Parker, I. (2007) ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Marxism’, Lacanian Ink,
29, pp. 121-139. [New York: Wooster Press, ISSN: 1049-7749]
NB: This version has full footnotes and references not included in the published version.
LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM
Ian Parker
Capitalism creates the conditions of possibility for the movements to develop that will be
able to challenge it and, perhaps, replace it.1 This complex dialectical relationship,
between a powerful and pervasive exploitative system and the forces that aim to make the
world a place where the free development of each is the condition of the free
development of all, poses particular problems for those working for social and individual
emancipation. On the one hand, Marxists have always been impelled as much by fury at
the injustices that capitalist social relations wreak on individuals as by analyses of the
illogic of this political economy; in that sense the socialist-feminist slogan that ‘the
personal is political’ recovered the collective memory of the type of struggle that the best
of Marxist politics was always concerned with. On the other hand, psychoanalysts have
often insisted that personal self-understanding is not enough to take us to the roots of
human misery; reflexive interpretation of how we have come to be who we are in the
world must be connected with collective action to change it.2
Psychoanalysis as such is not necessarily anti-capitalist, and many analysts have
followed Freud’s own sardonic assessment of idealist promises for socialism and happier
times,3 endorsing in the process a view of the end of personal analysis as entailing for the
analysand scepticism if not cynicism about political activity. One of the paradoxes that
operate to further separate and restructure the fraught relationship between the individual
and the social under capitalism is that it has been the abstract academic forms of
psychoanalytic theory that deepened our understanding of contemporary ‘subjectivity’
and that have unfortunately succeeded in providing the main reference points for how we
might combine psychoanalysis and Marxism. That they cannot be combined, that they are
‘directly opposites’, was recognised long ago by psychoanalysts, but the more interesting
and fruitful question that still needs to be worked through is ‘are they dialectical
opposites?’4 To answer that question we also need to be clearer about what the
appropriate reference points might be. It is not enough simply to say that we can now
address the question by comparing and contrasting the writings of Marx and Lacan.
Specifying the particular theoretical traditions – Marxist and Lacanian – can be
helpful as a starting point; for there are two assumptions they hold in common that we
must take seriously in order to ground the debate. First, there is an emphasis on the
dimension of practice, an insistence that it is not enough to interpret the social world or
1
Mandel 1971.
See, for example, Kovel 1988.
3
‘…a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction
than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made
useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature’ (Freud 2001a, p. 143).
4
Strachey 1937, p. 7.
2
1
the inner world; in the early psychoanalytic tradition this is apparent in the attention
given to what characterises a ‘mutative’ interpretation5 and for practising Lacanians it is
evident in their focus on clinical training. The domains of practice are very different, but
it is only from the work within each of these domains that we may arrive at answers that
are both genuinely Lacanian and Marxist. Second, there is an acknowledgement that the
location of the work is an accumulating tradition; a movement of activists or practitioners
that read and re-read founding texts, but which collectively deliberates the trajectory of
the writing and commentaries in order to assess what can be made of errors when theory
is put to the test. In each case, of course, the task of retrieving and maintaining that
tradition is necessarily figured against an understanding of the specific disastrous errors
by which those who speak for the tradition – psychoanalysis or Marxism – have betrayed
it.6
There is, in addition, a close correspondence between the kinds of errors in
practice that each of the movements has documented and then sought to avoid. Whether
this correspondence signals more than an analogy between the Lacanian and Marxist
tradition, and whether it then warrants the conclusion that the answers that the traditions
have provided are homologous in nature is another matter, one that we will explore in due
course. The similarity between the enmities that each movement has constituted in the
process of its historical development has, in itself, appealed to enough commentators
looking from one to the other and searching for a complementary relationship to make it
worth identifying some of the errors and enemies internal to and spawned by the
traditions. They include; first, the impact of certain cultural forms that systematically
distort the critiques and the aims of the movement (consumer culture in general for many
Marxists and US-American society in particular for Lacan), and, second, the
crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste that regulates theory and practice in its own
interests (the ruling apparatus in the Soviet Union for Marxists and the stranglehold of the
International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) for the Lacanians). The various
attempts to formulate sufficiently rigorous theories of culture and to construct alternative
forms of organisation in response to these real problems that have beset the movements
have all the more served to sharpen the work of their adherents, either as Lacanian
psychoanalysts or as revolutionary Marxists.
‘Al tu sers à rien’7
Let us turn to some more contentious internal enemies that Lacanians and Marxists have
faced but dealt with somewhat differently. In both traditions there has been an appeal to
forms of thought that promise to validate and improve the theory but which then threaten
to irrevocably ruin it, and the dangers of this appeal and its consequences adherents of
each movement can see clearly enough. However, there is a fatal dissymmetry between
the traditions that mirrors at precisely this point the separation between the individual and
the social, a separation that is very convenient to most psychoanalysts in their everyday
practice but which then riddles and sabotages every attempt by Marxists to put the two
5
Strachey 1934.
Mandel 1979; Roudinesco 1990.
7
Paris 1968 student slogan, cited by Macey 1994, p. 146.
6
2
aspects of the equation together again.8 Lacan knew what the stakes were here, using
some existing theoretical frameworks from outside the Freudian tradition and refusing
others in order to open the way to an articulation of what is intrinsically social about the
individual.9 It was this strategic navigation through hostile ground to return to Freud that
was repeatedly misunderstood by Althusser.
