Bad Object
Errant Marxist-Lacanian ideology
Thomas Waller
Lacanian-Marxism, Marxist-Lacanianism. Both formulations are unsatisfactory, and for the same reason. Where one qualifies Marxism adjectivally through the lens of Lacanianism, the other repeats the gesture from the opposite side. The alternatives of “Lacanianism” and “Marxism” are no more desirable, for they forgo the connection altogether. “Lacanianism–Marxism” and “Marxism–Lacanianism” are both too cumbersome to be effective. The matter is compounded when we consider that “Marx” and “Lacan” are each but a shorthand for the most plural of divisions and the most passionate of allegiances. There is the humanist Marx, the early Lacan of the imaginary order, the middle Lacan of the symbolic order, the mature Marx of the critique of political economy, the topological Lacan, the Hegelian Marx, Marx the communist, Lacan and the surrealists, and so on. One is tempted to give up and halt the slide of signification with a shrug of the shoulders. Tomato, tomato. But if psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it is that, even if we don’t recognize ourselves in our speech (especially when we don’t recognize ourselves in our speech!), what we say and how we say it have the power to change everything.
So, what’s in a name? Is Juliet right to claim that roses would smell as sweet if we called them something else? Within psychoanalysis, proper names have a special role on which Lacan ruminated at length in his seminar Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964–65). Here, Lacan notes that, although proper names are typically considered by linguists as significant only in their denominations (as denotative rather than connotative functions of language), if a proper name truly had no meaning whatsoever, we would struggle to do basic things like introduce ourselves. “To say that a proper name, in a word, is without meaning,” says Lacan, “is something grossly erroneous. On the contrary it carries with itself much more than meanings, a whole sum of notices.” As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Lacan will know, what is being suggested here is not a happy harmony between signifier and signified. Rather, proper names are, for Lacan, a “moveable function” that operate at the level of lack, at the level of the hole, for the simple reason that the function of the subject is itself inscribed as lacking. Speaking of himself, Lacan puts the situation aptly: “it is not qua individual that I am called Jacques Lacan, but qua something which may be lacking, which means that this name will be for what? To cover over another lack.”
But, we might protest, there are so many lacks to choose from, and no fewer Marxes! Indeed, when it comes to the histories of Marxism and psychoanalysis, the “sum of notices” swells to palimpsestic proportions. What the two fields hold in common is their penchant for sectarian dispute, their metastatic ability to divide into schools and traditions. Yet, despite this chorus of names that lends itself so well to catchwords and slogans—“return to Freud!” “expropriate the expropriators!”—what unites the two fields even more is the lack that lies behind the words used to describe it. For praxis does not strictly have a name. It is that void towards which any theory worth its salt is directed. If it does find its way into language, it appears as effects which are themselves but subversions of what one intended. The “moveable functions” of psychoanalysis and Marxism are then significant only as denotations (or detonations) of the praxis that marks their own liquidation: the alleviation of suffering, a new sinthome, the victory of the proletariat, the abolition of value. The revolution will be conjugated contrariwise, which is precisely the meaning of the Latinate prefix “para-.”
Diane di Prima said that revolution is love spelled backwards. Might this poetic figure offer a way to think the articulation between Marx and Lacan? That is to say, perhaps psychoanalysis and Marxism are composed of the same elements but expressed in reverse order—star-crossed lovers whose unification is barred by the names in their own theoretical vocabularies, but whose connection is established no less effectively through this very non-relation. The question is no mere academic exercise, but has real practical consequences. Can one establish links of solidarity based on suffering voiced in the clinic? Does working through our transferential attachment to the analyst entail a more fundamental recalibration of our attitudes toward politics and class? The stakes are high here, nothing less than the wholesale transformation of people and the world, the psychic and the social.
