This seminar will study questions that arise at the intersection of philosophy, politics, political economy, and psychoanalysis.  These include problems of conceptualizing individuals and society when both are viewed as historical realities confronted by nature within and without.  They also include issues of consciousness, imagination, and language as these bear on the structure of social experience and the relation to social ideals and possibilities.  We will discuss competing conceptual approaches whose relation to these themes is at the same time a response to contemporary uncertainty about the Enlightenment tradition and the related uncertainty about the possibilities of political action.