On the one side of this ostensibly equivalent handling of convenient but
potentially dangerous forces, Lacan drew upon structuralism; Lévi-Strauss to reconceptualise kinship relations and the terms of the Oedipus complex as essentially
empty, defined instead only by their position within a structure;10 and Saussure to arrive
at an account of signifiers operating within a system of ‘differences without positive
terms’.11 But, at the same time, Lacan never abandoned conceptual systems that were
diametrically opposed to structuralist theory – of which Hegel’s, read through Kojève, is
the most important –12 and he tactically employed other theories of linguistics, such as
Jacobson’s,13 to legitimise his own theoretical developments. And, at the same time,
Lacan rejected the lure of ‘psychology’, the cluster of academic and empiricist studies of
individual development that seemed to offer a solution to so many psychoanalysts who
were called upon to provide evidence for the efficacy of their treatments.14 Often in his
writing the signifier ‘psychology’ stands for what is worst about the adaptation of
individuals to US-American culture, an endeavour reluctantly accepted and then
enthusiastically advertised by his opponents in the IPA. Lacan’s aversion to those
‘practitioners of orthopaedics … psychologizing analytic theory’15 may be gratifying to
Marxists, and his critique resonates with our suspicion that bourgeois psychology ratifies
the individualisation of experience and explanations of oppression, but this hostility owes
little to Marxism as such.
Lacan’s earliest psychiatric work on paranoia forms the core of his return to Freud
and of his psychoanalytic reading of early twentieth-century cultural malaise as derived
from the ‘decline of the paternal imago,16 but the political consequences of this reading
for an understanding of fascism, for example – as perverse narcissistic imaginary
identification with the father – are bad news for Marxists looking to the revolutionary
power of human creativity. The political position that flows from this analysis is more
compatible with surrealist approaches which then do not much more than merely mimic
this identification.17 Likewise, Lacan’s closest approach to joint action in groups once
again offers little that will be of immediate comfort to Marxists; the temporal logic that
he outlined in his paper on ‘anticipated certainty’18 is a critique more than an
‘Only through the articulation of their difference … can their relation be adequately expressed’ (Adorno
1967, p. 70).
9
‘In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model , as an object, as a helper,
as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable
sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well’ (Freud 2001b, p. 69).
10
Lévi-Strauss 1963.
11
Saussure 1974, p. 120.
12
Through Kojève 1969.
13
Jacobson 1975.
14
See, for example, Lagache 1953.
15
Lacan 1973, p. 23.
16
Lacan 1980.
17
See, for example, Greeley 2001.
18
Lacan 1988.
8
3
endorsement of intersubjectivity, and while that critique is useful if not necessary for
clinical work with individuals, the most immediate connections with psychoanalytic
group psychology are with the conservative psychiatric tradition in England during the
Second World War that Lacan was so impressed by.19
Notions of creative labour and collective activity as the two most powerful
defining features of human nature assumed by Marxism are thus obscured by Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and to take the line adopted by hard-line Althusserians that there is no
human nature at all is simply to be swallowed whole by one particularly virulent antiMarxist version of quasi-Lacanian social theory.20 We leave aside here the
pathobiographical descriptions of the tactical moves that Lacan made to mobilise support
from a range of different influential figures; entreaties and missives to church leaders and
the French Communist Party (PCF) indicate that Lacan was neither Christian nor
communist.21
On the other side, to which we will now turn in vain for an adequate Marxist
response to these issues, Althusser also adopted structuralist precepts to reinvigorate a
theoretical practice that would comprehend history as a ‘process without a subject’,22 and
grasp how ideology ‘represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence’.23 This enabled him to steer a course between the newly
rediscovered ‘humanism’ of the PCF and a supposedly scientifically rigorous account of
the human subject. While it took some nerve to recruit Lacan to this task, against the
background of pathetic self-criticism by communist analysts who had declared
psychoanalysis to be a ‘reactionary ideology’,24 Althusser’s ‘anti-humanism’ was still but
one move within the network of machinations required by the Party.25 In addition,
Althusser adopted ideas from Lacan that would, in this particular domain of theoretical
elaboration, keep alive some version of the humanism that he ostensibly side-stepped;
something uncannily close to the very psychology that Lacan pitted himself against.26
The most striking manifestation of this psychologising element is to be found in
the use Althusser makes of Lacan’s account of the mirror stage.27 For Lacan this ‘stage’ –
the site upon which the Imaginary is constituted – is embedded in, and necessarily
19
Lacan 2000.
See, for a Marxist case against this aspect of Althusserianism, Geras 1983.
21
Roudinesco 1997.
22
See Althusser 1976.
23
Althusser 1971, p. 153.
24
‘The least one may say of the analytic approach is that it blocks at the highest point the freedom of
ascribing to the facts any causes other than those postulated by psychoanalysis itself. …the analytic
technique can only lead the patient to the halfway mark, at the point where he becomes conscious of the
myth which weighed on him but not of its profound sources. It only offers him an artificial liberation in an
imaginary world’ (Eight French Psychiatrists 1949, p. 19).
25
‘Althusser advanced a philosophy of history which allowed acknowledgement of the political distortions
existing in the superstructure of the USSR, while preserving the economic categorisation of the country as
socialist. Theoretically this was a major political advance over the “cult of the personality” explanations
proferred [sic] by the PCF leadership. Politically it allowed a degree of criticism of the USSR and permitted
the PCF a degree of independence from the CPSU’ (O’Donnell 1982, p. 25).
