ABSTRACT
If a single concept could claim to underlie the diverse innovations in post-Marxism, postcolonialism, critical race studies, feminism, queer theory, and gender studies over the last 30 years, it would surely be Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, understood as the productive commingling of power and knowledge. And yet, relatively few have seen that Jacques Lacan’s work offers arguably even richer resources for a theory of the interweavings of discourse, power, and knowledge. Well before Foucault’s work made such an impact, Lacan had been developing a nuanced theory of discourse that drew on Saussurean linguistics, game theory, and cybernetics, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. It was to discourse, too, that Lacan returned in a novel way in Seminar XVII as a response to the radicalism of May ’68 (Lacan 2007). However, what Lacan meant by discourse was never what Foucault meant.
