ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author proposes that Jacques Lacan should indeed be considered a major social theorist, a theorist who developed a systematic approach to the study of the relation between self and society. Lacan's importance consists in certain key themes and problematics that he has helped bring to prominence in social theory—including the status of the imaginary in personal and social life, the symbolic ordering of social relations, the fracturing effects of the unconscious upon social order, and the phallocentric structuring of sexual subjectivity in contemporary culture. Perhaps the most central preoccupation of Lacan's interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis is the primacy accorded to the unconscious in the human subject's relations with others. The political pessimism of Lacan's doctrines—the distorting traps of the imaginary; the symbolic determination of the subject; the lack or failure of desire—has proved attractive to many social theorists and cultural analysts.
