Johnston, A. (2017). From Closed Need to Infinite Greed: Marx’s Drive Theory. Continental Thought and Theory, 1(4), 270-346.
The capitalist drive for self-valorization is an unsatisfiable demand, to which no labour can live up to.” Johnston quoting Tomšič. Johnston like much of what Tomšič says. However he finds that Tomšič is not sufficiently sensitive to what Johnston points out are the specificities of capitalism. Stating:
Simply and bluntly put, the Lacanian drive-desire distinction is not, for Lacan himself, peculiar to properly capitalist socio-economic systems … whereas the Marxian greed-mania distinction is (as I show throughout the preceding) (318).
And Johnston disagrees with Tomšič’s de-historicizing tendencies. Johnston believed libidinal drive pre-dates capitalism, nevertheless with the advent of capitalism, it ramped up this drive. Here’s Johnston’s point:
Immediately identifying, as Tomšič appears to do, manic consumerism with Lacan’s désir dehistoricizes the former, tearing it out of its capitalist context by decoupling it from its dependence upon and connection with the specifically capitalist drive (i.e., abstract-qua-quantitative hedonism as the circuit M-C-M′). Likewise, greed als Mehrwertstrieb comes into effective existence and operation only in and through capitalism.
and further Johnston goes on:
As a Lacanian, I would say that the metapsychology of the libidinal economy transcends and is irreducible to merely one or several historical contexts, with capitalism (as one of these contexts) at most generating differences-in-degree between pre-capitalist and capitalist libidinal economics. But, as a Marxist, I would say that these differences-in-degree generated by capitalism are so broad and deep as to be tantamount de facto to differences-in-kind.
Here is Johnston’s major disagreement with Tomšič
Johnston claims that Tomšič portrays Freud, “through Freud’s self-avowed wounding of humanity’s narcissism, as carrying forward from the natural to the human sciences the anti-narcissistic implications of modernity’s valorization of an anonymous, impersonal, trans-individual reason.” And further, “Tomšič, in line with Milner, contends that the core of the scientific Weltanschauung in which Freudian analysis proudly participates consists of an anti-humanist rationality corrosive to human narcissism.
Therefore according to Tomšič, “For both Marx and Lacan, the negative, which… means the non-narcissistic subject, is the necessary singular point on which political universalism should build”
Johnston’s conclusion
Nonetheless, I have some significant reservations and objections to raise in response to these reflections. To begin with, capitalism’s social relations of servitude, domination, exploitation, oppression, etc. ultimately arise from and remain fueled by capitalism-specific greed (i.e., der Trieb des Kapitals, der Mehrwertstrieb as auri sacra fames, die Bereicherungssucht, and/or die Goldgier [M-C-M′]). Therefore, however much social relations within capitalism appear to reproduce ancient and/or medieval inequalities and hierarchies, this really is an appearance emerging from modern rather than pre-modern social structures, a matter of superficial resemblances belying structural differences-in-kind between incommensurable social orders.
Furthermore, Tomšič, as seen, equates “narcissism” with the selfishness central to the self-conception of classic (Smithian) liberalism and its offspring. He speaks in this vein of “self-love and self-interest.” Likewise, Tomšič’s closing arguments pivot around a zero-sum binary opposition of the “narcissistic animal” of capitalism versus the “alienated animal” of “revolutionary politics” (including a certain Lacanianism). The latter’s emphasis on “extimate” social mediation “in the subject more than the subject itself”(to resort fittingly to some Lacanese) is said to allow for “a non-narcissistic love and consequently… a social link that is not rooted in self-love.” By implication, capitalism actually, factually is materially grounded in a social link rooted in self-love. But, this is precisely where there are some serious problems, especially given Tomšič’s dual allegiances to both Marx and Lacan.
