LACAN AND MARX

Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom provides an incisive commentary on
Lacan’s reading of Marx, mapping the relations between these two vastly influential
thinkers.
Unlike previous books, Bruno provides a detailed history of Lacan’s reading
of Marx and surveys his references to Marx in both his writings and seminars.
Examining Lacan’s key argument that Marx “invented the symptom”, Bruno
shows how Lacan went on to criticize Marx and contrasts Marx’s concept of
surplus-value with Lacan’s surplus-enjoyment. Exploring the division between
Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives on social and psychological need and
Lacan’s formalisation of the capitalist discourse, the book compares the positions
of Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Žižek on the relations between Lacan,
Marx and capitalism, using a wide range of cultural examples, from Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Brecht’s Joan Dark and Pierpont Mauler. Through these
readings, Bruno also elaborates an extended commentary on Lacan’s central idea of
the division of the subject. His focus is not only on showing how we can exit from
capitalism but also, and just as importantly, on showing how we can make capitalism
exit from us.
This book will be of great interest to scholars and readers of Lacan and Marx
from across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy and political economy, and will
also appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysts in clinical practice.

Pierre Bruno is a psychoanalyst based in Paris. He is a former professor of

psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and he is a
member of the psychoanalytic association Le pari de Lacan (Lacan’s Wager) and the
editorial board of the journal Psychanalyse.
The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research Library
Series Editors:
Anouchka Grose, Darian Leader, Alan Rowan

CFAR was founded in 1985 with the aim of developing Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis in the UK. Lacan’s rereading and rethinking of Freud had been
neglected in the Anglophone world, despite its important implications for the the-
ory and practice of psychoanalysis. Today, this situation is changing, with a lively
culture of training groups, seminars, conferences, and publications.
CFAR offers both introductory and advanced courses in psychoanalysis, as well as a
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psychoanalysts working in the UK, and has links with Lacanian groups across the world.
The CFAR Library aims to make classic Lacanian texts available in English for the first
time, as well as publishing original research in the Lacanian field. www.cfar.org.uk

Recent titles include

The Marks of a Psychoanalysis

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KARNACCFARL
LACAN AND MARX
The Invention of the Symptom

Pierre Bruno
Translated by John Holland
This translation was supported by House of Publications.
First published 2020
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CONTENTS

Translator’s preface vii

Introduction1

PART I
The splitting of the subject 33

1 London/Berlin 35

2 From A to Z 62

PART II
The capitalist discourse 109

3 UMHA 111

4 The capitalist exemption 133

PART III
On the symptom 149

5 The sense of symptoms 151

6 Exiting from capitalism 170

vi Contents

Foundations196

Appendix 1: Lacan’s portrait of Marx 205

Appendix 2:The insatiable 210
References215
Index228
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Pierre Bruno’s Lacan, passeur de Marx: l’invention du symptôme was published in France
during the winter of 2010 and was the culmination of a long process of research
concerned with relating psychoanalysis to the work of Karl Marx and the critique of
capitalism (see Bruno, 1993, 2003; Roudinesco, 1986, pp. 535–536). Since that time,
a number of texts on this subject have appeared in English, and not only because
of the continuing crisis of capitalism. For example, in a far-reaching study, Samo
Tomšič (2015, pp. 49, 97) has argued that the “unconscious production of jouissance
and the social production of value follow the same logic” and has pointed to the
existence of a “social non-relation”; Alenka Zupančič (2017, pp. 30, 33) has writ-
ten that the “social relations of power – domination, exploitation, discrimination –
are first and foremost forms of exploitation of th[is] non-relation”, one that, as
Marx understood, is “built into the capitalist mode of production”; David Pavón-
Cuéllar (2017, p. 7) has treated both Marxism and psychoanalysis as forms of
resistance to the discipline of psychology, with its “dualist distinction between the
psychic-mental-behavioural and the physical-somatic-environmental”; and Jodi
Dean (2012, p. 187) has advanced the concept of a resurgent “communist desire”,
which “recognizes the impossibility of reaching the object” – the people as object
a – “and holds on, refusing to cede it”. Much of this work carries the influence of
the teaching of Slavoj Žižek, who during this period, has sought to rework dialecti-
cal materialism in a way that would include psychoanalysis (Žižek, 2014), and like
Tomšič, has provided a reading of Lacan’s capitalist discourse that differs markedly
from Bruno’s (see Tomšič, 2015, pp. 219–229; Žižek, 2017, pp. 208–209).
Bruno’s book approaches the connections between Lacan and Marx in a differ-
ent way; instead of drawing out the relations or nonrelations between Marxism and
psychoanalysis, it argues that Lacan’s work is marked by a process of transmission,
one in which his reading of Marx produced decisive effects on both his teaching
and his practice. As the title of this book indicates, the area in which Marx affected
viii Translator’s preface

psychoanalysis most significantly is the concept of the symptom. In his seminar of

1970–1971, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Lacan (2006, p. 164) states that
it was not psychoanalysis that introduced the “notion of symptom”, for the figure
“who was responsible for this is Marx”. In the same seminar, Lacan argues that:

if there was a moment when Freud was revolutionary, it was in the way that
he highlighted a function that Marx also brought out – it’s even the only
element that they had in common: that of considering a certain number of
facts as symptoms.
(ibid., p. 24)

Two years earlier, in his seminar of 1968–1969, D’un Autre à l’autre, Lacan had
recalled how, during the 1920s, he had read the first volume of Capital while he was
riding the métro in Paris (see Appendix 1), and his statement in his later seminar
locates something of the effect that Marx had on him. For Lacan, Marx, like Sig-
mund Freud, pursued truth: Lacan applies the psychoanalytic (and medical) term
“symptom” to Marx’s method because he was struck by the latter’s way of examin-
ing capitalist phenomena; the critique of political economy, as Jacques Rancière
(1965, p. 88) had already written, treats them as “hieroglyphs, which have to be
deciphered”.1 One of Marx’s effects was to aide Lacan to explore and extend this
concept within his own field; Lacan’s own work bears witness to the impact and
resonance of this encounter with Marx’s desire.

I
The importance that Bruno accords to Lacan’s statement about Marx, like his own
diagnoses of capitalism in this book, is inseparable from his analysis of a series of
questions raised by psychoanalytic practice and theory: questions that concern the
status of the subject, the end of an analysis and the real father. These concepts are
sometimes presented allusively or elusively, in part because this book does not shy
away from pushing relations to the point where they become paradoxical; it is not
by chance, for example, that Russell’s paradox appears at two crucial points in the
argument. It is also the case that, like many Lacanians of his generation, Bruno
developed his reading of Lacan in the context of an oral teaching; his published
texts sometimes serve as “quilting points” or “button ties” for certain aspects of this
reading, providing more or less definitive formulations of certain concepts, while
taking others as already established, and providing broad outlines of others, which
would then be developed more fully elsewhere.2
The understandings of both the subject and the end of analysis that are devel-
oped in these pages are closely connected to Lacan’s seminar of 1967–1968, L’acte
psychanalytique, which is both unpublished and unfinished; with the outbreak of the
revolutionary events of May 1968, Lacan suspended it, thereby leaving the conclu-
sions of his argument undeveloped. Bruno suggests that this seminar and other
works related to it have a decisive effect upon the way in which we are to understand
 Translator’s preface ix

the status of the “divided” subject in Lacan: the French word “division” corresponds
to the German term, “Spaltung”, a word that Freud brought to the forefront in his
late, unfinished paper, “The Splitting of the Ego in the Processes of Defence (Die
Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang)”. Division is to be understood as splitting.
Without undertaking a thoroughgoing analysis of Lacan’s use of these terms, one
can recall that in his seminar Anxiety, he approached the “division” of the subject in
its mathematical sense. The S, or barred subject, comes into existence in a separation
that involves a “fall[ing]-away” of the object a (Lacan, 2004, p. 167); this separation is
theorised, at the beginning of the seminar, as a mathematical operation in which the S
emerges as a “quotient” and the object a as a “remainder” (ibid., p. 27; also see p. 160).
This equation of division and splitting is puzzling, in large part because Freud’s
presentation of the “splitting” of the ego is very different from the division of the
subject. For Freud, this splitting is a consequence of the mechanism of disavowal
(Verleugnung), which serves as a way of maintaining two contradictory positions: it
sets up a fetish as a way of both recognising and denying the mother’s castration, of
“preserv[ing]” the belief in her penis, while also giving it up (Freud, 1927, p. 153).
Near the end of his life, in the paper on the splitting of the ego and in related passages
in “An outline of psycho-analysis”, Freud develops this concept by defining splitting
as the characteristic of the psychic agency – the ego – that must bear the effects of
this contradiction. The ego is concerned with recognising reality while defending
itself against the insistence of the drives. Such a defence may involve choosing not to
acknowledge certain aspects of reality; it can even choose simultaneously to acknowl-
edge and to refuse such aspects. Freud (1940b, p. 275) writes, for example, of a patient
who “rejects reality”, while “in the same breath, he recognizes the danger of reality”.
In such situations, “the disavowal of perceptions” is “supplemented by an acknowl-
edgement of them” and the “splitting of the ego” results from this co-existence of
“two contrary and independent attitudes” (Freud, 1940a, p. 204).
Lacan’s theorisation of splitting involves several decisive shifts of emphasis; first,
not surprisingly, this disavowal will be related more to the subject than to the ego.
As Bruce Fink (1995, p. 45) has noted in reference to Lacan’s teaching from this
period, the subject can be said to be “split between ego . . . and unconscious . . .,
between conscious and unconscious, between an ineluctable false sense of selfhood
and the automatic functioning of the unconscious. In such a context, the subject
can be defined a being nothing but this very split”.
In L’acte psychanalytique and related texts, the splitting that is emphasised is the
one between the S and the object a. In a lecture that Lacan gave one month after
his suspension of L’acte psychanalytique, he indicates that this distancing involves a
very particular form of “disavowal”. He notes that

for years, I have held . . . in reserve . . . the term Verleugnung, which Freud . . .
brought out in relation to an exemplary moment of the Spaltung of the sub-
ject, I wanted to make it live where it is . . . pushed to its most touching point,
at the level of the analyst him/herself ”.
(Lacan, 1985, p. 5)
x Translator’s preface

The end of analysis includes a “disavowal” that is important, in part, because it

will enable us to see retroactively that the primal “division” between subject and
object was also a splitting between them.This disavowal is related to the act referred
to in the seminar’s title, the act that enables the analysand to move to the position
of analyst.Within analysis, as the analytic discourse indicates, the object a has served
as a cause; it has provided the impetus for the analysand’s production of a series of
signifiers and constructions that are attempts to symbolise it. Now, however, this
procedure comes to a halt and the analysand’s position changes; s/he approaches
the a as something that is real through and through, and therefore radically resistant
to symbolisation. The newly self-authorised analyst thereby assumes a discordant
and even contradictory relation to the object; it serves both as the basis of her/his
psychic and libidinal position and as something that s/he can, and must, discard, in
a process that can be painful and almost melancholic.
This disavowal, unlike the one that occurs in the splitting of the ego, is not
located at the level of reality, and has nothing in common with the fetishistic con-
ception of the mother as simultaneously castrated and uncastrated. Instead, what is
in question is what Bruno (2013, p. 96) has referred to elsewhere as a “disavowal
of the real”, an expression that can be taken in two senses. First, the object that is
disavowed – which is simultaneously vitally important and is also capable of being
discarded – is real. Second, something of the real is also involved in accomplishing
this disavowal: the “sinthome”, an archaic French word that Lacan adopted in order
to designate the symptom with which the analysand has been able to identify at the
end of analysis, and which acts to bring about this distancing from the object. By
means of such a “disavowal”, the subject is able to experience as fully and radically
as possible the “splitting” between S and a that had already been operating since
their primal “division”.
The “real father”, another term that recurs throughout this book, originated in
Lacan’s seminar of 1956–1957, La relation d’objet, where it figured in a complex com-
binatory inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss; the “real” father is the figure who imposes
upon the subject a “symbolic castration” that bears on an “imaginary object” (Lacan,
1994, p. 269). The term reappears thirteen years later, at a crucial moment in The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis: the point at which Lacan approaches Freud’s three myths
of the father – the myths of Oedipus, the primal horde and Moses – subjecting them
to a critique that would open the path towards the formalisation of sexuation that
would be developed in 1971 and 1972, in . . . ou pire and The Psychoanalyst’s Knowl-
edge. In the formulas of sexuation, the father arises as a necessary logical supposition,
one that can be written as a propositional formula – ∃x.Φx , the at-least-one term
that is not subjected to the phallic function of castration (see Lacan, 2011, p. 22) –
thus stripping this figure of many of the imaginary associations that are inevitable
when words such as “father” or “mother” (to say nothing of “man” or “woman”)
are used.
The term “real father”, as Bruno employs it, is closely related to this math-
eme; it is distinct from the Name-of-the-Father, which in Lacan’s (1959, p. 481)
 Translator’s preface xi

early definitions, is a signifier that can arise in response to the neurotic’s call or
“summon[ing]”, serving as a foundation for his/her desire. Both the real father’s
position and what it produces are different. It is located outside the realm of the
signifier and Bruno will argue that this externality is the source of the difficulty
that Freud’s analysands experienced in recounting the fantasy that he discusses in
“A Child is Being Beaten”.They are unable to remember its second, crucial phase –
in which “I am being beaten by my father” (Freud, 1919a, p. 198) – because the father
in question is too close to the real father, who resists being integrated into the
symbolic. This fantasy seeks to stage the action of the real father in order to pro-
vide a sort of “myth” of the imposition of castration, which has already been thrust
upon the subject by the fact that s/he speaks; a figure who cannot be symbolised
becomes, nevertheless, the “agent” (Lacan, 1994, p. 269) of this imposition.
Bruno tends to use the term “real father” instead of the matheme because it
serves as a way of highlighting certain qualities of the figure of the exception:
there is something living in it, something that is far from being abstract. As Isabelle
Morin (2009) has argued, the expression “real father” emphasises, first, a cru-
cial distinction between the Freudian and Lacanian fathers. For Freud, the father
whom we encounter is, to a great extent, the dead father; Freud’s reading of the
Oedipal myth presents us with what Lacan, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
calls a “crude schema”, according to which the “murder of the father” leads to
the “jouissance of the mother” (Lacan, 1991, pp. 117, 113). In the other two myths
Freud discusses, the dead father is not only the foundation of the law, but is also
the figure who “holds the key to jouissance” and his death will provide the sons
with “access to it” (Morin, 2009, p. 365). Much of Lacan’s work, on the other hand,
emphasises the living father; it seeks to locate in this figure a trait of jouissance,
one that enables him to be seen as the agent of the subject’s castration. It is partly
in relation to this exceptional quality that the subject is then able to locate him/
herself either as “wholly” or as not entirely submitted to castration. Bruno’s use of
the term “real father” underscores the idea that, however unsayable this trait may
be, it can nevertheless be located within a particular figure in the family romance
(ibid., p. 367).

II
Lacan’s conception of analysis as terminable rather than as interminable serves as
a basis for Bruno’s treatment of both capitalism and Marx’s role as the inventor of
the symptom. For Bruno, capitalism is the most radical of all attempts to undo the
splitting of the subject.This position is the result of his reading of Lacan’s enigmatic
rethinking of his theory of discourse, which Lacan had first presented systematically
in 1969–1970, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Two years later, in 1972, he added
an important modification to this theory by introducing a fifth discourse, the capi-
talist discourse, which is characterised by a “foreclosure” of castration. According
to Lacan’s conception, the discourse of the master is a way of theorising the effects,
xii Translator’s preface

within specific social practices, of his own formulation that a “signifier represents
the subject for another signifier”; by 1972, he was writing this discourse as follows:

S1 S2

S a
The capitalist discourse involves a “twist” that reverses the two terms on the left:

S S2

S1 a
This reversal has two crucial effects. The first is that the master-signifier no
longer represents the subject for another signifier, and this change disrupts the
relation between knowledge and the subject of the unconscious (Holland, 2015,
pp. 99–112). As Bruno shows, in the discourse of the master, the S is able to com-
municate directly with the S2, but this is no longer the case with the capitalist dis-
course, where the S can only reach the S2 through the mediation of S1, the capitalist.
He develops the consequences of this distancing through an analysis of two literary
works, both of which involve attempts by the central characters to separate them-
selves from characteristics with which they are ill at ease: Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan
of the Stockyards and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. In Brecht’s play, Pierpont Mauler, the “meat king” of Chicago situates himself
in the place of a form of knowledge that would include unconscious knowledge,
while also attempting to distance himself from his own goodness, which he locates
as S, in the figure of the missionary Joan Dark. In Stevenson’s short novel, Henry
Jekyll also locates himself in S2 and seeks to separate himself from the pure “evil”
of the drives, which becomes embodied in Edward Hyde, in the place of S. For
Bruno, Stevenson thereby inaugurates a modern myth, distancing his work from the
tradition of the double, a figure that represents something like the repressed aspects
of the main character: his “suppressed acts of volition” (see Freud, 1919b, p. 236).
Hyde, however, is not Jekyll’s unconscious; instead, the opposite is the case. Jekyll,
in the place of knowledge, embodies what would be Hyde’s unconscious if the two
figures were not radically separated. Jekyll, through his use of technoscience, has
entered the capitalist discourse in order to effect and maintain a radical distance
between the unconscious and the drives, which he wants to know nothing about.
The rigid distancing of the subject from knowledge goes hand-in-hand with
a second effect of the capitalist discourse, one whose outlines can already be dis-
cerned in Jekyll’s reaction to Hyde. Whereas the structure of the discourse of the
master had rendered it impossible for the object a to communicate with the barred
subject, the capitalist discourse nullifies this impossibility; a vector goes directly
from a to S, thereby inducing the expectation that there can be a jouissance that
satisfies this subject.
 Translator’s preface xiii

Bruno’s construction of the capitalist discourse enables him to locate what he

considers to be certain limitations in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: this analysis, he
claims, does not provide a fully adequate account of our psychic subjection to capi-
talism. In revealing the hidden and causal role of surplus-value, Marx produced a
fundamental concept, which remains indispensable if we are to understand the char-
acter of capitalist exploitation. This concept does not, however, lay bare the nature
of capitalism’s libidinal and psychic hold over us. Bruno makes a similar argument
in relation to Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities, which masterfully lays
bare their concealed social character but fails to explain their libidinal force.
Instead, Bruno suggests that the capitalist discourse provides the key by which we
can understand our relation to jouissance within this mode of production. Although
the vector that leads directly from the object a to the barred subject promises jouis-
sance, it also inevitably disappoints us. Todd McGowan (2016, p. 11) has argued that
“capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as unsatisfying”; Bruno suggests that
the vector from a to S actually creates what Lacan (1970, p. 455) describes as a thirst,
the “thirst of the lack-in-jouissance [manque-à-jouir]”. It is not only the case that “the
more I drink, the thirstier I get” (p. 140); we also develop an appetite precisely for
this thirst, and the jouissance that we derive from lack becomes itself insatiable. As
Bruno points out, such formulations strike at the heart of the fundamental assump-
tions of marginalist economics.Vilfredo Pareto had argued that levels of satisfaction
can be calculated: consuming one commodity of a particular type will be more
satisfying than the immediate consumption of a second, which in turn will be more
enjoyable than a third. Once, however, the question of jouissance comes to contami-
nate that of satisfaction, it becomes impossible to envision an end to consumption.
According to this perspective, therefore, “it is not possible to exit from capitalism
through a new distribution of surplus-value”; this goal, instead, “can only occur through
a mutation in the subject’s relation to jouissance” (p. 162). This mutation, however, is
extraordinarily difficult to accomplish, precisely because of the same structural con-
dition that had made Jekyll believe that he could separate himself completely from
Hyde: the capitalist discourse has made any direct relation between the subject
and its unconscious impossible. Capitalism thus sustains and reproduces itself not
through ideology or by “formatting consciousnesses”, but by a specific discursive
operation: “by cutting the bond between the subject and the unconscious”, between S and
S2 (p. 165).This cut prevents the unconscious from providing the slightest treatment
or amelioration of the lack-in-jouissance that is located in S. Our inability to lessen
this particular lack entraps us more and more within a capitalist libido.
It is in this context that the symptom becomes important. Bruno argues that
the capitalist discourse stands as the most impenetrable obstacle to what analytic
practice can achieve and does so precisely because the direct relation between S
and a renders the disavowal of the real impossible.The symptom, however, moves in
precisely the opposite direction, and for this reason, Marx re-enters the argument.
Bruno proposes that Lacan’s encounter with Marx’s treatment of the symptom –
both its theoretical advances and its supposed limitations – would enable him to
develop a theory of the symptom that would have radical effects upon analytic
xiv Translator’s preface

practice. The beginning of this development can be found in Lacan’s text of 1966,
“On the subject who is finally in question”, in which he alludes to Marx’s relation to
the symptom:

it is difficult not to see that even before the advent of psychoanalysis, a

dimension that might be called that of the symptom was introduced, which
was articulated on the basis of the fact that it represents the return of truth as
such into the gap of a certain knowledge.
(Lacan, 1966, p. 194)

Bruno notes how, in almost the same breath, Lacan goes on to demarcate the limits
of Marx’s approach:

Symptoms remained somewhat vague when they were understood as repre-

senting some irruption of truth. In fact they are truth, being made of the same
wood from which truth is made, if we posit materialistically that truth is what
is instated on the basis of the signifying chain.
(ibid., p. 194)

In this passage, the symptom is not simply the index of truth, in a way that a strike
would point to the existence of exploitation; instead, because the signifier is a part
of it and creates surprise when we grasp its presence, the symptom is truth. The
development of this implication would lead Lacan, in the 1970s, to his new theory
of the symptom, and this theory bears witness to the impact of his encounter with
Marx, even if certain aspects of it also clearly situate his formulations outside Marx’s
concerns.
For Bruno, this new theory also arose from an axiom related to clinical practice.
At the beginning of our psychic lives, we are guided by a double determination; on
the one hand,“I want to get off on the Other”, but on the other hand,“I don’t want
the Other to get off on me” (p. 191). A series of theses unfolds from this axiom, and
it is a measure of the complexity and ambiguity of Lacan’s clinical and theoretical
legacy that some of these stand in direct opposition to other prominent readings
of Lacan’s work on the symptom. For example, Bruno explicitly criticises Colette
Soler’s (2003, p. 275) view that the symptom acts to mask the nonexistence of the
sexual relation: “The symptom is . . . what makes up, in every case, for the absence
of a sexual relation that can be written”. His position is that the symptom instead
arises first as a primal manifestation of the impossibility of the sexual relation, in the
form of the infant’s refusal to become One with the mother. He also disagrees with
Jacques-Alain Miller’s judgement, made in the light of Lacan’s discussions of James
Joyce, concerning the relation between the symptom and the Name-of-the-Father.
As a psychotic, Joyce had foreclosed the Name-of-the-Father, but his symptomatic
use of writing enabled him to make up for this foreclosure and avoid a psychotic
break. For Miller (2005, pp. vii – viii), this analysis indicates that Lacan’s examina-
tion of the “limits of the Oedipus complex and of the paternal myth” culminated
 Translator’s preface xv

in the reduction of the “Name-of-the-Father to the level of a symptom and uten-

sil”; the Name-of-the-Father becomes nothing more than a particular form of the
symptom. Bruno counters that such a formulation is correct as a reading of Joyce,
but that it misses the more general role of the symptom: to provide a far more radi-
cal way of making up for the limitations of the Name-of-the-Father.
The symptom enables the subject to surpass the Name-of-the-Father’s – and, for
that matter, the real father’s – inability to open onto the right – feminine – side of the
table of sexuation: the side where “phallocentrism fails, and where poetry becomes
possible” (p. 166). This can occur with the emergence of the sinthome, which would
also embody more fully a position that is already present in our symptoms. The
sinthome here provides a place outside the deadlock between subject and Other that
results from the initial clinical axiom: the sinthome is neither subject nor Other but
instead a third element, one that enables us to experience a new relation between
knowledge and truth, and meaning and the real. A certain kind of knowledge comes
to be located in neither the subject nor the Other, but in this form of the symp-
tom; this knowledge will not, however, exclude the disruptive effects of truth. The
symptom will also be the place of a jouis-sens, in which meaning and the real are
no longer, as they usually are, mutually exclusive (Lacan, 1974–1975, p. 11); instead,
“the symptom, through an inconceivable circuit [tour]”, will “kno[t] them together” (p. 152).
Such considerations do not, in themselves, show us how we can exit from capi-
talism; Bruno does argue, however, that analytic practice and the sinthome that results
from it are antithetical to the capitalist discourse. While the radical disjunction
between the unconscious and the drive establishes a direct connection between a
and S, thereby heightening the subject’s subjection to surplus-jouissance, analysis
seeks to induce the subject – through the disavowal of the real – to cast away the
object. The final sections of this book explore various aspects of the hope, which
is admittedly razor-thin, that identifying with the symptom will provide sufficient
numbers of people with a capacity to leave capitalist jouissance behind. Two sec-
tions in particular – the discussions of problems within psychoanalytic schools and
of Catherine Millot’s quasi-mystical experience of the not-all – call for a fuller
explanation of certain of his references.
The emergence of the sinthome can have numerous effects; it can serve as a basis
for a new kind of social bond among analysts and it can also open up an access to
a jouissance that goes beyond the limitations imposed by castration. In examining
the character of the bonds among analysts, Bruno develops a distinction between
“institution” and “association”, an opposition based on certain indications that are
found in the “Letter of Dissolution” of 5 January 1980 – in which Lacan declared
that he was dissolving the École freudienne de Paris3 – and his seminar, “The Other is
Missing”, which followed ten days later.
In the “Letter of Dissolution”, Lacan (1980a, p. 130) defines an “institution”
as the “effect of a consolidated group”, thus linking it directly to Freud’s analysis
of the army and the church in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He
then sets such institutions in opposition to the analytic discourse, arguing that the
Freudian school had been working “at the expense of the discursive effect that is
xvi Translator’s preface

expected from an experiment, when it is Freudian. One knows what price was paid
for Freud’s having permitted the psychoanalytic group to win out over discourse,
becoming a Church” (ibid., p. 130). Suffering from the effects of the “deviations
and compromises” that had “blunt[ed] its progress while degrading its use” (ibid.,
p. 129), this school had failed “to produce Analysts within it who would be of the
requisite level” (Lacan, 1980b, p. 133). Hoping to found a new school, Lacan (1980a,
p. 130) called for members who would “Demonstrat[e] through acts” that the insti-
tutionalisation of the École freudienne “is not of their doing” (ibid., p. 130). He asked
those who were willing to take part in this school to write to him, “declar[ing] to
me that [they are] interested in continuing with me” (Lacan, 1980b, p. 134). If they
did “so in terms that do not, to my mind, contradict the assertion in advance, they
will be accepted by me to associate with [anyone who] does the same” (ibid., p. 134,
emphasis added).
Bruno bases the distinction between institution and association on these state-
ments, arguing that Lacanian schools have not been exempt from the pernicious
effects of leaders who are determined to turn an association into a group. On the
other hand, he also argues that an association can become an institution through the
effects of “envy”, a term that he borrows from Melanie Klein (1957, pp. 183, 186),
who understood envy as the libidinal force that “spoil[s] . . . the object” and the
“capacity for enjoyment”, thus creating a situation in which “the envied person is
felt to possess what is at bottom most prized and desired . . . a good object, which also
implies a good character and sanity” (ibid., p. 203). For Bruno, in cases in which envy
“threatens to undo the associative foundation”, then “the solution becomes dissolu-
tion” (p. 178).This argument is related directly to his explanation that the identifica-
tion with one’s symptom at the end of analysisinvolves the acceptance of one’s own
radical singularity.The effect of this singularity is to “rende[r] null and void all forms
of comparison”; it thus constitutes the “only way to get out of envy” ­(p. 167, note 8).
Envy here becomes a sign that one has not yet identified with the symptom.
In the section entitled “Gelassenheit”, Bruno treats the more or less mystical
experiences that Catherine Millot recounts in Abîmes ordinaires (2001) as an instance
of the symptom’s ability to open up access to aspects of the not-all, aspects that
would not – or would no longer be – impeded by the limitations imposed by the
Name-of-the-Father. In Millot’s own case, these “ordinary abysses” began before,
and precipitated, her entry into analysis; at the beginning of her book, she recounts
three of them. The first occurred when she was six, after her father, a diplomat,
had been posted to a position in the French embassy in Hungary and her family
was moving into a villa near Budapest. Asked to find something on a lower floor,
she began to walk down the stairs, when “suddenly the world emptied out. In an
instant, it had become deserted. No longer any before, no longer any afterwards, no
longer any parents, no longer anyone. For several seconds, I was absolutely alone”
(Millot, 2001, p. 11). To write of her experience in this way, however, is already too
coherent: “it is even too much to say ‘I’, or rather it would have to be said that it
was an ‘I’ without qualities, a pure stain of bare existence. On the empty staircase
with nothing around” (ibid., p. 11).
 Translator’s preface xvii

Something of this sense of “bare existence” recurred six years later, shortly after
Millot and her family had arrived in another city, Helsinki. Alone in a room filled
with packing boxes, she again suddenly experiences a

void, and even more, the infinity of a sidereal space that was opening up.
A sudden cutting had snatched [arrachée] me from myself and sucked me into
light-years, leaving a self [moi] that was no longer anything like me, in this
strange room, reducing me with extraordinary quickness to a ridiculously
small point: the “I”, no longer with any identity, was vertiginously carried
away – more abducted [raptée] than spirited away or ravished [ravie] – to
cosmic heights.
(ibid., pp. 11–12)

In this state of bewilderment, Millot seeks refuge by invoking her “own proper
name, the effect of which was to call me back to common realities” (ibid., p. 11).
Her third such experience occurred after she had reached adulthood, when she
was moving once again to a new place, this time alone. Having been assigned to
a teaching post in a village whose name began with “Mort [Death] . . .”, she was
driving a rented car when a tyre exploded, nearly propelling her into an oncom-
ing truck. Her first reaction was to feel that she had survived only by a miracle;
“almost dying on the road to Mort . . .” became a sort of “obscure verdict and a no
less obscure early release” (ibid., p. 13). Then, during the next few days, “A great
void set in” (ibid., p. 13). She felt as if “an invisible lid” had been lifted from the sky,
“allowing a bottomless hole to be seen”. Shortly afterwards, the void “extended”
and became

an almost material, interstitial, separating void. It reigned in the intervals

between things like a crystal in which each thing shone in isolation, for it
was a magnifying void. It gave birth to another space and another time of
vibrant immobility, in which one ceased to be ahead of oneself [d’être en avant
de soi-même], always a bit elsewhere. Everything was there, simply, and noth-
ing was lacking, where the nothing had become obvious, and presence was
made more acute by a background of absence, so that what was beyond was
dissipated. It was as if the world was lit by a more intense light.
(ibid., p. 15)

At the end of this period, she left Mort . . ., and shortly afterwards, began an
analysis with Lacan. When she described her experiences, “He answered me with
a word that did not have the appearance of an interpretation and was still less a
clinical label. What I had described to him, he told me, was Gelassenheit” (ibid.,
p. 16). “Gelassenheit”, as Bret W. Davis (2010, p. xi) notes, is a word commonly
used in German, where it refers to a “sense of ‘calm composure’”, especially in an
“existential or religious experience of letting-go, being-let, and letting-be”. Millot
recognised this word from her reading of Meister Eckhart, but Lacan’s reference
xviii Translator’s preface

was especially to Martin Heidegger’s rethinking of the concept. Translators of Hei-

degger commonly render it in English as “releasement” (ibid., p. xi). Releasement
involves leaving behind our common mode of thinking, which is a “willful repre-
sentation, an objectification that transcends – climbs over – things to determine a
transcendental horizon which determines the forms through which things can only
appear as objects to subjects” (ibid., p. xiii). With releasement, one lets go not only
of such representations, but also, and especially, of the “will-to-representation” that
underlies them (Heidegger, 1995, p. 71). Accordingly, “releasement lies – if we may
speak of lying here – outside the distinction between activity and passivity”, since
such an opposition depends upon the “domain of the will” (ibid., p. 70 also see
Davis, p. xi). This sense of releasement gives us a way to theorise the experience of
the not-all, which is located on the feminine side of the table of sexuation. Bruno,
in turn, seeks to connect the not-all to the sinthome and to see in it something that
is at the furthest remove from capitalist jouissance.

III
Translating Lacanian terminology is frequently difficult, and translators are often
obliged to leave a number of fundamental terms in French or to stretch – or
dismember – them on the Procrustean bed of the foreign language. In the present
case, this dilemma began with the French title of the book, which presents Lacan
as Marx’s “passeur”, a reference that has had to be lopped off in the English trans-
lation. The word is the technical term for one of the participants in the “passe”,
a term that itself, in this context, refers not to the analysand’s movement to the
position of analyst, but rather to the procedure in which s/he testifies about what
has made this change possible. The term “passe” is translated here, as elsewhere, as
the “pass”, a term that needs to be approached with some caution. To Anglophone
ears, to “pass” is too often understood as to “succeed” – in, for example, a competi-
tive examination. To understand the verdict that the pass has occurred as a success
and the opposite judgement as a pure and simple failure is to cover over the more
complex sense of the term: the pass is an attempt to transmit something about the
movement of change that has occurred. In this procedure, a passant, the analysand
who has authorised him/herself to become an analyst, explains to two passeurs the
changes that enabled this to take place. The passeurs then, in turn, seek to convey
the character of the change to a committee of analysts; the indirect character of
the testimony is part of an attempt to ensure that the effect of the testimony will
not be produced, for example, by personal magnetism. Instead, something in the
passeurs’ words may perhaps allow the contours of the analytic act to be grasped.
Stuart Schneiderman (1983, p. 67) and others have translated “passeur” as “passer”,
a word that I have also used. For “passant”, I have chosen the rather inelegant term,
“passand”, on the basis of its analogy with the only slightly more elegant, but much
more familiar term, “analysand”.
Following Bruce Fink (2006, p. 764) and others, I have used the direct English
cognate of the French word “signification” in order to translate it. “Sens”, which is
 Translator’s preface xix

itself related to Freud’s term “Sinn”, has been translated as both “meaning” and
“sense”. In using the latter word, I am following the practice of the Standard Edition
of Freud’s works in English translation, which entitles the seventeenth lecture of the
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis “The Sense of Symptoms”. It is this lecture
that Bruno discusses in the first chapter of the final section of this book, and which
gives this chapter its title.
In the French version of this book, Bruno uses the verb “scinder” in a new way:
it names the capitalist discourse’s operation of breaking the direct linkage between
knowledge (S2) and the barred subject (S). I have rendered this term as “sunder”.
– John Holland, Nantes, August 2018

Notes
1 One can also remember that in the same collective work, Reading Capital, Louis Althusser
(1965, p. 27; also see Althusser, 1993, p. 170) had argued that Marx performed a “sympto-
matic” reading” of the texts of classical political economy.
2 It can be noted, for example, that Bruno’s seminar in 1998–1999 at the department of
psychoanalysis of the University of Paris 8 was devoted to the capitalist discourse and
included readings of the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Saint Joan of the
Stockyards. The present work serves as a way of nailing down and situating some of the
developments of that seminar.
3 The questions that have been raised concerning the provenance of the “Letter of Dissolu-
tion” (Roudinesco, 1986, pp. 651–653) will not be addressed here.

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INTRODUCTION

“The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is
turned into the problem of descending from language to life.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

“Marx was also a poet, a poet who had the advantage of having succeeded in
starting a political movement.”
Jacques Lacan, 15 November 1977

“Warning to non-communists: All is common property, even God.”

—Charles Baudelaire1

Psychoanalytic causality and the resilience of capitalism

Each day, as it perpetuates itself ever more completely, capitalism shows its inability
to construct a civilisation that would break, definitively, with its prehistory. The fall
of the Berlin Wall in August 1989 marked the end of a credible communist alter-
native, at least in the form of what is known as “real socialism”. Correlatively, and
even for those who take issue with it not only as a mode of production but as a
form of social organisation, capitalism has come to seem endowed with a resilience
that has forced us to break with earlier judgements that its ascension was resist-
ible. The question of its possible replacement remains abstract, purely formal and
only becomes truly urgent for those who fear that capitalism may end up as the
worst of all “utopias”: an “end of history” that could really put an end to history.
Furthermore, even if we suppose that capitalism could be replaced, what its replace-
ment could be must still be determined, and this may make us wary of some blind
“deconstruction” of it. To take up these two questions, we must first, as a prereq-
uisite, ask whether all civilisation is in league with progress. When “progress” refers
2 Introduction

to cultural triumphs that have come to seem definitive – the development of the
productive forces of science and technology – as long as their expansion does not
harm nature, then there is no reason to stigmatise it.
However, in this sense, progress is more a means than an end. Authentic progress
would involve the extension of human rights and putting them into practice, an
equitable distribution of wealth, a lifting of the barriers of segregation, a satisfactory
mixture of individual freedoms, respect for others and so on. Yet, even if commu-
nism were to come about as a sort of addendum to the current situation, this would
not suffice. There is effectively no guarantee that such an optimal social state, bal-
anced between the golden age and the communist promise of a better life, would
be anything more than a fantasy; no one is certain that we would not end up under
the “black sun of Melancholy” (Nerval, 1851, p. 41) or the grey clouds of ennui.
What matters is not simply to renounce the diabolical underside of progress:
in concrete terms, capitalism’s mad “kinetics”, to use Sloterdijk’s (2007) expres-
sion. There is little doubt that in the twenty-second century, and, let us hope, even
before then, people will feel the same dismay about financial bubbles – which serve
only to concentrate money and impoverish people – that we feel about the Mayan
religious practice of human sacrifice. What we deem to be inevitable today may
come to seem unthinkable.2 Progress must nevertheless be called into question, for
even in its least dubious ethical ambitions, it disregards the nature of satisfaction and
remains a serf to attempts to evaluate levels and degrees of jouissance.
The pre-eminence of jouissance over satisfaction is all the more difficult to
contest because satisfaction is itself defined by a threshold of jouissance, one that
must be attained in order to reach the point at which something is “enough”. The
“discontents” of civilisation: that was Freud’s name for the ferocity of the superego,
which insists that we are guilty for being alive, something punishable by the forfeit
of jouissance. In the light of this diagnosis, how can we exit from this structural
malaise, which has its origins in the inventiveness of language and the mortifica-
tion of the thing through symbolisation? How can each of us have the opportunity
to depose the “dark God” that is the superego (Lacan, 1973d, p. 275)? This God is
nothing more than a paper tiger, but it is precisely its lack of flesh and blood that
makes it so difficult to defeat. We may not want to propose any utopian vision of a
satisfaction that would either be devoid of all jouissance or – and this amounts to
the same thing – would procure an absolute jouissance.Yet how can we envision a
satisfaction that, even if it is not relieved of the burden of the superego, would, at
least, be distant enough from the superego that its virulence would be deactivated?
A solution would lie not in some general askesis that would do away with jouis-
sance, but rather in devaluing jouissance. In what follows, we shall attempt to define
this devaluation, but here, at the outset, it is already possible to note the pivotal role
of the notion of value, which is fundamental to Karl Marx’s thought, but which is
also found, more discreetly but just as decisively, in Jacques Lacan’s work.
What allows one to say that psychoanalysis, which has so little influence in the
world in general and in politics in particular, is precisely what we cannot do with-
out? It enables us not so much to take leave of the fantasy of progress, but to take it
 Introduction 3

apart, in order to adjust the levers and dials of jouissance. Jouissance is neither pleasure
nor pain. It is what Baudelaire was talking about: that exquisite, intoxicating scent
that changes unexpectedly when we seek to concentrate it, to make it “divine”.Then
it becomes a horrible stench, the stink of rot, since jouissance attains its nirvana in
death.3 Psychoanalysis undertakes to liberate the body that has been colonised by jou-
issance, so that this jouissance can make way for satisfaction.This does not imply that
jouissance must be renounced; instead, it will no longer be subjected to an endless and
unreasonable attempt at escalation, and this change would not be to the taste of those
who traffic in a marketable jouissance. Lacan himself said that psychoanalysis would
lay down its arms when faced with “civilisation’s increasing impasses”, although he
did add that this would lead people to consult “the instructions in my Écrits” (1968a,
p. 349). Psychoanalysis can hope to play such a role because of the very texture of
its experience, which rejects every possible combination of biological, sociological,
and psychological determinants. Other approaches combine these determinants in
varying degrees – on a scale that goes from zero to just about everything – in order
to arrive at a satisfying explanation. It would be a mistake to deduce, on the basis of
Freud’s resolute determinism, a concept of the subject, who, at the end of analysis,
would “know” her/himself. To put this in more modern terms, such a subject would
be transparent to her/himself, once s/he had made a complete circuit around the
biological, sociological and psychological variants that determine her/his history.
Let us say, at the outset, why this would be a mistake.
Suppose that a particular analysand’s father and mother are political refugees
from Spain, while another analysand is a victim of paedophilia and incest. A third
has excellent parents and a close family and has never experienced any events that
could be thought of as traumatic, whereas the father of yet another analysand was
regularly cheating on his wife and leading a double life. The grandfather of a fifth
analysand was a Nazi collaborator, who apparently tortured members of the resist-
ance, and so on. Whether these realities are viewed as sociological (“her parents
are political refugees”), psychological (“his uncle sexually abused him”), or even
in terms of Saint DNA, and regardless of the consequences that – as the analysand
believes – they have had on him/her, these realities cannot be changed.
How is it possible to change the effects of what cannot itself be changed unless
we have a novel conception of causality? In other words, the fact that a person
has parents who are political refugees (or rich capitalists), has an uncle who is an
incestuous paedophile, or has a developmental disorder does not make that person
blameless in relation to the symptomatic result of these experiences, whatever they
may be.
The paradox is that renouncing this innocence enables an analysand to wash
away her/his feelings of guilt, by recognising the part that s/he had played in con-
structing the symptom. Having acknowledged this, the analysand can then subtract
her/himself from the status of someone who, at birth, was the object of his parents’
jouissance (this is the basis of the passivity that Freud (1915a) considers to be one of
the poles of the drive). The jouissance that they obtain from the subject can go to
the point of making her/him nothing more than the puppet of their desire.
4 Introduction

Once he had discovered repression, Freud wasted no time in drawing attention

to resistance (Widerstand), the force that opposed its lifting. Freud provided several
hypotheses about where this force comes from: the unconscious, the id, the ego
and the superego. All of these may well be correct, but perhaps it would be bet-
ter to define resistance in an even more general way: as a force that uses reality in
order to allow repression to remain intact, for the sake of a refusal of knowledge.
As Lacan noted, resistance comes from neither the analyst nor the analysand, but
rather from the inertia that reality opposes to any rift between the cause (which
concerns how a subject grasps what he or she is an effect of) and determinism
(which concerns reality). From this point of view, we can say that resistance neutral-
ises the cause in favour of determinism, while psychoanalysis is supposed to liberate the cause
from determinism.4 By distinguishing among biological, sociological and psychologi-
cal determinants, and by trying to weigh the respective importance of each, we
place an ideological mask over the fact that reality can only be defined by including its
subject-effect.5 Consequently, the subject, in making itself a response to this effect,
confronts reality with what Lacan calls the real of this response, which takes the
form of the symptom. These initial considerations are certainly not self-evident,
and they will be drawn out and developed in what follows, but we also cannot
ignore them; if we were to do so, it would be, as Robert Musil (1930, p. 494) puts
it, “like trying to hammer a nail into a fountain’s jet of water”. The same problem
arose in this form just before the birth of psychoanalysis: was a particular hysterical
symptom produced by a direct physical action (a particular accident) or by the fear
provoked by this accident? There is no “either/or” answer to this question because,
even if fear – an effect of the subject – did not provoke the appearance of symp-
toms, another consideration remains. When we encounter an hysterical symptom,
we should suppose that the subject has played a part, unconsciously in this case, in
its appearance; we should not settle simply for speculating on a cause-and-effect
relationship, which, as a result of as-yet-undiscovered chemical pathways, would be
responsible for a paralysis that has no known organic basis. Similarly, if an analysand
tells you that when s/he leans out the window, s/he can hear the roofs talking
to her/him, it is only through self-discovery and through coming to accept that
s/he actually is the voice of the roof that this analysand can come to distance her/
himself from the hallucination.

