Editorial

‘Intersections’ is over-used in contemporary humanities and social sciences. It may confer promises of interdisciplinarity, or of the complex navigation of gender, class and race in social phenomena, but it can equally stand, in numerous edited collections, as an apology for the loose affiliation of research papers emerging from conferences and workshops. At its best it can indicate a commitment to piece together afresh differing social visions, stand-points and fragmented histories, without assuming a governing logic or tendency. ‘Intersections’ may organize histories without clear origins or end-points or centres of ‘logocentric’ authority; or they can designate a post-structuralist recognition of the interim status of psychological identity - Lacan himself contributed to the notion of subjectivity as a site of (contested and concealed) intersections.

This special issue on ‘Lacanian Intersections’ places Lacan beside a range of interlocutors - Fanon, Bion and Klein in particular - as well as in a variety of contexts and temporalities (post-war Britain; Uruguay in the 1970s; contemporary critical race studies in the US). None of these articles, it hardly need be said, focus on Lacan as a person, nor even Lacanian theory as a quasi-system or programme (like Freud's, a notoriously incomplete and evolving one) for which one might trace how it came together or fell apart, or whence particular concepts originated. Each of the articles in the issue locates itself somewhere between Lacanian thought and other phenomena - the point being that examining such intersections is not just concerned with how or why ideas shift from A to B; rather, the ‘in between’ position itself generates new historical objects, and new expositions of psychoanalysis as a social, political, psychiatric or therapeutic project. None of the pieces gathered here provide conventional ‘histories’, and each straddles a line between historical work and intervention. To deal in ‘intersections’ can mean to d