The Real Is Not What Was Lost: Lacan’s Split-Subject Beyond the Marxian One
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Introduction
In his 2024 book Embracing Alienation, psychoanalytic theorist Todd McGowan argues that modernity’s scientific revolutions have destabilized humanity’s position in the symbolic order, thus decentering its symbolic identity (McGowan, 2024). Through the semiotic landscape’s destructuring, subjects are forced to recognise the disjunction between their symbolic identity and their subjectivity. The homelessness of subjectivity made evident by the modern epoch’s scientific leaps pushes subjects to confront the alienation that defines their subjective condition. Subjects are always barred (ક), always divided as French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would put it, as our symbolically constructed Ideal-egos are constantly undermined by our unconscious drives. However, our subjective condition’s revealed split can be seen as traumatic as it pushes us to unsubstantialise symbolic identities. In this article, I attempt to explore Marxian libidinal dynamics by centering psychoanalysis’s notion of split-subjectivity in my theoretical arsenal. I wish to expand McGowan’s thesis by focusing mainly on Lacan’s intervention within the psychoanalytic tradition, utilising the insistence the late analyst placed upon lack as a defining component of our psychic experience. However, I also mobilise theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Jean-François Lyotard, whose contributions to psychoanalytic thought’s pertinence in contexts of social critique aid us to grasp the libidinal nature of Marxian discourse. Finally, I set out to put Lacan’s comprehension of subjectivity to use by analysing and critiquing attempts made by Marxists Louis Althusser and Herbert Marcuse to marry Marxism with a deeper comprehension of subject formation while neglecting structural negativity.
Political Fetishism: Tradition and Revolution
McGowan contrasts modernity’s confrontation with subjectivity’s split to the philosophical responses of thinkers like phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, who argue that resisting this alienation requires a return to a 'lost authenticity', an existence where alienation is absent and ‘being in the world’ is unfragmented (McGowan, 2024). Traditionalist sentiment which opposes modern alienation to pre-modern authenticity has not lost its voice. Take Aleksandr Dugin. The Russian philosopher, often dubbed ‘Putin’s brain’, advocates for the destruction of modernity’s claim to universality, favouring a multipolar world in which civilisation-States return to an organic authenticity (Dugin, 2012). Thus, Dugin views modernity’s universalism as a force which alienates members of particular civilisations from their authentic non-divided ‘being in the world’. In multiple contemporary political discourses, a signifier evoking a lost authenticity in which one’s symbolic identity was indistinguishable from one’s subjectivity is constructed to organise libidinal investments within the political landscape. In the right-wing populist desiring circuit, this signifier is easily identifiable as it often signifies a particular nation’s ‘lost greatness’. Through this signifier, right-wing populism seeks to ‘un-bar’ the subject by substantialising the symbolic identity of the particular nation’s ‘people’, which was supposedly blurred due to the corruption brought by a semiotically constructed enemy. Fetishistic political discourses veil two traumatic encounters for the subject; one with its self-division by equating itself to its constructed symbolic identity; and two with the Big Other’s non-existence by establishing a non-contradictory Law that guides enjoyment. If modernity confronts subjects to their alienation, political discourses can construct desiring-circuits that camouflage this alienation by articulating a series of fetishised signifiers.
Political discourses that rest upon the semiotic longing for a lost non-divided authenticity do not uniquely emerge on the right. One must consider left-nostalgia’s existence which longs for a lost ‘oneness’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, in his Discourse on Inequality, was fixated on the idea of a ‘natural man’ ‘for himself’ which was then lost via private property’s rise. For Rousseau, this ‘state of nature’ gave man a sense of self-dependency which constituted his vision of freedom. Rousseau, in a sense, resisted the rising confrontation with alienation of his time by constructing a desiring-circuit in which the Other is shunned and the ‘natural man’ is substantialised as a non-divided subject for whom Id and ego exist in harmony.