But maybe the grammatical form of the palindrome is not so apposite after all. Does it not presume an alltoo- easy reversibility between the thought of the world and the life of the mind? Is it not rather that, in giving to politics what we lack, we spell out a different kind of world altogether? What is ciphered in the writing on the wall is, in any case, the promise of a future as unknown as it is unguaranteed. A future of free association, loss, struggle, and hope—a future mortgaged on optimism of the will, signed in letters of blood and fire. How might the way we articulate the relation between psychoanalysis and politics change our perspective on the past definite of what was, altering our fight for (or against) the future perfect of what will have been?
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The problem of the theoretical non-relation between Marx and Lacan was addressed by Jacques-Alain Miller in two key papers from the 1960s. The arc of Miller’s politics is as good a benchmark as any to assess the tribulations of Lacanian-Marxism. As an editorial member of the Cercle d’Épistémologie, Miller published a series of theoretical texts on Marxism, psychoanalysis, science, logic, and mathematics that still do not fail to excite in their rigor and intellectual ambition. But the recent appearance of the now-infamous “Docile to Trans” essay in a 2021 issue of The Lacanian Review, in which Miller launched a set of befuddling reflections on what he termed the “trans crisis,” crowned a trajectory that had already been riding a declining slope.
The École de la Cause Freudienne’s public denunciation of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential elections, for example, did not coincide with support for the center-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Rather, it came with a tactical endorsement of neoliberal Emmanuel Macron. In the same year, the World Association of Psychoanalysis—another institution founded by Miller—held an international forum to discuss the relationship between Lacanianism and politics in which analysts were explicitly discouraged from affiliating with any political party or movement. Aside from being a cause for shame for those Lacanians that still uphold some commitment to the communist hypothesis, Miller’s tergiversation poses an unavoidable question for Lacanian-Marxism: is there something inherent to Lacanianism itself that leads towards a politics of reaction?
“Is there something inherent to Lacanianism itself that leads towards a politics of reaction?”
“Action of the Structure,” first published in Cahiers pour l’Analyse in 1968, plays its cards on the table with the opening line: “Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, provides the principle for a new organization of the conceptual field.” The attempt at unifying two terms that have, up to this point, been kept in disjunction relies on a wager: not only that they share a reorganizing principle, but that they do, indeed, occupy the same “conceptual field.” By the article’s conclusion, Miller is able to articulate this wager more forthrightly: “We maintain that the discourses of Marx and Freud might communicate with each other via regulated transformations, and might reflect one another in a unitary theoretical discourse.”
Two years earlier, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)” appeared, marking what Alain Badiou would later describe, in a well-known adage, as “the first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan.” The source of the later text’s unifying impulse is here openly identified as the “logic of the signifier.” This logic is “general” insofar as it is endemic to “all fields of knowledge,” but only acquires its “specificity” within psychoanalysis, which is hereby elevated to the status of adjudicator. With no less prowess, Miller develops this general theory of discursivity through an engagement with Gottlob Frege’s theory of the number zero as a suturing stand-in for a fundamental lack. But insofar as the act of generalization is undertaken in the first place by “piecing together indications dispersed through the work of Jacques Lacan,” the project of bringing psychoanalysis into dialogue with external fields is achieved on psychoanalysis’s own terms. The synthesis of Marx and Freud—more than a mere a wager—is achieved through an introjection of Marxist theory into the psychoanalytic domain with Lacanianism placed comfortably in the position of mastery.
It took Badiou to flag up the ideological gesture implicit within this improper generalization of the logic of the signifier. In “Mark and Lack: On Zero,” published three years later, Badiou cautioned against seeking out a single theoretical discourse that would positively unite psychoanalysis and Marxism. Without ruling out the possibility of conjoining Marx and Freud “through their very disjunction,” Badiou concluded that to argue for the “universal legitimacy” of the concept of suture is to “reflect science in ideology” by de-stratifying external fields in order to “prescribe them their lack.” Yet, Badiou was still eager to maintain a degree of separation between “the concept of suture” and the “concept of the signifier in general.” Pace Badiou, we might query the relation between the two: was not Miller’s original intervention subtended by a set of assumptions about the generalizability of Lacanian thought, a generalizability that took for granted the presumed superiority of Lacanianism as such?