An erratic practice
Psychoanalysis is an erratic practice. An “erratic” is one of those irregular blocks of
ice that breaks away from a glacier when it is melting. This was already happening
during Freud’s lifetime.Without getting caught up in the many deviations that were
explicitly rejected by Freud, yet still continue, in some cases, to lay claim to the
name of psychoanalysis (Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung,Wilhelm Reich), nor in the brazen
shamelessness of old-fashioned hypnosis when it tries to present itself as some sort
of neo-psychoanalysis, let us note that, after Freud, there has been a kind of disper-
sion and dislocation of psychoanalysis (to limit ourselves to the most neutral of
 Introduction 5

terms). This has not at all slowed down and, in the absence of Freud’s speech [dire],
confusion has, at least for a while, become the rule.
In an unpublished lecture given in San Francisco in 1946 under the title “Social
science and sociological tendencies in psychoanalysis” (published in French as La
psychanalyse revisitée [1972]), Theodor Adorno – someone who, incidentally, was
never an ardent Freudian – provides a compelling critique of revisions of Freud’s
work, especially those of Karen Horney, who, in the 1930s, was one of the first
to oppose Freud in the “Jones – Freud controversy” concerning feminine sexual-
ity in the 1930s (see Guillen, 2007). Adorno was taking aim at a psychoanalysis
that had been “culturalised” in the wrong way, skipping over infantile sexuality
and completely misunderstanding the implications of Freud’s introduction of the
death drive. By way of Horney (whose dubious friendship with Matthias Göring,
Herman’s elder cousin, should suffice to discredit her approach), Eric Fromm also
came in for criticism, although he had been working intermittently with Max
Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research.6
The ensuing post-war period was monopolised by the confrontation between
Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. These two theorists injected divergent approaches
into analytic practice, which remain active today in the International Psychoana-
lytic Association (IPA). The first of these approaches overestimates the ego, which
is thought to be able to master the conflict between the id and the superego;
the second provides an over-interpretation of the unconscious, thus understanding
transference in the present as the resurgence of something much earlier: the initial
“I love you . . . me neither”7 of the mother-child relationship. Both of these neglect
any examination of the role of the symptom, a primal rebellion against the sense
that this relation has no exit [huit clos]. In both cases, the theory leaves behind an
aporia for practice: for Anna Freud (1936), analytic treatment ends with the sub-
ject’s “adaptation” to a “way of life”, without having drawn the necessary conclu-
sions from his/her symptom; for Melanie Klein (1957, p. 234), it ends with envy, the
destructiveness of which could only be overcome “to some extent”, as she had the
honesty to acknowledge in her final book.
When Lacan burst onto the analytic scene at the end of the 1950s, his work pro-
vided a new way of understanding analysis and introduced a new era. Lacan began
as a Kleinian and continued to have great respect for two British psychoanalysts
who followed in her footsteps, D. W. Winnicott and Michael Balint, even if he also
criticised their work. Lacan is often credited with having been the first to provide
a psychoanalytic interpretation of the mirror stage, in a presentation given at the
1936 International Congress of the IPA in Marienbad.8 It is true that this revitalis-
ing and innovative theory served as the basis for his critique of ego-psychology
(and, by extension, of Anna Freud), for it argues that the ego, as a result of the way
it takes shape, is a form of imaginary misconception [méconnaissance] and that it is
pointless to make its strengthening and reinforcing the desired outcome of psy-
choanalysis. However, an exaggerated emphasis on this theory of the ego leads one
to neglect what is at least as decisive for Lacan’s ensuing theory: his article, “Logical
time and the assertion of anticipated certainty” (Lacan, 1945), written when the
6 Introduction

tide of World War II had turned against the Nazis. In this text, Lacan argues that
the act precedes knowledge and is its basis, and not the reverse. This rather abrupt
rejection of the French tradition of spiritualist philosophy, which held that action
is the result of a cognitive process, would become the cornerstone of the dialectic
to come: the enunciation [énonciation], as act, goes beyond the statement [énoncé].
Consider this admirable formulation: “The point is not to know whether I speak
of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when
I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak” (Lacan, 1957c, p. 430).
The anticipation that characterises the act would only take on its full signifi-
cance after Lacan had theorised “structure”, a term borrowed from linguistics and
Lévi-Straussian anthropology. Here again, there is room for misunderstanding: dur-
ing a certain period, Lacan was classified as a structuralist (as were Roland Barthes,
Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser). This is a theoretical blunder because, for
Lacan, structure was not a subset of the universe; instead, it enables us to grasp a
real that the concept of “universe” can neither exhaust nor even approach without
falsity. In a certain sense, Lacan got himself out of structuralism by taking a door
opened up by twentieth-century mathematics, and especially Gödel, who came
along at just the right moment with his demonstration of formal undecidability
(see Nagel & Newman, 1986). This demonstration destroyed the possibility of cre-
ating a mathematics that could cover the universal.9
Even worse, Lacan’s reading of Freud’s death drive has been misunderstood. He
characterises it not as some mysterious biological force, but rather as the power
[puissance] of symbolic nihilation [néantisation] through language, thus stripping lan-
guage of its instrumental, communicative function and making it the condition of
the existence of the unconscious.10 The unconscious is a form of knowledge that is,
in part, real, which is based on the fact that its status as unconscious is confirmed as
one goes about interpreting it. This would serve as the basis for some decisive and
unprecedented statements during the 1970s, in particular in reference to feminine
jouissance and the symptom.
This is an abbreviated survey, but it at least enables us to pinpoint the essential
isomers of psychoanalysis. To go further, we would need to start making a list of
the misinterpretations that are continuing to squander Freud’s discovery. I shall only
mention two examples of them here.
Freud is often considered as the source of the idea that the prohibitions that a
subject sets itself involve internalising (or “introjecting”, to use the technical term)
prohibitions established by the parents. So be it. We could use Freud’s texts on the
superego as the basis for this position. To do so, however, would be to put the cart
before the horse. We forget that, according to this thesis, parental prohibitions do
not fundamentally explain why children submit to them, in a servitude that is both
voluntary and unconscious; instead, they are what generate desire. In Totem and Taboo,
Freud (1912–13) states that it is the prohibition communicated to the sons by the
father or the father’s wives that leads them to turn murder into the first epiphany of
desire; only then, secondarily, do they internalise the parental prohibitions. In other
words, the prohibition is the condition that enables desire to emerge. How are the
 Introduction 7

daughters involved in this? This question is more delicate: for them, the prohibition
concerning the father is a prerequisite, but it makes the prohibition that bears on
the mother more uncertain. This accounts for both the “ravaging” character of the
mother-daughter relation, and, more positively, the detour through homosexual
initiation that often paves the way for the encounter with a man. Lacan conceptu-
alised Freud’s immense work in this area in order to shed some light on questions
that had, until then, remained shrouded behind prejudices of all kinds: he posited
that “law and repressed desire are one and the same thing” (Lacan, 1963, p. 660). In
other words, the law gives form to desire; this wipes out the ideologies (whether
they are libertarian or restrict freedom) that make the opposition between desire
and social repression a sort of universal passkey.
The other example is more bibliographical. It is common knowledge that a
certain Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has distinguished himself by his persistent efforts
to destroy psychoanalysis, especially with his contribution to the famous “black
book” dealing with the field (see Meyer, 2005). It should perhaps also be noted that
this same author, who was interested in hypnosis, had already perpetrated a book
intended to introduce Lacan to Anglophone readers, entitled Lacan, The Absolute
Master (Borch-Jacobsen, 1990). This book should not be underrated, because it
presents a serious reading of Lacan’s Écrits and seminars (with the important excep-
tion of the later seminars). However, a strain is put on the book by the author’s
excessive taste for philosophy, which leads him to make himself the absolute master
of the “absolute master”. In the chapter on the phallus, after having done a good
job of explaining Lacan’s (1958) article “The Signification of the Phallus”, Borch-
Jacobsen (1990, p. 217) turns to some of Lacan’s much earlier texts in order to
state that, in the final analysis and “in spite of all Lacan’s negations”, the phallus is
fundamentally imaginary:

it is not surprising that the phallus, actually penile and masculine, is simulta-
neously so asexual in Lacan. It is nothing but the object in which the subject,
before any sexual characterization, represents himself to himself, in his fixed,
permanent, substantial identity.The phallus, erected and majestic, is the statue
of the ego . . ., the Vorbild or Gestalt typical of humanity in general.
(ibid., p. 218)

After this pedantic rigmarole, we could begin to think that Lacan’s style is a para-
digm of Boileau’s vision of the poetic arts. How, on the basis of a reading of Borch-
Jacobsen, can we understand the cutting edge of Lacan’s views on the phallus,
namely, that it is a symbolic operator that, unlike every other signifier, has no signi-
fied, but instead conditions the signified-effects of every other signifier?

Psychoanalysis and science: an impossible glasnost

After the era in which the “absolute master” was exalted, we have now reached
the moment when the alleged “guru” is being put to death, with greater and lesser
8 Introduction

degrees of brutality. Freud was subjected to similar misfortunes; in France, for exam-
ple, he was accused of being a coarse German, so that speakers of the more refined and
subtle romance languages had no reason to involve themselves with psychoanalysis.11
Following the looting of his legacy in the university, Lacan is certainly no longer
the darling of the French media, as he once was. There has been an obscurantist
regression, which needs to be examined analytically and understood as a symptom.
Rather than focusing nostalgically on the once-mighty Lacanian empire, which
had its own problems, we ought to try to decipher this situation.
Before doing so, however, we must consider whether Lacan established psychoa-
nalysis, which Freud discovered, as a science. Freud himself never gave up on its sci-
entific, or even scientistic, character.The keenness of his observational skills and the
rigour of his reasoning were as outstanding as his inventiveness. Lacan had another
objective: to raise the question of the singularity of psychoanalysis in relation to
science, while also retaining its scientific character, as Freud had conceived of it.
This singularity can already be grasped in the caesura between experience and
structure (see Bruno, 2000). In “L’étourdit”, Lacan (1973b, p. 483) defined structure
as “the aspheric that is contained in the articulation of language, inasmuch as an
effect of the subject can be grasped through it”.12 This is another way of saying
that the subject of the enunciation, the subject that is speaking about itself in the
present, is heterogeneous to the subject that it is speaking about (“aspherical”).
It also highlights how the subject, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term – the
divided ­subject – is a consequence of language; at the same time, this subject is
only an effect to the extent that it can grasp itself in the “aspherical” revealed by
language. This theoretical assertion gives a good sense of the division that exists
within psychoanalysis: it is divided between a doctrine (the knowledge developed
by Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts) and the singular experience constituted
by each analytic treatment. Could it be said that the doctrine is ever “applied” to
the treatment? Perhaps, but only on the condition that we do not forget that such
an application always leads to the aspects of the case that cause problems for the
theory, a situation that also occurs frequently in hard science.The originality of psy-
choanalysis lies elsewhere. If the purpose of treatment is the emancipation “of ”, or
“from”, desire, we must look into just what the possessive term “of desire” implies;
it means both “desire is emancipated” and “I emancipate myself from, or of, desire”.
This is one of the key aspects of the method Lacan has given us.13 In its first sense
– “desire is emancipated” – there are no objections: it is liberated when it is allowed
to be recognised and accepted in terms of what “I” say and do. Thus, in one of
Freud’s (Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 135) first cases, Elisabeth von R. came to recog-
nise that the “painful fatigue” of her left thigh was a masked indicator of her desire
to be loved by her brother-in-law, the husband of a sister who had just died. In its
second sense, in which “I emancipate myself from, or of desire,” it is something else.
Desire is metonymic, like the ferret, which runs from object to object, without
ever being satisfied14; it is maintained only as unsatisfied (this is another thesis that
the study of hysteria enabled Freud to set forth). Thus, in order for desire to stop
recycling itself through endless and precarious demands and for the subject to stop
 Introduction 9

always putting off the act until tomorrow, analysis seeks also, and especially, to get
him “to know if he wants what he desires”, as Lacan (1961, pp. 571–572) writes
in his “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation”. This game between will and
desire signals a dialectic that is opposed both to an indecisive desire – as we have
just seen – and to a desire that would veer into a monomania that would denature
it. What enables desire to be satisfied and not to lose itself in a headlong rush is the
alternation between disappearance and resurgence. One must thus be careful not to
confuse a “resolute desire” with a frozen desire.
The subject who begins an analysis is indeterminate, in the sense that what has
determined her/his particular history is, to a large extent, unknown. Free associa-
tion, and even more fully, Durcharbeitung, “working through” (see Freud, 1914) – if
we take “through” to mean both a lateral movement and a movement beyond –
will enable the subject to reconstruct the succession of determinations that have
produced her/him as s/he is. It happens that, at the very point at which the subject
could finally see her/himself as a whole, s/he discovers that s/he is not the product
of these determinations, which have nevertheless been proven and experienced.
S/he exists only as a process of detaching her/himself from them, a process during
which s/he rewrites her/his history. It cannot even be said that this crucial process
is simply a matter of mourning “who I was”; instead, it involves a “new love”, and
through it – whether s/he yields to her/his desire or not – s/he adopts the symp-
tom that s/he now makes into her/his cause.15 This border defines her/his history
as a past that can never be rebuilt, and in order to make it perceptible, Freud and
Lacan paid great attention to poets; through them, freedom, which is a kind of
ethical synonym for infinity, finds its true place, a place to which the judiciary will
make a civilising accomodation, but always much later.
Two additional comments must be added to this decisive remark. The first con-
cerns transference. One of the fundamental achievements of Lacan’s return to Freud
lay in his separation of repetition and transference. The latter is not reduced to what
had originally characterised the subject’s relation to her/his parents, since it also
enlists a sexual reality that is aroused by the analyst’s presence. In other words, the real
of the analyst prevents the analysand’s relation to her/him from being an exact repro-
duction of the old relation with the parents.This is the case whether the analytic rela-
tion is approached in terms of love (“I could never do without you”) or of distrust,
which is more difficult to confess; it took several months for the Rat Man to tell
Freud (1909, p. 285) that he suspected him of being the brother of a criminal who
was also named Freud and who had just been condemned to death. Both love and
distrust are ways of trying to reach what had first been missed in the relation with
the parents: a knowledge of whether the Other’s love was authentic or duplicitous.
Nevertheless, analysis will always only have one outcome: the discovery and verifi-
cation that there is no Other who can definitively guarantee to us what the Other
wants. The analyst’s only function is to allow her/himself to bear the consequences
of this failure, and this authorises Lacan to define satisfaction as what puts an end to
the mirage of truth.16 This is a way not of giving in to scepticism, but of showing that
truth cannot be said completely, and that this truth is known only in the unconscious.
10 Introduction

The second comment is connected with what Freud began to specify with the
processes of primal identification, and which Lacan, in “Radiophonie” (1970), treated
as the incorporation of the symbolic body into the bodily organism. It is common
today to observe that before speaking, and even before being born, the child is spo-
ken of. We could then think that when s/he begins to speak, the subject may well
be offered every latitude – although this is not always the case – to rectify what does
not suit her/him in the way that s/he has been spoken of.
This supposes that s/he could free her/himself from suggestion.Yet this supposi-
tion forgets that in this structural incorporation, the whole grammar of the drive is
set up, and this takes place in the form of “it speaks [ça parle] about her”: it manifests
itself in Dora’s thumb-sucking, in the Wolf Man’s constipation, and even in Schre-
ber’s transformation of the gaze into sound. The addiction to the objects of the
drive dates from this. To believe that it could be abolished by de-conditioning the
drive is to ignore an important fact: such de-conditioning does not operate when
it is confronted with the grammar of the drives because this grammar does not
result from conditioning.Thus, subjects can act on this grammar in another way: by
deciphering – more often through construction than through interpretation – the
way in which this grammar has been inscribed on their bodies.
These considerations can suggest a more concrete way of approaching the rela-
tion between science and psychoanalysis, especially by enabling us to set aside the
petty and malevolent criticisms that focus on the mote in the other person’s eye,
without any awareness of the beam in our own. Almost at the midpoint of his
teaching, Lacan wrote a text about this problem (1966g).17
His central concern was to bring out two new theses: 1) the subject involved in
analytic practice is none other than the “subject of science” and 2) the subject of
science is none other than the Cartesian subject of the cogito, or even, instead, of
the “dubito sum”.This subject is distinguished by rejecting all knowledge, as obvious
as it may be (2 and 3 make 5, for example) in order to allow a certainty about being
to emerge. What is illuminating here is its homology with analysands’ experiences:
their being as truth emerges by disassembling the family romance, screen memories,
the fundamental fantasy, etc.
Lacan makes only a slight correction to Descartes’ extraordinary formulation:
instead of writing, “I think, therefore I am”, he writes “I think: ‘Therefore I am’”,
“with quotes around the second clause, it is legible that thought only grounds being by
knotting itself in speech where every operation goes right to the essence of language”
(Lacan, 1966g, p. 734). By being speech,“therefore I am” escapes from the objection that
it is only one more thought. There is no doubt that the failure of science to consider
speech as something that is said disables science, or at least makes it problematic, in
the eyes of psychoanalysis. The irruption of speech makes this division of the subject
manifest.This division or splitting, in turn, can be said – and I am seeking to phrase this
in a way that preserves psychoanalysis from any burdensome psychologising appropria-
tion – to place the unconscious outside, rather than in the “depths” of the subject.
Once he had been “excommunicated” from the IPA in 1963, Lacan put a great
deal of energy into clarifying the relations between science and psychoanalysis.
 Introduction 11

Our contemporary amnesia has covered over this excommunication, making it just
one more item in a chronology; the intensity of this subjective cataclysm can no
longer be measured.Yet if you are a psychoanalyst yourself, try to imagine the effect
of being erased from the map of “Freud country”, disqualified as a psychoanalyst,
denounced as a dissident theorist, reviled and Berufsverboten – forbidden to teach or
to train analysts – by the entire analytic “fraternity”, including by a few psychoana-
lysts who deserved to be considered true Freudians.The only exception was a hand-
ful of students, almost all of whom were nearly unknown, whose transference to
Lacan had resisted the institutional transference to the IPA.The tacit complicity that
was and remains the rule of the analytic establishment, as may well be the case for
every establishment, was also involved, and silently covered over a mass cowardice.
This may be one of the reasons that led Lacan (1973d), in his 1964 seminar
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, to align himself with a scien-
tific method, one that was connected epistemologically to the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, and then to devote “Science and Truth” (1966g) to a more subtle
and dialectical elucidation of the relations between science and psychoanalysis. It
should be noted that people tend to modify the tense and mode of the verb that
Lacan used when suggesting a definition for science. He writes that “science would
not want-to-know-anything about the truth as cause” (Lacan, 1966g, p. 742, trans-
lation modified). The use of the modal “would” indicates, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, that science does not succeed in what it tries to do. Another definition of
science appears in “Radiophonie”: it is the “ideology of the suppression of the sub-
ject” (Lacan, 1970, p. 437), a definition that is congruent with this reading, since the
term “ideology” refers to science’s misrecognition of itself.
In this same text, he notes that mathematical logic, which is difficult for science
to wash its hands of, “brings us back to the structure in knowledge” (ibid., p. 437).
A programme has thus been opened up, one that would involve – here the modal
appears again but is now turned towards the future – an entrance into a new age
of knowledge, because of psychoanalysis. Without seeking for the moment to go
beyond this formulation, we can deduce that, whatever the other criticisms that
Lacan would make later concerning the discourse of science and its affinity with
the capitalist discourse, the fate of science has never been sealed. Today, numerous
facts invite us to consider that, if we set aside ideologies and technosciences and
concentrate on the sciences that are the least contestable, the question of the place
of the subject has now become inevitable (see Klein, 2004).We can thus catch our-
selves dreaming that, in a new scientific age, psychoanalysis will be in the driver’s
seat. This may well be a dream, or even a fantasy; perhaps it is also how we should
understand the term “ascience” (see Briest, Le Fur, & Tajan, 2006).
The topology of the final seminars can point in this direction.Topology, like psy-
choanalytic theory, can be made to say anything. A bit of string passes above or below
another bit of string, and this is independent of the unconscious relation between the
person who is manipulating it and his own servitude. If we keep to their topologi-
cal properties, a hand is a cord and the organism as a whole is a torus (the volume
constituted by the inner tube of a tyre). The electron microscope can certainly give
12 Introduction

us a less “figurative” idea of a body’s composition, especially with its helices, but this
does not make topology obsolete, because the same topological mode can be appro-
priated at two levels. It can be added, as a supplementary step, that the Borromean
principle – two cannot come together without a third – may only be a local property,
but one that could possibly introduce us to the principle that could make topology
the universal science of “fabric”, whether physical or psychical.
Let us, however, bring these motley ideas to a stop before we get too far afield,
and just retain the following idea: psychoanalytic knowledge, as a textual knowl-
edge, only comes to life within an analysis, and such analyses must be approached
one by one. Each analysis, in its structure, involves an objection to the textual
knowledge of psychoanalysis.This is why psychoanalysis cannot be included within
the scientific paradigm: the analysand can end her/his treatment only by extracting
her/himself as an exception from the totality of statements that have constituted
the treatment, and which are articulated with one another in a way that con-
forms to the textual knowledge of psychoanalysis. S/he only exits from her/his
treatment through an act, rather than by adding one more element of knowledge.
S/he renounces the hope of finding the truth of the knowledge that s/he has accu-
mulated throughout her/his treatment; this is the meaning of her/his acceptance
of division. This renunciation creates a boundary to the knowledge that has been
produced. Let us be clear, however: this act can only really occur in a situation in
which the knowledge that has been produced is not just any knowledge; if this is
not the case, then what takes place would only be a false act, in which the subject
would lose her/himself.

Situating Lacan’s references to Marx

Let us now approach the figure who is Lacan’s partner, or even his sparring partner.
One only has to consult the index of proper names for the Écrits (Lacan, 1966b),
the Autres écrits (Lacan, 2001a) and the seminars (see Krutzen, 2003) to notice
something that speaks volumes: Marx is mentioned seven times in the Écrits, twelve
times in the Autres écrits (Lenin is only referred to four times). This may not seem
to be many references, but they are rarely mere allusions. For the most part, Marx’s
name is connected to decisive theoretical developments. A comparative and rela-
tively unselective analysis of these references will provide an appropriate framework
for our research.
Let us begin with references to Marx’s name in the Écrits:

• Marx, like Socrates, Descartes and Freud, has a passion for truth (Lacan, 1947b,
p. 157). Such a statement is not simply praise, either for Marx or for the others,
since the passion for truth can mask the real.
• Marx’s “reversal” of Hegel consisted in the “materialist return” of “the ques-
tion of truth” (Lacan, 1966c, p. 194). This return involves marking out the
“symptom’s proper operation”, an operation to which Freud would later give
its definitive status.
 Introduction 13

• Marx, like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Arnold Toynbee or Auguste Comte, dis-

covered a meaning and direction in history (Lacan, 1956b, p. 216). Lacan then
suggests that what we can retain from this concerns the theory and philosophy
of history rather than history in a more conventional sense.
• What is propagated in our culture “in Freud’s name” is not unlike what is car-
ried out in Marx’s name (Lacan, 1957a, p. 70).18
• Finally, the last reference to Marx’s name in the Écrits, in “Science and Truth”,
may be the most significant. Lacan criticises the naivety of Lenin’s formula:
“Marx’s theory is omnipotent because it is true!” He continues by saying that,
“An economic science inspired by Capital does not necessarily lead to its utili-
sation as a revolutionary power and history seems to require help from some-
thing other than a predicative dialectic” (Lacan, 1966g, p. 738). This rather
caustic remark prefigures what Lacan would develop concerning the primacy
of the real over the true – which is the single condition for a materialism that
would be more authentic than its Marxist version – and echoes the false praise
for the passion for truth, which he attributed to both Marx and Freud.

Turning next to the Autres écrits, we note that the references to Marx’s name occur
in works that were written after the final texts of the Écrits. The first is found in
“Response to Students of Philosophy Concerning the Object of Psychoanalysis”
(published in English in Television [1974b]); these students were from the École
normale supérieure, and, after May 1968, they became one of the sources of the enor-
mous media attention devoted to both Lacan and Marx. Lacan casts doubt on the
possibility of the “subject’s revolutionary praxis of going beyond his alienated labor”
(ibid., p. 110). This would be, he says, like wanting to go “beyond the alienation of
discourse” (ibid., p. 111). He then adds, pointing to the students’ adherence to a
questionable Marxist vernacular:

All I can see as transcending that alienation is the object sustaining its value,
what Marx in a homonym singularly anticipatory of psychoanalysis, called
the fetish, it being understood that psychoanalysis reveals its biological
significance.
(ibid., p. 111)

The five following references, which I shall examine more closely in the course
of this book, are in “Radiophonie” (1970). Lacan notes first that the French Revolu-
tion would have been reduced to the “return of the masters” – a reduction that was
as true “for Bonaparte as for Chateaubriand” – if Marx had not put it back “into the
structure that he formulates it in: a discourse of the capitalist” (Lacan, 1970, p. 424).
Yet this salutary change is undone because this structure “foreclosed the surplus-
value by which it motivates this discourse”. Lacan continues:

In other words, it is with the unconscious and the symptom that he claims
to extend the great Revolution: it is by discovering surplus-value that he
14 Introduction

precipitates the consciousness that is called class consciousness. Lenin, through

his passage à l’acte, obtained nothing more than what is called regression in
psychoanalysis: which is the time of a discourse that has not been given in
reality, first of all because this discourse is untenable.
(ibid., p. 424)

As I shall discuss below, it is the status of surplus-value that is questioned. This is

not a repudiation of Marx’s essential discovery, which constitutes the foundation
of his critique of classical political economy. Instead, as we shall see, the problem is
that he did not take jouissance into account in his calculations.The other references
concern the way in which Marx’s desire was involved in his discovery of surplus-
value. Hence this striking formula: “Mehrwert [surplus-value] is Marxlust, Marx’s
surplus-jouissance” (ibid., p. 434).
In the “Postface au Séminaire XI” (Lacan, 1973c, p. 506), there is a passing refer-
ence to the “gospel according to Marx” and then in Television, Lacan (1974b, p. 14)
refers to the “ideal worker”, who, with Marx would “take over the discourse of
the master”. Finally, in the first appendix to the Autres écrits, there is a comment
about the insufficiency of Marx’s views of Jewish people, “so as to repay the
debt incurred by the constitutive segregation of this ethnic group” (Lacan, 1978a,
pp. 588–589).
When we move on to the twenty-seven years of Lacan’s seminar (1953–1980),
Henry Krutzen’s (2003) concordance identifies sixteen references to Marx’s name,
and this is to say nothing of his references to communism and communists, capi-
talism and capitalists, revolution, Marxism and surplus-value. The references to his
name, however, offer us some relevant starting-points. These references are various
and disparate, touching several times on the concepts of use-value and exchange-
value. In this context, I would like to highlight several stumbling blocks. Let us con-
sider a session from the seminar, La logique du fantasme, where Lacan (1966–1967, 12
April 1967) sets up an opposition between use-value and “jouissance-value”, which
he places beside exchange-value. He does this because jouissance is only thinkable
if something is subtracted from it. Exchange-value does not realise use-value, for it
suspends use in order for exchange to take place. From this perspective, Lacan sets
up a homology between the psychoanalytic and the Marxist concepts of the fetish:
the fetish is a use-value, “extracted” and “frozen – a hole somewhere”. In Freud,
the fetish is the substitute for the penis that a woman does not have, and thus fills a
“hole”. It happens that this hole in jouissance establishes jouissance. In a comparable
way, Marx, in order to explain the relations between commodities, treats the fetish
as presenting commodities as relations between things rather than between people.
This very astute and subtle intuition leads to a definition of commodity-fetishism as
the setting up of a substitute, the commodity, as having an intrinsic value as a thing;
it then allows us to disavow the fact that this thing-value does not exist and is only
the result of a social relation between people who are working during a determi-
nate time. The hole that is masked in this case is the gap between the working time
necessary to reproduce labour-power and surplus-labour.
 Introduction 15

Let us also take note of the seminar that followed May 1968 directly. In the
first four sessions of D’un Autre à l’autre, Lacan (2006a) reminds his audience that
surplus-value depends on a renunciation of jouissance (ibid., p. 18), alludes to
Althusser’s work on Marx (ibid., pp. 16–17, 29–30) and refers to the passage in
Capital where Marx speaks of the capitalist’s laughter (ibid., p. 65; also see Marx,
1867, pp. 300–301). Finally, he talks about his memory of reading Capital in the
Paris metro when he was twenty (ibid., p. 64).
Lacan’s relation with Marx is expressed in its densest form in The Other Side
of Psychoanalysis. Here we find the thesis that the Soviet Union is directed by the
discourse of the university: a bureaucracy has appropriated for itself the place of a
knowledge that is defined as a whole (Lacan, 1991, p. 206).This is a consequence of
Marx’s inability to find a way out of the discourse of the master, the discourse that
is the other side (or underside) of psychoanalysis. The discourse of the university
derives from it, with the difference that, in the university, the master is hidden.19
I shall come back to this.
Two points, in particular, are taken up in this seminar. Lacan notes that surplus-
value corresponds strictly to Marx’s concept of “surplus-labour”: surplus-value
comes from the socially necessary labour-time over and above the labour-time
that is affected in order to maintain labour-power. Such labour is paid for in the
same way that any other commodity is (ibid., p. 20). Instead of workers, who have
sold their labour-power, being paid more, their surplus-labour pays for a bonus
of jouissance, a surplus-jouissance, which “it is very urgent that one squander”
(ibid., p. 20).20
The second point concerns the objective of the session that deals with the
“Lacanian field”, the “field of jouissance” (ibid., p. 81).What Lacan posits here con-
cerns the transformation of the discourse of the master into that of the university.
In the first of these discourses, the master is in the dominant place, while in the
second, it is knowledge. According to Lacan, Marx calls this rotation a “spoliation”
because the key to exploitation involves reducing labour-power to a commodity
that has a particular value, a reduction that is permitted by knowledge (ibid., p. 81).
A pivotal thesis is also found in the next seminar, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du
semblant, where Lacan (2006b, p. 164) says that Marx is “responsible” for the notion
of the symptom. This passage situates Marx as the figure who denounces the fetish
as a semblance, unlike Hegel, who constitutes the acme of a tradition in which the
semblance is taken at face value.
In following these signposts, it is striking to note that, for Lacan, while Marx and
Freud are similar in that “they don’t bullshit” (Lacan, 1991, p. 71), Marx reinforced
the discourse of the master by calling it into question. In his 1971–1972 semi-
nar . . . ou pire, Lacan (2011a, p. 118) states that Marx’s discourse “includes a protest,
which happens to consolidate the discourse of the master by completing it, and not
only with surplus-value – I feel that this is going to create some turmoil – by incit-
ing woman to exist as an equal”.This is not simply a criticism, since by “crystallising
the discourse of the master” (ibid., p. 224), Marx takes a decisive step, but this is not
the same as Freud’s.
16 Introduction

What is the difference between Marx and Freud? An answer – one that, in this
case, does not fluctuate very much – is given in two of his later seminars. In RSI,
Lacan reiterates Marx’s primacy as the inventor of the symptom and then com-
ments on how he analyses this symptom: because the proletarian is the one who
has been “stripped of everything” (Marx, 1877, p. 201), Marx transforms this figure
into the “Messiah of the future”:

If we treat man no longer as what may convey a future ideal, but if we deter-
mine him in terms of the particularity, in each case, of his unconscious and of
the way that he gets off on it, the symptom remains in the same place where
Marx placed it, but it takes on another meaning. It is not a social symptom;
it is a particular symptom.
(Lacan, 1974–1975, 18 January 1975)

This judgement is confirmed on 18 March 1980 during the seminar Dissolution,

one of Lacan’s final public presentations:

I have paid homage to Marx as the inventor of the symptom. This Marx,
however, is someone who restores order, simply because he breathed the
dit-mension of meaning [sens] back into the proletariat. The proletariat was
enough for him to do this, and he says this.This was a lesson to the church. . . .
Know that religious meaning is going to go through the kind of boom that
you can’t imagine. . . . I’m trying to go against this, so that psychoanalysis
won’t be a religion, as it tends irresistibly to be, as soon as we imagine that
interpretation only operates through meaning. I teach that the mainspring of
interpretation is elsewhere, namely in the signifier as such.
(Lacan, 1980c, pp. 18–19)

This passage is a superb statement of the blind spot in Marx’s work – the impasse
concerning jouissance – which dilutes his intrinsically revolutionary conception
of the symptom, transforming it into a political gospel that is irrevocably counter-
insurrectionist. QED.

Lacan “vs.” Marx?

This book is neither a sword-and-sandal epic nor a horror film along the lines
of “Godzilla vs. Frankenstein”. The preposition “vs.” or “against” [contre]” is to be
understood in the sense that it takes on in the expression “helpmeet against”, which
can be found in Lacan.21 The playing field thus levelled, a new temptation can be
born: the temptation to create a new couple – Lacan-Marx – which can be substi-
tuted for another couple – Marx-Freud – which has long been divorced. In itself,
there would be no contradiction in giving in to this temptation. It is clear that, for
Lacan, Marx is a major thinker whose work is at least the equal of the thought of
those who, apart from Freud, have opened up our understanding of what exists
 Introduction 17

and have done so in ways that have never been surpassed. Plato, Aristotle, Dante,
Rabelais, Galileo and Descartes are our authentic contemporaries. Such figures are
not intimidated by the idea that history always delegates the task of knowing to
future generations, making former “contemporaries” into outmoded figures in rela-
tion to what the truth of knowledge could be. Lacan certainly felt close to Marx’s
adventure, and even to planet “Marx”. To take a single example, in one of the final
texts of the Écrits, “Position of the Unconscious”, Lacan (1966e, p. 706) mentions
the communists’ mistrust of psychoanalysis and says that “I . . . consider justified the
prejudice that psychoanalysis encounters” – note the use of the present tense – “in
Eastern Europe”. His sympathy for Georges Politzer or Lev Vygotsky, like his “luke-
warm” attitude (a euphemism) towards Jean Piaget goes in the same direction. He
even chose his favourite poets, such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, from what
could be called a certain (i.e. the communist) camp.
These considerations are neither off-topic nor anecdotal. They enable us to
deduce the existence of a discreet yet real “comradeship” between Lacan and the
children of Marx, as well as a no less perceptible irritation at the doggedness with
which communists sought to transform Marx’s saying [dire] into a catechism. The
consequence of such a tendency is to reduce Marx to being nothing more than a
philosopher of history.
The borderline is located here. Freud (1933, pp. 176–177) used the term Wel-
tanschauung to pin down and stigmatise Marxism and wanted to prevent psychoa-
nalysis from suffering the same fate. Perhaps one key to the differences between
the lineages of Freud and Marx can be found in the fact that the term “Freudian-
ism” has not been substituted for “psychoanalysis” and that “dialectical material-
ism” has not supplanted “Marxism”. In French, for that matter, the use of the
word “lacanisme” remains both limited and pejorative. We could perhaps even
question whether “psychoanalysis” – in the singular – exists at all, because of the
extraordinary differences and divergences that can be found within it, even if we
set aside flagrant shams such as Jungianism and “psychoanalytic” psychotherapy.
Should we therefore speak of “psychoanalyses”? Yes and no. No, because psycho-
analysis as a form of knowledge cannot refuse to question itself about its borders:
which statements can be called “non-psychoanalytic” or “anti-psychoanalytic”?
Do the various tendencies within psychoanalysis come together, in a more or less
unified or consistent way, to explain difficult phenomena? To speak not of “psy-
choanalysis” but of “psychoanalyses” would be to admit that there has been a dias-
pora and that there is no longer any common denominator among analysts; this
would eliminate any common reference to the radical difference that is named
“Freud”. It would be better to speak of “psychoanalysts” to the point of daring
to say, as Lacan (1973b, p. 454) did: “There is not the slightest access to Freud’s
words that has not been foreclosed – and without any possibility of return in this
case – by the choice of such an analyst”.
The degradation of Marx’s work could perhaps be imputed partially to his
disciples – or rather to sectarians – but to do so would be to promote a repetition
of the same failure: the failure in which the key contained in his work is used to
18 Introduction

open the wrong door. Marx, as Althusser (see 1965, p. 334) judiciously emphasised,
defines the subject as the bearer [Träger] of the relations of production. He thus
transforms the subject into an agent. The concept of groups or masses – which
Freud (1921) deals with in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego – relies on
the postulate that agents can be treated as a collective. To say then that the masses
make history is neither incoherent nor shocking. What is damaging is that, in
Freud and in a way that has an even stronger foundation in Lacan, the subject is
neither a bearer nor an agent. It is still less the subject of psychology, the homun-
culus that only reflects the really restricted span of its creator: it is not enough to
add conflict or the unconscious in order to transform the pumpkin into a coach. It
would be better, instead, to turn the coach into a pumpkin, for the pumpkin – the
divided subject – is real.
The division or splitting of the subject (S) is the element without which psy-
choanalysis would collapse. As we shall argue, this subject is linked to two consid-
erations. First, the sexual drive, which is somatic and psychical rather than organic,
consists in the very failure that results from the incorporation of language by the
physical organism. Second, the unconscious has a “navel”, a kernel that remains
irreducibly unconscious, since speech cannot itself speak. It is this double discovery
that Freud brings together in his final conception of the Spaltung – the splitting of
the ego between a recognition and a disavowal of the mother’s castration – a con-
ception that Lacan then takes up as the division of the subject.
It turns out, as a result, that divided subjects, unlike subjects who are “bearers”,
cannot be grouped into a set [ensemble], and that social psychology can exist only
on the individual level, in which each subject is taken one by one; at the intersub-
jective level, the relations between subjects can only lead to an authentic dialogue
in extremely rare occurrences. Thus communist millennialism leaves the stage (see
Delumeau, 1995), and what enters is evil (or in more secular terms, jouissance) as
the only possible bond with my neighbour (the nebenmensch). The idea that “it feels
good to do evil”, rather than being a postromantic whim, is what Sade, still a bit
too apprehensively, was able to theorise (Lacan, 1963, p. 646). Only by recognising
the evil within jouissance and by understanding that this evil is permanent does it
become possible to envision a way of devalorising it.
Perhaps, finally, the most relevant way of measuring the gap between Lacan and
Marx might be their relation to Jeremy Bentham. In L’homme économique: essai sur
les racines du néolibéralisme, a book that immediately became the reference in its field
when it appeared in France, Christian Laval (2007) paints an historical portrait of
“homo oeconomicus”, a portrait to which, significantly, Marx contributed nothing,
while Bentham brought a great deal. This might seem surprising, for Marx is often
presented as the figure who imposed an economist dogma in which everything that
is “human” is determined by the base concern of putting food on the table or, at
best, by “material” needs. In reality, what emerges from this book is the ingenuity by
which everyone – from Bentham to Walras, and even to Keynes – uses a psychology
of desire to cover over the quantitative measurement of value, a form of measure-
ment that must be made manifest if exploitation is to be recognised.
 Introduction 19

In relation to Bentham and his utilitarianism, Lacan, who always lauded the dis-
covery of surplus-value, had first adopted a position that was very close to Marx’s
absolute condemnation:

With the dryest naiveté he assumes that the modern petty bourgeois, espe-
cially the English petty bourgeois, is the normal man. Whatever is useful to
this peculiar kind of normal man, and to his world, is useful in and for itself.
He applies this yardstick to the past, the present and the future. . . . lf I had the
courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr Jeremy a genius in the
way of bourgeois stupidity.
(1867, p. 759, note 51)

Lacan then changed his opinion in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, indicating that
Roman Jakobson had led him to read Bentham in a new way (Lacan, 1986,
p. 12). What he now finds attractive in Bentham’s work is that he is “the man
who approaches the question at the level of the signifier” (ibid., p. 228). Bentham’s
guiding intuition, to which Lacan pays homage, is that pleasures and pains can
only serve as an arithmetic that can regulate the functioning of society if they are
approached as “fictions”: not as phenomena that can be quantified naturally, but as
phenomena that are shaped symbolically by language. This is the great difference
between Bentham and naturalist utilitarianism, and this may be why Marx himself
applied the word “genius” to him. Anyone who uses the term “symbolic” is saying
that the cathexis of the signifier involves taking into account the body’s relation to
jouissance, and not simply to needs, whether these needs are said to be natural or
historical. Because he did not recognise the beach of jouissance under the paving
stones of surplus-value, Marx failed, for example, to give a satisfying account of the
gap between the exchange-value and the price of works of art, thereby underes-
timating the monstrous development of financial capital and of credit as a fiction.

Youthful questions
This is not to disqualify history, just to consider it still early days, although this fact
should not stop us from following Walter Benjamin in bringing out those chapters
that have been forgotten, as they were vanquished, as it were, smothered in their
cribs. History should not only be written by the victors, and this procedure is
analogous to what serves as the true cutting edge of analysis. As Benjamin (1950,
p. 256) writes in his extraordinary, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, “There
is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism
has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart,
acedia”. Acedia, or sadness, affects historians who empathise with the victors. One of
the consequences of doing so, as Benjamin notes, is to prevent us from seeing that
the most eminent conquests of culture could not have been accomplished without
barbarism: they depend on the “anonymous toil” of the people who lived through
and suffered from these conquests (ibid., p. 256). This “acedia” is quite precisely the
20 Introduction

“moral failing” that, in Television, Lacan (1974b, p. 22) treats as the equivalent of
sadness. When the historian identifies with the victor, this cowardice returns in the
form of sadness; similarly, when the subject identifies with repression, the result is
the affect of sadness.
These remarks enable us to be more precise: the dominant modes of production
are what benefit from this empathy, and today, the forgotten histories are the ones
that have challenged the capitalist discourse, which is an avatar of the discourse of
the master. This other side of history remains to be explored, but we can already
wonder whether beginning to write this history may not be a symptom, one that
indicates that this discourse is being questioned and is beginning to decay.
As soon as the back of the page is written, it turns out to have an other, front
side, which is what Lacan made visible by crediting Marx as the inventor of the
symptom. In saying this, Lacan was making a strong interpretation, because the
term itself is rarely present in Marx. One notable exception is to be found in the
speech Marx gave for the anniversary of the People’s Paper:

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact
which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life
industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of former human history had
ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing
the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.
(Marx, 1856, p. 299, emphasis added)22

Here, Marx is sketching out the problem that defines political space. What is the
meaning of the decay that is located at the very heart of progress, and which serves
as a symptom? The correlation between symptom and decay can help us theorise
not only the very real opposition between the forces of progress and of reaction, but
also something that is much more important: the question of what does not work
in progress. Progress can open up a margin for this “decay”. In other words, does the
invention of the symptom only involve theorising the polarised distribution of wealth
produced by the growing production of this wealth in capitalism? Perhaps the symp-
tom also calls into question one of the ways in which a socialist or communist alter-
native to capitalism has been constructed: the tendency to conceive of “progress” as a
consistent whole. Of course, according to this perspective, a symptom such as a work-
ers’ strike would take on a meaning in whatever political context it may take place,
whether in a regime that is overtly capitalist or that claims to serve the working class.
In any case, doesn’t this “decay”, taken as a symptom, always work in opposi-
tion to a tendency towards idealisation which would aim simply to eradicate every
symptom? Wouldn’t this set a limit to any understanding of progress as an asymp-
totic approach (see Lacan, 1956b, p. 251) towards a paradise on earth? At this level,
an examination of what a symptom is for psychoanalysis can throw light on this
question.
The symptom is out of pace with progress, with the idea that history can have an
end, and therefore can be said to have instituted the field of politics. Today, politics
 Introduction 21

can only be approached in terms of its relation to democracy. How, then, can we
understand the sort of compass constituted by democracy today? In his stimulating
book, Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière (2005) creates and defends a thesis that
has a fortunate stereoscopic effect upon any attempt to grasp what is at stake in this
problem. He uses a striking formulation to criticise the foregone conclusion that
democracy can only be “representative democracy”: “‘Representative democracy’
might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron” (ibid., p. 53).
His thesis is that:

Democracy is neither a type of constitution nor a form of society.The power

of the people is not that of a people gathered together, nor of a working class.
It is simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlements to
govern than to submit.
(ibid., pp. 46–47)

This thesis has strong Freudian resonances: “democracy” becomes the name of the
impossibility of governing. If we grant this comparison, however, it gives rise to an
objection. Democracy becomes detached from any historical reference; from this
perspective, the requirements of democracy have been present since the dawn of
politics.
In Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology, Luciano Canfora (2004) uses a
different method. Canfora is an historian and locates his work explicitly within the
Marxist tradition. History is the single cultural field in which this reference truly
remains current, although the historians marked by Marxism – including Moses
Finley, Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and Michel Vovelle – come from a genera-
tion that was born before the Second World War. If we were to follow only Canfo-
ra’s subtitle, we could be led to believe that he is interested in the concrete historical
avatars of democracy. This assumption, however, sets aside what is really at stake in
the book. Although Canfora begins by relativising the belief that democracy began
in Greece during the fifth century BCE, and is closely concerned with ideological
uses of this term, the fundamental aim of his detailed study is to demonstrate that
democracy has been subordinated, as superstructure, to historical configurations
that can be analysed in terms of class struggle. Even more significantly, in refusing,
like Rancière, to reduce democracy to “political forms” or “forms of government”,
he comments on a passage in Herodotus that highlights its scandalous character:
it is founded on the requirement of equality (Canfora, 2004, pp. 248–249).23 This
formulation may well be vague, yet it succeeds in emphasising the insurrectionary
character of the famous slogan, “One man, one vote”, a slogan that, until the end of
Apartheid, struck fear into the hearts of most white South Africans.
It is regrettable that the rectification that distances the reader from a fascination
with the history of the victors – for the moment, capitalism – can throw less light on
why the Soviet political system became the greatest enemy of communism.Yet this
immediately raises a question that keeps recurring throughout history: the question
of Caesarism and the lethal attraction exercised by power on both those who hold
22 Introduction

it and those upon whom it is exerted. Lacan (1973a, p. 379) speaks of “The proven
impossibility of a pulverulent discourse is the Trojan horse by which the master
who is the psychotic returns into the city of discourse” (the cult of the One pre-
vents the psychotic’s delusion from crumbling). Such a remark immediately calls to
mind Wilson and Hitler, Stalin and Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, and more recently,
the dynamic duo of “B.” and “B.”, etc. We may well wonder whether, among the
“great men” who have made their careers in politics, psychotics might not be the
rule, rather than the exception. This observation is not made to stigmatise psychot-
ics. Instead, it forces us to confront a major question: why today, at every level of
the social hierarchy, including psychoanalytic associations, is the place of Führer the
preferred place that enables psychotics to treat their wandering [errance] by mistreat-
ing their neighbour? This was not the case in other societies, where the psychotic
could find a less harmful place – that of shaman, for example. A second question,
correlative to that of the status of the symptom, needs to be asked here. What sort
of civilisation would enable the genius of psychotics to flourish, while permitting
them to renounce their tyranny? Conversely, what would help neurotics to rid
themselves of their lethal fascination with psychotic tyranny (Freud (see 1905b)
had already noticed the hypnotic effect that the pervert exercises upon the neu-
rotic)? The entire work of Michel Foucault – however we may judge his solution –
was devoted to producing a shift in this terrible cartography.
These preliminary remarks would be pointless if the question of Freud’s rela-
tion to the transcendent had not already been raised directly, and such a question
is interesting since religions claim that only they can provide a suitable place for
transcendence. Freud opted to break this presumption: one has only to read his cor-
respondence with Oskar Pfister (1963), with its sometimes fierce dismantling of the
temptation to turn psychoanalysis into a gospel, and analysands into experimental
catechumens. As Ernest Jones (1957) noted and sometimes even criticised, Freud’s
relation to occultism was more complex and troubled. Should Freud’s papers on
the occult and telepathy be considered as bits of refuse that need to be swept away?
Should we note, instead, that in these tortuous works, even while seeking a scien-
tistic explanation of phenomena that are called supernatural or paranormal, Freud
also allows an intimate bond between infinity and discourse to show through, in
the very place of his own symptomatic vulnerability? I am not going to analyse
these texts, because I shall take a more classical approach; I believe, however, that
my approach will be just as effective in questioning the border that gives religions
the monopoly on the transcendent and reduces the symptom to the field of medi-
cine. Freud’s response to Romain Rolland concerning the “oceanic feeling”,24 for
example, suggests that beyond his atheistic motives and his ambition for giving
metapsychological explanations, Freud tends to close off problems of this kind. It
is also true, however, that any way of opening up these problems that would arouse
the anxiety of a “negative” oceanic feeling – today, we would call it a bad “trip”25 –
must be excluded from the start.
To lay my cards on the table, I shall argue that the foreclosure of the transcend-
ent, which can certainly be connected to the scientism endemic among scientists
 Introduction 23

and scholars, and which can go hand-in-hand with an indulgent attitude towards
parapsychology, must be rethought. The enunciation always stands in an ex-centric
relation to the statement, since the “I” cannot be grasped simultaneously in its
statement and in its act of enunciation. For this reason, Freud could legitimately
reproach both metaphysics and every ontology for aggrandising themselves by sug-
gesting that there is a being whose enunciation would be included in its statement.
These would be avatars of the celebrated assertion, “I am the one who is, or who
will be”. If this is correct, it may well be through the saying [dire], which, as we shall
see, transforms the symptom into the sinthome, that the transcendence connected
with the real can pierce the virtuality of the linguistic: this is the promise of a world
without boredom.
There has indeed been some misdealing of the psychoanalytic cards, which – to
change the metaphor – has made the ship of analysis sail and sink in an area located
between ecclesiastical atheism and positivist spiritualism. Psychoanalysis can only
have both a meaning and a direction if it does not shrink from connecting the
infinite quality of the mystery of existence to the relative character of discourse –
while recognising the effectiveness of science. In referring to the “infinite quality
of mystery”, I mean what critical philosophy has restored to us, on the basis of a
crisis of transcendence, in the form of the aporias of reason. “Where do we come
from?” What follows this is an echo that does not stop answering this question but
does enable each singular language to compose its own version of the eternal song:
“From where nothing knows everything”.
The expression “infinite quality of mystery” might seem overblown, and arouse
the objection that we are in danger of regressing from Freud’s metapsychology
to metaphysics. This phrase is, however, brave enough not to allow certain kinds
of questions to be diluted in the hypocritical shadow of medicine: these are the
questions asked by the psychotic, whom I am calling upon again, and who, in this
respect, is more courageous than the neurotic and the pervert. The psychotic wel-
comes such questions, considering them to be fundamental, for they contain the
enigmas that religion and philosophy seek to sterilise. Freud’s sometimes reluctant
discovery restored these questions, which opened up the issues of the Heimlich and
the Unheimlich, as well as of das Ding, the thing that the Other cannot tame. Lacan
himself does not hesitate to place his Écrits on the same shelf as what he calls “mysti-
cal jaculations” (Lacan, 1975c, p. 76). For psychoanalysis, the outcome of this ques-
tioning is not a doctrine but an effect in the body, and even an effect of the body:
the lifting of inhibition, the disappearance of anxiety, the reversal of jouissance in
relation to the symptom. (Such a remark indicates the Rubicon that psychoanaly-
sis has crossed within culture.) These results of treatment are corporeal responses
to the “infinity of mystery”. Saint Theresa, at the end of a transference that tran-
scended the object that was called God – an object that could only be represented
inadequately – experienced what Marguerite Duras would have called a “ravish-
ing”. This ravishing enabled her to disencumber herself from the horror of doubt,
which had led her to wonder whether she was being possessed or being enraptured,
and which had provided so much painful jouissance for her.
24 Introduction

What defines the prehistory that we are perhaps now in the painful process
of leaving is the absence of any emancipation from the death drive.26 This drive,
which Freud discovered and named so aptly, is the consequence of language: in kill-
ing things, language also kills the things that are called “human beings”, who then
continue the ideal of language by reducing themselves to their names. They prefer
glory and death to life and dishonour, and administration to psychoanalysis, for
what matters above all else is to extract oneself from the fate of being unimportant
human beings. The result of this primary allegiance to the rites of the virtual is that
the real – which is to be distinguished from reality – is always encountered only by
chance or, on the contrary, is brought out through practices – including psychoana-
lytic, poetic and political experience – when the act has not been appropriated by
and for a thirst for power.

