Howard Rouse hat einen Ph.D. in Philosophie der Universität Essex. Er ist Mitglied der Sección Clinica am Institut du Champs freudien, Barcelona.Sonia Arribas ist Professorin für politische Philosopie an der Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

This book tries to bring together the work of Marx, Freud and Lacan. It does this not by enumerating what might stereotypically be considered to be the central theses of these authors and then proceeding to combine them a method that is inevitably doomed to failure but instead by confronting each one of their oeuvres with what might best be described as its extimate core. The work of Marx is confronted with a problematic that implicitly, and at times even explicitly, runs throughout it: that of the splitting, dividing and doubling (or, perhaps better, knotting) of the (proletarian) subject. The work of Freud is confronted following on from this analysis of Marx with the hidden social and historical determination of its own most revolutionary insight, that "the nucleus of the ego is unconscious"; and this social and historical determination itself in turn allows for a reinscription of the three fundamental categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.

The claim is often made that Marxism lacks an adequate conception of the subject and psychoanalysis an adequate conception of the social. "Egocracy: Marx, Freud and Lacan" seeks to render this contention redundant. The book's first part elaborates a new (non-Lukacsian, non-Althusserian etc.) reconstruction of the development of Marx's thought, centering around the (proto-Lacanian) problematic of the split subject. There are, we discover, three Marxes, not one (Lukacs et al.) or two (Althusser); and it is only the third Marx, the today much-maligned Marx of "Das Kapital", who definitively succeeds in the social articulation of the subject's division. Part two traces the effects of this articulation on the coherence of the work of Freud and Lacan. Freud, ironically, is revealed to have repressed his most revolutionary insight: "the nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious". Carried through, this formula is seen to explode the fundamentally asocial presuppositions of the two metapsychological topologies. Lacan, paradoxically, is shown to do justice to his master's most radical aspect only by effecting a gradual "return to Marx"; which is, at the same time, a turning away from his own earlier and indefensible erection of a "transcendental" symbolic order. Lacan's famous barred subject turns out, with a whole host of repercussions, to be none other than the (proletarian!) subject centrally diagnosed in Marx's magnum opus.