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Using neoclassical thought as his entry point, Yahya M. Madra offers a vital prolegomenon to a recalibrated critical political economy. Madra's reinterpretation of the economic field pivots around what he calls the theoretical-humanist problematic, suggesting that an ontologically inflected recharacterization of economic thought is essential to any serious development of progressive alternatives to dominant mainstream forms of political economy. After outlining the constituent elements of theoretical humanism and some of Madra's key conceptual moves, this essay explores several analytical, normative, and ideological implications of such a redrawing of the boundaries of economic thought. Madra's intervention opens up at least three lines of inquiry regarding the theoretical-humanist problematic: the relative amplitude of tensions internal to different economic approaches in its orbit, including their capacities to resist or escape its gravitational pull; how it circumscribes the scope of concrete, normative visions; and how everyday practices and identifications reinforce or depart from related ideological fantasies underpinning it.

Abstract
Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification 'critical' in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research.

In this essay I explore the appeal of the psychoanalytic category of fantasy for critical political theory, by which I mean a theory grounded in a political ontology that offers a rationale for both normative and ideological critique. I draw on the work of William Connolly, Susan Faludi, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler, among others, to consider the explanatory and critical implications of the concept of fantasy for questions of identity, and political identity in particular. I argue that fantasy is a useful device with which to explore and probe the political and ideological aspects of a practice or narrative because it foregrounds the combined significance of the symbolic and affective dimensions of life. Moreover, a psychoanalytic perspective can facilitate a move away from an epistemological or moralizing understanding of fantasy and political identity, shifting the emphasis instead toward a more ontological and ethical understanding.

This article explores the implications that a particular psychoanalytic insight carries for thinking about freedom in general and Charles Taylor's approach to freedom in particular. Courtesy of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this insight supplies a logic of enjoyment to explain an aspect of the problem of self-transgression – a problem summarising those situations in which a subject appears both to affirm an ideal and, at the same time, systematically to transgress it. This insight points to a generally neglected source of unfreedom or 'freedom fetter' – what I call self-transgressive enjoyment. My argument is that Taylor's account of freedom and its fetters captures something important about the dimension of self-transgressive enjoyment, but that it finds it difficult to elucidate and accommodate what is ultimately at stake in this psychoanalytically informed conception of unfreedom.