A three-part division
Before venturing into the “French” jungle that is opened up by this kind of psy-
choanalytic questioning, I would like to make several clarifications. I would like to
claim, first, that this entire book belongs to the field of psychoanalytic knowledge.
To this end, I shall develop a thesis that will have certain consequences for analytic
experience, for it involves the interpretation of structure: the division of the subject
constitutes the subject. Beginning with his 1962–1963 seminar, Anxiety (2004), the
barred subject is said to be produced as the quotient that results when a subject that
does not yet exist is divided by the Other: the place occupied by language and from
which speech originates. This can occur if there is a living agent or bearer to carry
out this division. The symptom, in its primal emergence, is the ineffaceable mark of
this division. It is what objects to any pseudo-jouissance that would aim to annul
this division. In psychoanalytic practice, we encounter the very early appearance of
symptoms that testify to an almost innate discord between mother and infans.
On the basis of this thesis, a new understanding of castration and its complex
becomes necessary. This will enable us to clarify Lacan’s otherwise incomprehensi-
ble proposition that capitalism is the “foreclosure of castration”. To give the reader
a foretaste of this clarification, in a form that is as compressed as Lacan’s own thesis,
we shall say that castration is what makes it possible to produce the semblance in
which the Other would not itself be divided by the subject who proceeds from it.
In other words, even when castration operates, it maintains the fiction that there is
at-least-one who would not be castrated. Lacan resolves this paradox by identifying
what founds this fiction: the fiction of a real father, who is exempt from the phallic
function’s requirement that we be castrated, whether or not we have the phallus. For
a man,“having” the phallus requires that he had once not had it, and that it was then
given to him. Lacan’s advance in this area is related to another aspect of his teaching,
which also calls into question some claims of certain currents of feminism: a woman
is not entirely submitted to the regime of castration, and, like her, a man can be
exempted from this regime. Division, on the other hand, holds for everyone. As we
can see, there is a risk of confusion, if castration is considered as the equivalent of
 Introduction 25

division. An analysis can dissipate this confusion and bring out the division of the
Other, the matheme for which is S(A). It can also put an end to the culture of lack
and the anxiety which accompanies this. In helping the subject no longer to play
with castration, it enables the subject to put an inaugural loss – that of the invention
of language – behind him/her, and to discover that it is fullness, rather than the void,
which can be frightening.
Finally, the specific character of psychoanalysis is exemplified by the bizarre
encounters that often take place in the analyst’s waiting room: a psychiatrist may
meet her patient there; an analyst can run into another analyst, who is seeing him
for supervision. Yet all of them are in this room as analysands, and their very pres-
ence contradicts any arrangement of discourse that would be based on hierarchy.
The bond between analyst and analysand, except in the fantasy of one of them, is
not set up in the same way that the connection between other pairs – master/slave,
professor/student, patient/doctor – is arranged. The hysteric, in reversing the con-
ventional hierarchical order, creates a symptom, which analytic discourse can then
throw light on. The final word here is always the analysand’s.
I have therefore started by bringing out the subject’s inescapable division (part I) and
then what could be qualified as either its apogee or its opposite: the capitalist accident,
which involves a filling in of this split, an operation that I have called the “sundering”
of the subject. Hyde/Jekyll, Dark/Mauler.The spectre of paranoiac sincerity hangs over
these two couples; this sincerity can lead such characters to strangle with one hand and
bless with the other. Then, immediately afterwards, I shall examine four thinkers who
did not hesitate to confront Lacanian psychoanalysis: Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek, each of whom, in his own way, produced a read-
ing of the Freudian subject. Precisely because their undertakings are rigorous and well
argued, it is necessary to show how they diverge from the path of psychoanalysis. If
castration means that the mother has no phallus, whereas division and splitting concern
every subject, whether a man or a woman, we can explain what division is by starting
with its mathematical sense: the Other, the place of language, is divided by the subject,
and this division gives rise to a remainder that Lacan calls the object a, which cannot be
symbolised, and which constitutes the failure of language to represent all of the real.27
In the first part, I seek to make this pared-down algebra more concrete.
The second part is more difficult. It will sometimes require the reader to become
a re-reader.
I have tried to present Lacan’s concept of discourse in a fluid prose that would
almost resemble the style of classic adventure novels as retold for children. I would
even have preferred, paradoxically, not to use Lacan’s mathemes. This is paradoxical
because the explicit function of these mathemes is to favour the transmission of
knowledge.28
I would have liked to be able to explain intrinsically difficult matters directly
and simply. Finding myself unable to do so, I have adopted a two-stage procedure:

1 I present the clothes;

2 I present the man whom they do not make.
26 Introduction

In other words, first I provide an exposition of the matrix of the discourses, its formal
functioning and its descriptive relevance; then I examine the consequences of these
discourses and what is at stake in the battles that have arisen over Freud’s discovery.
I am not simply trying to make my work readable, however legitimate this require-
ment may be. Instead, I am trying to verify that I have mourned the primal language,
which is Lacan’s, the figure who brought us into psychoanalysis. Here, concerted
mourning precedes and precipitates loss. In other words, if we call ourselves Lacan’s
students, we should not remain vassals to his signifiers; students should preserve only
the concepts that they have reconstructed themselves.This even implies that because
the concepts themselves turn out to flatten the experience that connects the infinite
to the finite, only the axioms should be retained. Such axioms enable us precisely to
bend structure to experience. Do these axioms exist? Have they existed from time
immemorial, just waiting to be discovered? Are they created by someone, or are they
ultimately only conventions? The investigation is still taking place.
Lacan provided us with various means – graphs, mathemes, topology – of transmit-
ting the aspects of psychoanalysis that can be transmitted in a way that can be verified.
Whatever the validity of these means, this transmission can only take place in a process
that must not remain formal – in the sense of a calculation that could be affected by the
“scientist’s” computer. If this process were simply formal, it would risk being disquali-
fied, for it would not involve the analyst’s desire. In relation to this desire, we cannot
do anything other than to note its presence: it manifests itself in this questioning of the
primal language. It involves a rethinking, at its own expense, of psychoanalysis.
Finally, part III seeks to reformulate, in terms of the fundamental vector of the
symptom – which is a sort of insurrection or uprising – questions that have been
worked on from every conceivable angle in a field that had ended up being steri-
lised. It has been sterilised by the hypothesis that there is a lack of division between
Marx and Freud. At the present moment, the land has been left fallow for a certain
period, and new growth seems both possible and desirable.
This part is entitled “On the Symptom” because it re-examines Lacan’s major
thesis: the symptom is a “clip”, in both senses of the term: it both fastens the work
of Marx and Freud together and cuts them apart. Lacan repeatedly paid homage to
Marx for his invention of the symptom. As we shall see, although Freud’s treatment of
the symptom is fundamentally different from Marx’s, there is an intersection between
the two, which enables us to discern their common epistemic atheism. For both of
them, the symptom is what does not work well. Marx presents it as being both the
first and the last obstacle to Hegelian idealism, which ultimately promotes the ration-
ality of the real and sketches out a contradiction that, at the ever-delayed end of his-
tory, will itself be absorbed in order to produce a totalisation of knowledge in a truth
with a capital “T”. For Freud, the symptom sets up an obstacle to a miracle: one that
would dissolve polymorphous perversion – the “bad start” of sexuality – in the acid
of the genital relation. With the symptom, Freud rids us of the illusion that sexuality
would be something like a little peg that will fit comfortably into a little hole.
If we held on to a bit of the philosophy of history, we could remark that the
slow death of the Bolshevik revolution was the history of the forcing, and then the
 Introduction 27

disappearance, of this contradiction contained in the symptom, thereby enslaving the

revolution to a teleological conception of communism. People were then awakened
from this history by the fall of a wall – which is a symptom par excellence. A parallel
could be established between this and the slow degradation of psychoanalysis after
Freud’s death and the American exile of his students, a degradation that Lacan con-
demned. This is also the history of a forcing, one that set itself in opposition to the
pranks of an infans who was seen both as pre-Oedipal and as insufficiently Oedipal.
This forcing was undertaken to make genitality the norm for the beast with two
backs, even if, in the fullness of time, these backs were permitted to be of the same
sex.The symptom made its force felt not with the fall of a wall, but with the excom-
munication of a psychoanalyst, an excommunication that would liberate him.29
We should bear in mind the following observation: a contradiction, which only
language can bring out as real, can only become a (dialectical) motive force by
making black equal white. It thereby allows the human act the privilege of mak-
ing contingent good emerge from necessary evil. We owe this salutary discovery of
cruelty to Antonin Artaud.
On this basis, we shall try to offer a few scraps of an answer to the question of
how to leave capitalism. We can do so, first, by giving up our tendency to think of
socialism and communism – to use these words again – as the movement beyond
a contraction between productive forces and the relations of production; such a
movement would then get rid of the private ownership of the means of production
(which certainly needs to be abolished), the market and the financialisation of capital.
These actions are necessary but not sufficient. When we take a retrospective look at
the daily life of the countries that practised “real socialism” – an unconsciously ironic
expression – what is striking is that once revolutionary enthusiasm had passed, apa-
thy invaded public space. Although there have been no subtle social-psychological
investigations to back up this hypothesis, the endemic debate, in these countries, on
the respective importance of material and ideological stimuli points incontestably to
societies in which, in the best of cases, a certain material security, a relative sexual lib-
eration and a strong encouragement of culture were powerless against the syndrome
of small differences. This syndrome gave the advantage to the smoke and mirrors
of the capitalist countries. Freedom of movement, less official censorship, a greater
diversity of consumer goods, and even risks: all of these conferred upon this capital-
ist world the semblances that maintained a more lively enthusiasm for jouissance.30
I have sufficiently emphasised the way in which the stumbling block of the symp-
tom becomes a token of life (Eros). Now I would like to highlight – as a counter-
point and in a way that surely falls short of the symptomatic being by which each
subject separates and distinguishes him/herself from the social and parental Other –
the requirement that generational being be respected. This is the celebrated Name-
of-the-Father, which one must either make do with or make up for in order to allow
the symptom to heal with a scar and thus keep the subject from becoming a skinless,
tormented being. In the developed capitalist countries, civil religion, like religion
itself, can easily take the form of the primal fabric or tissue onto which semblances
can be grafted. Unlike this situation, the more recent epic of revolution and its rites
28 Introduction

in real socialist countries was skewed by a fraudulent materialism, which foreclosed

the transcendent. In order not to succumb to the complaint, “What good is jouis-
sance?” such an epic required a society that would have been composed exclusively
of poets.Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide marked the death knell of such a hope.
The easiest task of the book is to show the impact of Marx and Freud’s kinship
in terms of the insurrectional character of the symptom. In the final part, I have
tried to do something much more difficult. Instead of prolonging the negative
remarks that I have just made concerning the malaise of real socialist countries,
I have sought to approach, in a more positive light, the question of how to leave
capitalism. Instead of providing a definitive answer, I give a few preliminary scraps
of a response to this question, one whose currency and urgency is always before us.
Very early, in his 1945 article, which I have already quoted, on logical time,
Lacan takes a gamble: through a “logical” problem – the parable of the three
prisoners – he seeks to elaborate a collective logic that is removed from both
Freud’s Massenpsychologie (1921) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s sense that there is No Exit
(1947). What he brings out, in particular, is that the solution to the problem can
only be envisioned if each of the three prisoners trusts the reasoning of the other
two; in such a case, as soon as one of the three finds the solution and is freed, the
same will occur for the others. Can this ideal model be applied in this context? We
know that in the postwar years, Lacan (see 1947a) was very interested in the psy-
chiatric experiments of Wilfred Bion and John Rickman, who overturned a num-
ber of assumptions about the discourse of the master and the ideology of selection,
assumptions that had, until then, been considered self-evident. Lacan always con-
sidered this to be an inexhaustible axis of research, and it may well have been a
priority for him. When he founded the École freudienne de Paris [Freudian School
of Paris] in 1964, he was seeking to create an association that would be based on
the bond of the analytic discourse. His dissolution of the school in January 1980
was an attempt not to allow this experiment to collapse. During this period, he
invented the pass and several years later, in 1974, tried to form a school on its basis.
I shall argue that Lacan’s work of the 1970s suggests that he may well have hoped
that an association of “saints” could succeed where the École freudienne was failing.
During the same period, and especially in Television, Lacan (1974b, p. 15) exam-
ined what a saint is, defining this figure as the one whose actions involve “trashitas”
and seeking to bring the saint closer to the psychoanalyst, even making them coun-
terparts. Trashitas goes against the ecclesiastical tradition and is closer to the line of
François Fénelon than of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. It involves subtracting oneself
from worldliness and the wish to repair, or at least to reduce the unjust distribu-
tion of goods, and thus of money. The impulse towards trashitas leads the saint to
abstain, first and foremost, from the theological virtue that would treat God as the
supremely expensive or dear (carus) being, the figure that no one can do without.
Can capitalism be rendered obsolete by making psychoanalysis as widespread as
literacy? To ask this question is, at the very least, to forget that no one is born psy-
choanalysed. Is my aim then to attain a majority of saints? It is unlikely that Lacan
would have appreciated this adulterated conception of a theologically-inflected
 Introduction 29

democracy. After the dissolution of 1980, he wagered on whether persons who

were – or were not – saints could create the conditions for a psychoanalytic asso-
ciation that would finally not be afraid to guide psychoanalytic discourse: to do so
in a way that would prevent it from falling back into the ruts of group “obscenity.”
This final section will close by examining the dialectic between association and
institution; it will test the idea that culture does not necessarily need to be legalist in
order to be active and that law, as necessary as it may be, is only positive if subjects
mark out the boundaries of its empire.
Finally, by approaching the decisive question of the transcendent in psychoanaly-
sis (see Lacan, 1974b, pp. 111, 112), my objective is not only to refine the separation
between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, but to suggest a stereoscopic presenta-
tion: one that will include both the sinthome and the requirement not to fill in the
gap between the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom. This Name guarantees a
law that a father, as Other, has the task of seeing that it be respected; the symptom
objects to this guarantee and founds, at its own risk, the division of the subject.

Notes
1 Marx & Engels (1932), p. 446. Lacan (1977–1978). Baudelaire (1897), p. 92.
2 This question has been specifically addressed in Le nouveau mur de l’argent by François
Morin (2006) and La finance mondialisée, edited by François Chesnais (2004).
3 See, for example, Charles Baudelaire’s (1869) prose poem “Dog and Flask”; the structural
caprices of jouissance as regards pleasure (and unpleasure) are perhaps most intelligible
in relation to the sense of smell.
4 In a footnote added to the Interpretation of Dreams in 1925, Freud (1900, p. 517, note 1)
writes:
The proposition laid down in these peremptory terms – “whatever interrupts the
progress of analytic work is a resistance” – is easily open to misunderstanding. It is
of course only to be taken as a technical rule, as a warning to analysts. It cannot be
disputed that in the course of an analysis various events may occur the responsibility
for which cannot be laid upon the patient’s intentions. His father may die without his
having murdered him; or a war may break out which brings the analysis to an end.
But behind its obvious exaggeration the proposition is asserting something both true
and new. Even if the interrupting event is a real one and independent of the patient,
it often depends on him how great an interruption it causes; and resistance shows
itself unmistakably in the readiness with which he accepts an occurrence of this kind
or the exaggerated use which he makes of it.
5 [Translator’s note: see, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry (1986, p. 59).]
6 [Translator’s note: on Fromm and the IPA, see Paul Roazen (2001).]
7 [Translator’s note: this is a reference to the Serge Gainsbourg song “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus”.]
8 This text was published in the Écrits as “The mirror stage as formative of the I function
as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” (Lacan, 1949); its initial version, presented at
the Congress 1936, has not survived.
9 For more on Gödel, also see Pierre Cassou-Noguès’ excellent Les démons de Gödel: logique
et folie (2007). The work of the logician Charles Sanders Peirce also played an important
role in Lacan’s distancing of himself from structuralism.
10 Lacan’s Écrits were published in 1966, and then in 1970, Jean Laplanche’s Vie et mort en psy-
chanalyse (translated into English as Life and Death in Psychoanalysis in 1976), was published
by Flammarion. Although the section of this work that deals with “life” is interesting, the
30 Introduction

section on “death” gets caught up in a reading of Freud that accentuates the opacity of his
text. This book is the beginning of Laplanche’s movement away from Lacan’s teaching, a
distancing that culminates in his claim that the unconscious is the condition of language;
this is, essentially, the most succinct antithesis possible of Lacan’s teaching.
11 In an early writing, Georges Politzer (1939, p. 13) attributed this view to Charles Blondel.
12 [Translator’s note: Unless otherwise noted, the citations in English of texts published in
French have been translated for this edition.]
13 Lacan translated several of Freud’s terms with désir [desire]: Wunsch [wish], which was
commonly used by Freud, but also Begierde [desire or craving] and Begehren [desire or
avidity], which Freud used very rarely but which is found in The Phenomenology of Spirit
(Hegel, 1807). This double meaning must be included in any serious reading of what
Lacan meant by désir.
14 [Translator’s note: This is a reference to a game in which a small object – a “furet” or
ferret – is passed around from one person to another while a person standing in the mid-
dle tries to guess who is holding it. See Fink (Lacan, 1966a, p. 787, note 259,1).]
15 Michael Turnheim (2001) correctly emphasises the gap between “Mourning and Melan-
cholia”, where Freud (1917) treats mourning as a process that can be completed, and his
letter of 12 April 1929 to Ludwig Binswanger, where he states that there is something
beyond mourning, something that remains “inconsolable” (E. L. Freud, 1975, p. 386).
Also note that the expression “Qui je fus” is the title of a collection of poems by Henri
Michaux (see 1997, pp. 3–5).
16 As Lacan (1973d, p. viii) writes in his preface to the English translation of The Four Fun-
damental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: “The mirage of truth . . .] has no other term than the
satisfaction that marks the end of the analysis.
17 This article, “Science and Truth”, is a reworking of the first, introductory session of
Lacan’s (1965–1966, 1 December 1965) seminar, L’objet de la psychanalyse.
18 [Translator’s note:This reference comes from the discussion that followed Lacan’s presenta-
tion of “La psychanalyse et son enseignement” at the Société française de philosophie on 23 Feb-
ruary 1957 (see 1966a, p. 866). The discussion itself is not reprinted in the Écrits; it only
appears in the original version published in the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie
(Lacan, 1957a).]
19 Would this imply that Stalin was a hidden master? There is no reason not to reply in the
affirmative, especially if we suppose that he was presented as the custodian of the line as
it was supposedly determined by the Party.
20 We could however add that such squandering has to be supervised, so that the capitalist can
invest part of the surplus-labour in the process of production. It is worth noting that Lacan
had read and appreciated Weber’s (1905) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
21 For example, Lacan (2005b, p. 20) states: “My starting point is my condition, which is
that of bringing to Man what the Scripture states, not as an help meet for him, but as an
helpmeet against him”.
22 Also see Rubel’s (1994) introduction to volume IV of the French Pléiade edition of
Marx’s collected works.
23 Incidentally, Herodotus locates the origin of democracy here with the Persians rather
than the Greeks.
24 In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930, p. 64) explores the oceanic feeling (Gefühl),
a feeling that Rolland held was the basis of all religious needs, independently of “every
belief and every illusion” (p. 64).”. After stating that he is not able to discover this feeling
within himself, which suggests that it is not universal, Freud provides a metapsychologi-
cal analysis. He argues that the feeling is the “restoration” of a primary emotional state,
specifically one of “limitless narcissism”, but he does not agree that such “oneness with
the universe” involves any “attempt at religious consolation” (ibid., p. 72). For Freud,
religious needs derive from the experience of infantile helplessness (Hilflösigkeit) and are
a substitute for the need for paternal protection. He thus rules out all forms of religious
mysticism, or at least considers them to be secondary matters.
 Introduction 31

  We also note that to express his own views, Freud (ibid., p. 73, note 1) cites Schil-
ler’s (1797, p. 48) poem “Der Taucher [The Diver]”: “Happy they whom the rose-hues
of daylight rejoice”. It is interesting to note the next lines of the poem, which Freud
does not cite: “May the horror below never more find a voice – /Nor Man stretch too
far the wide mercy of Heaven!/ Never more – never more may he lift from the mirror,
/The Veil which is woven with Night and with Terror!”. These lines seem to testify to
Freud’s need to defend himself against a fear of what is “below”. We thus could say that
Freud’s rejection of the transcendental is related to the fact that he was unable to forgo
a recourse to the father as the solution to infantile helplessness. His secularisation of the
father, which is the decisive condition for the existence of psychoanalysis, may well not
be the final word on the matter. (It is also worth noting that, in a letter written a few
years later – “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” – Freud (1936) put himself
in the position of the analysand in relation to his friend Rolland.)
  Here, however, Freud did have access to what poets use to free themselves from the
lysis of language, as he shows in quoting an extraordinary phrase from Christian Dietrich
Grabbe, which he (Freud, 1930, p. 65, note 2) cites without wanting to acknowledge its
significance: “Indeed we shall not fall out of this world. We are in it once and for all”. He
has Hannibal speak these words; this figure, in Western history, is the epitome of an unbeat-
able loser. A ghost calls out to us: what if Rome, rather than Carthage, had been destroyed?
25 [Translator’s note: English in the original.]
26 Jacques Derrida (2000, p. 241) asked the right question here, albeit from a philosophical
perspective: “can one think this apparently impossible, but otherwise impossible thing,
namely, a beyond the death drive or the drive for sovereign mastery, thus the beyond
of a cruelty, a beyond that would have nothing to do with either drives or principles?”
Although this question can be formulated philosophically, one can wonder whether it
can be answered through philosophy or whether analytic experience is required.
27 The subject itself consists in this division, and the end of analysis can be defined as the
acceptance of the Other’s division, along with the externalisation of the object a, which
refers to the discovery and acceptance that it is impossible to convey or render it fully
with signifiers.
28 For readers who may be unfamiliar with mathemes, here is an example:

  It can be read as follows: an hysteric (such as Anna O., for instance), represented by
“A”, asks a doctor (such as Breuer), represented by “B”, to explain the causes of her
troubles to her. The causes are a form of knowledge, represented by “C”. However, in
the end the doctor fails. The true cause, represented by “D”, eludes her (and that is why
there is no arrow from “C” to “D”).
29 Marxists could say that when Lacan was excommunicated from the IPA in1963, he was
the victim of a purge.
30 Regarding the “small-difference syndrome”, see the films of directors from the former
German Democratic Republic, such as Good Bye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others.
PART I
The splitting of the subject
1
LONDON/BERLIN

The “division of the subject” is not a warlike expression, although the military
sense of the word “division” can introduce the idea that such division is the only
weapon at the subject’s disposal for becoming and remaining sensitive to the real.
This real, indeed, only becomes such by resisting the linguistic domestication that,
like time for Baudelaire (1857, p. 20), is an “enemy that gnaws our heart”. “Divi-
sion” and “splitting” are translations of Freud’s German term, die Spaltung, a word
that appears late in his work, in his article,“The Splitting of the Ego in the Processes
of Defence” (1940b). The epistemic event signalled by this term went unnoticed
for a time; splitting was first understood as a supplementary defence mechanism
(although the Kleinians were more perceptive on this point than the followers of
Anna Freud). Nevertheless, it prefigures what I do not hesitate to call, in a propo-
sition that owes everything to Lacan, a new treatment of castration. It should be
noted that the article on the Spaltung is more or less contemporaneous with “Anal-
ysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), the article in which Freud introduced
the expression, the “bedrock” of castration.1
Post-Freudianism does not distinguish between castration and splitting, and a
part of “post-Lacanianism” seems to have repeated this lazy reading. Yet the dif-
ference between them is decisive. Lacan (1967–1968) began to theorise this in
his 1967–1968 seminar, L’acte psychanalytique. What is in question is a difference
that is synonymous with that between lack (which opens up the possibility of not
lacking) and loss (which is irreversible) and especially between the negativisation
of the phallus (-φ) and the barred subject (S).The latter implies the production of
an object, called the object a, which has no representation; this situates it radically
outside any representation in language. The end of an analysis lies in accepting
this division and mourning one’s castration, inasmuch as the latter, as we have
just seen, preserves the possibility of filling in lack (by sex, money, power). This
36 The splitting of the subject

idea will be decisive for this section of the book: because the capitalist discourse
rejects castration, its effect is a fortiori to mask the division of the subject.
Two couples – Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, in the Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bertolt Becht’s Joan Dark and Pierpont Mauler,
in Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1938) – show us this refusal of subjective division,
in the form of a new literary myth that ultimately includes both the material for
the ideology of this refusal and a critique of that ideology. It seems incontestable
and relatively easy to demonstrate that capitalism, in the form of the individualism
that derived from the French Revolution, projected its lethal shadow upon both
Stevenson and Brecht. What this myth concerns is not the kind of contradictory
debate between libertinism and virtue, which can be set up between Sade and
Robespierre, Mirabeau and Saint-Just, figures who exist as entities outside their
pairing and each of whom claims the privilege of having been faithful to the revo-
lution. Instead, these couples – Jekyll and Hyde, and Mauler and Dark – constitute
a single unit, and their sundering into two separate people prevents either of them
from being split; such a splitting would involve accepting the dialectic of the rela-
tion to the unconscious. Far from being the recognition that the unconscious has
an intangible and inaccessible kernel, it is purely and simply the rejection of the
very hypothesis of the unconscious. Hyde, because he has been cut away from his
unconscious, which is found in Jekyll, escapes from the latter’s control; this pro-
scription of the unconscious enables us to hear the silence of the drives.
Joan Dark has also been cut from her unconscious, which exists in Mauler, to
whom she lends her innocence, and she does not want to question her own relation
to this innocence. This position leads her to betray the cause that she has sincerely
adopted, and she does so without even realising it. Pure evil (Hyde) like pure good
(Joan Dark) are fictions of the ideology that enables capitalism – or more precisely,
its discourse – to breathe; this discourse is the linguistic armature without which
the capitalist mode of production would collapse.
I shall refrain from giving an exposition of the four discourses, as Lacan forged
them in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and the capitalist discourse, which derives
from one of these four – the discourse of the master – until a later section, entitled
“UMHA [University-Master-Hysteric-Analyst]”. However, in order to make the
relevance of its epistemic use in this first part understandable, I must note that
the specific characteristic of the capitalist discourse is an exemption from the
form of the four discourses. These discourses – of the university, the master, the
hysteric and the analyst – are explicitly constructed in terms of the principle of
a “barrier” of jouissance (Lacan, 1991, p. 108); within these discourses, this bar-
rier prevents the place of the production from reaching that of truth. In order to
forestall any misunderstanding, I shall note that this major thesis does not signify
an absolute scepticism; it simply means that truth, which should not be confused
with the real, can be touched only through the negative path of falsification. In
no case is it possible to say the truth about the truth, or to hope that the “whole
truth” can be said, to quote one of Lacan’s (1974b, p. 3) canonical formulations.
 London/Berlin 37

What characterises the capitalist discourse, on the contrary, is the lifting, or rather
the annulment of this barrier. Its spirit is best summarised by the slogans coined by
the sinister Prime Minister of the French July Monarchy, François Guizot – “Eve-
ryone is a capitalist [Tous capitalistes]!” and “Enrich yourselves [Enrichissez-vous]!” –
who took advantage of the legal equality between individuals in order to authorise
the idea of a potential equality that would exist at a level of having possessions, an
equality that capitalism would offer. I would like to argue immediately that the
secret that provides the foundation for this lie is found in the capitalist discourse: by
annulling the barrier of jouissance and thus allowing people to glimpse the mirage
of a consumption that would saturate desire (a possible definition of jouissance),
this discourse asserts that the object a – the surplus object, of which we can funda-
mentally have no idea – is equal to money, which can be counted and entered into
financial records.2 This enables us to understand why Lacan credits – or discredits –
Marx with having given a foundation to capitalism by taking surplus jouissance, the
object a, as a surplus-value, thus making it subject to an energetics and contradict-
ing the principal axiom of psychoanalysis: there is no energetics of jouissance.3
The alchemy of capitalism does not transform desire into jouissance, yet in mak-
ing the plastic carrot glimmer with desire, capitalism keeps sharpening it until it has
been worn down to nothing, as is demonstrated by the various addictions that are
responses to this death of desire.
I shall now give the briefest sketch possible of the logical bases of Lacan’s
discourses. In the matheme of the capitalist discourse, as I shall argue in detail
later, there is a vector that goes from a (surplus-jouissance) to S, the subject.4 As
with all scientific notions, even when it is possible to give definitions and for-
mulas for them, this relation is not absolutely transparent: it cannot be reduced
to a denotation that would make it entirely and eternally intelligible. This same
arrow is also found in the analytic discourse, where, however, it is marked as
impossible.

This can be read from right to left: the desire of a subject – in this case, the
analysand – cannot (hence the impossibility) find its satisfaction in the object a –
in this case, the analyst – which nevertheless causes the subject’s desire. If analytic
treatment can be described as the analysand’s mobilisation, through transference, of
surplus-jouissance, a “profit” of jouissance that feeds his/her desire to speak, then at
the end of analysis, this jouissance proves to be vacuous, and this “profit” becomes
the commemoration of an initial and founding absence: that of a jouissance that
could saturate desire. In reality, as I shall argue later about the analytic discourse,
this absent jouissance is the Other’s. The jouissance that I impute to the Other is
nothing more than a product of my thought, for any jouissance that I experience
can only be what affects my body. I cannot reach jouissance in the Other’s body.
The genius of obsessional neurosis is to support this jouissance of the Other by
38 The splitting of the subject

pure thought, while the genius of hysteria is to posit that a lack of satisfaction is the
condition for desire. The analytic discourse is able to turn these two neurotic crea-
tions around by turning the fantasy around, because it is constituted on the basis of
the impossibility for the subject to experience the jouissance of the Other (God,
the parents, the partner, etc.).5
The capitalist discourse presents us with a route that can be repeated indefinitely,
a route that, in a certain way, makes repetition present. This discourse derives from
the discourse of the master. In the latter discourse, with the vector that goes from S1
to S2, the master commands the slave, but the slave is the one who knows, a knowl-
edge that enables him/her to act. In this respect, the transposition of this couple
into that of the capitalist and the worker is not unwarranted, since what intervenes
in production is the certification (S2) of labour-power. What gives this S1 its abil-
ity to command is not knowledge but money. This money will be valorised by the
investment and cathexis of knowledge in production.

The worker produces, and in the Marxist sense, produces surplus-value. Within
capitalism, labour-power becomes a commodity. Thus, surplus-jouissance can take
the form of surplus-value.This surplus-value (Mehrwert) is the extra value produced
by the wage-earner during his/her overall labour time, once the value of his/her
labour-power has been reproduced during the earlier hours of the working day. As
Marx notes in the Grundrisse:

if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day,
then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day.The
second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears
as surplus value on capital’s side appears identically on the worker’s side as
surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his
immediate requirements for keeping himself alive.
(Marx, 1939, pp. 324–325)

Hyde and seek

In the capitalist discourse, S (the subject) and S2 (knowledge) constitute a couple
in which each element is sundered [scindé], rather than split [divisé] from the other.
I am using the term “sundered” as the name of a process in which the dialectic
that occurs in splitting is absent. This sundering is the true subject of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s extraordinary text, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This book
appeared in 1886, three years after Marx’s death, and two years before the article
 London/Berlin 39

on hysteria that Freud (1888) wrote for Villaret’s medical dictionary. This narrative
deserves to be considered as a new myth because it is different from the problematic
of the double, which is characteristic of German “dark romanticism”. Just as Hyde
is not Jekyll’s double, so Jekyll is also not Hyde’s double. They are two sundered
entities rather than a split subject.
It is true that Jekyll himself uses the word, “double” in the succinct notes that he
keeps on the experiment in transformation (see Stevenson, 1886, p. 123).Yet there is
a decisive reason not to rank Stevenson’s story within the enormous body of litera-
ture concerning the double produced during the nineteenth century: Hyde and Jekyll
never encounter one another, for although they are sundered, they are also the same.
They are both enclosed within the “fortress of identity”, as Stevenson (1886, p. 111)
says. Naturally, Jekyll is situated in the place of S2 and Hyde in S. Jekyll is a doctor, a man
of knowledge, like Faust. Yet Doctor Faust triumphs where Jekyll fails. If a diagnosis
were required, one could say that Jekyll and Hyde together are a single schizophrenic.
Yet what is important is that, during the very period when the process of constitut-
ing the individual had been achieved and the metaphor of the organic social body
had become obsolete, Stevenson’s story brought to light an individual sundered from
himself, in the form quite exactly of a subject who has been cut from his unconscious: S // S2.
This is one of the keys to the book: Jekyll is Hyde’s foreclosed unconscious.
In other words, Hyde should be considered as the hero, whose inability to know
anything about his unconscious is the tragic weakness that constitutes the story’s
motive force and novelty. His access to the unconscious has been radically closed
because the barrier of jouissance has been lifted and the unconscious ends up going
solo. If the unconscious, like Jekyll, is in S2, this means that, contrary to the received
psychoanalytic idea that Hyde is Jekyll’s unconscious, it is Jekyll who is Hyde’s uncon-
scious. Because Jekyll is the unconscious, which is closed in the capitalist discourse,
Hyde becomes the drive. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the emblematic figures of this
“sundering”. They could even become its eponym, if we keep the game of hide
and seek in mind, since Hyde’s name is obviously a punning reference to this game.
Stevenson, who came from a family whose men had traditionally been builders
or engineers of lighthouses, wrote this tale at the age of 36. The kernel of the story
emerged in a nightmare that he had had a year before, from which he had been
awakened by his wife, Fanny, frightened by his screams. He wrote a first narrative
based on this nightmare, which he then destroyed after a violent argument with her;
she objected to it because it did not include any moral.
This tale has a precedent in Stevenson’s work: an early play written with William
Ernest Henley entitled Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life (1892), which was inspired by a
real event. By day, Brodie was a deacon and cabinet-maker; by night, he was a burglar.
The fact that he is a deacon – and thus charged with the distribution of alms – already
indicates that Stevenson is concerned more with questions of money than with neo-
romantic narratives of doubles. It is not irrelevant to note both that his father was a
rigorous and intransigent Calvinist and that, according to his own statements, he wrote
his tale to pay his debts to “Byles the butcher” (see Dury, 2005, p. 9). It is also worth
noting that Stevenson was once struck by reading an article on the subconscious.All of
40 The splitting of the subject

these matters converge on an emphasis on a conflict between good and evil, in which
problems of money and the “subconscious” come into play in an entirely new way; the
result is a new configuration that goes beyond received ethical conceptions.6
I have chosen the term “sundering” in order to accentuate the incompatibility
between two entities, which belong, nevertheless, to a single personality. Entzweiung
[division, split, rupture, rift], the term that Freud uses in the article, “Splitting of the
Ego in the Process of Defence”, would have been appropriate if I were writing in
German.“Two divide into one” – a reversal of Mao Zedong’s (see 2007, p. 196, note
19) definition of dialectic – could also be appropriated ironically. For that matter,
the lacerating “schism [scission]” of the French psychoanalytic movement in 1953, in
which Lacan and other notables broke away from the Société psychanalytique de Paris
[Paris Psychoanalytic Society], could be described as an institutional sundering.
Lacan, by analogy, would, of course, be Mr. Hyde (the drive) and the Société psy-
chanalytique de Paris would just as incontestably be the unconscious. Let us hope that
this institute will not lead to Lacan’s “suicide” – which, in my little analogy, would
involve the transformation of his work into something that would be absorbed into
the IPA, if we equate this with a sort of petrification of theory.
Do contemporary myths exist, or must we now resign ourselves to dealing only
with ideologies? I am tempted to maintain that myths remain relevant; perhaps we
would be better off if we replaced – or regenerated – sociology with an ethnography
of our own societies. These societies, although they may be civilised, are nonetheless
prehistoric, since writing still does not have its true place in them.Writing was com-
promised first by the sacralisation that it inspired, and now by an inflation of publi-
cations, which resembles what is referred to, in finance, as a money-printing frenzy.
As the very perceptive critic Jean-Pierre Naugrette (1994) notes in his preface
to a French translation of Stevenson’s story, there is, however, a limit to this sun-
dering: except on one occasion, Hyde never says “I”. For this reason, he can never
become the radically immoral narrator of the tale. The final chapter is entitled,
“Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”, with its equivocal use of the term
“case”, which can refer to both a police investigation and a clinical case. Jekyll has
thus not, at this point, lost the capacity to speak. The loss of his subjectivity will
eventually reach the point where he can no longer say “I”, and where Hyde will
take over from him. This may be the story’s sole resemblance to the problematic of
the double, but this also may not be a correct assessment. It would be better to ask
what the status of this “I” is in analytic experience. A narration of a dream often
begins with “I”, but we know that the action reported by this “I” also conceals the
actual place of desire; this desire is figured, instead, in the third person, in another
of the dream’s entities. This brings up another question: does waking up have the
function of preventing us from articulating the aspect of desire that has to do with
pure evil, with Thanatos, freed from its entanglements? It certainly does. Perhaps
this means that there could be a satisfying dream, one from which we would never
wake up, or at least one that would be brought to an end by our awakening. Such a
dream would have to contain a certain cache of Thanatos, some element that would
bind Thanatos libidinally. This is Stevenson’s story: disentangled Thanatos. Mr. Hyde
 London/Berlin 41

is forbidden an “I”. In other words, saying “I” is a minimal libidinalisation of the

pure culture of death.
These are the sorts of questions raised by the story of Henry Jekyll, an honour-
able physician and scientist, who is transformed by a drug into the cruel Mr. Hyde.
The latter, after trampling a girl in the street, kills a member of parliament, Sir
Danvers Carew, for no reason. Jekyll decides to stop this experiment, but the trans-
formations continue, and he can no longer control them. In order not to become
and remain Hyde, Jekyll commits suicide.7

From the door to the window

In this story, the choice of various last names involves a certain “predestination”
in Stevenson’s treatment of his characters. This is obvious with “Hyde”, but is also
the case with “Utterson”, the utter, perfect son, who is also an utter idiot. He is an
“incurable” son: one who cannot make himself an exception to the Oedipus com-
plex, whether the latter be positive or negative. Such a son would fundamentally be
a sinner, even without killing his father. Utterson thus contrasts with Markheim, the
main character of another story by Stevenson. Refusing to believe that he can be
reduced to his criminal act, Markheim wants to be judged only on the basis of his
interiority, of what exists within himself. Externally, he is determined by his act, but
he remains free “within”; this, according to Markheim, is what counts in God’s eyes.
He is his father’s son, but this predicate misses his being. For this reason, he refuses
the pact that the devil proposes to make with him.8 There is another difference
between “Markheim” and the Strange Case. In the former, the hero resists the devil –
or at least the tempter – whereas Hyde is constantly mentioned as a possible figure of
the devil.This suggests, as soon as we learn that Hyde is Jekyll, that the devil is not an
external character: instead, the devil is the part of each of us that involves the drives.
If we go a step further, we will reach Freud’s thesis that the devil is the equivalent of
the father: a representation of the father whom it is possible to hate.
We can now return to Utterson, the strange lawyer who, in apparent contrast
with his well-ordered and disciplined life, “incline[s] to Cain’s heresy”, by “lett[ing]
my brother go to the devil in his own way” (Stevenson, 1886, p. 2).9 His ability to
forgive anything makes him an ideal father, which is the fate of a son who is impris-
oned for life in the Oedipus complex. In the first part of the story, as investigator,
he wants to know who Hyde is: “If he be Mr. Hyde . . . I shall be Mr. Seek” (ibid.,
p. 21). Yet he starts off by following a false, rather vague lead, which is not exactly
the one that was given to him by Richard Enfield, the friend who had witnessed
Hyde’s trampling of the little girl. Enfield had mentioned the possibility that Mr.
Hyde was blackmailing Dr. Jekyll, but Utterson fixates on a somewhat different
idea: that Jekyll is concealing an old wrongdoing, which would explain the myste-
rious will in which he has made Hyde his heir, just as it would explain why Hyde
is in possession of his signed checks. Utterson, after seeing his friend and trying
in vain to convince him to change the will, ends up in consenting to a request of
Jekyll’s: that he help Hyde after he himself is dead.
42 The splitting of the subject

Both these events and those that follow raise a question concerning the reader.
As the story progresses, there are numerous clues that Jekyll is indeed Hyde. Unfor-
tunately, it is difficult to locate a particular moment when readers would solve the
mystery, since most readers are now aware of the solution from the beginning.
Even a reader who does not know the story would probably be a few steps ahead
of Utterson, who is unequalled in his capacity to be duped. While we await the
revelation, the facts emerge gradually, before being placed in logical order by Jekyll’s
final confession.Yet a question remains, one whose importance can be emphasised
by returning to the question of psychosis: at what point is it possible to know that
Jekyll is Hyde, and thus escape from the trap of paranoiac innocence (which is so
admirably preserved in the background of authenticity found in paranoid behav-
iour) as well as the trap of fierce schizophrenic ignorance?
A year after Jekyll’s request to Utterson, a crime occurs: it repeats, in an aggravated
form, the inaugural scene in which Hyde trampled the little girl. In this second scene,
the victim, who does not survive, is a member of parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, who
is “trampl[ed] . . . under foot”, an action that, because of its repetition, suggests that it
had figured in Stevenson’s nightmare (ibid., p. 37). In scene I, the witness is Utterson’s
friend, Enfield. In scene II, the witness is a maid with “romantic” tendencies, whose
master was being visited by Hyde (ibid., p. 35). A letter for Utterson is found on the
corpse, thus confirming Utterson’s status as the key character to whom all the others
are connected. This is an important point: Utterson is the ultimate receiver of all the
numerous letters in the story, even of those that are not initially addressed to him.
This letter is the only one whose content we never discover. It has the status of an
exception, and it constitutes a point of incompleteness in the story, like the hand of
one of the “meninas” in Velasquez’s painting. Let us also note, because it confirms that
this text is not part of the romantic tradition, the narrative’s astonishing modernity.
The action involves objects that could be so many clues to help us discover the truth,
but which must await the correct interpretation: an example is the cane, which is
not only the murderer’s weapon, but is also a present given by Utterson to Jekyll.
The same could be said for the butt of the cheque book, which had escaped being
destroyed by fire in the chimney of Hyde’s apartment, and which bears Hyde’s name.
Because of this clue, the police inspector and Utterson wait for Hyde at the
bank where he has his account, but he never comes.Then Utterson visits Dr. Jekyll,
who claims that he no longer has any relation with Hyde. He shows Utterson a
letter supposedly written by Hyde (letter 2), in which he assures Jekyll that he has
a way to keep from getting caught. Utterson is reassured, but after asking Poole,
Jekyll’s servant, what the messenger looked like, he learns that there had been no
messenger. Returning, worried again, to his home, he shows the letter to Mr. Guest,
his head clerk, who also happens to be an expert graphologist, and asks him his
opinion about the “murderer’s autograph” (ibid., p. 51). After examining the paper,
Guest says that the writer is “not mad; but it is an odd hand” (ibid., p. 51). When a
servant enters, carrying a letter (letter 3) – an invitation from Dr. Jekyll – Guest rec-
ognises the handwriting and asks Utterson for permission to compare Hyde’s letter
with Jekyll’s note, concluding that “the two hands are in many points identical:
 London/Berlin 43

only differently sloped” (ibid., p. 52). Later, when alone, Utterson thinks to himself,
“What! . . . Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” (ibid., p. 52). This episode is inter-
esting because it raises the question of whether Jekyll knew what he was doing
in forging a letter. The answer revises this question; the “forgery” is real. A better
question would be: who wrote it, Jekyll or Hyde? If Hyde wrote it, he did so not to
deceive Jekyll, but to enable Jekyll to deceive Utterson. If Jekyll wrote it, it would
still have the same goal. The ruse is the same whoever wrote it.
Thousands of pounds are offered for Hyde’s capture, to no avail. Jekyll becomes
himself again and renews his relations with his friends. However, Utterson twice
finds his friend’s door closed to everyone, and worried once again, pays a visit to
Lanyon, with whom he had dined at Jekyll’s home a few evenings before. He finds
Lanyon dying, and the latter, knowing that he has so little time left, confides in him:
“I sometimes think that if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away” (ibid.,
p. 57). In retrospect, we can, of course, explain why Lanyon makes this statement,
but upon reading it for the first time, it is enigmatic. Lanyon also tells Utterson that
he has broken entirely with Jekyll.Troubled, Utterson returns home, writes to Jekyll
to ask him why he is not receiving and why he has quarrelled with Lanyon. Jekyll
answers (letter 4) without revealing anything, and only asking Utterson to “suffer
me to go my own dark way” (ibid., p. 58). Eight days later, Lanyon dies, leaving
Utterson an envelope (letter 5) that contains another envelope (letter 6) marked as
“not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll” (ibid., p. 60).
Utterson is struck by the term, “disappearance”, which had already figured in the
will that Jekyll had made in Hyde’s favour.
Utterson has stopped visiting Jekyll because of his friend’s taciturnity, but one
evening, while on a walk with Enfield, he finds himself standing under Jekyll’s
window. Encountering Jekyll, they begin to speak with him, and he seems happy to
see them, but then suddenly “the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by
an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two
gentlemen below” (ibid., p. 64).
From then on, events move quickly. One evening, Jekyll’s servant, Poole, visits
Utterson and begs him for help, since his master has shut himself up in his labora-
tory. On knocking on its door, they hear Jekyll say that he does not want to see
anyone. Poole remarks to Utterson that Jekyll’s voice has changed, and that they are
now hearing Mr. Hyde’s voice.

