The Capitalist Unconscious

Samo Tomšic

Description

A major systematic study of the connection between Marx and Lacan's work
Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology-as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Zizek-there remain remarkably few systematic accounts of the role of Marx in Lacan's work.

A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan's teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan's unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian 'labour theory of the unconscious'. Tracing these developments, Tomsic maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions.

Finalist for the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Political Ideologies
• Movements
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Communism
• Structuralism
• Post-structuralism
• Psychoanalysis
• Politics
• Deconstruction
• Communisme

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 08 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784781095
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
MARX AND LACAN
SAMO TOMŠI Č
First published by Verso 2015
© Samo Tomši č 2015
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-108-8 (PB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-111-8 (HC)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-110-1 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-109-5 (UK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tomši č , Samo.
[Kapitalisticno nezavedno. English]
The capitalist unconscious : Marx and Lacan / Samo Tomsic.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78478-108-8 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-78478-111-8 (hardback)
– ISBN 978-1-78478-110-1 (US) – ISBN 978-1-78478-109-5 (UK)
1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. 3. Psychoanalysis. 4. Capitalism. 5. Consciousness. I. Title.
HX39.5.T55513 2015
335.4’12–dc23
2015027998
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Lacan’s Second Return to Freud
1. ‘The Unconscious Is Politics’: From Saussure to Marx
Structure and History
Saussure and Political Economy
Representation and Production
The Logic of Surplus and Loss
2. The Capitalist Unconscious: A Return to Freud
Weltanschauung
The Labour Theory of the Unconscious
Lustgewinn
Repression and Production
3. The Fetish and the Symptom
Against Psychoanalytic Generalisations
Fetishism without Perversion
The Organ and the Animal
The Symptom between Truth and Jouissance
4. What Is the Capitalist Discourse?
Marx and the Theory of Discourses
From the Master’s Discourse to the University Discourse
The Fifth Discourse?
Conclusion: Politics and Modernity
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank to my friends and colleagues who have contributed to the preparation of this volume with their readings, discussions and feedback: Pietro Bianchi, Chiara Bottici, Nathaniel Boyd, Andrew Cole, Jodi Dean, Katja Diefenbach, Michael Friedman, Dominiek Hoens, Sami Khatib, Gal Kirn, Peter Klepec, Boštjan Nedoh, Benjamin Noys, Ozren Pupovac, Rado Riha, Eric Santner, Aaron Schuster, Dubravka Sekuli ć , Jan Sieber, Olivier Surel, Jelica Šumi č , Tzuchien Tho, Dorothea Walzer, Mai Wegener and Andreja Zevnik.
The work on the book began during my postdoctoral research at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2011–13) sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Bonn). I am most grateful to Professor Joseph Vogl, who has welcomed me at the Institute for German Literature and supported my research in the most generous way.
The preparation of this volume is most indebted to Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupan č i č and Slavoj Žižek, whose work remains a major inspiration for me.
Finally my greatest thanks go to Jenny Nachtigall for her invaluable personal and intellectual support.
Introduction: Lacan’s Second Return to Freud

