Book Review Essay: “Quilting Lacan” A Review of Todd McGowan’s “The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan”

Introduction: Staking One’s Flag 

When lecturing on G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807/1977) in the 1930s, Alexandre Kojève (1947/1969) used the veneer of a definitive introduction to Hegel in order to present his own thought, which was not simply Hegelian, but imported a pseudo-Marxist philosophy of history and labour, and a Heideggerian existentialism of being-towards-death. On the other hand, we have, for example, George di Giovanni’s masterful translation of Hegel’s Science of Logic which, as laid out in the introduction, seeks to treat the work on its own merit, treating the multifarious interpretations of the Logic from a “global” perspective (di Giovanni in Hegel, 1812/2010, p. xii). 

As both a good Lacanian and a rigorous scholar of Jacques Lacan, Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan (McGowan, 2025) toes the line between these two tendencies—to neither completely smuggle in his own thought nor to attempt to disavow one’s subjective investment and by providing a neutral, objective reading of Lacan. Rather, by taking a decisive stance on certain issues, McGowan provides a needed systematic treatment of Lacan’s thought whereby we may both appreciate his debt to Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec’s reading of Lacan but nonetheless be provided with fair treatment of those competing interpretations which have diverged from Žižek and Copjec’s use of Lacan, who themselves are at odds on various issues. This would have only been further enriched by the late Mari Ruti’s own contributions inasmuch as Ruti herself toed the line between sympathy with the Žižekian-Badiouan reading of Lacan and her own reading (which receives some of its voice via McGowan’s exposition of her and Richard Boothby’s readings) that emphasised other parts of Lacan’s oeuvre. Here, we cannot easily speak of different readings which make use of different aspects of Lacan’s system, for no such thing exists, which McGowan emphasises: we can only speak of certain periods in Lacan’s thought since the conceptual developments in one period become incompatible with another. If it is a system, it is a system wrought with contradiction, cloaked in obscurantism, and in constant development, such that it becomes far more illuminating to take McGowan’s historiographical approach if one is to give proper scope to the breadth of interpretations and thus assume the pseudo-dialectical middle-ground between a localised interpretation of Lacan, inseparable from one’s subjective investment in certain elements of Lacan’s thought, and a global view which provides an “objective,” historical exegesis of Lacan’s conceptual developments. 

With Lacan, one must stake their flag in the ground at certain points—to recognise certain conceptual advances and regressions alike, evidenced by their philosophical implications and political stakes, which McGowan keeps front of mind. In particular, McGowan’s treatment of Lacan may be taken according to three loosely separated domains which afford such stakes around which we can make sense of Lacan, “the most misunderstood theorist of the twentieth century” (p. ix), whether through our own sympathies with McGowan’s position or by properly demarcating the grounds for our disagreement. These three registers, which cannot be easily held apart for the effects in one are registered in the others—the historiographical, theoretical, and philosophical—provide a map for engagement with Lacan’s thought and the contest over his legacy as a thinker against his self-inflicted obscurantism. We are thus positioned to address two further questions firmly in the political register. The first is the question of not only Lacan as a thinker of the political, but of the many “Lacanianisms” in their attempts to think the political, particularly drawing on the question of the relationship between philosophy (where psychoanalytic theory intervenes into philosophy) and politics, and between the individual and the social. McGowan’s historiographical periodisation allows us to illuminate these relationships through the philosophical grounding of Lacan’s project, whilst recognising the limitations of squarely placing Lacan in the domain of the political without proper grounding. Given this connection between psychoanalysis and politics via philosophy, we are then left with the question of the fate of the theory of recognition as developed by Hegel (above all, the “lord-bondsman dialectic” in Hegel, 1807/1977, pp. 111-119) and bastardised by Kojève (1947/1969), Lacan’s self-professed “master” (Lucchelli & McGowan, 2016, p. 340), and to thus make sense of the status of recognition in Lacanian theory and the subsequent ethical implications of absolutising misrecognition. In addressing these concerns, McGowan’s exposition allows us to trace out how Lacan departs from his master, and from the post-structuralists in spite of their apparent proximity, through his fidelity to the subject, whilst also recognising scope for further theoretical engagement with Lacan’s legacy as a thinker of the ethical and the political. 

Quilting Lacan  

Despite constant references to much the same conceptual signifiers throughout his seminars, Lacan’s thought itself risks devolving into non-sense through the slippage in their signification. To this end, McGowan quilts Lacan himself around a number of points which give meaning to his corpus and thereby illuminate its continued relevance for philosophical thinking and political practice. These quilting points may be loosely organised across three registers: the historiographical, the theoretical, and the philosophical. 

