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THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
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THE CAPITALIST
UNCONSCIOUS
MARX AND LACAN
SAMO TOMŠIČ
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First published by Verso 2015
© Samo Tomšič 2015
All rights reserved
e 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 Le 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
Tomšič, Samo.
[Kapitalisticno nezavedno. English]
e 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
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Lacan’s Second Return to Freud 1
1. ‘The Unconscious Is Politics’: From Saussure to Marx 13
Structure and History 13
Saussure and Political Economy 27
Representation and Production 47
e Logic of Surplus and Loss 64
2. The Capitalist Unconscious: A Return to Freud 79
Weltanschauung 79
e Labour eory of the Unconscious 99
Lustgewinn 117
Repression and Production 130
3. The Fetish and the Symptom 149
Against Psychoanalytic Generalisations 149
Fetishism without Perversion 156
e Organ and the Animal 172
e Symptom between Truth and Jouissance 183
4. What Is the Capitalist Discourse? 199
Marx and the eory of Discourses 199
From the Master’s Discourse to the University Discourse 211
e Fi h Discourse? 219
Conclusion: Politics and Modernity 231
Index 239
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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 feed-
back: 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 Sekulić, Jan Sieber,
Olivier Surel, Jelica Šumič, Tzuchien o, Dorothea Walzer, Mai Wegener
and Andreja Zevnik.
e 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.
e preparation of this volume is most indebted to Mladen Dolar,
Alenka Zupančič 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.
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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, e 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 le a much deeper mark on
his work, notably Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Why then, among such an
abundance of in uences, should one privilege Marx? Is it in order to
make Lacan yet another representative of the Freudo-Marxist orienta-
tion, 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 le ist 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 gures
such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
and many others of comparable stature strongly identi ed 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 nally
argued that the student demands were merely manifesting the transforma-
tion of capitalism into a ‘market of knowledge’ or, to recall the formula that
1 e present book leaves aside the broader biographical context and explores
merely the theoretical potential of Lacan’s engagement with Marx’s critique of
political economy. e best and most exhaustive intellectual biography remains
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
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2 THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
may today already sound anachronistic, ‘knowledge society’.2 All these
consciously controversial statements make Lacan appear more like a prede-
cessor 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 o en encoun-
ters a restraint in discussing political matters, a peculiar distance that o en
dri s into cynicism3 and seeks legitimacy in Lacan’s ambiguous remarks
on revolutionary movements. Hence the inevitable question: if psycho-
analysis recurrently appears as a form of sophistry that relativises the
scope of le ist political struggles and questions their resistance to capital-
ist 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. is development inevitably led to a
radicalisation of the structuralist research programme and also a rejection
of the stereotypes that public opinion, on the Le as well as on the Right,
formed about Marx and Freud and their methods, concepts and goals.
Some le ist 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
2 See P. F. Drucker, e Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing
Society, London: Heinemann, 1969, notably part four. For a critique of the capitalist
commodi cation of knowledge, see J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à
l’autre, Paris: Seuil, 2006, 39, and Seminar, Book XVII, e Other Side of Psycho analysi s ,
New York: Norton, 2007, 32. Whether Lacan was aware of Drucker’s work remains
debatable, but his reading of the university discourse in connection with capitalism
in many ways echoes the central themes of Drucker’s book.
3 For a condensed but well-pointed critical account of ‘psychoanalytic politics’,
see S. Žižek, Less than Nothing, London: Verso, 2012, 967–71.
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INTRODUCTION 3
bourgeoisie.4 Such critiques could easily nd theoretical support in
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, who, despite their philosophical di er-
ences, 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
con icts 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
signi cation, thereby reproducing the vulgarised version of Freudianism,
which has barely anything in common with the epistemic complexity of
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
ere 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 exible workforce. So while for the le ists all psychoanal-
ysis 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 symp-
tomatic point, both epistemologically and politically speaking, that o ers a
particular critical insight into the production of capitalist subjectivity.
As for Marx, his work is o en 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 o en encoun-
ters the notion that Marx called for unmediated and authentic human
4 e most exhaustive historical account of the ups and downs of the relations
between Marxism and psychoanalysis remains H. Dahmer, Libido und Gesellscha ,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982, in particular 241 ., where the author
analyses the motives for the Marxist resistance to Freud’s theories.