By Marx’s and Lacan’s lights alike, Tomšič mistakes capitalism’s representations of itself for its true real(ity). As Marx warns while delineating the fundaments of historical materialism in the (in)famous preface to 1859’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge… a period… by its consciousness.” Therefore, as a Marxian historical materialist, one cannot judge capitalism by its own ideas about itself. Similarly, psychoanalysis conveys no lesson if not that one cannot trustingly take for granted as accurate the self-awarenesses and self-depictions of both psyches and societies.
Of course, liberal and neo-liberal ideologies explicitly assert and rely upon images of capitalism as the social arrangement best suited to accommodate peacefully and sublimate productively an incorrigible human selfishness. In Marx’s view, capitalism is split from within by a dialectical-structural discrepancy between (to borrow some Hegelian language) what it is for itself (für sich) and what it is in itself (an sich). For itself, at the superstructural level of the ideological, capitalism seems to be inseparable from selfishness, narcissism, self-love, self-interest, and so on. But, at the infrastructural level of the economic, capitalism really is, in itself, a potent accelerator of the socialization of production, a set of material processes transforming means and relations of production such as to bring about a historically unprecedented extension and intensification of social co-dependence between more and more people and populations. Capitalism does not become synonymous with “globalization” for nothing.
For both Hegel and Marx, when there is a discrepancy between the für sich and the an sich, the truth resides on the side of the latter. As is well known, one of the principle contradictions at the core of capitalism, in Marx’s eyes, is its constitutive juxtaposition of, on the one hand, private property and everything entangled with it politically, legally, and ideologically (i.e., superstructurally) and, on the other hand, a thoroughly socialized mode of production as its real underlying infrastructural base. So, Marx, as already seen here, and Lacan, as will be seen below, both object to liberalist and individualist ideologies that capitalism’s conception of itself as serving private persons’ egocentrism (i.e., Tomšič’s “narcissism”) is a misconception, a paradigmatic case of ideological self-consciousness (or réconnaissance de soi) as méconnaissance (to employ another key term from the Lacanian lexicon).
Although the antagonism Tomšič relies upon between the “narcissistic animal” of capitalism versus the “alienated animal” of “revolutionary politics” has some validity at the level of competing ideologies, of clashing superstructural appearances, it is inaccurate and misleading apropos infrastructural being(s) within the capitalist mode of production. When he says of Marxian and Lacanian subjectivities that, “the subject of revolutionary politics is an alienated animal, which, in its most intimate interior, includes its other,” this suggests that capitalism’s egocentric subject, by contrast, does not harbor within itself any such extimacy (qua public/social mediation within seemingly private/individual immediacy). But, one of the load-bearing theses of Marx’s historical materialist critique of capitalist political economy is precisely that, however unconsciously, the subjects of capitalism are caught up and absorbed in a historical trajectory of socialization far exceeding the breadth and depth of such mediation in human history hitherto.
Now, what about Lacan’s take on capitalism vis-à-vis selfishness? To begin with, narcissism, in light of the Lacanian accounts of both ego (moi) and subject (sujet), is vain according to both meanings of this adjective. That is to say, not only is narcissism synonymous with vanity – it also is vain in the sense of futile. For Lacan, the narcissist, corresponding to how Tomšič uses the word “narcissism” (as Freudian secondary narcissism), is stuck in a doomed endeavor to (over)valorize him/her-self in and through the alterity of matrices of mediation consisting of words, images, etc. external to his/her “self.” Succinctly stated, this vanity of narcissism is tantamount to the impossibility of transubstantiating otherness into otherlessness. It mistakes the outer for the inner.
However, an authentically Lacanian assessment of capitalist selfishness cannot and would not limit itself to such broad brushstrokes of an ahistorical, metapsychological sort. This is especially true considering some of the highly astute glosses on Marx offered by Lacan himself. Indeed, as I will show in what follows, Lacan interfaces Marx’s historical materialist analyses of political economies with his own psychoanalytic account of libidinal economies in ways that further elucidate what I have counter-intuitively described as the selflessness of capitalism.