In the first case, McGowan delineates three distinct periods of Lacan’s thought, which, although they contain brief transition periods in which one concept gradually shifts its sense, or emerges from the background into the centre or slips into the background, one can identify certain distinct shifts in Lacan’s concerns. The “early Lacan” McGowan identifies with the period from Seminar I (1953-54) to Seminar VIII (1960-61). Thereafter, and what McGowan takes to be the most theoretically rich period, as evidenced by the adoption of many of its concerns and concepts by subsequent thinkers—the “middle Lacan”—is identified with the period from Seminar IX (1961-62) to Seminar XVI (1968-69). Lastly, a period which McGowan takes to be a retreat from his greatest insights—the “late Lacan”—covers everything following Seminar XVII (1969-70) until his final seminar, Seminar XXVII (1980). McGowan thus situates these periods in terms of Lacan’s intellectual influences and institutional status: the early period is defined by Lacan’s proximity to an intellectual scene dominated by structuralism, surrealism, existentialism, and phenomenology, at which point Lacan remains a background figure of psychoanalytical developments in France; Lacan’s subsequent rise to the centre of the institutions of psychoanalysis and intellectual life in France, only to face excommunication in 1963, which he recounts in Seminar XI by analogy to Spinoza’s cherem (Lacan, 1973/1998, pp. 3-4); and the late period in which, defined by a certain antagonism with the public, students, and other intellectuals in the 1968 “moment,” Lacan appears to embrace his excommunication in his flight into obscurity. 

Any such post-mortem of Lacan’s seminars, by what its incisions include and exclude, bears inevitable theoretical consequences. Whereas some Lacanians have sought to provide a systematic sheen to Lacan’s thought, such as Jacques-Alain Miller, largely responsible for the dissemination of Lacan’s teachings, and others have offered different lines of dissection, such as Samo Tomšič’s treatment of Lacan in terms of his two “returns to Freud” as the movement from “representation” to “production” which allows for the simple structural homology with Marxism (Tomšič, 2015, p. 47), McGowan repeats this tripartite schema which sees Lacan fleeing from his own theoretical insights in their Hegelian-Marxist core. In this way, McGowan situates Lacan within a certain theoretical and historical milieu whilst maintaining his resistance to being canonised in the same schools of thought as those around him. Lacan is indebted to Kojève’s philosophy, just as he is defined by a certain critical adoption of structuralism following Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure, but he is never reducible to his influences. The emptiness of the signifier “post-structuralism,” under which Lacan has been at times expropriated, blinds us to the multifarious distinctions between the thinkers it claims to signify. Yet leaving aside the differences between the thinkers it claims to represent, in terms of Lacan alone it obscures the difference between himself and the others it has been taken to signify: whereas other theorists have sought to denounce the subject, Lacan retains the subject, even in his late embrace of multiplicity, not seeing it as simply reducible to ideological interpellation or conceptual schemas, but as that which resists such totalisations. This allows us to see Lacan as a “structuralist of the real.” And likewise, vis-à-vis his “master,” Kojève, Lacan resists being reduced to this influence, particularly in his middle period in which he gets Hegel right where Kojève doesn’t. These three phases in Lacan’s thought can therefore be traced onto their own corresponding theoretical approaches: “​​the early more structuralist phase, the middle objet a phase, and the later sexuation phase” (p. 22). Although Lacan retains the three registers of symbolic, imaginary, and real across all three periods, in each period, as McGowan draws out, one comes to take precedence and thus colour our image of the others. In the early period, Lacan emphasises the “determinative role of the symbolic order” (p. 16) which is taken to explain and thereby denounce as mere fantasies the imaginary illusions sustained by subjects. In the middle period, the real is afforded theoretical primacy as precisely that which “disrupt[s] the functioning of the symbolic” (p. 16). And in the later period, the real completely takes over from the symbolic in its “isolat[ing] each subject in its own way of structuring itself” (p. 17). Corresponding to these three periods are distinct concepts, or distinct senses of the same concepts. It is in this middle period, however, that Lacan develops what he took to be his greatest theoretical contribution, objet a, as that which is not the object of desire but its cause. Grasping the functioning of objet a in Lacan’s work, however, requires a certain understanding of its emergence in the rupture of the real in the shared symbolic space—a space of impossible relation between subjects, not the non-relation of the later period, nor the earlier period in which the “real” is loosely the same as “reality.” It is in this period in which, as McGowan demonstrates, objet a as the manifestation of the subject’s unconscious desire marks the “inability of the subject to master itself and the society’s inability to stamp out all challenges,” and thereby identifies the “universality of subjectivity in the subject’s break from the symbolic order” in its very incapacity to fit in the symbolic (p. 17). Hence, whereas many a post-structuralist has fled, Lacan retains the emancipatory kernel of “universality,” and he makes good on this fidelity in the middle period. Here, not yet formulated in the earlier seminars and abandoned in the subsequent years, the political stakes of Lacan’s thought properly appear. In turn, against Miller, for McGowan, “one can be an early Lacanian, a middle Lacanian, or a late Lacanian. One cannot simply be a Lacanian” (p. 15). This movement, however, is only properly understood as waged between the legacies of Hegel and Immanuel Kant, which McGowan offers as the coordinates for Lacan’s shifting understanding of contradiction and impossibility. 

