¹Department of Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA

Correspondence: Dr Henry Krips, Arts & Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, 121 East Tenth Street, CA 91711, USA. E-mail: henry.krips@cgu.edu

It may be a bad sign when the first theorist in a political movement is a psychologist. (Janice Haaken, 2007)

For psychoanalysis, the question of its own relation to radical politics is bounded by Freud's methodological prescription that, within the confines of the clinic, psychoanalysts should steadfastly maintain neutrality on political issues. It is, however, an open question to what extent this prescription precludes the application of psychoanalytic techniques or knowledge to politics in the broader public sphere. On the one hand, it seems ethically inappropriate to use clinical techniques in changing people's minds about political positions – the specter of "brainwashing" looms large in thinking this possibility. On the other hand, it seems appropriate to use psychoanalytic insight into the human condition as a guide to more enlightened social policies. And, indeed, at the end of his discussion of the Little Hans case, Freud (1909, p 146) himself uses psychoanalysis along exactly these lines, as a basis for suggesting reforms in Austrian educational policy.

Eli Zaretsky's paper in this issue provides valuable insight into this vexed relation between psychoanalysis and radical politics. Zaretsky points out that in the political arena there have been two Freuds: On the one hand, the conservative Freud of ego-psychology, dominant in the US at the beginning of the 1960s, who centralized the positive role of reason as a means for the subject to adapt to reality. On the other hand, a second Freud, excluded from the professional canons, whose work is represented in the US through the writings of Norman O. Brown, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse: a Freud for whom, as Zaretsky puts it, "reason arose from madness". This Freud made a direct impact upon student political activists of the 1960s.

Todd McGowan's paper in this issue offers a way of mediating the historical opposition between Zaretsky's "two Freuds". McGowan points out that, on the one hand, without repression there would be no radical emancipatory politics, but on the other hand, he adds, a political act cannot simply involve the attempt to sustain repression, since it "produces injustice and evil". He then discusses three regressive ways of coping with repression: the "fundamentalist", the "positivist", and the "hermeneutic", each of which, he argues, "function[s] ideologically to deliver us from the trauma" attached to repression. He then suggests a fourth way – a progressive "psychoanalytic" politics – which is founded on an encounter, indeed identification with the trauma.

Janice Haaken's paper in this issue mediates the opposition between the two Freuds in another way. She argues that much feminist political as well as therapeutic discourse in the arena of domestic violence has been impeded by an adherence to simplistic stereotypes, such as the "violent husband" and the "good wife". These stereotypes ultimately disadavantage women by "collapsing many dimensions of their relational lives", thus ironically "shoring up the very conception of the self that feminism has sought to critique: the cultural fantasy of the autonomous male". Haaken then argues for a feminist politics in the sphere of domestic violence, which allows not only victims but also crisis workers to develop their own narratives through which they reflect upon and thus give meaning and coherence to their experiences. "This capacity for self-reflection – and creative storytelling", she concludes, "is vital to feminism if it is to thrive and transform the world".

Haaken thus attempts to straddle the opposition between Zaretsky's two Freuds: On the one hand, she invokes the conservative Freud by highlighting the need for safe spaces where the ego can use its creative story-telling/reasoning capacities in order to adapt to the traumatic violence of everyday life; on the other hand, she invokes the radical Freud in advocating the "transformation of the world". How, then, does she envisage negotiating the leap from the first to the second Freud – from therapy to politics? Through reason and more specifically through what she calls "critical reflection from a position of collective strength". But, of course, what this formula omits is exactly the nub of the second Freud, for whom critical reflection ultimately "arose from madness". In short, the problem for Haaken is how to strike a balance between, on the one hand, the violence and madness that are required in order to transform the world, and, on the other hand, the need for safe spaces in which to work through the traumatic effects of such transformations.

