Stavrakakis, Yannis. Lacan and the Political. New York:  Routledge, 1999. Pp.  x + 188.

“What does Lacan have to do with the political?” Feminist theory has long debated the political implications of Lacan's work, and post-structuralism its implications for politics. However, Anglophone political and social theory generally has been resistant to Lacanian psychoanalysis, characterizing it as irrelevant to political issues or dismissing it as “psychoanalysis.” Lacan and the Political presents a cogent and compelling argument for rethinking the importance of Lacan's work for contemporary political theory. This book shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis reconfigures our understanding of the political. It examines how the Lacanian theory of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary provides a radically new conception of the political field. Rather than conceiving politics as the operation of given institutions and structures, the book argues that symbolic and fantasmic relations constitute the political field.

In this way, Lacan and the Political highlights the importance of the psychoanalytic problematic for political theory. The challenge of Lacanian psychoanalysis to existing concepts of the political lies in its insistence that imaginary and symbolic relations constitute political relations, and hence that the political field is necessarily incomplete. Traditional political theory examines the position of the conscious willing political agent and the institutions created by that agent. By contrast, a psychoanalytic political theory emphasizes the production of the affective and unconscious subject in the representational and fantasmic field of the political. Lacan and the Political engages with the task of developing such a psychoanalytic political theory. It shows how Lacan's theories have been crucial to rethinking the political in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantai Moufife, and Slavoj Žižek. It sets out the Lacanian foundations of these reconceptions of the political, thereby articulating the specificity of Lacanian political theory. In this way, Lacan a