McGowan accordingly situates Lacan’s thought in terms of the philosophical developments of German Idealism—particularly between Kant and Hegel—onto which he maps subsequent Lacanian thinkers in terms of their position vis-à-vis Kant and Hegel, which tends to track with their position vis-à-vis the historiographical periodisation McGowan offers and their corresponding theoretical developments. The analogue with Kant and Hegel allows one to recognise how certain theoretical elements of one period become incompatible with the elements of one another: although Hegel remains indebted to explicating much of the philosophical revelations wrought by Kant, just as Lacan sought to preserve the radicality of Freud’s own revelation against its subsumption into ego psychology, Hegel enacts certain shifts which dissolve the validity of Kantian schema. There is no room, for example, for the “thing in itself” in Hegel’s system—only in what its overcoming reveals to us about the nature of truth. McGowan sees the early Lacan as taking the symbolic and real to exist in external, dualistic relation to one another, replicating Kant’s distinction between appearances and the thing in itself, where appearance doesn’t “reveal the thing in itself when it breaks down” (p. 62) but simply remains inaccessible. This early Kantian dualism of symbolic (appearance) and real (thing in itself) whereby contradiction is taken as an insuperable, external barrier to understanding, however, is abandoned in the middle Hegelian period in which contradiction becomes rather the basis for understanding. This relies on a shift in Lacan’s thinking whereby he sees the real rather as the internal hitch of the symbolic—a parallel manoeuvre to Hegel’s understanding of contradiction vis-à-vis Kant. For Hegel, we can know about things in themselves not through access to supersensible reality but by attending to the way in which the “realm of appearances collapses” (p. 64). The contradictions in appearance “point us to the thing in itself. They show that the realm of appearances cannot explain everything. The fact that appearances can fail reveals what appearances cannot directly say” (p. 64). And it is here that the subject emerges as a divided subject—giving body to the fact that the symbolic order cannot symbolise everything. The political import of this understanding of contradiction therefore emerges not in the Kantian imposition of an abstract universality, but in recognising universality where things don’t fit, such that it is futile to imagine some harmonious social order in which everything fits. The philosophical structuring of the developments in Lacan’s thought offered by McGowan, therefore, allows one to recognise the resources in Lacan for social critique. Lacan, however, throughout his seminars, maintains the Kantian project—the interrogation of the conditions of the possibility of subjective disclosure of the “critique of pure reason”—by preserving the subject whilst incorporating the Freudian unconscious. This clinging to Kant, in spite of his Hegelian middle period, manifests in his late period as the turn away from contradiction to difference, abandoning the shared symbolic space, and thereby the possibilities for emancipation as we are left on our own islands of jouissance, crafting our own master-signifiers. This marks a shift in Lacan’s understanding of contradiction, whereby the “real ceases to name the point of impossibility or contradiction within the symbolic” (p. 64) but rather denotes the impossibility of “symbolic connections” (p. 65). 

Despite the many changes undergone by Lacan’s thought, it is the preservation of this understanding of subjectivity, contradiction, and universality which separates Lacan from other 20th-century theorists. Where the structuralists and post-structuralists hypostasise the interpellation of the individual qua subject, Lacan retains the subject as that which precisely resists such totalisation and thereby maintains the space for freedom central to the German Idealists which allows for critique and both individual and social transformation.  

Psychoanalysis and Politics

Through this Kant-Hegel analogue, McGowan cashes out the political consequences of these theoretical manoeuvres, not reducing their political value to Lacan’s own evaluations or intentions, nor his personal biography, but also how they have or have not been taken up by subsequent Lacanians. This allows for not only a history of Lacanianisms, but for grasping the contemporary relevance of Lacan’s thinking independently of Lacan’s own convictions. However, in any such application of Lacan as a political thinker, we risk too hastily shifting from the “theoretical” to the “political.” Or more precisely, we are caught in a certain tension between maintaining fidelity to the singularity of the clinic as the point of origin for psychoanalysis, and the privileging of psychoanalysis as, if not dictating politics, capable of explaining all social and political phenomena. McGowan’s situating of Lacan in terms of Kant and Hegel, and his elaborated account of signification, however, help attend to such risks whilst revealing fertile sites for further consideration. 

McGowan isolates the middle period as the most fecund for Lacanian theorists, such as Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, because of this Hegelian understanding of the relationship between the real and symbolic and its anti-conformist political valence. However, McGowan offers his own corrective against the likes of Žižek and Zupančič in emphasising how Lacan’s understanding of signification is at stake, necessitating an elaboration of the distinction between master signifier and quilting point—a distinction which affords these thinkers their political import. Where Žižek’s ideology critique commonly interchanges the two terms, and Zupančič calls for an emancipatory master signifier (Zupančič, 2017, pp. 125-128), McGowan draws out the political consequences of this failure to properly distinguish between master signifier and quilting point. As McGowan recounts, Lacan conceives of the symbolic order and the subject it engenders from Saussure’s account of signification, for whom “signifiers and signified simply line up with each other,” such that there exists no risk of “sliding” (p. 102). Lacan, however, rejects such an intrinsic link, seeing the signifier and signified at constant risk of losing their connection. Their only connection is afforded by the quilting point, which does not denote the ossification of the signifying chain but its retroactive production of sense. The master signifier appears to perform a similar function in providing a reference point by which the set of signifiers acquire meaning. Yet this obscures their different functions within the signifying process seen by their differing positions within this process: whereas the master signifier enacts signification, the quilting point is its end. This is not simply of theoretical interest in determining meaning, however, but of political import, for to identify with the master signifier is to commit oneself to a logic of exclusion (to be a member of the nation requires taking up certain signifiers, having certain characteristics), whereas the quilting point transforms the meaning of the existing regimes of signification (really to be a member of the nation requires the displacement of another people, say). “Class struggle” (p. 103) or “climate change” (p. 104) doesn’t ground the signifying process in the same way that “the market” or “wealth” does—they are not taken up as master signifiers in their own right but retroactively transform the signification of going to work or taking a flight. We can see the difference most clearly in the case of “Germany” as master signifier for the Nazis, which relies on “Jew” as its quilting point (p. 105). The Jew is not simply one signifier amongst others, or a competing master signifier, but the anchoring point of the Nazi fantasy, and to bring to light its insubstantiality is to threaten to uproot the Nazi’s symbolic order. It is to this end that McGowan offers the quilting point as the most timely instrument for political intervention from Lacan’s thought: 