In the context of le Séminaire, some of Lacan’s earliest references to Marx surface in the fifth and sixth seminars. These hint at a structural resemblance between the ego’s self-thwarting (secondary) narcissism and the dynamics of capitalist economics. In Seminar V, he claims, somewhat enigmatically, that Marx’s conception of exchange-value anticipates aspects of his own mirror stage. Then, in Seminar VI, he maintains, citing Marx’s critique of Proudhon in 1847’s The Poverty of Philosophy, that exchange-valorizing an object is equivalent to devalorizing it. Taking these two 1950s Marx references together, it seems that Lacan is suggesting an isomorphism between his theory of the ego and Marx’s theory of value. The Lacanian ego attempts to valorize itself, to validate its narcissistic “selfness,” via a detour through mirroring others (and Others). This detour invariably ends up compromising and diluting the (false) self of the ego with alterity, with foreign (i.e., not-self) mediation. Likewise, Marxian use-value, on Lacan’s reading, enters the economy’s networks seeking to be represented as exchange-value, only to find that exchange-values have no correspondence with use-values from the perspective of the latter. For instance, commodities of the greatest utility rarely command notably high prices in the marketplace, while those that are unusually expensive quite often possess little to no practical-material utility.
Lacan’s analytic interventions of the 1960s and early 1970s with respect to Marx’s theory of value are what is most indispensable for my present purposes. Therein, Lacan develops a hybrid of political and libidinal economics capturing the self-subverting narcissism and ultimate selflessness of capitalism. This will be the focus of my remaining remarks in this contribution.
Admittedly, Lacan is cautious and even ambivalent in his approaches to Marx. He is careful to acknowledge that Marxian historical materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis both deal with specific structures and phenomena distinct from and irreducible to each other. Nevertheless, Lacan’s assessment of the Marx-Freud pair clearly counts them as sharing a sizable amount in common: In their wakes, neither thinker can be avoided or surpassed by the intellectually honest; Neither thinker “bullshits” (déconner), intended as the highest of praise by Lacan; Marx, along with Freud, helps define modernity through contributing to a rigorous conceptualization of the unconscious; And, both Marxism and psychoanalysis, by Lacan’s reckoning, equally depend on what (post-)Saussurian structuralism comes to delineate in the guise of a general theory of the signifier (Lacan highlights Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in particular as depending on “the logic of the signifier,” with currency as the signifying stuff of this fetishism. Additionally, and as I have underscored here as well as elaborated upon elsewhere, Lacan goes so far as, from time to time, to self-identify as a Marxian materialist of a certain sort.
plus-de-jouir
But, before examining the cross-resonances Lacan establishes between Marx’s surplus value and his surplus-jouissance, what about the rendering of plus-de-jouir as “no more enjoying?”
Several of Lacan’s descriptions of surplus-jouissance reveal that “plus-de-jouir” is another name for Lacanian désir. Desire as plus-de-jouir is what remains of jouissance once and insofar as the latter is mediated by the signifiers of a socio-linguistic big Other.
Specifically as regards castration qua the symbolic order’s incisions into the singular parlêtre (speaking being), the pivotal 1960 écrit “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” famously asserts near its close that,
“Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire” (La castration veut dire qu’il faut que la jouissance soit refusée, pour qu’elle puisse être atteinte sur l’échelle renversée de la Loi du désir).
enjoyment-beyond-the-Law
Desire is generated in and through the laws of socio-symbolic mediation. This mediation also generates, along with désir as bound and constrained by the structures of Others, the compelling phantasm of an enjoyment-beyond-the-Law, of a non-castrated jouissance as pure, undiluted, limitless, and absolute.
The incarnations and representations of this impossible fully to obtain (but also impossible ever to exorcise) spectral jouissance are manifestations of the Lacanian objet petit a.
Hence, plus-de-jouir is the infinitely receding residue of supposedly lost jouissance connected with each and every instance of object a.
