Addressing the intersection of two polemical concepts, psychoanalysis and the University, exposes us to the intersection of various taboos that risk parasitizing the logical coherence of our proposal.

The taboos of psychoanalysis are well-known, since they are at the origin of its exclusion from academic and clinical circles: persistence of theoretical dogmas, methodological and epistemological failures, etc. The taboos of the University do not confront us with controversies concerning the individual unconscious, but rather with those concerning the economic unconscious.

The latent elements of the economic unconscious have been largely integrated by the public and institutions thanks to economic propaganda and the standards of modern life, which exploit the individual unconscious to the point of saturation. In the case of the University, it is increasingly a matter of industrial and corporatist way of knowing (Gaudillière, 2015) and determining what knowledge is legitimate; that seems to lead to aberrations in the evaluation of research (Gingras, 2014) and to capitalist logics based on the production, extraction and permanent accumulation of knowledge for the profits of the military-industrial complex (innovate to win the war – Rasmussen, 2015).

Probably in this case, as elsewhere, we are in a binary perspective (as we will see with Gheorghe; in press) or even algorithmic: target or waste, 0 or 1, go or die. “Some universities, such as Manchester or Paris VI, will have as their only reference their world position in (academic) research. They will be evaluated and will find their public and private funds according to the international rankings that will have been imposed in the European and world market” (Laredo and Paradeise, 2010, §20).

This complex system of “laws”, disciplinary norms, guidelines, scores, measures, monitoring, regulations, financing, rewards and creation of professional careers has become, consciously or unconsciously, consensual; on it depends the future of those who project themselves into a high level professional future, assuming the accumulation of capital and knowledge.

“The ‘keep on knowing’ imperative that sustains the knowledge regime contains a dual requirement: to organize knowledge in such a way that it serves the production of subjects of capitalism and contributes to the stabilization of the economic Other”, Tomšič, 2015 suggests.