Since the Miller–Badiou polemic reflects the intellectual climate of its time, it needs updating to account for subsequent events in whose development the polemic itself played a significant role. One should not underestimate, for example, the influence that Miller’s arguments had on Lacan himself, notwithstanding the latter’s somewhat cautious reception of them. Moreover, the idea that there is such a thing as a generalizable logic of the signifier—albeit one that may now be identified as mystificatory—is still one of the bread-and-butter principles that one accepts as a sort of “initiation” into the Lacanian field. The task of separating Lacanianism from attempts to integrate the insights of external fields with itself situated as master is, in other words, troubled by the very fact that Lacaniansim is but the sum of these ideological parts—a patchwork quilt woven from objects that are twisted and warped through the overextension of the discourse. At the center of this sprawling network is the proper name “Lacan”: an empty placeholder, a sum of notices, a moveable function, a lack.[1]
Take Žižek’s correlation between the money-form under capitalism and the master-signifier. As Marx demonstrated, the money-form stitches together the world of commodities by making social relations between individual workers appear as if they were autonomous relations between things.[2] Not to be confused with the money commodity, its material bearer, the money-form is a self-referential function that allows other commodities to represent their value in it. When the miser refuses to part with his pieces of gold, hoping to retain what is assumed to be their intrinsic worth, he mistakes the natural form of the money commodity for its valueform— a kind of “madness.”[3] Yet, far from an aberration, the topsy-turvy world of capitalist exchange is reproduced through such perceptual inversions. As Marx writes:
“What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind.”
This argument does seem to correspond with the role of the master-signifier in “quilting” the signifying battery through its own inherent meaninglessness. In the same way that the money-form sutures the capitalist totality, the master-signifier acts as a “nodal point” that imbues the subject’s world with consistency, but which in itself has no “positive property.” To adapt one of Žižek’s examples, “individual freedom” is a master-signifier for liberals, not because they recognize the need to make their ideology cohere, but because it appears to confer meaning upon reality itself.4 One can even rewrite the Marx quote to certify the homology: “what appears to happen is not that a particular signifier quilts the symbolic order because subjects decide to treat it as a master-signifier, but, on the contrary, that subjects treat it as a master-signifier because it quilts the symbolic order.”
There is a strong temptation to take this line of reasoning as a corroboration of Miller’s argument that Marxism and psychoanalysis pertain to a “unitary theoretical discourse.” Overstepping the stony limits dividing the two fields, their unification would here derive from the constitutive role of illusion in both social and psychic reality. Future possibilities for refining the homology cut both ways: on the one hand, Lacan’s early work on the symbolic order might be put into a more fruitful dialogue with value-form theoretical accounts of impersonal domination; on the other, value-form theory itself can be shown to presuppose a Freudian idea of the unconscious. And yet, as soon as one attends to the fact that the Lacanian theory of the signifier is tied in the first instance to a set of artificial clinical conditions—above all, the analytic dialogue à deux—the suggestion that one can explain the money-form through a Lacanian theory of discourse crumbles of its own accord.
What Gabriel Tupinambá calls “Lacanian ideology” is a shorthand for this theoretical impasse. His book The Desire of Psychoanalysis, published in 2021, offers the reader one of those rare opportunities to confront a text that totally changes one’s picture of the object in question. After reading the book, Lacanianism doesn’t quite look the same again, and examples of Lacanian ideology appear wherever one looks. Its thesis, already formulated in a roundabout way, can be stated (too simply) as follows: What has historically underpinned many Lacanian attempts to engage with external fields such as science and politics has been, on the one hand, a silent though pronounced adherence to the presumed superiority of Lacanianism itself and, on the other, an erasure of the artificial clinical conditions to which Lacanian doctrine first refers. From this, everything follows.