Plus-de-jouir is the donkey’s carrot, the dragon forever chased but never caught—thus, plus-de-jouir as “no more enjoying” (or as “manque-à-jouir” [lack of enjoying], as Lacan puts it in 1970’s “Radiophonie”). Various of Lacan’s pronouncements regarding surplus-jouissance substantiate the highly condensed summary I provide in this paragraph (what is more, my
2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive covers much of this ground).
plus-de-jouir and surplus value
Lacan’s plus-de-jouir (or, as he translates it into German, Mehrlust) is avowedly modeled on Marx’s surplus-value (Mehrwert). The latter is specifically capitalist surplus-jouissance as orbiting around objet petit a in the socio-historical guise of commodities (as use-values bearing exchange-values that themselves in turn bear surplus-values). Lacan relabels Marx’s Mehrwert as Marxlust qua Marxian plus-de-jouir.
The insatiable drives of capitalists and capital-prodded consumers are the embodiments of a plus-de-jouir secreted by capitalism as a determinate mode of production.
The commodity fetishisms of both abstract-qua-quantitative hedonism (i.e., the capitalist’s greed) and concrete-qua-qualitative hedonism (i.e., the consumer’s mania for possessions) both vainly chase after, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, schematizations of the metapsychological category of object a (with the surplus-jouissance embodied in a incessantly slipping away, metonymically sliding off ).
Likewise, on one occasion, he portrays objet petit a as the point of overlap/
convergence between Marx’s surplus-value and surplus-jouissance. The more (plus) commodities capitalism manufactures, the more discontent (Unbehagen, malaise, unenjoyable jouir) it produces in its various (class) subjects.
In Seminar XVII, Lacan identifies commodities and associated consumerist spectacles as “imitation surplus jouissance” (plus-de-jouir en toc), with capitalist “crowds” (beaucoup de monde) continually swarming around whatever is advertised as the latest shiny “semblance” (semblant) of plus-de-jouir.
Capitalism, as illuminated by the Marxist critique of political economy, reveals itself to be organized around individual and collective flights toward mirages of never-to-be-attained infinite (and inexistent) enjoyments. Plus-de-jouir is a bottomless pit unable to be filled with any amount of profits or products.
Lacan’s sixteenth and seventeenth seminars contain what arguably are his most detailed and significant engagements with Marx. I will return to Seminar XVII in a moment. In Seminar XVI, Lacan playfully Oedipalizes Marx’s Mehrwert (surplus-value) by associating it with the homophonous mère verte (green mother). One indeed fairly could portray surplus-value as the mother of capitalism. Capitalism’s very raison d’être is the augmentation of Mehrwert in perpetuity.
I take the greenness of this mère to signal envy. The circuit M-C-M′, as movement of capital in pursuit of surplus-value, is envious in its extraction of everything else from everyone else. That is to say, Mehrwert endlessly demands of others that they sacrifice themselves and their belongings to it, to its boundless self-valorization.
Additionally, many might assume that Lacan implicitly conflates la mère verte with the figure of the capitalist—with the corresponding figure of the proletarian as the addressee of this envious mother’s commands. This assumption would align with a cartoon version of Marxism pitting selfish capitalists against victimized proletarians. However, as a not imperceptive reader of Marx, Lacan does not conflate the capitalist, as bearer or personification of capitalism’s greed-as-drive, with the green mother. The de-psychologized, structural envy of surplus-value (Mehrwert) relentlessly extorts sacrifices out of capitalists too as its fungible, disposable bearers/personifications. Although la mère verte gives birth to capitalists, she is all too ready to cast them aside or utterly destroy them if they fail to live up to her greedy imperatives. She is an inhuman monster.
Several key moments a year later, in Seminar XVII, corroborate my immediately preceding assertion that Lacan sees capitalists too as amongst the green mother’s countless potential and actual victims. The first of these moments occurs in the session of November 26, 1969:
…in Marx the a… is recognized as functioning at the level that is articulated—on the basis of analytic discourse, not any of the others—as surplus jouissance (plus-de- jouir). Here you have what Marx discovered as what actually happens at the level of surplus value (plus-value).
