Teoria laclauniana e psicanálise: uma análise das articulações teóricas no pensamento de Ernesto Laclau

Abstract

The present research concerns a theoretical study regarding the articulation of psychoanalysis and further thought traditions constituent of the Radical Plural Democratic Theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. More specifically, it refers to a study on Laclau's theorizations guided by the following research question: How do the articulations between psychoanalysis and further currents of thought constituent of RPDT contribute to the analyses of the social and the political proposed by Laclau? This research question, which configures the general objective, unfolds on the following specific objectives: a) understand the main concepts of RPDT, considering the author's different theoretical influences; b) apprehend the way in which psychoanalysis is used by Laclau in an articulation to further currents of thought constituent of RPDT, therefore, considering the dialogues the author establishes with his interlocutors. In order to reach the proposed objectives, the following material has been elected: Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985/2015), published in collaboration with Mouffe, New reflections on the revoution of our time (1990/2000), On populist reason (2005/2013). In the face of the referred objectives and the material of analysis, we have realized a discourse analysis as proposed by Orlandi (2009) in articulation to the procedures of analytical and interpretative reading proposed by Bastos (2009). From this methodological referential we have undertaken concepts from Laclau's theory as analysis operators, namely the concepts of articulation and antagonism, which have allowed us to understand the way the theoretical pluralism to which Laclau resorts to is articulated by him as to construct a discursive formation, the RPDT, antagonistic to both essentialist and determinist understandings of subject and society. The analysis that has been developed has lead us, thoughout the dissertation, to stand behind three thesis concerning the functioning logics of the RPDT, as well as concerning the contributions of the articulation of psychoanalysis to the laclaunian theory: a) on chapter two, the thesis that the social is a precarious objectivity, constituted in a contingent and discursive form; b) on chapter three, the thesis of the primacy of politics over the social, considering the antagonism as the defining criterion of the political and the ontological condition of possibility to the social. Such thesis, however, is reiterated on chapter for as to show the twist on Laclau's understanding of the antagonism by articulating the concept of displacement (the Lacanian Real) to his theory; c) on chapter four, the thesis that as psychoanalysis gains space in Laclau's theoretical argumentation, he reassures certain argumentative logics from RPDT or provokes theoretical reorderings, which results in a continuous approximation of Laclau, in ontological terms, to psychoanalysis. Such approximation allows the elucidation of concepts - displacement, empty signifier, affection -, which enables to deepen the analysis of the social and the political in terms of constitutive processes concerned to them. That way, we highlight at least three contributions of this research on the field of theoretic-methodological discussions in political psychology and related areas: a) inmethodological terms, we demonstrate as Laclau and Mouffe's RPDT serves not only to analysis of the discursive conflict construction of reality, but also to analysis of argumentative construction of theoretical corpus; b) In response to researches that highlight the theoretical pluralism constituent of RPDT and, yet, do not explain explicitly how such pluralism is integrated, we delineate more precisely how Laclau proposes the articulations between the theories that form the RPDT; c) Regarding the articulation between RPDT and psychoanalysis, the discussion we have developed allows for questions that can be fertile in conducting new researches.