Marxism, which bases its political philosophy upon the sublation of capitalist dynamics in favour of an unseen communism has the non-divided subject as its Master-signifier. McGowan notes in his book that Marx departs from Hegel’s conception of alienation, similar to the Lacanian notion of barred subjectivity, by theorising it as a historical consequence of the capitalist mode of production that will be overcome by the proletarian revolution, rather than as a structural condition of subjectivity with which we must reconcile (McGowan, 2024). The Marxist aim toward oneness risks giving birth to totalitarian symptoms as it introduces the phantasmatic object of desire (objet-a) into the social Law (Žižek, 2014). Even though Marxism portrays itself as ‘scientific’, it discards our desiring condition’s Real. As Žižek puts it in The Most Sublime Hysteric (2014): “Real socialism is the price paid in blood for misunderstanding the dimension of phantasy in scientific socialism.”
Phantasmatic Marxism translated into social Law has incarnated in totalitarian forms as it socialises an enjoyment-structure that entertains the possibility of attaining non-barred subjectivity. As psychoanalysis teaches us, phantasy’s object is never attained, it represents the lack intrinsic to our desiring condition. Subjects are always barred, always castrated. However, as this confrontation with the impossibility of ‘oneness’ is traumatic for the subjects, an object of fulfilment is semiotically and libidinally constructed. When such an object guides the enjoyment of subjects, anything can be done in its name. It is here that Lacan’s reversal of the famous declaration “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” (wrongly associated with Dostoevsky), changing it into “If there is no God, then everything is prohibited. ” makes sense. The Marxian libidinal economy’s phantasmatic structure demands violent excesses as it further fuels the enjoyment one has vis-à-vis the oneness to come. Totalitarian regimes emerging following Marxist revolutions consequently incarnate the subject’s superegoic demands interpellated by the phantasised object when the latter is socialised into Law.
Political Superego and the Object of Desire
Here, it is crucial to comprehend the differences between Freud and Lacan’s conceptions of the superego. The theories represent dissimilar structures when it comes to the subject's relation to the object of desire which would mark an end to alienation.
To illustrate the societal contexts that birthed the theoretical divergences between Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, one must note the function of paternalism’s evolution marking the time period between the two psychoanalysts. Jacques-Alain Miller, editor of Lacan’s seminars and psychoanalyst, remarks in a talk given in 2013 that in a not-so-distant epoch, all compasses pointed towards the same North: the Father (Miller, 2013). Ruthless patriarchy seemed to be the invariable doctrine of humanity's social structures whether it be incarnated in family, religion, or political institutions. Miller notes that although the Age of the Father’s decline finds its roots in the French Revolution, slowly progressing to bring us where we are now, Lacan’s intervention within the psychoanalytic tradition elevates paternal discourse’s decline into theory. For Miller, Freud was still in the Age of the Father, conceptualising the Father figure in its concrete sense, that is, as the child’s male parent. Whereas in Lacan, the Father is elevated in the realm of the symbolic, it is rather the Name-of-the-Father signifier that takes its place. In Lacan’s time, the Name-of-the-Father signifier is seen as a symptom sustained by neurosis (Lacan, 2005).
For Freud, famously, the superego is a psychic function that appears as an internalisation of parental law’s opposition to the child’s desires. The Freudian superego holds a grip on the ego as it prohibits and inhibits desires going against internalised morality. If desires transgress the superego’s authority, the individual experiences guilt and moral anxiety as they have failed to sustain their Ideal-ego. Thus, Freud’s vision of the superego as a psychic force can be considered the internalisation of the paternal “No !”, desire’s negation in favour of morality. As Freud describes in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: “...the superego takes the place of the parental function, and thenceforward observes, guides and threatens the ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the child before” (1993).
Lacan offers a different interpretation of the superego. Indeed, in his 20th seminar Encore, the psychoanalyst conceptualises this psychic function as an enjoyment (jouissance) imperative. “Jouis !” (Enjoy !), orders the superego (1972). The superego thus does not negate desire, rather, it channels desire to find enjoyment in the Other’s repressive discourse. It is here that enjoyment’s violent nature is made evident: we enjoy by going against our self-interest. As Lacan notes in seminar 7 that the Freudian ‘good’ keeps us away from enjoyment (Lacan, 2019). While Freud describes pleasure as the elimination of excess excitation (Freud, 1920/1955), enjoyment goes beyond the pleasure principle, being excessive and self-destructive. Superegoic tendencies in Lacanian theory as enjoyment imperatives are metonymic for the decline of the paternal “No!” in favour of a much more powerful “Yes!”. Hence, for Freud, the superego represents an internalised paternal authority that enforces moral prohibitions by negating desires, leading to guilt when those desires are transgressed. In contrast, Lacan redefines the superego as an enjoyment imperative, a demand that channels desire through the Other’s discourse in a self-destructive manner.
