Yannis Stavrakakis

Populism for traversing the fantasy?

Interview by Thomás Zicman de Barros

Translated from Lacuna, uma revista de psicanálise #4, November 2017, p. 11.

Yannis Stavrakakis has been interested in psychoanalysis since his youth. It was this interest that led him, after completing his degree in Political Science in Athens, to choose the postgraduate programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex, and to move for a few years to the small town of Colchester in Britain. Created by the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who would go on to be Stavrakakis' research supervisor, this postgraduate programme promised to articulate approaches from different perspectives, such as post-structuralism, post-Marxism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis.

The promise of interdisciplinarity was undoubtedly true, but it cannot be denied that Stavrakakis had an important influence in deepening the use of psychoanalytic notions by the so-called Essex School. If Laclau had been drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan at least since his first debate with Slavoj Žižek in the early 1990s, Stavrakakis' insistence on conceptual clarity, in partnership with his colleague Jason Glynos, influenced his former supervisor to be even more explicit in his relationship with psychoanalytic concepts.

Stavrakakis began his intellectual production at a young age. In 1998, aged just 28, he suggested to Simon Critchley, who at the time edited the series Thinking the Political (Routledge), that he publish Lacan and the Political, which was released in 1999. In 2007, Stavrakakis published The Lacanian Left, in which he discusses the work of various political thinkers who, like him, were influenced by the thought of Jacques Lacan. In recent years, he has coordinated the Populismus research group, as well as a political observatory on populist phenomena, based at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he is now a professor. As Stavrakakis explained in the following interview, one of his current endeavours is titled The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory, a compendium that deals with the various uses that political theory has made of psychoanalysis and which is due to be published soon.

It was on the same campus of the University of Essex where Stavrakakis began his academic career that we met on 1 August [2017] for this interview. We discussed the relevance of psychoanalysis for political studies, the concept of populism and how these notions relate to the political perspective he defends: radical democracy.

[The interviewer]

Ten years ago, you published a book called The Lacanian Left (2007). Before that, you had published another work titled Lacan and the Political (1999). Why is psychoanalysis important for understanding political phenomena?

To a certain extent, the two books, especially the second one, sought to register a movement that was precisely trying to analyse politics through psychoanalysis. This is, of course, an orientation that had already been addressed long before I came into contact with these issues. In fact, we're talking about a trend that started from the limitations faced by more traditional approaches, which were already being felt at the beginning of the 20th century. The very emergence of psychoanalysis as a theory and clinical practice coincides with the emergence of these difficulties of explanation, criticism and political mobilisation, especially felt by the left more than a hundred years ago.

At the time, the crucial problem was the concept of subject and subjectivity. Commonly, a simplistic model of subjectivity was adopted, typical of modernity: the subject seen as rational, autonomous, responsive and endowed with certain natural rights and faculties. Curiously, this conception was accepted by both mainstream thinking and critical approaches. The result was the emergence of various difficulties, notably in socialist and communist circles.

From the perspective of these movements, if I explain to you why you behave in a certain way, or why you are exploited in a certain way, you, as a rational individual, should be persuaded to actually change your way of being. However, on the eve of the First World War, it was already more than obvious that things didn't work that way. For example, the fact that many proletarians preferred to fight for their nations rather than give priority to their transnational class identity - which should have ensured a more internationalist outcome - was a clear indication that there were unconscious processes that overdetermined subjective decisions and behaviours, as well as collective social behaviours - two dimensions that are obviously connected. None of this could be understood from the traditional theoretical framework through which subjectivity was thought of at the time.

This was therefore the reason why there was a turn towards psychoanalysis: to build a new way of understanding political subjectivity and identification processes. What facilitated this process was the fact that it was a two-way movement. Freud himself produced several works that dealt with social and political issues, opening up psychoanalysis to this type of reflection. Later, Lacan, always in dialogue with the great socio-political debate of his time, continued this mutual fertilisation. Thus, the radical spectrum - made up of figures such as Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School, and then Louis Althusser and the post-Althusserian current - began to develop an interest in these alternative ways of understanding subjectivity and collective identity. It was in this way that a psychoanalytic political theory began to take shape. Books such as The Lacanian Left sought to record this trend and shape it in a more systematic direction, capable of advancing our reflexive capacity and underpinning our ethics and political strategy.

