Cassal Lecture in French: University of London. Study of the troubled relation to cities in modern history seen as metaphor of psychical hostility to civilization a la Freud. Rereads Rousseau's 'primitivism' not as longing for it, but as a critique of its myth of goodness.

The question of 'the postcolonial' is viewed from the perspective of psychoanalysis, using Lacan, Hannah Arendt and others to consider the way European whites' unconscious psychological reaction (and role of the maternal) to those they encountered as they purveyed their version of "the Good" to those they colonized.

Using contemporary fashion (both "high" and "low") as my focus for analysis, I apply Lacan's insight that sexual difference (feminine/masculine) is an effect of divergent psychical and bodily logics that guide a subject's relation to jouissance. I point out Lacan's growing reliance on Freud's 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (which demonstrated the pressure for group conformity in dress, and overcoming gender distinctions) for his understanding of sexual difference in relation to social order. I point out that Lacan used Freud's vision of an ego-based rather than a subject-based society for his analysis of capitalist/university discourse in his 1969 Seminar XVII; and I argue that Freud's text also inspired Lacan's subsequent exploration of the logic of femininity (a heretofore neglected topic) in Seminar XX 1972-3 and in Télévision in 1975. Late Lacan thus grounds my argument that postmodern/capitalist culture is dominated in its management of enjoyment - its ethos, its economics and its fashions - by only the masculine model for jouissance. I ask that we consider entertaining ideas about what forming our culture on the feminine model of jouissance might be like.

I argue for a psychoanalytic approach to spatial questions. I then examine whether the topological (philosophical and mathematical) work of Alain Badiou is compatible with such an approach. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom Badiou cites, also deployed topology, but I argue that Lacans use of topology is fundamentally antithetical to Badious. As illustration, I analyze Badious treatment of The Paris Commune (also contrasting it with the work of Walter Benjamin on the same subject). I then draw out the implications for social and spatial thinking of Badious concept of the site (the locus of an Event which is, according to Badiou, the place of the advent of truth). © 2009 Pion Ltd and its Licensors.

The volume is split into three distinct sections: Psychoanalysis and Politics: this section will frame the discussion by providing general background of Lacan’s engagement with politics and the political Lacan and the Political: each ...