Via these different comprehensions of the superego, we can conceptualise the crucial difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Authoritarianism’s libidinal economy evokes the Freudian superegoic “No!”. The authoritarian State is a paternalistic entity that represses political desires to impose the impossibility of transgression.
Consider the case of Chile’s former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The general assumed power via a military coup in 1973 against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende precisely to prohibit the realisation of political desires. His cold-blooded leadership intervened as a swift “No!” against Unidad Popular, the left-wing coalition in power. Chile’s political superego under Pinochet’s dictatorship operated as a repressive apparatus, negating leftist enjoyment. The libidinal Law disciplined political transgression like a Freudian father disciplines their child pursuing a prohibited desire. Pinochet’s authoritarian regime separated the leftist subject from the object of its desire (democratic socialism). Authoritarianism in the Chilean case is thus a crude manifestation of Freudian paternalism’s political incarnation, negating political desires seen as excessive.
In comparison, totalitarianism’s libidinal economy evokes the Lacanian superegoic enjoyment imperative. As we have noted previously, totalitarianism’s dangers derive from its socialisation of the phantasmatic object of desire into Law. The superegoic enjoyment imperative commands subjects to attain the drive’s impossible object. As the superego’s demands can never be answered successively, a cycle of insatiable violence is liberated upon the socio-political sphere. Totalitarianism’s inability to attain its phantasy’s object sends it into a state of paranoia in which it must eternally persecute internal and external enemies that block the attainment of said object. China’s Cultural Revolution, an attempt to purge the popular republic of its ‘parasitic’ elements (landowners, ‘rightists’, revisionists, bureaucrats, intellectuals, traditionalists, etc..), is an example of totalitarian paranoia. The political revolution led by multiple factions of the Chinese radical youth (some associated with the Communist Party, others, not) continuously targeted particular ‘enemies’ which needed to be purged from social life to create the possibility of attaining the object of desire. However, as the object is unattainable, enjoyment is derived from the continuous persecution of semiotically constructed obstacles. The obstacle to the object is a crucial component of the totalitarian libidinal logic as it fuels the phantasmic structure of the object (S ◊ a). If the obstacle is ‘eliminated’, then the libidinal logic of totalitarianism is torn asunder as its subjects confront the impossibility of the object (which is a confrontation with the impossibility of oneness). In Surplus-Enjoyment, Žižek describes the libidinal logic of the obstacle within our phantasms: “...the very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself ” (2022).
The excesses of the totalitarian superego’s persecuting logic during the Cultural Revolution is exemplified by the rise of ‘Bloodline Theory’, a theory developed by the loyalist faction of the Red Guard according to which one’s genealogical background was the best indicator of one’s class conviction (Wu, 2014), the perfect example of the rejection of alienation in favour of reducing subjects to their symbolic identities. As enjoyment is always excessive, totalitarianism is necessarily self-destructive. The enjoyment comes not from reaching the object but from the repeated acts of purging and persecution. Insatiable enjoyment is menacing for the status quo: it is Mao who mobilised the military to put an end to the Red Guard’s agitations (Wu, 2014), marking the return of the authoritarian “No!” which limits the superego’s “Enjoy!”. The Freudian superego thus reemerges to counter the destructive ‘sexuation’ of the Cultural Revolution’s social dynamism. The Cultural Revolution’s excesses highlight that enjoyment is not a pure vulgar expression of our desires, but rather a product of an internalised Ethic structured around the phantasy of the object. It is this ‘ethical’ dimension of enjoyment that legitimises its destructiveness (Žižek, 2021). The political incarnation of Freudian superegoic repression is structured around the distancing of the subject from the object of desire, firmly reestablishing inviolable oedipal territorialities, while the enjoyment-centered Lacanian incarnation brings the phantasmatic object into social Law.
