Lacan And The Politics Of Psychoanalysis – An Interview With Thomas Svolos (original) (raw)

Lacanian Subversion: Psychoanalysis for the Post-Humanity Era

Crisis and Critique - 50 Years After May 68, 2018

The present article explores the triad theory-practice-political for psychoanalysis portraying contradictions, missusages and paradoxes, which derive from it. The discussion of the political as a feature embedded within the field is articulated and problematized. Through the Lacanian notion of subversion, this essay examines Lacan's position on May '68 and metapsychological implications for the field of such discussion. Focusing on what a psychoanalysis for the post-humanity era would look like, this critical appreciation of the political and Lacanian subversiveness, tensions the ethical of the field itself.

“The pandora’s Box Has Been Opened": Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Politics After 2017

Crisis and Critique, 2019

This essay proposes a diagnostics of the current predicament of Lacanian psychoanalysis, based on the recent political crisis of the WAP, in 2017. Departing from this critical study, we then investigate the history of different articulations between Marxism and psychoanalysis in order to delineate the underlying ideological relation currently allowing psychoanalysis to consider itself a judge of political thinking. Finally, we confront this ideological position with a schematic theory of the compossibility between fields, a different way of conceiving the non-relation between forms of thought which does not continue to reproduce this problematic articulation.

What Would I Do with Lacan Today? Thoughts on Sartre, Lacan, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis

What Would I Do with Lacan Today? Thoughts on Sartre, Lacan, and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2016

This article is a reply to Blake Scott's discussion of the Sartrean critique of Lacan that I present in three chapters of Sartre and Psychoanalysis. Here I revisit those chapters, written 25 years ago, with questions about how I might approach Lacan today. I also discuss how I might approach recent developments in psychoanalysis, some of which are influenced by both Lacan and postmodernism. While I still think Lacan does not give an adequate account of agency and responsibility , there are definitely parallels between Sartre and Lacan and even a significant, though ambiguous, debt that Lacan owes to Sartre, similar to the often-neglected influence of Sartre on postmodern philosophy. The rest of the article considers the influence of postmodernism and existential phenomenology on contemporary psychoanalysis. Despite certain theoretical difficulties, the relational and intersubjec-tive emphasis in much of contemporary psychoanalysis, combined with a rejection of drive theory, is in some ways surprisingly compatible with Sartre's requirements for an existential psychoanalysis.