian pleasures of theater and mythologizing may in fact be more successful in critically sparking insurgency than the somber, measured ways in which the liberal left does its politics.

Saketopoulou uses exigent sadism to pressure left liberalism’s fantasy that dialogue, repair, and a commitment to reason can defeat fascism’s libidinal force. Exigent sadism instead urges us to be open to forms of aggression about which the left has felt all too squeamish.

During her visit to Berkeley, Saketopoulou also participates in a conversation with faculty members on Tuesday, October 7, at 5 pm in the Geballe Room at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall.