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Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Marx's Trajectory -- or, Three Ways of Splitting the Subject -- 1. The Imaginary and the Real (Part One): the "Early Writings" -- 2. The Imaginary and the Real (Part Two): from the "Theses on Feuerbach" to the 1859 "Preface" -- 3. The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real: Das Kapital -- II. From Freud to Lacan... and Back to Marx -- or, How Psychoanalysis Slowly Discovers the Social -- 1. "The Nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious": the Trauma of the Social in Freud's Two Topographies -- 2. From the Transcendental Symbolic to the Historicity of Discourse: Lacan's "Return to Marx" -- 2.1 Two Contradictory Trends in the "Early" Lacan -- 2.2 Egocracy and the "Discourse of Capitalism" -- or, Rethinking the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real in Seminar XVII -- Abbreviations -- Bibliography

Based on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève produces a theory of an "anthropogenesis" that allocates the constitution of self-consciousness in a markedly historical and social field centered on the "dialectic of the master and the slave". More than this, it emerges in a domaine seized by the conflictuality of such a central operator of socialization, namely the desire, which is always, in the last case, a desire for recognition. Aware of this idea and on the path of the development of an imaginary's theory, Lacan was pursuing the necessity to reallocate certain points of the Freudian constitution's theory of the ego. He was aiming to bypass Freud's supposed "biologism" (especially in his theory of the "death drive") by emphasizing the fundamental dependence of the other's figure on the process of "hominization", in which "aggressiveness" plays an inherent role. If the projects of Kojève and Lacan present undeniable convergences, it is necessary, however, to better understand them, as well as to establish the uniqueness of their distances, inflections and objectives.

This article explores the relation between the work of Lacan and Derrida, focusing on the use of modal logic in both writers (the categories of necessity, impossibility, contingency, and possibility). The author explores the structure of the aporia in Derrida as a peculiar conjunction of necessity and impossibility, distinct from previous forms of contradiction (antinomies in Kant and dialectical contradiction in Hegel) and therefore historically situated in relation to the tradition of metaphysics. He argues that the other two modal categories, possibility and contingency, are largely absorbed by the aporia of necessity and impossibility. In Lacan, by contrast, modal categories are introduced in Encore, his notorious seminar on sexual difference, to develop the distinction between masculinity and femininity. The author argues that the sexuation graph of Encore, which is written in symbolic logic, is later redescribed by Lacan in modal terms, and this later description alters Lacan's initial presentation, allowing for greater flexibility among these categories. The essay shows that Lacan eventually presents a model of discursive transformation in which each modal category is capable of being shifted into another. This produces a model of discursive transformation that brings Lacan closer to Foucault than most commentators have acknowledged. The broader horizon of the argument concerns psychoanalysis and historical change, and the author argues that Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida all address the problem of history and that the relations among these thinkers deserve more attention than their polemical reception has allowed, particularly with regard to attacks on psychoanalysis as ahistorical.