ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the appraisal of the ethical turn in philosophical excursus and frames ontological terms of desire and drive a framework that can be used as the theoretical foundation for an anti-dromocratic and properly political conception of the city in the explicitly psychoanalytic. Such a psychoanalytic account relies heavily on Lacanian/Žižekian theories of subjectivity and, therefore, it requires that a good amount of space is devoted to explaining this theory that may appear for many readers unfamiliar and, perhaps, quite difficult and abstract. This diversion is necessary to establish the theoretical foundation for a new critical theory of the city; one informed by what, given the existing theoretical climate, can only be considered fairly unorthodox values and perspectives on the good life. Drive suggests that human subjects by their very nature are stuck in routinized, repetitive circuits of behaviour that mitigate against all the humanist and post-humanist imperatives to experience change and the new as celebrated by critical theory.
