ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 argues for complementing traditional discourse-analytical focus on meaning with an attention to affect. A detailed discussion is devoted to the Lacanian subject, understood as split between his or her discursive and affective sides. Different dimensions of subjectivity and social reality are operationalised with the help of three sets of logics: social logics, which capture the routinised patterns of social life; political logics, which deal with the contestation and reproduction of social orders; and fantasmatic logics, which show how subjects affectively bind themselves to discourse. These arguments are developed also in relation to the notions of explanation, truth and critique.
