‘What does not work in the world’: the specter of Lacan in critical political thought

Judicialising Urban Political Ecologies: Post‐Politics and Environmental Governance in South Asia

“…On the other hand, politics is also about struggles, antagonisms, and dissensus (Badiou 2005;Mouffe 2005;Ranci ere 1998;Zi zek 2000). In our view, the political rests on this post-foundational view of difference and conflict that reside at the limits of politics (Pohl and Swyngedouw 2021). Judicialisation operates as a mode of consensus, and thus antipolitics, by containing challenges to the status quo within the boundaries of the courts and administrative law.…”

Illiberalism and the democratic paradox: The infernal dialectic of neoliberal emancipation

“…'Immunological' has to be understood here as the suspension of the obligation of mutual communal gift-giving, a form of asylum that suspends one's duty to participate in the rights and obligations of being-in-the common, of the community. Similar to Lefort's and other post-foundational notions of the People (see Pohl & Swyngedouw, 2021a), for Roberto Esposito community does not refer to a set of individual properties that are shared by members of the community (like values, language, religion, etc. ):…”

“…Erik Swyngedouw https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7494-2824 Note 1. I mobilise here the Lacanian terminology of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary (see Pohl & Swyngedouw, 2021b). The social bond and the terrain of everyday social, cultural and political life is, according to Lacan, structured as a Borromean knot of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.…”

“…It is here that the culture of neoliberalism finds its core libidinal attachment in the sense that it continuously promises to deliver individual ‘enjoyment’, yet has to perpetually invent the new, thereby frustrating the desire for fulfilment in the existing, but nonetheless promising it yet again in the next ‘thing’. While enjoyment is fantasmatically circulating around an object-cause of desire (what Lacan names as ‘object a’), this ‘thing’ never really satisfies fully (for further details of the Lacanian analysis of enjoyment as a political factor, see Dean, 2009; Hook, 2017; McGowan, 2004, 2013; Pohl & Swyngedouw, 2021a; Stravakakis, 2007; Žižek, 2007). As Jodi Dean continues, enjoyment (‘ jouissance ’) denotesan overwhelming, even agonizing, affective intensity.…”

“…‘Immunological’ has to be understood here as the suspension of the obligation of mutual communal gift-giving, a form of asylum that suspends one’s duty to participate in the rights and obligations of being-in-the common, of the community. Similar to Lefort’s and other post-foundational notions of the People (see Pohl & Swyngedouw, 2021a), for Roberto Esposito community does not refer to a set of individual properties that are shared by members of the community (like values, language, religion, etc. ):[O]n the contrary, community is without particular properties; it is defined by sharing what one has in common, not about sharing individual properties…to belong entirely to the originary communitas means to give up one’s most precious substance, namely, one’s individual identity, in a process of gradual opening from self to the other.…”