Introduction: The Love of Lacan (Derrida, Žižek)

This introduction sets the scene by recognising that more recent reinvestments in the ‘political’ facility and prospects of psychoanalysis, frequently routed through debates around Lacanianism, display a tendency to dismiss ‘poststructuralism’ (and, indeed, any vestige of a ‘poststructuralist’ Lacan), as they attempt sharp distinctions between, say, a materialism supposedly capable of addressing ‘political’ issues today versus unwanted traces of a longstanding idealism with which ‘deconstruction’ can now be historically aligned. Reviewing some of Derrida’s writing on Lacan, the introduction moves on to assess the dismissal of ‘poststructuralism’ that one finds, for example, in Žižek’s recently published doctoral thesis, originally from 1982. Since the ‘political’ implications of this dismissal are far from simply ‘progressive’, the introduction asks questions about the ‘politics’ of the performative in both Derrida’s and Žižek’s texts on Lacan.