After this linkage of Marxian plus-value with psychoanalytic plus-de-jouir and its objet petit a, Lacan continues:
Of course, it wasn’t Marx who invented surplus value. It’s just that prior to him nobody knew what its place was. It has the same ambiguous place as the one I have just mentioned, that of excess work (travail en trop), of surplus work (plus-de-travail). ‘What does it pay in?’ he says. ‘It pays in jouissance, precisely, and this has to go somewhere.’
Lacan might have the Althusser of 1965’s Lire le Capital in mind in the first two sentences here. He perhaps is thinking specifically of Althusser’s contention that Marx, in forging the theory of surplus-value, did not invent this ex nihilo, but, rather, explicitly and systematically posited the implicit and unsystematic presuppositions of such economic predecessors as the Physiocrats, Smith, and Ricardo (economists who blindly bumped up against surplus-value without, in Lacan’s words, “knowing what its place was”).
That noted, Lacan’s equation of plus-value with plus-de-travail is perfectly, orthodoxly Marxist. Marx himself defines surplus-value as the value produced by the worker in excess of what the capitalist pays in terms of the worker’s wages—an excess arising from surplus laboring time over and above the laboring time necessary for producing value equivalent to the worker’s means of subsistence (reflected in wages). Every working day without exception under capitalism contains unpaid overtime, whether this is acknowledged or not.
But, what about Lacan’s linkage of surplus work with jouissance in the second half of the block quotation above? Although the worker is paid a wage, he/she pays the capitalist back in value exceeding this wage.
Despite ideological misrepresentations of labor contracts as fair-and-square deals for the workers “freely” accepting to enter into them—of course, Marx fiercely debunks these insidious, pervasive, and persistent capitalist myths—capitalism is predicated upon the structural injustice of unequal exchange between the bourgeois and the proletarian. Each working day is divided between “necessary labor” (as producing exchange-value equal to the entire day’s wages paid by the capitalist to the worker) and “surplus labor” (as uncompensated labor producing surplus-value accruing to the capitalist at the expense of the worker). In short, surplus labor = unpaid labor = surplus-value (= surplus-jouissance, Lacan adds).
Lacan’s psychoanalytic supplement to Marx’s meticulous accounts of all this is that the worker “pays in jouissance” in exchange for wages that never compensate this loss. There is a libidinal as well as financial imbalance in this socio-economic relationship between bourgeois and proletarian.
Presumably, the “somewhere” to which the worker’s jouissance goes, to where it is paid, is the capitalist and his/her (deep) pockets.
As regards this destination of legally stolen jouissance, the worker may well consciously or unconsciously fantasize about something along the lines of an envious parental figure relishing ill-gotten gains with a sadistic smirk. On the heels of the prior quoted passages from the session of November 26, 1969, Lacan injects a further twist. He states:
What’s disturbing is that if one pays in jouissance, then one has got it, and then, once one has got it it is very urgent that one squander it. If one does not squander it, there will be all sorts of consequences.
Jouissance as hot potato
Jouissance is akin to the proverbial hot potato. As soon as it lands in one’s hands, one must quickly toss it to someone else. If one holds onto it for any length, one suffers the painful “consequence” of getting burned (with jouissance, if ever attained, proving to be traumatically intense or crushingly anti-climactic).
This supposed enjoyment (in)exists in a state of constant circulation, always being passed on to others (and forever being imagined as really enjoyed only by these third parties).
Perhaps Lacan is hinting that workers might be, at least in part, libidinally complicit in their exploitation by capital, repeatedly “squandering” the excess/surplus of their lives in payment to capitalists as a means of avoiding what otherwise would be unbearably too much and/or miserably not enough. To paraphrase one of Lacan’s glosses on the Oedipus complex, if the exploitation of labor were not a fact, it would have to be invented.