You seem to defend the thesis that psychoanalysis can provide an ethical compass for politics, in the direction of what might be called a "radical democracy" project. Can you explain how this would work?

I'm not sure I'd use the term "compass", because this is very close to traditional forms of morality: the morality of the "good" that Lacan tried to dislodge in his work and which Freud associated with the sadism of the superego.

My attempt to relate the ethical orientation of psychoanalysis to radical democracy has been the result, once again, of the failure of traditional ways of thinking about a radical political strategy. It seems to me that a psychoanalytic orientation very strongly involves a self-critical dimension. It doesn't aim to replace one version of the good with a new psychoanalytic version of the good, but precisely to deactivate this traditional notion of the good. It wants to introduce an orientation beyond phallic and fantasised notions of the good. And there is a whole ethical field that emerges when we deactivate this phallic and oppressive understanding of morality.

If this is possible in analytical practice, through strategies such as "traversing fantasy", my question is: what is its political and social equivalent? Precisely because I don't think there is a radical division between the subjective and objective or collective levels - they are two sides of the same coin - I believe it would be possible to find such an equivalence [of "traversing fantasy"] on the collective level.

In politics, in particular, I think that the constant challenge of institutionalising a democratic culture - something that begins even in Ancient Greece, if not before - involves the challenge of dealing with the limits of personal desire, but also of intersubjective ties. It is the challenge of common life with others, of an experience that embodies both radical homogeneity and heterogeneity, the promise of identity and the experience of otherness. Democracy is a way of dealing with this paradox and enabling the search for a better, more egalitarian and fairer future. Without, however, idealising such a future, without succumbing to fantasies of plenitude and completeness, and without idealising our ability to produce some kind of miracle here and now. This challenge has always been difficult, which is why democracy has only prevailed for short periods in human history. On the other hand, however, this indicates that we have something worth fighting for, something worth experiencing, insofar as it would provide us with the political equivalent of this psychoanalytic ethics of the Real.

In The Lacanian Left, you associate a project of radical democracy with the Lacanian notion of feminine jouissance, of the jouissance of lack, of the not-All. You seem to oppose this jouissance of lack to the phantasmatic jouissance of a reconciled society, in which the "thieves of jouissance" would have been neutralised, and you present this identification with lack in the symbolic order as a way of traversing the fantasy. But are these two forms of jouissance incompatible or even separable? You cite an example used by Slavoj Žižek, about the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime in Romania. On that occasion, the socialist coat of arms was cut out of the centre of the Romanian flag, which would represent the lack of symbolic order. However, this cut in the flag also represented the rejection of the regime they were toppling down, a regime that was perhaps presented there as "stealing the enjoyment" of the people. In short, is a political life without fantasy possible?

Obviously there is no life without fantasy. Nor is there identity without difference. So we're talking about an unavoidable problem. The question is how far we can go.

There will always be various fantasies on offer and they can be very attractive, because we are marked by symbolic castration, by the lack that cannot truly be erased. Our socio-symbolic reality offers us a variety of objects promising solutions to this lack. These so-called solutions can be conservative or progressive, left-wing or right-wing - all kinds of objects can fulfil this particular function. Thus, for some people, the utopian, communitarian promise of a left-wing or communist society can fulfil the same function as, for others, the consumerist propaganda of a new Lamborghini. In all these cases, there is a promise of a final and definitive solution to subjective lack and social antagonism.

Of course, all these objects that are offered to us obey the phallic logic of desire. And the more we fail [to find the definitive solution to the lack through phantasmatic objects], the more we cling to these objects or the more we replace them with other objects that promise to fulfil the same function. There is no solution to these problems. But we're not just facing a dead end. What I think is most important is to understand that, during this process, in the passage from one object to another, from one consumerist commodity to another, something is sustained: a whole economic system and a whole political system. So this phallic organisation of desire has important repercussions on the form that human sociability takes and on the way in which our social and political identification takes place.

