In this wide-ranging study, Anthony Elliott aims to provide a comprehensive and critical survey of contemporary contributions to social and psychoanalytic theory. Developing a line of analysis strongly grounded in the European tradition, he examines the importance of psychoanalysis for opening new interpretative strategies for critical social theory in relation to the self. The book begins with a reconsideration of the importance of Freud for social and political theory. In doing so it considers anew the relation between self and society, bringing a distinctive viewpoint to bear upon many contested issues in this area. This paves the way for critical analyses of the leading theories in social and pscyhoanalytic thought - including critical theory, Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought, post-structuralism and feminism. Elliott provides interpretations of the thought of Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Lacan, Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe, Zizek, Cizous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Castoriadis and others. The purpose of this survey is constructive in character: through a critique of these leading theories, Elliott seeks to formulate the contours of a novel account of the relations between self and society. Contemporary researchers, he argues, have falsely downgraded the profoundly imaginary character of the self and social reproduction. In this connection, he argues for the importance of the imaginary and the unconscious as key concepts through which issues about the self and self-identity, ideology and power, sexual difference and gender, should be sustained.

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