One can envision theoretical engagement in politics manifesting itself through the contribution of a timely quilting point. By quilting social relations with a term like class struggle, a barrier to equality becomes visible in a way that it wasn’t prior to the act of quilting. (p. 104) 

This understanding of the signifying process is afforded by McGowan’s re-situating of Lacan vis-à-vis Kant and Hegel, whereby “truth” is revealed in what is excluded, the impossibility sustaining the social order. This privileging of quilting point, in turn, provides a viewpoint from which we can analyse certain phenomena without reducing everything to psychoanalytic processes. This is to preserve something of the singularity of the origins of psychoanalysis in the dyadic, or rather triadic (analysand-analyst-Other) relation, felt in the transferential relation and the irreducible individuality of its participating subjects, whilst also recognising the immense value of its inflation to abstract social and political phenomena. There is, in other words, a certain autonomy of the philosophical which is felt in politics, and in politics which is felt in the philosophical, and which make their presence felt in psychoanalysis. The Hegelian-Lacanian understanding of contradiction allows us to recognise the false promise of a substantial, harmonious social or political order, manifest in objet a, but also to recognise how this failure in the symbolic order’s efforts to symbolise everything reveals something about the very structure of the symbolic order predicated on abstract, formal impositions of equality and freedom as master signifiers, such as that afforded to the wage-labourer. Rather, we see how the real inequality, displaced unto the quilting point, “exploitation” or “class struggle” sustains this fantasy, bridging the gap from the “short session” to ideology critique and political praxis. 

Yet Lacan avoids simply explaining social phenomena by reference to psychological mechanisms. In the same way that the Freudian dream is not simply a repository of the day’s activities, but involves an “unconscious labour” (Tomšič, 2015, p. 11) by which its truth resides in the subject’s own failures in signifying its content, Lacanian social and political analysis does not involve simply describing collective fantasies but sees their re-narrativisation with their point of failure as the source of truth. McGowan’s privileging of the quilting point as an irruption in narrativisation thus serves to maintain this link between the individual and social. In elaborating our fantasies about the social order, it is what fails in our explanation that reveals the “truth” of the social order—contradiction becomes something not inaccessible as the “outer limit” of reason, but constitutes its “inner limit” (Dolar, 2020, p. 40). As Yannis Stavrakakis (1999) maintains, the political import of Lacanian psychoanalysis lies in its very effusion of the “essentialist division” between the socio-political and the individual through theorising not only the “split subject” but likewise the “split object” of its reality (p. 8). Following Stavrakakis, we see how McGowan is not simply applying psychoanalytic concepts onto a socio-political reality, but seeing the subject as that which does not fit in a world which is itself without some given harmonious order, marking the possibility for their “confluence” (Laclau, 1990, p. 96, as cited in Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 4). Lacan does not assume the subject and object apart from one another but allows us to trace their processes of historical constitution. Thus, it is not a matter of “understanding what society is, but what prevents it from being” (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 4), and in this moment of failure in constructing the impossible object, politics emerges in all its necessity for psychoanalysis. Stavrakakis thus bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and politics by seeing the “major political significance of Lacan’s work [in] the fact that his split subject is coupled by a ‘split object’, a split in our constructions of socio-political objectivity” (Stavrakakis, 1999, pp. 7-8). McGowan thus likewise need not appeal to external phenomena but maintains something of the singularity of the individual’s need to reconstruct the phantasmatic explanation before the Other as always-already a political moment in manufacturing social and political reality as a complete object in which we may assume our ordained identity-positions as subjects. 