But can we have different arrangements? Obviously, an alternative cannot presuppose the disappearance of fantasy. Waiting for that would be too utopian. But perhaps we can go one step further, in the sense of deactivating this phallic attraction that all these objects and fantasies seem to exert on us. Can we deactivate this attraction, at least a little? Can we go one step further than these objects, so as to encourage or allow us to enjoy the experiences of partial jouissance when they occur, instead of seeing them as the first manifestation of a final fulfilment that lies ahead in the future? Can we pay attention to those partial experiences that may have something important to tell us?

Can we?

Ah, but we do it all the time. Both in the analytical framework and outside of it. We're just not aware that we do it. And only very rarely do we give these experiences the importance they deserve.

Beyond psychoanalysis, your recent work has been dedicated to studies on populism. By the way, following Ernesto Laclau, many authors from the so-called Essex School have discussed this phenomenon. You even coordinated a research project and a political observatory on this subject. In your view, what is the relationship between radical democracy and populism?

I remember once I was intrigued by this question [about the relationship between radical democracy and populism] and I discussed it with Ernesto [Laclau]. I asked: "We talked a lot about radical democracy, but you've also talked a lot about populism in Latin America. So what's the connection between the two?". And he replied, I remember very clearly: "Well, what are you talking about? Populism is radical democracy!" So, in his view, there was a clear connection between the two. I think there is. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are the same thing, but the connection exists in the sense that probably some forms of populism (which, of course, is a very ambivalent and very complex phenomenon) can provide the collective subject necessary to materialise and advance an orientation of radical democracy.

Populism typically involves the creation, emergence and construction of a particular political and collective subject, potentially hegemonic, which brings to the fore particular demands that were previously excluded. Populism makes it possible for social sectors that have been victimised or excluded from the political game, from the social and economic enjoyment of rights, to emerge into the political arena, obtain concessions and influence decision-making. To the extent that this political subject becomes the vehicle for egalitarian demands, demands that can be associated with a perspective of radical democracy, with broadening the participation of the population in decision-making, then in these cases we can say that populism becomes a political subjectivity through which an agenda of radical democracy can truly influence the public sphere.

Of course, there are other types of populism, such as European far-right populism, which is heading in an anti-democratic direction. We should also be aware of the ambivalence of populist experiences - an ambivalence that doesn't just depend on the orientation and trajectory of a populist project examined in isolation. It usually also depends on how political antagonism is structured more broadly. Thus, populisms of the egalitarian, radical democracy type must compete against anti-populist, elitist or even authoritarian projects. The dialectic of this political antagonism is very complex and cannot be controlled in advance. It can lead to pernicious forms of polarisation, or even to the dissolution of the social bond. In most cases, however, this is not due to an inherent defect in the populism of radical democracy, but to the shape of political antagonism within particular cultures.

In any case, I would say that, in most cases, this particular type of populism can become a vehicle for advancing an agenda of radical democracy. And when this is not met with suspicion of violence on the part of establishment forces, there is room for a progressive influence on institutions.

What is the difference between radical democracy and Western liberal democracy?

Liberal democracy is an institutional hybrid that has emerged from the articulation of two very different political traditions - and perhaps two antithetical logics: the logic of liberalism and the logic of democracy, freedom and equality. This has been very well documented by political theorists and philosophers such as C.B. MacPherson and Chantal Mouffe - when she speaks, for example, of the "democratic paradox". But this is something that is often forgotten because, especially in the West, we identify democracy with liberalism.

It is clear, however, that democracy existed before liberalism. Democracy is about popular sovereignty, popular participation and a particular way of legitimising decision-making. It goes beyond claims about blood, family, knowledge and wealth as legitimate factors for some to have the right to rule. As Jacques Rancière rightly put it, democracy involves a different logic, according to which even someone who cannot claim any of these qualities, who represents or belongs to the "part of no-part", has the right to participate in decision-making and to govern their own community, their own society.

This particular logic is profoundly egalitarian, and does not present the necessary articulation with a liberal orientation, which can be perfectly compatible with an oligarchic system, restricting the enjoyment of rights and freedoms to a fairly restricted group of social elites. For example, in Latin America, as you know, there is a long history of oligarchic liberalism. But also in Europe, in the 19th century, liberalism gave the right to vote only to people who owned property and had a certain income. It was movements like Chartism in the United Kingdom that, throughout the 19th century, made it possible to broaden and deepen democracy, moving us away from oligarchic liberalism. These struggles ended up facilitating this paradoxical articulation between very different traditions - the liberal and the democratic - and bequeathing us liberal democracy.

