Lacanian theory

Abstract

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is generally recognized as the most important and original post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorist. Conscious of the irreducible link between identity and difference, ego-formation and alienation and registering the linguistic and cultural turns in the social sciences, Lacan will advance an anti-humanist understanding of subjectivity stressing the dependence of the lacking subject on imaginary lures and symbolic structures. Anticipating more recent trends in social theory, he will eventually focus on the real as the limit of representation, as a radically alienating and inaccessible fullness beyond-representation. Lacanian theory permits a revealing mapping and interpretation of human experience by capturing the dialectic between these three registers: imaginary, symbolic and real. Particular aspects of Lacan's work are today highlighted and further developed by the Lacanian Left, an expanding group of social and political theorists. Not least because they allow a non-reductionist and thoroughly illuminating confluence between psychoanalysis and socio-political theory. Drawing on the work of such theorists – especially Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau – this short text aims to familiarize the reader with the most basic Lacanian logics and conceptual innovations and to briefly sketch some of their implications for social and political theory and the analysis of ideology, as well as for reflecting on the cultural, political and ethical dimensions of the 2008 economic crisis.