The change of voice

It is difficult to resist referring once again to the anomalous matheme of the capi-
talist discourse. The statement about the voice allows this object to be located at a:

Hyde S S2 Dr. Jekyll

Stevenson S1 a voice
44 The splitting of the subject

If S2, knowledge, is Dr. Jekyll, and the subject is Mr. Hyde, then in S1 we can only
place the author himself, Robert Louis Stevenson, the master of the mystery. The
transformation of the voice concerns two vectors: the one that descends from S2 to
a, and then the diagonal arrow that moves upward from a to S.Voices are modulated
by knowledge. Is it possible, for example, not to recognise the voice of a priest on
a radio broadcast? In this context, the consequence of the transformation of Jekyll’s
voice into Hyde’s is to strip it of the knowledge that has clothed it; now the strings
of the drive – which had until then been concealed – begin to vibrate. Knowledge
has one voice and the drive has a very different one, which betrays the subject.This
reading may seem a bit forced, but, more generally, since Lacan defines the object
a in this discourse as surplus-jouissance, one might well wonder whether it would
be more appropriate to say that money – and especially surplus-value – occupies
the place of production. This place could also be taken by the numerous consumer
objects, which are intended to saturate the subject’s desire; the attempt to use them
for this purpose fails, however, since the subject never ceases to be split. This struc-
tural requisite will form the centre of the denouement of the “strange case”. I shall
soon confirm these hypotheses.
Despite these considerations, there is another reason to emphasise the voice as
object a. The variation in the voice invites us to locate not only Hyde, but also
Utterson, in S. Perhaps, at the end, Utterson, the utter son, is also found here, in a
way that resolves the enigma of how two are divided into one. After all, it is Utter-
son who will be substituted for Hyde in Jekyll’s will, a substitution that has never
received the emphasis that it deserves.
In the denouement, Poole provides Utterson with new information, giving him
a note (letter 7) in which Jekyll complains to his apothecary that a particular pow-
der did not have the same composition as the one that he had bought earlier. (It
will turn out that the first powder was impure and that this very impurity had prob-
ably enabled it to turn Hyde back into Jekyll.) Then Poole tells Utterson that he
had once seen his master disguised, as if he were wearing a mask on his face. After
having once again produced an incorrect explanation, Utterson finally decides to
intervene, as Poole had asked him to. They break down the laboratory door, and
find the corpse of Hyde, who has swallowed cyanide.
This time, the reader will certainly have seen further than Utterson, who is still
looking for Dr. Jekyll, even after finding Hyde’s body. Utterson’s time is always,
structurally, late. He does not know how to read the clues that he continues to dis-
cover, even when he finds a religious text, which is annotated in Jekyll’s own hand
with “startling blasphemies” (ibid., p. 86). Finally, on the table, Utterson finds three
documents: Jekyll’s will, in which he is designated as heir in Hyde’s place; a letter
(letter 9) in which Jekyll enjoins him to read the document that Lanyon had sent
to him; and finally, Jekyll’s confession (letter 10).The solution to the mystery finally
appears in these two last documents.
These two documents bring to an end the story, along with its enigmas and
lacunae, its holes in the narrative tissue, its red herrings and the pseudo-explanations
produced systematically by Utterson. The action finishes. Lanyon and Jekyll are
 London/Berlin 45

dead. With the unveiling of what had been hidden, one returns to the present in
order to go back over the course of events, which has now become comprehensible.

The devil or science

There is a reason why the two final texts were written by two doctors, custodians
of knowledge, who were rivals in the field of science, or rather, disagreed about its
powers. One, Lanyon, was a humanist/positivist, while the other wanted to enable
human beings to become the equals of their “creator”, to borrow the terminol-
ogy that was used in the second half of the nineteenth century. This theme marks
a turning point. In dark romanticism, people turned towards their doubles or their
shadows and thought that the Devil was responsible for the coherence of these
forms. A pact – which was itself constraining – could be made with the Devil,
which would permit access to a jouissance that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Goethe was an exception to this scheme, because he subverted the notion of the
pact, making Faust the victor and Mephistopheles the vanquished. In this respect,
Jekyll is more modern than Lanyon, just as Doctor Moreau is more modern than
Brigitte Bardot: they prefigure the biological manipulation that seeks to preserve
the animality of the human, rather than to imagine the humanity of the animal.
Nevertheless, the gap between Lanyon and Jekyll cannot be more slender. The
most blinkered positivism can be compatible with the most credulous spiritual-
ism,10 but this is not what is really at stake: neither Lanyon nor Jekyll is tempted by
spiritualism, and they are not responsible for the return of an interest in astrology
under capitalism. Instead, the question is the fundamental one of the limits of sci-
ence. Does science have a place in the field of jouissance? What is in question is
not sexology, which is always stupid and fraudulent, but the intertwining and the
disentwining of the drives, of Eros and Thanatos.
The two final documents, particularly Jekyll’s statement, throw an interesting
light on this problem. Before examining them, I would like to point out a signifi-
cant discrepancy in Lanyon’s text concerning the date of the letter in which Jekyll
had appealed to him to follow his bizarre instructions (which were supposed to
enable Jekyll, who had been transformed unexpectedly into Hyde while far from
home, to procure the drugs necessary to recover his original identity). The date of
this letter is 10 December. In his confession, however, Jekyll situates this episode on
a “fine, clear, January day” (ibid., p. 131). Perhaps this contradiction results merely
from an oversight on Stevenson’s part.Yet even if there is some confusion, why not
raise this to the level of a symptom, and consider it as the final mark, in the real, of
the impossibility of grasping simultaneity? One person’s time is never the same as
another’s, and even if physics can measure both, it cannot situate them on the same
continuum, since the space in which they take place is never the same.
More importantly, we learn from Lanyon’s narrative that he encountered Hyde
and was shocked to see him being transformed into Jekyll. Lanyon tells Utterson
about the effect produced by Hyde’s presence: an “odd subjective disturbance [was]
caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and
46 The splitting of the subject

was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse” (ibid., p. 99). Lanyon makes it
clear that his reaction does not result from hatred. Certainly Hyde, as other wit-
nesses have attested, inspires and even catalyses hatred. Yet Lanyon is testifying to
something else: perhaps what he discovers in this unalterable alterity is the human
being as such.
The effect of Jekyll’s reappearance is less shocking, although just as cataclysmic:
“My life”, says Lanyon, “is shaken to its roots” (ibid., p. 105). The horror of discov-
ering Jekyll’s “moral turpitude” and that he is Carew’s murderer (note the affection-
ate use of the name, “Sir Danvers”) will push Lanyon to his death. Only ethics can
evaluate this situation, since morality, as Dr. Lanyon’s death proves, does not provide
a sufficient rampart against this discovery.11
The central part of Stevenson’s edifice is Jekyll’s own narrative, his “statement
of the case”, before Utterson as judge. Jekyll’s rather commonplace biography
is dominated by the conflict between duplicity and sincerity: objective duplic-
ity and subjective sincerity. Closer to the heart of the ethical question, we find
the thesis that “man is not truly one, but truly two” (ibid., p. 108). Perhaps, he
wonders, the “fortress of identity” exists only to contain this primal sundering
and can be undone by orienting one’s scientific studies “towards the mystic and
the transcendental” (ibid., pp. 111, 107). Beyond this, Jekyll does not reject the
idea that people can be multiple; Stevenson himself kept abreast of the work of
psychologists and physicians, who were using an experimental model involving
hypnosis to study multiple personalities. The story, however, leaves the question
of dualism or pluralism in suspense, and we shall return to it in the chapter on
Deleuze and Guattari.
In the case of Jekyll, however, only two entities are confronted with one another:
good and evil.These “polar twins” are not divided up in Jekyll and Hyde partes extra
partes. Although Hyde is indeed presented as pure evil, Jekyll remains torn between
the two. Had this not been the case, Jekyll would not have been tempted to become
Hyde. Two points need to be noted concerning Jekyll’s relation to Hyde. First, iso-
lating evil and transferring it onto Hyde, exonerates Jekyll from his guilt:

the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of
his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his
upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no
longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
(ibid., p. 109)

One can only be struck by this prefiguration of the modern, even postmodern sub-
ject; nearly half a century later, the character of Pierpont Mauler in Bertolt Brecht’s
Saint Joan of the Stockyards would follow this configuration to an astonishing degree.
Yet it should also not be forgotten that this attempt at sundering, which can be
criticised for its conformity to the capitalist discourse, was originally a rejection of
the doctrine of original sin. Seen in these terms, the conclusion would not be so
unilateral, for this ideal goes well beyond its possible uses by capitalism.
 London/Berlin 47

Second, in relation to his conception of Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde (evil

is physically smaller!), Stevenson has an intuition about the immateriality of the
body. To translate this intuition without forcing things, I shall quote Lacan’s (1970,
p. 409) treatment of this question in “Radiophonie”: “The first body [the body of the
symbolic] creates the second by incorporating itself into it.This is where the incor-
poreal that remains to mark the first comes from, from the time after its incorpora-
tion”.This is why Hyde is called an “inorganic” creature, which does not contradict,
but rather confirms his “love of life” (Stevenson, 1886, pp. 133, 139).This love is not
an Eros that has a biological essence; it is the result of an experimentation that had
been wanted and conducted by a human being.
This leads us to the heart of Jekyll’s practical reason.Whereas Hyde is supposed to
be pure evil, Jekyll is a composite of good and evil. Because he rejects this subjective
division, he conceives and carries out the “Hyde project”, but without succeeding.
Jekyll and Hyde are therefore not symmetrical, and we have reason to believe that
the myth forged by Stevenson concerns the refusal of the subject’s splitting. There
are only two ways by which Jekyll can rid himself of the Hyde within him: change
himself entirely into Hyde or kill himself. In the same way, mutatis mutandis, in Saint
Joan of the Stockyards, Joan is supposed to be pure good, and Mauler embodies the
splitting between good and evil. Thus, it is not very surprising that Jekyll himself
had believed that he had made this discovery “under the empire of generous or
pious aspirations”, and that it would enable him to “come forth an angel instead of
a fiend” (ibid., p. 115). This may be an illusion, but it reveals the temptation to rid
himself of the ethical question. In this sense, sundering is an orthopaedic prosthesis that
serves to screen off the subject’s splitting.
As I have mentioned, a gnawing preoccupation makes itself felt throughout
the everyday life of this bizarre couple: the need for the money that would enable
Hyde to survive should Jekyll disappear. At the beginning, there is the will that
makes Hyde the heir; then the money demanded by the parents of the girl whom
he had trampled; the cheque to them taken from a cheque book in Hyde’s name;
the fact that the police believe wrongly that they can catch him when he goes
to the bank to take out some money, etc. The transfer of personalities requires
a transfer of money; with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production,
money has become not only the indispensable means of subsistence, but also the
standard for measuring value. Hyde’s “respectability” can only be guaranteed by
Jekyll’s fortune.There is no subject without money, no S without a.The entry into
language produces a loss of jouissance, which then establishes the requirement
for jouissance; in this way, money comes to occupy the place of this loss. In the
place of a in the capitalist discourse, I first situated the voice, as part-object.Yet the
voice, as Stevenson says over and over, changes. Hyde’s voice is not Jekyll’s. This
variability of the objects a makes them precarious and signals their inability to
ensure surplus-jouissance; this surplus-jouissance, in the capitalist discourse – for
an individual who has been deprived of his/her unconscious – is expected finally
to be able to lift the bar that divides the subject. The full-fledged capitalist dis-
course would reduce this subject to the status of zero, which would be its status
48 The splitting of the subject

outside its constitutive division. Zero is the value that would be appropriate to the
subject as soon as the latter is treated as a pure effect of language. Since, however,
the splitting of the subject cannot be eliminated, it is the capitalist discourse that
is headed for a blowout.12
In the capitalist discourse, money therefore comes to substitute for the part-
objects as their general or “universal equivalent”, to use Marx’s (1867, p. 180) term;
it ensures that there will be an invariability in surplus-jouissance, thus preventing
this jouissance from failing. Its ability to act in this way in the capitalist discourse
supposes that money can be conceived through a parthenogenesis, which would
shelter it from devaluation. (This is precisely the illusion that is being maintained
by those who have abandoned the real economy.)
The point of no return is reached when Jekyll can no longer control Hyde’s
transformations into him and vice versa. Jekyll’s will is now deactivated. This event
occurs on that “fine, clear, January day” mentioned earlier; until then, his will had
guaranteed the permanence of his identity (ibid., p. 131). Hyde was merely his
“creature”, even if the “creator” rejoiced in Hyde’s “moral” independence. In this
new configuration, Jekyll’s panic becomes the signal that he is threatened with
depersonalisation: the total loss of identity, which would involve reconstituting his
identity in the form of Hyde. In this situation, what comes literally to save Jekyll is
a memory: “that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write
my own hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must
follow became lighted up from end to end” (ibid., p. 133).
As we recall, it was Guest, Utterson’s first clerk, who noticed that Jekyll and
Hyde’s handwriting differed only in their slopes. Unlike the voice, writing cannot
change; it can only, at a pinch, be forged. Writing is on one side, and the voice and
money are on the other. To speak in general terms: what saves Jekyll is what con-
demns the capitalist discourse. To make this formulation more absolute, I shall add
that writing resists virtualisation and is therefore nothing other than the symptom
as such. There is no need to treat “writing” as a metaphor to move from handwrit-
ing to Stevenson’s status as writer. The signature marks the presence of the proper
Name, which has a geographical particularity that goes against the globalisation of
language; writing becomes the way to exit from the prison-house of language. As
Nathalie Sarraute wrote, “Knock, knock, real, open up!”
Finally, on this basis, we can approach the most sensitive question: who dies
when Jekyll commits suicide? Is it even a suicide? After all, the body of the person
who has killed himself is not the same as the corpse that Utterson and Poole find.
In his statement of the case, Jekyll makes a revealing remark: “He, I say – I cannot
say, I” (ibid., p. 134). He thus emphasises that when he is Hyde, he can no longer
appropriate himself subjectively by speaking in the first person. In a sense, this is
a usual and necessary state: the “I” of the enunciation never corresponds to that
of the statement. Is Jekyll, however, telling the truth? The final proposition of this
narrative is “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (ibid., p. 141).
Who, in this case, is “I”, since Jekyll is referred to in the third person? “I” may well
be Hyde. Several lines above, Jekyll writes, “when I shall again and forever reindue
 London/Berlin 49

that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair”
(ibid., p. 141). In this sentence, a transfer of the “I” is operating continually, perhaps
making the reader sensitive to the pathos of Hyde as subject: the evil man who
finally attains his division, through his own anxiety.

The three scenes

This examination of Jekyll’s final letter does not resolve the enigmatic quality of his
case; we have not yet mentioned an important event that figures in his statement.
While Hyde is going from the hotel to Dr. Lanyon’s home, where he hopes to
find the drug that will turn him back into Jekyll, “a woman spoke to him, offering,
I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled” (ibid., p. 135).
This scene constitutes the third version of what we have referred to as the primal
scene, and the three, taken together, resemble Freud’s (1919) analysis of the three
phases of the fantasy in “A Child is Being Beaten”. In Stevenson’s tale, we would
obtain the following:

Primal Scene (Scene I): a little girl is being beaten by Hyde, while a man is watching.
Scene II: a man is being beaten by Hyde, while a woman is watching.
Scene III: a woman is being beaten by Hyde, but who is watching?

Since this third scene had at least one witness – the one who reports it – we could
say that Jekyll is watching. It happens that this witness is unsure of himself, and adds,
concerning the matchbox, “I think”. At the moment when this scene takes place,
Jekyll seems already to have been partially absorbed into Hyde’s personality, and is
on the point of disappearing as a witness.13 Yet the final witness, the tale’s author, is
Stevenson himself. We shall soon see how this hypothesis will be borne out.
In these three scenes, Hyde is in the position of the agent: the agent of cas-
tration, to introduce Freud’s thesis, and the real father – who carries out the
subject’s castration – to present Lacan’s, in his seminar, The Other Side of Psychoa-
nalysis (Lacan, 1991, p. 128; also see Bruno, 2003b). This conclusion confirms,
rather than contradicts, the argument that Hyde is a pure being of the drives. The
fantasy, which is primarily sadistic, is located on Jekyll’s side, in either an uncon-
scious or a conscious form, and the bare drive, stripped of the fantasy, is found
on Hyde’s side. The murder of Sir Danvers Carew procures a sadistic jouissance
for him (he “tast[ed] delight from every blow”) (Stevenson, 1886, p. 127), but the
jouissance that Stevenson attributes to him is certainly the result of a confusion
connected to the author’s own conception of the real father. The jouissance of
the real father must always remain unknown: the very definition of this figure
carries the logical implication that the jouissance that he is supposed to feel is
the subject’s own (see Stevenson’s nightmare). Yet despite this reservation, Hyde
is very much the agent of castration; he is an exception to the phallic law and is
exempt from the passion of hatred for the man he kills. He is the object rather
than the agent of hatred.
50 The splitting of the subject

This leads us to question the figure of the father who is paired with Hyde:
Utterson, who is decidedly a jack of all trades. He is a symbolic father, the one who
conforms to the law in everything, and who, as a correlate, can explain everything,
especially the turpitudes of the sons. The perfect son, quite consistently, turns out
to be the perfect father. I shall not even enter into Stevenson’s apparently rather
complex relations with his own father, who supported his son, but had rather set-
tled opinions on the path that he should follow: he suggested that, as a way of com-
promising between the careers of engineer and writer, his son should study law!
Jekyll refuses his division as subject and occupies the place of knowledge,
delegating that of subject to Hyde. In doing so, Jekyll inscribes himself precisely
in the capitalist discourse: his explicit hope is to disencumber himself of desire
by constructing a relation in which the object-cause of desire would complete
Hyde as subject. This completion would put an end to the subject’s division,
as well as to subjectivation itself. This subjectivation is to be found in the fact
that Jekyll is never totally absent from Hyde. If he were, why would he want to
become Jekyll again? The splitting of the subject is therefore what resists the capital-
ist discourse; it is what this discourse cannot tame. As for the solution in which
Hyde would become the figure who commands, thereby incarnating the place of
S1 – the master signifier rather than the subject, S – this is precisely what Jekyll
refuses with horror, for if it were to take place, it would involve accepting that
Hyde is the agent of castration, which he does not want. Such an acceptance
would, however, be the condition for moving back from the capitalist discourse
to that of the master; S1 would be found again in the place of the agent, and S
in that of truth.

Capitalist Discourse Discourse of the Master

S S2 S1 S2

S1 a S a
Through this return, the unconscious could reclaim its rights and an analysis
could begin.
The last matter that Jekyll mentions is the possibility that Hyde will destroy his
statement. Likewise, he notes that in setting down his pen, he puts an end to the life
of Dr. Henry Jekyll. What is a tale if not the duration of its reading, during which
the characters are alive? Can Hyde, in this fiction, exit from the fiction in which he
was born, in order to prevent Jekyll from living in this fiction, and in consequence,
deprive Stevenson of the status of being the author, and us of reading this master-
work? To whom is Stevenson alluding, in this highly discreet, shadowy passage, if
not to his wife Fanny Osbourne, who, at an early moment, had suggested that the
immoral first version of the Strange Case should be destroyed. And who better than
his beloved cousin, Katherine de Mattos, could be the dedicatee of this first verse of
the epigraph: “It’s ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind”?
 London/Berlin 51

Dark
Bertolt Brecht finished Saint Joan of the Stockyards in October 1931, between the
great economic, social and financial crisis of 1929 and Adolf Hitler’s assumption
of power in 1933. A very short summary of the play could go like this: whereas in
Friedrich von Schiller’s 1801 play, The Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc saves the king of
France, in Brecht’s play, Joan Dark saves Pierpont Mauler, a great capitalist. Mauler
wants to canonise her, but she refuses, for by the end of the play she has understood
that, in saving him, she has taken the wrong path.
The play (Brecht, 1938) is divided into twelve scenes of unequal length, some
of which are then subdivided. The first ten scenes have titles that announce and
summarise the action. Scenes 11 and 12 only note the setting. The title of the
final scene announces the denouement: “Death and Canonization of St Joan of the
Stockyards” (ibid., p. 303). To read this play, it is essential to follow the sequence
in which it is presented, which can, without any misuse of terminology, be called
dialectical. I shall treat not Joan Dark, but Pierpont Mauler, the “meat king” of
Chicago (ibid., p. 202), as the main character. What sort of man must he be if he
can arouse such love, devotion and credulity in a young woman who desires the
good with an extraordinary intensity? I am using the term “dialectic” because the
schema of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, when applied to Mauler, provides the archi-
tecture of the drama. Mauler is presented successively as bad and hypocritical, then,
antithetically, as generous and sincere, and finally as a bad but generous person
and a sincere hypocrite. That synthesis thus leaves us with an enigma: how can he
be all of these simultaneously? The character of Joan would seem to be easier to
grasp. Unlike another of Brecht’s great female characters, Pelagea Vlassova from The
Mother (1932), she does not attain a sense of class consciousness, except perhaps at
the end, in a way that is undecidable. She is not a revolutionary, but her generosity
and kindness are never questioned.
It could have been said that Joan’s characterisation is consistent with the psychol-
ogy of the German classical theatre of Schiller and Goethe, but an important charac-
teristic distinguishes her from the characters of these dramatists. In her relation with
Mauler, she is what Hyde is for Jekyll. There is, however, a reversal: for Mauler, Joan,
rather than being evil, is pure goodness. Mauler must rid himself of his own good-
ness by locating it in someone else, thus rejecting his subjective division in the same
way that Jekyll does. Joan is the excuse or even “alibi” – understood in its etymologi-
cal sense as “elsewhere” – who enables Mauler to inhabit more easily the being that
he achieves at the moment of synthesis: the generous villain and sincere hypocrite.
Thus, there is, as in Stevenson’s text, a game that involves both a pure being – now
devoted to goodness – and a being composed of both good and evil. Mauler does
not experience Jekyll’s torment, and if he can finally be said to “kill” Joan in a way
that constitutes her “suicide”, he gets off rather lightly. In a certain way, the capital-
ist discourse certifies his ability to reach this end, which is also the end of the play.
Joan’s case is more delicate but no less instructive: what blinds her and even leads
her to betray the workers’ cause, which she had believed that she was defending, is
52 The splitting of the subject

her reduction to being the incarnation of good, and thus of knowing nothing of
evil. This could be Brecht’s moral maxim: ignorance of evil is the mother of evils.
If this moral can be stated easily, the same cannot be said for its practical rea-
son. Brecht’s genius lies in his ability to add a dimension that, through its distance
from the dimension of the two main characters, gives a depth to what is at stake
in practical reason. This dimension is the fluctuations of the stock market, which
directly determine Mauler’s decisions, which always aim to valorise his capital. Here
a remarkable dissymmetry appears: the value of Mauler’s stocks is determined by
a financial algorithm that is completely independent of his psyche. Joan’s actions,
however, are determined by a hollow dream: that her goodness could prove to
unbelievers that evil does not exist. We shall not tarry at this point, since Saint Joan
of the Stockyards is not an intimate, two-character play. Other figures populate it:
capitalists, workers and the “Black Straw Hats”, the fictionalised counterparts of the
Salvation Army. These figures are not unified groups or masses. Each has his/her
own individuality, which is itself interesting.
One of the questions dominating the play is whether the capitalist discourse –
which sets up the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and its relations
of production – reduces human action to the automatic functioning of a pro-
gramme that is generated by iron laws. If this is the case, then the gap between the
dimensions of good and evil would be abolished and what is at stake in practical
reason would disappear. Perhaps, however, a particular human being, whatever the
social conjuncture, can “feel the breath of another world”, as Brecht (1938, p. 215)
suggests, mockingly but sincerely, in the title of the third scene.
In this context, I prefer the term “practical reason” to “ethics”, and this involves
choosing Kant over Spinoza. Kant, by stating the concept of the categorical
imperative – which is subtracted from the conditional character of contingency –
may well have anticipated the age in which the generalisation of capitalist preda-
tion and the long-standing weakening of any effective religion have led to a world
in which neither God nor human beings are feared. The result of this has been
to connect the law to faith in capital, in a way that would perplex believers in
Pierre-Simon Laplace’s statistical determinism. To give only one example: should
we attribute the success of the struggle to reduce the working day and to limit child
labour – which Marx (1867) described admirably in the first volume of Capital – to
the struggle of workers themselves or to an understanding, on the part of the politi-
cal representatives of the capitalist class, of the threat posed by too quick a destruc-
tion of the productive forces? We could, of course, answer “both . . . and”, or even
connect the two with an ampersand, &, which could mark the sort of conflictual
collaboration that is supposedly the condition of the progress of civilisation. Yet
how can a strictly rhetorical solution be satisfying?
One of the problematic aspects of this situation is that the individual members
of the capitalist class do not act in terms of collective logic; instead, they act under
the strict condition that collective logic must not figure in their calculations. By
“collective logic”, I mean the awareness and understanding that the other person is
also a subject.We tend to forget this, and this forgetting transforms the other subject
 London/Berlin 53

into someone who is radically other: an alien figure rather than a counterpart. Is
the best response to this situation the one that has already been tried in history:
construct a “new man” – whatever meaning may be given to such a term – by com-
pletely destroying the existing/former man, perhaps even by killing him? Acting in
this way, apart from any other consideration, may well involve a fetishistic belief in
the determinism of filiation. Instead, if we do not believe that a capitalist can be
touched by grace, we could always wait patiently for natural death to do its work.
It is also interesting to note that the belief in the determinism of class membership
and the belief in the determinism of filiation are consistent with one another. They
both make collective logic impossible, debasing practical reason into a reason that
justifies practice, whatever that practice may be.
This is why Brecht is interested in bringing out symptoms that can thwart the
rejection of practical reason. Only such symptoms can confront the double dialectic
of the stock market and the libido and confer upon this dialectic an irreducibility
that could change history: these symptoms could prevent history from being noth-
ing more than the history of human modelling clay. I shall now examine Brecht’s
text in order to analyse these symptoms.

First letter
In Chicago, the city of the stockyards, Pierpont Mauler receives a letter from his
friends in New York.
Brecht, in the place of S1, the writer who sets up the fiction, has a clear sympathy
for Joan, thus revealing his proximity to Mauler, who is authentically touched by
her, even if his emotions are also ways of taking advantage of her. In the letter from
his friends, Mauler learns that “the meat market has been severely depressed” and
that he should “drop the meat business” (Brecht, 1938, p. 203). He thus possesses
knowledge, S2 in the schema of the capitalist discourse. The object a, in turn, is by
no means a false appearance: it is money, which can generate more money. He hides
this letter from his partner, Cridle, but this does not mean that he is deliberately
trying to deceive his associate. In this context, we can adopt a form of behaviour-
ism that would be more extreme than the behaviourism of psychologists: when we
observe, from the outside, the hiding of the letter, nothing enables us to deduce
anything about Mauler’s internal psychic processes. Perhaps he does not know what
his hand is doing, and the stage directions throw no light on the situation.Whatever
the case may be, everyone involved in the meat market – producers, retail traders,
livestock farmers – is ruined by the shutting down of the two main factories. The
producers and retail traders can no longer sell their commodities because of the
crisis of overproduction and the reduced purchasing power of redundant workers.
The farmers are ruined because Mauler is no longer buying cattle for his stockyards.
Joan Dark is a lieutenant in the Black Straw Hats and has very conformist and
comforting views on divine jouissance and false earthly jouissance – the jouissance
from which the workers have been alienated. Two characteristics, however, single
her out: first, despite the warnings of her superiors and her colleagues, she wants to
54 The splitting of the subject

know – to know why the labourers are out of work. Second, she recognises Mauler,
a fact that cannot be explained. She is said to be able to recognise him and does
so; she picks him out of a group, even when he denies that he is Pierpont Mauler.
What happens here is something like a Hegelian radiance: behind the bloody mask
that Mauler has put on, and despite his disguising of his voice, Joan recognises a
human being in him. The price of making oneself into the agent of capitalism – of
devoting oneself body and soul to valorising capital – is dehumanisation. Mauler’s
sentimentality could thus be more than a way of deceiving others; it could also be
a symptom of his refusal to cut himself off irreversibly from humanity.The problem
with this reading of Mauler, which Brecht’s text does not accentuate, is not the dis-
creet suggestion of essentialism in its definition of what humanity is. Instead, such a
reading misrecognises Mauler’s undecidable ambiguity, which provides a structural
principle that bears some resemblance to quantum mechanics. In the latter, we can-
not simultaneously measure both the speed and the position of particles; there is an
unpredictable element that cannot be eliminated. Likewise, at the level of practical
reason, nothing can be said about Mauler. The same problematic can be found in
Galileo (Brecht, 1938), where we cannot know whether the great scientist with-
draws his work through cowardice or because remaining alive is a way of preserving
the interests of science.
We shall now cross a barrier. Mauler, who has been unable – and has not even
believed it possible – to corrupt Joan with money, has her descend into the depths,
so that she can see how bad the poor are. Guided by Sullivan Slift, she meets a
young worker, Mrs. Luckerniddle and Gloomb, all three of whom are members of
the working class and, in various ways, behave reprehensibly. Mrs. Luckerniddle’s
husband has been killed in an industrial accident; he “fell into one of the render-
ing tanks . . . and he ended up with the leaf lard” (Brecht, 1931, p. 224). When the
widow learns of this, she accepts twenty free meals as a bribe for remaining silent
about the accident. Slift believes that such behaviour shows Joan the immorality
of the poor, but she replies: “You have shown me not/The baseness of the poor
but/The poverty of the poor” (ibid., pp. 229–230). This aphorism has become famous
and we can infer that it has an implied counterpart, written in a sort of invisible ink,
concerning Mauler: “You have shown me not/The immorality of the rich but/the
wealth of the rich”. Perhaps Mauler relies on Joan in order not to become a pure
instrument of capital; in this, he would resemble Jekyll, who finally preferred to be
divided, even at the cost of his death, rather than to be abandoned to pure evil.This
is a subtle and problematic dance, for the comparison seems flawed: Jekyll, finally,
does not want to come together with Hyde, whereas Mauler’s relation to Joan is
not defined in the same way. Mauler and Jekyll have in common, however, a refusal
to be reduced to a kind of knowledge that would be unaware of itself. This ten-
dency, indeed, can retroactively make Jekyll’s reaction more comprehensible: what
he refuses is not so much to be transformed into a figure who is dedicated to evil.
Instead, everything suggests that if he were to lose control of the transformation,
Hyde would end up being divided, just as Jekyll was. What Jekyll refuses is to be
pure knowledge, an agent of the great linguistic computer and an element of the
 London/Berlin 55

unconscious. As René Daumal (1938, p. 68) puts it, emphatically, in A Night of Seri-
ous Drinking, “I know everything, but I don’t understand any of it”.
This analysis provides us with a Freudian way out, which can honour practi-
cal reason without using the categorical imperative: the alternative is not between
good and evil. Joan’s good, as we shall see, is hardly better than Mauler’s evil; as her
name indicates, it is very “dark”. Instead, the true debate takes place between Eros
and Thanatos. The victory of Thanatos would reduce Jekyll and Mauler to being
mere agents of knowledge, and they would thus be cut away from the true character
of the drive, the site of the simultaneous intertwining and struggle between Eros
and Thanatos.

Mauler’s theorem
The second letter that Mauler receives threatens to pin him down, like a butter-
fly in a collector’s glass case. It would make him nothing more than the place of
knowledge: the knowledge of stock-market calculations. This letter comes, once
again, from his New York friends (and we may start to wonder who is writing to
these friends). It tells him to “buy meat” (Brecht, 1931, p. 246), and this is what
Joan has also asked him to do, in order to save the manufacturers, the retail traders
(who buy the canned meat) and the livestock farmers, and thus to rekindle the meat
industry, which would enable the redundant workers to be rehired.We may suspect
that the letter from New York does not use the same arguments. The members of
congress have been corrupted and are ready to suppress trade barriers and open up
the southern market. Buying the canned meat has thus become a good calculation.
Mauler first hesitates and then decides to buy, but in doing so, it is not clear
whether he is following the letter’s advice or Joan’s pleading. In the decisive passage,
he tells Slift, “Yes, yes, I did buy meat, but I didn’t/Buy it because of the letter and
its advice/(Which is all wrong anyway, pure theory)” (ibid., p. 245). Mauler seems
to baulk at the prospect of being nothing more than an element of an analysis that
has been made elsewhere. This does not mean, however, that he took his decision
because of Joan. The secret of his decision lies in what can be called “Mauler’s
theorem”:

Somebody makes a mistake. Let’s call it A.

It’s a mistake because his feelings got
The better of him. Then he makes
Another move. We’ll call it B. B too
Is wrong. But taken together A and B
Two wrongs – will make a right
(ibid., p. 248)

“A” is the decision to buy the cans of meat; “B” is what he is going to do: buy all
the cattle, which he can sell at a very high price to the manufacturers, who are
bound by contract to deliver the cans to him. Thus, he distances himself from the
56 The splitting of the subject

knowledge of his New York friends, which has become a sort of imperative coming
from the superego, while also achieving a brilliant financial success.
The situation, however, does not improve for the workers, and Joan rebels.
Mauler believes that he can calm her down by offering to donate money to the
Black Straw Hats, but Joan does not place herself within the capitalist discourse.
Breaking with it, she tells him, “Mr. Mauler, I don’t understand what you’ve been
saying/And I don’t wish to understand” (ibid., p. 263). She thus leaves this discourse:

Joan S S2 Mauler

Brecht S1 a money

Joan’s apostasy
Is this the end of their idyll? Not quite. In scene 9, Joan is now living in the stock-
yard area with Gloomb and Mrs Luckerniddle, the figures who were supposed to
have shown her the fundamental corruption of the workers. She tells them a dream
that she had had a week earlier. This dream should be left uninterpreted, except for
its end, where she sees herself as a warrior, marching “With warlike steps and bleed-
ing forehead” at the head of a multitude that is “wreaking immoderate destruction”
and is “Perceptibly influencing the course of the stars” (ibid., p. 265, translation
modified). Assuming a prophetic mode, she explains its meaning: all the poor will
march on Chicago. In the dream, she has fulfilled her wish for a revolution, but this
dream is not the prelude to a revolution, for no dream is prophetic, except when it
is falsified fantasmatically. Instead, it is a prelude to her betrayal.
The revolutionary worker’s movement has been preparing a general strike,
which will be coordinated through letters that are being sent to worker-delegates
at the main factories. Joan volunteers to carry one of these letters to the Graham
factory, the area that is being watched the most carefully by the police. Despite
an initial hesitation, the labour leaders decide to trust her, even if she has not
renounced her belief that Mauler is a human being. They warn her, however, that
if this letter is not transmitted, the strike will fail. Joan leaves on her mission to the
stockyards, and then gives a very lucid speech about the system, denouncing its
promotion of the belief that everyone can be a capitalist. Everyone is told, “Come
up, then all/Of us will be on top”, whereas in reality, “[t]his whole system’s a see-
saw”: some can be on top only because many are on the bottom (ibid., p. 278).
Yet there are already some clues – her irritation, her whims, her uncustomary
injustice – that she is ready to crack up. When the reporters come to announce
that Mauler has agreed to sell cattle to the manufacturers of canned meat, and
that work can therefore begin again, Joan is in a hurry to believe them: “At least
the righteous man among them/Has proved himself ” (ibid., p. 280). She gives this
speech at the very moment when the advancing army is using machine guns to
subdue the crowd.
 London/Berlin 57

This is a religious moment, so a term from religion can be used to describe

it: apostasy. Joan knows how the system works, but she does not understand the
consequences. The weather is colder than it had been in her dream and her oneiric
anticipation of the strike has rendered the actual strike null and void for her. She
does not deliver the letter. When she explains her betrayal, she speaks of a refusal to
betray: she refuses to rise up against the established order, without which she would
feel lost. “The movement of the stars/Over his head would no longer be governed
by/The old rule” (ibid., p. 283).
This nearly explicit reference to Galileo throws light on this moment, in which
what is in question is the subject’s relation to knowledge: the subject knows, with-
out understanding the consequences of what she knows. In order for the subject to
be able to understand the consequences of knowledge, this knowledge must have
abolished the mirage of truth, and she needs this mirage in order to believe that
she is innocent. It is not necessary that she feel guilty, for guilt and innocence are
only two sides of the same coin, and this coin has the face of Adam stamped upon
it. Instead, the subject must not refuse to understand what will happen if she does
not grasp the implications of what she knows. As it happens, Joan does not want to
know that if the letter is not transmitted to its addressee – despite her promise to
do so – a chain will be broken. The result of this is that the worker-delegates will
themselves end up in chains; Joan will see them pass in handcuffs before her eyes.
What counts is not whether she is good or evil; instead, what is important is that
she now refuses to know anything about the effects of her refusal to deliver the
letter. She refuses this in the name of her “subjective truth”, which is nothing other
than a dignified name for her fantasy. The snow becomes the shroud that covers
over this knowledge.
She then has a vision in which she sees herself as a criminal, who has “No bear-
ings in/A world grown unfamiliar” (ibid., p. 283). There is something that she has
not been able to confront by acting, because she still remains under the influence of
an established order’s truth, from which she could only have freed herself through
crime.What she could not see is now returning to her in what we must not hesitate
to call a visual hallucination. She has preferred a truth that conforms to her fantasy
and now this vision makes a real present for her, a real that would otherwise have
been buried forever under the snow, along with the knowledge by which the real
signals to her. In the same way, a bit later, she begins to hear voices.Through the real
of these voices, a knowledge that she had not wanted to hear breaks in: “O Truth,
bright light, unseasonably darkened by a snowstorm!/Never more to be seen! Oh,
what force in a snowstorm!” (ibid., p. 287). This “psychotisation” has a salvational
value for her, showing the path that she will make her destiny, just like the real Joan
of Arc.

Monopoly
Joan’s development is symmetrical with Mauler’s; while these events have been
transpiring, he has not been wasting any time. He has acquired a monopoly on
58 The splitting of the subject

livestock and has made its price rise to dizzying heights. This may be why, once
again, as he tells Slift, he begins to “feel sick” (ibid., p. 276). There is nothing new
in this: it remains in the realm of the subjective truth that was criticised with
Joan, and such truths can be used to justify both domestic and political tyranny.
On the other hand, Mauler, having an idea of the repressive turn that the situa-
tion is going to take, has detectives look for Joan, so that he can protect her, but
to no avail.
Now, once again, the action returns us to Joan’s “seesaw”; we could well wonder
whether there is any difference between its movement and that of the dialectic
of desire. This seesaw swings back: the manufacturers of tinned meat, ruined by
Mauler’s manoeuvres, stop buying from him. The price of livestock collapses, and
he goes bankrupt.
This is the situation at the start of scene 10: “Pierpont Mauler Humbles Himself
and Is Exalted” (ibid., p. 288). Naturally, with this title’s parody of Christian vocabu-
lary, it is tempting to hear only its caustic connotation. This is especially tempting
since this is the most violently anticapitalist and antireligious14 part of the play.
Through Mauler’s cynical speech, it is “humanity” as it has been “dehumanized” by
capitalism that triumphs (ibid., p. 298). Mauler’s humiliation, however, does not last.
Having taken refuge with the Black Straw Hats as one of the new poor, he is soon
joined by the meatpackers and the livestock breeders. Graham, a meatpacker, then
narrates to him the “battle” that ended with the collapse of the banking system itself
(ibid., p. 292). Brecht makes this bravura speech worthy of the greatest epic narra-
tives, from Homer to Corneille. For the third time, apparent defeat has become the
instrument of a new victory.
A further letter now arrives from New York, and whether its advice is correct is
of no importance, for it provides Mauler with the key that will lead to his promised
“exalt[ation]”: set up a single trust for which he will own half of the stock (ibid.,
p. 296). Everyone is enthusiastic about his solution.

