ABSTRACT
It may seem strange to situate the relevance of Lacan's work in a close connection with the philosophy of dialectical materialism and the problems of ideology in Marxism, but it is precisely in drawing these connections that his re-reading of Freud has most significance. For it provides the foundation of a materialist theory of the subject in the social process, a subject constructed as always already included by those social processes, but never simply reducible to being a support. Lacan's subject is therefore this new subject of dialectical materialism: a subject in process. Lacan aSSerts that the discoveries of Freud open on to the mobility of which revolutions are made. They point to the 'missing area in human sciences, that of the process of meaning in language and ideology, the process of the "I" in history, an area which would operate in the same space as dialectical materialism itself' (Kristeva, Tel Quel, no. 48).
