Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.
Any discussion of the homology between surplus-enjoyment and surplus-value must begin with the psychoanalytic understanding of ontological difference. Contrary to popularly held theories that disclaim any notion of human nature, psychoanalysis posits a “minimal difference” that enables us to recognize a specifically-human dimension.
For Žižek, the key to the zero-degree of “humanization” is to be found in the Freudian notion of “death drive.”
Death drive represents:
the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things. (Žižek 2006b: 62)
The “minimalist anthropology” of death drive—the psychoanalytic conception of ontological difference—allows Žižek to develop the idea of surplus enjoyment, Lacan’s equivalent term for Marx’s concept of surplus-value. There is a certain elegance to this homology: just as surplusvalue sets capitalist production in motion, surplus enjoyment provides the object-cause of human desire, what Lacan designates objet petit a. In Lacan’s hands, surplus-value becomes a subsequent instantiation of surplus enjoyment, with the implication that the latter exists as an eternal condition of human existence. (At one point in Seminar XVII, Lacan jests that Marx would have invented the concept of surplus jouissance if he had not had to “invent” capitalism.)
Objet a introduces an important distinction in the economy of enjoyment. Objet a represents the object-cause of desire, not the object of desire. The object of desire is simply the material object, the body of another, etc. The object-cause of desire, on the other hand, is the je ne sais quoi of this object, what is in a product more than the product itself. In the latter sense, objet a signifies the promise of enjoyment-in-the-Real, of an experience of full jouissance, total fulfillment and satisfaction. The impersonal pronoun starring in the eBay ads works because it represents this object-cause of desire as opposed to the objects of desire available at the click of a mouse button. The “it,” the commodity form, is empty precisely because it can never deliver on its promise of jouissance; the objet a can never coincide with the object of desire.
If eBay promises to make “it” accessible, this promise entails the collapse of an irreducible split between what is obtained from what was expected, what was requested from what proves to be ultimately unsatisfactory. In Lacanian terms, the commodity form obfuscates the difference between desire and demand by asserting the possibility of their equivalence. Against this marketing deception, we should assert that the demand for “it” is always an obfuscated desire for objet a. Moreover, when eBay delivers on our demand—when we obtain that obscure something that we have wanted since a time before we can remember—we can rest assured that our desire will remain as restless as it was before the purchase. Objet a is the name for why we respond to “it” with “that’s not it!”
What happens when enjoyment becomes the mandate of an entire symbolic order? One result of the shift from a superego that fosters guilt to one that demands enjoyment is the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. As Jameson and other theorists of postmodernity have argued, the symptomatic subject of late capitalism is schizophrenic. Yet, prior to schizoid normativity, it was Lacan who postulated that the appearance of hysteria was concomitant with the burgeoning of consumer society. Hysteria emerges at a specific time in history when the symbolic order could no longer guarantee an answer to the subjective question, “What does the Other [the symbolic order] want from me?” The radical cutting of traditional social bonds that occurs with the rise of capitalism universalizes this adolescent question and renders it permanent. The hysteric is no longer able to rely on the symbolic order to structure his or her desire, but suffers from a so-called “identity crisis.” Capitalism exploits the hysterical response to the waning of the symbolic order’s efficiency to create meaningful identifications for the subject. Žižek writes, “The excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction” (Žižek 2005a: 228). We can refer to the excess of doubt and permanent questioning that capitalism exploits as the “infinite metonymy of desire.”
Capitalism feeds off the historical opening up of this infinite metonymy of desire. “Lacan designated capitalism as the reign of the discourse of the hysteric,” writes Žižek. “The vicious circle of a desire whose apparent satisfaction only widens the gap of its dissatisfaction…is what defines hysteria” (Žižek 1993: 209). We can now see how the surplus-enjoyment of objet a connects with the basic functioning of capitalism.
The hysteric-consumer, in his or her permanent quest to fill the lack (a lack shared by hysteric and symbolic order alike), searches for the object cause of desire in the endless aisles of mega-marts, department stores, antique shops, thrift stores, etc. Through purchases the hysteric begins to construct an identity, but this identity is provisional and always open to alterations.
The seemingly infinite malleability for the hysterical subject to make and remake him- or herself through consumerism (the infamous lifestyle branding heralding a new step in this logic), mirrors capitalism’s constant revolutionizing of its own conditions. “The explosion of the hysterical capitalist subjectivity,” writes Žižek, “reproduces itself through permanent self-revolutionizing, through the integration of the excess into the ‘normal’ functioning of the social link (the true ‘permanent revolution’ is already capitalism itself)” (Žižek 2005a: 228). The normalization of this excess signals a primary (if not the primary) contradiction of capitalism.
What does it mean to cement the social link in surplus-enjoyment? Žižek acutely describes the unparalleled moment we currently live in, and I quote at length:
Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others…a certain excess which was, as it were, kept under check in previous history, perceived as a local perversion, a limited deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions—that is to say, in which the thing can survive only as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints (Žižek 2006b: 297).
Žižek’s wager is that the “micro” libidinal economy of the hysteric parallels the “macro” political economy of capitalism. Both are characterized by a permanent process of self-revolutionizing through the integration of an excess,surplus enjoyment for the hysteric and surplus-value for capitalism, and both can survive only by exceeding their own normal constraints. The hysteric paradoxically maintains his or her desire by rummaging through a constant parade of object products in desperate search of “it,” the object-cause of desire. By comparison, the capitalist contradiction centers on objet a: “this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the ‘condition of impossibility’ of the full deployment of the productive forces [that] is simultaneously its ‘condition of possibility’” (Žižek 2005b: unpaginated).
Acknowledging that these surpluses are homologous presents a great challenge for the desire called utopia. Žižek writes:
If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist it if “stays the same,” if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value—the “cause” which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek 1989: 52)
To repeat Marx but not to fall into the evolutionist trap of believing that communism will spontaneously arise out of capitalism, we must envision a symbolic order that somehow eliminates surplus-value while preserving a certain degree of surplus enjoyment. Such is one task of utopian thought.