First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress. The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept: a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology, where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago and has been adopted explicitly by research methodologies such as autoethnography. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension-between the value of methods such as autoethnography that offer a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the 'authentic' self on the other-can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity based on Spivak's (in: Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected subaltern studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988) notion of 'strategic essentialism', especially when modified by De Certeau's (The practice of everyday life, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1984) distinction between 'tactics' and 'strategies'. The implications of this distinction in terms of developing autoethnographies of distress are then discussed.

There is something paradoxical about a ‘reader’ in theory. On the one hand, it must be tailored to the needs of its readers precisely, implying a set of values around clarity, simplicity, and transmissibility. On the other hand, a reader in theory should challenge the politics behind such pedagogical assumptions, even championing the inherent overlaps between critique and difficulty. Calvin Thomas’s anthology does a fine job of walking this tightrope. As its title suggests, this collection of eighteen crucial theoretical interventions aims — unlike many previously published theory readers, often compendious enough to double as actual door-stoppers — to be compact. It achieves this by eschewing contextualizing commentaries in favour of allowing the texts to speak for themselves. Inevitably, the ‘big names’ and their ‘classics’ feature prominently, so that the problem of the politics of the canon is not circumvented. Yet when those classics continue to provoke and surprise us in ever new ways, that is entirely as it should be: Marx, Nietzsche, Fanon, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are given a place alongside more recent and in some cases alive-and-kicking thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek. Reading these short but conceptually dense pieces feels like the intellectual equivalent of a good hot, sweet espresso and is similarly rejuvenating. Despite the broadly chronological organization of the volume and the ‘usual suspects’ issue, creative juxtapositions between texts manage to make sparks fly. For example, this reader appreciated anew the resonances between Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ and Saussure’s structuralist suspension of the referent in ‘The Sign Considered in its Totality’. The same could be said of reading Barthes’s ‘Myth Today’ immediately after Fanon’s ‘The Fact of Blackness’, foregrounding the mythological rather than biological status of race. I found a number of these intertextual echoes and appreciated Thomas’s ability to allow them to resound without speaking didactically over them. The collection is bookended with a lively self-reflexive Introduction (in part bemoaning the ‘permissions hell’ behind its production) and a more applied Conclusion. Together, these give a sense both of what theory can be — witness the iconoclastic verve of the opening assertion that the purpose of ‘theory’ ‘is to disturb everybody’ (p. 1), though a more developed sense of the theory–praxis connection might have helped — and of the uses to which it can be put: Thomas’s conclusion focuses, in a mainly deconstructive manner, on the queering of gendered norms. However, Thomas himself effectively invites a question. To what extent does this anthology function as a stand-alone work, and to what extent does it operate instead as a companion to his related volume from the same publisher, Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)? In fact, in true deconstructive fashion, there is probably a false binary at work there: both and neither, then, since ‘readers’ should also direct readers to endlessly other readings. To this end, I will certainly be setting this anthology for postgraduate students ready to embark on their own adventures in theory.

This chapter explores the relative sidelining of psychoanalysis in critical approaches to Happiness Studies thus far. It argues that this stems from an American strand of psychoanalysis known as ego-psychology which forms an unacknowledged element in the genealogy of Happiness Studies itself. However, the chapter focusses primarily on Jacques Lacan’s critical interventions into ego-psychology and his elaboration of a contrasting psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is claimed that Lacan’s criticisms of happiness as an ego-based therapeutic ideology, and his related suspicion of models of ‘cure’, constitute a crucial resource for critical approaches to Happiness Studies. Finally, it is argued that, to this end, psychoanalysis is best approached as a clinical practice involving a tact with the subjective demand for happiness, rather than as a social or cultural theory that supports a generalised critique of happiness as a neoliberal ideology but misses, thereby, the affective hold over intimacy and sociality contemporary happiness has.

This article employs a Lacanian framework to re-visit the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and medication, which, it is claimed, also pertains to debates about the status of the psychoanalytic body. Whilst acknowledging the importance of critiques of ‘Big Pharma’, the article makes the case for a different approach. It argues both that ‘medication’ can be considered as a (dominant) discourse that extends well beyond the taking of pills, and, relatedly, that the psychoanalytic clinic reveals the ways in which subjects can make use of medication in often creative and productive ways. It does so partly via a brief clinical vignette and partly through a reflection on the issues raised in an article by the French Lacanian psychoanalyst Éric Laurent, which posits four libidinal modes of medication: the pharmakon , the placebo, the ‘surplus of life’ and anaesthetics. Overall, the article argues that while psychoanalysts must not work for ‘Big Pharma’, they can support the uses to which some subjects put the products of ‘Big Pharma’.

