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Considering its role in the consolidation of the Western heterosexual male psyche and the concomitant abjection of difference through misogynistic, heteronormative, and racist discourses - what might psychoanalysis have to offer the political efforts of feminist, queer and postcolonial theory? Jan Campbell approaches these questions through a carefully researched engagement with some of the most pivotal theoretical debates and impasses within psychoanalysis and their corresponding tensions with political and cultural theory. She weaves together otherwise isolated strands of psychoanalytic theory that have become rigidly dichotomized along theoretical “party lines,” and challenges the premises of these polarizations - arguing that they have compromised the political possibilities for psychoanalytic theory. Over eight densely packed chapters, she constructs a series of innovative bridges between a staggeringly broad spectrum of theorists and their interlocutors across queer, feminist, and post-colonial theory, resulting in a deeply suggestive reworking of psychoanalytic theory.
Cast as ahistorical, apolitical, quietist, and defeatist, psychoanalysis has often been rejected by those seeking political and social change. From the originary tensions between Freud and Marx, political theory and theories of the unconscious have often been regarded as incommensurable. Nonetheless, increasing recognition of the dynamism of the subject and its non-correspondence with discursive and practical orders has highlighted the inadequacy of social and materialist analyses that neglect to theorize the complexities of subjectivity and the unconscious. Campbell executes a balanced and sophisticated negotiation of these well-worn tensions. She writes: “If Lacanian psychoanalysis can be faulted for refusing the historical experience of the body, then a more socialist analysis may also be censured for situating that body so passively and refusing the unconscious a dynamic role” (28). Campbell