26
‘Althusser may seem to reject psychology but re-introduces it via the Ideological State Apparatus’
(O’Donnell 1982, p. 29).
27
First outlined in English, in New Left Review, as if it were indeed a ‘mirror-phase’ that could be part of a
developmentalist account (Lacan 1968). Compare this with Lacan 2002.
20
4
intertwined with the Symbolic and Real.28 For Althusser, though, this is a self-enclosed
point of imaginary unity with the mother treated as the original point from which the
subject emerges as able to recognise and be recognised within ideological systems.29 The
relation that the individual subject takes up with respect to the various Ideological State
Apparatuses or to the ‘Absolute Subject’ is an ‘imaginary’ relation30 rather than always
already being structured by the Symbolic; and the Real as the third necessary element is
reduced by Althusser to consisting of ‘real conditions’, as if psychoanalysis was
concerned with ‘reality’ as a measure of distorted perceptions. Althusser thus presses
Lacanian concepts into shape to understand ‘ideology’, but in the process he
‘imaginarises’ them, and so turns the Imaginary itself into something that functions as a
key concept; it appeared to open the way to a Marxist theory of subjectivity but actually
locked us all the more tightly into ideology as something eternal and inescapable.
To use psychoanalysis in this way to provide a theoretical grip on ideology is
therefore to distort what Lacan was aiming at. In clinical practice it is crucial that the
analyst tackles the role of the Imaginary for each particular analysand so that the
analysand may be brought to the point where they are able to move beyond the painful
repetitive circuits that hold them in thrall to certain objects of desire; analysis is the
practice of speaking by which the analysand will break from the Imaginary as eternal and
inescapable. However, the Lacanian psychoanalyst is also concerned with how they, the
analyst, can position themselves within the Symbolic (as the Other to whom non-egoic
unconscious ‘true speech’ is directed) or in the Real (as the other, objet petit a, as
enigmatic cause of desire that will open pathways of speech from the unconscious).31 In
Althusser’s hands psychoanalysis becomes a treatment of ideology practised by analysts
rather than a ‘talking cure’ practised by analysands; what he overlooks is that analysands
do change their own little worlds within the limits of capitalist social relations, and that
process of change is what revolutionary Marxists should be more interested in
conceptualising and connecting with. The term ‘theoretical’ in Althusser’s work is
actually a replacement for ‘practice’, whether political or psychoanalytic practice.32
This curse
28
Lacan 1998.
‘At the root of the problem is Althusser’s invocation of an “individual” who is pre-ideological and indeed
must be pre-ideological if Althusser’s most fundamental thesis (that ideology is the process by which
individuals are constituted as subjects) is correct. …Althusser has given us the worst of all possible worlds
in presenting a model of the subject that manages to strip away or weaken adult powers of political agency
at the same time that it retains metaphysical and essentialist assumptions about pre-social capacities of the
individual child’ (Barrett 1993, pp. 178-9).
30
‘…the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and
Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is
constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning’ (Althusser 1971, p. 168).
31
This positioning is posed differently in Lacan’s earlier and later work, with a shift of emphasis from the
Symbolic to the Real.
32
The work of Castoriadis could be contrasted with this position, though his later work – at the point where
he turned to psychoanalysis – was neither Marxist nor, in the end, Lacanian; Castoriadis was an activist
from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group (writing as ‘Paul Cardan’) who trained as a Lacanian, then broke
away from Lacan’s school to practise as a psychoanalyst, in the ‘Fourth Group’, and went on to elaborate
an overarching theory of the ‘imaginary institution’ of society. See, for example, Castoriadis 1987.
29
5
The next generation – the ‘post-Althusserians’ in the English-speaking world –
compounded this misreading of Lacan, with a displacement of interest from the
Imaginary to the Symbolic; analysis of ideological forms could then more easily be
directed at the domain of ‘texts’ and ‘discourse’. Academic appropriations of Lacan in
literary theory or film studies which tended to use Althusser as a filter then had to settle
accounts with the image of the Symbolic as if it were a gigantic Imaginary system so that
linguistically-structured cultural products could be read critically and the hope held out
that texts could be dismantled and transformed.33 In the US, for example, Jameson’s
rather negative assessment of the work of the Symbolic in Lacan, which he had
assimilated to his motif of the ‘prison-house of language’ in his influential critical survey
of structuralism and Russian formalism,34 was replaced five years later by a more positive
account; even so, he was still wary of how the celebration of ‘submission to the Law’ and
‘subordination of the subject to the Symbolic Order’ meant that a ‘conservative
misappropriation’ of this ‘clearly anti-Utopian scheme’ was ‘unavoidable’.35
Jameson’s use of psychoanalysis was more nuanced then reductive approaches in
literary criticism that speculated about the motivations of individual writers and their
creations, but it was precisely his insistence that analysis must be concerned with the
production and appeal of complex ideological systems in texts that led him away from
Lacanian psychoanalysis as such. The Imaginary slipped into the background as if it
merely pertained to the idiosyncratic elements of personal history (of the author or
characters in the text) that child psychologists might be concerned with – a disciplinary
demarcation that was anathema to Lacan – and the Real, for Jameson, was ‘simply
History itself’,36 a formulation that did at least still capture something of its
incomprehensible traumatic aspect in psychoanalysis.37 To reduce the Real to History in
this way, however, turned it into something that could, ideally, be narrated (as if it were
the widest possible symbolic order and Ur-text for each particular local semiotic system).