In Embracing Alienation, McGowan highlights the political dangers associated with the conceptualization of alienation as a problem to be overcome rather than as a structural component of subjectivity as psychoanalysis postulates. His criticisms of anti-modern traditionalism and Marxism derive from the fact that both these theoretical frameworks situate themselves with a lost authentic non-alienated past that has been stolen by an outside force (modernity for traditionalism and capitalism for Marxism). In traditionalism, it is easy to identify this ‘lost past’ in which subjects were ‘one’. When it comes to Marxism, McGowan first identifies ‘oneness’, like Althusser, in the 1844 Manuscripts (McGowan, 2024) in which a ‘human essence’ is theorised as being intrinsically linked to identification with labour. Thus, for Marx, as McGowan notes, capitalism, by its appropriation of the proletariat’s labour, alienates human essence. Communism is for Marxism the elimination of the ‘alien’ which splits us from our human essence. Artisanal labour is the ‘one’ which has been lost.
A Necrophilic Drive Named Marx
Jean-François Lyotard explores the nostalgic kernel of Marxian libidinal dynamics in length in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy. Lyotard affirms that in Marx’s writings, a ‘Little Girl’ desire to ‘return’ to our ‘(in)organic body’ resembles Rousseau’s (1993). The poststructuralist thinker is cynical vis-à-vis libidinal circuits that posit themselves in relation to a radical outside of ‘oneness’, targeting both Marxism and intellectual currents that fetishise ‘primitivism’. When Lyotard rejects the notion of primitive society (1993), it is precisely to unsubstantialise it as a radical region of libidinal exteriority that his contemporary thinkers like Baudrillard tend to portray it as. He thus defends first that primitive society does not exist and second that capitalism is still primitive as there has been no ‘bar’ marking the end of so-called primitive society’s subjectivity. When investigating the libidinal intensities within the Marxian text, Lyotard recognises that the ‘Little Girl Marx’ struggles with an ‘Old prosecutor Marx’ who finds enjoyment in the postponement of the revolutionary moment and the impossible completion of the theoretical body: “The jouissance of infinity.”
Here, the reality of the Lacanian drive within the Marxian text is made evident. The drive is structured around a phantasmatic object, the object-cause-of-desire (Lacan, 2014). The drive is a constant force, thus no object can satisfy it. Lacan explains in his 11th seminar that as no object can satisfy the drive, the drive “ fait le tour” (circles around) the object (it is important to note as Lacan did that the French word ‘tour’ refers to both ‘turn’ and ‘trick’). The ‘goal’ of the drive is not to attain the object but to repeatedly go back into circuit. As attaining the object of the drive is impossible, it is the repetition of the failure to grasp the object that provides enjoyment to the subject (Lacan, 2014). The reality of the drive is present in Lyotard’s analysis of the libidinal dynamics of Marxian theoretical discourse as he defends that they are embedded with a “non-finito” trait. The ‘Old Prosecutor Marx’ theoretical imperative is “ Wait until I have finished.”, Lyotard explains (1993). As it must be obvious by now, the finitude never arrives. Lyotard illustrates the ‘perversity’ of this drive for infinite theoretical understanding via the image of a prosecutor who is both amazed and scandalised by the accused, endlessly prolonging the inquiry of the study case.