But we can't ignore the socio-economic conditions that allowed this hybrid compromise to be established. These conditions have to do with what is commonly referred to as the Welfare State, which involves the compromise between capital and workers, trade unions and social democratic parties, which expressed the demands of the latter. The Welfare State reveals a socio-economic aspect that allowed this hybrid articulation to take root. It was within this framework that it was possible to establish the dominant system in the West, allowing democracy to deepen. It is in this context that we see the flourishing of the feminist movement, which left a very important mark, but also of civil rights movements, such as the fight against racism and segregation in the United States, among others. Although the welfare state system was far from perfect, it allowed and created within itself, in economic and political terms, a favourable framework for the pursuit of all forms of democratisation. This was very important and left a precious legacy of liberal democracy. It was important precisely because if, on the one hand, democratisation promoted progress, on the other, liberalism contributed to balancing the system by adding checks and balances.

What is clear, however, is that this trend was eventually reversed. This is why many theorists have spoken of "post-democracy" and a process of "de-democratisation". Liberalism gradually became the guiding force, and came to be single-handedly identified with liberal democracy. Having lost its connection with values of democratisation and equity, the whole system has entered a post-democratic phase, in which technocratic solutions are prioritised, which exclude many areas of public life from popular participation in decision-making.

This short-circuited the productive potential of the hybrid of liberal democracy.

So, for me, liberal democracy was very productive at a particular time when, from a social, economic and political perspective, it created a framework allowing for more democratisation, while at the same time protecting the rights of minorities and controlling any decisions that could have repercussions on rights and freedom. However, the situation changed completely the moment "post-democracy" emerged and established itself as "the only game in town". Since then, the welfare state of liberal democracy has been under constant attack from neoliberalism, with the dramatic problems we experience around the world.

In this sense, since the first publication of The Lacanian Left (2007), we have seen an international financial crisis that has accelerated the dismantling of social protection policies, but which also seems to have created many forms of political contestation. You're Greek, and your country was one of those that suffered the most in this process, with memoranda and austerity. But Greece was also one of the countries that offered the most forms of resistance, in the Indignados movement [Aganaktismenoi] and, later, with the election of Syriza [Coalition of the Radical Left]. What can we say about the psychoanalytic dimensions of the Greek crisis?

We have a bad habit of discussing these issues in a very technocratic way. We can stick to the economic level and discuss debt, deficit, numbers, statistics that go up and down, but that wasn't the way the economy was discussed in the past. In a more traditional framework of political economy - and I don't necessarily mean a radical approach, I'm thinking of names like Adam Smith - you find engagement with a "moral" dimension, and morality in this perspective already has a broad meaning. The same concern is present in Karl Marx's political economy, when this perspective takes on a new twist, embracing commodity fetishism and emphasising the importance of intersubjective desire in the constitution of a commodity. Max Weber, from another point of view, also knew that there was an important link between economic behaviour and a "spiritual" dimension. He took into account the meaning that subjects attach to economic behaviour, a particular moral value that subjects attach to it - hence his work on asceticism and the "spirit of capitalism". We could also mention Werner Sombart and many others. This is the kind of reflection that we lack today. I think we need to go back to these nuanced and immensely sophisticated studies to understand economic phenomena in general, and crises in particular. That's what a psychosocial approach tries to do. In this context, a psychosocial perspective is important for dealing with the issues that emerge with the economic crisis, on a multitude of interconnected levels, and with how subjects respond to them.

In the case of Greece and southern Europe as a whole, it seems to me that adopting a psychosocial perspective and reactivating some of the concepts introduced by Weber, Marx and other theorists - and of course also by psychoanalysis - allows us to arrive at more comprehensive explanations of what is at stake.

Can we truly understand the role of debt if we restrict ourselves to economic understanding, only comparing private debt and public debt, only considering the situation from an accounting point of view, with its ups and downs over time? It's impossible. We have to see how debt - and credit, which is the other side of the same coin - has been able to colonise our lifeworld, overdetermining our desires, our holidays, how we raise our children, how we plan our future. In fact, just before the crisis, credits and loans were the way in which something close to egalitarianism - a false egalitarianism - was promoted.

