"Offering a compelling feminist engagement with the Lacanian Left, this book allows reconfiguring the notion of the sexual position in ways that question and decenter the Master's Discourse. In so doing, it grapples with stimulating questions of subjectivation, oppression, symbolic identification, and the act, while remaining committed to the possibility of developing a critical analysis of how political subjects emerge within unequal power relations. Attending closely to feminist theories of performativity and precariousness, Alicia Valdés provides an engaging meditation on the complicated questions and conditions that might articulate a feminist Lacanian Left as an alternative framework for contemporary political theory and
praxis."
Athena Athanasiou,
Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece "Tracing a feminist and intersectional reading of the political Left, Valdés deploys fundamental Lacanian concepts (structure, sexuation,
jouissance, fantasy, object a, the four discourses) to offer a critical analysis of contemporary Left politics and the discourses that support them. Aiming at a meaningful intersectional ontology, the book foregrounds the tendency of discourses, including Leftist ones, to non-inclusivity. The feminine 'not-all' is posed as both revealing the androcentric 'all' and as an alienator and disrupter of a seamless masculinity, and is what proffers a social bond that is more collectivist and inclusive. Read this book to bolster a psychoanalytically informed feminist political consciousness fit for the twenty-first century!"
Eve Watson,
Senior Lecturer at Institute of Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy (IICP), Ireland"In recent years, the Lacanian Left has facilitated the dynamic development of psychoanalytic political theory. How do feminism and intersectionality interact with this orientation? Alicia Valdes argues that, apart from being plausible, such a mutual engagement could also have significant impact both at the level of conceptual refinement and at the level of socio-political praxis. Her argumentation is bound to greatly influence the crucial debate around psychoanalytic feminism(s) and to help dispel mutual suspicions and misunderstandings."
Yannis Stavrakakis,
Professor of Political Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
