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The "who", which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters. (Arendt, 1958, p. 180-181)
Let us say that the subject is not often studied. (Lacan, 1989[1965], p. 18)
The appeal to political subjectivity carries a critical value in a context where the objectivist ideals of natural science methodologies exert considerable power over the way we think about the conduct of social and political research. Modern natural science, according to Lacan, actively forgets or forecloses the subjective drama of its practitioners, and this has consequences. The price one pays for this active forgetting is the "return of the subject" in the form of various foundational crises in science and mathematics documented in the history and philosophy of science (Lacan, 1989, pp. 17-18; Glynos, 2002). If social and political research emulates natural science by similarly guaranteeing its findings on a methodology that sutures the subject - whether the researching subject or the researched subject - it carries comparable risks. In drawing our attention to the foreclosed subject, then, Lacan anticipates those philosophers of science, and social science researchers who declare such scientistic aspirations as quixotic, misplaced, even dangerous. On the contrary, "the impossibility of detachment through methodological guarantees" means we must "take seriously a subjectivity that always intrudes, no matter what one's best intentions" (Walkerdine et al. , 2002, p. 194).
In this paper, we aim to explore and exploit the theoretical, empirical, and critical potential of subjectivity in political theory and psychoanalysis, suggesting that a turn to fantasy and enjoyment can help sharpen what is at stake in appeals to this concept. We indicate the way fantasy has already been invoked in the literature to enhance our understanding of organizational practices, in order to show how a Lacanian approach to "the subject of enjoyment" can supplement these accounts. We suggest that the categories of fantasy and enjoyment are useful vehicles with which to think the insights of a Lacanian approach to subjectivity for political theory and analysis.
Fantasy as a category for social and political study
Today there is considerable interest in...