You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Mari Ruti Fordham University Press, New York, 2012, 260pp., $27.00. ISBN-13: 978-0823243150
At least since the 1960s, dialectical social theory has been at odds with the new kinds of post-humanist (structuralist and post-structuralist) social theory that were being formulated by the likes of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. In recent years, this debate has been carried forward in the guise of identity politics, trauma theory and multiculturalist theory, all of which see themselves, broadly, as anti-dialectical, preferring a concept of the
subject as essentially fragmentary. Both sides have their excesses, dialectical theories (from Stalin to Sartre and Althusser) having often allied themselves with a scientific view of human development that repudiates the early Marx and Kantian-Hegelian inheritance of the German idealist tradition. Post-humanist theories, by contrast, have tended to proclaim the death of the subject (Barthes) or at least to minimize it, seeing the person as a collection of influences that are only contingently unified by a given structure at any one time. While scientific Marxism and, as a consequence, much dialectical social theory has largely been given up, the post-humanist theory has, without a natural predator, been free to develop into the hegemonic creature that is Theory, at least in the American academy.
In her most recent book, The Singularity of Being; Lacan and the Immortal Within, Mari Ruti wades confidently into this debate, seeking to reclaim Lacanian psychoanalysis for what I’ve been calling dialectical social theory. As the subtitle suggests, Ruti's aim is to develop a theory that rejects the fragmentary subject model of which Lacan is allegedly one of the chief architects. Ruti's intervention in this debate is not, however, generally motivated by academic squabbles. Her core concern is that the post-humanist view leads to the “propensity to universalize human disenfranchisement to the degree that it becomes difficult to distinguish b