Lacan and the Political

The work of Jacques Lacan is second only to Freud in its impact on psychoanalysis. Yannis Stavrakakis clearly examines Lacan's challenging views on time, history, language, alterity, desire and sexuality from a political standpoint. It is the first book to provide an overview of the social and political implications of Lacan's work as a whole for students coming to Lacan for the first time.The first part of Lacan and the Political offers a straightforward and systematic assessment of the importance of Lacan's categories and theoretical constructions for concrete political analysis. The second

1. The Lacanian subject : the impossibility of identity and the centrality of identification -- 2. The Lacanian object : dialectics of social impossibility -- 3. Encircling the political : towards a Lacanian political theory -- 4. Beyond the fantasy of utopia : the aporia of politics and the challenge of democracy -- 5. Ambiguous democracy and the ethics of psychoanalysis.