European Social Constitution: Between Solidarity and Access Justice

Gramsci's ideas, particularly his formulation of cultural and ideological 'hegemony', have been a vital reference point in post-war Marxism and radical political thinking generally. Laclau and Mouffe's recasting of hegemony in a post-Marxist idiom continued a wider tendency to amplify a specific aspect of Gramsci's work, largely by neglecting consideration of his historical context or political and organisational commitments. By expanding hegemony into a radical theory of social constitution, I argue, Laclau and Mouffe drew upon Gramsci effectively to distance themselves from much of his legacy. This, I suggest, exemplified an interpretive attitude of 'mourning' that contrasts with the tendency to a 'left melancholia' that seeks an authentic radical subject prior to politics.

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Fanon’s Lacan and the Traumatogenic Child: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Dynamics of Colonialism and Racism

Theory Culture & Society ◽

10.1177/0263276415598627 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 33 (4) ◽

pp. 77-101 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Erica Burman

Keyword(s):

Close Reading ◽

Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽

Social Constitution ◽

Black Skin ◽

The Social ◽

Lacanian Theory ◽

The Look

This paper revisits Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood – primarily as mobilized by the ‘Look, a Negro!’ scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man’s sense of alienation from his own body and his inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child to reconsider Fanon’s ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan and some aspects of Lacanian theory opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon’s writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful.

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