The eventual slide into US-American-style pragmatism as the antithesis of
historical materialism was actually accomplished by theorists in Europe melding analyses
of ideology with the search for class-collaborationist historic compromises. If Althusser
was one of father figures of the dissident ‘Chinese’ faction of the crisis-ridden PCF busy
elaborating a new ‘humanist’ stance, then Laclau and Mouffe should be seen as inheritors
of the line of the ‘Italian’ faction. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy contained the barest
of references to Lacan,38 but this academic manifesto of Eurocommunism which entailed
a social-democratic interpolation of Gramsci as a theorist of discourse could now easily
recruit ‘signifiers’ and ‘subject positions’ to its own readings of cultural texts.39
33
See, for example, Metz 1982.
Jameson 1972.
35
‘On the other hand, if we recall that for Lacan “submission to the Law” designates, not repression, but
rather something quite different, namely alienation – in the ambiguous sense in which Hegel, as opposed to
Marx, conceives of this phenomenon – then the more tragic character of Lacan’s thought, and the
dialectical possibilities inherent in it, become evident’ (Jameson 1977, p. 373).
36
Jameson 1977, p. 384.
37
‘Just as the Real, for Lacan, is that which is impossible to bear, History, for Jameson, is “what hurts”’
(Homer, 1998, p. 52).
38
Laclau and Mouffe 1985.
39
See, for example, Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000.
34
6
Lacan had in fact outlined a theory of discourse, artfully presented to an audience
of academics and activists during his seminar of 1969-1970 with a smattering of semiMarxist concepts – such as ‘surplus jouissance’ as if it were the psychic complement to
‘surplus value’ – to flatter his Leftist interlocutors.40 But the main theoretical
development in this seminar on ‘the reverse side of psychoanalysis’, was directed, once
again, to the question of psychoanalytic practice and to the reactionary sedimentation of
that practice in the IPA. Naming the worst of contemporary discourses the ‘discourse of
the university’ served to expose the way knowledge and career positions were formalised
in such a way as to recruit and adapt potential bureaucrats and so turn psychoanalysis into
part of the pyramid-selling apparatus of therapeutic culture. The description of a
‘discourse of the master’ enabled Lacan to mobilise Hegelian categories – a version of
the master-slave dialectic borrowed from Kojève – and to taunt the rebellious students
that what they aspired to was a new master; their ‘revolution’ would only amount to the
revolving of terms from position to position in the four discourses.41
The distinctively Lacanian ‘theory of discourse’ does give some more mileage to
academics who make it their business to trace the pathways of the Symbolic and reproduce it as a form of knowledge, even ‘critical’ knowledge, into which new students
can be inducted.42 However, what the uptake of Lacan’s theory of four discourses
conveniently overlooks is that he was primarily concerned with how the discourses of the
university and the master structure and sabotage individual psychoanalytic work, the
discourses of the hysteric and the analyst are therefore theoretical and practical
conceptual frameworks for facilitating challenge – rebellious questioning by the
analysand – and enabling difference, even personal transformation. It is true that the
‘hystericising’ of the analysand does not immediately and inevitably produce a good
revolutionary subject, but it is only the discourse of the analyst that can allow this
hysterical refusal of mastery to emerge; and perhaps it is just such a hysterical refusal that
is a precondition for revolutionary subjectivity. The juggling with signifiers by ‘discourse
analysts’ concerned with political and policy texts incites instead a bureaucratic
orientation to language; it lies in the domain of advertising and focus groups rather than
the domain of truth. It is the opposite of psychoanalysis, its ‘reverse’.
The worrying turn to language in this line of work, already been noted early on by
Marxists,43 was finally brought to fruition in order to better lay the way for new political
alliances that were forged through the ‘resignification’ of the various terms of debate. In
the subsequent turn to discourse that builds upon Laclau and Mouffe’s work, all
categories of ‘identity’ – with class identity as the most suspect of all – are dissolved into
a conception of the Symbolic as an interweaving of texts, and the ‘antagonism’ that
makes any attainment of identity or resolution of differences between them impossible
becomes the focus of cultural analysis; the signifier ‘antagonism’ itself functions in this
strand of academic research as a kind of fetish that might serve to ward off ideological
40
Lacan 1969-1970.
‘What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one’ (Lacan 1987, p. 126). This
comment too is a return to Freud: ‘Theoretical Marxism, as realised in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired
the energy and the self-contained and exclusive character of a Weltanshauung, but at the same time an
uncanny likeness to what it is fighting against’ (Freud 2001c, pp. 179-80).
42
See, for example, Bracher 1993.
43
See, for example, Callinicos 1982, and Anderson 1983.