A double desire
Let us return to Joan. The delegates of the workers have been imprisoned, and the
general strike has been brought to a halt because Joan did not deliver the letter.
When the reporters tell her this news, she faints. This is the denouement (scene
12): “Death and Canonization of St Joan of the Stockyards” (ibid., p. 303). Slift and
Mauler are the first to understand how to use this champion of the working class,
who was a rebel but not a revolutionary. They turn her into a media and religious
figure who comes to symbolise the exorcising of evil, a banner around which both
workers and capitalists can unite. Joan herself is dying of the cold, hunger and
despair, but she is finally lucid: “Take care that when you leave the world/You have
not merely been good but are leaving/A better world!” (ibid., p. 306). This is her
critique of Mauler. She neither denies his aspirations towards the good nor accuses
him of being a fraud; instead, she reproaches him for what she also reproaches herself.They
had both believed that being good oneself is sufficient, just as it would be sufficient
to be analysed oneself, without worrying about the effects of the system:
 London/Berlin 59

Those at the bottom are kept at the bottom

So that those at the top may stay on top.
And the baseness of those on top is beyond measure.
And even if they got better, it wouldn’t
Help.
(ibid., pp. 306–307)

Mauler, as we would expect, lauds her good soul. Is this the final verdict on Joan’s
death? Now Brecht’s play reaches its greatest brilliance: its maximal commitment is
founded upon a point of undecidability, which only the reader’s own commitment
can settle. In his final speech, Mauler declares that:

A razor-sharp dichotomy
Cutting deep into my breast
Fashions two souls from my soul.
Though do-gooding suits me best
Meanwhile business interest
Also plays a certain role
Unconsciously.
(ibid., p. 310)

Before we reach the final chorus, spoken by everyone on stage, it should be empha-
sised that Brecht plainly yields, without any parody, to tragedy in its densest and
most purified form, the model for which remains Greek. He does so in order to
present a fundamental human contradiction, without either judging or resolving it.
Everything that has preceded it certainly relativises this refusal of any judgement:
Joan’s distinction between good intentions and a concern with one’s effects on the
world remains a small and fragile movement towards a solution.Yet Brecht chooses
the form of accepting the power of Mauler’s message. The final speech of the cho-
rus confirms this and it is clear that we cannot decide whether or not it expresses
Brecht’s point of view. Instead, an impersonal voice, the voice of no one, is speaking:

Humanity, two warring souls reside

Deep inside you.
No use trying to decide.
For you can’t help having two.
With your other self contending
Cleaving, clawing, splitting, rending
Keep the good and keep the evil
Keep the god and keep the devil
In a conflict never-ending!
(ibid., pp. 310–311)

This is certainly a direct response to the end of Goethe’s Faust. If, however, we fol-
low the thread of analytic discourse, which I have tried neither to lose sight of nor
60 The splitting of the subject

to break, it is also a rejection of an imposture: the one that promises to suppress the
splitting of the subject through the excess of a supply that would end up in extin-
guishing demand. Such an imposture could efface irreversibly the only trace that
guides us along the invisible path of desire, to the point where, at the end of this
course, desire can act without demand.

Notes
1 [Translator’s note: See Freud (1937, p. 252, emphasis added):
We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest
we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and
that thus our activities are at an end.This is probably true, since, for the psychical field,
the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock.]
2 Regarding the “new spirit” of the capitalist discourse, see Boltanski and Chiapello (1999).
3 This should lead us to revise, rather than completely abandon, Freud’s economic model.
4 Here are the mathemes of the capitalist and the analytic discourses:

5 To grasp what analytic discourse is able to achieve with psychotics, two factors must
be noted: the paranoiac subject, at the cost of delusion, locates jouissance in the Other,
within which the subject must find a place in order to find his bearings. Only the mel-
ancholic subject reaches the truth on this, in ruling that the jouissance of the Other is
impossible to reach. This verdict, however, is precisely what s/he gets off on, at her/his
own expense, for example by negativising the image of the body in the real.
6 In his essay “A Chapter on Dreams”, Stevenson (1892, pp. 248–251) mentions the role
of “brownies”, who can be compared with molecules of the unconscious.
7 [Translator’s note: In French this sentence concludes with a bilingual pun: “Jekyll se suicide
(kills je)”. The syllables of Jekyll’s name are reversed, and what becomes the second syl-
lable, “je” – French for “I” – receives the action of what is then the first syllable, “kill[s]”.
In this way, Jekyll’s very name contains his suicide, once it is turned inside-out.]
8 It would be worthwhile to investigate the modes by which the subject can relate to the
devil. Faust, the most eminent among them, signs a pact but succeeds in outwitting the
devil. If we admit that Toussaint Turelure – a character in Paul Claudel’s trilogy, which
Lacan (2001b) discusses at length in his seminar on transference – serves as a figure of
the devil, then Sygne de Coûfontaine makes a “pact” for which she would receive noth-
ing in return. Finally, at the end of her life, she refuses a new pact that would distort the
meaning of the first one. Christophe Haizmann, the painter whose story Freud (1923)
reconstitutes in “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis”, invents a pact as an
excuse for his inability to do without a nurturing, and perhaps even “nourishing” father.
Such ethical choices, and they are not the only ones, mark out three major aspects of
the subjectivity of our age. In the case of “Markheim”, whether the figure involved is
indeed the devil remains uncertain. The character who proposes the pact is, instead, the
incarnation of temptation.
9 In this respect, Utterson resembles Sacher-Masoch, who was also a “Cainite”.
10 Engels (1883) explored this tendency in the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, a first-rate
English naturalist and scientist, who turned towards the study of miracles at the end of
his life.
 London/Berlin 61

11 The gap between morality and ethics is a constant in Stevenson; for example, in
“Markheim” (1887), the hero is a criminal in the world and pure in God.
12 As Lacan (1978b, p. 48) puts it, the capitalist discourse “works like a charm, like skids that
have been fully greased, but that’s just it: it goes too fast, it consumes itself [ça se consomme],
and it does this so well that it uses itself up [ça se consume]”.
13 Pierre Legendre (1989) discusses the case of a man who committed a crime while being
filmed by a surveillance camera, and who remembered nothing when confronted with
this recording.
14 This anticlericalism is not specific to revolutionary activists. Freud’s (1928) discussion, in
“Dostoevsky and Parricide”, of repentance as a form of recidivism is similarly anticlerical.
2
FROM A TO Z

In the next three chapters, I examine the work of three philosophers (Louis
Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek) and one psychoanalyst (Félix Guattari).
I have chosen them because they wanted, and were able, to take psychoanalysis into
account, unlike other thinkers who believed that they could avoid it or adapt it in
any manner they pleased. Even in criticising their ways of defining the problem of
the relations between castration, subjective division and the symptom – definitions
that would affect the aim both of an analysis and of psychoanalysis itself – I shall
also be paying homage to their courage and perspicacity.
I do not want to summarise the results of my reading at the outset, except on
one point, which is, as it were, the “guard rail” of this book: the symptom. Freud
announced the splitting of the subject just before his London exile; it is as if the
coming Spaltung between Vienna and London had led him to intuit it. The central
question now is whether, without the division of the subject, a non-pathological
doctrine of the symptom would even have been conceivable. In my opinion, this
would not have been possible.The symptom – invented by Marx and given its foun-
dation by Lacan – does not emerge unscathed by the major concepts of these four
thinkers: Althusser’s “bad subject”, Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome” and Žižek’s
“empty subject” are all modes of avoiding this constitutive division, although in
Žižek, this question is very complex. This symptom is the corporeal event through
which the body, at least once and in one place, subtracts itself from the Other’s
will-to-jouissance. By being spoken of, this body becomes a speaking body, and this
event brings division into existence and makes it present: speech originates from
the simultaneous splitting of the body by language and the splitting of language
by the body. These four authors also sometimes mention castration, which I could
define as an operation carried out by an agent – the real father – which enables the
divided subject not to be drawn and quartered psychically, as is often the case when
castration fails. Yet in doing so, castration privileges the phallus, thereby masking
 From A to Z 63

what could be called the innocence of splitting, since castration – whether or not
it succeeds – links speaking to guilt. Consequently, an operation on the symptom
proves necessary, through an experience that could occur in analysis, but also else-
where. This operation will attempt to revitalise the symptom’s relation to what it
has always sought to do: create a diagonal of freedom between the Other’s will-to-
jouissance and the subject’s own.

Althusser’s comet
In 1966, the same year that the Écrits appeared, Louis Althusser (see 1966, pp. 33–37)
circulated among his students a manuscript entitled “Three Notes on the Theory of
Discourses”. At that time, Althusser’s interest in Lacan was intense, as he had already
shown with his 1964 article, “Freud and Lacan” (Althusser, 1993, pp. 7–32) which
had been published in La nouvelle critique, the journal of Communist party intel-
lectuals. This article had already done much, in both France and Latin America, to
rehabilitate the status of psychoanalysis as a revolutionary discipline.Whether or not
this was a misunderstanding, its consequences have been unmistakable. Like Oscar
Masotta, the Argentinian existentialist who was exiled in Spain, Althusser was one
of Lacan’s passers [passeurs].1
As the reader may know, the dramatist Heiner Müller (1982, p. 189) made a
cruel and notorious observation: “The first event in Althusser’s life was the murder
of his wife”. This assertion is not, however, immodest, and Louis Althusser would
not necessarily have been shocked by it; in order that his status as subject not be dis-
missed, he had insisted on being judged for this murder in a criminal court. Perhaps,
instead of saying “first event”, it would be better to say, “first act”. In any case, Mül-
ler justified his statement by noting that he was not interested in Althusser’s theo-
retical work. Like any important dramatist, however, he was interested in discourse,
an interest, indeed, that was striking. To take only one example, in Müller’s (1980)
Quartet, which was inspired by Les liaisons dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos, 1782),
the roles are reversed in the middle of the play. The Marquise de Merteuil becomes
the Vicomte de Valmont and vice versa, a change that may be a response to Val-
mont’s remark, made just before the reversal: “We should have our roles played by
tigers” (Müller, 1980, p. 110). After this first change,Valmont becomes himself again,
then turns into Merteuil again, and finally, upon becoming himself one last time,
commits suicide in a supposedly “feminine” way by opening his veins with scissors.
He then tells his former lover that he is dying because she has poisoned him.
This extraordinary use of the semblance tells us more about Lacan’s concept
of discourse than ten thousand pages of exegesis could. The theatre is the stage of
discourse: it enables us to locate places and terms on it. References to the theatre
take a priority in Lacan’s teaching; he discussed at least one play by each of these
authors: Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Racine, Claudel and Genet
(see León-Lopez, 1999).2 And perhaps the subject of theatre is always the entrance
into discourse, in that it is offered to human beings on condition that they can
surmount the lethal jouissance of keeping themselves apart from the world. This
64 The splitting of the subject

entrance, however, can only take place in the gap between the places of production
and truth in a discourse, a gap imposed by the barrier of jouissance.
To appreciate the theoretical impact of Althusser’s “positions” on psychoanalysis,
and in order not to get stuck in discussions of his disagreements with or misunder-
standings of Lacan, I shall begin by isolating a central thread that appears in several
texts: these include a speech that he gave after Lacan’s dissolution of the École freud-
ienne de Paris, his correspondence with René Diatkine and with Lacan, his 1973
text on transference and countertransference, and finally, the presentation intended
for the Tbilissi conference and published without his consent.3 All of these texts
point to an enunciation that touches Althusser’s experience as analysand directly; in
this way, they are unlike some of his other works, which are more distant from this
experience. These other works are also marked by the same symptomatic certainty
that there is an absolute discontinuity between science and ideology (we know that
one of the philosophical foundations of this distinction was Spinoza’s third kind
of knowledge).
Althusser’s speech at the PLM Saint Jacques on 15 March 1980, given during an
internal meeting of the École freudienne de Paris and published under the title of “In
the Name of the Analysands . . .” (Althusser, 1993, pp. 125–144), was motivated by
his disapproval of the way in which analysts tend to “drop” their analysands. This
disapproval was both very old and very harsh; it may well have come to include
Lacan after the latter’s late-night visit to Althusser, following Lucien Sebag’s sui-
cide.4 Perhaps this disapproval gives the speech its lucidity. In any case, although
he was in a state of incontestable agitation, as Jacques-Alain Miller has noted (see
ibid., p. 181, note 1), Althusser was able to ask a fundamental question: “But not
one [analyst] asked whether in dissolving the Ecole and founding ‘La Cause Freud-
ienne’, Lacan was not dragging them into a new Ecole” (ibid., p. 120). Nearly
thirty years later, this remains an urgent question. In dissolving the École freudienne
de Paris, was Lacan hoping to put an end to a school whose functioning was the
reverse of what he had hoped for when he founded it? Was he, on the other hand,
rejecting the very concept of a school, on the grounds that it was inappropriate to
psychoanalysis? At the time, arguments drawing on supposedly “historical” expla-
nations were made in order to show that the second option was indefensible, but
that fact (which itself can be disputed) does not, in my opinion, render the question
completely pointless today.
The other important aspect of Althusser’s intrusion is also related to this ques-
tion. He hoped to explain what he had noticed during the meeting of 15 March:
most of the analysts who, in private, criticised, objected to or questioned Lacan’s act
nevertheless remained silent in public, and admitted to him that they were doing so
out of fear. This situation can seem insignificant and commonplace; such incidents
have been witnessed by anyone who has attended assemblies of analysts. All in all, it
would be imprudent to prefer a psychotic “fearlessness” to neurotic “fear”, accord-
ing to a moral classification that could well be called “down to date”.Yet Althusser
did not attribute what he witnessed to moral conformity; instead, he developed an
analysis of this collective silence that remains interesting:
 From A to Z 65

It is best to stop at this point, since the logic that demands that analyst-­
intellectuals – who are often very subtle and not racist and “Lacanian” adults,
broadly speaking – assemble out of a need to be afraid of Lacan or of X . . . in
order to be reassured, is a logic that far transcends analysts, since one can find
its equivalent in a number of organizations – particularly workers’ organiza-
tions (I mention them because I know them somewhat, but one could just as
well invoke the Church or the army). In all of these, the need to be afraid can
serve as a reason for belonging to a community of belief, thought and action;
this reason assures you that you are indeed afraid and are right to be afraid, and
at the same time reassures you against that fear and its reason, since you are
no longer alone as a result of your belonging. This gives you the warmth – be
it maternal or any other – of the active and protective group. . . . So, one falls
back all the more on the group that satisfies this need for fear and protects
against it.
(ibid., pp. 139–140, translation modified)5

This speech, like the other texts in question, defends analysands against the hold
of a transference that threatens to annihilate them. This position is implicit in his
correspondence with Lacan. If Lacan did not immediately answer a long letter
from Althusser – one in which the philosopher shows him the theoretical place
that Lacan occupies for him – Althusser (ibid., p. 159) would immediately write
a second letter that begins with the words: “Your silence has a great value for me.
I expected it”. This letter cannot hide his chagrin that the man whom Althusser
considers to be a genius has not behaved as a mirror image: he has not addressed
Althusser in the same terms in which the philosopher had addressed him. He par-
ries this disappointment in a way that is very weak, attributing Lacan’s lack of
response precisely to his genius, while knowing that he has himself engineered this
silence. The letter in which Althusser speaks of Lacan’s failure to respond is dated
Tuesday, December 10, less than a week after the preceding letter, which is dated
Wednesday, 4 December.
A transferential misunderstanding, involving both love and hatred, is visible in
this letter. Yet what is remarkable is a reversal, in which Althusser attributes to the
analyst a fascination with the analysand or the “analysed”. The letter, of course,
testifies to the opposite: Althusser’s fascination with Lacan. “The desire of the ana-
lyst. It sends us to the desire of the analyzed. Desire of a desire. Dual structure of
fascination, whence so many interminable-unterminated analyses” (ibid., p. 163).
This reversal is not, however, without value: the interminability of such treatments
could well result from a desire of the analyst’s, which would be nothing without
the desire of the “analysed”. This actually raises, in a negative form, the question
of the analyst’s relation to a knowledge of which s/he must become the symptom;
without this, the analyst would be nothing more than the papyrus on which the
scribe writes.This non-living analyst evoked in Althusser’s remarks is nothing other
than an avatar of the impasse about the real father. From this perspective, Althusser’s
arrow would not necessarily have missed its mark; unfortunately, however, his way
66 The splitting of the subject

of developing this point annuls its significance. Althusser imputes the establish-
ment of the dual relation to the imaginary aspect of the analyst’s desire, which can
thereby be nothing without the desire of the analysed. It then becomes easy for
Althusser to denounce the fact that this imaginary desire of the analyst is never
called into question “in the analysis of the other imaginary, the one that the desire
of the analysed attempts in vain to establish” (ibid., p. 166).
It should not be surprising that Althusser did not choose Lacan or one of his
students as his analyst; René Diatkine was a member of the Société psychanalytique de
Paris, and was thus, almost by definition, a champion of countertransference, which
is precisely that which Althusser reproaches Lacan for being unaware of.
If we follow Lacan’s critique of countertransference, it is certainly easy to dis-
pense with this concept. Freud uses this term infrequently; it occurs only three
times in his work, most interestingly in “Observations on Transference-Love”,
where his remarks prefigure Lacan’s critique: “For the doctor, the phenomenon [of
the patient’s falling in love] signifies a valuable piece of enlightenment and a useful
warning against any tendency to a counter-transference which may be present in
his own mind” (Freud, 1915b, p. 160). Following Lacan, we can consider that an
analyst operates as object rather than as subject, and thus does not act as an analy-
sand. Thus, when Freud warns of the risk of countertransference, he is only warn-
ing doctors not to give up their position as analyst, which is a bare minimum. This
single remark destroys Althusser’s argument about the desire of the analyst.
The argument grows more interesting, however, if we consider it in terms of
the analysand. Thus, in a text that was given the humorous title, “Petites incongruités
portatives”, before it was rewritten as “Sur le transfert et le contre-transfert”, Althusser
(1973) combats the opinion that the analysand’s transference to the analyst is pri-
mary and that the analyst’s transference to the analysand is secondary. He puts
forward a thesis that, rather unexpectedly, undoes the symmetry of the analytic rela-
tion: countertransference is more important than transference. Although he does
not provide a sufficient elucidation to this question, which he has had the merit
of bringing out, he proposes what he calls the “primacy of controlling [contrôle du]
countertransference” (ibid., p. 186, emphasis added). It is possible to understand
this in various ways; I am of the opinion that Althusser could have benefitted from
having an opportunity to explore, in the context of his own treatment, the differ-
ent ways in which what he said could be understood. It could mean, first, that the
process by which analysts are produced should be reconsidered; this could prevent
the treatment from becoming an intersubjective relation. Second, and this antici-
pates what Althusser would call for in “In the Name of the Analysands”, an analyst
must neither act as a Pontius Pilate – which is also a minimum – nor use a power
of intimidation, which the analysis bestows on him, and which – unless the ana-
lyst makes some slight avowal of his/her ability to be mistaken – can confer upon
him/her an aura of infallibility. This sort of caricature can also be found among
analysts, proving that it is indeed an effect of their production and not only of their
infantile history. It happens that Althusser and Lacan agree about this point, despite
their nearly total theoretical disagreement: they are both careful not to attribute to
 From A to Z 67

infantile history something that is the artificial effect of a certain conception of a

psychoanalytic association, and, by extension, of the production of analysts.6
The section of Writings on Psychoanalysis entitled “The Tbilissi affair: 1976–1984”
(Althusser, 1993, pp. 79–124) includes two texts that were written for a conference
on psychoanalysis that was held in the Soviet Union. The first, which Althusser
withdrew but which was later published without his permission, was written in
the spring of 1976 and was entitled “The Discovery of Doctor Freud”; the sec-
ond, written the following year, was called “On Marx and Freud”. As is often the
case with Althusser, the intended audience is crucial. Althusser thought that he was
addressing a public of Marxist intellectuals, communist scientists from whom he
would remove the blinkers that had led the Soviet Union to reject psychoanalysis.
Discreetly, these two texts, which are neither pedagogic nor messianic, take on a
status that differs from his other theoretical works; they seek to defend psychoanaly-
sis from itself, thus enabling it to be integrated into dialectical materialism. For this
reason, they do not mention Althusser’s work on ideology – the ideological state
apparatuses, the discourses, etc.
Instead of giving an exposition of the content of these two texts, I would like
to explore Althusser’s depiction of the relation between psychoanalysis and phi-
losophy. First, in describing analytic treatment, he repeats his judgement about the
relations between transference and countertransference. For Althusser (ibid., p. 89),
countertransference is the analyst’s introjective identification with the analysand,
“which means that the analyst cannot manage to separate himself from the patient”.
Once again, one could subscribe to this view if the identification with the analy-
sand were not interpreted in terms of the analyst’s countertransference: if the analyst
identifies with the analysand, the very position of analyst ceases to exist. Further,
there is the unlimited series of the analyst’s psychic states, which have no effect on
the treatment if the analyst’s place is maintained. Even further, there is the analyst’s
possible acting out,7 which supposes that s/he identifies the analysand with an
Other whose consistency s/he has not been able to reduce fully. Rather than being
a countertransference, this is the transference of the non-analyst who exists within
the analyst.
The second point, Althusser’s understanding of repression, is even more deter-
minant. “The second nucleus, revealed by the first [unconscious infantile sexuality],
is the idea of a prodigious social censorship of those same unconscious sexual wishes”
(ibid., p. 95). In this context, we may think of Wilhelm Reich or Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s phantoms of an absolutely bad Other, but such references can only
take on their full clinical significance if we examine why the fault is located in
this way. The idea that repression is caused by parental – and beyond them, social –
prohibitions is often wrongly attributed to Freud, but it is undermined by his
second theory of anxiety, which he develops in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxi-
ety (1926a). There he reverses his earlier thesis that the repressed portion of the
libido is transformed into anxiety; now anxiety gives rise to repression. In this new
argument, anxiety cannot be deduced from social censorship, which, instead, often
resolves anxiety. Anxiety is a corporeal signal that there is a gap between a sort of
68 The splitting of the subject

virtual reality – to which language summons us – and trauma, which is constituted

because we speak; the subject who takes the risk of speaking becomes an exception
to this virtualisation. In other words, “social censorship” is the effect rather than the
origin of this anxiety; it is nothing more than the groping attempt of civilisation to
make anxiety bearable, because it cannot eradicate it absolutely.
Furthermore, although Althusser believes that the superego performs this social
censorship, this is actually only its secondary function. Its primary function is to
bring jouissance back into the place of the signifier, since in a primal logical time,
the place of the signifier is the non-place, a sort of nolle prosequi [non-lieu] of jouis-
sance.Yet when jouissance returns to this place, it does so at a price: it will now take
the form of a fault or sin. This is the aporia of the superego: the more we follow its
injunctions to jouissance, the greater the unconscious sense of guilt grows. As we
know, the imperatives of the superego can cover a whole range of apparently con-
tradictory imperatives, from “Thou shalt kill” to “Thou shalt not kill”. In these two
extreme cases, the subject obtains the scant jouissance permitted by the incompat-
ibility between language and jouissance. Thus, the criminal would be equivalent to
the saint, if a single difference did not make them antagonists: the place they give
to the real other. I shall return to this question: the real other is neither the other
whom I imagine nor the counterpart who is my equal; instead, it is a recognised
alterity. In State of Exception, the second volume of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben
(1995, p. 36) forcefully brings out the homology between a state of exception as a
“free and juridically empty space” and language, the empty space of speech, pro-
moting a conception of law that could be related not only to the discourse of the
master but also to that of the analyst. He does so by outlining the thesis of a kind of
law in which the other could be the subject of something other than law.
Finally, Althusser’s conception of the subject involves an obvious and irremedi-
able disagreement with Lacan. For Lacan, who was following Freud’s final state-
ments about the dialectic between the recognition and disavowal of castration, the
subject is split. Althusser considers Lacan’s reading to be a misinterpretation; for
him, there is neither a split subject nor a subject of the unconscious. He recognises
only a single subject, which is constituted through an interpellation by Ideology;
the consequence of this mode of constitution is the regular doubling of the subject
by an entity that is its ideal specular counterpart: God. Thus, the only “subject” that
can be named as such and would be immune to this ideological effect is the “bad
subject”, who is condemned to undergo a passage à l’acte in order to escape its vas-
salage to what, for Althusser, is the most terrifying figure of the Other: Ideology
with a capital I.8
The other text, rewritten for the publication of the acts of the Tbilisi symposium,
is entitled “On Marx and Freud”. Even more directly than in the first, Althusser is
addressing readers whom he supposes to be Marxists and is seeking to exonerate
psychoanalysis by accentuating the homology between Freud and Marx’s relation to
science. He calls our attention, by the way, to the fact that both Freudian and Marx-
ist science are “scissionist” – a term that he interprets, in a way that is not uninterest-
ing, as resulting from the primacy of experience in both disciplines (Althusser, 1993,
p. 109). Even if Althusser does not state this idea, it is difficult not to think that the
 From A to Z 69

conflictual character of these two sciences requires – if we want to be on the “right

side” – that we choose the side of the analysands in one case and of the people in
the other. He has almost crossed the Rubicon by making the analyst into an “enemy
of the people”. The reader, by a bit of forcing – and we know that caricature is the
sincerest form of paying homage to truth – can glimpse that in psychoanalysis, there
must be an opposition between the science of the analysand and that of the analyst.
I shall now return to the question of the subject, which is really what is at stake for
Althusser. His violent criticism of the unified subject of psychology refers to Lacan’s
teaching, although he gets rid of its major consequence, the splitting of the subject.
Thus, in developing the idea of a unitary subject that, like a fetish, would come to fill
the absence of the subject of the unconscious, Althusser concludes that the subject of
law must be considered as completed by the psychological subject, which is at least
potentially conscious of itself (ibid., p. 115). Here again, we would expect Althusser
to bring up the idea of a split subject, since, in Lacan, this splitting is based on the
irreducibility of the unconscious. Furthermore, a bit later, Althusser seems to invite
us to think that the subject is structurally divided between truth and what it is per-
mitted to know; he mentions that “Every individual thus ‘spontaneously’ develops
a reflex of ‘defense’ when confronting the unconscious, which is part of his own
unconscious” (ibid., p. 120). Instead, however, there is a twist, in which Althusser
forbids himself from taking the step that would allow him to accept this division:

Every individual? This is not certain. It is not established that the defensive
reflex is always equally active; experience shows, on the contrary, that there
exist subjects in whom that resistance is – by virtue of their accommodation
of their phantasmatic conflicts – sufficiently superseded to permit them to
acknowledge the reality of the unconscious without triggering a reflex of
defense or flight.
(ibid., p. 120)

This is little more than a feeble dodge, in which an “exception” – which should
be taken as a psychological consideration – only reinforces my judgement that
Althusser uses the diktat of the “bad subject” to impose this lack of splitting upon
the subject.There has been no act that would include the subject: an act that would
take place between alienation and separation, between the subjection to language
that divides the subject and the separation through which it is liberated. Therefore,
the bad subject can only assert its truth by provoking its own destruction, and it
does so by destroying an other who is too similar. I shall gladly group the texts that
have just been examined under the heading of a “science of the analysand”. In any
case, these texts bear the same relation to texts less concerned with the analytic
experience as the foundations of a house bear to its visible structure.
We shall now examine the works that constitute this visible structure. First,
“Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses” (1966), which was written three years
before Lacan gave his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Here, Althusser dis-
tinguishes four discourses: scientific discourse, aesthetic discourse, ideological dis-
course and unconscious discourse. What he is seeking, above all, is to connect the
70 The splitting of the subject

unconscious and ideological discourses. Each of these discourses is characterised in

two ways. First, there is the level of structure: ideological discourse has a specular
structure, in which the human subject is reflected and doubled in the divine sub-
ject; the discourse of the unconscious has a metonymic structure, connected with
the fact that a placeholder stands in for the subject-effect. Second, there are the
elements of structure: “fantasies” for the unconscious discourse, and more diverse
elements – from words to forms of conduct – for ideological discourse.What is rel-
evant in this context is not the question of whether Althusser’s construction is well
founded, but its formalist character; like structuralism, this formalism is explicitly
linked to a refusal to consider the question of the subject in any terms other than
those of a subject-effect.The consequence is the “bad subject”, which is not broken
by being an effect.Yet Althusser allows this path to lead to a dead end, for he does
not want to recognise that the “bad subject” is not bad, but instead is divided by its
enunciation, which separates it from jouissance.
Therefore – and in this sense, Heiner Müller’s diagnosis is correct – Althusser’s
theory of discourse is characteristic of what Lacan called the discourse of the uni-
versity, which is one of the four configurations that are possible on the basis of the
matrix that I have already indicated.

S2 a

S1 S

It may seem severe to apply this schema to Althusser’s theory of discourses; it can
even lead readers to accuse me of doing precisely what I am attacking: I am elevating
Lacan to the level of some kind of knowledge that would have the status of a whole
[tout-savoir]. Yet in this context, there is no difficulty, for Althusser’s conception of
science is clearly a form of this knowledge.The only difficulty is that Althusser does
not hide that his teachers are Lacan and Marx.9 What exonerates him from being a
“knave” (Lacan, 1991, p. 61) and shows that his enunciation involved taking risks,
or a forcing, is that his body opened the Pandora’s box that contained language.
Pandora was a woman, and if we take Hesiod’s Theogony literally, this means that a
woman was the first master. This origin was subsequently masked because people
believed that they could correct this first lie,10 since speech is itself a lie, by con-
structing a discourse that would separate the true from the false. On this site, first
philosophy and then science have constructed their glory and unveiled their limits.
As a part of his implication in the discourse of the university, Althusser elabo-
rated a theory of discourses, which involved a general theory – historical materi-
alism – of which psychoanalysis would be a local theory. In this respect, all other
things being unequal, his ambition was close to the ambition that underlies Lacan’s
four discourses. For readers who are familiar with Lacan’s conception of discourse,
any comparison of the two theories may seem inappropriate. Lacan understands
“discourse” in a way that is very different from its common meaning as a form
of speech; Althusser, on the other hand, used the word in its usual sense. His only
 From A to Z 71

specific originality is the proposition that “every discourse produces a subjectivity-effect”,

and thus each of the four forms of discourse (unconscious, ideological, aesthetic
and scientific) “induces” a different subject-effect (Althusser, 1966, p. 48). Althusser
sets up an opposition concerning unconscious and ideological discourse by claim-
ing that the subject of the latter is “present in person”, whereas the subject of the
former “is represented . . . by one signifier which ‘stands in’ for it” (ibid., p. 49). This
definition indicates a gap between Althusser and Lacan’s formulations (we do not
know whether this gap is deliberate or results from a confusion produced by a hasty
reading). For Lacan, the signifier that represents the subject (S1) is different from the
signifier that serves as a stand-in (S2), for the stand-in is not representative. As we have
seen, ten years later, Althusser would repeat his refusal, which is already implicit
here, of the splitting of the subject.
No one will be surprised that Althusser’s theory gives precedence to the subject
of ideological discourse. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser
(1970) develops this question much more fully and refers explicitly to this “bad
subject”, which becomes the exception to the state of ideological conformity pro-
duced by interpellation. Yet as early as 1966, the bases for this had already been
established: “It is ideology”, with a small “i”, “that performs the function of desig-
nating the subject (in general) that is to occupy this function: to that end it must
interpellate it as subject” (Althusser, 1966, p. 51).
These notes sought to relate ideological discourse to unconscious discourse. It
would be better, however, to examine whether this problem is even relevant. Why
is a theory of the relation between the unconscious and ideology necessary? On
this point, I would be tempted to share the healthy simplicity of Freud, for whom
no “social” effect is truly social, for it always depends on the individual’s reactions.
Social psychology is actually just psychology. Marx and Engels brought the term
“ideology” to the forefront, but it was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1817),
in his Éléments d’idéologie. For Destutt de Tracy, ideology is the science of ideas. In
contrast, Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology (1932), perform a coup de force,
emphasising that the function of ideology is to write a history that neglects the
determinant role played by surplus-value in the various modes of production; ide-
ology gives rise to a history that has been distorted into idealism and abstraction.
Yet their observation goes beyond this, for they show that this ideology came into
existence because those who produce and convey it have economic positions and
interests that lead them to misunderstand the importance of surplus-value.
According to this account, however, Marx should himself have believed in the
German ideology. If he did not, it was because, as subject, he chose another path.
This remark may seem trivial, but we see its weight when applied to Wilhelm
Reich’s work. For Reich, a worker may choose to become a communist because of
his/her class membership, and there is no need to make any psychological mecha-
nism intervene. On the other hand, if a worker becomes a fascist, the existence
of a pathological psychological mechanism must be postulated (for example, see
Reich, 1933). If Reich’s reasoning were applied to Marx, then Marx’s invention of
communism would be pathological. It would be better to conclude that there is no
72 The splitting of the subject

“natural” choice. Every ideological interpellation, to use Althusser’s expression, is

never anything but a plunging into a language that certainly has its own significa-
tions; only “half ” of the subject, however, is ever interpellated in it.
If, therefore, the term “ideology” has any meaning, it is to designate false theories
in the field of history.There are indeed false theories of history – the idea, for exam-
ple, that society is an organism; such theories can degenerate into slogans, to the
point of becoming ossified phrases. They are never “entities”, demons that would
magically instill an illusion or a false belief in someone. Ideology is never anything
other than the product of a linguistic effect, one in which a theory becomes meta-
phorical. The subject, however, must always choose to accept this metaphorization.
This invalidates neither Destutt de Tracy’s project nor Marx’s analysis; it does, how-
ever, invalidate the idea that ideology is a collective unconscious. Marxist Jungianism has
still not been eradicated.
In his notes on discourse, Althusser finds himself on this slippery slope, and the
best proof of this is that he makes the Other into both the entity of Ideology and
a subject:

The big Other, which speaks in the discourse of the unconscious, would then
be, not the subject of the discourse of the ideological – God, the subject and
so on – but the discourse of the ideological itself, established as the subject of
the discourse of the unconscious, and established in the specific form of the
discourse of the unconscious, that is, as an effect of this discourse.
(Althusser, 1966, p. 61)

For Althusser, there is no subject of the unconscious; therefore, the Other, through
an effect of the ideological discourse, comes to occupy this place as a false subject.
Yet what need is there to bring in ideology if this subjectivation of the Other – this
belief in the existence of an Other of the Other – can be sufficiently explained by
the unconscious itself? The theory of fantasy does this. Why do we need to bring
in ideology except because it has been posited as an entity against which the sub-
ject can do nothing? In other words, according to Althusser, to recognise oneself as
subject is tantamount to accepting the consistency of the Other.
Althusser comes close, however, to what could have given him another solution
when he says that ideological discourse serves in “the discourse of the uncon-
scious . . . as a symptom” (ibid., p. 60, emphasis added). Such a solution, however,
would have led him to abandon his initial conception of alienation, which had
already been set in stone at the time of his 1964 article,“Freud and Lacan”. For him,
subjection is very much an alienation in the place of an Other who is a subject. In
this sense, the mechanism that he describes is incompatible with what Lacan con-
ceptualises with the term “alienation”, where the Other is precisely not a subject.
Lacan takes care to make an explicit statement about what alienation is not, and even
if he is not aiming at Althusser, he hits him. Does alienation mean that the

subject is condemned to seeing itself emerge, in initio, only in the field of

the Other? Could it be that? Well, it isn’t. Not at all – not at all – not at all.
 From A to Z 73

Alienation consists in this vel, which – if you do not object to the word con-
demned, I will use it – condemns the subject to appearing only in that division
which, it seems to me, I have just articulated sufficiently by saying that, if it
appears on one side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it appears on the
other as aphanisis.
(Lacan, 1973d, p. 210)

Polynices & Polynices

Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both of which were subti-
tled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, were written by a philosopher (Gilles Deleuze)
and a psychoanalyst (Félix Guattari). The title of the first volume, Anti-Oedipus,
announces its character very clearly, and its publication was an event.Yet the legacy
of this book seems much less certain, and the schizoanalytic treatment that it pro-
motes seems to have fizzled out, if, that is, there was ever much fizzle there.
By 1972, the Écrits had been available for six years. During 1971–1972, Lacan
gave his seminar . . . ou pire (Lacan, 2011a) and a related series of lectures at Saint-
Anne that has been partially published in English translation as Talking to Brick Walls
(Lacan, 2011b). In them, he continued his investigation of what could be called
phallic “imperialism” and the Oedipal “dictatorship”, to choose two expressions
that would not have displeased Deleuze and Guattari. Lacan was seeking to high-
light the existence of a dephallicised jouissance that was specific to femininity –
which does not mean that men are not involved in it – and which does not emerge
through any acceptance of castration. If women are not wholly within the regime
of the castration complex, the consequence is that Freud’s impasse concerning
femininity – the supposedly insurmountable persistence of penis envy – finds its
exit not in a forcing but in a topographical displacement: the dead end remains a
dead end, but numerous other roads remain available to anyone who wants to move
about freely. Lacan’s proposition seeks not to jettison the castration complex but to
limit its scope to the definition of sexuation that it permits, and to undo its mad
project of abolishing the dimension of the drives.
In writing the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari
were not unaware of what Lacan was doing, but the reader of this book will not
find a carefully argued confrontation with his work during that period. Paradoxi-
cally, Anti-Oedipus, despite its libertarian inspiration, presents itself as a closed system
that is very difficult to enter into; it cultivates its own technical language and devel-
ops a reading-grid that is able to “decode” – a term that the authors are very fond
of – all of the theoretical territory that is related, directly or indirectly, to human
action.The entire book depends on an organon of dichotomies or differentiations. If
we hope to be able to understand it and reconstruct its axioms, these dichotomies
must be “tamed” and comprehended. The first of these is the distinction between
“desiring-machines” and “bodies without organs”. To say “we, desiring-machines”
would be to go too far. Yet the prototype that the authors propose, following the
principle of a machine that is never isolated but is always connected to another
machine, is the breast-mouth couple: the breast-machine produces a flow and the
74 The splitting of the subject

mouth-machine cuts off that flow. The model is thus that of the montage of the
drives, except that, unlike Lacan’s, it is a functional montage.11 Desire is thus defined
as what does not cease to effect a coupling between a continuous flow and the
removal or slicing off [prélèvement] of the flow: “desire causes the current to flow,
flows itself in turn, and breaks the flows” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 5).
As we shall see, this is where the vitiation of the Oedipus and castration
complexes begins, for they reject the dissemination that is part of the regime of
­desiring-machines.This is shown with great acuteness in the chapter “1914: One or
Several Wolves” in the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus. “[M]olecular multiplici-
ties” are placed in opposition to what is supposed to be the phallic reign of unicity,
which would set up a humiliating and defeated acceptance of the Oedipus complex
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 27). Their example comes from Salvador Dali, who
stopped talking about “THE rhinoceros horn” – another overly opportune meta-
phor for phallic “unicity” – and begins comparing “goosebumps to a field of rhi-
noceros horns” (ibid., p. 27). Seen from this perspective, the ego itself is the opposite
of a paranoiac corset: it is an undelimited zone of fluctuating and varied events.
Here the authors graft on what could be the book’s most decisive thesis: the
infantile Oedipus complex is an artefact forged by the paranoia of a father who
imputes to his son the desire to kill him. Here is the key statement: “The paranoiac
father Oedipalizes the son. Guilt is an idea projected by the father before it is an
inner feeling experienced by the son.The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting as
if things began with the child” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 275).12
The concept of desiring-machines is paired with a second concept: that of the
“body without organs”.This expression was taken from Antonin Artaud’s radio play,
To Have Done with the Judgement of God:

So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.

– How’s that?
How’s that?
No matter how one takes you, you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.
– By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his
anatomy . . . .
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him in order to scrape off that
animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and
restored him to his true freedom.
(Artaud, 1947b, pp. 570–571)
 From A to Z 75

