  Although they are in often uneasy alliance, the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious provides feminist theory with resources for both political and ontological inquiry. Ontologically, psychoanalysis offers a distinctively psychical understanding of sexual difference, how we come to inhabit our bodies and our identities, and misinhabit them, an analysis reducible to neither social nor biological categories. Politically, psychoanalysis offers a depiction of the forces that impel us to organize, disorganize, and reorganize the bonds that hold us together. By offering insight into the formation of subjectivity and the animating fantasies of social life, psychoanalysis thus also facilitates feminist analysis of the obdurate elements of patriarchal social relations, including the symbolic bonds and internal forces that undergird identity and attach sexed subjects to relations of dominance and subordination. Psychoanalytic feminist attention to the core constituents of civilization, to the nuclei of sexual difference and communal affiliation, helps explain the perpetuation of masculine power and enables feminist theorists to articulate possible correctives, challenges, routes of amelioration, or ethical interruptions that go to the roots of political life and to its beyond and do not simply operate on the given social terrain.