41
7
closure.44 The political drift of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, which provided one local
articulation of the Eurocommunist project as almost the last breath of Stalinism,45 was not
surprisingly toward a position that would thenceforth be self-avowedly ‘post-Marxist’.46
Those who have attempted to reassert Lacanian psychoanalysis within this version
of discourse theory have, however, already followed Laclau and Mouffe too far down this
relativist road to be able to forge any direct links with revolutionary Marxism. Instead,
‘politics’ is itself caricatured and characterised as an impossible project, with Marxist
politics presented as one of the obstacles to ‘radical democracy’.47 Then, when Laclau is
taxed by his former students about the role of Lacanian concepts such as ‘jouissance’ –
impossible pleasure ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ and outside the Symbolic, in the Real
–48 Laclau is able to reply that he has, of course, been talking about jouissance all the
time.49 By now in this strand of work everything has been absorbed into the Symbolic,
and every disturbing and disruptive element of Lacanian theory has been recuperated into
discourse.
The real thing
The inspiration for much of the recent psychoanalytically-inflected writing among
discourse theorists has been Laclau and Mouffe’s one-time ally Žižek, and almost singlehandedly he has put theoretical rapprochement between Marx and Lacan back on the
agenda.50 Žižek’s early work was part of in an intense theoretical struggle in Slovenia
during the 1980s that was, at that time, embedded in political practice; a group of
theorists were settling accounts with the bureaucracy and with Althusser, and using Lacan
as key resource.
Many of the themes that reappear in Žižek’s writing on ideology,51 for example,
are apparent in Rastko Močnik’s comment that Althusser’s description of ‘interpellation’
– whereby ideology hails and constitutes individuals as subjects – already presupposes
that a subject is there to start with, one able to respond to the call of ideology.52 Here in
this critique there is an elaboration of Lacan’s formula for transference – in which the
analysand attributes knowledge to a ‘subject supposed to know’ –53 now as the formation
‘…social antagonisms occur because social agents are unable to attain fully their identity. …the task of
the discourse analyst is to explore the different forms of this impossibility, and the mechanisms by which
the blockage of identity is constructed in antagonistic terms by social agents’ (Howarth, Norval and
Stavrakakis 2000, p. 10).
45
Mandel 1978.
46
Laclau and Mouffe 1987.
47
See, for example, Stavrakakis 1999.
48
‘…without taking into account enjoyment, the whole Lacanian framework loses most of its explanatory
force’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2003, p. 120).
49
‘…by discourse I do not understand something restricted to the linguistic conceived in its narrow sense,
but a relational complex of which enjoyment is a constitutive element’ (Laclau 2003, p. 283).
50
‘the strictly dogmatic Lacanian approach combined precisely with a not-post-Marxist approach is what is
needed today’ (Žižek 1997, in Long and McGann, p. 133).
51
See, for example, Žižek 1989.
52
‘…in this case, the constitution of the subject would escape the epistemic power of historical
materialism’ (Močnik 1993, p. 139).
53
‘Whenever this function may be, for the subject, embodied in some individual, whether or not an analyst,
the transference … is established’ (Lacan 1979, p.233).
44
8
of an ‘intersubjective structure’ in which there is ‘the relation of identification to “the
subject supposed to believe”’.54 This is a motif which Žižek then employs in his own
later work.55 For Močnik, Lacan is one way of returning to Freud, ‘the materialist’ for
whom ‘the whole is the untrue’, and this materialism is thus supposed to be very close to
a Marxist view of the ‘illusion of totality as the result of ideological totalization’.56
Against any illusion of coherence and the idea that there is a totalising knowledge to be
discovered under the set of signifiers that constitute ideology and its concomitant fantasy
elements, we come to see that there is nothing: ‘nothing but the hiatus that makes the
social structure unwhole, the hiatus of class struggle’.57
The lesson that there is nothing, that the ridiculous fantasies that glue us to our
objects are the stuff of signifiers, is indeed something that a subject in Lacanian
psychoanalysis may come to know. When the analyst is able to ‘obtain absolute
difference’58 the analysand can then, perhaps, even drop them as a subject supposed to
know and realise that nothing will come of nothing in a moment of subjective destitution
as they traverse that underlying fantasy relationship with their objet petit a that structured
who they were.59
But is this ‘nothing’ really just another name for class-struggle, equivalent to the
impossibility of any coherent totalisation of the social field? Why could the lesson to be
drawn from the particular relationship that one constructs and deconstructs in analysis not
also be that there is no such thing as class struggle, that the historical materialist critique
of political economy itself serves to plug a ‘gap’ or ‘lack’ in the subject, and that political
struggle draws activists into a fantastical relationship with their leaders who will fulfil the
function of ‘subjects supposed to believe’? This is exactly the conclusion that some of the
Lacanian advocates of ‘radical democracy’ have drawn.60 For Žižek ‘class struggle’ is
used to mark an antagonism that cuts across any attempt to make the social into a
wholesome complete system, a conceptual impossibility that will frustrate those who
want to improve capitalism, but a necessary impossibility that will also block those who
want to overthrow it. The working class is not, in Žižek’s worldview, a class that will
struggle to simultaneously take power and abolish itself in the very process of socialist
revolution. For Žižek the ‘obstacle’ or ‘antagonism’ that he obsessively circles around is
the condition of possibility for capitalism to exist; to remove this impediment would be to
lose the very productivity that is generated by it, ‘if we take away the obstacle, the very
potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates’61 Despite some ultraleftist rhetoric that is
occasionally wheeled out to annoy the likes of Laclau, Žižek does not think beyond the
horizon of capitalism.62
Močnik 1993, p. 141.
‘…the fundamental, constitutive feature of the symbolic order’ (Žižek 2002a).
56
Močnik 1993, p. 149.
57
Močnik, 1993, p. 152.
