On Some Questions Prior to any Possible Treatment of Lacan's Theory of Discourses as Political

Abstract

It goes without saying that, for Lacan, discourse roughly corresponds to an innovative notion of intersubjectivity through which we can continue to develop and ameliorate the socio-political applications of psychoanalysis already outlined by Freud. In a loose sense, Seminar XVII is Lacan’s Group Psychology. However, straightforwardly starting off from the equivalence between discourse and intersubjectivity–as many commentators do especially when motivated by the sterile urge to establish whether Lacan was a covert reactionary, an unredeemable liberal, or an unappreciated revolutionary–fails to account for the meta-psychological level of discourse, namely, for its material, biological, and onto-phylogenetic basis, without which the dialectic between knowledge, power, and jouissance (arguably the kernel of any Lacanian incursion into politics) remains unfathomable. Recently, I have tried to tackle this meta-psychological level through the notion of anthropie, the species-specific entropy of the anthropos.0F1