The Lacanian left on the horizon of political ecology: reflections on the question of life

Abstract

Under the title of the so-called “Lacanian left,” we provide a text that places —within the horizon of political ecology— a series of readings inspired by the speech of the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan with regard to “the question for life” in our contemporary worlds. We connect theoretical routes between what Lacan called “the excision of the subject” in terms of “the reality of the constitution of subjectivity” and what, in political ecology, is known as the “pre-ontology of
being” with three fields of representation regarding the society-nature relations: the ontological, the political and the ethical. It is, therefore, to think about life with a ternary that we combine what the Lacanian left adopts from the field of psychoanalysis.