The ‘Little Girl Marx’ described in Libidinal Economy is a desiring intensity that longs for the (in)organic body of pre-capitalism. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis seminar, Lacan proposes that the drive rests upon an “ex-nihilo” (out of nothing) reality (2019). Hence, the French psychoanalyst indicates the object of the drive is not something that the subject once possessed, but rather, the subject is always already lacking. The absence of the object is what marks subjectivity: a positive negativity. Yet, subjects position themselves semiotically and libidinally in relation to a lost past of reconciliation with the object. The object-cause-of-desire for the little girl is a totality that opposes the alienation that Marx sees as a product of capitalist exploitation. The little girl desires to pass from barred to ‘full’ subjectivity (ક→S). Lyotard insists that the ‘unity’ of the desired body is phantasy and that it is this phantasy that is at the root of one’s disgust for alienation provoking nostalgic desire. Like Žižek in The Most Sublime Hysteric, Lyotard helps us grasp the phantasmatic nature of ‘scientific socialism’ by insisting upon the impossibility of the unity between the subject and the object of the drive. The subject of desire is necessarily a barred subject. As a matter of fact, in his 6th seminar, Lacan equates the two (Lacan, 2013). The phantasmatic non-barred subjectivity that the little girl desires is a case in which the Ideal-ego substitutes psychically the subject’s alienation (i(a)/ક). Lacan notes that the ‘One’ or the ‘totality’ he conceptualises as the subject’s ideal identification is impossible to experience (Lacan, 2013). Furthermore, he defends that analysis does not ‘restore’ the lost ‘One’(Lacan, 2013). The end of the psychoanalytic treatment for Lacan is precisely marked by the fact that the analysand traverses the radical fantasy (Lacan, 2014). Instead of focusing on the ‘secret’ of the non-lacking Other to go beyond barred subjectivity (ક/A → S), Žižek insists that going beyond alienation necessitates reconciliation with one’s incompleteness and recognition of incompleteness in the Other (ક/A → ક/Ⱥ). Thus, paradoxically, a subject goes beyond alienation when they comprehend that alienation is not a state one can dodge. At the end of the analytic cure, the analysand becomes frustrated with the analyst as the latter no longer signifies the subject-supposed-to-know. The analysis has come to an end when the analysand ends his identification with the analyst, realizing that the latter is also barred (Ⱥ). The analysand rather identifies with their ‘sinthome’ (Moncayo, 2014). According to the Lacanian analytic framework, the subject is stuck in a phantasmatic desiring-structure that hides the fact that the root of satisfaction is already embedded within his subjective condition (the satisfaction brought by the ‘circling around’ of the drive’s object) ,whereas, in Marxian discourse, the class-conscious proletarian subject knows what he desires (socialism) yet has not attained this object as it is posited as radically exterior. Marxism’s materialism thus reveals itself to be incomplete as it depends upon a radical phantasmatic exterior (Lyotard, 1993). By mobilising the psychoanalytic affirmation that subjectivity depends upon division like Todd McGowan does in Embracing Alienation, one can root out the phantasmatic exteriority upon which Marxian libidinal dynamics lies.
Marx’s Chimeric Man
Both in the 1844 Manuscripts and the German Ideology, Marx (with Engels for the latter) conceptualises non-alienation. In the first text, labour is described as an essential trait of humanity, thus, capital’s appropriation of humanity’s labour is a force which divides humanity from itself (Marx, 1968). We therefore understand why McGowan reproaches Marx of historicising the split which psychoanalysis teaches us marks the condition of subjectivity. In the second text, when Marx and Engels examine tribal society, they depict the consciousness of tribal individuals as “animalistic”, likening it to that of a sheep (Marx and Engels, 1974). It is as though the authors fail to distinguish the ego from the id in these individuals, unable to conceptualise the fact that even “primitive” societies are characterised by semiotic complexity as shown by Claude Lévis-Strauss’s anthropological work. Marx and Engels describe a tribal individual driven purely by instinct whereas Freud, in Totem and Taboo, articulates tribal society in a manner which highlights the social prohibition of instinctual desires (2010). The tribal individual depicted by Marx and Engels is ‘One’ as it knows no split marked by symbolic construction. In the German Ideology, the communist co-authors also depict the coming proletarian revolution as a moment in which Man’s “Existence” and “Essence” reconcile (Marx and Engels, 1968), positing the semiotic construction of a state of non-division brought forth by a socialist revolution.
In Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, however, we seem to confront the limits of an illustration of the human which does not rest upon divided subjectivity. First, Marx defends that humanity can not be understood in the abstract, noting that “human essence” does not exist in reality (Marx, 1968), going against the Feueurbachian notion of “Man” which Marx sees as a bourgeois individualist vision (Marx, 1968). He rather defends that one can only talk about “Man” by analysing the relations of productions in which he is situated.Then, in the same text, he surprisingly notes that man must be a “supreme being” for man (Marx, 1968). The question must thus be asked: how does one worship a being which can only be articulated via the analysis of the relations of productions? Through this theoretical confusion, one can understand the divide between humanist Marxism on the one hand and anti-humanist Marxism on the other. The former theory incarnated by the works of intellectuals like Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse posits that the class struggle’s revolutionary objective is to liberate “humanity” from the shackles of domination and objectification (Creaven, 2015). The latter, pioneered by structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser posits that socialism is a scientific concept while humanism is an ideological one (Althusser, 1965).
