An intellectual encounter between three writers sympathetic to some degree with Lacan's work has been recorded in the book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Butler, Laclau and ·i·ek, 2000a). These three writers are well known in the overlapping collection of fuzzy sets "cultural studies", "literary theory" and "political theory", and, as the subtitle of the book "Contemporary Dialogues on the Left" indicates, they also have some sympathy with Marxist, "post-marxist" or feminist politics. One question that the debate between the three often returns to is whether it is possible to articulate Lacanian theory with radical politics. However, another question that is embedded in the encounter but which is only obliquely addressed is whether there are clinical implications for the kind of leftist readings of Lacan that these three writers engage in. I focus on that question in this paper.
Lacanian social theory; clinical practice; politics practice