But, what about the capitalists themselves? What do they do when these payments of jouissance land in their laps and start oozing into the lining of their pockets?
Later in Seminar XVII, during its March 11, 1970 session, Lacan begins to answer these questions about capitalists. In doing so, he believes himself to be correcting Marx in certain respects:
What is masked at the level of Marx is that the master to whom this surplus
jouissance is owed has renounced everything, and jouissance first up, because he has exposed himself to death, and because he remains firmly fastened to this position whose Hegelian articulation is clear.
In the theory of the four discourses developed in the seventeenth seminar and the contemporaneous intervention “Radiophonie,” Lacan treats the capitalist as a variant of the figure of the master (maître), with “the discourse of the master” being one of the four discourses (along with those of university, hysteric, and analyst).
He elsewhere reiterates this subsumption of capitalism under a more general template of mastery. 200 Through this identification of capitalist with master, Lacan then, as he does in the passage just quoted, casts this bourgeois power in the role of the lord as per Hegel’s dialectic of “Lordship and Bondage” in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (i.e., Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, itself the veritable obsession of Lacan’s own maître in matters Hegelian, namely, Alexandre Kojève).
To condense a very well-known story, Hegel’s lord wins what ends up being a Pyrrhic victory. His apparent triumph turns into, converges or coincides with, his actual defeat.
The position of (seeming) mastery is supposed to confirm both the master’s transcendence of animality (via defiance of death) and his authority over others (represented by the slave).
Instead, this position proves to be self-subverting, resulting in a regression back into what Aristotle would call the pleasures of a barnyard animal furnished by servants upon whom the lord becomes abjectly dependent.
And, of course, these denigrated bondsmen, in their denigration, are unable to confer authority-sustaining recognition (Anerkennung) upon the lord, since being recognized by a dehumanized slave counts for nothing. Moreover, as he-who-does-not-work, the Hegelian master unwittingly deprives himself of the only real praxis in and through which subjective agents leave lasting traces of themselves within the worked and reworked world. In exchange for risking everything in the initial struggle for dominance, the victor, through his very victory, loses everything. The sacrifice through which he becomes master proves to be self-sacrifice.
In the prior quotation from Seminar XVII, Lacan not only alleges that the capitalist, like the Hegelian master, is (however knowingly or not) self-sacrificial—he charges Marx with having failed to learn this lesson from Hegel (with Marx’s writings, starting in the early 1840s, exhibiting his familiarity with the Phenomenology of Spirit).
But, I would maintain that this is a rare instance in which Lacan uncharacteristically proves to be a less than stringently rigorous and attentive reader. In fact, Lacan here repeats Weber’s mistake of failing to credit Marx with already having alighted upon and done justice to the selflessness of capitalism. As I have shown throughout much of the preceding, Marx’s texts reveal him to be acutely conscious of and intellectually responsive to the renunciative character of capitalism for capitalists themselves.
Still in the seventeenth seminar’s session of March 11, 1970, promptly after the previous quotation above, Lacan embellishes further upon his misdirected criticism of Marx. He proceeds:
The master in all this makes a small effort to make everything work, in other words, he gives an order. Simply by fulfilling his function as master he loses something. It’s at least through this something lost that something of jouissance has to be rendered to him—specifically, surplus jouissance.
Lacan continues:
If, by means of this relentlessness (acharnement) to castrate himself that he had, he hadn’t computed this surplus jouissance (comptabilisé ce plus-de-jouir), if he hadn’t converted it into surplus value (fait la plus-value), in other words if he hadn’t founded capitalism, Marx would have realized that surplus value is surplus jouissance. None of this, of course, prevents it being the case that capitalism is founded by him, and that the function of surplus value is designated with complete pertinence in its devastating consequences.