There are numerous readings of this poem, and they can be divided into two groups.
On the one hand, through the body without organs, Artaud seems to be seeking to
achieve a body without sexuality. Such readings argue that Artaud considers god (a
term that is written here without capital letters) to be someone who gets off sexually
on Artaud’s body. It should be noted as lightly as possible that this single indication is
sufficient to locate Artaud within paranoia, rather than schizophrenia.What is impor-
tant, in this context, is not the general form of Artaud’s subjection, which is absolutely
secondary, but his relation to his symptom, to the singularity of his refusal to be
“encaged” in the being of language. Artaud undoes what, through god, “machines”
him as an object, one that has become the passive receptacle of an intrusive jouissance.
The second reading of the body without organs, which Deleuze supports
explicitly in The Logic of Sense, is that it corresponds to a nonphallic, rhizom-
atic sexuality, which would be homologous to the heterogeneous objects of the
drive. This reading is also irrefutable. Yet whichever interpretation one chooses,
Artaud’s “body without organs” is what is obtained by subtracting the body from
the generative chain of the father and the mother; this would be done by “scrap-
ing off ” the animalcule-god’s organs. In other words, it would be done with the
automatisms of its organism, which are like the after-effects or the side-effects of
the infection of the body by god. In other words, it is necessary to begin with the
colonising of the body into an organism in order then to exit from it; nothing
indicates that there is any possibility of a primal bifurcation that would render such
colonisation unnecessary. Having begun with the question of anti-Oedipus, we
have now been led to question Deleuze and Guattari. Does their theory go beyond
the Oedipus complex or fall short of it?
There is also a significant slippage in Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term
“body without organs”: they (1972, p. 32) speak of “a full body without organs”,
moving away from the letter of Artaud’s work. This would be a body before the
void and before lack, in a way that has serious consequences. It contradicts Artaud’s
proposition that the body is made of nothing, as he writes explicitly in his poem
“And not like god”: “the fact that what is nothingness is the body” (Artaud, 1947a,
p. 264). What does this mean, if not that language is equivalent to this nothing-
ness [néantisation], which, literally speaking, makes everybody. Therefore, for Artaud,
“body without organs” and “full” are mutually exclusive notions. This is a complex
question, for “nothing” is not “lack”; it is the reverse [envers] of full: “this wrong side
out [envers] will be his [the body’s] real place” (Artaud, 1947b, p. 570). We see thus
that for Artaud, the body can only have a place as the underside of the full, the place
that is imposed upon it by the animalcule-god.
This is the exact opposite of Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis, which nevertheless
makes this expression a major and unsurpassable reference. In their argument, lack,
castration, etc. seem to be nothing more than paranoiac caprices. It would have
been better, however – including and especially in terms of their determination
to mark the limits of these terms – to examine how language itself made them
necessary. It is therefore astonishing to see that, in taking nothingness into account,
Artaud enables his “brothers” in castration – even those who are only neurotics – to
76 The splitting of the subject

find a sort of neighbourhood when faced with the walls of language. This wall
obliges them to experience nothingness in order to inhabit their bodies.
The anti-Oedipal idea is entirely different: if the body is marked as zero, this is
to signify the zero degree of numbering: the body precedes the One and is not the
consequence of a nihilation [néantisation] by language. It is true that, in A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari devote a chapter to exploring how the body without
organs or “BwO” is a “set of practices” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p. 150). These
practices mobilise “intensities” – “pain waves”, “refrigerator waves” and other waves
that belong to an order that is strictly impossible to interpret (ibid., p. 152). By thus
treating the BwO “as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the
organization of the organs” (ibid., p. 153), these practices have the aim of calculating
the potential for intensity contained in this egg.
Fascinated by the facts of masochism, schizophrenic mutilation and melancholic
negative hallucinations, Deleuze and Guattari do not overlook the question of the
sombre side of the BwO: “So why these examples, why must we start there? Emp-
tied bodies instead of full ones. What happened?” (ibid., p. 150). Yet the fact that
they are writing after Freud does not lead them to wonder whether these specifi-
cally human facts may be related to the symbolic nihilation [néantisation] induced
by language. Instead, moved by a passionate hatred for the symbolic, they prefer to
mock the death drive. In this way, they miss precisely what limits the lethal hold of
the symbolic: the symptom.
Seen from this perspective, the subject is a hanger-on, a parasite of the body
without organs, and would therefore, oddly enough, have the status of Artaud’s
animalcule-god. The subject is a series of states, a host of metonymies that through
their very “transitivity” (in the double sense of “transitive” and “transitional”) make
something present: the impossibility of any identification that would name and thus
unify the subject. Since the body without organs is precisely the place where the
desiring machines will take hold, it needs to be understood as fully as possible; we
must not forget that these bodies do not efface the gap between the full body and
the body-as-nothing. Artaud, indeed, was not satisfied with this volatile subject, for
he never stopped using the body to forge an identity for the ego [moi]: “The self
[moi] is not the body, it is the body that is the self [moi]” (Artaud, 1947a, p. 251).
The desiring-machines, to return to the other term of Deleuze and Guattari’s
opposition, are systems of cuts, which operate on a continuous material flow. Cut
(or schiz) vs. flow: this is their minimal dialectical relation. Deleuze and Guattari are
probably conceding the importance of language by having these machines include
a code, which, however, is a code of “polyvocal” signs rather than a system of signi-
fiers. This cacophonic code produces desire: it makes machines desire (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1972, p. 38). This code also brings organs into existence, but in a way that
does not connect each organ to a function; on the contrary, it makes the organ
participate in negating its supposed function (an “anorectic mouth”) (ibid., p. 38).
This antifunctionalism is, however, more a sort of negative version of functionalism
than a subversion of it, as it is in Lacan.There are three sorts of cuts: “breaks that are
a slicing off (coupures-prélèvements)”, which “have to do with continuous fluxes and
 From A to Z 77

are related to partial objects”; “breaks that are a detachment (coupures-détachements)”;

and the “residual break (coupure-reste) or residuum, which produces a subject along-
side the machine, functioning as a part adjacent to the machine” (ibid., pp. 39, 40).
These three operations – slicing off, detaching, residual breaking – are the compo-
nents of the production of desire.
The body thus serves both to support the code and is a material reality that,
paradoxically, is prior to the organism. The other material realities, however, which
can become machines (the means of production) still remain undefined. A dialectic
is taking shape (flux vs. breaks), one that is clearly opposed to the dialectic that the
authors attribute to Oedipal psychoanalysis: in the latter, desire comes into exist-
ence as a lack of the object. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “Desire does not
lack anything. . . . It is rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks
a fixed subject”, because “there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (ibid.,
p. 26).The objective being of desire is the real itself.The formulation “the subject . . .
is missing to desire” would be extraordinary and absolutely true if it did not trans-
form desire into an external entity, one for which the subject could lack respect,
despite the fact that, in any case, no subject is without the filament – whether it be
slender as a hair or solid as a tow rope – that connects it to the symptom. Indeed,
the conclusions that the authors draw from their formulation confirm this reserva-
tion and reduce my initial enthusiasm: 1) “there is no particular form of ” the real
“that can be labelled ‘psychic reality’”; 2) “the real is not the impossible”, but the
possible (ibid., p. 27, translation modified).
What, then, is the source of the lure or illusion that desire is correlated to lack?
The answer is that, “We know very well where lack – and its subjective correlative
come from, the fantasy. Lack [manque] is created, planned, and organized in and
through social production” (ibid., p. 28).We can now understand at what level capi-
talism intervenes. As Lacan’s thesis about the lack-in-jouissance [manque-à-jouir] that
is produced by the capitalist discourse suggests, capitalism is, among all the modes of
production, the one that pushes the manufacturing of lack to its height; this manu-
facturing becomes the very condition that enables capitalism to function. Desire as
the effect of lack thus becomes the false capitalist version of desire, to which the
authors can oppose schizophrenia, which, for them, preserves the true nature of
desire. In doing so, they are referring not to the psychiatric entity that bears that
name, but the essence of the process itself. The two authors do not fail, in a note, to
signal the “two poles” of Lacan’s theory of desire: an admirable one that is “related to
the object small a as a desiring-machine”, and another, which is more Oedipal and
“which reintroduces a certain notion of lack” in relation to the Other (ibid., p. 27).
The “capitalist machine” “deterritorializ[es] . . . the socius” (ibid., pp. 33, 34); it
abolishes particular social territories in a movement towards universalisation, but it
is incapable of producing the code that would give a meaning to this universalisa-
tion. In this respect, we could add, capitalism is a-religious, despite a recurrent resist-
ance on the part of religion, which tries to palliate this absence of meaning. Money
neither makes sense nor creates meaning; Guizot’s axiom “enrich yourselves!” does
not provide any answer to the mystery of existence. There would thus be – note
78 The splitting of the subject

the use of the modal – a tendency towards schizophrenia within capitalism; this
echoes Lacan’s thesis about the foreclosure of castration by the capitalist discourse
and could even provide an explanation of the difference between the foreclosures
of the Name-of-the-Father and of castration. Nevertheless, the capitalist tendency
towards deterritorialisation, the existence of which is incontestable, never ceases to
approach its limit – schizophrenia – while also being prevented from reaching it,
from “realising” it. Capitalism “continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while
simultaneously tending toward that limit” (ibid., p. 34).
We can thus see the principal thesis taking shape: capitalism, through its deter-
ritorialisation, and by substituting money for codes, approaches schizophrenia
asymptotically. It does not cease not to want to reach this limit. To prevent itself
from doing so, it relies on the principle that contradicts schizophrenia: the Oedipus
complex. Thus, the Oedipus complex is the means by which capitalism uses and
literally perverts psychoanalysis. Castration – the theory that desire is caused by a
lack – is the correlate of the Oedipus complex, and together they are able to consti-
tute capitalism as a whole [ensemble], thereby strengthening its claim to universality,
to the detriment of its dissociative, rhizomatic, affective action.
⁂
By promoting familialism, psychoanalysis places itself in the service of this project.
The Oedipus complex serves to suppress [réprimer] desiring production; this socially
manifest suppression conditions repression [refoulement] within the psyche. In the
form of myth, the Oedipus complex reintroduces the meaning that is missing from
capitalism. Even more importantly, this complex completes itself by bringing in the
castration complex and a theory of the fantasy, thereby providing capitalism with
what could be called a “therapeutic machine”, one that validates and authorises
the functioning that the authors have attacked. By the end of the book, nothing in
Freud has been spared, and if Lacan emerges nearly unscathed from this beating,
it is at the price of being emancipated, even against his will, from Freud’s tutelage.
It goes without saying that Reich remains in a state of grace. A question, however,
arises: what is the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the familialism that
they impute to Freud?
Their first reproach is that Freud constituted a general theory on the basis of what,
at the beginning, was only one contingent connection among others, thereby trans-
forming the Oedipus complex into a form of explanatory imperialism. They seek to
demonstrate this forcing, for example, in their analysis of Freud’s article “A Child is
Being Beaten” (1919), dissecting the three moments of the fantasy for the girl.
They note cheerily that the father does not yet appear in the first phase and is
no longer there in the third; his presence is only unequivocal in the second phase,
about which, as Freud (1919, p. 185) notes explicitly, “. . . we may say of it in a
certain sense that it has never had a real existence”.Their criticism, however, seems
more rhetorical than substantial; this is not because they question Freud’s clinical
observations and his reading, which are fragments drawn from analytic experience,
and which are therefore difficult to cast doubt upon. It seems rhetorical, instead,
 From A to Z 79

because they are never interested in what Freud’s actual thesis is; this is what they
would need to criticise in order to damage his credibility. Freud emphasises that the
source of fantasy’s persistence and opacity is the subject’s inability to represent the
agent of castration, the real father. This then conditions the aporia involved in
the subject’s acceptance of castration, whether this subject is a girl or a boy: how
can s/he accept what, structurally, corresponds to a necessary hole in what can be
represented? Deleuze and Guattari are correct in attacking the ideologies of repre-
sentation, but by imputing them to Freud, they accept the readings of the psycho-
analysts of the IPA, readings that Lacan rejected. (It can be noted in passing that
they are embracing, quite indulgently, the work of André Green.)13 Likewise, they
read the phallus in terms of representation, and this is why they reject this concept.
They make it the representative representation, whereas, even already in Freud, it
is the non-representative term par excellence. It is the condition of all representa-
tion, which is precisely what enables us to question the status of representation.
Their next, parallel step is no more convincing than this claim that Freud’s
treatment of fantasy is marked by Oedipal imperialism: they valorise the group-
fantasy to the detriment of the “individual” fantasy. “The revolutionary pole of
group fantasy” is extolled as being antagonistic to the “enormous inertia which
the law communicates to institutions in an established order” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1972, pp. 62, 63). It is difficult to respect this slogan when we remember how much
the inertia of groups – whatever their explicit political content may be – feeds the
lies of institutions. Institutions impose their primacy upon the truth of the subject;
more precisely, they pervert the subject’s truth by accommodating it to their own
worst tendencies.The fact that these words were written shortly after 1968 explains
the authors’ confidence in group fantasy.
Nevertheless, once my mood of initial rejection passed, I understood the impor-
tance of the central question that they are raising: are there individual fantasies or
are there only group fantasies? For Deleuze and Guattari, these fantasies arise from
two categories of groups: groups that are subjects and groups that have been sub-
jected.The difference lies in whether or not they have been subjected to the imagi-
nary structure of the Oedipus complex and castration. It can certainly be accepted,
or at least not dismissed a priori, that an analysand’s fantasies are actually group
fantasies. Why not? Yet what is decisive in an analysis lies in the singularity of each
subject’s detachment of itself from the fantasy. The prototype of fantasy is the one
in which the Other wants the subject to be castrated; the subject must find its own
singular way of detaching itself from this fantasy. This detachment is a process that
cannot be represented or take the form of an idea; to quote Freud’s (1919, p. 185)
exact words again, the second phase, which makes the fantasy hold together, “has
never succeeded in becoming conscious”.
As soon as we realise that castration is missing in what is called psychosis, the
imperialism imputed to the Oedipus complex may well turn out to be fragile.
We must remember that castration is the symbolic lack of an imaginary object
(see Lacan, 1994, pp. 215–219) and consists in the fact that an empty place is left
in the Other by the removal of an object; this empty place is filled by an image
80 The splitting of the subject

with which the subject identifies. If castration is to take place, this image must be
negativised. In this configuration, the Other is neither the mother nor the father,
who are only its supports. Instead, it is the “treasure trove of signifiers” (Lacan, 1960,
p. 682): the mother tongue, inasmuch as it has not yet been constituted as a code.
Nothing forces this negativisation to take place, but the consequences of its failure
may be as intransigent as those of its “success”.
Should castration then be thought of as a “whole” [le tout]? For psychoanalysis,
the answer is that it absolutely must not be. At the very moment when Deleuze
and Guattari were attacking castration, Lacan was showing that it cannot resolve all
of what they call the game of the flux and the schiz, a game that, for him, is jouis-
sance. Lacan does so by going beyond, rather than stopping short of castration. The
absence of the category of jouissance from these books, moreover, is significant.
Deleuze and Guattari are trying to construct a theory on the basis of real questions;
however, if this category, along with the task of taking language into account, were
to intrude into their theory, then it would be undone from within.
If the phallus is not all [tout], it is because structure is actually commanded by
something else – by the symptom.The received and systematic opposition between
the “schizophrenic” processes and the “Oedipal” matrix may not really be debat-
able, but the authors can be reproached for proceeding by means of an exclusive
(rather than an inclusive) disjunction, a disjunction that they then attack for being
part of the Oedipal regime. The Oedipus complex can certainly be considered,
in terms of set theory, as an operation of mapping that “consists in establishing a
constellation of one-to-one correspondences between the agents of social produc-
tion, reproduction, and antiproduction, on the one hand, and the agents of the
so-called natural reproduction of the family on the other” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1972, pp. 100–101, translation modified). Yet this idea that the father, the mother,
the phallus and I are all mappings controlled by socio-economic formations, which
then provide a false support for psychoanalysis, misses out on something important:
this “mapping” can only be made because it corresponds to a logic whose founda-
tion is located elsewhere than in it.
This foundation lies in each subject’s relation to the “Other”, a term that must
be understood in its full ambiguity, as both the place of the signifier and the living
support of this place. This relation includes a subversive set theory and topology;
these are the respective fields, for example, of neurosis, perversion, psychosis. Bring-
ing to light the logic of set theory – with its practice of establishing one-to-one
correspondences – is not the result of a flaw in psychoanalysis. The flaw would not
lie in a blindness to topology, but in the converse: in giving a preference to this
topology without seeing the necessity of set theory. This would involve following
an ideological choice that is as questionable as the familialist ideology that they
impute to Freud.
⁂
I have presented Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud from the perspective
provided by the forty years that have elapsed since the book appeared, and by
 From A to Z 81

highlighting its – possibly antagonistic – tension with Lacan. For these two authors,
however, this critique constitutes the basis of schizoanalysis, which they present as
a practical alternative to psychoanalysis, without defining it clearly. This form of
analysis can be summarised in four theses:

1 “Every investment is social, and in any case, bears upon a sociohistorical field”
(ibid., p. 343).14
2 “Within the social investments we will distinguish the unconscious libidinal
investment of group or desire, and the preconscious investment of class or
interest” (ibid., p. 343).
3 “Schizoanalysis posits the primacy of the libidinal investments of the social
field over the familial investment” (ibid., p. 335).
4 The “final thesis . . . is . . . the distinction between the two poles of social libidi-
nal investment: the paranoiac, reactionary and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid
revolutionary pole” (ibid., p. 366).

These four theses are backed up by arguments, but the form in which they are
stated suggests that schizoanalysis does not propose a new form of practice; instead,
it concerns what could be called the “reading” – and not an interpretation – of
this practice. The only modification that touches practice is the indication that
transference should be “schizoprenized”, rather than perverted (which is what
Freudian psychoanalysis supposedly does) (ibid., p. 339). This modification follows
from applying these four theses when responding to patients and is, moreover, not
uninteresting. Lacan himself, after all, wonders about the limit of a “permitted”
perversion in the transferential relation. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, he does not
consider that it is possible to eliminate this “turn toward the father” – père-version
– from the beginning, since it is constitutive of transference. This “perversion” of
transference can only be resolved by resolving this transference (which is the ter-
minable analysis). We can see the practical gulf between these two positions. We
have reason to wonder what the actual consequences of schizoanalysis would be,
for it would impose its schizoid reading without taking into account the perverse
dimension that conditions the very possibility of the message.
Hunting down the jouissance turned towards the father is hardly better than
channelling this jouissance towards him. They are both ways of thumbing one’s
nose not only at the message of the symptom but also at the character of perver-
sion. Perversion is a transgression that the father is required to bless; it transforms
the structural lack of adequation in the relation between the subject and the Other
into a symptom. Perversion only stops – as perversion, but not as symptom – when
transgression is revealed as what posits the enactment of the law, if the subject takes
such a transformation upon himself, without leaving this task to the father.
The four theses of schizoanalysis are disappointing because it is not clear how
they are relevant: they do not mark out a clear border between the positions of psy-
choanalysis and schizoanalysis, except in the field of ideology. If we assume that the
latter will have an effect on practice, it will be at a level – see the second thesis – that
82 The splitting of the subject

is not preconscious, but unconscious. The only relevant thesis would be the final
one, through its very exaggeration: as a paranoiac, Artaud was a fascist, like Rous-
seau, Reich, Dali and so many others. Here, paradoxically, I agree with Deleuze and
Guattari, in the sense that this “exaggeration” highlights the status of the symptom:
it is the subject’s life-and-death struggle against the form that subjects it. Thus, in
my opinion, “schizophrenising” psychoanalysis means apprehending the symptom
as what marks the nonexistence of the sexual relation (and thus not the nonexist-
ence of the One, but the nonexistence of the whole). A paranoiac analysis, on the
other hand, would suppress the symptom in order to force the sexual relation into
existence. The difficulty with this formulation is that, whether one is paranoiac or
not, nothing can abolish the symptom and make the sexual relation exist.This is the
formula for atheism, or a reversal of Pascal’s wager. If the God who would be able
to understand us does not exist, then we should stop doing anything and everything
at all – which is not the same as washing our hands of it all.
In fact, the key point of my own critique of Deleuze and Guattari is that, with-
out their awareness, they fall short of explaining “structure”, as Lacan, in his reading
of Freud, understood this term. This weakness may well result from an ideologi-
cal prejudice, which prevented them from understanding the full significance of
the innovative intuitions that nevertheless fascinated them. For example, they con-
stantly confuse desire and drive: they act as if Lacan had never differentiated them
and shown how they create the division of the subject.
In “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire”, Lacan (1964, p. 724)
states:

desire comes from the Other, and jouissance is located on the side of the
Thing. Freud’s second topography [the one that introduces the death drive,
which Deleuze and Guattari reject] concerns the pluralizing quartering of
the subject that results therefrom – yet another opportunity not to see what
should strike us, which is that identifications are determined by desire there
without satisfying the drive.That occurs because the drive divides the subject
and desire.

Without wanting to start, or restart, the nonetheless necessary debate on the

scientific status of psychoanalysis, let us note that Lacan’s statement is a theorem that
may well be as decisive as Galileo’s law of falling bodies; treating it as an opinion,
and even despising it as an opinion, can only result in the impasse that has been
observed in schizoanalysis. In defence of schizoanalysis, it can be added that it has,
at least, not become involved in the return to suggestion.
Freud does not place the father as an entity on one side and society on the other.
If the traces of the father and the mother are not just flights of fancy, it is because
they are the first social agents with which the infans deals. This infans should be
understood as a sort of homo non-psychologicus; it wagers its life in the entry into
language. Who would deny that the father and mother are products of society? Yet
who would also deny that, because of the symptom, the mother and father are not
 From A to Z 83

merely social products, passive agents of a machine that works like clockwork? If
desire then comes from the Other – from language as borne by someone who exists
or has existed (this transcends the opposition between the living and the dead) –
how do identifications, which try to ensure the hold of an intrinsically inaccessible
Other, serve as suitable means of satisfying the drive that emerges, as irreducible,
from language’s failure [échec] not to miss [rater] representing the subject? This gap
between identification and drive is manifested, on the side of the Other, by the
confirmation that it cannot be absorbed; it remains irreducibly Other. On the sub-
ject’s side, it is manifested by the symptom.
The same impasse can be envisioned in other ways; in analytic experience, what
takes precedence is not the signified but the subject’s relation to the bar that, in the
algorithm for language, separates the signified from the signifier (Lacan reversed
Saussure’s treatment of the relation between the two).The father cannot be reduced
to a signified, which would then have to be reduced to another signified, such as
“desiring-machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 297). Instead, the father is the
index of the relation to this bar. In every case, this bar is structurally impossible to
efface. It can, however, be written in two ways: as phallus, Φ, in cases in which the
signified with which the subject identifies has been negativised, or as more or less
discrete elementary phenomena – which can be highly variable and can go from
hallucination to hypochondria – when this negativisation has not taken place.
⁂
The schizophrenic says, “The game has no rules”: there is no semblance. The psy-
choanalyst must admit that this is right, yet must also say that the rule of the game is
life itself, thus letting the schizophrenic know that s/he is rejecting this rule. Perhaps
undertaking a reading of this book could turn a criticism of it into the same kind
of dialogue. If we pair Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments with Lacan’s own contem-
poraneous teaching, the result could be a very severe judgement on them, and even
a condemnation. Yet this condemnation is always a misdeal. Let us say instead that
these talented “craftsmen” of language seem to have begun to dislike their tool; they
seem superstitiously to attribute to it the malevolent power to use them, to “engi-
neer them”, in order to make them the henchmen of the despotism of the One.
Lacan claimed that “there is such a thing as One (Y a d’ l’Un)” (see Lacan, 1975c,
p. 5, note 19). There is no use in denying it, but it is necessary to sever the unity
of this One. In relay racing, if athletes stop being united, this leads to defeat. In
psychoanalysis, the situation is the opposite: not undoing this unity can also lead to
defeat. This defeat, however, can be hidden by rhetoric, and there is, in this respect,
a confusion concerning the status of the One. If the One is the interchangeable
element, the unit, which would be the only basis for constructing a numerical order,
Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism would score a hit; they are correct in rejecting
the identity of this One with itself and preferring a heterogeneous multiplicity.Yet
Lacan’s formulations about the One were attempts to confront a different clinical
problem. The “One” that is posited is the name by which zero can be symbol-
ised. The negativisation of the phallus is homologous to this fundamental logical
84 The splitting of the subject

operation, and the multiple can only be theorised on the basis of this. Yet, on the
other hand, there is such a thing as the One of unicity, in the sense that nothing is
identical to anything else: singularity founds heterogeneity, which is different from
multiplicity: the latter can always be reduced to the denumerable.15
It can now be seen that Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism aims at Freud but hits
Marx, not by calling his discovery of surplus-value into question, but by observ-
ing that although he may have been a great painter, he was not a musician (or vice
versa). In other words, in order to demarcate the field in which he was working,
Marx was obliged to use a “clipping path”, to borrow a term from photo editing.
This means, however, that everything outside the field so defined is free for others
to exploit as they see fit, as it were.
Let’s therefore switch perspectives, erase all the preceding criticism from the
canvas and take a new look at what Deleuze and Guattari try to introduce, in an
avant-garde way, into the “contemporary psychoanalysis” of the new millennium,
that is, at the malicious click of the mouse that is supposed to throw its stiff and
starchy outlines into disarray. What is quite surprising is that their selective, and not
always very charitable approach to psychoanalysis often ends up formulating criti-
cisms that are not only homogeneous to Lacan’s thoroughgoing criticism of post-
Freudianism, but also bring out questions with far-reaching consequences. There is
an urgent need to examine these questions in order to regenerate “post-Lacanian”
psychoanalysis, thereby reawakening it from its monsterless nightmares. For exam-
ple, “Surplus value of code is the primitive form of surplus value” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1972, p. 150). This statement refers to the work of the anthropologist
Edmund Leach and concerns the conversion of “perishable wealth” – consumable
goods – “into imperishable prestige through the medium” of “counter-prestations”
(in the case of marriages) or spectacular activities (Leach, 1961, p. 89; as cited in
Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 150). Perhaps they are also thinking of Marcel Mauss’
study of the potlatch and even of Georges Bataille’s discussion of the economy
of expense. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari meet up again with Lacan’s thesis that
­surplus-jouissance precedes surplus-value.16 The conversion they mention produces
a jouissance-benefit – in this particular case, prestige. In this sense, this “surplus-
value of code” is to be distinguished from Marx’s surplus-value; the latter concerns
the gap between exchange-values and does not consider entities, such as prestige,
that cannot be integrated into the money-commodity-more money (M-C-M′)
cycle. It thus becomes homologous to Lacan’s surplus-jouissance. Just as Marxlust
(see Lacan, 1970, p. 434) precedes the discovery of Mehrwert, so also capitalists, func-
tioning in the place of surplus-jouissance, are never tempted to interrupt the cycle
of M-C-M′ by going on strike themselves. They are never tempted to do so unless
they have a political interest in this, one in which the M′ – the money increased by
this cycle – would be threatened.
⁂
Deleuze and Guattari’s reversal of the Oedipus complex and promotion of
schizophrenia involves a caustic criticism of psychoanalysis. Despite the
 From A to Z 85

misunderstandings that I have brought out, their criticisms contain something

that is quite accurate: their lauded multiplicity may well be the figure by which
they seek to put an end to the One of unity, which continues to haunt psy-
choanalysts, despite their disavowals. This One of unity has appeared in many
forms: from the one among others, which aims at a universalising (and Chris-
tian) homeostasis of narcissism (see Vasse, 1978), to the definition of the symp-
tom as masking the nonexistence of the sexual relation (see Soler, 2002),17 not
to mention the paradoxical act of making the not-all [pas-tout] uniform. In all
of these cases, contemporary psychoanalytic doxas seem to league together in a
way that would retroactively show the truth of what these fierce critics of psy-
choanalysis say. All of these doxas militate in favour of a group-psychology that
would take as its model the army, the church, the party or a business. People
who promote them tolerate any criticism that does not draw conclusions from
what it says; they channel the transference by means of “tour guides”, whose
job is to enable amused analysands to discover the great priests and priestesses
of psychoanalysis.
An ambiguity, however, still remains. Inveighing against neurotics is a practice
that can be found whenever the analytic discourse deviates into the discourse
of the master. This can seem to contradict the observation that psychoanalysis
has distanced itself from psychosis, which has been colonised by psychiatry.
In reality, what is unbearable is to accept that the other gets off, because the
imputation that this other is the Other still remains. It is the jouissance of the
Other that is intolerable, because this Other wants me to be castrated. Analytic
experience, however, shows that there is no jouissance of the Other, J(A), and if
the other, with a small “o”, gets off, this jouissance does not threaten me. Even if
the fear that the Other wants to castrate me is unfounded, perhaps it still has to
be eradicated as it testifies to a refusal of castration. The answer is that it should
not at all be eradicated: if castration were to come from the Other, it would
prohibit all jouissance, making me melancholic. This would not be the sort of
castration that would be the condition for a different jouissance, a jouissance
that would not be the pure and simple annihilation implied in the death drive.
Far from being “ridiculous”, the death drive is what enables us to explain how
desire is what deactivates this drive by escaping from its legislation, through the
symptom. The lack within desire is thus not a return to religion, but what is
necessary to counter annihilation.
This leads us back to the question of the status of multiplicity, which turns out
to have the same status in the deviations of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis that it
has in schizoanalysis. The post-Lacanians evade multiplicity by seeking to obtain
“ones” that can be fitted into a set, thus disguising the group’s imaginary qualities
as an institution. Schizoanalysis misses multiplicity in a different way: it hides the
idea that the condition for a truly heterogeneous multiplicity is the fulfilment of
each person’s unicity. This is achieved – without taking this as a stopping point –
through a transitory acceptance of the unity of one’s symptomatic being.This being
is equivalent to a division from one’s being as a subject.
86 The splitting of the subject

The last Hegelian

I
Slavoj Žižek can certainly not be reproached with what Deleuze and Guattari are
guilty of: a deliberate misunderstanding of the message of psychoanalysis. In the
introduction to Subversions du sujet, the French translation of his book Tarrying
with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, he locates himself within it
impeccably, arguing that psychoanalysis is a quest for the unconscious that unveils
something other than the true personality: it reveals a “primal lie” located in each
person’s fantasy, “through which we try to veil the inconsistency of the symbolic
order that we inhabit” (Žižek, 1993a, p. 13). Thus, he locates himself as anti-anti-
Oedipus. Schizoanalysis tends to found itself on a truth that is to be discovered
by schizophrenising the unconscious; it attempts to escape from the philosophical
tradition of “critique”, as inaugurated by Kant, and we need to pay close attention
to the implications of this attempt.
Žižek, however, is not a Kantian. If he could be reduced to an epithet, it would
be a “wild” Hegelian, or even a “wild and crazy” Hegelian. This does not mean that
there is a flaw in the rationality and rigour of his understanding of Hegel. Instead, it
is a way of paying homage to his ability to breathe life back into the primal pulsa-
tion of Hegel’s questioning, which has been debased by the university’s restoration
projects. He starts with the question of the subject, giving Descartes, by his inven-
tion of the cogito, the credit for preparing the way for Kant’s critical revolution.The
first section of his book is significantly entitled, “The Void Named Subject”. I have
implicitly treated the problematisation of the void as inherent in the action of lan-
guage: words produce the emptiness of the thing. Deleuze and Guattari positively
mistrust the void, which is connected to the critical tradition.This tradition does not
set up an ontological opposition between the void and fullness; instead, it examines
the naming of the void, without always seeing this void as a consequence of language.
It is thus that Kant promotes the transcendental subject, the subject required as
a thinking unit (and unity) that conditions the synthesis of empirical representa-
tions (although given in a priori forms) and nonempirical representations (see Kant,
1781, pp. 246–248).The unity of “I think” guarantees the object as object. As Žižek
remarks very appropriately, this transcendental subject cannot reflect on itself, an
impossibility that founds the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon: “if
I were given to myself phenomenally, as an object of experience, I would simultaneously have
to be given to myself noumenally” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 16).
In order to go beyond what seems to be critical philosophy’s intangible point
of equilibrium, Žižek’s stratagem is to read Hegel as completing Kant, which first
implies that the subject is “absolute negativity”: it is, as negativity, the mark that the
thing is not absorbed into the object (ibid., p. 23). There is thus always a remainder
that the dialectic of subjective negativisation cannot eliminate; Žižek makes this
remainder homologous to Lacan’s object a. The second implication is that the sub-
ject “is the purely formal void which is left over after the substantial content has
 From A to Z 87

wholly ‘passed over’ into its predicates-determinations. . . [the] ‘subject’ is that very
X, the empty form of a ‘container’ which remains after all its content was ‘subjectiv-
ized’” (ibid., p. 21).
What is important in this context is not to judge the cogency of Žižek’s reading
of Hegel, and still less to criticise it because it contradicts Lacan’s explicit state-
ments. In a response to Jacques-Alain Miller in The Four Fundamental Concepts
of ­Psycho-Analysis, Lacan (1973d, p. 215) confirmed unambiguously that he was
“against Hegel”. What does need to be considered is Žižek’s theory of the subject:
this theory is presented as deriving from Hegel, but it then becomes the paradigm
of the theory of the subject as forged by psychoanalysis – by both Freud and
Lacan – on the basis of analytic experience. Such experience would thereby realize
The Phenomenology of Spirit in concrete form. Thus, to take up Žižek’s major devel-
opments, self-consciousness “has to internalize this force of negativity and recog-
nize in it its own essence, the very kernel of its own being” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 23).
Žižek thus starts with Hegel: negation “is the universal will which in its ultimate
abstraction has nothing positive and therefore can give nothing in return for the
sacrifice” (Hegel, 1807, p. 362; as cited in Žižek, ibid., p. 24). This is a crucial state-
ment, for it indicates that there is some limit, some discretion, in the on-going
dialectic: the point at which nothing can be given “in return for the sacrifice”. He
also asks, “what is ‘subject’ if not the infinite power of absolute negativity/media-
tion”? (Žižek, ibid., p. 23). This “that’s not it” is very much that of Žižek’s subject
who knows – without always drawing conclusions from this knowledge – that s/he
cannot be satisfied when the demand is satisfied; s/he cannot be satisfied with an
Other who would believe that it could be completed by the subject’s offer. It is a
sort of seesaw that indicates the moment when a mental propaedeutics passes over
into the experience of transference.18 This seesaw is also a catapult, for it enables the
question of the void to be displaced from the subject onto the Other; an imaginary
askesis becomes a real separation. This is what Freud incontestably locates first in
what he calls “maternal castration”, where the subject is subtracted from being the
Other’s imaginary complement.
Of course, in taking this path, Žižek comes up against an obstacle: his own
remainder, Marx. It is, however, with a certain joy that he sees Marx’s true face:
Marx’s critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism is his own self-criticism. For Hegel,
the reconciliation is not the moment when “substance becomes subject”; this is
Marx’s illusion concerning what could be called the “dis-alienation” of the prole-
tariat. “The dimension of subjectivity is inscribed into the very core of substance
in the guise of an irreducible lack, which forever prevents it from achieving full
self-identity” (ibid., p. 26). Ultimately, Žižek’s reading of Hegel is congruent with
Engels’ (1886, p. 360) remark that in Hegel’s philosophy, the system is conservative
while the dialectic is revolutionary.
How do these formulations affect the status of the subject in psychoanalysis?
What are the characteristics of this “subjective dimension”, which is now the
dimension of an irremediable lack? The conception of the subject as a lack, or
rather – and this is not equivalent – as a void is very interesting. It is the kernel
88 The splitting of the subject

of the hysterical fantasy, which can be taken as the universal matrix of “subjectiv-
ity”; the very use of this latter word instead of “subject” is already significant. The
hysteric fears the equivalence between the subject and “nothing”, and in analytic
experience, s/he resists the idea that the denouement of an analysis will confirm
this presupposition; “I am nothing” would mean that in the place where s/he is
seeking the truth of her/his being, there is only a void. However, this fantasy is
congruent with a defence that enables her/him to avoid being an object on which
the other gets off; if s/he is nothing, then s/he annuls any risk of this kind. In this
context, we can recall Deleuze and Guattari’s refusal to generate desire on the basis
of lack. The religion of desire, which has often and correctly been attacked, may
have more than one card up its sleeve, but it has only one card to play: hypostasising
desire leads us to miss the drive, which is the other side of the same card. Desire is
a lure, for behind the veil of Maya, there is nothing.
To return to Hegel, his conception of the subject as a pure negativity can only
be evaluated if one remembers that it implies a subject as a dialectical process. The
subject is thus, properly speaking, neither the nothing that would give consistency
to the hysteric’s fantasy, nor, in the field of Buddhist nirvana, the acceptance of
nihilation [néantisation]. Žižek (1993b, p. 25) takes up the analysis of the subject’s
“internalization” of “revolutionary Terror”, which concludes with a subject who is
radically and “eternally split”, since this internalisation can be read as the superego.
Thus we return to the Kantian subject, which has now been raised to the level of
the noumenon; Hegel’s dialectisation of Kant then authorises the critical distance
between Kant’s two terms, “phenomenon” and “noumenon” to be reconceived as
the real of the movement of reason (see Hegel, 1832). The other consequence is
to give a new interpretation to the “negation of negation” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 25).
This is not the always-renewed compensation for an always-repeated loss; it means,
instead, that “what first appears as an external obstacle reveals itself to be an inher-
ent hindrance, i.e., an outside force turns into an inner compulsion” (ibid., p. 25).
Two different judgements are possible here. On the one hand, Marx can be
transformed into an authentic Hegelian idealist: he would thus embody a mis-
understanding (in the sense of “it takes one to know one”), which is not without
interest. By making the proletariat a “substanceless subjectivity” (ibid., p. 27), Marx
is implicitly proposing a movement from prehistory to history, one that defines his-
tory in terms of the advent of a subjective substance, the new humanity. It could be
objected that, through this parousia, the proletariat loses its symptom. To paraphrase
Henri Michaux, “he who loses his madman loses his voice”.19 This would be an
interpretation of Marx’s impasse: he rejected the symptom, even if, according to
Lacan’s words of tribute, he also invented it.
On the other hand, the Hegelian subject, as Žižek rethinks it, bears a strange
resemblance to “[t]he spirit which eternally denies”, immortalised by Goethe (1808,
p. 37) in the figure of Mephistopheles. More disquietingly, it even tends asymp-
totically towards Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s 1984: this
subject can only escape from guilt, which is maintained by the superego, by loving
and submitting to the torturer. This is certainly not what Žižek says, but the way in
which Hegel, the “most sublime hysteric”, toadied to the autocratic Prussian state
 From A to Z 89

does not contradict this reference. Žižek’s article “Hegel avec Lacan” also ends up
touching on this same sort of allusion. By writing that “the subject, by definition,
cannot master the effects of its discourse, since it is the Other who has this task”
(Žižek, 1995, p. 108), he defines the subject as being trapped irremediably in the
snares of religious discourse, a discourse in which the Other is indeed in control
of this effect. Freud, in his article on Dostoevsky, had already criticised this figure
of repentance.
This power accorded to the Other is confirmed again even more clearly if,
returning this time to psychoanalysis, we pay attention to what Žižek says in a long
parenthesis:

And what is at stake in la passe, the concluding moment of the psychoanalyti-

cal process, is precisely the analysand’s readiness to fully assume this radical
self-externalization, i.e., “subjective destitution”: I am only what I am for the
others, which is why I have to renounce the fantasy-support of my being, my
clinging to “my own private Idaho”, to some hidden treasure in me, inacces-
sible to others’.
(1993b, p. 31, emphasis added)

This definition of the subject reduces it to a sort of “mass-media” treatment of it,

thereby producing what may be a radical and salutary rupture with any romantic
emphasis on its ineffable qualities.Yet this definition also proposes that at the “end”
of analysis – the equation of the pass and the end is already questionable – the “self ”
is externalised without any remainder; this externalisation promotes, in a way that
affects his earlier argument, the figure of the analysed subject as a “surface” being,
in terms of preprojective geometry, which cannot be topologised. Žižek is probably
silently repeating a thesis by Jacques-Alain Miller, but as a result, like the latter, he
misses what is essential.
The essential point is that subjective destitution removes a reflexive knowledge
from the subject of the fantasy: a Schillerian knowledge in which the eye would see
itself, the mouth would kiss itself, etc. This destitution also shows, at the level of the
remainder that cannot be eliminated, that only the symptom knows; the pass must
be judged from the standpoint of a mutation in the subject’s relation to the symp-
tom.This “inner garden” does not have to disappear. If we conceive of it in terms of
the Hegelian dialectic – one that would concern the symptom rather than the subject –
we could say that this garden becomes public, without ceasing to be a garden. Freud
protects us from a conception of an analysed subject whose only narcissism would
depend on the narcissism of others – unless we imagine, as “Catharists”, a world
that would be entirely free from narcissism, except from that of God. If we define
the pass in this way, it would end up dissuading any candidate who is seeking any-
thing other than an institutional promotion.
We can now understand how it is the symptom and not the subject that “emerges
as the crack in the universal Substance” (ibid., p. 33). It may well be seductive to
define the subject as the zero that commands the infinite series of ordinal numbers.
God – why not believe this? – could well have created me as the zero that would
90 The splitting of the subject

serve as the basis of number. Indeed, Žižek himself deviates, without saying so, from
this initial conception of the subject as void when he perspicaciously mentions the
myth of a creation by a father who has passed from the status of the empty master
signifier (S1) to that of knowledge (S2). When, as Žižek says, a father identifies with
knowledge, he creates a monster: whether Frankenstein’s monster or Roy Batty, the
character played by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.Yet the father’s movement – or
rather, straddling of the position – between S1 and S2 is the rule. This is why every
human creature is a monster: a being that, by its symptom, sets itself up as a rebel
against its creator, thus depriving the creator of his omnipotence and marking him
as contingent.
The crucial step, however, has not yet been taken, since Žižek continues to
think that this objection to the creator can only come from a monster; he there-
fore unveils what constitutes the “fundamental fantasy” of his critique, painting a
portrait of the analyst as a cannibal. He writes about Hannibal Lecter, from Thomas
Harris’ novels:

[Y]et even the utmost effort to imagine Lecter’s cruelty fails to capture the
true dimension of the act of the analyst: by bringing about la traversée du fan-
tasme (the crossing of our fundamental fantasy), he literally “steals the kernel
of our being,” the object small a, the secret treasure, agalma, what we consider
most precious in ourselves, denouncing it as a mere semblance. Lacan defines
the object small a as the fantasmatic “stuff of the I,” as that which confers on
the S, on the fissure in the symbolic order, on the ontological void that we
call “subject,” the ontological consistency of a “person,” the semblance of a
fullness of being – and it is precisely this “stuff ” that the analyst pulverizes,
“swallows”.
(ibid., p. 48)

This quotation may well be the one that makes Žižek’s position most explicit. First,
the subject is a void. Second, the object a is the stuff that gives the subject its status
as an appearance of being. Third, this stuff can be devoured and destroyed. An allu-
sion to the Eucharist follows, revealing the character of this ingestion. If the analyst
is the one who devours, the analysand is the host, and thus the body of Christ, the
substantiality of God. By devouring this, the analyst is identifying with the analy-
sand. Fourth, the subject is annihilated.
Perhaps fortunately, this terrifying odyssey is based on a misinterpretation of
subjective destitution.This destitution is not the subject’s negativisation or its “reali-
sation”, as it were, of the Buddhist ideal of the void; it is also not, as has been noted,
the hysterical fantasy. Instead, it is the destitution of the subject-supposed-to-know.This
means that the analysed subject does not consent to submit to the Other; instead,
by encountering the inconsistency of this Other – there is no Other of the Other –
s/he discovers that there is an antinomy between the subject and knowledge. The
name of this antinomy is the unconscious. Such a conclusion is not easy to theorise
in Hegelian terms. The assertion that only the symptom knows is already apparent
 From A to Z 91

in Freud’s conception of the symptom. The signifiers that are encrypted within
it exist, concealed within this symptom. Freud’s conception, however, lends itself
to a misunderstanding: because the symptom has to be deciphered in order to be
resolved, the idea that knowledge can thus be transferred to the subject seems self-
evident. This idea is false, but opponents of psychoanalysis have not failed to use it
against Freud by remarking that deciphering the symptom, and thus knowing what
it means, does not make it disappear – which, indeed, is a proven fact.
What, then, does it mean to say that the symptom knows? Before discussing the
answer, we need to examine the key that can unlock this question for us: the subject
can only participate in this knowledge through identification. Such an identifica-
tion with the symptom would be impossible as long as the subject attributes an
unlimited knowledge to the Other of the Other: the figure who would say the
true about the true, and who would be Hegel’s absolute knowledge, which has no
limit. Even if a materialist were to think that it would take the infinity of time to
travel across such knowledge, this would still be a way of lending credence to the
Other of the Other, whose final secret figure is nothing other than the subject itself
(agalma). In such a situation, identifying with the symptom would be impossible,
because identification would be directed entirely towards the Other of the Other,
who would be considered to exist as subject. In this respect, the analysand would
correspond strictly to Hegel, who closed his immense philosophy at the point just
before the breakthrough of the pass.
In order for the removal of this misunderstanding not to give rise immediately to
another, it needs to be made clear that only in the authentic misunderstanding that
is involved in transference – which is the basis of all human experience – can we
speak of an identification with the Other who would know itself. It should be noted
that even if identification is conceived of in this way, it does not really occur in this
way, since it takes place in relation to the real Other, the Other of a radical alterity,
an Other that is not transparent to itself and is not reflexive. This alterity cannot be
reduced to the One. In fact, it is when there is an identification with the symptom
that identification can be thought of as making the real of alterity even more real
(if this kind of comparative is meaningful here), especially since this alterity is dealt
with, as symptom, by the subject him/herself.The subject thus acquires a relation to
her/his own symptom that is absolutely homogeneous to the one that s/he could
have to any other symptom – if s/he does not decide to desert, because there is no
set pathway – her/his progression towards a saintliness that could be called secular.
In the identification with the symptom, it is therefore not the mechanism of
identification that changes; instead, this identification is no longer controlled by
the misunderstanding inherent in transference. In other words, transference is
“resolved” [résolu], rather than “dissolved” [dissous], with the semantic dimension
that could well get the upper hand [prendre le dessus]: I resolve even to love, or even
to hate, if my cruelty is not sufficiently audacious for me to hold on to love.
⁂
92 The splitting of the subject

This disagreement affects Žižek’s way of reading Lacan’s opposition between full
and empty speech. This opposition is governed by the conception of the object
a, if we take the word “conception” in the sense of procreation. In a discussion
of the game of Fort-Da, which Freud (1920, pp. 14–16) recounts in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Žižek, quite correctly, rejects the idea that the child engenders
this object when he substitutes the bobbin for the mother; instead, Žižek (1993b,
p. 91) makes it the “sacrificed part of the subject itself ”. He also argues that “the
object which compensates for the loss of the Mother-Thing is part of myself” (ibid., p. 92).
Here, once again, the fate of the subject is to be sacrificed primally by the loss of
the thing and reduced to the void. Logically, this subject-void is the proof that the
initial sacrifice was absolute, rather than partial. This thesis itself is enough to show
the palpable distance between Žižek and Lacan. In Lacan, the subject exists only
on the basis of its constitutive division. Although the unbarred S can be found in
Lacan, for example in “Kant with Sade” (1963), where it becomes the figure for
the pathological subject – the raw, suffering S – this is not at all the subject before
division. Instead, this subject has been reconstructed on the basis of the model of
the pre-critical philosophical subject; its only vocation is to assure the other subject,
which conceives it, of its unswerving fidelity.
Concerning full speech, at a first level, Žižek’s perspective converges with what
Lacan says. Thus, when Žižek refers to Hegel’s reading of the sacrifice of Christ,
whose death on the cross is transformed into a triumph, he explains that:

complete ground is the unity of formal and real ground: it is the real ground
whose grounding relationship to the remaining content is again grounded
in what? – in itself i.e., in the totality of its relations to the grounded. The ground
grounds the grounded, but this grounding role must be itself grounded in the
relationship of the ground to the grounded.
(ibid., p. 139)

This formulation corresponds incontestably to one of Lacan’s (1956a, p. 319) defi-

nitions of full speech: “[f]ull speech is defined by the fact that it is identical to what
it speaks about.”
Such a parousia of full speech inevitably evokes the fiat lux, the speech that
makes the real emerge. It raises problems for Žižek, for it devalorises empty speech,
the other term of the alternative. Žižek does not depreciate empty speech, for it
corresponds precisely to the subject as void! Instead, he sets out an astute inter-
pretation, which should not be rejected entirely: “for Lacan the exemplary case of
empty speech is the password (mot-de-passage)” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 94). This argument
is interesting because it excludes the statement [énoncé] considered in terms of its
signification; what counts is only whether what the passand says corresponds to
what the passer is expecting. This assertion is very close to the definition of the
subject as reduced to the Other’s statements about it, thus becoming the emblem of
mass-media exposure and virtualisation. “I say what you expect” completes “I am
what you say”!20
 From A to Z 93

This is not, of course, what Žižek means. In a way that is just as ingenious, empty
speech, which has been revalorised as the crossing of a boundary, transforms the
subject into a sort of temporary subject of the enunciation, an absolute enunciation;
for the statement, “the enunciated context is totally indifferent” (ibid., p. 94), since
it only has to be the “right” password.This absolute enunciation is the “name”.The
name subtracts the enunciator not only from the Other, but also from him/herself
as subject; therefore, it becomes the linguistic matrix of the symptom, the negative
fingerprint (see, for example, the negative hand stencils in the caves of Gargas).
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that this plenitude of the enunciation, brought
about by hollowing out any statement, does indeed suppose a statement that cor-
responds to what is expected by the passer, who is thus posited to be the Other.
This is the contrary of everything that Lacan expected of the pass. Žižek’s prop-
osition is more a sleight of hand [tour de passe-passe] than a part of the pass. On the
contrary, in the experience of the pass, the only password would be one in which
the statement cannot be annulled and would have nothing to do with the statement
expected by the Other. This is the opposite of the way that Žižek completes his
conception of the pass: only “empty speech”, through its very void – through its
distance from its stated content, which is perfectly indifferent – opens up the path
to “full speech”, a speech in which the subject can articulate its position as subject
of the enunciation. It is thus that “only the spear that smote you/can heal your
wound” (ibid., p. 92). Only through a complete acceptance of the void of “empty
speech” can you hope to articulate your truth in “full speech”. Amen.
The hitch, first, is that “the spear that smote you” will wound you just as much if
it smites you again.The second smiting will only cure you if a different spear is used;
this means that saying [le dire] founds doing [le fait], which is indeed what occurs in
analytic experience. Late in his teaching, Lacan also explicitly criticised the oppo-
sition between full and empty speech. First, the expression, “empty speech” is a
perfect designation of the sort of statement that, as it unfolds, moves further and
further away from the kernel of being that it is seeking to grasp; it is like an awk-
ward speaker who, the more he tries to correct a blunder, the worse he makes it.
This is very different from the kind of speech that would be “identical to what it
speaks about” (Lacan, 1956a, p. 319), a definition that contradicts the principle that
the saying [dire] is ex-centric in relation to what is said [dit]. Lacan (1956b, p. 249),
indeed, does not fail to add – in order to take into account an objection that he
is tacitly opposed to – that “true speech” must include “the subject’s realization of
his history in its relation to a future”. It must posit, in terms of topology, a point at
infinity in which what is external to the circle can be integrated into it.
Lacan (1976–1977, 15 March 1977) comes to reject, explicitly, the binary oppo-
sition between empty and full speech. He does so by interposing a third structure,
which is homologous to analytic interpretation and to poetic saying [dire]. From
then on, full speech pertains to meaning (and direction) [sens], and, more specifi-
cally, to the double meaning that emerges in the founding or creative speech where
God is the other side [verso] of the father and vice versa. Such speech is of the order
of desire. Empty speech itself pertains to signification, and more precisely to empty
94 The splitting of the subject

signification; as such, it only has love at its disposal to create a message. Žižek’s ref-
erence to the password is relevant at this level, but only at this level. Without even
emphasising the erotic value of the term, we can note that passwords are frequently
used by lovers as a private language that will be forgotten if they cease to love one
another. Thus, “coffee” can mean “let’s make love” and “sugar” a particular position.
They can exchange these words in the presence of a third party, and the frisson
involved in having a secret will be heightened by not revealing this secret in public.
⁂
The severity and even the acerbity of my criticism are ways of paying homage to
Žižek’s quickness of thought, which should inspire psychoanalysts. At the very least,
readers do not find in his work the sort of parroting that, by its irrefutably learned
quality, becomes even more ruinous for psychoanalysis. Despite Freud and Lacan’s
enormous efforts, psychoanalysis has not been exempted from attempts to make
it say the opposite of what it says, or to remain at a sort of low-water mark, one
where theoretical and clinical confusion will be expressed and transmitted with an
impeccable scholarship. In Lacan’s topology, a piece of string can go over or under
something. In psychoanalytic language, a cat can be both black and white; black can
be white and the feline theorist will always be able to fall on his/her feet.
My disagreement with Žižek concerns: 1) his precipitateness in making the sub-
ject equivalent to the void;21 2) the absence of a theory of the symptom. In an
attempt at a sort of mathematical exhaustion, it would be possible to follow out the
consequences of this “deviation” (Žižek would appreciate the political savour of this
word, which is borrowed not from Stalin, but from Lacan). For example, when Žižek
explains Hegel’s return to the thing itself by defining it as the inclusion of the name
in the definition of the object, he makes a convincing use of the logical distinction
between description and name. Lacan also availed himself of this distinction in posi-
tioning himself in relation to both Bertrand Russell (1905) and Saul Kripke (1980)
in his re-evaluation of the status of the Name-of-the-Father. This would have given
Žižek the chance to exit from Hegel’s toutology – a sort of tautology of the whole –
by establishing a distinction between the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom.
The Name-of-the-Father participates in the whole and serves as the guarantee by
the Other of the capacity of language to signify. The status of the symptom is dif-
ferent: if we take the common complaint, “I’d be willing to give up everything, but
not that!”, then the symptom would consist in the words “but not that”, which are
separate from “everything” or the “whole”. It calls into question the guarantee com-
ing from the Other.Yet, rather than pointlessly multiplying examples concerning the
consequences of Žižek’s deviation, it would be better to locate its source: the theo-
retical point where this deviation occurred. It seems to me that, in this theoretical
edifice, the key to the vault is the conception of contradiction, as Žižek describes it:

The last phrase in the quoted passage from Hegel’s Logic22 locates the con-
tradiction clearly inside “father” himself: “contradiction” designates the antag-
onistic relationship between what I am “for the others” – my symbolic
determination –and what I am “in myself ” abstractedly from my relations to
 From A to Z 95

others. It is the contradiction between the void of the subject’s pure “being-
for-himself ” and the signifying feature which represents him for the others,
in Lacanian terms: between S and S1.
(Žižek, 1993b, p. 131)

To posit a contradiction between one of these constitutive terms (S1) and the
­subject-void is to pass over the other constitutive term of the contradiction (S2).
With a slight adjustment to Bertrand Russell’s (1902) analysis, this can be stated
in terms of the paradox of the set of all the sets that do not contain themselves:
as soon as this set is posited, the question of whether it contains itself arises.23 The
implication of signifiers S1 → S2 is contradiction itself; this means that S1, which
forces its membership upon the set of sets that do not contain themselves, should
not belong to this set. It also means that the other signifier (S2), which does not
claim to belong to it, could therefore belong to it. The result is that S1 is indeed the
master signifier; it signifies nothing other than its unwarranted membership in the
set [ensemble] of all the sets that do not contain themselves (E). S2, by not belonging
to this set, concretises its being in the body at the level of the cut within the drive:
the removal from this set of an object that cannot be a signifier. Here is the kernel of
the impossible – of the real. If we want to develop this dialectic, we must remember
that an articulation between S1 and S2 can only be conceived of and then made
actual if the S2 is preceded in this articulation by the empty set, which is the empty
part of the subject: S1 → (∅, S2). In other words, the S2 would be preceded by the
set that marks its absence in E, the place where it should be because it is not there.
For readers who began to read this book out of an interest in its section on the
capitalist discourse, these considerations may seem off topic. Such readers may even
be starting to wonder whether they could sue the publisher for false advertising.
I may be able to offer them some slight apology by noting that the preceding con-
siderations could throw a new light on the critique of political economy. Let us take,
for example, Žižek’s remark about John Maynard Keynes, who posited an equiva-
lence between money and credit to which some Marxists have objected. “What
Marx as well as strict monetarists commonly hold against Keynes is the conviction
that sometimes, sooner or later, the moment will arrive when we actually shall have
to ‘settle accounts,’ reimburse debts and thus place the system on its proper ‘natural’
foundations” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 81). If it is true that money is the form of signifier
taken by exchange-value, and that the latter has been produced materially, it is also
true that, in its temporal functioning, credit can anticipate money. In a sense, money
can anticipate itself, according to the structural scheme of symbolic debt, without
which no exchange between humans would be either possible or conceivable.
Does this observation force us to believe in the permanence of money? This
permanence is related to the predicament of the younger generation: its members
can only apprehend themselves as a distinct generation by recognising their sym-
bolic debt to the preceding generation. The classic instance of such a debt can be
found in the case of the Rat Man (Freud, 1909). This debt can cease to be a handi-
capping burden, shot through with the superego, once it has been detached from a
96 The splitting of the subject

desire of the Other that had nothing to do with its birth; it can only cease to be a
burden if its existence is recognised. In other words, the virtual can have a real effect:

As we know from Keynes onwards, the capitalist economy is “virtual” in a

very precise sense: Keynes’s favorite maxim was that in the long term we are
all dead; the paradox of the capitalist economics is that our borrowing from
the (virtual) future, i.e., our printing of money uncovered in “real” values, can
bring about real effects (growth).
(Žižek, 1993b, p. 79)

I agree with Žižek’s treatment of Keynes’s criticism of Marx.The significance of

this criticism is not only economic but philosophical, for it includes the subject’s
relation to the symbolic as a component of reality. Such reality is not the real, and
the problem is to construct a reality that would not close itself off from the real; this
becomes quite a challenge once the real has been defined as what is impossible to
symbolise. This is the unprecedented problem of psychoanalysis, and it has specific
solutions that I shall not try to summarise here, since, throughout this book, I have
been seeking to take them into account.Yet, in order not to stray too far from the
Keynes-Marx dispute, I shall conclude that Keynes’s theory is only valid if Marx’s
own theory remains true at the level of abstraction where it is situated; the limits of
the virtual are not intrinsic to the virtual, as we see when financial bubbles burst,
but depend on the risk of a return in the real.
This dichotomy between the virtual and the real has an echo: the dichotomy
between the symbolic and the real dimensions of the desire of the Other. Žižek, in rela-
tion to the struggle to the death between the master and the slave, remarks that once
the death in question is considered to be symbolic. then “the mere possibility of vic-
tory” becomes “sufficient” (ibid., p. 160). Starting from this and referring to Bentham’s
(1843) panopticon, Žižek (1993b, p. 160) argues that, at the level of fantasy, anxiety is
produced much less by the certainty than by the possibility of being seen, and the “radi-
cal uncertainty” that accompanies this. He (ibid., p. 160) concludes that “This surplus
of what is ‘in the possibility more than a mere possibility’ [i.e. anxiety] and which gets
lost in its actualisation is the real qua impossible”.This reading of Lacan’s famous equation
of the real with the impossible then enables him to paint a delightful portrait, caustic
yet fair, of the master. He (ibid., p. 160) argues that “the way for a Master to strengthen
his authority is precisely to present himself as ‘human like the rest of us’, full of little
weaknesses, a person with whom it is quite possible to ‘talk normally’ when he is not
compelled to give voice to Authority”. Žižek’s aim in this passage is perfect.
One question, however, remains: what is the value of this reading of the real? It
is impeccable and is especially relevant in relation to anxiety as the affect of the real.
It can be added that, for Lacan, fantasy is indeed the entry into the real, whereas
the symptom is the entry into truth. Yet with the seminar on Joyce, The Sinthome
(Lacan, 2005b), there is a reversal that leads us to redefine fantasy as the entry into
the false, and the symptom as the entry into the real. It would be even more precise
to say that the real is the entry into the symptom.
 From A to Z 97

Let us consider the castration complex, which when it is put to the test, makes
the real – the real that is immediately impossible – emerge as what is in fact being
interrogated. It is impossible for the infans to become One with the maternal Other,
and this impossibility involves both sides of this relation: the first or the subject’s side
and the other side. In Anneliese Schnurmann’s (1947) case history of Little Sandy,
which Lacan (1994) discusses in the fourth year of his seminar, there is an almost
furtive, but utterly decisive remark: Sandy wants to be able to choose to detach
herself from her mother, but does not accept that her mother stop being at her
beck and call, or even at her mercy. This asymmetry refutes the idea that there is
some kind of primordial fusion or primary narcissism. In the couple formed with
the mother, the infans requires the possibility of detaching itself from the Other. In
other words, the impossibility of making One (see Lacan, 1975c, p. 5) is there right
away, on the first side and is a condition of the possibility of the subject’s willingness
to make One.
If we follow Freud, the entry into the castration complex – which, for girls,
occurs before the Oedipus complex starts, and for boys, follows it – involves call-
ing the other side into question. The maternal Other – despite what the subject
tyrannically demands [revendique] – is not just ready and waiting to make One with
the subject, even when the subject has an imaginary identification with φ, which
is the element that is supposed to restore to the maternal Other the missing part
whose absence is preventing her from making One. The fact that this is only an
identification already indicates sufficiently that the subject does not lend itself as
such to this reduction – or induction – of the Other to the One. By only identifying
with an image, the subject preserves its ability to detach itself, and thus indicates the
contingent character of “making One”. Either make One or live: this is the subject’s
symptomatic dilemma.
Then castration, which logically concerns the other side, continues its neurotic,
psychotic or perverse course. Castration is also at work on the subject’s side, and
what it produces there may well be the outcome that Freud considered satisfac-
tory: the acknowledgement of maternal castration takes precedence over its disa-
vowal; Lacan rethought this process in terms of the negativisation of the phallus, -φ.
This outcome can never, however, become the sole and unique law of jouissance,
since it concerns only the other side; meanwhile, the first side, the side of the sub-
ject, has already catalysed jouissance around the symptom. Although the process of
castration – in whichever form it occurs – will always re-order this jouissance ret-
roactively, this symptomatic process will never stop being – in the words of James
Joyce – a “work in progress”. It will always mount a structural resistance to any
attempt to measure it. Therein, perhaps, lies Freud’s error about the “oceanic feel-
ing” in his exchange with Romain Rolland; he simply skipped over the White
Goddess and focused instead on the Sun God, Aten.24
Let’s return now to Žižek and his definition of the real as an excess – an excess of
anxiety when something that is possible has not taken place but can take place. This
excess could be an equivalent of the symptom. Yet as I have already insisted, Žižek
not only does not speak of the symptom as such but eliminates it. The place where
98 The splitting of the subject

it could emerge has been blocked by the conception of the subject as void and the
correlative conception of the analyst as the devourer of the agalma. There is thus a
recurring confusion between the response of the real and a response of the Other;
this confusion occurs because the excision of the symptom has removed the very
backbone of the real. Thus, he writes that, “This ‘answer’ of the real on which we
rely, this support in the big Other whose gesture of response ‘subjectivizes’ the abyss
of the pure subject, is what Hegel has in mind when he speaks of the “cunning of
reason” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 169). Likewise, in the passage from “Hegel avec Lacan” cited
above, when Žižek, making an opportune distinction between discourse and its
effect, adds that “the subject, by definition, cannot master the effects of its discourse,
since it is the Other who has this task”, he fails to grasp the character of the pass:
the pass is precisely that by which the subject does not master the effect of his/her
discourse but is also not released from its burden.

II
Thinkers who do not contradict themselves are nothing but censors.
By “contradiction”, I do not mean changes of opinion that seek to adjust an
unchanging grid to the vicissitudes of ideological correctness.25 To contradict one-
self is to try to correct one’s aim, and Žižek’s epistemic power is confirmed in a more
recent book, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), in
which he does not avoid confronting the transcendent and making a certain num-
ber of changes in his reading of psychoanalysis. The puppet of the title is the phe-
nomenal subject and the dwarf the noumenal subject. In questioning the truth of
Buddhism and the three religions of the book, Žižek opens up disciplines that have
become so closed off from one another that science cannot say anything about God
or the saints without shutting itself up in positivism or drowning in spiritualism.
First, we find a healthy undoing of the attraction currently exercised by Bud-
dhism, which, for many of our contemporaries, has become a seductive alterna-
tive to Christianity. Earlier, I qualified Žižek’s position on the pass and the end of
analysis as a kind of hysterical Buddhism: the subject is reduced to being only what
others say of him/her, and this means being equal to the void, since I am not what
others say about me. In The Puppet and the Dwarf, there is a related formulation:
“I am what I do” (Lewis, 1966, p. 225; cited in Žižek, 2003, p. 22). Žižek rejects
this statement, thereby showing the distance that he has taken towards a certain
reading of his own thesis. The pleonastic character of this aphorism, which has an
existentialist appearance, is not visible immediately. However, just as with the for-
mula, “I am what others say about me”, and now even more ironically, in this new
context, the evacuation of any ethical dimension from “I am” and its reduction to
a restrictive behaviourism leaves the subject void. Žižek (2003, p. 27) notes, with a
cruel justice, that Lewis’s definition makes “absolute discipline coincide with total
spontaneity”. The absence of any soul-searching characterises not only saints but
also soldiers who obey criminal orders unhesitatingly. Generalising his criticism,
Žižek shows that Buddhist doctrine is a great equaliser: if killing a fly is just as great
 From A to Z 99

a crime as genocide; if, as the Bhagavad-Gita says, “The self kills not and the self
is not killed”; and if, more radically, birth and death are mere illusions, then what
follows is a conclusion that must be rejected: the response of the Nazi executioners
concerning the Jews whom they had murdered would be “you ought not to grieve”
for them (ibid., pp. 30–31). Žižek also notes that the Bhagavad-Gita was Heinrich
Himmler’s favourite book and that the members of the Brazilian military dictator-
ship had adopted, behind their mask of conservative Catholicism, “an improvised
Eastern mysticism as their unofficial religion” (ibid., p. 176).
This slight displacement enables Žižek to approach the question of castration
from a new angle. Relying, as he often does, on the plot of a spy film, in this case
Jeannot Szwarc’s 1982 film Enigma, he argues that castration could well be based on
“feigning [the] loss” of jouissance (ibid., p. 51).26 Using the examples of obsessional
rituals of sacrifice and of what he calls a “woman’s sacrifice” in remaining in the
shadow of her husband, Žižek argues that such pretences enable subjects to “dupe
the Other” (ibid., p. 51): to make the Other believe that, through sacrifice, they are
seeking, in exchange, to obtain what they are missing. The structure of the paradox
is the following: 1) I possess the object that I was coveting in the Other; 2) I pretend
that I do not possess it and let the Other see me looking for it; and 3) I make a sac-
rifice, which is intended to make the Other believe that I am not feigning and that
what I am seeking is so precious that I consent to losing an object that is supposed
to be important to me. Žižek (ibid., p. 52) can thus conclude, with good reason, that
this “sacrifice is the most refined way of disavowing” castration; in feigning that he
does not possess the object that would ensure jouissance, the subject reaches the
incorrect conclusion that since he pretends not to have it, he really has it.
This misunderstanding, in which the subject, without knowing that he is doing
so, makes himself the victim, is an exemplary illustration of the difference between
castration – which enables us to pretend that we have abolished it – and division
or splitting, which implies a loss that cannot be recovered. Splitting situates what
has been lost outside the subject, for if what has been lost remains inside, it is not
an object. It is necessary to understand, however, that what constitutes the passage
from castration to splitting is not at all a movement from the relativity of lack to the
absolute character of loss. Instead, it is the acceptance that castration is not whole
[n’est pas tout, ou n’est pas toute], an acceptance that can easily be impeded because
the belief that an Other is preventing our jouissance is profoundly comfortable to
us.To return to the source, Freud’s more or less contemporaneous discovery of both
the bedrock of castration and Spaltung (splitting), does not contradict the pass, but,
on the contrary, lays the ground for it.To accept one’s subjective division is to accept
that the bedrock is indeed a bedrock; this bedrock, however, does nothing more than
to forbid access to a place where jouissance would be equivalent to dying.
On the basis of his shift in emphasis, Žižek’s (ibid., p. 53) criticism of the “per-
verse solution that forms the very core of ‘really existing Christianity’” becomes
significant. He suggests that the border between Law and transgression could be
better understood by defining “universal Law” as the “absolute transgression” (ibid.,
p. 36); in doing so, he both explains the failure of perversion and marks out its limit.
100 The splitting of the subject

To posit the existence of the Law in order to be able to transgress it is to miss what
is essential. The Law can only be born through a transgression, a transgression of
what submitting to the sexual relation would impose on us: I would get off on the
Other in the same way that I would let the Other get off on me. Sade’s maxim27
is only the dream of abolishing the symptom, which itself marks the nonexistence,
not of the Other, but of the sexual relation.
This is also what authorises Žižek to toy with the idea of criticising Lacan’s
(1986, p. 319) overworked formula in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: do not “give
ground relative to one’s desire”.28 In this case, I am very pleased to agree with
Žižek. Jacques-Alain Miller and the Millerians have used this aphorism to justify a
conception of the “reconquest” or “reconquista”, in Schmitt’s sense of the term, of
the Freudian field (Miller, 1990; Schmitt, 1950, 1955). It can also, as Žižek (ibid.,
p. 54) suggests, be read in terms of Bataille’s Sadean position that one should “think
everything to a point that makes people tremble” (see Surya, 2002, p. 479; cited by
Žižek, 2003, p. 54). This, however, is only one reading, one that Miller has neither
promoted nor put forward; he has, however, made it possible through his own work
of interpretation, a work that is the prisoner of his own determination to trans-
form – under his aegis and according to his criteria – the psychoanalytic movement
into a group that would resemble the army or the Church.
Unlike Bataille, for whom jouissance is the hypostasis of desire (see the five-issue
journal Acéphale, partially translated in Bataille [1986]), the seminar on ethics posits
that there is a point of disruption between desire and jouissance. I agree with Žižek,
however, that Lacan’s formulation has both a paradoxical dimension as an impera-
tive, and risks giving rise to a religion of desire: a “dogmatics” of desire, to the detri-
ment of its “dialectic”. I would argue, instead, that what founds the ethical value of
desire is cowardice: cowardice involves the moment when the subject gives up on
his/her desire, a moment that is terrible because it makes guilt coalesce. Without
such an experience of giving up, no subject would ever envision undergoing an
analysis. To give up on one’s desire is homologous to the gesture of a swimmer, just
before a competition: s/he tastes the water. Without such a surrender, it would be
impossible to accept the splitting of the subject.
For Lacan – as we can see from his next seminar, The Transference (2001b) – the
ethical paradigm was not Antigone but Sygne de Coûfontaine, the protagonist of
Paul Claudel’s (1911) play, The Hostage. In a first period that lasts almost her entire
life, she betrays her desire: both her love and the object of that love. Then, before
dying, she refuses three times to say that she has not betrayed her desire. In her
refusal of speech, she exiles herself from the lie that speech is; such a refusal goes
beyond or falls short of any refusal that could take place in speech, and it leads to
the birth of her granddaughter, Pensée. Although Paul Claudel was extraordinarily
unpleasant, there was genius in him.
With this, some things fall back into order and give us a better sense of what is
at stake in desire:

the true problem is the mother who enjoys me (her child), and the true stake
of the game is to escape this closure. The true anxiety is this being-caught
 From A to Z 101

in the Other’s jouissance. . . . [I]nstead of the child mastering the game [of
Fort/Da], and thus coping with the trauma of the mother’s absence, we
get the child trying to escape the suffocating embrace of his mother and
construct an open space for desire.
(Žižek, 2003, p. 59)

I have one reservation29 concerning Žižek’s rejection of Freud’s explanation that

the child was trying to confront the mother’s absence; yet this distinction between
jouissance and desire is the only one that enables us to construct a psychoana-
lytic, rather than psychological, conception of the symptom.30 Likewise, I can only
endorse his conception, in the pages that follow, of the difference between the
desire and the jouissance of the Other, and his resulting definition of phallic jouis-
sance as “jouissance under the condition of desire” (ibid., p. 61).
The next developments in The Puppet and the Dwarf are even better. As I men-
tioned at the beginning, in this book Žižek confronts the question of the transcend-
ent. To paraphrase Baudelaire: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist to be
perfect”.31 Žižek is Baudelairean in his analysis of Christianity, since he (ibid., p. 89)
argues that the Christian identification with Christ is “ultimately [an] identification
with a failure – and, consequently, since the object of identification is God, God Him-
self must be shown to fail”. The statement could be completed with the words “to
exist” in any other way than by the fall, which is the true beginning.The same logic is
present in Žižek’s apparently paradoxical analysis of the antagonistic relation between
the death drive and the nirvana principle, the goal of which is death.The death drive,
on the contrary, represents “the dimension of the ‘undead’, and of the spectral life
which insists beyond (biological death)” (ibid., p. 93). I agree with the fundamental
point of this remark, although the paradox could be presented differently: it is less a
matter of a contradiction between Thanatos and nirvana than of a contradiction that
is internal to the death drive’s power of dissolution.
In a way that can now be understood clearly, because he gives a decisive impor-
tance to Lacan’s repositioning of the castration complex in Encore, Žižek makes a
probing comparison between the law in Judaism and Christianity. He does so by
referring to Alain Badiou’s book, St. Paul:The Foundation of Universalism, citing Eric
Santner’s formulation of the question Badiou directs to Paul: “Is all the subject
within the figure of legal subjection?” (ibid., p. 116). As Žižek (ibid., p. 116), still
quoting Santner, notes, for Lacan “there is no direct path from legal subjection to ‘not
all’; not all only opens up through a traversal of the fantasy of exception”.32 Through
this proposition, he can claim that the Christian conception establishes a correlation
between law and transgression (sin), thus obeying the “‘masculine’ logic of excep-
tion” (ibid., p. 116). Experiencing the law involves being tested by sin; this is why
the law, which constitutes sin and reveals itself by means of sin, “has to appear to the
subject as a foreign power crushing the subject” (ibid., p. 116).
At this point, it becomes difficult to grasp how Žižek situates the place of love in
this conception of Christian law. He seems to adopt a double solution. On the one
hand, “there is too much love” in the Christian law: the law only seems to impose
itself from the outside if the subject experiences it as threatening “its attachment
102 The splitting of the subject

to the pathological agalma deep within itself ” (ibid., p. 117). On the other hand,
both Paul and some Lutheran theologians approach the opposition between law
and divine love by de-emphasising the importance of the first and accentuating the
second; love is reintroduced in a form that is divine and no longer human. Unless
my understanding of Žižek is mistaken, it would thus be nonpathological. Certainly,
as we have already stressed, there is an opposition between two conceptions of the
fall; in the first, a “strange, perverse” God programmed it in order, next, through
the offer of redemption, to glorify Himself; in the second, the “Fall is identical to
redemption” (ibid., p. 118). In other words, if this second conception is correct, God
would only be God by accepting – through the human being – not to be God.
There is an even better way of formulating this, one that would present the under-
side of Baudelaire’s statement about God: He would only exist as God by no longer
being God. Yet why then should there be an opposition between “pathological”
human love and divine love? It is certain that a thousand and one forms of love can
be distinguished, in both the psychoanalytic and the literary “clinic”, yet the true
question about love may well be the following: isn’t love what enables us to escape
from the deadly attraction exercised by the conviction that there is a sexual relation
(the dilution or contraction of two into One)? Doesn’t love enable us to do this by
making up [suppléant] for the nonexistence of this relation?
It is difficult not to sense that the ambiguity of Žižek’s position concerning love is
directly related to his mistrust of transference; as I have already suggested, this derives
from the supposition that analysis (and the analyst as the operator of this aim) is deter-
mined to deprive the analysand of her/his “secret garden”. Finally, even if Žižek’s gen-
erous reading of Christianity is quite acceptable – except for theologians, who may
find the kernel of atheism in it – why should it be ruled out that Christianity, and per-
haps every religion, is perverse? Perhaps the only reason is that today, perversion, like
psychosis, remains stained by a moralistic opprobrium that confuses our judgement.
It is difficult not to see that this discomfort about transference misses its mark:
God is the target, but it is the analyst who is shot. This is apparent in the chapter
entitled “Subtraction, Jewish and Christian”, where Žižek develops a thesis whose
premises are related to the attempt to exonerate Christianity from the charge of
perversion (ibid., pp. 122–143). If Job is one of the most representative figures of
Judaism, the figure of Jesus brings in another relation: a relation between God and
the one who despairs of Him. With Jesus, the gap between the “desperate man”
and God “is transposed onto God Himself, as His own radical splitting, or rather,
self-abandonment” (ibid., p. 126). Jesus’ despair, as caused by God’s abandonment,
is nothing other than the death of God the father, a death that “reveal[s] His utter
impotence” (ibid., p. 126). Therefore, what Christianity would thus take upon itself
would be a divine impotence, one, it is true, that has been surmounted (Aufgehobt)
by the resurrection of God in the form of the Holy Spirit. Yet perhaps Job also
had a premonition of this. Judaism, through the figure of Job, distances itself from
any sense of resignation before God’s “crushing” and incomprehensible injustice.
Instead, there is a subtraction: Job realises that it is not he, “but God Himself, who was
actually on trial in Job’s calamities” (ibid., p. 127).
 From A to Z 103

Try substituting the words “the analyst” for “God” here. Doing so would place
this theory at the heart of Freud’s account of the dissolution of transference, which
is confirmed by an endnote, in which Žižek (ibid., p. 183) sees the murder of Moses
not, like Freud, as the founding parricide, but as “the humiliation of the Pharaoh”.
Žižek then asks, “What if this humiliation of the father was the precondition for
establishing Judaism as the first great religion . . . the religion of a group without a
state identity?” (ibid., p. 183). Through this hypothesis, Žižek, discreetly but openly,
casts doubt upon the religious foundations of the state of Israel.
This diversion of his course from an analysis of Judaism and Christianity to that
of psychoanalysis becomes explicit when Žižek wonders whether “the revolution-
ary party and the psychoanalytic society” – a significant pairing – are not a new
type of collective organisation: a community knit together not by a master-signifier,
but by “fidelity to a Cause” (ibid., p. 130). This is a striking but vague remark. In
the penultimate chapter of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921,
p. 121) draws certain conclusions from his thesis that the community is founded by
the father’s murder – “on the basis of a shared guilt for parricide” – and that the dead
father returns in the form of a master signifier: this thesis enables him to provide
a relatively cruel definition of the human being. The latter is not a “herd” animal
or Herdentier – an allusion to Wilfred Trotter’s ideas about the “herd instinct” – but
rather a “horde animal” (Hordentier).This means that Freud’s analysis of the crowd or
group (Masse) is based on the idea that the crowd (whether a natural one or an arti-
ficial one like the army or the Church, the community of believers) is a “revival of
the primal horde” (Freud, 1921, p. 123). Because the crowd’s identification involves
substituting the object a for the ego-ideal – which explains horizontal identifica-
tion – the “fidelity to a Cause”, to use Žižek’s terminology, is not at all opposed to
the master-signifier. Instead, it is added to this signifier. In itself, such fidelity would
seem insufficient without the presence of a leader (Führer). In this respect, one of
Freud’s valuable suggestions is to locate Nietzsche’s Ubermensch not in the future
but in the past: the primal father, “at the very beginning of the history of mankind,
was the ‘superman’ whom Nietzsche only expected from the future” (ibid., p. 123).
Without going too far too quickly, it is already possible to locate the problem:
if we seek to envision a mode of the collective that would be purified of any alle-
giance to a leader, this would give a place to the object that functions as a cause.
Even if the object that Freud presented in his schema of group-identification and
the formation of a mass is not the object a, it already occupies this place. If this
object takes the place of the ego-ideal, it cannot establish a social bond that would
be free from the discourse of the master.
What remains convincing in Žižek’s analysis is his way of interpreting God. We
have seen that God’s impotence and incapacity enable him to exist: this is God as
interpreted through the paternal metaphor. Yet this is not all: “The very notion
of creation implies God’s self-contraction: God had first to withdraw into Him-
self, constrain His omnipresence, in order first to create the nothing out of which
He then created the universe” (Žižek, 1993b, p. 137). This interpretation identifies
God with the power and potentiality of language, which annihilates the thing, but
104 The splitting of the subject

which is also consequently the source of the freedom to create. It might well be
necessary to specify the connection between God-the-Father (the proper name, by
which such a God limits the debasement of the thing to its virtualised state) and
God-as-language, which – once the thing has been annihilated (the creation of
nothingness) and taking into account the safety catch [cran d’arrêt] introduced by
God-the-Father, since he cannot let there be only nothingness – turns God-the-
Father’s own power of invention back against him, leaving him speechless.33 Lights!
Camera! Action!

Notes
1 [Translator’s note: For a discussion of the translation of “passeur” and the related term “pas-
sant”, please see the translator’s introduction.]
2 See Patricia León-Lopez (1999). It has been established that discourse, in Lacan’s sense
of the term, was dramatized in the theatre. It suffices to recall the extraordinary remark
Eugene O’Neill supposedly made to his publisher: “I’ve finished the play – now I just
have to write the dialogue”, as well as Samuel Beckett’s play Quad, an assemblage of stage
directions without any dialogue.
3 [Translator’s note: “Positions” is the title of a collection of essays published (in French) by
Althusser (1976). It included “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”.]
4 [Translator’s note: Lucien Sebag (1934–1965) was an anthropologist who had prepared for
the agrégation teaching examination under Althusser and begun an analysis with Lacan. In
his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser writes that a “panic-stricken” Lacan
paid him a visit early one morning, immediately after Sebag’s suicide, in order to explain
to him the circumstances of what had taken place. Lacan had terminated Sebag’s analysis
when the latter had fallen in love with his daughter, Judith; he told Althusser that “It was
impossible, for technical reasons” to continue seeing him. In an attempt to prevent the
suicide, Lacan “had assured him that he would visit him at any hour of the day or night
if he asked him to” (Althusser, 1992, p. 189).
  Althusser (ibid., p. 189), for his part, notes that “I wanted to ask if he could not have
had Sebag taken into hospital for his own safety”, and adds that Lacan “would probably
have told me that it was against the analytical ‘rules’”. Althusser also states that “I have
often wondered what he would have done in my own case: if he would have left me
unsupervised (I constantly wanted to kill myself) so as not to infringe in the slightest way
on the ‘rules’ of analysis”].
5 Let us note that these words express either a fallacy or something quite subtle, since the
object that the members of the group fear is itself a member of the group.
6 In the “Letter of Dissolution”, Lacan (1980a, p. 130) wrote that one reason he had
decided to put an end to the École freudienne de Paris was because it had become “an
Institution, the effect of a consolidated group”. If only he had lived long enough to be
able to remind us of this warning!
7 [Translator’s note: English in the original.]
8 [Translator’s note: On the “bad subject”, see Althusser (1970, pp. 268–269):
Let me summarize what we have discovered about ideology in general.
The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:
1) the interpellation of “individuals” as subjects;
2) their subjection to the Subject;
3) the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of
each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself;
4) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that
the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will
be all right: Amen–“So be it”.
 From A to Z 105

Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjec-

tion to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects
“work”, they “work by themselves” in the vast majority of cases, with the exception
of the “bad subjects” who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detach-
ments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects
work all right “all by themselves”, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized
in the Ideological State Apparatuses).They are inserted into practices governed by the
rituals of the ISAs. They “recognize” the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that
“it really is true that it is so and not otherwise”, and that they must be obedient to
God, to their conscience, to the priest, to De Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that
thou shalt “love thy neighbor as thyself ”, etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is
simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.]
9 Lacan was sometimes very critical of the university discourse, noting its connection with
“knavery” (Lacan, 1991, p. 61): it tends to lay claim, without justification, to propositions
that belong to someone else.
10 [Translator’s note: This can be related to the “hysterical proton pseudos” (Freud, 1950,
pp. 352–357).]
11 For Lacan, the montage of the drive is not a matter of function. This is clear in the
explicitly surrealist image he provides in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-­
Analysis: “[the] image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap,
a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying
there looking beautiful” (Lacan, 1973d, p. 169).
12 This idea is also developed in the first pages of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972).
13 The French mentality has, even among the most insightful of those who are plagued
with it, a rather confounding ability: it always gets what is essential wrong at least once.
For instance, Deleuze and Guattari take André Green, rather than Lacan, as the point
of reference here. It is as if the authors were trying to inoculate themselves against the
malady of submission by maintaining a certain distance towards the master, while prais-
ing one of his dissident students. The result of this kind of counterfeiting is always a
tendency to recoil from thought; it is a way of opting for a cosmetically original position
rather than the unimaginable one. If the latter were fully and irrevocably embraced, it
would require one truly to leave the sheltering haven of the master.
14 [Translator’s note: The translators of Anti-Oedipus use “investment” as a translation of the
French word, “investissement”, which is itself a rendering of the Freudian term, “Beset-
zung”; in the Standard Edition, this word became “cathexis”. As James Strachey notes
(1962, p. 63, note 2), “Besetzung” is “in ordinary use, and among many other senses,
might have some such meaning as ‘occupation’ or ‘filling’”.The libido can thus be said to
“occupy” a particular object, in a sense that is close to that of a military occupation. Stra-
chey states that he coined the word “cathexis” on the basis of the Greek term “κατέχειν,
catechein, to occupy” (ibid., p. 63, note 2). The French expression, “investir un lieu” can
also be used to refer to an occupation – not necessarily military – of a particular place.
The English words “invest” and “investment” possess similar resonances, which, how-
ever, struggle to make themselves heard above the overwhelming din of their financial
meaning.]
15 For further discussion of these questions, see Alain Badiou’s (1990) essential introduction
in Number and Numbers.
16 [Translator’s note: Lacan (1969, p. 18) writes: “Recently, in an ongoing course I am giv-
ing, I correlated this cause [the a-cause] and the function of surplus jouissance (Mehrlust,
which is obviously homologous, but may not be analogous, to Marx’s Mehrwert, since it
is the cause rather than the effect of the market)”.]
17 Soler (2002, p. 175) writes: “I will start again with the fundamental symptom. It fills in
the yawning gap of the ‘there is no [il n’y a pas]’ – of the sexual non-relation – with the
erection of a ‘there is [il y a]’”.
18 The “that’s not it” of the obsessional – or of the hysteric in another form – touches on
what is inconvenient for the subject and not on what is inconvenient for the Other.
106 The splitting of the subject

19 [Translator’s note: See Michaux (1997, p. 175):“He who hides his madman dies voiceless”.]
20 This is not as close as it might seem to Lacan’s (1973b, p. 491) concept of “parêtre [para-
being]” in “L’étourdit”. The parêtre concerns what allows the subject to devise a way to
write the body and thereby become differentiated from its reduction to a being, some-
thing forced on the subject by the fact of being spoken by the Other. [Translator’s note:
Lacan’s neologism “parêtre” is also a homophone of the French word “paraître [to seem]”.]
21 A similar conception of the subject can be found in Millot’s (2012, p. 94) discussion of
Madame Guyon, the French mystic who was accused of being a Quietist: “the funda-
mental omission of oneself that is perhaps the place of the subject”. The problem here
probably concerns the distinction between the moi [generally translated as “ego”] as an
instance of the imaginary and what Lacan himself called the “Ego”, which plays a crucial
role in Joyce’s sinthome (Lacan, 2005b, p. 128).
22 [Translator’s note: Žižek is referring to the following passage:
Father is the other of son, and son the other of father, and each only is as this other of
the other; at the same time, the one determination only is in relation to the other. . . .
The father also has an existence of his own apart from the son-relationship; but then
he is not father but simply man. . . . Opposites, therefore, contain contradiction in so
far as they are, in the same respect, negatively related to one another.
(Hegel, 1807, p. 441; cited by Žižek, 1993b, p. 131)]
23 [Translator’s note: For more on Russell’s paradox, see p. 132, note 18 below and the related
discussion.]
24 [Translator’s note: Concerning the “White Goddess”, see Lacan’s (1974a, p. 34, emphasis
added) comment in “Spring awakening”:
How to know if, as Robert Graves puts it, the Father himself, the eternal father of us
all, is not one Name among others of the White Goddess, the one that according to
him gets lost in the night of time, because she is the Different one, the forever Other
in her enjoyment – like those forms of the infinite whose enumeration we only start
when we know that she is the one who will suspend us.]
25 From Bernard-Henri Lévy to Alain Finkielkraut, and without forgetting André Glucks-
mann: the extent to which what is “in” among these intellectuals involves the asphyxia-
tion of their intellects is deplorable.
26 [Translator’s note: Žižek (2003, p. 51) describes this film as follows:
Enigma . . . tells the story of a dissident journalist-turned-spy who emigrates to the
West, and is then recruited by the CIA and sent to East Germany to get hold of a
scrambling/descrambling computer chip whose possession enables the owner to read
all communications between KGB headquarters and its outposts. However, small
clues tell the spy that there is something wrong with his mission: that is, that the East
Germans and the Russians were informed of his arrival in advance – so what is going
on? Is it that the Communists have a mole in CIA headquarters who informed them
of this secret mission? As we learn toward the end of the film, the solution is much
more ingenious: the CIA already possesses the scrambling chip, but, unfortunately,
the Russians suspect this fact, so they have temporarily stopped using this computer
network for their secret communications. The true aim of the operation was the
CIA attempt to convince the Russians that they did not possess the chip: they sent
an agent to get it and, at the same time, deliberately let the Russians know that there
was an operation going on to get the chip; of course, the CIA is counting on the fact
that the Russians will arrest the agent. The ultimate result will thus be that, by suc-
cessfully preventing the mission, the Russians will be convinced that the Americans
do not possess it, and that it is therefore safe to use this communication link. . . . The
tragic aspect of the story, of course, is that the mission’s failure is taken into account:
the CIA wants the mission to fail, that is, the poor dissident agent is sacrificed in
advance for the higher goal of convincing the opponent that one doesn’t possess his
 From A to Z 107

secret.The strategy here is to stage a search operation in order to convince the Other
(the enemy) that one does not already possess what one is looking for – in short, one
feigns a lack, a want, in order to conceal from the Other that one already possesses
the agalma, the Other’s innermost secret.]
27 [Translator’s note: See Lacan (1963, p. 648):
Let us enunciate the [Sade’s] maxim:
“I have the right to enjoy your body,” anyone can say to me, “and I will exercise this
right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate
with your body.”
Such is the rule to which everyone’s will would be submitted, assuming a society
were to forcibly implement the rule.]
28 Žižek (2003, p. 54) writes: “Far from being the seminar of Lacan, his Ethics of Psychoa-
nalysis is, rather, the point of deadlock at which Lacan comes dangerously close to the
standard version of the ‘passion for the Real’”.
29 This is not a minor reservation, for it involves the difficulty Žižek constantly has in
differentiating between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary without relying exclu-
sively on binary relations between two of these three terms. See, for example, his dis-
cussion of the real and reality (Žižek, 2003, pp. 75–77); we note that language prohibits
jouissance because it is also the condition of jouissance.
30 Psychiatry, psychology and many psychoanalysts hold that the purpose of therapy is to
eliminate the symptom; they are like nudists, who are confused about the difference
between skin and clothing.
31 [Translator’s note: See Baudelaire (1897, p. 31): “God is the sole being who has no need to
exist to reign”.]
32 I (Bruno, 2003a, p. 19) have also stressed this point, in connection with the real father:
“the function of the exception should be intrinsically correlated with its buttress of
impossibility, at the risk of reintroducing suggestion”. From this point of view, there is an
(evangelical) risk of trying to make the ideal analysand into “one among others” (which
is the title of a book by Denis Vasse [1978]). That would be to forget that the fantasy,
before it is traversed, was constructed or put together, and that this putting-together
cannot occur without such a reliance on the exception as impossible, including in psycho-
sis, where the non-functioning of the real father leads the subject to embody the exception.
33 Again, see Artaud (1947a, p. 264): “nothingness [le néant] is the body”.
PART II
The capitalist discourse
3
UMHA

In the preceding section, an examination of the splitting of the subject showed the
true significance of the castration complex and how, when the capitalist discourse
ends up sundering the subject, S, from unconscious knowledge, S2, it has deprived
castration of its dialectic. In this kinetics, the more the subject drinks, the thirstier
s/he becomes. This exhausting misunderstanding feeds on the capitalist axiom that
it is not impossible for surplus-jouissance (a) to satiate the subject. Dr. Jekyll, in
order to put an end to this vicious circle, commits suicide as Hyde. Joan Dark is
led to her death by Pierpont Mauler, with the best of intentions, in order to pre-
serve the criminal innocence of the unconscious. Mauler, despite his frequently
displayed soul-searching, does not want to give up on this misunderstanding. What
will become of him after Joan’s death? Perhaps he will become both the wealthiest
capitalist and a convert to a new form of Mariolatry.
The chapters on Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari and Žižek defined their theo-
retical relation to the splitting (Spaltung) of the subject. In Althusser, splitting is
refused, which paves the way for the bad subject. Deleuze and Guattari give pre-
eminence to one of the poles of this division – multiplicity – since this division can
be located, in psychoanalysis, between the One and the Other. Finally, Žižek, con-
nects the subject, as void, to the object a. What is striking about these three enter-
prises, retroactively, is that the last of them stands, without any doubt, in a very close
relation to psychoanalysis. It is obvious that Žižek has read Lacan, including his late
work, very closely. One problem, however, has not been resolved: the discourse of
the philosopher is not that of the psychoanalyst. Lacan’s verdict remains valid: we
must separate ourselves from philosophical discourse in order not to become con-
fused about what analytic discourse is.
Lacan’s theory of discourse can be introduced in terms of the two themes of lysis
and guise. “Lysis” marks the place of discourse: it belongs to the order of language,
which dissolves the thing. A discourse can take place “without speech”; speech is
112 The capitalist discourse

not the only fate of language. Language can manifest itself in a graph, which implies
writing and sets up logic. This is what we shall be dealing with here. The “guise”
refers to the way in which a discourse is established, in order, on the one hand, to
ward off the metonymic drifting that characterises speech in mania, and on the
other hand, to inscribe the division of the subject within the constraints of the
graph. Doesn’t capitalist discourse, in exempting itself from this second characteris-
tic, dictate a speech that is so over-encoded that the real is held at a distance, as if it
were behind a glass? The imagery of the spectacle of war, for example, becomes so
inflated that it covers over the real of what war actually is.