5 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe, Paris: Minuit, 1972. Of course,
Deleuze and Guattari remained consistently ambiguous in their criticism of
psychoanalysis. ere is no doubt that their privileged target is its institutionalised
version, the International Psychoanalytic Association, and its successful integration
of Freudian discoveries and therapeutic goals into the free-market ideology.
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4 THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
relations, the association of free men mentioned in Capital but le unex-
plained, and hence for the elimination of all possible variants of subjective
and social alienation. is is how both humanist Marxists and psychoana-
lysts ( rst and foremost Freud) perceived Marx’s critical project.6 at said,
we could certainly claim that Marx never intended to elaborate a commu-
nist 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 interpre-
tation 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 lling in the gaps of reality– to a
materialist interpretation that, in quite the opposite fashion, uncovers the
very gaps that existing worldviews strive to foreclose.7 By detecting these
structural gaps, the materialist method provides a rigorous understanding
of logical relations that support the capitalist social link, thereby also detect-
ing the structural disclosure that enables one to address the question of
change. It is precisely at this point that Lacan intervenes in the debates
regarding Marx’s epistemological and political coordinates, proposing a
structuralist reading that implies a much more unorthodox, albeit no less
politically radical, Marx.
Psychoanalysis is neither gospel nor worldview, and the departure for
Lacan’s reading of Marx is that his critique of political economy should not
be treated as an epic tale of the historic necessity of communism either. Nor
is it a vitalist attempt to liberate living labour from the vampirism of capital.
Marx’s gothic metaphor of the ghostly negativity of capital versus the crea-
tive potential of living labour is misleading. Recall that the critique of
political economy begins with an examination of value, containing a rigor-
ous logic; it could even be considered the most Hegelian part of Capital, a
condensed Marxian equivalent to the Science of Logic. e analysis of the
value-form indicates that Marx locates the revolutionary potential not so
much in a speci c consciousness, that of the working class, but in a
6 Freud carefully touches the Marxist ‘worldview’ in his New Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933). His reservations will be examined in the second
chapter.
7 For a critical reading of Marx’s eses on Feuerbach, see P. Macherey, Marx
1845. Les ‘thèses’ sur Feuerbach, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008, notably 229–32.
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INTRODUCTION 5
structural negativity, labour-power, which occupies the place where the
contradictions of the capitalist mode of production are brought together. At
the same time, the appearance of capital is associated with a vitalist fantasy,
‘money-breeding money’, in which psychoanalysis helps us to discern the
ctional hypothesis of a subject without negativity. Marx’s mature critical
project most incontestably intersects with psychoanalysis at the point when
it reintroduces negativity qua subject into what appears as the purely vital-
ist and autonomous machinery of capital, expressed in its presumed power
to ‘bring forth living o spring’ or to ‘lay golden eggs’.8 Marx thus continu-
ously moves on two di erent but intimately related levels, that of the logic
of production, which explains how the abstract and seemingly neutral rela-
tions between values support and reproduce concrete social antagonisms,
and that of the logic of fantasy, which examines the reproduction of objec-
tive appearances, whose function is to repress, distort and mystify the
existing structural contradictions. e logic of production and the logic of
fantasy are the two basic components of Marx’s notion of critique.
Only by reintroducing the negativity that capitalism simultaneously
produces and forecloses– there is no capitalist mode of production with-
out labour-power as a source of value, but there is also no capitalist
fetishisation of social relations without the foreclosure of labour-power–
can the critical project succeed in uncovering the logical paradoxes that
are the necessary precondition for thinking social change and for the
production of a new subjectivity that no longer depends on the abstract
universality of the value-form. is means, then, that Marx’s localisation
of labour-power in the general structure of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion unfolds a theory of the subject. For Lacan the logical, and even
homological, response to this subjectivised negativity is the subject of the
unconscious. e analysis of the structural deadlocks of capitalism,
Marx’s central e ort in Capital, is thus necessarily accompanied by a
new – de-psychologised and de-individualised – understanding of the
subject. With these two features Marx, as Althusser has insisted,9 rejected
8 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books, 1992, 255.
9 L. Althusser, Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero, 1965, 235–6. According to Althusser,
Marx abolished the category of ‘man’ as the main theoretical ground of (the critique
of) political economy. Lacan pursued this Althusserian line by introducing the
subject of the unconscious, thereby proposing a psychoanalytic version of ‘theoretical
anti-humanism’, yet one which moved away from Althusser, who rejected the notion
of the subject.