In their position statements, Bracher and Figlio also allow a progressive political role for psychoanalysis. But they do so in ways that not only cut across Zaretsky's distinction between the two Freuds but also strike a very different note from the psychoanalytic politics suggested by McGowan or Haaken. Bracher regrets that professional thinkers – academics but also psychoanalysts – seem doubly constrained from making any significant contributions to "real politics". On the one hand, constrained by their identity formation as think-ers rather than do-ers; on the other hand, distracted from real politics by the petty, institutional "politics" of their own professions (what Heidegger delightfully calls "academic busy-ness"). In this context, there is a double role for psychoanalysis: First (and here Bracher's essay makes an important contribution) in explaining why intellectuals fail to get involved in real processes of social change. Second, Bracher looks forward to the contribution by psychoanalysts themselves to doing something about concrete political problems – to using their knowledge and skills not only to guide but also to enact social change in useful ways. As he puts it in his clarion call to action: "we can produce all the psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, and clinical understanding in the world, but if this knowledge doesn't get translated into action, it is worthless – or worse, it functions as a means of containment".

Figlio, by contrast, reminds us that the opposition between analysis and talking/thinking is a false opposition: that psychoanalysis is, after all, not only talk but also a cure – the "talking cure (sic)". In particular, Figlio sees a risk in calls for action, such as Bracher's. Not because there is anything wrong with action, but rather because (a) there is rhetorical risk that such a call will blind people to the need for thinking/talking even as they act, but also (the more subtle point) (b) such calls fail to recognize that thinking/talking is already a form of action that, especially in the clinical context, has material, indeed transformative effects. In support of Figlio, we may cite Adorno. If action is elevated into an absolute value, Adorno says, then "only reaction is possible and for this reason the reaction is false". Adorno goes on to say, "When the doors are barricaded, it is doubly important that thought not be interrupted" (Adorno, 2006, p 200, emphasis mine). Of course, neither Adorno nor Figlio go to the extreme of taking thinking or talking as ends in themselves. On the contrary, Figlio's warning serves merely to highlight the risks in emphasizing "action" – a warning that, in turn, raises the question that I presume both Bracher and Figlio would agree is central: namely, the difficult relation between knowledge and action in the field of the political. Indeed, Bracher's paper exemplifies the difficulty in negotiating exactly this relation: on the one hand, it is a call to put aside theory in favor of action; on the other hand, it is itself a theoretical analysis of the causes of academic political inaction.

Ellie Ragland's paper continues the theme of politics and psychoanalysis by offering a Lacanian interpretation of the Islamic Hijab. Ragland argues that in Islamic society, the Hijab functions as a "pure" (that is, meaningless) signifier that covers over the traumatic lack of meaning created by the Oedipal prohibition. I address the details of Ragland's interpretation in more detail in my paper, as does Marilyn Charles.

Charles argues that a Lacanian analysis of the Hijab represents it as a male device that objectifies and disenfranchises woman. But Charles then points out that this analysis sits uneasily with the experience of the young Islamic woman, for whom the Hijab has a positive meaning for precisely the reverse reason: "in prohibiting the gaze of the other, [the Hijab] defies objectification and thus creates a space for her own subjectivity and autonomy". Charles also points out that we should take into account the way in which, from the western side of the East–West divide, the Hijab "becomes a conceptual barrier that eludes understanding", and thus reinforces the relations of exclusion through which East and West take on the role for each other of the excluded other.

In my paper I elaborate upon some of Charles's points but also explore the more technical details of Ragland's paper, and in particular use the case of the Hijab to expose an ambiguity within Lacanian theory over the question of woman. In this introduction, however, I want to address a rather different, meta-interpretational question: namely how to differentiate the type of interpretation of the Hijab that Ragland offers from the other, more orthodox, hermeneutic types of interpretation used by the authors in this issue. At first glance, Ragland seems to offer an interpretation in a quite traditional sense: namely a hypothesis about the meaning of the Hijab. But here it is important to note Ragland's Lacanian commitment. Ragland understands the Hijab as a site of non-meaning, and, more specifically a site of struggle in the battle of the sexes. According to Lacan, this battle is not a battle between the sexes – on the contrary, for Lacan, the sexes never meet. Rather, it is a battle to conceal the non-meaning or failure-of-meaning that the Oedipal prohibition creates – a non-meaning that continues to haunt the Hijab, or indeed any other of the "pure" signifiers (like the phallus) that are deployed in this struggle. Ragland's paper exposes this non-meaning, and as such falls outside the traditional hermeneutic approach to interpretation as the unfolding of meaning(s). More generally, we can say that for a Lacanian the issue is not to "interpret" the Hijab in the traditional hermeneutic sense of investigating its meanings, but rather to "interpret" it in the sense of showing how it becomes a site at which non-meaning or lack of meaning is negotiated.