58
Lacan 1979, p. 276.
59
Lacan 1979, p. 273.
60
‘This is one of the ways in which democracy identifies with the symptom (the constitutive antagonism of
the social which is usually presented as a mere epiphenomenon) and traverses the fantasy of harmonious
social order: by instituting lack at the place of the principle of societal organisation’ (Stavrakakis 1999, p.
136).
61
Žižek, 2002b, p. 275.
62
‘…if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!’ (Žižek,
in Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000, p. 326).
54
55
9
Žižek is not a Marxist, but this is not the main issue that concerns us here.63
Although he addresses political-economic phenomena in commentary and critique and
with a rhetoric that is infused with Marxist terminology,64 this is merely the opportunity
to play out themes from German idealist philosophy. And although Lacan is often
invoked, this is as a theoretical framework to read Hegel (and, at times, Schelling). So,
when Žižek appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis – as a practice of self-examination
through which the truth of the unconscious may be but half spoken – as a template for
political action we are being led well away from revolutionary Marxism.65
At the same time as there is a relentless desubstantialisation of social categories in
this line of work, there is also often a romanticising of heroic individual gestures of
refusal, and here Lacan’s notion of the Real becomes the touchstone for something that
might be an explosive force outside the Symbolic and the Imaginary. This is nowhere
clearer than in Žižek’s characterisation of the ethical psychoanalytic ‘act’ which will
‘touch the real’ and so change symbolic coordinates of a life-world.66 The example of
militant figures true to a cause is then conjured time and again in a bizarre series that runs
from Saint Paul (true to Christ), to Lenin (true to Marx) and Lacan (true to Freud). This
conceptual separation of individuals from historical context thus obscures what is
genuinely revolutionary about Marxism – its emphasis on creative collective action which
prefigures socialist forms of organisation – and it draws Žižek into some of the most
reactionary identifications with those he admires most. Insofar as he is faithful to
psychoanalysis it is to the institution rather than the clinical practice, and in particular to
the present leader Jacques Alain-Miller, the ‘good’ Stalin.67
Žižek is a consummate Stalinist, lurching from pragmatic politics to ultraleftism,
and each time with sectarian denunciation of those he characterises as hysterical rebels or
conformist liberals.68 In the landscape of French Communist internecine struggles of the
1960s and 1970s, Žižek stands among the ‘Chinese’ Althusserians and the ‘Italian’
Laclau-Mouffe post-Marxists as the bourgeois caricature of the ‘Russian’ totalitarian, in
favour of the reassertion of the party apparatus and fidelity to the cause.69
Dialectical difference
63
See Parker 2004.
The concept of ‘extimacy’ – exterior intimacy, intimate exteriority – that Jacques-Alain Miller (1994)
usefully elaborates from Lacan’s writing to explore the ‘theft of enjoyment’ in racist fantasy, for example,
is mined and put to work by Žižek (e.g., 1990).
65
See, for example, the assertion that we should interpret instead of attempting to change the world, ‘the
first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things’
(Žižek, 2002b, p. 170).
66
‘This is the Lacanian act in which the abyss of absolute freedom, autonomy, and responsibility coincides
with absolute necessity: I feel obliged to perform the act as an automaton, without reflection (I simply have
to do it, it is not a matter of strategic deliberation)’ (Žižek 2002c, p. 69).
67
Žižek 2002b, p. 316.
68
See, for example, Žižek 1998.
69
Badiou is a relevant point of identification for Žižek to sharpen his own position here; Badiou, who does
offer some new ways of thinking the relationship between ‘ethics’ and ‘community’ in relation to the Real,
bases his work on what he accepts to be the historical defeat of Marxism, and his use of Lacan is as a
philosophical resource for a new logic of political action, not as a way of connecting personal change with
socialist revolution. See, for example, Badiou 1988; Hallward 2003.
64
10
These three attempts to connect Lacan with Marx failed; once theoretical explication was
prioritised over clinical and political practice it became possible to separate one of the
three orders – Imaginary, Symbolic or Real – from their necessarily knotted relationship
with each other, and to then forge ahead with false questions that would inevitably give
rise to answers that would be neither Lacanian nor Marxist.
There is an important aspect of psychoanalysis that is neatly glossed over in the
appropriations of it by social theory, one that we have not so far attended to, which is that
it is as much a theory and practice of sexuality and sexual difference as it is of the
unconscious. How could we bring this sexual element to play in political theory and
practice? One way is by noticing that the antagonism between the domains of the
individual and the social might well be characterised as being like the famous
‘impossibility’ of rapport that Lacan used to describe sexual difference,70 but even then
this highly abstract formulation only answers to an already too-generalised puzzle.