The logic was as follows: no problem, you get paid less, you work in worse conditions, there's more uncertainty, but you can maintain your consumption habits by taking out a loan. In fact, you not only can, you must! After all, maintaining your consumption habits in late capitalism has been elevated to a socially mandated moral duty and a source of shame and guilt in the event of failure. And of course, as soon as the bubble burst, everyone was responsible for paying off the debt themselves, and a pound of flesh is required, to invoke Shakespeare.

This is interesting and makes me think of Brazil. Today, the country is suffering from the biggest economic and political crisis in its recent history, with a government of questionable legitimacy, imposing austerity measures that were not validated in elections. But at an earlier time, in the first ten years of this century, we saw the opposite: prosperity and social inclusion, mostly through consumption. You seem to think that these two moments - the moment of austerity and the moment of consumer enjoyment - are actually compatible. Could you clarify this point?

This has to do with how a particular system stabilises itself. Systems try to stabilise themselves in various ways. To a certain extent, a system can try to stabilise itself through coercive measures. But this is very rare and, in practice, unsustainable. In practice, people need to be persuaded and offer their consent, or at least their habitual conformism. From this point of view, a system can be sustained on the basis of an ethos of prohibition, of sacrifice, or, more effectively, on the basis of a consumerist ethos, of commanded enjoyment.

Let's look at what has been happening in various countries recently. The post-democratic system has generated an exponential increase in inequality, the creation of the so-called "1%" that Occupy Wall Street brought to light, and all kinds of labour problems, such as precariousness, etc. All this is underpinned by a prohibitive ethos. The disadvantaged classes have been deprived of many of the rights they enjoyed during the period of the Welfare State, in which a consumerist ethos prevailed. The welfare state system was only possible because there was minimal incorporation, via consumption, via credit, as I explained earlier. As Todd McGowan has shown, these are two sides of the same coin, and history is marked by a pendulum movement between them.

I think that the 2008 crisis clearly revealed a shift, with a return from the second type of incorporation [consumerist] to the first [prohibitive]. In response to this, we see the emergence of various movements demanding the inclusion of excluded and impoverished sectors. But what needs to be understood is that it is never enough to limit critical and radical intervention to the framework of restoring the consumerist model of commanded enjoyment that was hegemonic in the past. Real change can only emerge from deactivating this dual structure, this pendulum movement.

Thus, the problem that many movements have faced - especially populist movements - is that the restoration of the balance of the scales, the regaining of part of the income by impoverished groups, has been done by means that continue to be phallic, in a consumerist way, usually by restoring the level of consumption. And this is where the problem of radical politics lies: this restoration has not allowed a change in political identification, in ways of life that encourage a more egalitarian and progressive structuring of desire and jouissance. As a consequence, the moment of crisis can even be temporarily "resolved" with a return to previous levels of income, but along with this comes a return to the previous mode of jouissance and desire - a neoliberal mode, we might say. And subjects are led to vote and behave according to this mode.

Does the fact that movements like Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Aganaktismenoi and Nuit Debout have shown less success than other phenomena, such as Bernie Sanders' campaign and parties like Podemos and Syriza, indicate that the best way to organise political contestation is through the electoral-institutional route and with charismatic leaders?

No. I think we're living in a situation where we have to deal with the limitations of both strategies. On the one hand, there is this more horizontal strategy, exemplified by Occupy Wall Street, by local mobilisations and without clear leadership. These experiences can attract a lot of attention, and may even succeed in changing the terms of public debate, but, as you said, they have very particular limitations. On the other hand, we have this vertical strategy, in which the concentration, transmutation, expression and representation of these protests are sought. The symbolic and affective dynamics of the crowd are channelled into some kind of concentrated action, for example through a political party that takes on the role of representing it.

The most obvious cases of this verticalisation are, in fact, Podemos in Spain, in which a new party formation took on this task of representation, and Syriza in Greece, with a slightly different scenario, in which an existing radical left-wing party, located on the margins of the system, took on this function of representation. However, in these two cases, where things have moved a step further, where these parties have adopted electoral approaches - in the Greek case, actually winning the elections and forming a government - we cannot say that they have succeeded in introducing a new political framework against austerity, against the brutal imposition of neoliberal measures, beyond any sense of democratic representation.