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6 THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
the humanist and the cognitive comprehension of the subject, distin-
guishing between subjectivity that is still embedded in the empiricist
theories of cognition and in various, essentially idealist worldviews, on
the one hand, and the subject that is implied by the autonomy of exchange-
value, on the other. A materialist theory of the subject rejects both
empiricism and idealism, which come together in their e orts to reduce
subjectivity to consciousness.
One of the foundations of Marx’s critique is precisely the autonomy of
value, which operates in every ‘innocent’ act of exchange. When Marx
departs from the gap between the use-value and the exchange-value that
determines the double character of commodities– he in fact anticipates the
main achievement of structuralism: the isolation of the system of di er-
ences. Furthermore, this autonomy is envisaged as the terrain where the
change that would destabilise and potentially abolish capitalism needs to be
thought. e change of the mode of production is in the last instance a
structural displacement in the organisation of production. e notion of
the subject nds its place in this precise context. Far from rejecting it as a
mere bourgeois category, Marx’s critique of the subject provides the neces-
sary tools to di erentiate between the (economic, political, juridical and
cognitive) ction of the subject and the real subject of politics. If the former
is criticised as abstraction, the latter is revealed as negativity, so that the
tension between abstraction and negativity is the kernel of a materialist
theory of the subject. e Marxian lesson is here entirely univocal: the
subject of cognition (including Lukács’s notion of class-consciousness)
cannot be the subject of politics. On the contrary, the subject of politics that
a materialist critique can only be decentralised, de-individualised and
de-psychologised. Lacan enters at this point by stressing the epistemologi-
cally and politically subversive potential of the critique of political economy
in the claim that it was none other than Marx who invented the notion of
the symptom.
at Marx was the rst theoretician of the symptom implies that the
proletariat is the subject of the unconscious. is means that the proletar-
iat designates more than an empirical social class. It expresses the
universal subjective position in capitalism. But as a symptom, that is, as a
formation through which the repressed truth of the existing social order
is reinscribed in the political space, the proletariat entails a rejection of
the false and abstract universalism imposed by capitalism, namely the
universalism of commodity form. With the shi from the proletarian
seen simply as an empirical subject to the subject of the unconscious, the
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INTRODUCTION 7
notion and the reality of class struggle also appears in a di erent light. It
no longer signi es merely a con ict of actually existing social classes but
the manifestation of structural contradictions in social and subjective
reality, thereby assuming the same epistemological-political status as the
unconscious. Neither class struggle nor the unconscious stands for some
invariable transhistorical essences– their entire ‘consistency’ lies in the
distortion of appearances that accompany the reproduction of the given
order.
Marx and Lacan reject the simple opposition between negativity and
positivity, dead and living labour, abstract structure and concrete experi-
ence, structure and genesis. e failure of Freudo-Marxism and other
attempts to free the creative potential of unconscious desire and of living
labour suggests the conclusion that capital is creative potential, that capital
is Life, and that capitalism is a speci c form of vitalism. Of course, this
does not imply that every vitalism should be denounced as being, in the
last instance, a vitalism of capital. It merely strives to problematise the
simple and all too comfortable opposition of the ‘bad’ negativity, aliena-
tion and lack of being, on the one hand, and the ‘good’ positivity, creative
potential and fullness of being, on the other. e dynamics and adaptabil-
ity of capital– its capacity to mystify, distort and repress subjective and
social antagonisms, assimilating symptomatic or subversive identities and
so on– su ciently indicates that capital should be understood as life with-
out negativity, or more precisely, that the e ciency and the logic of
capitalism is supported by a fantasy of such life, subjectivity and society.
With regard to this vitalist fantasy, Marx’s critique of fetishism turns out to
be more than a mere philosophical curiosity in the entirety of Capital,
since it targets precisely the hypothesis of the inherent creative potential of
the three central capitalist abstractions: commodity, money and capital.
e critique of fetishism is the critique of capitalist vitalism, of vitalism as
a spontaneous capitalist philosophy.10 If we recall Marx’s enumeration of
the four fundamental concepts of economic liberalism– freedom, equal-
ity, property and ‘Bentham’ (private interest)– we again encounter the
fantasy of a subjectivity and society without negativity, notably without
class struggle, this principal Marxian name for the negativity that traverses
society and the subject.
