‘What does not work in the world’: the specter of Lacan in critical political thought

ABSTRACT

This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demonstrate that a Lacanian theorization of ‘the political’ can help to open up a space for articulating the current deadlock that locks the Left in a state of melancholy, anxiety, depression, and/or impotent acting out. After a brief conceptual introduction to the notion of ‘the political’, the paper mobilizes and develops the Lacanian theory of the subject. This permits opening up the terrain of psychoanalyisis to the question of the political as that what does not work in the world. The key insights of a Lacanian-inflected political theory are then explored through the work of some of the key critical political theorists: Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical political theory
• post-foundational thought
• Jacques Lacan
• psychoanalysis
• radical politics
• subjectivation
• political desire

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Lucas Pohl

Lucas Pohl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geography of Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD in 2020 at the Department of Human Geography of Goethe University in Frankfurt with a dissertation that elaborates on a psychoanalytic approach to urban ruins. More generally, he works on the interstices between urban geography, psychoanalysis, and philosophy with a focus on social- and spatial theory, built environments, and political action.

Erik Swyngedouw

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester University. His intellectual agenda has set the academic agenda in a range of fields, including political ecology, hydro-social conflict, urban governance and urban movements, democracy and political power, and the politics of globalization. Erik was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford University. In 2020, Erik was visiting professor at the University of Wageningen, The Netherlands.