So the problem is that horizontalism without vertical articulation remains important, but vertical articulation without a collective subject to support its decisions is also relevant and becomes incapable of dealing with structural pressures - such as the pressures that the European Union and other international organisations have imposed on Syriza. So, for better or worse, it's clear that there will be no progressive solution without some kind of sustainable, long-term articulation between these two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. There will be no way out without a salient dialectic between them - a dialectic capable of facilitating the creation of new forms of subjectivity and action to cross over and deactivate the limitations currently in play.

And what is the relationship between populism and institutional politics? Leaving Europe for a moment and thinking, for example, about President Lula in Brazil: during the election period, his party often created antagonism by opposing the so-called elites, who had historically governed the country without caring about the people. However, once in power, Lula always engaged in dialogue and tried to please these same elites, without seeming to threaten the institutions. Between the populist logic of equivalence and the populist logic of difference, where would he stand?

This goes back to my last answer. It's never just one thing or the other. We never have a zero-sum game: either equivalence or difference, only one type of institutional and administrative logic or only a populist logic of confrontation and antagonism. There will always be both, to some degree. The question is where the centre of gravity lies.

If you're a populist, of course you want to express a series of frustrated popular demands. However, once in power, you need to organise some kind of institutional arrangement for these demands to be addressed, an institutional way of embodying populist slogans and orientations. This can be done, and has been done in the past. I can cite the first four years of PASOK [Greek Socialist Party] in Greece in the early 1980s, when a series of reforms were implemented. We're talking about reforms to family law, the higher education system, etc. They also recognised the resistance against the Nazis in the Second World War, among other things. There were various symbolic, economic and institutional reforms, implemented with a more or less egalitarian orientation. It was therefore possible to find a balance between the institutional dimension and the dimension of confrontation, of antagonism.

But, of course, the process can go either way. Sometimes populist movements succeed in building a balance, but at other times this proves impossible. In these cases, populist movements tend to reproduce the existing system. This can mean that they are unable to fulfil any item on a reform agenda, just accepting the rules of the game. This may have been the case in Brazil, but I don't know enough about it to be able to articulate a more comprehensive view.

In the Greek case, the 1980s saw the introduction of an alternative clientelist system. There was already a clientelist tradition in Greece, which allowed the old establishment to present some solutions to social problems, respond to some demands and gain legitimacy. PASOK's populism, with its routinisation, ended up losing its radical tendency and established a new clientelist system which, once again, was highly problematic, very corrupt, and which ended up marking the end of the original project. Another problem, seen in many cases, is the reproduction of some hierarchical system, either by accepting the rules of the game or by setting up a new nomenklatura, a new hierarchy. Furthermore, we shouldn't forget Lord Acton's famous saying: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". For me, this can apply to all political forces, populist or anti-populist.

In these terms, could we talk about Venezuela and the crisis it is currently going through?

I'm not sure about that. It's a more complex situation. Ironically, I think Venezuela has suffered a lot because it has huge oil reserves. One of the biggest mistakes of Hugo Chávez's populism was failing to introduce some alternative way of organising production and consumption. It was based on oil income, much like the old system. Yes, it was possible to redistribute some of this income in a more progressive and egalitarian way, but as soon as the price of oil plummeted, a major crisis arose.

That said, local political culture also plays its part. In the highly polarised Venezuelan climate, the crisis has led to a disaster that slowly but steadily flirts with the dissolution of the social bond itself, perhaps with some form of civil war. As we discussed in the previous question, the antagonistic dialectic between populist and anti-populist forces can always have unpredictable results. In Venezuela, I think we may have an example of the most disastrous scenario.

Recently, in Spain, Podemos has avoided dividing the political field between "left" and "right", preferring to pit "la gente" against "la casta", the oligarchy. You used the term "Lacanian left" in your book. Should we continue to cling to terms like "left" and "right", given that it is complicated - or perhaps impossible, as Laclau suggested in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) - to give a definitive meaning to a signifier like "left"? 

