ABSTRACT
The Lacanian Left, according to Yannis Stavrakakis’s eponymous book, describes ‘a new theoretico-political horizon’ that explores the relevance of Lacan’s work for the critique of contemporary hegemonic orders’ (2007: 3–4). The field is heterogeneous, and there is no preexisting unity between the theoretical projects included. Indeed, it is the existence of internal division that testifies to the emergence of the field as such. This chapter explicates two closely interrelated trajectories of the Lacanian Left, the Lacano-Marxism of Louis Althusser in the mid 1960s and the Foucauldian inflected notion of discourse deriving from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s project for radical democracy. I trace the first trajectory from the groundbreaking work of the Cercle d’Épistémologie, through Slavoj Žižek and the Lacano-Maoism of Alain Badiou, to Samo Tomšič’s argument for a labor theory of the unconscious (2015: 11). The second trajectory derives from Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) and runs through the pioneering work of the Lacanian feminists grouped around the journal m/f and their critique of the aporias of both contemporary feminism and the Marxist Left. This trajectory continues through Laclau’s more overt endorsement of Lacan, culminating in his assertion of an identity between the respective logics of hegemony and the objet petit a (2005). The chapter concludes with Stavrakakis’s reassertion of the importance of affect and Todd McGowan’s work on the death drive and negativity.