Don’t expect anything more subversive in my discourse than that I do not claim to have a solution .
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
Karl Marx is just one of the many theorists referred to in Jacques Lacan’s teachings. Other classic thinkers seem to have left a much deeper mark on his work, notably Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Why then, among such an abundance of influences, should one privilege Marx? Is it in order to make Lacan yet another representative of the Freudo-Marxist orientation, a tradition marked by a rather failed endeavour to ground radical politics on the liberation of desire? Or is the aim simply to turn Lacan into a leftist thinker?
Such an attempt is, of course, immediately countered by a wealth of biographical trivia and more or less trustworthy anecdotes regarding Lacan’s political preferences, which, it is said, inclined towards Charles de Gaulle’s conservatism. 1 We should also mention his notoriously ambiguous reaction to the student and worker uprisings in the late 1960s. While figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and many others of comparable stature strongly identified with the promise of a communist revolution, Lacan went against the intellectual current and labelled himself a liberal. Moreover, he portrayed the students as hysterics who demanded a new master; he reduced the political definition of revolution to its astronomical meaning of circular movement and finally argued that the student demands were merely manifesting the transformation of capitalism into a ‘market of knowledge’ or, to recall the formula that may today already sound anachronistic, ‘knowledge society’. 2 All these consciously controversial statements make Lacan appear more like a predecessor of the nouveaux philosophes than a revolutionary thinker.
In addition to these episodes, the various reservations against reading Lacan as a thinker whose ideas were consonant with Marx’s were best taken up by the man himself. He saw the most subversive aspect of his teaching in the fact that he did not pretend to have a solution for social antagonisms. Indeed, among Lacanian psychoanalysts, one often encounters a restraint in discussing political matters, a peculiar distance that often drifts into cynicism 3 and seeks legitimacy in Lacan’s ambiguous remarks on revolutionary movements. Hence the inevitable question: if psychoanalysis recurrently appears as a form of sophistry that relativises the scope of leftist political struggles and questions their resistance to capitalist forms of exploitation, then why argue for its continued political relevance? Why associate Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis with Marx’s critique of political economy, which provides, and on this point at least both its supporters and opponents agree, the paradigmatic case of a discourse that claims to have a solution?
Lacan’s teaching is generally associated with its famous motto of a ‘return to Freud’. In the following pages I argue that in the late 1960s Lacan initiated a second return to Freud, in which the reference to structural linguistics (particularly Saussure and Jakobson) was supplemented with Marx’s critique of political economy. This development inevitably led to a radicalisation of the structuralist research programme and also a rejection of the stereotypes that public opinion, on the Left as well as on the Right, formed about Marx and Freud and their methods, concepts and goals. Some leftist voices would probably claim that psychoanalysis prospers only in the capitalist universe and even that it was historically invented to be nothing more than a class-therapy, serving the mental well-being of the bourgeoisie. 4 Such critiques could easily find theoretical support in Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, who, despite their philosophical differences, strived to show that several psychoanalytic currents actively contribute to the normalisation of desire and thereby openly reproduce capitalist forms of domination. Neurotisation of desire, reduction of psychic conflicts to the Oedipal triangle of Father-Mother-Child, as Deleuze and Guattari have insisted, 5 is the paradigmatic case of an ideological operation that maintains desire in the capitalist–patriarchal order. We nevertheless have to acknowledge that Lacan insistently countered these criticisms, for instance by demonstrating the mythical status of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s theories and by dethroning the infamous primacy of the phallus – which the critiques of Freud continue to reduce to its anatomical signification, thereby reproducing the vulgarised version of Freudianism, which has barely anything in common with the epistemic complexity of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
There are also the voices of free-market ideologists, cognitive-behavioural therapists and neuroscientists, who immediately recognise in psychoanalysis a time- and money-consuming practice, incapable of providing society, that is, the demands of the market, with what it requires: an adaptable and flexible workforce. So while for the leftists all psychoanalysis does is normalise, for neoliberals it never normalises enough and should therefore be abolished. In opposition to these two options, the guideline of the present book will be that psychoanalysis remains a symptomatic point, both epistemologically and politically speaking, that offers a particular critical insight into the production of capitalist subjectivity.
As for Marx, his work is often criticized as being at once utopian and disastrous. Marx is said to have composed something equivalent to a gospel that, in its endeavour to dissolve the capitalist mode of production, also promises the abolition of all forms of social antagonism. One often encounters the notion that Marx called for unmediated and authentic human relations, the association of free men mentioned in Capital but left unexplained, and hence for the elimination of all possible variants of subjective and social alienation. This is how both humanist Marxists and psychoanalysts (first and foremost Freud) perceived Marx’s critical project. 6 That said, we could certainly claim that Marx never intended to elaborate a communist worldview and that speculation about the future social order did not belong in his mature critical work. In addition to this, Capital openly refutes the conventional reading of the 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the opposition of theory and practice, interpretation and revolutionary change.
Marx’s critical project repeatedly shows that the passage from interpretation to political action involves a move from the production of philosophical, political and religious worldviews – which, as Freud would later mockingly claim, spend their time filling in the gaps of reality – to a materialist interpretation that, in