Division beyond interpellation
Anti-humanist Marxism highlights the capitalist (in a non-economist manner considering the relative autonomy Althusser grants to the political and ideological spheres) “structuring” of subjectivity and defends that socialism arises from capital’s self-destructive logic. The two interpretations of Marx, humanist and anti-humanist, thus fall on opposite sides of the subject's ‘bar’. Humanism focuses on the ahistorical ‘Man’ while anti-humanism focuses on ‘structuring’. In Althusserian Marxism, individuals are ‘subjectivised’ by ideological interpellation (Gillot, 2009). As Althusser posits ideology as omni-historical, like Freud does for the unconscious, individuals are always already subjectivised (Gillot, 2009). For the structuralist Marxist, Man is an ideological animal by nature (Althusser, 1965). In For Marx, he adds that ideology is profoundly unconscious (1965). The previous thesis marks a rupture with Marx and Engel’s “tribal man” of animal consciousness described in the German Ideology and the omni-historical Man of humanism. Many critics argue that Althusserian Marxism falls short in its ability to theorise the possibility of individuals liberating themselves from ideological apparatuses, as it portrays subjects as mere structural products of ideology (Choi, 2012). Although Althusser mobilises the Lacanian notions of ‘Symbolic Order’ and ‘Imaginary’ in his articulation of ideology, it is precisely the absence of the ‘Real’, the third component of the Lacanian triad, which limits his theoretical arsenal (Choi, 2012). McGowan insists that symbolic identity is constantly undermined by our unconscious (McGowan, 2024), hence, pure ideological structuring of subjectivity is impossible. As the Real is unsymbolisable, ideology, in the Althusserian sense, always misses its objective. In his 11th seminar, Lacan makes this evident by noting that the Real always returns to the same place (Lacan, 2014). The Real which defines subjectivity in the Lacanian framework consequently always subverts the symbolic order. Interpellation is never entirely successful. If we take Althusser’s example of a police officer interpellating an individual as a metaphor for how subjectification works and interpret it through the lens of Lacan's concept of the Real, we can conclude that the individual never fully recognises or accepts the symbolic identity the officer imposes on them. There is always resistance to interpellation and this resistance is not an obstacle, but a necessary component of subjectivity. Furthermore, Althusser justifies his structuralism in For Marx by claiming to be the eir of a ‘scientific’ Marx following his 1844 ‘epistemological break’, a moment for the French thinker that marks the end of ideological humanism and the embrace of historical materialism within Marx’s oeuvre (Althusser, 1965). If it is true that abstract notions such as ‘human essence’ seem to be absent in Marx’s mature work, it would be naive to claim that humanism has completely left the picture following 1844. For example, in Capital, the theorist and militant repeatedly refers to “human nature in general” which he opposes to human nature modified by a particular historical period (Fromm, 1971) much like Freud who views the unconscious as eternal yet who recognises the importance of civilisation’s role in the structuring of our libidinal dynamics.
Lacking in Abundance
Psychoanalysis offers us a theoretical paradigm able to grasp division or incompleteness as a structural component of our subjective condition. Nonetheless, many figures trying to articulate a ‘marriage’ of Marxist and Freudian theory seemingly recreate Marxian ‘Oneness’. Take Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 essay Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. In this Freudo-Marxist text, the Frankfurt-School theorist and activist calls into question Freud’s claim made in his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents according to which civilisation depends upon the repression of desires to function (Freud, 1993). The German author associated with the ‘New Left’ puts forward the conceptualisation of a socialist civilisation beyond a reality principle of repression, noting that post-War capitalist society depends upon political, economic and cultural repression: surplus-repression (hinting to Marx’s notion of capitalist extraction of surplus-value) (Marcuse, 1992).
