Egocracy - Marx, Freud and Lacan

Description

This book tries to bring together the work of Marx, Freud and Lacan. It does this not by enumerating what might stereotypically be considered to be the central theses of these authors and then proceeding to combine them a method that is inevitably doomed to failure but instead by confronting each one of their oeuvres with what might best be described as its extimate core. The work of Marx is confronted with a problematic that implicitly, and at times even explicitly, runs throughout it: that of the splitting, dividing and doubling (or, perhaps better, knotting) of the (proletarian) subject. The work of Freud is confronted following on from this analysis of Marx with the hidden social and historical determination of its own most revolutionary insight, that -the nucleus of the ego is unconscious-; and this social and historical determination itself in turn allows for a reinscription of the three fundamental categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. " Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction I. Marx's Trajectory; or, Three Ways of Splitting the Subject 1. The Imaginary and the Real (Part One): the "Early Writings" 2. The Imaginary and the Real (Part Two): from the "Theses on Feuerbach" to the 1859 "Preface" 3. The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real: Das Kapital II. From Freud to Lacan... and Back to Marx; or, How Psychoanalysis Slowly Discovers the Social 1. "The Nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious": the Trauma of the Social in Freud's Two Topographies 2. From the Transcendental Symbolic to the Historicity of Discourse: Lacan's "Return to Marx" 2.1 Two Contradictory Trends in the "Early" Lacan 2.2 Egocracy and the "Discourse of Capitalism"; or, Rethinking the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real in Seminar XVII Abbreviations Bibliography