Series: Political subjectivity

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The (Lacanian) unconscious: structure and negative ontology

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As I pointed out in the last post, Lacan’s successful juxtaposition of a psychoanalytic model of the subject with (post)structuralist approaches to meaning and linguistic organization has contributed immensely to the contemporary understanding of the subjective as political. At the same time, however, a significant aspect of Lacan’s ‘structural’ conception of the subject which has fundamental relevance to our …

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The Unconscious: Metaphor and Metonymy

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In his 1930s text, ‘the structure of the unconscious,’ Freud described the unconscious as “a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description.” Construed through this very mystifying, if not metaphysical, perspective, the unconscious then remained to be the single most unknowable and more or less untheorizable element of all observable features of human psychology, and of the psychoanalytic …

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Political subjectivity and (Jameson’s) political unconscious

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Sara from NY wrote last week to say that the idea of data and theory crossing paths intrigued her –which makes a lot of sense, and I hope this conversation develops in a way that I can bring in actual ‘data’ and discuss that convergence at some point soon. Daniel asked the very useful question of what I mean by …

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Political subjectivity and mental health

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The idea of political subjectivity has preoccupied my mind for a few years now, so I am thinking a good number of my contributions here will center around that topic.

The challenge is that there just doesn’t seem to be enough thought out there yet to allow an easy grasp of the scope and implications of this concept, especially when …