As if to authorize Tupinambá’s argument, consider that some of the more innovative recent Lacanian literature has attempted to re-engage external fields whose insights have historically been misprized by the Lacanian tradition. Lorenzo Chiesa’s work on logic and biology in The Not-Two, for instance, demonstrates that a more careful engagement with contemporary “evolutionary-developmental” theory makes Lacan’s various denunciations of the life sciences look not only obsolete, but in fact rather conservative. Two other examples would be Adrian Johnston’s research on neuroscience and, to a certain extent, Žižek’s own engagements with quantum physics—not to mention the ongoing project of putting Lacan into dialogue with a more accurate picture of Hegel and German idealism. The list could go on.
While this scholarship does not, as a rule, call into question the generalizability of the logic of the signifier, it does demystify the kneejerk Lacanian-ideological gesture, in which external fields are treated as validations of what was always already there in Lacan. Without ever fully delivering, such work promises to turn the tables by subjecting Lacanianism to the sort of critical scrutiny it is—not always—unwilling to deploy elsewhere. In Tupinambá’s terms, this relation of two-pronged critique would be one of “compossibility,” which reevaluates the limits and foundations of psychoanalysis on the basis of insights native to exogenous domains. It goes without saying that pulling the rug from under Lacanianism is unlikely to receive a warm reception from the movement’s keystone institutions, which is, of course, precisely the point.
Can one say that Lacan’s engagement with Marx was likewise launched from the perspective of the compossible? That is, which Marx—and what kind of Marxism—does Lacan have in mind when he speaks about concepts like plus de jouir and the discourse of the capitalist? If Lacanian ideology has so thoroughly stamped the clinical, theoretical, and institutional development of Lacanian psychoanalysis, then how, we might ask, has it shaped Lacan’s references to Marx?
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There are numerous points in Lacan’s oeuvre at which he intimates an immanent connection between Marx and psychoanalysis that bears comparison with Miller’s concept of a “unitary theoretical discourse.” In the insurrectionary aftermath of May ’68, for example, Lacan held a seminar entitled From an Other to the other in which he went so far as to claim that psychoanalysis was “a field in which Marx is perfectly in his place.”[5] In an interview for Belgian radio conducted the year after this seminar, Lacan stated with equal matter-of-factness that “surplus- value is Marxlust, the surplus enjoyment of Marx.” What is remarkable in these quotes is the authority with which Lacan is able to claim such a homology between himself and Marx. In light of the foregoing remarks on Lacanian ideology, we should find ourselves training a suspicious eye on such pronouncements. What is the source of this theoretical hubris?
A clue may be found in a passage from Seminar VI:
“it suffices to open the first volume of Capital to realize that the very first step of Marx’s analysis of the fetishistic nature of commodities consists precisely in broaching the problem from the level of the signifier, even if the term is not used there [!!]. The relations between values are defined as signifying relations, and all subjectivity, and possibly even that of fetishization, comes to be inscribed within this signifying dialectic. This is true beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
The incorporation of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism into Lacan’s discourse is hereby achieved under the sign of the logic of the signifier. By generalizing insights developed between the four walls of the consulting room, Marx’s text is seen to enact this logic regardless of whether the term signifier itself appears there. It is as if Marx is himself placed on the couch. The result is that the critique of political economy is circumscribed within the parameters of the field of psychoanalysis, which alone can restore to Capital the meaning of the signifying relations it is explicating without knowing it. Through this unilateral engagement, Lacan protects his own discourse from being subjected to the kinds of critical effects that would emerge from a more compossible dialogue with Marx’s work.
If there were no homology between Marx and Lacan, such an ideological gesture would not be possible. What matters for future interactions between psychoanalysis and politics is precisely how, in what form, this homology is articulated. In claiming that Marx is “perfectly in his place” in the field of psychoanalysis, Lacan spoke of a “homologous” field, through which he was able to develop his theory of the object a. Yet, as François Regnault has noted, “in ‘homology’ Lacan interprets homo- more as ‘same’ than as ‘similar.’” To this extent, the correlation between surplus value and plus-de-jouir presupposes that “the gravity center of capitalism” is the same as “the gravity center of psychoanalysis.” This seems to me to be a “bad” version of homology, for it collapses one term into the other rather than conjoining them through their disjunction.
