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The name Lacan has been conjoined to a seemingly infinite number of signifiers in psychoanalytic scholarship: ‘Lacan and feminism’, ‘Lacan and film studies’, ‘Lacan and Marx’ and so on. Nevertheless, it comes as something of a shock to see the term ‘intersectionality’ emerge in this series. How could this concept, which places identity at its core, have any place within a psychoanalytic framework famed for its anti-identitarian approach to subjectivity? Especially for those who associate political applications of Lacanian theory with Slavoj Žižek, ‘intersectionality’ may sound downright anathema to a Lacanian politics, predicated on a fixation with the ‘imaginary’ level of identitarian differences that symptomatically bypasses the ‘Real antagonism’ Žižek has spent his career foregrounding as Lacan's central contribution to the Left.
Alicia Valdés's Toward a Feminist Lacanian Left: Psychoanalytic Theory and Intersectional Politics aims to prove that an intersectional Lacan is both possible and politically necessary. Valdés makes clear that her ‘Feminist Lacanian Left’ centres less the ‘feminist reading of Lacan’ associated with thinkers like Juliet Mitchell and Julia Kristeva than the Lacanian political theory initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, sometimes referred to as the Essex School of Discourse Analysis and dubbed the ‘Lacanian Left’ by Yannis Stavrakakis (2007) in his book outlining this heterogeneous and emergent field.
Valdés aims to put this ‘Lacanian Left’ into conversation with intersectional feminism: namely, the analysis of how social and political oppression operates in complex, intersecting ways along lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, geography and other categories. Whilst recognizing Kimberlé Crenshaw's original theorization of intersectionality - which focused on the limits of anti-discrimination law - Valdés cautions against a ‘static ontology’ of identity, embracing a more expansive notion of ‘situated i