When Lacan claims that, “Simply by fulfilling his function as master he loses something,” he likely is relying upon his account of specifically symbolic castration. The very signifiers of mastery (i.e., S1s as insignias, marks, traits, etc.) are prostheses external to the speaking subject (masquerading) as master. These prostheses always remain irreducible to, not fully identical with, the subjectivity attaching itself to them. A gap stubbornly persists between subject-as-$ and S1-as-signifier. This gap is the cut of symbolic castration. Hence, just as the Hegelian master is defeated in and through his very moment of (seeming) triumph, so too is the Lacanian maître (symbolically) castrated in and through the very process of being crowned with the emblems of potency-as-non-castration. The signifiers of power simultaneously signify impotence. Put in Lacanian terms, the phallus is the signifier of castration.
Likewise, the Marxian master-as-bourgeois “castrates himself” in and through assuming the very role of capitalist as the ostensible potentate [autocratic ruler RT.] of capitalism, namely, capitalism’s subject supposed-to-enjoy.
Lacan almost certainly is well aware of Marx’s renditions of the individual capitalist as a mere bearer (Träger) or personification (Personifikation) of capital. As seen, depsychologized greed as the circuit M-C-M′, the logic of capital itself, is a drive (Trieb, pulsion) in the capitalist more than the capitalist him/her-self. Abstract-qua-quantitative hedonism is a socio-structural thrust capable of overriding (Lacan might say “overwriting”) what would otherwise be the volitions and actions of the person bearing/personifying capital and its drive.
As seen, depsychologized greed as the circuit M-C-M′, the logic of capital itself, is a drive (Trieb, pulsion) in the capitalist more than the capitalist him/her-self.
This drivenness is, as Lacan indicates in Seminar XXII, the père-version, the perversion of the father, for the paternal figure of the capitalist-as-master (in addition to his/her structurally dictated sadism and psychopathy, there is also, for Marx as well as Weber, his/her miserliness and masochism).
Therefore, insofar as the “symbolic” in Lacan’s “symbolic castration” also
refers to the symbolic order as a set of social structures akin to Hegel’s objective spirit and/or Marx’s infrastructure-superstructure arrangement, Marx’s capitalist, seen from a Lacanian perspective, indeed should count as symbolically castrated. Whether Lacan himself, as a somewhat shameless French bourgeois bon vivant, intends for his audience to shed tears on
behalf of the poor, castrated capitalists is difficult to tell.
In the second of the two preceding quotations from the seventeenth seminar, Lacan asserts psychoanalytic metapsychology’s explanatory priority vis-à-vis historical materialism. For him, Marx’s surplus-value is a species of the genus surplus-jouissance, with the former being a historically peculiar instantiation of the latter. He evidently assumes that Marx (and Marxists) would have to take this as a critical correction. Lacan maintains that Marx’s focus on capitalism specific surplus-value (i.e., the species) blinds him to the trans-historical category of (surplus-)jouissance (i.e., the genus). Marx purportedly cannot see the forest of plus-de-jouir for the tree of Mehrwert (“if he hadn’t converted it into surplus value (fait la plus-value), in other words if he hadn’t founded capitalism, Marx would have realized that surplus value is surplus jouissance”)
Marx’s surplus-value is a species of the genus surplus-jouissance, with the former being a historically peculiar instantiation of the latter
As my earlier unpacking and reconstruction of Marx’s drive theory indicates, Marx actually is sensitive to such genus-species distinctions. He refers, as seen, to “a particular form of the drive” (eine besondre Form des Triebs), thereby signaling a difference between drive (as such) and its specific instantiations.
Hence, it is unclear whether Marx would object, as Lacan presumes he would, to Lacan’s analytic insistence on distinguishing between, on the one hand, the socially non-specific categories of libidinal economics (here, surplus-jouissance) and, on the other hand, the socially specific manifestations of these categories as mediated by political economics (here, surplus-value).
