1st Edition
Powers of Abjection Politics and Lacanian Ontology
In this book, Ricardo Laleff Ilieff presents a new ontological understanding of politics through the writings of Julia Kristeva’s notion of “abjection” in dialogue with Sigmund Freud’s concept of “Unheimlich” and Jacques Lacan’s ontology “du rél”.
Aimed at those who are interested in the politics-psychoanalytic “praxis”, Laleff Ilieff argues that the abject enables one to critically read conceptual developments that are central to contemporary thought. Examining the abject in sacrifice, war, and the One as articulated by contemporary thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Carl Schmitt, RenéGirard, Pierre Clastres, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancièe, Laleff Ilieff argues that abjection does not operate on the margins of the social but is what unveils the failure of all identity.
Powers of Abjection provides new questions and insights into the relation between psychoanalysis and politics and is an invaluable resource to students and scholars.
Foreword
Yannis Stavrakakis
Introduction
Part One: The Real and the Symbolic
1. The Uncanny
2. A Pure Real
Part Two: Sacrifice
3. The Crisis of Distinctions
4. Homines Sacri
Part Three: War
5. The Enemy
6. The Partisan
Part Four: The One
7. Being Pané
8. The Part of Those That Have No Part
Afterword
Biography
Ricardo Laleff Ilieff is Professor of Political Theory at the Gino Germani Research Institute (University of Buenos Aires) as well as a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) of Argentina.