This article makes the case for the largely unacknowledged relevance of the thought of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, for the emerging field of the medical and/or health humanities. From the 1930s all the way through to the late 1970s, Lacan was deeply concerned with the ethical and political consequences of then-dominant conceptions of the human in the ‘psy’ disciplines. His attempt to ‘humanise’ these disciplines involved an emphasis on humans as symbolic beings, inevitably entangled in the structures of speech and the ‘logic of the signifier.’ This article explores the implications of Lacan’s linguistic framework for his understanding of trauma. It argues that the Lacanian concept of trauma offers a timely antidote to dominant psychiatric notions of trauma today, linked as they are to the questionable politics of ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ and, more recently, of ‘Post-Traumatic Growth.’

First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress. The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept: a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology, where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension - between the value of narrative methods as a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the ‘authentic’ self on the other - can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity based on Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, especially when modified by Michel De Certeau’s (1984) distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’.

This article evaluates the gains but also the losses of the set-theoretical ontology Badiou develops in Being and Event, in order to stress the importance of the shift to a concern with appearance and difference in Logics of Worlds. It is argued that this shift suggests a possible rapprochement between Badiou's philosophy of the event on the one hand and postcolonial critical race theory on the other. This is explored through an evental reading of the so-called Morant Bay Revolt that took place in Jamaica in 1865. The article closes by exploring some of the overlaps between Badiou's development of an "objective phenomenology" in Logics of Worlds, and Frantz Fanon's elaboration of a phenomenology of race in Black Skin, White Masks.

This article assesses the contemporary relevance of Sade's work and thought by returning to Jacques Lacan's interpretation of it. It is argued that if the Sadean emphasis on sexual freedom has been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism, this is in part thanks to avant-garde intellectuals of the twentieth century who approached Sade through a simplistically libidinal reading of Freud. By contrast, the article argues that Lacan's more sophisticated reading of Freud enables him in turn to situate Sade amidst eighteenth-century philosophical and political debates regarding, not sexual pleasure or revolutionary desire, but happiness. Lacan shows that Sade was already challenging the modern, and today market-based, notion of a ‘right to happiness’ with the ‘maxim for jouissance’ he asserted in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. This more troubling Sade, it is claimed, opens up the possibility of a perverse ethic distinct from the ‘polymorphous perversity’ characteristic of contemporary consumer culture and its related conceptions of happiness.

Criticising the discourse of happiness and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective, this article is in five parts. The first offers a brief philosophical genealogy of happiness, charting its diverse meanings from ancient Greece, through Medieval Scholasticism and on to bourgeois liberalism, utilitarianism and neoliberalism. The second contextualizes contemporary happiness in the wider milieu of self-help culture and positive psychology. The third explores the growing influence but also methodological weaknesses of the field of Happiness Studies. The fourth then focuses specifically on the notion of wellbeing and the impact it has had on changing definitions of health itself, particularly mental health. The fifth and final sec-tion then turns to psychoanalysis, its Lacanian orientation especially, to explore the critical resources it offers to counter today's dominant therapeutic cultures. It also emphasises psychoanalytic clinical practice as itself an ethico-political challenge to the injunction to be happy that lies at the heart of consumer culture.

Abstract This article explores the origins of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of art in his engagements with Maoism in order to speculate about the potential impact of that philosophy on contemporary Chinese art and art criticism. Utilizing the broad concept of ‘translation’, the article first situates Badiou’s position on art in relation to the translation of Maoism in France and his personal participation in France’s experience of May 1968. It is then argued that French Maoism was interpreted through pre-existing avant-gardist models of aestheticized politics that largely departed from what was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution. By understanding Badiou’s critique of the depoliticizing effects of this avant-gardist conflation of art and politics, it is possible to understand more clearly his later concept of ‘inaesthetics’. Although it is a theoretical piece, this article aims to encourage a mutual ‘translation’ between Badiou’s work and contemporary Chinese art and art criticism.