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Published online: 28 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
Despite the common and rising interest in psychoanalysis from a Marxist, anarchist and activist perspective, it is primarily as an ethical form of enquiry that psychoanalysis relates to politics, oppression and resistance. By mobilising the term ‘ethical’, so central to the project of this book, I am not referring to the bureaucratic, psychological and institutional formation of ethics but rather to an analytic ethic that relates action to desire and desire to action. This edited book is grounded in an analytic ethic, making space for different voices and trajectories to unfold and critically discuss what interests us the most; how, as the authors suggest, to keep psychoanalysis open as ‘a radical space for the subject to discover and exercise a voice’ (p. 3).
Simply exercising such a voice does not, however, solely relate to the space of the clinic. It also considers how we may think about and practise psychoanalysis as a critical social theory and as a praxis of and for liberation. This ethical-practical orientation of the book begins with the book’s first critical theoretical intervention. Ian Parker, commenting on his jointly-authored book project with David Pavón-Cuéllar, Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements (2021), initiates this discussion and makes room to reflect critically on the ways psychoanalysis and Marxism are mutually aligned and differ from each other. In the same line of argument, in his own chapter in this book, Pavón-Cuéllar utilises psychoanalysis and Marxism to situate and analyse how capital, enjoyment and suffering intersect in today’s capitalist patriarchal society. And, complementing these accounts, if Lacan has been read by some as a ‘white man’s burden’, Clint Burnham paves the way to ask what has been fundamentally obscured in psychoanalysis as ‘the indigenous origins of the split subject’, or, in