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While psychoanalysis has been utilized as an effective means for critiquing the cultural strictures and regimes that attempt to normalize sexuality, in the epic theater of contemporary theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis has appeared most often in two reductive and mutually reinforcing roles. One is the universalizing and ahistorical psychoanalysis, a confusing and elusive but ultimately patriarchal and heteronormative law. The other is what Joan Copjec describes in her book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists as a “‘Foucauldization’ of Lacanian theory”: a Foucault-heavy synthesis of Michel Foucault's and Jacques Lacan's theorizations of sexuality (19). In both appearances, the radical potential of psychoanalysis' formulation of the unconscious and desire is occluded, repressed, or simply invisible. Tim Dean's ground-breaking study, Beyond Sexuality pulls the curtain down on these well-known performances and brings the act of actually reading Lacanian psychoanalysis psychoanalytically to center stage. In doing so, Dean reveals how a psychoanalytic understanding of Lacan's work can help transform and radicalize contemporary theorizations of sexual desires, practices, and identities, and then put those theorizations to politically progressive use.
Unlike many studies of psychoanalysis that too quickly fold back on their own discourses even as they theorize the relation between psychoanalysis and the social, Dean takes the reader through the necessary steps to show how a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious, which is thoroughly sexual, can positively effect the social dimensions of sexuality for the better. First, Dean articulates how immanent history and the social are to the psychoanalytic symbolic. And perhaps more importantly, he reminds us that Lacan's formulation of desire constitutes a conceptual outside that resists the reduction of history and the social to the images through which they appear. He then maps out specific and foreseeable ways th