Freudo-Marxism’s most visible representatives, Wilhelm Reich and
Herbert Marcuse, seem to have walked into a similar vitalist trap. In their
10 I rely here on Benjamin Noys’s ongoing project ‘Anti-Life’.
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8 THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
respective readings, they adopted the opposition between drives and
culture that echoes in Freud’s late dichotomy of Eros and anatos. Based
on Freud’s cultural writings, they declared sexuality the privileged terrain
of emancipatory struggle and opposed its creative vitality, its ‘polymor-
phous perversion’ to the cultural tendencies, to normalisation and notably
to the commodity form as the general agency of capitalist normalisation.11
Freudo-Marxism thus amounted to what Michel Foucault rightly criticised
as the ‘repressive hypothesis’,12 a hypothesis that seduced even Deleuze and
Guattari in their critique of psychoanalysis. e minimal common ground
between Freudo-Marxism and schizo-analysis could be seen in the idea
that the e ciency of capitalism is rooted in the repression of sexuality, the
inhibition of drives and the neurotisation of desire. Social oppression is
equated with psychic mechanisms of repression, the class con ict becomes
an external form of psychic con ict, while libidinal energy is channelled
into the restrictive mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production and
subjected to alienation (castration and commodi cation). Here we should
recall that Freudo-Marxist interpretations focused predominantly on
Freud’s ‘second topic’ (id, ego, superego), in which a problematic substan-
tialisation of the unconscious, by means of rather speculative biological
metaphors, phylogenetic fantasies, and most importantly by the energetic
model of the psychic apparatus, indicate the possibility of a more vitalist
version of psychoanalysis.13
With the failure of the Freudo-Marxist attempt to ground politics on
sexual liberation in mind, it is not surprising that Lacan decidedly rejected
direct translations of psychoanalytic contents into Marxist contents. He
instead accentuated their logical a nity, thereby taking a necessary step
back to the common epistemological ground of psychoanalysis and the
critique of political economy. By placing the accent on logic, Lacan also
11 Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955])
remains the most accomplished document of this direction. For a critical account of
Marcuse’s reading of Freud, see J. Laplanche, Le primat de l’autre en psychanalyse,
Paris: Flammarion, 1997, 59–88.
12 M. Foucault, e Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin Books, 1998, 17.
13 e question of Freud’s biologism and vitalism is surely more complex. e
introduction of the death drive, which visibly shocked the psychoanalytic community,
suggests that Freud never abolished the speculative line, in which the discussion of
negativity plays an important part in the theory of libido. An exhaustive critical
reading of Freud’s biologism can be found in J. Laplanche, Le fourvoiement biologisant
de la sexualité chez Freud, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006.
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INTRODUCTION 9
relativised the expectation that Marxism and psychoanalysis contain a
corpus of positive knowledge that could potentially lead to a new political
worldview.
The dialectics of Marx’s Capital sufficiently shows that the revolu-
tionary character of critique is not in the promise of such a worldview
but in its method, in the analysis of structural relations that sustain the
apparent universality of commodity form and the fantasmatic vitalism
of capitalist abstractions. And if Marx’s political project indeed contains
a ‘communist hypothesis’,14 then the term ‘hypothesis’ should be read in
pair with Newton’s hypothesis non fingo. Why? Because the communist
hypothesis, grounded on a materialist science of value, most certainly
does not assume the same status as the pseudoscientific hypotheses of
political economy: the fetishist hypothesis of the vital forces of capital,
the liberal hypothesis of the homeostatic and self-regulatory nature of
the market (Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’) or the hypothesis of the
capitalist social relation founded on abstract freedom and equality, and
supplemented with property and private interest. The communist
hypothesis assumes a different status and is inscribed in the epistemo-
logical horizon of scientific modernity, on which Marx strived to ground
his science of value and his critical method. This inscription can be
demonstrated in the way materialist dialectics approaches social reality.
It uncovers the immanent breaks in existing social appearances, thereby
repeating the way modern science uses the mathematical apparatus in
order to grasp the real of physical appearances.15 The dialectical materi-
alist method, following modern epistemic ideals, discerns the structural
real, which amounts to Marx’s central hypothesis in Capital: there is no
such thing as social relation.16 Or to quote The Communist Manifesto,
14 A. Badiou, e Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010.
15 e main point is that the real explored by modern science is non-empirical
and that its procedures are not centred on the ‘human observer’. Alexandre Koyré,
whose readings of scienti c modernity were Lacan’s main epistemological
reference, emphasised this autonomy of mathematical formalisation throughout
his work.
