5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
other persons, located in the symbolic context of society, culture and politics.
The psychoanalytic dislocation of the subject emerges in various guises in
contemporary social theory. In the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, it is part
of an attempt to rethink the powerlessness of identity in the face of the objectifying
aspects of contemporary science, technology and bureaucracy. In Habermas,
it is a series of claims about the nature of distorted intersubjective and public
communication as a means of theorizing repressive ideologies. In Lacan, it is a
means for tracing imaginary constructions of self-concealment, as linked to the
idea that language is what founds the repressed unconscious. In Lacanian and
post- structuralist feminism, it is harnessed to a thoroughgoing political critique
of sexual difference and gender hierarchy. In the postmodern works of Deleuze and
Guattari, and of Lyotard, it is primarily a set of socio-political observations about
psychic fragmentation and dislocation in the face of global capitalism.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGIES OF RATIONALITY: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
Most conversations these days in social theory and philosophy are about ‘endings’.
The end of history, the death of the subject, the disintegration of metaphysics, the
disappearance of community, the fragmentation of political power: all such ‘endings’
play the role of a symptomatic element which allows us to perceive a widespread
sense of political pessimism, of an overwhelming irrationality, of generalized anomie
and groundlessness, that permeates postmodernity. Against this backdrop,
psychoanalytic social theory has been credited by some observers with going against
the grain of the contemporary critical climate, rejecting the manic celebration of
fragmentation and dispersion in postmodernism, and instead addressing the
profound political difficulties of finding new paths for the radical imagination in order
to further the project of autonomy. Indeed, psychoanalysis in recent years has been
drawn upon in order to rethink the new and the different in contemporary social life.
This turn to psychoanalysis has been undertaken in the name of both conceptual
adequacy and political proficiency. At a conceptual level, the turn to Freud reflects a
growing sense that social theory must address the libidinal, traumatic dimensions
which traverse relations between self and other, identity and non-identity, subjectivity
and history. At a political level, the turn to Freud is more strategic: given the
flattening of the political imagination and the rising fortunes of technocratic
rationality, psychoanalysis is for many a potentially fruitful arena for radical political
engagement at the current historical juncture.
Freud’s relevance to social critique remains perhaps nowhere better dramatized than
in the various writings of the first generation of critical theorists associated with the