McGowan’s Lacan thus offers a counter against Jean-Claude Milner’s theorisation of the dislocated relationship—or non-relation—between psychoanalysis and politics. For Milner (1995/2021), “philosophy is like politics” in that they are both “radically out of sync with the modern universe,” speaking Greek and Latin (p. 99). This “fundamental disynchrony,” in turn, gives psychoanalysis a “principled indifference” (Milner, 1995/2021, p. 99). This leads Milner to thus declare that in the same manner as “science and politics have nothing to do with each other … psychoanalysis has nothing to do with politics,” deducing an “antipolitics … running parallel to antiphilosophy” (Milner, 1995/2021, p. 99). As Milner describes, this means not a mere quietism on political matters (Milner takes Lacan’s four discourses as such a political intervention), but a radical indifference to take sides within the fields of philosophy and politics: Lacan makes use of the whole range of the philosophical canon, thereby rendering philosophy “a constellation of brilliant texts” but not a coherent “thought” (Milner, 1995/2021, p. 100). Hence the indifference is immanent to these fields themselves—it is not that psychoanalysis is indifferent to politics or philosophy, but in these domains. Tomšič (2015) follows Milner in tracing this disynchrony in the projects of Lacan and Marx as the ethico-political impulse to bring this non-relation into relation. Tomšič and Milner see modernity as a series of scientific decentralisations of human narcissism in favour of Freud’s “dictatorship of reason,” (Freud, 1933/1964, p. 213) whilst capitalism restores unreason by re-centring man in his self-interest. Hence the disynchrony between politics and scientifics modernity in capitalism’s “economic theocracy,” whose “abolition … is the necessary condition for the synchronisation of politics with the modern universe” (Tomšič, 2015, p. 232). To this end, for Tomšič, Marx and Lacan bring into focus two elements in modernity which are of use: “the necessity to mobilise the subversive dimension of modern science,” (p. 238) containing a Platonic kernel which resists the quantification of modern life and decentres the egoistic human being and their self-interest (psychoanalysis as a materialist science which includes its own subject); and following from the former, “the actualisation of the third term that drove the French Revolution, fraternité, the enigmatic signifier of communism” (p. 238)—whereas its other terms have been co-opted by the language of capitalism and idealism, fraternité is only possible through this materialist theory of the subject. Disynchrony is not absolute but a historical development which may be traversed by drawing on psychoanalysis to bring about the requisite transformations in the political order to bring us into the world we have created for ourselves. Following McGowan, however, by situating Lacan in terms of the Kant-Hegel relation, we have reason to be suspicious in such faith in science or any such master signifier. Although Lacan makes use of a range of concepts from philosophy and politics, he nonetheless, perhaps unknowingly, commits himself to certain positions within philosophy and politics by function of his understanding of signification, contradiction, and impossibility. The strength of McGowan’s reading lies on seeing the understanding of contradiction and signification of the middle Lacan as committing him to a certain understanding of the disharmony of the social order that he regresses from, rather than seeing him as merely indifferent across his teaching. Moreover, whereas McGowan, who may be joined with Žižek, Stavrakakis, and Mladen Dolar in maintaining that science only reveals its emancipatory kernel in its failure to explain everything, Tomšič and Milner seek to expand the domain of science—to impose rationality upon the economy rather than retrieve the rational core of the irrationality of its objectivity. The effect of this manoeuvre by Milner and Tomšič, following McGowan’s schematisation, is to not only propose the false security of a master signifier (science, fraternité), but to succumb to the Kantian deadlocks of the late Lacan’s regression from an understanding of contradiction to difference, relation to non-relation. This philosophical regression is felt in the domain of politics as the turn to the multiplicity of master signifiers (economy, politics, philosophy, science, etc.) rather than grasping the failure of the master signifier in anchoring the shared symbolic space. 

However, what remains missing from McGowan’s picture of Lacan is an account of the institutionality of psychoanalysis itself as a political agent, or a form of organisation for political agents, which complicates the easy road from psychoanalysis to politics that McGowan and Stavrakakis chart by already assuming something about that which psychoanalysis itself cannot explain. That is, in fetishising the object which does not fit we risk denouncing its own radical potential for politics, appropriating the autonomy of politics. As Gabriel Tupinambá (2021) warns, psychoanalysis must avoid depriving politics of the capacity to articulate its own problems and forms of organisation. Tupinambá does not dismiss psychoanalytic applications to politics, but sees these applications as “most useful when treated as material to be shaped and evaluated” by political processes, “rather than something which could direct it any way” (Tupinambá, 2021, p. 6), and how this same operation works in the opposite direction, such that both domains require interrogating their autonomy. This requires grappling with psychoanalysis’ own problems in articulating its own crises and incapacity to act effectively in the real world—to consider why Lacanian psychoanalysis, despite its emancipatory theoretical formulations, has failed to organise itself effectively. This desire only persists through the “problematic object it orbits around” (Tupinambá, 2021, p. 4), by which Tupinambá preserves psychoanalysis as a procedure—an institutional arrangement, a potential for the formulation of its own impasses—which draws on the “constitutive tension between the unconscious as an underivable hypothesis and the clinic as an experimental practice” (Tupinambá, 2021, p. 4). This tension has often been concealed, however, by both a clinical and ideological fantasy: to maintain the fantasy of something exceptional and unknowable about ourselves as beyond the procedures of the psychoanalytic clinic; or to maintain that “we already know what it is that exceeds the immediate stakes of analysis” (Tupinambá, 2021, p. 5), taking this not as evidence of a lack of explanatory value but its undue surplus. Tupinambá therefore calls for a “decoupling of psychoanalysis from other fields of thought [by which we may open] the space for what we have called a desire of psychoanalysis—the desire to partake in the historical inscription of psychoanalysis into the world” (Tupinambá, 2021, p. 15). To this end, in following McGowan’s emphasis on the middle Lacan’s objet a as the piece of the real interrupting our everyday experience, we may recognise a danger in fetishistically “knowing” the unknown object. This opens up a tension within McGowan’s privileging of the middle Lacan between maintaining the alterity of the unknowable, as Tupinambá demands, and avoiding lapsing into the unknowability of the non-relation which is hypostasised in Milner and Tomšič. Yet, following Althusser, for psychoanalysis as a science to not simply have a “theory” (a “corpus of concepts”), but a “Theory of their theoretical practice,” where “a ‘theory’ feels the need for the Theory of its own practice … [only] occurs post festum” (Althusser, 1965/2005, p. 174)—for psychoanalysis as a political agent to encounter that which eludes its grasp. 

