Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107
In our attempt to develop a psychoanalytically informed class difference, however, we encounter another resistance, namely, a particular psychoanalytical approach to Marxian discourse, in which the scope of some key Marxian concepts is limited to the form they take within the specific discourse of capitalism. We find the virtual absence of surplus labor in the psychoanalytical literature symptomatic in this respect.
Rather, surplus labor appears in only one conceivable form, the capitalist form of surplus value. Such a reduction of Marxian concepts to their particular form within the discourse of capitalism eliminates the possibility of conceiving different relations to surplus labor (and hence to class) as integral to conceptualizing economic difference from capitalism.
Lacan’s seminars XVI and XVII, delivered in the aftermath of May 1968, include many favorable references to Marx’s discourse and the significance of the concept of surplus value. It is in seminar XVI that Lacan, in order to underscore the intimate relationship between surplus jouissance and surplus value, emphasizes the term “homology,” thereby evoking the idea of a fundamental similarity in the structure and function of these two concepts, a sameness that needs to be strictly distinguished from a cursory resemblance
between two discrete entities 87
Our interpretation of the encounter between Marx and Lacan begins from conceiving the homology as one between two nodal points (surplus labor and surplus jouissance) that set a new “discourse” in motion that revolves around them. Žižek, on the other hand, understands the homology as one between surplus jouissance as the object cause of desire and the surplus value as the “cause” which sets in motion the circuit of capital. His analysis differs from ours primarily in its oversight of the Marxian distinction between surplus labor and the particular form it takes under capitalism, surplus value. This, in turn, as we shall demonstrate, leads to a representation of capitalism as the only game in town. We believe that with the absence of the epistemological dimension of the homology that insists on retaining the independent existence and the distinct objects of each theoretical discourse, the attempts at articulating psychoanalysis with Marxism fail to do justice to either discourse. 87
What then, for Žižek, is the precise nature of the homology between the two concepts and what was it that Marx failed to recognize? What additional insight does the psychoanalytical concept of surplus jouissance bring into the Marxian concept of surplus value?
For Žižek, surplus jouissance is essentially “a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation” (1989, 180) that gets “embodied” in the Lacanian objet petit a.
The Lacanian objet petit a “is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier” (95).
Zupančič adds that surplus jouissance is a pure waste, an excess, a senseless and entropy-inducing refuse of signification that results from “the inadequacy of the signifier to itself, its inability to function ‘purely,’ without producing a useless surplus” (2006, 159).
However, surplus jouissance is not a simple, ordinary waste or excess that could be disposed of without consequence. Quite the contrary, in its status as the limit of signification, surplus jouissance (or objet petit a) is where the cause, the kernel of enjoyment is. The objet petit a is the “‘surplus’ in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds” (Žižek 1989, 95): because it lacks consistency, because it is “just an objectification of [the] void” of signification, it simultaneously frustrates and incites our desire to pin its meaning down to a concrete attribute.
Nevertheless, the subtraction of this excess, this surplus, this “something in it more than itself” will not deliver a balanced desire:
[Surplus jouissance] is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an ‘excess.’ 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 if it ‘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 SOO 1989, 52-53)
Žižek … argue[s] that because capitalism is marked by a constitutive imbalance, it is impossible to reform it or eliminate its foundational discord between the forces and relations of production.
Just as one cannot obtain domesticated, balanced desire without surplus jouissance, one cannot maintain a regulated capitalism without an incessant push towards capital accumulation that continually revolutionizes its conditions of production and reproduction. 89