Instead, if we were to ask what Lacanian psychoanalysis might be useful for as one
specific element of class struggle, and in relation to what specific facets of Marxist
revolutionary activity, it might then be useful to focus on the role of sexual difference and
its intersection with class struggle. The separation of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres of
life under capitalism and the corresponding separation between stereotypical masculinity
and femininity is the key here.71 This intersection between the overlapping and mutuallyreinforcing axes of capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression has, of course, been
worked at more intensively by feminists than by Marxists.72
Earlier generations of radical psychoanalysts who had attempted to develop
theories of personal change linked with revolutionary politics had, of necessity, made the
thematic of ‘sexual revolution’ a key part of their work.73 But all too-often the ‘sex’ that
would drive the revolution was essentialised, turned into a self-sufficient force that could
and should be brought to the surface.74 Lacan shows, in contrast, how the constitution of
a speaking subject is also, at the same time, the constitution of another side to speaking,
another place which is the unconscious, in which representations tied to libidinal forces
enjoy their power by virtue of the very process of their expulsion from everyday language
and ordinary consciousness. The superego, for example, then feeds upon the guilty
awareness that there is something desired that is not being fully realised and continually
sends back the command to enjoy; sex is incited as much as it is prohibited.75
It is this that provides us with a new way of thinking the problematic of sexual
difference, so that the ‘impossible’ sexual relation is one that is constitutive of fantasies
about what men and women really are; and, on the side of the man, fantasy about what
woman has access to as something beyond the Symbolic order, something beyond the
‘Lacan’s Marxism never existed, in recognition of this intractable discord; Marxism’s Lacan did exist as
the jubilant but finally alienating misrecognition of a projected harmony’ (Valente 2003, p. 172).
71
Zaretsky 1976.
72
See, for example, Haraway 1991.
73
See, for example, Fenichel 1977.
74
See, for example, Reich 1972.
75
‘The parent of the same sex appears to the child at once as the agent of the sexual interdiction and as the
example of its transgression’ (Lacan 1980, p. 191).
70
11
always failing ‘phallic jouissance’ to which ‘man’ is confined.76 There is, of course, the
temptation in this account to idealise ‘woman’ – a motif that all the more efficiently holds
in place her degradation –77 and so an attention to the historical constitution of this
impossible sexual relation and the idealisation that goes along with it is necessary to take
this account forward.78
For example, feminisation is part of the logic of capitalism that dissolves nuclearfamily relationships and the ‘traditional’ roles accorded to men and women; alongside the
recruitment of women to the workforce as honorary men and the destruction of the
‘private’ sphere accorded to women there are corresponding, sometimes desperate,
attempts to find again that lost femininity; it is present in motifs of child-rearing to which
men are seeking access almost as fervently as women, and in ‘emotional labour’ through
which men imagine that they will learn to be as competent as women in performing
sensitivity and so really feeling something deep inside.79
The feminisation of capitalism is also accompanied now by the rise of
psychotherapy, a sphere of work traditionally associated with women but in which men
are becoming more powerful, and even in psychoanalysis as a more ‘rigorous’,
stereotypically masculine, activity in which men and women try to rediscover the
feminine side of themselves.80 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, this process of
‘feminisation’ is simultaneously mobilised and problematised; worked with and worked
through in what it would be possible to see as a ‘personal-political’ process that opens a
way to femininity as something that is necessarily repressed for capitalism to work, but in
such a way that refuses to essentialise or idealise it. The ‘hystericisation’ of the
analysand, for example, is a feminisation of the position of the subject who challenges the
master, and it builds upon the earliest crucial observations in the history of
psychoanalysis, that hysteria was not confined to women. But this feminisation is not
bewitched by fantasies about what a woman really is, for the sublation of ‘femininity’ is
the point at which the analysand of whatever sex knows not only that there is no
harmonious sexual relationship but also that ‘the woman’ does not exist.81
In the process of this challenge and transformation – this rebellion against the
normative and pathologising symbolic material that has constituted the individual subject
– some of the individualised and self-defeating images of happiness under capitalism are
also subject to close examination and change. Stereotypical allocation of aggression and
subjection to masculine and feminine roles, possession of socially-valued commodities,
and illusory freedom from intrusion by others strange to us, could each be analytically
conceptualised as if they were ‘ideological’, but these images are chained together in
‘…we must take issue with the philosophical premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis without denying the
social fact of phallic privilege in language and representation (and hence the difficulty of affirming the
“feminine”)’ (Segal 1999, p. 67).
77
‘There are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality have
become properly fused; the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his
sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object’ (Freud 2001d, p.
185).
78
‘…psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one’ (Mitchell,
1974, p. xv).
79
See, for example, Hochschild 1983.
80
Verhaeghe 1999.
81
Lacan 1998, p. 81.
76
12
different ways at different times. Even if the political projects here are not
complementary, there are ways in which they may coincide; Revolutionary Marxists, for
example, are not against ‘ideology’ as such, but in the way collective creative activity is
suffocated, sometimes by those who see ideology everywhere, and Lacanian
psychoanalysts are concerned with the lies that ideological motifs might enable a
particular subject to tell themselves, lies that attach them to their symptom.
Psychoanalysis provides a rich vocabulary to describe subjectivity, but not as a set
of signifiers that could be used to supplement or replace political analysis. Perhaps there
is something prefigurative about being able to attend to and share with others aspects of
emotional existence that are usually suffocated, suppressed and often-times repressed as a
function of wage-labour. The almost impossibly tense dialectical relationship between
Marxists and feminists has led to changes in political practice among Marxists, and
perhaps it is only that relationship so briefly flagged here that would enable Lacanian
psychoanalysis with individuals to contribute to revolutionary Marxist practice.
References
Adorno, Theodor 1967, ‘Sociology and psychology I’, New Left Review, 46: 67-80.
Althusser, Louis 1971, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.
Althusser, Louis 1976, Essays in Self-Criticism, London: New Left Books.
Anderson, Perry 1983, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain 1998, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso.
