ABSTRACT
This last chapter focuses on the disjunction between clinical and political change, and on the speci®c nature of psychoanalytic speech that opens the space for revolutions in subjectivity. This enables us to tackle the supposed unity of knowledge and unity of self in versions of clinical practice informed by theological conceptions of ethics. An emphasis on the disjunction between the clinic and politics enables us to approach in a properly Lacanian manner the construction of transference, `clinical structure' and the direction of the treatment in such a way as to treat each `structure' as an instance of subjectivity rather than as `pathological' deviation from capitalist society. The chapter engages with the `relational' turn in psychoanalysis as an approach that does attend to political change, and I outline overlapping aspects of the `relation' that is posited in that approach. Here an explicit connection is made with feminist explorations of the link between the personal and the political, and there is discussion of the often reactionary but potentially progressive ± ambiguous, ambivalent, paradoxical ± political role of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