It is in this tension that there remains room for greater articulation between the knowable and unknowable, prognosis and diagnosis, psychoanalysis and its other side, which will bring the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics into greater light by applying the insights of psychoanalysis upon itself. 

Kojève and the Fate of Recognition 

This leaves us with the question of Lacan’s proclaimed greatest influence, Kojève, and the fate of the concept of “recognition” privileged by his sublimation of the “master-slave dialectic” to the centre of any reading of the Phenomenology. Given McGowan’s interest in situating Lacan in terms of the Kant-Hegel relation, and the Hegelian fidelity to the concept of recognition against its dismissal by Lacanian thinkers, its status within psychoanalysis remains largely underdeveloped. Kojève’s account of recognition is itself inseparable from his flight from the political in the foreclosure of history and its subsequent influence on political theory, first in Kojève’s encounter with Leo Strauss (Strauss, 2000), and Strauss’s reception by Francis Fukuyama in the enthroning of neoliberal democracy. 

Lacan insists upon the necessity of misrecognition throughout his teaching and writing. For example, in Seminar VII: “This fellow self whom we so easily turn into our reflection, we necessarily implicate in the same misrecognition that characterises our own self” (Lacan, 1986/1992, p. 197). In Seminar III: 

The myth of unity of the personality, the myth of synthesis, of superior and inferior function, confusion about automatism, all these types of organisation of the objective field constantly reveal cracks, tears and rents, negation of the facts, and misrecognition of the most immediate experience. (Lacan, 1981/1993, p. 8)

And in Écrits: “Man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognised by the other” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 222). Here, Lacan takes from Kojève the inherent need for human beings to be recognised by others whilst also recognising how the ego, as an imaginary illusion, is fundamentally constituted by misrecognition.

It is in this turn away from Kojève that Žižek staked his post-Althusserian ideology critique, and Copjec’s (1994) conception of the “gaze” against its Sartrean (Sartre, 1943/1956, pp. 252-302) and film theoretical adoptions, whereby the subject escapes recognition, captured in McGowan’s delineation of Lacan vis-à-vis structuralism and post-structuralism. Whereas Althusser recognises how we are split subjects caught up in the dialectics of interpellation, he misses that the interpellating structure is itself incomplete, and the subject is evidence of which. Following Stavrakakis, the split object speaks the truth of the split subject, and it is this dimension of not only objet a but the attempt to think the symbolic order in its proclaimed objectivity the truth of the political situation is revealed. Whereas Althusser defers to his Spinozist-Marxist “science” in which there exists no outside to “ideology in general” (Althusser, 1970/1971, p. 158), Lacan, particularly in his middle period as McGowan conceives it, preserves a space for a critical distance from the regimes of domination and interpellation through his theorisation of the subject: not simply as the subject of the address, but the subject which emerges in the aporia of the address itself in which we are misrecognised by not only the other but the big Other. 

Hence, Lacanians have resisted utilising “recognition” as a tool for normative critique since there remains a certain structural impossibility within every intersubjective relation—we are never able to properly recognise one another, such is the failure of the symbolic to directly articulate our desires to the other. This leads Žižek to declare that “the truth arises from misrecognition” (Žižek, 1991,  pp. 188-212), and this appears to be a Hegelian truth: the big Other does not exist, the analyst does not really know, there exists no authentic identity to be recognised, but we cannot short-circuit our way to this truth. McGowan, likewise, as treated at length in his Emancipation After Hegel, denounces this move to inflate the moment of recognition as a hermeneutic for all of Hegel’s political philosophy (McGowan, 2019, pp. 139-142, 202-207). This appears a warranted reproach given the endpoint of Kojève’s philosophy of recognition in the ennui of the Last Man, and the limitations of a “politics of recognition.” Lacan, and Hegel for that matter, rather maintain the openness of history precisely through a reorientation of what desire amounts to vis-à-vis Kojève in Žižek and McGowan’s call for a “return to Hegel,” for whom philosophy cannot tell us about the future, only able to “paint its grey in grey” (Hegel, 1821/1991, p. 23). McGowan takes Lacan to be following Hegel in seeing how jouissance contains its emancipatory kernel in being reserved for those who lack social recognition (pp. 77-78), and since we cannot encounter the Other except through the mediation of the big Other (which doesn’t exist), the insubstantiality of the Other’s demand for us to obey marks the emptiness of any such recognition afforded to us, and we must rather seek individuality in the singularity of our desire for there exists no safe endpoint secured by recognition:

Lacan’s critique of our investment in the big Other is a critique of conformity. Subjects sell themselves to the big Other without realising that it cannot offer the support for their identity that they demand from it .… the subject must give up its reliance on the big Other as a social authority and take responsibility for its desire. Rather than investing itself in the big Other, the subject must come to recognise its own singularity in its unconscious desire. (p. 85) 