The concept of Lacanian ideology provides a means of thinking how external discourses are incorporated into a Lacanianism which is itself locked into a, more or less, veiled position of mastery. This ideological integration has to do with a generalization of clinical findings about the role of language in psychoanalysis, epitomized in what Miller famously called the “logic of the signifier.” Yet, although this account tells us much about how Lacanianism looks outwards at other fields, there remains a question about the status of the object in this ideological transaction. Just what kind of “Marx” is Lacan talking about when he refers to a “homologous” field? What is lost when we enshroud Marx under the logic of the signifier?
“The concept of Lacanian ideology provides a means of thinking how external discourses are incorporated into Lacanianism with itself locked into a, more or less, veiled position of mastery.”
For a start, we should insist that Lacan’s ideological attempt to integrate Marx into his discourse is not a successful one, since the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis can only ever be asymptotic. To capture the failure of this incorporative gesture, we need to account for how the object is bifurcated through the ideological operation to which it is submitted. For when Lacan claims that Marx is perfectly compatible with his theory of the signifier, he vitiates precisely what is essential about the critique of political economy, turning him into a different kind of Marx altogether.
There is a precise way of accounting for this bifurcation, which involves distinguishing between the “exoteric” and the “esoteric” Marx. Taken from Hegel, the distinction allows one to parse the inner conceptual logic of a given methodology or philosophy from its external imbrication with the intellectual culture of its time. In the case of Marx, the “exoteric” names his support for the workers’ movement and the posthumous deification of his work by traditional or “worldview” Marxism. The “esoteric,” by contrast, refers to his critique of value as a totalizing form of social mediation, and needs to be continually reconstructed not recited like holy writ. As Robert Kurz writes, where the exoteric Marx is “directed towards the outside” and “easy to understand,” the esoteric Marx “thinks categorically” and is “not very accessible.”
Disarticulating Marx from the class struggle in this way sounds like a scandalous proposition, and in many ways it is. But insofar as he has been written out of the history of Marxism by the elevation of the exoteric Marx to a dogma, the recuperation of the esoteric Marx is in itself a political act. Moreover, by demonstrating how the workers’ movement has remained trapped within the fetishized horizon of bourgeois thought, the critique of value is able to shed new light on why the proletariat failed to achieve its historic task. The problem, as Endnotes points out, is that “such a decoupling would leave us with no plausible alternative scenario for the realization of this vision.” Yet, what is this negative space if not the ground from which new forms of praxis will emerge—the lack that subtends the moveable function, the void pulsing beneath the sum of notices?
To presume, as Lacan does, that Marx could be integrated wholesale into the field of psychoanalysis is to transform him into an exoteric object and to distort him beyond repair. Overextending a framework designed to treat phenomena endogenous to the clinic, Lacan misidentifies his own theory of the signifier as the conceptual core of the critique of political economy. By disavowing the esoteric Marx, Lacan is able to reconfirm his own supremacy. As an effect of this elision, the categories of Marx’s value-critique are deracinated and forced to speak a language not their own. When formulated in this way, the homology between Marxism and psychoanalysis is reduced to talking at cross purposes, one that malforms the insights of each field: a plague on both houses.