However, the Lacanian insight when it comes to capitalism’s socio-psychic dominion does not focus on repression, but rather on enjoyment. In fact, instead of mobilising the term ‘surplus-repression’ to talk about capitalism’s libidinal economy, Lacan insists on the expression ‘surplus-enjoyment’ (plus-de-jouir) in his 16th seminar D'un Autre à l'autre (Lacan, 2003).
When considering Marx, the French psychoanalyst suggests that the capitalist commodity structurally serves as the object-a (a), the object-cause-of-desire (Lacan, 2003). As Marx describes in Capital Volume I, commodity fetishism derives from the hidden structural exploitation of the proletariat’s labour-time, giving the commodity its ‘religious aura’. The commodity is therefore conceptualised by the capitalist subject as pure excess, hence the surplus-enjoyment. Enjoyment, Lacan teaches us, is always excessive, always beyond the pleasure principle.
Todd McGowan draws a similar portrait of capitalism in Embracing Alienation. The American scholar invites us to articulate the capitalist commodity as a phantasy of non-alienation. In the third chapter of his book, he states the following: “It [Capitalism] has a libidinal dimension that draws them [desiring beings] in, that derives from its promise of overcoming alienation. The commodity form defines capitalist society. This form compels our interests because it connotes the coming end of alienated subjectivity. When I look at the commodity, I see the possibility of achieving plenitude.” (McGowan, 2024) Yet, as we have seen, satisfaction does not derive from the achievement of reconciliation with the object, but from repeated failure of non-alienation (circling around). Hence, capitalism continuously constructs the psychic possibility of fulfilment via the phantasy of one’s reconciliation with the commodity, the supposed object of the drive, but the real satisfaction is a byproduct of the subject’s constant failure to get beyond division. Capitalism’s dominion derives from its libidinal economy structured around the surplus-enjoyment provoked by the commodity.
In Marcuse’s depiction of the capitalist subject, we are presented an otherwise fulfilled subject psychically repressed by the shackles of capitalist libidinal dynamics. The German intellectual argues that repression is a byproduct of a society of precarity, thus, that post-War capitalist repression is artificial. The task of socialist civilisation is therefore to develop a non-repressed libido. Marcuse imagines a ‘mature’ civilisation beyond surplus-repression in which Eros, ‘the life instincts’, are “released to an unprecedented degree” (Marcuse, 1992). Lacan-oriented thinkers should be cynical towards this proposition as it detaches Eros from Thanatos: the death-drive. Freud proposes a somewhat dualistic binary antagonism between Eros and death in Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1929/1955), yet if we are to refer to his older work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the analyst offers a more dialectical reading of the psyche’s contradictions. For example, Freud illustrates in his 1920 text ‘repetition-compulsion’, an unconscious drive towards the repetition of the same experience “beyond the pleasure-principle” (Freud, 1920/1955), a principle which was seen as the basis of the psyche’s functioning before the publication of this revolutionary essay. Therefore, one must not conceptualise Eros as being opposed to Thanatos. Rather, the Lacanian lesson based on Freud’s 1920 text is that Eros derives from repeated Thanatos. One does not exist independently of the other: the unity of opposites. Once again, the end of the analytic cure does not represent a moment in which the analysand gets rid of their unconscious undermining, liberating a ‘pure’ Eros, instead, it indicates the patient’s identification with their symptom. Marcuse’s non-repressive “order of abundance” (Marcuse, 1992) depicted in his book would not necessarily be one in which subjects experience non-alienation since no object is responsible for the drive’s satisfaction. We could even provocatively claim that a collectivised abundance society that has not reconciled with divided subjectivity would accentuate libidinal malaise (for people with a relatively comfortable mode of living) as there is no clear structural organisation of the objet-a. Capitalism, Lacan and McGowan show us, via commodity fetishism, is able to universalise the justification for one’s subjective division: the subject thinks of themselves as divided as they have not yet attained the next fulfilling commodity. Hence, capitalism incorporates the subject’s repetition-compulsion into its libidinal economy. Historically, ‘actually existing socialism’ has not had to wrestle with abundance as successful communist revolutions have taken place in semi-feudal agrarian societies such as Russia and China in which precarity and shortages had to be fought. Žižek gives a nice example of the objet-a’s structural role in ‘Real socialism’. When discussing happiness in a 2019 European Graduate School lecture, the Lacanian scholar notes that in 70s and 80s Soviet-influenced Czechoslovakia, people were happy for a multiplicity of counter-intuitive reasons (Žižek, 2019). First, people had access to desired products such as coffee most of the time, yet, when shortages occurred, it reminded people of their gratitude for the said products. Second, all problems emerging in the socio-economic sphere could be blamed on the Soviet-backed Communist Party (Žižek remarks that a common joke at the time was to blame bad weather on the communists). Third, subjects could situate themselves vis-à-vis the phantasy of the 1968 Prague Spring, a popular attempt to democratise the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic which the Soviet Union crushed by force. Thus, in Czechoslovakia’s non-abundant authoritarian ‘Real socialism’, the phantasy of one’s non-division was never far away, yet the obstacle to its attainment could always be targeted. However, when the phantasy of non-alienations persists in a society of collective abundance, how will subjects confront their libidinal malaise ? If one thinks of capitalism’s psychic dominion purely in terms of libidinal repression, one falls into this trap.
