This book makes a bold and thought-provoking contribution to the study of discourse in international relations. It is both a focused story about the rise of neoconservative discourses on U.S. foreign policy, from the post-Vietnam era to the War on Terror, and a more broadly relevant experiment in excavating deeper layers of political discourse. Rather than fixate on either rhetorical strategy or overt evidence of “othering,” Ty Solomon digs more deeply into the unconscious processes driving political discourse. For guidance on this difficult terrain, he draws from psychoanalytic theory, especially the work of Jacques Lacan and Ernesto Laclau. The result is a rigorous and compelling study that succeeds in retraining discourse analysis onto the affective undercurrents that sustain the symbols, identities, and other representations that have for so long captured the attention of constructivist research.

The bulk of The Politics of Subjectivity consists of meticulous analysis of U.S. foreign policy discourse from the Carter era to the War on Terror. Chapter 2 addresses the discursive processes through which the War on Terror became normalized as the “common sense” response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Chapter 3 steps back to consider the earliest expressions of neoconservatism, staging a comparison between the foreign policy pronouncements of Jimmy Carter and the more widely resonant ideas of Norman Podhoretz and other founding fathers of neoconservatism. Chapter 4 then assesses the return of neoconservative ideas in the late 1990s, especially the contributions of Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Robert Kagan. In each of these chapters, Solomon reviews extensive textual evidence from published sources; indeed, there is enough historical context and empirical material in these chapters to provide the uninitiated (reviewer included) with a reliable and engaging guide to American neoconservatism. And yet in the midst of these empirical commitments, the book drops no analytical balls and consistently uses its Lacanian toolbox to shed new light on historical evidence.

The book is also philosophically robust, and its first chapter contains a masterfully clear explication of key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Solomon reviews both Lacan’s underlying ontology of desire and his framework for mapping the different elements of discourse, and then supplements these ideas with Laclau’s more explicitly political theory of hegemony and the consolidation of “common sense” through specific constellations of discursive meaning. Solomon is meticulous and thoughtful in explaining how a Lacanian-inspired approach extends analysis beyond the symbols and other representations at the surface of political discourse and onto the shifting economies of desire that enable and variously conjoin those representations. The author makes a powerful case for regarding conventional discourse analysis as a valid but limited endeavor—as yet unable to expose the implicit “emotional investments” that give discourse its peculiar power (p. 2 and passim).

A key contribution of The Politics of Subjectivity thus lies in showcasing the viability of a species of discourse analysis capable of moving beyond surface representations to trace the dynamics of desire that engender cultural resonance. Solomon’s approach instructs readers to treat discourse as an ongoing practice, and as part of a larger process in which ideas and symbols are exchanged in fulfillment of collective psychosocial needs. Desire is a “flow” or “movement” (p. 177) that courses through the various iterations of discourse. And so, even as his textual objects are confined to elite discourse, Solomon’s interest lies in understanding how these political expressions are received by an audience of listener-participants. Sometimes those discourses resonate, as with Podhoretz’s lament on isolationism, and sometimes they do not, as with Carter’s so-called malaise speech. But for Solomon, we cannot understand the cultural politics of discourse by structuring analysis around either the psychological dispositions or the intentions of its authors.

Solomon is well attuned to both the multiplicity of discursive structures present within political discourse and the sometimes contingent associations and symbolic relays affecting their various elements. While Lacan’s typology of discourse (Master’s, University’s, Hysteric’s, and Analyst’s) can feel somewhat formalistic, Solomon is careful to use the apparatus in a way that insists on the multiplicity of discursive formations within any one text or utterance. Moreover, the Lacanian framework allows him to accommodate often unstated interconnections among components of political speech. For example, he casts neoconservative constructions of the “rogue state” during the 1990s as necessary elements of incompleteness within discourses enacting the “fantasy” of “American global domination” (p. 194). And his use of Laclau’s theory affords insight into the lateral threads that stitch together the various elements of a commonsense, hegemonic discourse. In the Cold War discourses of neoconservatism, for instance, terms such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “free world” became tethered to public imaginings of “America.” Solomon’s analysis encourages us to linger on these intuitive associations and inquire into the discursive (and affective) processes that make them so seemingly self-evident.

The author also offers useful and compelling signposts to register where and how his approach is able to supply insights that rival theories cannot. For example, Solomon acknowledges the many capable contributions that explore the role of rhetorical strategy and identity constructions in American foreign policy discourse. But he insists that these various approaches neglect a more fundamental explanation for how and why certain arguments, symbols, and narratives resonated with their audiences. And he notes the fundamental disjuncture between psychological approaches that begin from a preconstituted subject and his psychoanalytic alternative, which treats the ego as “but a fantasy” that constitutes subjectivity in the first place (p. 19).

Not all readers will find the Lacanian account of desire and lack adequate to the many affective dynamics associated with discourse and discursive power. Indeed, as Solomon notes, the Deleuzian tradition offers an alternative less wedded to the idea that desire is primarily organized according to “frustrations and blockages of desire” (p. 50). But for prospective readers of every persuasion, The Politics of Subjectivity amply succeeds in providing a more solid footing on which future conversations might explore the affective politics of discourse. A key virtue of the book is that it so persuasively and unapologetically shifts the goalposts of discourse analysis in a way that compels future contributions to address the unconscious investments that give discourse its power.