Conformity is not only undesirable on this view, but impossible since “no matter how strenuously we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of conforming, we can never go far enough for the big Other” with “no substantial big Other to grant us that recognition that we seek” (p. 85). Lacan thus departs from Kojève: the desire for recognition becomes the “desire for what escapes the realm of recognition” (p. 114). Where Kojève does not include the unconscious, Lacan sees “objet a as what is irreducible to recognition,” (p. 114) thereby displacing Kojève’s “desire” into the register of “conscious demand” which is actually animated by the unconscious desire of objet a. The subject of desire, therefore, in Lacan’s view, “doesn’t desire the Other to recognise it but desires the desire of the Other” (p. 114). Yet given the enigmatic character of unconscious desire, subjects are left to interpret the desire of the Other which is really their own desire such that only we only “relate to the world [and the Other] through the singular distortion of the objet a” (p. 116) even if this relation is always a failure. This understanding of misrecognition, therefore, allows for the critique of ideological formations premised on the notion of harmonious recognition. 

However, the necessity of misrecognition need not mean the demise of recognition as a normative principle beyond its negative function altogether. As Ruti (2015) argued in Between Levinas and Lacan, Alain Badiou and Žižek, by extrapolating the Lacanian theory of the subject from within the locus of Althusserian ideology critique, have allowed us to both recognise the effects of ideology and maintain the possibility for emancipation, whereas the Levinasian theorisation of subject as fundamentally vulnerable to the Other, for which Judith Butler is taken as representative, has been unable to offer any such resistance against its interpellation. Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” of not giving ground to one’s desire forms the fertile ground upon which Badiou and Žižek have theorised the “event” (Badiou, 1988/2005) and the “act” (Žižek, 1989, p. 247), locating emancipation in the singularity of a break with the desire of the Other. Although this ethics is outlined in Seminar VII, prior to the theorisation of objet a and therefore of the early Lacan, McGowan follows Badiou and Žižek in sacralising the “break.” Yet, as Ruti recognises, such moments of ethical rupture, although desirable, leave opaque their real content and thereby abandon the normative demands of political philosophy. It is necessary to pass through this moment of subjective destitution but to propose it as a normative standard appears excessive without a corresponding restitution. For Lacan, ethics cannot be the “antithesis of desire” as it is for Levinas and Kant, but is a “matter of pursuing the truth of desire even when this means violating sociocultural norms of proper behaviour” (Ruti, 2015, p. 123). This ignores whether our “desire is hurtful to others” or “clashes with the desires of others” (Ruti, 2015, p. 123). Here, it is not simply that Ruti is clinging to the paradigm of a priori ethical principles, but identifies an inconsistency within the domain of the ethics of desire in abandoning normativity. The “aversion to a priori ethical principles” in Levinas (and Butler) and Lacan (and Žižek and Badiou, and we may add, McGowan), Ruti thus argues, “is not theoretically (or practically) viable” for such principles remain operative in any “project of deconstructing the arrogant subject of Enlightenment rationalism” (Ruti, 2015, p. 123). To this end, Ruti, against the Levinasian dualistic splitting of “ethics” from “justice” (Levinas, 1991/1998, p. 105), develops a feminist Habermasianism which seeks to address these antagonistic demands: the singularity of ethics in breaking from conformity, and the normative demands of everyday life in which we adopt certain modes of identification and criticise or recognise the validity of the identifications and behaviours of others.  

McGowan gestures to this problem through his theorisation of the relationship between the master signifier and quilting point—that we cannot simply abandon the master signifier or we are left as psychotics in the sea of floating signifiers. But how do we “choose” a signifier which allows us to maintain the significance and normativity of the symbolic order without capitulating to the exclusionary logic of the master signifier, or the imaginary identifications of the ego and “identity politics” which forecloses the work of politics proper? As McGowan notes, one is left in “complete disarray” if they think that they can “pass straight to the truth without going through the detour of the controlling symbolic fiction” (p. 94), for this only feeds the fantasy for a “real” master, and yet “[t]here is no such thing as a just or egalitarian master signifier” (p. 95). Identity appears to be a necessary fiction that we must maintain to be functioning subjects, yet our identity appears to be without validity inasmuch as it remains insusceptible to recognition. To affirm the other but to nonetheless recognise the structural impossibility of such a gesture thus appears to be the task in order to save Lacan from the Levinasian embrace of vulnerability, the Althusserian trap of affirming the omnipotence of ideology, and Derridean post-structuralism whereby recognition is not simply a fiction but an impossibility which infinitely postpones justice. The problem Ruti raises, and which remains here unresolved, is how to maintain the possibility of justice, which is to maintain the subject as its agent, and to therefore participate in this fantasy of recognition and identification, yet if we are consciously participating in this fiction, then does this fiction any longer hold weight? Like the attempt to render the unconscious conscious, this appears to represent its own point of impossibility, and a difficult task for subjects participating in emancipatory struggles. Here remains necessary an account of recognition beyond its failure which preserves the Lacanian commitment to universality whilst maintaining this theorisation of the subject. 