16 e axiom ‘ ere is no such thing as social relation’ should not mislead us
in drawing the neoliberal conclusion ‘ ere is no such thing as society’ ( atcher).
Quite the contrary– there is society albeit without an underlying social relation;
whereas for neoliberals there is only social relation (supported by the already
mentioned freedom of the market, equality in exchange, the right to private property
and the realisation of private interests) but without society.
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10 THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS
‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class strug-
gles’, which means, first and foremost, that History does not exist. The
plurality of class struggles reveals the decentralisation of history in the
same way as the unconscious exposes the decentralisation of thinking.
Capital also contains a critical epistemology, which problematises the
mobilisation of scientific methods and knowledge in the historical
transformation of labour, in the genesis of capitalist social abstractions
and in the introduction of two new figures of negativity in the social
link: labour-power and surplus-value. It is in these that Lacan will
recognise his subject of the signifier and object a.
Freud summarised the movement of modern scienti c revolution in
three major insults to human narcissism, linked with three scienti c decen-
tralisations: of the universe (Copernicus, but one should rather say
Newton), of life (Darwin/Wallace) and nally of thinking (Freud). He
thereby undoubtedly indicated that the discovery of the unconscious– a
speci c manifestation of negativity, a form of knowledge without the
subject of cognition, and nally a real discursive consequence– is made
possible only in the horizon of modern science. More precisely, the Freudian
theory of the unconscious becomes possible only once the consequences of
modern scienti c revolution have already been extended to the eld of
human production – in short, a er Marx’s ‘epistemological break’, as
Althusser would have put it.
Scienti c revolution as a process that enables us to think the function
and the place of negativity in the social link became the basis for the struc-
turalist coupling of Marx with Freud already in Althusser, who undoubtedly
inspired Lacan’s interest in the critique of political economy. Althusser was
the rst one to associate Marx systematically with the structuralist program,
insisting that, by thinking negativity in history and thought, Marx and
Freud subverted the very notion of science. Althusser described psycho-
analysis and the critique of political economy as ‘con ictual sciences’.17
eir antagonistic character comes from the fact that they both depart
from the ‘persistence of the negative’18 in the social and subjective sphere,
rather than from its foreclosure. In this light, alienation also appears as
constitutive of the subject and of society, a process that no longer stands
merely for deprivation but also and above all for transformation. One of the
17 L. Althusser, Écrits sur la psychoanalyse, Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993, 226.
18 B. Noys, e Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary
Continental eory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
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INTRODUCTION 11
main points in Lacan’s reading of Marx lies in the attempt to overcome the
opposition between vitalist positivity and dialectical negativity by reinter-
preting the very concept of alienation.
To repeat, the present book starts from the assumption that the refer-
ence to Marx signi es an important development in Lacan’s teaching and
inaugurates a second return to Freud that displaces the accent from struc-
tural linguistics to critique of political economy, and from the representation
of the subject to the production of jouissance. Jouissance (enjoyment, or
what Freud called libido) thereby reappears as the central problem of
psychoanalysis; this was already the case with Freud, but it was systemati-
cally neglected in the progressive subordination of psychoanalysis to the
ideals and demands of economic liberalism, through which the adaptation
and reintegration of individuals into the existing social order became the
main goal of analytic treatment. Jouissance does not only o er a privileged
entry into the political importance of Freudian theory, it also reveals a limit
of classical structuralism: to think the subject and the object that are
produced by the autonomy of the signi er.
We should recall that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious places the
main accent on the role of labour (Arbeit) in the satisfaction of the uncon-
scious tendency (desire or drive) and that it constantly uncovers the
productive dimension of the unconscious. is reference to labour should
be taken literally. By placing the energetic notion of labour-power at the core
of his discoveries Freud outlined a labour theory of the unconscious.19 Lacan’s
main point of interest in the late 1960s evolves around this important aspect
in Freud’s theory. In the concept of jouissance, Lacan brings together
Freudian ‘psychic energy’ (libido) and the notion of unconscious labour. In
order to fully determine the revolutionary character of Freud’s discoveries, a
theory of production was needed, a theory that Saussurean structuralism
could not o er. But Marx did.
19 is is also the main di erence between his understanding of the
unconscious and the philosophical notion of ‘unclear representation’ or the Jungian
‘collective unconscious’.
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