This operation is distinct from run-of-the-mill Lacanian ideology, for the claim is more than just that an external field is subsumed in order to re-establish the mastery of Lacan. In the case of Marx, this incorporation is precluded by his radical incompatibility with the field of psychoanalysis, which should also be the point of departure for any future dialogue. As Michael Heinrich puts it, after years of extensive research into bourgeois political economy, Marx mounted a critical exposé of “the categorical presuppositions of an entire branch of knowledge.” The succession of categories in Capital unfolds immanently, tied as it is to the elaboration of this critique. When imported into Lacanianism, these categories cease to correspond to their object, detaching Marx from his esoteric core. Better named, this is Lacanian ideology to the second degree: not only is the match between Marx and the logic of the signifier an unsuccessful one, but it is dysfunctional in a way that reveals Lacan’s own ideological gesture as misplaced.[6]
The best example of “first-degree” Lacanian ideology is the non-psychoanalytic domain that appears least foreign to Lacan, the external field without which it would seem impossible to imagine Lacananism: Saussurean linguistics, whose seeming inseparability from Lacan’s discourse is a certificate of the success of its ideological integration. The turning point is the period following what Jean-Claude Milner calls the “first Lacanian classicism,” inaugurated by the delivery of his paper “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in 1953.[7] Although the Rome discourse would seem to mark the birth of Lacanianism, it is more useful to read the narrative backwards rather than forwards. From this perspective, Lacan was at his most experimental clinically and theoretically in the run up to 1953, when he was engaging with a variety of external fields from Hegelian dialectics to cybernetics, searching for an adequate model for his radically new vision of psychoanalysis, an early name for which was “psychanalyse dialectique.”
Here the separation between Lacan and his interlocutors is plain to see. On the one hand, there is Lacan with his variable-length sessions and his membership in the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). On the other, there are the various candidates that Lacan is considering as model for his psychoanalytic project. By the time Lacan had definitively elected structuralist linguistics as his object, however, the boundary between what is internal and external is less easy to discern. To use Lacan’s own terminology, Saussure becomes “extimate” to the Lacanian project: linguistics is now absorbed into a broader theory of speech developed through psychoanalytic listening. Yet the marriage is not an unhappy one, for there is something specific about psychoanalysis that can only be accounted for through reference to structuralism. The two fields correspond to each other, preoccupied as they both are with the system of language. The match is, in other words, of the “first degree.”
“Marx is in fact double, and Lacan picks the wrong one.”
Of course, it is difficult to speak here in simple terms of an “ideological integration” of Saussure into Lacanianism, since there would be no Lacanianism without Saussure. The task of evaluating what impact the generalization of the logic of the signifier has had on the development of the Lacanian movement is, in some ways, a quixotic one—our perspective on what Lacanianism is has been formed through the very ideological integrations that would ostensibly be our object of critique. The situation is analogous to Borges’s fictional author Pierre Menard who, undertaking the daunting labor of rewriting Don Quixote for the twentieth century, is oppressed by the idea that, unlike Cervantes, he has to account for the exceedingly complex events of the preceding three hundred years, “[a]mongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.” In any case, the fact is that, after the Rome discourse, structuralist linguistics is so successfully paired with psychoanalysis that to think their separation becomes impossible. This union is achieved under the aegis of what Miller termed the logic of the signifier.
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With Marx, however, no such successful incorporation is possible, since Marxism and psychoanalysis are not on all fours with each other. Despite Miller’s claims to the contrary, they do not inhabit a single “conceptual field,” nor is it possible to bring them together into a “unitary theoretical discourse.” They are as inseparable and distinct as subject and predicate, bound together asymptotically as two parallel domains oriented toward the void of praxis—the unknown of transformation, the horizon of hope. Psychoanalysis does not come with a warranty, just as our Marxism is without guarantees. But to temper our subjection to the tyranny of the symptom is to create the space out of which solidarity may bloom. Resonantly, the struggle for the abolition of value reorganizes our subjective attachments through a kind of emancipatory “working-through.”
This hopeful disjunction is precisely what is placed under erasure by Lacan in his claims for an easy compatibility between his work and Marx: Surplus value is surplus jouissance; Capital analyzes the fetishism of the commodity from the level of the signifier; Marx is perfectly in his place in the field of psychoanalysis. What is precluded in such statements is a relation of compossibility through which each field might retain its relative autonomy, while subjecting the other to its modes of critique. By collapsing the homology from “similar” into “same,” Lacan establishes a false equivalence that future generations must untie lest they wind up in the kind of reactionary dead ends in which much mainstream Lacanianism currently finds itself.