McGowan’s exegesis of Lacan’s account of misrecognition, therefore, renders Lacan the remainder of his own intellectual influences through this shift in how he sees desire vis-à-vis Kojève, yet what remains untheorised is this path from de-identification and destitution to forms of re-identification and restitution which avoid the fantasies of substantiality and recognition from the big Other: to recognise the singularity of the other’s desire whilst recognising its fundamental opacity to any final interpretation. This unarticulated other side risks devaluing the political import of Lacan’s thought for social critique inasmuch as recognition (as that which overcomes alienation) as a historical form (the overcoming of specific historical social formations of misrecognition or alienation) and a transhistorical aspect of human existence (an inevitable disharmony at the heart of any social order) seep into one another. As Robert Lucas Scott (2025) argues concerning Žižek vis-à-vis Gillian Rose’s critical social philosophy, and which may be thus extended to McGowan’s Žižekian reading of Lacan, by “elevating … failure to metaphysical heights, [Žižek] overlooks how these failures might be better attributed and more clearly grasped by being understood as a necessary illusion of an otherwise historically contingent reality” (p. 38). To hypostasise the necessity of the illusion of recognition “leaves us only with the facticity that … the lack of the subject is the lack in the Other, which not only … reduces all historical social forms to a single structure, but turns ‘lack’ … into the unknowable source of history,” and thereby abandons what Rose maintains as “modern philosophy and its critical task” (Scott, 2025, p. 38). 

By abandoning these critical, normative, and historical dimensions of any critical social philosophy, the reading of Lacan favoured by McGowan runs the risk of bringing psychoanalysis into an antiphilosophy and antipolitics à la Milner and depriving this reading of its most fruitful insights. Confronting such questions frame any question of the possible (di)synchrony of psychoanalysis with philosophy and politics.  

Conclusion and Reflections on the Ethical

Far from simply offering a scholarly account of Lacan’s thought, therefore, McGowan’s systematic articulation allows us to lucidly pose a series of pressing questions for Lacanian theory. Although no fault of McGowan’s, Ruti’s absence is perhaps felt on two fronts: the question of the ethical orientation of psychoanalysis, which, as alluded to, Ruti sought to develop through her Habermasianism, and the question of the relationship between objet a and Das Ding. These absences are not disconnected, however, for Ruti uses the originary loss of Das Ding as the cornerstone of her ethical reorientation of Lacan: “it is because the subject cannot have the Thing that it feels compelled to reach for its echo through the various objects of desire, the objets a, that it encounters in the world” (Ruti, 2012, p. 17). This facilitates an ethics which breaks from formal morality and ideological imperatives: 

an ethics that is not dictated by the instrumentalist imperatives of the service of goods but rather assesses the value of things—as well as of the ethical actions related to those things—on the basis of their proximity (or loyalty) to the Thing. (Ruti, 2015, p. 138)

But it also provides a helpful move away from sacralising the ethics of desire of objet a by situating objet a in terms of Das Ding, rather than reducing the latter to a precursor to the former, and using Das Ding as a means for developing meaningful identifications: 

There is a distinction between “empty” or “mad” desires that are fanned by the sheer fact that the objet a in question is somehow unavailable and other (“truer”?) desires that aim directly at the sublime object and that are consequently “agitated in the drive.” (Ruti, 2012, p. 17) 

Ruti’s “ethics of sublimation” sought to maintain the link between the individual and social levels of ethical transformation by which “ethics is not a matter of seeing one’s desire to its destructive climax, but rather of keeping desire alive by refusing to close the gap between the Thing and things” (Ruti, 2012, p. 148). This invites a space of negotiation between the individual’s sublimation of objects and their symbolic status in a shared social space, and thus we remain attendant to the desires of others in pursuing the truth of our own desire, without regressing into the Kantian deadlocks of the late Lacan. 

If, moreover, as McGowan and Žižek argue, conformity is impossible since recognition is impossible, this risks downplaying the need to break with the dictates of conformity, for the possibility of total ideological interpellation, like recognition, remains itself a fantasy. Against this, Ruti seeks to maintain something of the recognition afforded to subjects participating in a shared symbolic space against reducing ethics to the “ethics of the act,” the impossible, the real. These points of divergence ought to be brought to the surface, revealing the singularity of any such claim of mastery over Lacan’s thought. 

Although Lacan’s embrace of obscurantism and the fetishisation of the “discourse of the analyst” have been politically disastrous, evidenced by many of the problems with psychoanalysis as an institution which Tupinambá draws our attention to, we are left to here follow McGowan in retrieving Lacan’s thought from obscurantism and re-evaluating its role as both a science and a philosophy, and its relevance for individual and political transformation. To this end, McGowan’s treatment of Lacan’s thought, here parsed in terms of its historiographical, theoretical, and philosophical periodisation, is of immense value. This schematisation, in which McGowan privileges the Hegelian “middle Lacan,” helps us shed light on the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, and trace the move away from Kojève’s reading of Hegel through his own theory of desire. This does not simply close the book on Lacan’s thought, however, but invites further questioning along certain lines thus provoked: the desire of psychoanalysis as a political agent, the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and practice, the object of psychoanalysis in its paradoxical unknowability, and the residual needs for recognition, identity, and normativity.