Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
consubstantial: Of the same substance, nature, or essence … Christian theol (esp of the three persons of the Trinity) regarded as identical in substance or essence
Entropy: a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed system
It is Lacan’s notion of the signifier that discloses the intrinsic limitation of Marx’s discovery:
the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.
Why? Because knowledge by definition strikes on the wall of its lack (of knowledge), its limit, thereby secreting an entropic addendum, i.e. a measure of libidinal energy which is not available to perform work. This is surplus-jouissance, whose presence proves that an unconscious knowledge is, literally, at work.
Everything hinges on the dialectic of knowledge and jouissance, for the surplus of jouissance (qua lack) is correlated to the arrival on the scene of the signifier. Language therefore ‘institutes the order of discourse’ but simultaneously ‘it does bring us something extra’. When Lacan claims that knowledge is a means of jouissance he explains that when at work, knowledge produces entropy, a point of loss, which is the ‘the sole regular point at which we have access to the nature of jouissance. (44).
Insofar as it overlaps with entropy, surplus-jouissance has no use-value: it is waste, a quantity of libido that is both produced by and lost to any working activity, for we cannot gain control over it — it remains other. (45)
We must clarify that, strictly speaking, we do not have jouissance in addition to the signifier, but as the very impasse consubstantial with the signifier: ‘Anything that is language only obtains jouissance by insisting to the point of producing the loss whereby surplus jouissance takes body’. Jouissance per se is a mythical entity, while surplus-jouissance is the libido materializing the loss that emerges from this myth — which means that whenever we speak of jouissance we refer to a surplus that can only be given as entropy, a plus that, as it were, coincides with a minus; and that for this reason it cannot perform any work.