Barrett, Michèle 1993, ‘Althusser’s Marx, Althusser’s Lacan’, in The Althusserian Legacy edited by E. Ann
Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, London: Verso.
Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek 2000, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso.
Callinicos, Alex 1982, Is There a Future for Marxism?, London: Macmillan.
Castoriadis, Cornelius 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Eight French Psychiatrists (Bonnafe, Follin, Kestemberg, Kestemberg, Lebovici, Le Guilland, Monnerot
and Shentoub) 1949, ‘Psychoanalysis: A Reactionary Ideology’, Marxism and Masses, 2, 9: 10-27.
Fenichel, Otto 1977, ‘Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical Materialist Psychology’,
American Imago, 24: 290-311.
Freud, Sigmund 2001a, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund 2001b, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921), in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII, London: Vintage, The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund 2001c, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’ (1933), in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII, London: Vintage, The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Freud, Sigmund 2001d, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI, London:
Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Geras, Norman 1983, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, London: Verso.
Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis 2003, ‘Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing Out the Limits of
Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan’, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 1, 1: 110-128.
Greeley, Robin Adèle 2001, ‘Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia’, Art History, 24, 4: 465-92.
Hallward, Peter 2003, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free
Association Books.
13
Hochschild, Arlie 1983, The Managed Heart: The Commercialisation of Feeling, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Homer, Sean 1998, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Howarth, David, Aletta Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis, eds, 2000, Discourse Theory and Political
Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1972, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Formalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1977, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the
Problem of the Subject’, Yale French Studies, 55/56: 338-95.
Kovel, Joel 1988, The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Society, London: Free Association
Books.
Lacan, Jacques 1968, ‘The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, New Left Review, 51: 71-7.
Lacan, Jacques 1969-1970, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, Psychoanalysis Upside Down / The
Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis (translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French
manuscripts with an eye to the official published version).
Lacan, Jacques 1979, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lacan, Jacques 1980, ‘The Oedipus Complex [Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu
(1948)]’, Semiotext(e), 4, 1: 190-200.
Lacan, Jacques 1987, ‘Impromptu at Vincennes (1969)’, October, 40: 116-27.
Lacan, Jacques 1988, ‘Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty: A new sophism’, Newsletter
of the Freudian Field, 2: 4-22.
Lacan, Jacques 1998, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973: Encore, The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Lacan, Jacques 2000, ‘British Psychiatry and the War’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks of the London Circle,
4: 9-34.
Lacan, Jacques 2002, Écrits: A Selection, New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Laclau, Ernesto 2003, ‘Discourse and Jouissance: A Reply to Glynos and Stavrakakis’, Journal for
Lacanian Studies, 1, 2: 278-285.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1987, ‘Post-Marxism Without Apologies’, New Left Review, 166: 79106.
Lagache, Daniel 1953, ‘Some Aspects of Transference’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34: 110.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1963, Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.
Long, Andrew and Tara McGann 1997 ‘Slavoj Žižek Interviewed by Andrew Long and Tara McGann’,
Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 1, 2: 133-137.
Macey, David 1994, ‘Thinking with Borrowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan, in Althusser: A Critical
Reader edited by Gregory Elliott, Oxford: Blackwell.
Mandel, Ernest 1971, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, London: New Left Books.
Mandel, Ernest 1978, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country’,
London: New Left Books.
Mandel, Ernest 1979, Revolutionary Marxism Today, London: New Left Books.
Metz, Christian 1982, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Miller, Jacques-Alain 1994, ‘Extimité’, in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society
edited by Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Ronald J. Corthell and Françoise Massardier-Kenney,
New York: New York University Press.
Mitchell, Juliet 1974, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Močnik, Rastko 1993, ‘Ideology and Fantasy’ in The Althusserian Legacy edited by E. Ann Kaplan and
Michael Sprinker, London: Verso.
O’Donnell, Paddy 1982, ‘Lucien Sève, Althusser and the Contradictions of the PCF’, Critique, 15: 7-29.
Parker, Ian 2004, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.
Reich, Wilhelm 1972, Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, New York: Vintage Books.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth 1990, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985,
London: Free Association Books.
14
Roudinesco, Elisabeth 1997, Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de 1974, Course in General Linguistics, London: Fontana.
Segal, Lynne 1999, ‘Cautionary Tales: Between Freud and Feminism’, Constellations, 6, 1: 61-79.
Stavrakakis, Yannis 1999, Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge.
Strachey, James 1934 ‘The nature of the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis’, International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 15: 127-59.
Strachey, John 1937, ‘Introduction’, in Reuben Osborn, Freud and Marx: A Dialectical Study, London:
Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Valente, Joseph 2003, ‘Lacan’s Marxism, Marxism’s Lacan (from Žižek to Althusser)’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zaretsky, Eli 1976, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, London: Pluto Press.
Žižek, Slavoj 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj 1990, ‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead’, New Left Review, 183: 50-62.
Žižek, Slavoj 1998, ‘Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou’, The South Atlantic
Quarterly, 2: 235-63.
Žižek, Slavoj 2002a, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917: V. I.
Lenin, edited with an Introduction and Afterword by Slavoj Žižek, London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj 2002b, ‘The interpassive subject’, http://www.lacan.com/interpass.htm (accessed 2 December
2002).
Žižek, Slavoj 2002c ‘The Real of Sexual Difference’, in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on
Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, New York:
State University of New York Press.
15