Near the start of this intervention, I argued that Marx is not the unreserved, reductive historicizer many view him as being (including Lacan in this context).With Marx’s Homer problem and drive theory (with the latter as part of a general philosophical anthropology underpinning historical materialism), he is not automatically averse to the sorts of amendments suggested by Lacan’s remarks in the seventeenth seminar.
The second quotation above from Seminar XVII also refers to the notion of “computing surplus jouissance” (comptabiliser plus-de-jouir). This leads into the last of the moments of concern to me in the seventeenth seminar, a moment likewise featuring this idea of comptabiliser (comme compter). Near the end of the session of June 10, 1970, Lacan observes:
Something changed in the master’s discourse at a certain point in history. We are not going to break our backs finding out if it was because of Luther, or Calvin, or some unknown traffic of ships around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean Sea, or anywhere else, for the important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance became calculable, could be counted, totalized (le plus-de-jouir se compte, se comptabilise, se totalise). This is where what is called the accumulation of capital begins.
Lacan’s wording indicates his de-emphasizing of the historicist sensibilities of three related theoretical perspectives: Hegel’s (Luther), Weber’s (Calvin), and that of Marxian historical materialism (“some unknown traffic of ships”). Consistent with his maintenance
of a level distinction between the dimensions covered by analytic metapsychology and historical materialism, Lacan pinpoints the transition from socio-economic pre-modernity to modernity proper (“Something changed in the master’s discourse at a certain point in history”) at the tipping point of the phase transition wherein trans-historical surplus-jouissance historically becomes mathematized, mediated by quantification, thereby becoming surplus-value (“the important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance became calculable, could be counted, totalized (le plus-de-jouir se compte, se comptabilise, se totalise). This is where what is called the accumulation accumulation of capital begins”). Already in Seminar XIII, Lacan recognizes that the historical emergence of capitalism induces a fundamental mutation in jouissance. And, with this, my own analytic labors here come full circle: This is Lacan’s version of “from closed need to infinite greed.”
Lacan recognizes that the historical emergence of capitalism induces a fundamental mutation in jouissance.
Before concluding, I should note that Lacan’s decision to speak of totalization” in the above quotation is strange and questionable. He proposes that rendering jouissance computable/calculable/countable also renders it totalizable. I assume he means “totalization” as synonymous with the accumulation designated in the phrase “the accumulation of capital.” But, Marx himself as well as Lacan elsewhere both indicate that the capitalist mathematization of all things (including the seemingly most intimate) infinitizes and, hence, de-totalizes jouissance, drives, and the like.
From the Marxist standpoint I have been elaborating throughout my contribution, it is crucial to appreciate that the libidinal unboundedness opened up by quantitative infinitization liquidates any actual or potential totality as final end or limit.
It now can be anticipated, with the combined lights of Marx and Lacan, that if one ends up at the very top of the Forbes billionaires list—God forbid—one will hurl one’s enormous mass of accumulated surplus-value/jouissance into philanthropic endeavors.
One thereby not only evades getting burned by jouissance attained, but, in the process, launders one’s past misdeeds, airbrushes one’s legacy. Nobody dares be caught dead wallowing in plus-de-jouir.
Following the Lacan of “Radiophonie,” one even can say that capitalism forecloses surplus-value by turning it into an infinite void, a never-ending hole, everyone, capitalists included, strains to avoid at all costs.
No sooner does the bourgeois (re-)obtain it than he/she “squanders” it again. The capitalist repeatedly sends surplus-value, and the surplus-jouissance clinging to it, back into circulation via reinvestment, decadence, philanthropy, and/or buying politicians.
As it turns out, capitalism is not good at satisfying selfishness, its supposed primary strength much touted by its defenders and apologists.
Agreeing that it at least provides substantial private satisfactions is still to grant it too much credit. Even on the terms capitalism sets for itself, it is wretchedly bankrupt—and this also for Smith’s imagined lucky few apart from his admitted unfortunate majority. In actuality, nobody gets truly to enjoy capitalism.