If there is to be an articulation between Marx and Lacan, it cannot come at the cost of Marx himself becoming a Lacanian. All to say, we must emphatically reject Žižek’s claim that “To be a Marxist today, one has to go through Lacan!” To follow it would be to say that Marx is only important insofar as he corroborates the findings of psychoanalysis, whereas it is precisely the generalizability of these clinical concepts that should be treated with suspicion. If one ignores these limits, one can expect a mute reply from one’s interlocutors. As Tupinambá puts it: “Why is it so hard for us to speak to other thinkers in their own language?”
Bracketing the esoteric dimension to Marx’s work, Lacan regroups Marx under the logic of the signifier and thus treats him as if he were only an exoteric figure: directed towards the outside, easy to understand, ready to subsume. But Marx is in fact double, and Lacan picks the wrong one. Not respecting the specificity of Marx’s critique, Lacan’s engagements with Marx are unilateral, insuring himself against the more far-reaching questions that would ensue from a compossible interaction. Mistaking what is immanent in Marx for what is exoteric and incorporable, Lacanian ideology shifts into the second degree. As a consequence, Lacan does not describe Marx, not even falsely.
However, the same distinction holds through the opposite side of the looking glass. Against the exoteric Lacan of the institutions, stage-managed by Miller, there is the esoteric heart of Lacanian thought, on whose radical specificity we should also insist. To recuperate this inner conceptual logic is to reverse the centrifugal movement of Lacanian ideology: not to generalize clinical findings, but to hone their potential for application in the clinic. From this perspective, the key concepts of Lacanianism would be useful for Marxism, not because they describe the realities of anti-capitalist struggle (although they may be useful for that, too), but insofar as they are inseparable from the situation of psychoanalysis (which is also political). On the face of it, maintaining the esoteric aspects of Lacanianism and Marxism seems to place an embargo on their cross-fertilization. How can two fields be brought into dialogue whose languages are incompatible? If homology presupposes separation, of what use is diplomacy? Yet, far from outlawing interconnection, this non-relation is the very source of their entanglement. The task for Lacanian-Marxists (or Marxist-Lacanians) is how to articulate this disjunction, for although unification is impossible, parting is such sweet sorrow.
[1] As Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe pointed out long ago, the fact that Lacan’s work is almost entirely made up of diversions and displacements precludes the possibility of upbraiding him for being unfaithful: when he integrates external fields, he intends to distort them. The result is what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe call a “synchronic projection and indefinite repetition of the history of Western thought,” in which names like Saussure, Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud function as metaphors for one another.
[2] The money-form is, in Marx’s words, the “finished form of the world of commodities.”
[3] Where the miser attempts to maintain his profit by withdrawing from the sphere of circulation, the capitalist readily parts with his cash in order to increase the quantity of his capital. In both cases the motivation is greed, “but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”
[4] Signifiers such as “private property” or “representative democracy,” for example, are retroactively quilted through individual freedom in a way that appears to liberals as meaningful. In the same way that the money-form permits the universal exchange of commodities, individual freedom totalizes the signifiers that populate the liberal’s worldview. But, just as Marx argued in the case of commodity fetishism, this ideological procedure appears inversely: individual freedom does not appear to be a master-signifier because it gives meaning to social forms such as private property and representative democracy, but these social forms appear to have meaning because individual freedom is a master-signifier.
[5] Interestingly, Fink downplays the ideological implications of Lacan’s statement by translating it as “a field where [Marx] certainly has his place.” The original, however, reads “un champ où il est [. . .] parfaitement à sa place.” I have altered the translation to render the adverb more accurately.
[6] “Second-degree ideology” is a term used, in a different context, by Roberto Schwarz.
[7] The “second Lacanian classicism” begins in the 1970s when Lacan takes up insights from mathematics, set theory, and formal logic in a new and more purposeful way.