Additionally, Marcuse draws the portrait of repressive capitalism’s phylogenetic epoch by noting that Thanatos is a product of repressive society. For the prominent German thinker, individuals are conditioned to desire both repression and aggression via ‘depersonalised’ superegoic institutions (Marcuse, 1992). Like Marx, who historicises alienation, Marcuse seems to historicise Thanatos and conceptualises it as the product of oedipal socialisation. However, as Jacques-Alain Miller indicates, the Lacanian intervention within the psychoanalytic tradition marks the theorisation of the Father’s decline. Lacan, via his illustration of the objet-a, shows us that what is “beyond the pleasure-principle” is constitutive of the psyche’s libidinal dynamism independently of the Father’s position, whether it be as a ‘biological’ Master or as a symptom. Freud emerges in the age of neurosis and strict oedipal repression: the unfulfilled subject wants the object yet is repressed by Law. Contemporary Western society’s libidinal dynamics are post-oedipal: the unfulfilled subject has access to the object yet confronts their division after attaining it nonetheless. Thus, the comprehension of divided subjectivity permits us to theorise the ‘death-driven’ character of post-oedipal society. Early Freudo-Marxism, incarnated by the works of figures such as Willhem Reich reveals itself to be perhaps too naive as it posited that the dismantling of the patriarchal bourgeois libidinal structures would bring forth political revolution. As McGowan notes in Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets: “ Both Gross and Reich believed that political and sexual revolution would be mutually reinforcing. If one produced sexual revolution, that would lead to political revolution, and vice versa” (McGowan, 2016). These ideals are reflected by the 1968 slogans in France such as “The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” However, Lacan was cynical vis-à-vis the 68 agitations: “As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”, he stated in Vincennes University. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps what followed the 1968 revolt was precisely not a patricide, but a replacement of capitalism’s repressive oedipal master to an enjoyment-driven post-oedipal master. The malaise associated with one’s refusal to reconcile with divided subjectivity persists, just as, if not more death-driven than ever.
Conclusion
To conclude, Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation articulates the contradiction of the unconscious drives and our symbolic identities as the structure of subjectivity, insisting upon the importance of alienation and the dangers associated with the desire to go beyond subjectivity’s division. McGowan argues that we find this desire to overcome alienation in anti-modern traditionalism and Marxism. Exploring this idea further by mobilising a Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigm, I have tried to accentuate the libidinal dimensions related to Marxian discourse’s insistence upon alienation’s overcoming. I defend that Lacan’s conception of divided subjectivity structured around a phantasmatic object, the objet-a, is an important theoretical tool to grasp the desiring-structure offered by Marx. Noticing that Freudo-Marxism, via Marcuse, tends to reposit ‘oneness’ when it comes to humanity’s libidinal potentials, I have tried to reframe the psychoanalytic conception of the capitalist subject via Lacan’s intervention in Freudian theoretical discourse. If we accept this reading of Marxian libidinal dynamics characterised by the theoretical contributions of McGowan, Lacan, Lyotard and Žižek, it is perhaps pertinent to rearticulate emancipatory discourses through the centering of the subject ‘traversing the radical phantasy’.
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