But now let us shift interpretive gears. Instead of focusing on the content of Ragland's interpretation, let us interpret it as a speech act, and in particular as an intervention into the rivalrous field of interpretation. The first point to make is that, although at the level of content Ragland's paper distances itself from the traditional hermeneutic project of uncovering meaning, nevertheless, at the level of form – of énonciation rather than énoncé – it seems to sit squarely within exactly such a tradition, in particular the tradition of explication de texte. To be specific, at the level of form, by recounting the meanings of Lacan and Miller's texts, it functions as a vehicle for a "message" that brings the good news from Paris to the US. But if this is right then, I contend, despite its groundbreaking, iconoclastic views of the Islamic Hijab, the essay does not engage with a radical politics. Why? Because, as Adorno makes the point, merely by virtue of its form as a polemical speech act, a message – even of the most committed kind – can never have radical political impact: "a 'message'...especially when it is politically radical, already contains an accommodation to the world: the stance of the lecturer conceals a clandestine entente with the listeners [an entente that may be cordial or not], who could only be rescued from deception by refusing it"¹ (2007b, p 193).

If Adorno is right about this, then the question arises (a question that both Bracher and Figlio raise) of how academic work, such as Ragland's, can be parlayed into making a contribution to a radical politics. I want to suggest that, despite first appearances, Ragland's essay does take some steps in that direction. Although pitched in one of the message-forms that are conventional in the academy – namely explication de texte – Ragland's essay, like Lacan's work more generally, subverts the message-form. How does it manage to play this contradictory role? In the name of fidelity to the Lacanian and Millerian source meanings for which it provides a relay, it reproduces them in all their reverberating resonances. And, as such, by refusing a monological, transparent style, it sacrifices its claim to be explicative. In short, it subverts its explicative form not by resisting, but rather by overconforming: in particular, by taking too seriously the injunction to be faithful to the original.

Similarly Ragland's essay overconforms to the injunction to analyze faithfully all the various strands of meaning/function that accrue to the Hijab. How? It offers so many different nuances of meaning/function that it ends up by leaving the question of the meaning/function of the Hijab without any definite answer – thus again subverting its message-form.² Through these gestures at the level of form, the essay shakes readers out of the simple pro- or con- positions, which, by according them the honor of speaking in the name of truth, distract them from the question of their investment in their own positions. Here, I suggest, in these formal effects, lies the radical political potential of the essay – a potential that it displays not so much in an ability to communicate a message, but rather through the very reverse: namely, the roadblocks that it throws up in the path of communication, and through which it disturbs its audience.

But of course, in order to be politically radical, it is not enough to disturb the audience, any more than in order to cure patients it is enough to shake them out of their phantasy. What else must an essay do to earn its radical political spurs? And how can psychoanalysis help in answering this question? I suggest that if an essay is to have any bona fide claim to making a distinctive contribution to radical political engagement, then, in addition to a subversive impact at the level of form, it must lead its readers (including of course the writer) to engage in a reflexive and reflective discourse, through which they examine their own investments in (a) how they interpret what they read, but also (b) how they evaluate its truth-value. In other words, the essay must produce in its readers the momentous meta-shift that Freud initiated in the concept of interpretation, when he turned from merely sending Dora interpretative messages (which she promptly rejected) to asking her the key meta-question that signals his break from psychology to psychoanalysis: What is your investment in opposing me on the field of interpretation? In Freud's terms, then, we may say that for an essay to be politically radical it must lead its readers to join in the discourse of interpretation, which Freud placed at the heart of the analytic process. In Haaken's terms, the essay must lead readers to "critically reflect from a collective position", or in Figlio's (and Adorno's) terms, it must lead them to "talk together" and "think". The question of how to do this, without falling back into an ego-psychological account of "thinking" as a capacity of the ego that is divorced from the madness of the id, I must leave for another occasion.