Can We Invest in “Radical Investment”: Laclau’s Misuses of Psychoanalysis

Ernesto Laclau

This is a paper I completed last spring, and it marks a turning point of sorts for me. I went into it thinking that perhaps I would be energized by Laclau's thought and enthused by discourse, if not in his precise understanding of it, but at least enough that I might build upon that in my future work. What happened instead is that I came to conclude that Laclau's entire theoretical edifice was shot through with holes, his use of psychoanalytic ideas terribly skewed, his own theory largely untenable as given, and my interest in his thought a thing of the past.

So the paper is available as a PDF by clicking this sentence (which redirects you to ifile). It is 50 pages in total and I've just worked through it and cleaned up a few typos and such.