It's precisely because of this fluidity, this emptying out, if you like, that it's important to maintain the use of signifiers like "left". Of course, this applies to all signifiers, but particularly to signifiers of this kind. It's worth noting that this [the signifier "left"] doesn't just have a political meaning. There is also an intellectual meaning. For example, we can talk about the "Hegelian Left", etc. [...]

There was also the "Freudian Left"...

Of course! Actually, I think the "Freudian Left" was slightly more political, especially when you consider figures like [Wilhelm] Reich. The "Hegelian Left" usually refers to the most vibrant, imaginative and progressive expression of a particular intellectual tradition, with many repercussions, of course, for religion, politics and the sense of historical consciousness.

To a certain extent, this also applies to Lacan, because Lacanian theory indicates, incarnates, the most radical appropriation of the Freudian endeavour. From an intellectual point of view, Lacanians constitute the left of the psychoanalytic tradition. They are the most radical, the most risky, the most imaginative, the most productive in this sense. But, additionally, my choice of this word has to do with a series of important social and political theorists and philosophers who dealt with it. Louis Althusser, [Slavoj] Žižek, [Ernesto] Laclau, [Alain] Badiou: they all place themselves within the political left - whether it's a communist or non-communist, populist or non-populist left, or the most diverse left-wing mentality - they all take on this notion. The fact that all these people, who consider themselves part of the left, ended up using and appropriating Lacanian theory as the vanguard of the psychoanalytic tradition to create a more sophisticated and productive version of an egalitarian orientation, was also an important reason for me to choose this particular signifier.

And, of course, you have to accept that all signification is inevitably flawed. All these signifiers are involved in long and ambivalent language games, and are constantly re-signified in radical ways. The political meaning of the left first emerged in the French Revolution, when, in the assembly, the most radical (Jacobins, among others) sat on the left. But this has certainly changed radically over time. That, however, is the beauty of it: it opens us up to contingency, to the fact that we can try to influence meaning, but that we can in no way control it beforehand.

Finally, one last question. Considering the current compartmentalisation of disciplines, which is more difficult: teaching political theory to psychoanalysts or teaching psychoanalysis to political theorists? 

Actually, that's an interesting question. Firstly, I have to say that this situation [the compartmentalisation of disciplines] is changing rapidly. There was mutual distrust until a few years ago, but today the situation is no longer the same. I mean, we have many important psychoanalytic theorists who have acquired celebrity status in academia. Think, for example, of Slavoj Žižek and even Ernesto Laclau and others. They had no trouble overcoming resistance from sectors that would have been very suspicious of this confluence of psychoanalysis and politics.

In fact, today we are moving towards the institutionalisation of this approach. Very recently, I was invited by Routledge to edit The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. This obviously means that a major publisher considers it important to publish a substantive volume of forty chapters that records the existence and development of a new orientation within political theory, which they call "psychoanalytic political theory". This gives us an idea of how successful this orientation has been. I accepted this invitation and am currently editing this book. It's very interesting because, even though I was already part of this current, I realised that I needed to carry out extensive complementary research to cover all areas of this field. It's important to say that the book is not restricted to Lacanian theory, but also takes into account all the different psychoanalytic traditions. I myself have been surprised by the number of people who have contributed to this endeavour. I was also surprised by the sophistication of the approaches that have been developed and their relative success in the difficult environment of academia, with its gate-keeping mechanisms.

However, even though the situation is changing rapidly, a lot of resistance still remains, and there is no reason to hide this fact. I sometimes present the same paper to different audiences of political scientists and often use psychoanalytic concepts to analyse some kind of problematic social phenomenon. When I openly mention that this or that concept comes from psychoanalysis, I tend to encounter more resistance, more suspicion and more criticism and questions than when I don't mention it. So there is still some work to be done. Ironically, however, I think that if these suspicions and resistance evaporate completely, it would indicate that there is nothing very radical being proposed by psychoanalytic political theory anymore. So a certain degree of resistance might not be such a bad thing after all. 

Yannis Stavrakakis is Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Political Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He obtained his PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex. He is the author of several books on the relationship between political theory and psychoanalysis, such as Lacan and the Political (Routledge, 1999) and The Lacanian Left (Suny, 2007). Between 2014 and 2015, he coordinated the study programme Populismus: Populist Discourse and Democracy.