The arrows and the barrier

1) Instead of sketching an epistemological history of the category of discourse, I shall
simply note that Lacan introduced his own discourses at the end of the 1960s, in his
seminars From an Other to the other (1968–1969) and The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
(1969–1970). Then, in “Radiophonie” (1970), he set down a first written account of
this theory.The title of the seminar, From an Other to the other, already speaks volumes.
It is telling that certain students of Lacan’s have transcribed it incorrectly as “From
an other to the Other”.This misunderstanding can easily be explained.The other is
the alter ego of the dual relation, while the Other is polysemous; it is not only the
“treasure trove of signifiers” (Lacan, 1960, p. 682)1 and the place of truth implied by
the existence of language; it is also the body that supports both of these, hence the
expression “maternal Other”. It can therefore seem orthodox to understand this title
as retracing a genesis that leads from the imaginary register – the relation with the
image of the other – to the entry into the symbolic order – the order of language.
This is not at all, however, what Lacan was aiming at in this seminar. Starting with
the Other, Lacan wonders how, through psychoanalysis, the other – other people in
everyday life, the partner, the neighbour or the stranger, the friend or the enemy –
can be recognised not as counterparts (this is the only kind of humanism authorised
by the discourse of the master) but in terms of their irreducible alterity.2 The date
of this seminar is also telling. In his teaching, Lacan was always sensitive to historical
circumstances, and this was his first seminar after May 1968.
2) If it can also be hoped that the reader will read Lacan, it cannot be expected
that s/he has done so already. Therefore, it is necessary to give some idea, briefly
and without any sugar coating, of what Lacan means by “discourse”; for him, this
term does not, as it usually does, refer to all [l’ensemble] of speech, unless we want to
define “all” as a mathematical set – which, unlike a class, can be empty, and empty
precisely of speech.
In this sense, there is an opposition between discourse and speech, for in speech,
the slippage of the signifier is more or less the rule. In a lecture given in May 1972,
in which Lacan writes the matheme of the capitalist discourse (and to which we
will return in what follows), this slippage is related to the fact that “there is no signi-
fier whose signification would be assured” (Lacan, 1978b, p. 43). This signification
 UMHA 113

“can always be a different one, and it even spends its time sliding as far in signifi-
cation as you would like” (ibid., p. 43). Thus, discourse is, first of all, what enables
us to ward off some of this slippage. If, for example, you are a man and go into a
pharmacy to ask about medication for impotence and the pharmacist answers you
by reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables, you can conclude – precisely because you
are in a pharmacy – that it is the pharmacist who is mad and not you. You would
have good reason for concluding that she has taken you for a spectator, a French
teacher, a theatre impresario or a casting director. A pharmacy is discourse: it ena-
bles you to specify places, relations and terms that have no need for actual speech
in order to signify.
Of course, if this slight misadventure ever befalls you, you can also conclude that
the pharmacist is not mad; she is simply joyous and mischievous, and her recitation
suggests that poetry is better than chemistry at rearming Eros. To accomplish its
function, discourse, as we are going to see, has a four-part structure.We shall also see,
without too much pain, I hope, that for Lacan, the human being is at least as much
a discoursing quadruped as a speaking biped.
3) Let us take leave of the pharmacist to go to a nonfictional example: Freud
and the young woman whom we know, through his case history, as Dora.3 In her
encounter with “Professor” Freud, Dora commands him to produce knowledge
about her case. Freud complies, giving a major interpretation that is mistaken, as
he would recognise twenty-five years later. For the hysterical subject, this provides
an inaugural proof that if the master can be mistaken once, he must always be
wrong. Achilles will never reach the tortoise. Lacan subtracts the hysteric’s Eleati-
cism from the pathology of neurosis and makes it one of the four discourses: one
of three ways (for in this quartet, analytic discourse is set apart) of refusing to let
the other be a subject. Either the other is a counterpart – and is therefore not an
other – or s/he is not a subject.This unfairness is even more unanswerable because
it claims to be its opposite, yet it is the fruit of an intellectual error: if the master,
having been mistaken once, is always wrong, then the concept of error would
lose all meaning. Possibly being wrong is not equivalent to always being wrong, just as
potentiality is not the act. Positing that her/his partner mistakenly takes himself
for a master, and failing to see that a single error does not disqualify him forever
from being one, the hysterical subject – whether woman or man – parades her/
himself as the only one who knows that s/he does not know. This is the hysteric’s
definition of the subject. Other people become thereby, at best, nothing more
than sketches that are drawn on the mystic writing pad of her daydreams and
then erased, victims of their belief that they are able to know. In the hysteric’s
defence, it should be added that in analytic discourse, believing that one is the
only analysand may well be a necessary, although transitory lure. The example of
Socrates leads us to think that an hysterical moment is required in every authentic
philosophical enterprise.
This situation can be written as a matheme, a framework that imitates math-
ematical formalisation. Four places – the agent of the discourse, its other, its
114 The capitalist discourse

production and its truth – and four terms – the subject (S), master-signifier (S1),
knowledge (S2) and surplus-jouissance (a) – can be distinguished. We thus obtain
a matrix:

Four Places
(1) agent other (2)
(4) truth production (3)

Later, Lacan would begin to refer to the place of the agent (at the top left) as that
of the semblance [semblant].
4) This formalisation still needs to be explained, by showing the meaning of
these places and especially of these terms. First, however, four preliminary remarks
are necessary:

• In order to produce this schema, Lacan proceeded by trial and error, mak-
ing successive approximations. The respective elaboration of places and terms
ended up being articulated in this four-part structure; on its basis and because
of the fixed character of the places, four – and only four – discourses can be
constructed by rotating the terms.
• This matrix is antistructuralist. For structuralism, a system is defined as a set of
elements whose places, definitions and relations obey a series of rules, by means
of an empty place that makes the “play” of the set possible. Anything that is out-
side this system is not taken into consideration, so that each system is a universe,
or a part of a universe. For Lacan, however, there is no universe of discourse. This
lack leads to a presence: between the two lower places – where there would be
a movement from production (3) to truth (4) – a barrier “of jouissance” appears.
(Other Side, p. 108.) This is what Freud locates as trauma and Lacan as the real.4

5) Jouissance. Without understanding this category, it is impossible to grasp what

discourse is for Lacan, since it is the barrier of jouissance that explains the gap
between the place of production (at the lower right) and that of truth (at the lower
left). Jouissance is fundamentally the fruit of Freud’s second topography. Thanatos,
the death drive, makes this “fifth element” manifest; all that can be said of it is that
it results from both the advent of speech (of which language is a sediment) and its
consequence: the representation of what cannot be represented. Death may be the
only state in which “I” can say itself without becoming different from what it says,
simply because the latter has been said. In this respect, jouissance would be what is
unrepresentable in the subject, what would fail to come about through a represen-
tation by language. Lacan (1960, p. 694) lends a voice to jouissance, which states,
voicelessly and from nowhere: “I am in the place from which ‘the universe is a flaw
in the purity of Non-Being’ is vociferated”.5 Only Non-Being, which is strictly
unthinkable, is pure, for death itself cannot prevent us from having been. The voca-
tion of jouissance is to remind us that creation is negative.
Freud (1905, p. 182) grasped jouissance through its effects (repetition, masochism),
but also invokes it with the dazzling example of a mouth kissing itself, or if we prefer
 UMHA 115

Lacan’s (1973d, p. 179) paraphrase of this, a kiss without a mouth. And why not? Lacan
promoted the category of jouissance to a major rank in psychoanalysis, but in doing
so, he was following in Freud’s footsteps. For example, in “The Economic Problem
of Masochism”, Freud (1924, p. 159) writes that “the Nirvana principle . . . would be
entirely in the service of the death instincts”. This statement deserves to be empha-
sised. As we have seen, jouissance has nothing in common with pleasure; the latter,
with its twin, unpleasure, regulates conduct, inciting the subject to stay within certain
limits. Jouissance only delights in what is outside the limit. Georges Bataille, whose
work preceded Lacan’s so discreetly, expressed its nature the best in The Tears of Eros,
when he wrote “this book’s meaning is the opening up of consciousness to the way
in which the ‘little death’ and actual death are identical” (Bataille, 1961, p. 20, transla-
tion modified). This homology between orgasm and death-throes or agony (etymo-
logically, “a-gonon”, the end of a struggle) follows the path of Freud, who made the
Nirvana principle the realisation of the zero degree of orgasm and jouissance. It also,
however, tries to resolve this paradox, since in Freud, the height of orgasm leads to
its end. Thus, just before no longer experiencing jouissance (death), a subject could
encounter the height of jouissance. Bataille (ibid., p. 20) speaks of this moment of
passage, of death, as one of “ultimate pain”. Lacan’s elaboration of the category of dis-
course enabled him not so much to resolve this paradox as to go beyond it. According
to Lacan, discourse is what “makes do” with jouissance, unlike “discourse” under-
stood in the more common sense of rhetoric, which wants to know nothing about it.
In his own way, Freud located the crux of the matter – or what might be called the
sinews of war – in this jouissance-obstacle. This reference to “war” can be taken liter-
ally, for if there is a discourse that is specific to war, no real war can ever be reduced to
conflict that is resolved by symbolic means. Even television, the magical instrument of
derealisation, is unable to accomplish this.6 When the nondiscursive breaks into dis-
course, this does not put an end to the civilising impact of the latter; instead, it incites
us not to allow ourselves to be cradled and lulled to sleep by what the victors say (see
Walter Benjamin): they claim that war disinfects us of evil. Jouissance is a barricade
between two or more camps; it is an excess that, as soon as the first flesh has been
made into the word, never ceases to complete the final butchery as quickly as possible.
6) If we retain just one characteristic of discourse, it should be this: a discourse is
produced, but its truth is inaccessible. Truth is not a paltry matter. In Western phi-
losophy, it is first and foremost, and always, a matter of the adequation between the
idea and the thing. “There is a Swiss navy”. Is this true or false? In examining this
statement, we are at the level of what Freud discussed in terms of the judgement
of existence.7 The requirement that there be an adequation between the idea and
the thing determines the programme of science, which can only, however, make a
pronouncement when attempts at adequation fail. Scientific procedures can prove
that a proposition is false, but that does not necessarily imply that what is not false
is true; there is always a possibility that the claim that the non-false is true can itself
be falsified (by proceeding to demonstrate the falseness of the proposition, whether
through experiment or formal reasoning). Lacan works this problematic into psy-
choanalysis by playing on the equivocation between “phallus” and “falsus” (“false”
in Latin). Thus, the phallic function says nothing other than “it is false that a man
116 The capitalist discourse

is a woman”. This function asserts that something is false, and it is only about what
is false that such assertions can be made. Contrary to what our habits would lead
us to believe, this does not debase the status of truth. Since truth can no longer be
the faithful copy of the thing (the much-vaunted “reflection”),8 it is always nothing
other than what is original in speech; a lie thus only makes truth more radiant.
In this context, the statement, “I am lying” is no longer a paradox. We only have
to admit that every enunciation, without exception, is true, and thus “I am lying”
would also be true. Psychoanalysis is based on this principle, which justifies a form of
association that is called “free”: at the level of speech, every enunciation is true. One
of the common mechanisms in the theatre is to have a particular character say, “I’m
going”, while the stage directions say that s/he does not move.9 Even here,“I’m going”
remains true. If the character were to say, “I’m staying”, then s/he – or rather, her/his
truth – would be different.Truth concerns the reality not of the action but of the char-
acter. The stage directions, which indicate that s/he remains, mark the entrance of a
kind of knowledge that would put truth to the test.When the Holocaust denier Rob-
ert Faurisson argued that the Nazi extermination camps were really holiday camps,
what he said was true in only one sense: it was a faithful part of his own self-portrait.
At the level of language rather than speech, however, the paradox is still able to create
a contradiction. Logic constructs a language based on written letters or symbols that are
abstracted from things and examines the question of truth at the level of propositions.
If, for example, A – whatever A may be – is greater than B, and B – whatever B may
be – is greater than C – whatever C may be – C cannot be greater than A. At the end
of the nineteenth century, mathematical logicians began to be concerned with judge-
ments about the existence not of things, but of formal propositions. In this respect, the
major epistemic question of the twentieth century was whether the symbolic could be
constituted as a universe that would exhaust the real.This task turned out to be impos-
sible, and this impossibility is congruent with Lacan’s conception of discourse.
7) This little journey into the province of truth gives us a better sense of what
is meant by the incompatibility between the production and the truth of discourse.
From the beginning, I have emphasised the lack of identity between discourse and
speech. This nonidentity reappears here, throwing light on the status of truth in
both of these: in speech, it is the substance of the enunciation, while in discourse,
it is inaccessible. In order not to contravene this inaccessibility, analytic discourse
situates knowledge as what effaces truth, while the latter is being renewed in and
by speech. Knowledge serves as a border around the hole that has been made by the
effacement of truth; this hole is both the condition for the constant regeneration of
this truth and the index of its limit. How, however, can this effacement of the truth
be reconciled with the proposition that “the symptom . . . represents the return
of truth as such into the gap of a certain knowledge” (Lacan, 1966c, p. 194)? The
answer is that if truth is supposed to be the “soul” of the symptom, then it cannot
be spoken entirely.This is why its effacement is necessary in order to mark this final
inaccessibility. Where truth, although present, cannot be said, a semblance – and a
semblance is not just some random term – can be fashioned; it is an element of
knowledge that takes the “blankness” of truth into account.10
 UMHA 117

8) Certain aspects of this conception of discourse resemble other, contempo-

raneous approaches to it. For example, Michel Foucault (1976, p. 123) defines dis-
course in a similar way: “discourse should be thought of neither as the collection of
what is said nor as the way in which things are said. Discourse is the collection of
constrained and constraining significations that are transmitted through social rela-
tions”; he thus emphasises that it is not the sum-total of speech, but a set of prac-
tices that regulate social interaction. Foucault does not, however, make the status
of truth disappear. According to him, the task of discourse is, in effect, to “say the
truth [dire vrai]” (Foucault, 1984, p. 678) and this task must be neither indifferent to
constituted powers nor replaced by a prescription of what truth is. There is thus an
“infinite labour” (ibid., p. 678), in which all members of the apparatuses of power
must participate, not only as actors but as elements of this apparatus.
As I have said, Lacan does not trust discourse in this way; for him, the truth of a
discourse can act without our ever being able to grasp it; perhaps, paradoxically, it
can only be grasped when knowledge takes the place that constitutes it as a hole.
Foucault, on the other hand, remains in the classical problematic of the Enlighten-
ment. He is not blind, however, to the fact that, as he claims in “The Discourse on
Language”, a “profound logophobia” lurks under the flaunted logophilia of discourse
(Foucault, 1971, p. 229). I shall not linger over the ways that he hopes to get rid of
this logophobia, which are related to the aims of his archaeology, but his accent on a
phobia that turns us away from thinking should be remembered, for it touches some-
thing important, and throws light on the ambivalence of his fascination with people
who were often considered vile. He does not say that “abnormal” individuals should
be distrusted just as much as coercive societies.There may be a difficulty, however, in
supporting an individual’s disobedience of a dominant discourse if this individual has
been reduced to being nothing more than a product of this very discourse.
9) After this presentation of the matrix and the schemas of discourse, we can
write the mathemes of the four discourses, in the order of succession that Lacan
chose when he first presented them in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (see Lacan,
1991, pp. 11–28):

A discourse can be defined through its differential relations with other discourses;
this is the thesis that Lacan treats in the seventh question of “Radiophonie” (1970),
written near the end of The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. There he examines the
relation – or rather, the absence of relation – between the term that occupies the
place of the production (on the lower right) and the one that occupies the place
of truth (on the lower left). It should be recalled that this rupture results from the
“barrier of jouissance”.
118 The capitalist discourse

If we concentrate only on the phenomenology of these four discourses, there

is nothing original about them; this is even more true when we approach them
through history. The Middle Ages saw the emergence of the discourse of the uni-
versity. Abelard is an exemplary figure of the latter, for he sought to travel through-
out the various regions of knowledge available in his age, in order to understand
and map out their comprehensive organisation. He chose as partner a woman who
was able to allow herself both to be his student and to be valued as object a; she
could also, and perhaps especially, lend herself to an education that subjected her
(S). This subjection may well have operated through the magic of love, and this
may endear this couple to us, but it also reveals that, without love, the discourse
of the university cannot succeed in bringing together two elements that continue
to remain distinct: teaching [instruction] and upbringing [éducation]. We know the
exemplary end of the story: on the orders of a master, Héloïse’s uncle, Abelard was
castrated for having tried to instill in her a hunger for knowledge (see Clanchy,
1997). The striking parallel between the birth of the University and the invention
of linear perspective, which enables a homogeneous space of knowledge to be con-
ceived, can be mentioned in passing here.
To see the emergence of the discourse of the master, we do not need to go back to
the Asiatic mode of production, which is too little known and too controversial as a
concept. Slavery, serfdom and capitalism show us a relation of mastery over the other
(S1 → S2); this mastery is based on the exploitation of the other’s knowledge (S2) in
order to produce, in the form of commodities or money, a value (a) that does not
bring any satisfaction to the subject.The sequence is even purer with capitalism: the
master has had to renounce enjoyment of his goods in order to begin the process
of exploitation, but this process thereby implies that the producer (S2) has become a
consumer (S).Without the modification that we shall soon encounter, the discourse
of the master turns out not to be strong enough to protect us from an irremediable
divorce between the subject (S) and the value that has been produced (a).
The discourse of the hysteric may well be the one that is most easily readable.
The history of this discourse presents us with a series of men: a series that goes
from Akhenaten, the feminiser of culture, to Socrates – who is “taught” by a slave
whom he transforms into a master – to the painter Christoph Haizman and Fyo-
dor Dostoevsky, to whom Freud devoted articles, up to Hegel – “the most sublime
hysteric”, and ends up with scientists who define themselves by falsifying their
teachers’ theories. The hysteric as subject, however, entered psychoanalysis through
a series of women, whose ancestors came from religious orders: the nun (S) and
her confessor (S1). Behind them, in turn, are two shadowy counterparts, a couple
that reveals what is really at work: the witch (S) and her judge (S1). The witch, the
classical paradigm of the hysterical subject, is seeking a master, God, whom she
can govern by proving that he is ignorant of the intimate mainspring of her desire.
Human masters (confessors), who parade themselves as God’s lieutenants, are left to
choose between renouncing their beliefs or burning the woman who could make
them doubt them. This relation also occurs in medicine, for example, in the couple
formed by a hypnotist (S1) and the woman who is subjected to his suggestions (S);
 UMHA 119

thanks to Charcot, Freud encountered them in his youth. Let us note that in order
to bring out what is at stake in analysis, Freud had to resort to a degraded form of
it, one in which a two-person relation was transformed into a relation between a
neurotic, on the one hand, and a “professional”, on the other.11
Lacan (1968b, p. 7) criticised Didier Anzieu’s (1959) thesis that Freud, in order
to authorise himself as an analyst, had to undergo a “self-analysis”. Lacan (1968b,
p. 7) argues instead that Freud placed a “quack”, Fliess, in the position of analyst:
the position of someone (a) who aroused and sustained his desire to speak or write
about the most intimate aspects of his questioning of himself as subject (S). Freud
was thereby led to proffer his free associations – the master-signifiers of his life (S1),
to which no one else had access – to Fliess. What is important in this context is
not whether this treasure was confided to good or bad hands; what is significant,
instead, is that, when Freud discovered his colleague’s lack of consistency and took
his distance from him, he gave him a zero as an analyst. In other words, he did not
name Fliess, retroactively, as an analyst.Yet this is what enabled Freud to name him-
self, in ordinal terms, as the first analyst.
This moment of naming constituted a decisive break. It would therefore be a
mistake to reduce the forms of discourse by tracing their outlines onto historical
figures, thereby reducing their polyvalence.The opposite movement is more appro-
priate: the emergence of analytic discourse should be considered as the one single
historical moment. On its basis, the atoms and articulations of discourse can then be
reassembled, by deconstructing their historical manifestations. This can be done by
recognising the barrier between production and truth, a barrier instituted by jouis-
sance. Such a recognition can occur, for example at the very moment that an analy-
sand describes – with an exactitude that can be called absolute – the way in which
he has been enclosed in the fantasy, an enclosure from which – he concludes – there
is no exit. Perhaps what is needed would be to indicate that, with these words, he
is speaking of himself as a statement [énoncé], and that his enunciation is not locked
into it. This is not, however, enough. What encloses him is his adherence to his
discourse, which has been transformed into a universe. As a consequence, he brings
about his fantasy by speaking of it.
He needs then to stay quiet and allow – without being able to do anything
about it – a meteor to appear; this meteor, in his speech, will come from two places
at once, situated on both sides of the barrier: from S1, according to the principle
of free association, and from knowledge (S2). The schema of the analytic discourse
marks out two trajectories for the movement from knowledge (S2) to the subject
(S): one of them is direct and the other passes via a.
Lacan writes this process in the following way:

a S

S2 barrier S1
Discourse of the Analyst
120 The capitalist discourse

Thus, there are four terms: S, S1, S2, a.Yet before entering into the circular move-
ment of discourse, we need to find a sort of governing principle that will enable us
to grasp the meaning of each of these terms and to avoid, if possible, any misunder-
standing that would be related to our regular semantic habits.
S: the “barred” or “divided” subject. With this term, Lacan refers especially to
Freud’s final works, which argue that there is an intrinsic splitting (Spaltung) in
every subject: a splitting between the recognition and the disavowal of the mother’s
castration.
S1: the “master-signifier”. This denotes the signifier that commands, or perhaps
more precisely, the signifier of truth, which can be located easily in the slip of the
tongue. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, for example, Freud (1901, p. 59)
reports a slip of the tongue made by the President of the lower house of the Aus-
trian Parliament, who, in opening a session, expressed publicly his secret wish: “I . . .
herewith declare the sitting closed!”. “Closed” is the master-signifier; it is the master,
especially, of the subject who pronounces it.
S2: “knowledge”. In the preceding example, “closed” is a single signifier that rep-
resents the subject at the moment when it is said. Knowledge, on the other hand,
is an articulation of signifiers. The unconscious is the knowledge that analytic treat-
ment seeks to decipher; this deciphering occurs by interpreting not only the dream,
but also the unconscious formations that manifest themselves in a subject’s conduct
and choices. Because all knowledge is constituted by the symbolic, which, as we
have just seen, cannot absorb the real, knowledge must include a kernel that remains
irreducibly unconscious. In order to forestall a confusion, I would like to emphasise
that the reason that this kernel remains unconscious is not because something in it
is ineffable or unsayable, or because since the real is supposed to be infinite, it would
always overflow or be ahead of knowledge.This kernel is unconscious because a sub-
ject can only represent itself by excluding something from the representation: it must
exclude the point from which it can be represented.The dream offers a metaphor of
this point, if only by its multiplication of the figures who can represent the dreamer;
yet this metaphor can only be interpreted if the subject, after awakening from the
dream, gives up any hope of knowing the point from which s/he is interpreting. In this way,
the subject is like a diver at the moment when s/he plunges from the diving board.
a: the “object little a”. Lacan (1981a, p. 11) referred to this as his own inven-
tion. In Freud, the object is lacking and therefore becomes the basis of sexuality.
This lack is not contingent, but structural, linked to the fact that the subject can
only constitute itself as such – as divided – because it is born into a world in which
it is spoken of. It is not only spoken of, however; it must also grasp itself through
speech, in order to be able to speak (or not to speak) in turn. Lack is therefore to be
situated as the result of a sampling or a removal of something from the basis upon
and place from which the subject is spoken, which Lacan calls the Other. Once this
object (breast, excrement, gaze, voice) has been removed from the Other, it cannot
be restored to it; the condition for this withdrawal is the production of a subject.
If this process were to be reversed, then the emergence of the subject would have
to be annulled, and this is impossible. Lacan calls this “element” surplus-jouissance,
 UMHA 121

or, in French, the plus-de-jouir, playing on the double meaning of the adverb plus,
which denotes both the absence (no more) and the increasing (more) of jouissance.
This means, first, that the object a cannot be integrated back into the Other; jouis-
sance, in the sense of a mouth that would kiss itself, is impossible. Second, although
that jouissance has not occurred, we can nevertheless get off; there is a supplement
of jouissance or something that would take its place [suppléance]. Such jouissance
is permitted as soon as the first, impossible, jouissance has been renounced. This
algebra founds Lacan’s theory of value, and we shall see how it enables Lacan to
drive a wedge into the concept of surplus-value, in which Marx’s genius is so clear.
It would not be superfluous to note how this inventory – in order to empha-
sise the extent to which the psychoanalytic terms, which are sometimes manipu-
lated blindly – implies a syntax whose source lies in experience; the experience of
analysis is impossible to model or simulate, and its framework must constantly be
refounded through logic.

La Ronde

U
Following the order of the first sequence that Lacan presented, we shall begin with the
discourse of the university.The barrier of jouissance is sketched on the bottom line:

S2 a
( place master subject S ( place
of truth) signifier S1 of production)

Lacan (1970, p. 445) comments on the curved arrow moving from right to left
by noting that “the structure of each discourse necessitates an incapacity or impo-
tence [impuissance] within it, which is to be differentiated as a disjunction – always
the same – between its production and its truth”. In the discourse of the university,
this disjunction is “the gap that the subject rushes into, the subject that it [qu’il, the
discourse] produces by having to suppose that knowledge has an author” (ibid.,
p. 445). In such a discourse, the subject is unable to articulate a master signifier that
could guarantee truth; it is led to posit that knowledge (S2) – which commands this
discourse – has an author. The subject thus personalises the master-signifier and
makes it the term from which knowledge originates. The author is a substitute for
the absent commander.
A thesis is starting to take shape here: anyone who is unable to occupy the place
that commands (S1 in the discourse of the master) can hide behind knowledge. One
of the consequences of this positioning is a misrecognition of the unconscious: a
misunderstanding of the incompatibility between knowledge and the subject. The
term “unconscious” does not mean “non-conscious”; it refers to the existence of
a kind of knowledge that the subject cannot reach, a knowledge that, nevertheless,
commands it.We shall see, however, how a subject can be guided by the knowledge
122 The capitalist discourse

contained in the symptom, and that the aim of analytic treatment is precisely to
enable the subject to “have a knack [savoir y faire]” for being guided by the symptom
(Lacan, 1976–1977, 16 November 1976).12 The author is only a false master, who is
supposed to suture S2 to S. Literary and artistic hacks are perfect illustrations of the
consequences of this blunder.
In the discourse of the university, the subject is produced, and is precisely an
effect.This irony should not lead us to turn up our noses at this discourse, any more
than at any other discourse.What intensifies this irony is that, as we have seen, Lacan
made this discourse the paradigm of the Soviet system, after it had been changed
first by voluntarism and then by stagnation. In Lacan’s own words:

It is odd to observe that a doctrine such as Marx’s whose articulation onto

the function of struggle, the class struggle, which he instituted has not pre-
vented it from giving birth to what for the moment is, indeed, the same
problem that confronts us all, namely the persistence of a master’s discourse.
To be sure, the present one does not have the structure of the old, in the sense
in which the old is installed in the place indicated under this big M [which
designates the discourse of the master]. The present one is installed in the
place on the left, the one capped by the U [which designates the discourse of
the university]. I will tell you why. What occupies the place there, which we
will provisionally call dominant [on the upper left], is the S2, which is speci-
fied as being, not knowledge of everything [savoir de tout] – we’ve not got
to that point yet, but knowledge taken as a whole. Understand that what is
being affirmed is nothing other than knowledge, which in ordinary language
is called the bureaucracy.
(Lacan, 1991, p. 31. translation modified)

According to Lacan, the discourse of the university involves a “bending” of

the discourse of the master. The “socialist” system still falls under the heading of
this discourse of the master, which Lacan deplores. Next, in a certain way, the
discourse of the university consolidates that of the master. It masks the fact that,
beneath knowledge, the term that commands, there is S1, a hidden master who
claims to speak from the place of truth, whereas in the discourse of the master,
the master only speaks in the name of a commandment that he takes upon him-
self, without claiming to do so in the name of truth. We can hang the portrait
of Stalin onto S1 and the acronym of the communist party of the Soviet Union
(“CPSU” in the matheme that follows): this characterises the discourse of the
university, which can be completed by the “new man” who will be produced (in
the place of S), and the mixture of material stimulus/ideological stimulus in the
place of a:

Material Stimulus /
CPSU Ideological Stimulus
Portrait of Stalin The New Man
 UMHA 123

The other problematic trait of the discourse of the university is that by placing
knowledge in the position of the agent, free rein is given to the subject’s tempta-
tion to make itself its own cause (causa sui), and thus the equal of God. We know
that Saint Augustine tried to head off this slippery slope at the beginning of On the
Trinity:

those who suppose that God is of such power that he actually begets himself,
are if anything even more wrong, since not only is God not like that, but
neither is anything in the world of body or spirit.There is absolutely no thing
whatsoever that brings itself into existence.
(Augustine of Hippo, 400 CE, pp. 65–66)

This radical criticism of the idea of the causa sui, which reappears in almost identical
terms in Nietzsche, enables Lacan (2005a, p. 64) to argue, in his comments on this
text of Augustine in the single session of his seminar on the Names-of-the-Father,
that there can only be a cause after the emergence of desire.

M
The discourse of the master is the twin of the discourse of the hysteric. This rela-
tion has remained the primal Prägung, or imprint, of psychoanalysis since Dora,
after her short treatment, moved from the position of agent in the discourse of the
hysteric to that of agent in the discourse of the master. Her swerve can be imputed
to Freud’s error in interpretation, which was not, however, the heart of the matter.
Dora was satisfied by having found in Freud the prototype of the castrated master:
the master who is always mistaken when he claims that he is able to reach the
truth of the hysteric. She then wanted to act as master within the social bond, a
movement that prefigures one of the outcomes of every institution, including the
analytic institution.13
The discourses of the master and the hysteric form a couple, and it is in this cou-
pling that the master experiences the failure of his knowledge; when the hysteric
calls upon him to be a “real” man, he can only produce a knowledge that does not
reach what causes this requirement. Correlatively, because he has not succeeded in
being a man, he is not able to get a woman to be the “cause of his desire” (I am not
saying “object”). Because this surplus-jouissance escapes him, the master turns to
the slave – situated in S2 – to produce it. Here again, however, the relation between
the master-signifier and the slave’s knowledge is marked by an impossibility: that of
governing knowledge. Finally, it will only be possible to “circumscribe the real” of
this impossibility on the basis of that lack-in-jouissance [manque-à-jouir]; in Dora,
for example, this lack is presented in the S of the discourse of the hysteric at the
“beginning”, but is maintained “at the end” in the discourse of the master (on the
lower left).To move from a specific example to the level of structure, we can say that
the reason for this impossibility can be read in the matheme itself, on the lower line,
where the terms on the left and the right are disjoined by the barrier of jouissance.
124 The capitalist discourse

There is no relation [rapport] between the S and the a. It is as if the subject were at
the Arctic Circle and the object a were in Antarctica, or vice versa. The subject is
fundamentally a lack-in-jouissance, for it is separated from the object a, which does
not fill it up. In the order of jouissance, the plus does not saturate the minus. Lacan
says this in another way when he argues that there is no sexual relation: there is no
sexual solution to the differentiation of sexed beings.
We can now write the matheme of the discourse of the master:
impossibility
S1 S2
S barrier a
Discourse of the Master

This writing refers to the relation between the ancient master and slave.14 The
master (S1) uses the slave’s technical knowledge in order to produce (a). The trans-
formation of labour-power into commodities would authorise Marx to name this
“surplus-value”, but generically, this is a surplus-jouissance; it is produced by the
process in which the renunciation of jouissance turns out to be the only way of
capitalising loss. Surplus-jouissance takes on its value in the master’s inaugural abdi-
cation of a jouissance that has already been lost.15 In analytic treatment, repetition
can point to this process; it shows us how, through the repetition of a loss (a series of
bungled actions), desire tries to give a renewed impetus to itself, to recreate a cause.
In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille (1967), following Marcel Mauss, saw the
pre-capitalist temptation towards an economy of expense; in the potlatch, this would
give rise to an unrestrained jouissance that would be devoted entirely to glorifying
the clan and its chief. An alternative to capitalism cannot, however, be anchored in
a return to this economy, any more than astrology would enable us to go beyond
scientism. Indeed, beyond such a dated example of the master-slave dialectic, what
the discourse of the master founds is the discursive status of the unconscious. The
term “master”, like its French counterpart “maître”, condenses two meanings that
are distinct in Spanish: a slave-owner (amo) and an intellectual authority. For Lacan,
this master is the allegorical and then historical figure of the signifier One. Within
language, this signifier sets a limit to divisibility. Because it is a single and therefore
not a differential signifier, it is only a virtual signifier. As Aesop says, Hic Rhodus, hic
salta, Rhodes is here, here is where you jump. Until we consent to enter into the
logic that will provide the key to the decisive homology between the unconscious
and the discourse of the master, we can understand nothing about it.
To issue a first signifier is to take the risk of commanding; this brings with it the
certainty that meaning will come about, for the first signifier can only be under-
stood in the locus of knowledge, where it takes a place. The problem is that it can
only take a place there at the price of being elided. This is how Lacan’s formula,
which has often been discussed at great length, “A signifier represents the subject
for another signifier”, is to be read. As soon as a signifier begins to represent the
subject, rather than something that is not subjective, its status changes. It becomes
 UMHA 125

the signifier that represents the subject as a statement [énoncé], and therefore cannot
represent it as an enunciation – as the source of the statement. Thus, in the knowl-
edge where it takes up a place, this S1 is inscribed as what fails to represent the
enunciation.16 Without wanting to reassemble psychoanalytic theory as if it were a
Meccano set, I shall note that its singular quality, in relation to science, is that it does
not efface the constitutive gap between experience and structure, and this leads
it to have to consent to a form that is frequently impassioned or rhapsodic. The
function of the phallus is to condition the integration of the second signifier into
the Other, thanks to the symbolic nihilation – the “elision” – of the first signifier,
since S1 and S2 cannot coexist. The task of the analysand is to enable each lost S1 to
arise again, to put them back into circulation, through the paradoxical freedom to
“say everything” or to speak in spite of everything; in the analytic discourse, each
S1 is produced in a place that is always disjoined from knowledge. Lacan writes this
knowledge as S2; it is a binary articulation of signifiers, in which one of the two sig-
nifiers can only figure in the empty place created by the elision of the first signifier.
What is the unconscious? Before Freud, it was seen as an anonymous network,
one that did not have a locus. After Lacan, it has become the discourse of the master.
This rather vertiginous leap leads to a corrosive revision of the doxa: psychoanalysis
is not the midwife of the unconscious, and its job is not to highlight the value of the
unconscious by revealing its secret riches. Psychoanalysis does not consist in sub-
stituting the unconscious for consciousness. If that were its mission, it would only
be carrying out the project of the discourse of the master by enabling neurotics to
transform themselves into masters.
The hysteric can do this easily, while the obsessional remains ambivalent about
acceding to this status: can he want what he does not desire? The psychotic, finally,
is not outside this movement, since, according to Lacan (1973a, p. 379), the “expe-
rience of the impossibility of pulverulent discourse” is “the Trojan horse by which
the psychotic can enter the city of discourse as a master”. In direct opposition to the
avatars that reduce it to being an assistant to bureaucracy, psychoanalysis teaches the
master that the unconscious is nothing more than a knowledge cut adrift, which
no subject can master. A subjectless knowledge: this is the only definition that enables
us to deliver the unconscious from the dimension of the psychic and its ideology
of mastery. The unconscious is real. The discourse of the master teaches us that the
unconscious commands us, but at the price of the subject’s being elsewhere. This
formulation may seem surprising and unorthodox, since it implicitly casts doubt
on the phrase, “subject of the unconscious”. This is quite precisely, however, what
Lacan says (2006a, p. 385): the master “is strictly what we call the unconscious . . .
namely what is unknown to the subject itself as such – an unknown from which
the subject is absent and from which the subject is only represented elsewhere”.
We can now reread the discourse of the master from this perspective. The pas-
sion for castration induced by the unconscious is the same passion that is refound in
the renunciation of jouissance, a jouissance that has, in any case, been abolished.The
master knows how to recuperate the best of this inaccessible jouissance through
the magic object that transforms loss into surplus-jouissance. This, however, should
126 The capitalist discourse

be noticed: it is as master rather than as subject (S) that he benefits from surplus-
jouissance. In other words, a, the surplus-jouissance produced by this discourse
can only be satisfying when it excludes the symptom from reality; this is satisfy-
ing because the symptom signals a real that could shake up the fantasy. For these
reasons, the discourse of the master is the reverse of analytic discourse. Fortunately
for analytic discourse, the barrier of jouissance is preserved in the discourse of the
master, thereby leaving us some hope.

H
In the discourse of the hysteric, the barrier of jouissance is located between S2 and
a: no knowledge produced by the master can grasp the truth of what makes the
hysterical subject desire.
Freud’s first clinical approach was centred on hysteria. Can hysteria, however, be
equated with the discourse of the hysteric? A formula of Lacan’s (1991, p. 129) –
the “hysteric wants a master she can reign over” – invites us to do so.Yet if we con-
sider that discourse marks out a mode of the social bond rather than of neurotic
functioning, it would be better to emphasise that this social bond highlights desire,
its just positioning – or just its positioning – in a way that concerns every subject,
and not only hysterics; similarly, obsessional neurosis does not constitute a discourse
but it does enable us to theorise the nature of thought. In this sense, the discourse of
the hysteric is both valuable and irreplaceable, in large part because it locates desire
in the place of the agent, as S, on the top left:

S S1
a S2
impotence
Discourse of the Hysteric

This discourse demonstrates and condemns the master’s inability – and even
impotence – when confronted with the task of producing a kind of knowledge
about what causes the subject’s desire.Thus, on the one hand, this discourse discred-
its the master, and on the other, it retroactively shows the necessity for the desiring
subject of choosing a master in order to evict him from this position.This perpetual
movement – based on the impotence or incapacity of knowledge (S2) to do justice
to the cause of desire (a) – maintains desire, but as unsatisfied. In castrating the
master, the hysteric is also not sparing the father, thus suppressing the real agent
who could lead her/him to consent to the mother’s castration. This is one of the
ambiguities of some currents of feminism, which may seek to promote the couple
constituted by the hysterical subject and the castrated master as a general rule in
culture. The emancipatory ideal is thus undermined by an economy of jouissance
in which the sought-for partner is castrated (a class from which it would be false to
exclude machos), which consequently leads to an impasse concerning that which
cannot be castrated, something that every speaking being must come up against
 UMHA 127

in order to gain access to the Archimedean point that would enable reality to be
changed. For each castrated master, there is a mother who remains untouchable.
What is in question, to be still more precise, is desire, insofar as the subject makes
itself the agent of discourse. It is therefore not enough to treat this desire as the best
part of the social bond (this is the case even if desire, in Lacan, is Pauline, and can be
deduced from the law). We saw this in our reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972,
1980) Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Even if desire is made schizophrenic, it is not
certain that it can be cleansed of its tendency to become the subject’s excuse: the
subject can simply proclaim, “that’s my choice”, one in which any consideration of
the other (person) would tend towards zero. Such a choice could manifest its vague
hopes only in a dazzling but inconsequential display of the law of the heart or in that
of the various cynical forms of the beautiful soul. Lacan took these two essential fig-
ures of subjectivity from Hegel (1807), who was himself inspired by Schiller’s (1781)
The Robbers; they cannot be reduced to a neurosis, but instead exemplify a subjec-
tive position. Certainly, in order not to be tempted to make this discourse moral by
demoralising desire, we should note that if the hysterical subject was Freud’s muse,
she was also and remains the vestal virgin who worships truth; through the discourse
of which she is the agent, she defends the truth of desire against the education/
instruction of the master.17 However, the best expression of this position is, rather,
that the essence of desire can only be put to the test in wanting.

A
Last but not least, there is the discourse of the analyst. It is characterised by author-
ising a desire that is not a subject’s desire but originates in a semblance of the
object. This proposition of Lacan’s is clearly as scandalous as Freud’s attack on the
equivalence between the psyche and consciousness and his daring thesis that there
is an unconscious thinking. In this discourse, we encounter a non-subjective desire!
Lacan’s discovery begins and ends here.
It should be said at once that this desire without demand (see Lacan, 2001b,
p. 370) is dissociated from the desire that manifests itself in the discourse of the
hysteric, a desire that is attached pathetically to the subject; in the analytic treatment,
this new desire has been transferred to the semblance of the object, which alone can
be adapted to fit this unrepresentable object.Thus, a first conclusion already appears:
by situating the subject of desire in the place of the other, the analytic discourse
becomes the only discourse to apprehend the other – not the counterpart [sem-
blable], but the other in its non-(veri)-similitude [l’in-(vrai)-semblable] – as a subject.
From the preceding discussion, the reader has probably been able to deduce the
matheme of the analytic discourse:

impossibility
a S
S2 S1
Discourse of the Analyst
128 The capitalist discourse

Just as it is impossible for the master (S1) to command knowledge (S2), so it

is also impossible for the analyst (a) to command the analysand (S). This is a way
of indicating the opposition between suggestion and psychoanalysis. During the
treatment, however, transference covers over and masks this impossibility. An end,
however, can be envisioned by remembering that although transference is a form
of alienation, it also arouses, in the subject who trusts it, a desire for free association,
S/
which can be written as . Resolving transference conditions the conclusion of
S1
analysis; this comes within the grasp of the analysand as soon as s/he has experi-
enced – an experience that requires patience – the inability of the signifier that
has been produced (S1) to represent her/him for the other signifier. Between
what s/he says (S1) and what s/he knows (S2), there is a disjunction that interdicts
jouissance. Accepting this disjunction implies consenting to a situation in which
the symptom, rather than the subject, knows. One can wonder whether accepting the
mother’s castration would be equivalent to this new condition, and the answer
would be that it both would and would not be. It would be, in the sense that this
acceptance is a necessary condition for this change. It would also not be, for this
acceptance does not make up for [supplée] what the Name-of-the-Father can-
not accomplish: the movement beyond the phallic function. In saying this, I am
encroaching on what I shall deal with in a more developed way in the final section
of this book.
This disjunction and its consequences prove that there is an impossibility, and this
condition characterises the relation written on the upper line: a → S. This same line
will reappear in the capitalist discourse, where it will be marked as possible. Before
this discourse can be presented in detail, however, it is necessary to examine the
logical framework that Lacan borrowed from twentieth-century mathematical logic;
this framework provides the key that will make the logical implication of S1 → S2
intelligible.
Bertrand Russell occupies a central place among Lacan’s references. If Russell
left to Wittgenstein the sceptic’s task of developing the idea of private language,
his discovery of the paradox that bears his name remains historically significant,
and not only because it eluded and even went against the work of Gottlob Frege
(see Russell, 1902). Consider the catalogue of all catalogues that is supposed to list
the catalogues that do not contain themselves. If this catalogue is on that list, there
is a problem, because the catalogue is supposed to contain the list of all catalogues
that do not contain themselves, which this catalogue now does, and this means that
it violates the very definition of what a set is. Yet if the catalogue is not on the list,
there is a problem as well, because it should, as a catalogue that does not contain
itself, appear there.18
Russell formulated this contradiction in 1901, at roughly the same time that
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published. It expresses the relation between
language and speech perfectly, and highlights what Lacan (see 1973b, p. 483)
called the “aspherical” character of this relation. The paradox allows us to define
 UMHA 129

the master signifier, S1, as the signifier that is a member of the set even if it should
not be. If we remove the master signifier from the set, the latter will no longer
contain itself, and therefore the master signifier should be a member of it. The
S2 is the second signifier, whose status is based in the fact that the first signifier
has been excluded. This is what happens every time language is used in any way,
even in baby talk, as we understand it. This logic controls how signifiers are dif-
ferentiable from each other, and it runs counter to Saussure’s idea about the two
sides of a sheet of paper.19 Of course, we could settle for saying that if there is
only one signifier, nothing can be signified (everything is, say, a “strumpf ”) and
that, for this reason, it is necessary to take the inherently differential or opposi-
tional character of the signifier into account: “black” is not “white”. However,
that would be quite inadequate and would lead us to miss Lacan’s essential point
here.
The S1 – the signifier called the “first” – is always an intruder in relation to
the Other, that is, to the “treasure trove of signifiers” (Lacan, 1960, pp. 682, 684).
That signifier belongs to language without belonging to language. What becomes
of the second signifier – the signifier that, because it is not in the set, should be
in it – in this case? It cannot be a member of the set, because if it were, it would
become S1. And here is the truly ingenious part of what Lacan does. What hap-
pens is that since this S2 cannot be subsumed [inscrit] within language, it is sub-
sumed [inscrit] within the body. It is written [inscrit] there as the signifying cut
that is the Freudian part object: an object that has been removed from the body
(breast, excrement, gaze, voice) and become separate from it. The halting move-
ment, in which the master signifier is intrusively written [inscrit] into language
while the second signifier is written [inscrit] into the body, sets up the disparity
between the unconscious and the drive or, in the dichotomous terms of Freud’s
second topography, between the unconscious and the id. While the unconscious
is a master who orders us around, the drive, literally, drives us – it steers [conduit]
or sidetracks [dérive] us – for, as bound up with the living body, or better, with the
way in which the symbolic is incorporated into the body, it produces and feeds
jouissance insofar as the latter is condensed into the drive’s objects. In this sense,
the drive is the response to what, as far as jouissance is concerned, imposes itself
as the consequence of Russell’s paradox: the locus of the signifier is the non-locus of
jouissance.
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a beggar who has borrowed money
from a more prosperous acquaintance is surprised when his benefactor criticises
him for using the money to order salmon mayonnaise at a restaurant: “I don’t
understand you . . . if I haven’t any money I can’t eat salmon mayonnaise, and if
I have some money I mustn’t eat salmon mayonnaise. Well, then, when am I to
eat salmon mayonnaise?” (Freud, 1905, p. 50). An even better example would be
Lacan’s (1966f, p. 114) ironic remark that Marie-Antoinette made cake the object
of psychoanalysis since it was “not to scarce bread, but to cake that the Queen sent
her peoples in time of famine”. Such is the object of psychoanalysis: something that
130 The capitalist discourse

is cut like a remnant [reste] from what has not been traced out between S1 and S2.
This is a solution to Russell’s paradox, but not one that Russell himself would have
proposed, for he was stuck in the universe of propositional logic. In this solution,
the signifier that should be in the symbolic because it is not there is, nevertheless,
not lost; instead it operates from within the body, condensing jouissance on the
inner and outer borders of the object of the drive.20
Incidentally, S2 should be considered as both the second signifier and the link
between the first and second signifiers. This linking is not achieved by adding the
first and second signifier together, since that would involve sidestepping the prob-
lems raised by Russell’s paradox. It is a linking that is heterogeneous, inasmuch as the
signifier that represents the subject can only be in the set that includes the second
signifier if, and only if, the second signifier is excluded from that set. This is how
Lacan’s time in the guild of structuralists came to a close.
Let’s take a break.
I could have called this chapter “The Birth of Aphrodite and Athena”. These
myths provide two different ways of throwing cold water on the assertion that
new life is generated when a man and a woman come together, and also, in a
subtle way, on the belief that there is a sexual relation which can be written as
“xRy”.
This would be a good place to try to shed some light on how psychoanalysis
creates another axiom, one that requires us to draw a distinction between being-
though-generation [l’être générationnel] produced by mommy-daddy – a holophrase
that is almost a hologram – and the being of the symptom [l’être de symptôme], that
opposes the generational. We are going to see the consequences of this.

Notes
1 In this passage, Lacan (1960, p. 682) describes the Other is a “treasure trove” rather than
a code. At the end of his teaching, starting with Encore (Lacan, 1975c), he examines the
status of the Other’s existence, which is not to be confused with its logical inconsist-
ency. In his final work, the Other becomes the Other-than-the-Real, i.e. meaning.What
are the consequences of this definition if “meaning is always religious” as Lacan (1980a,
p. 130) wrote in the “Letter of Dissolution” of the École freudienne de Paris?
2 It is probably not mere chance that contemporary philosophers such as Agamben (2002)
and Derrida (2000) have again taken up a question that seemed to have been fully
worked out: what distinguishes humans from animals? It is worth recalling that Witt-
genstein (1953, PPF i § 1) was asking this as well, at the very beginning of Philosophy of
Psychology – A Fragment: “One can imagine an animal angry, fearful, sad, joyful, startled.
But hopeful? And why not?”
3 Her real name was Ida Bauer.
4 The “real”, however, is not synonymous with trauma. One could go so far as to say that
by making the real a word, one effaces its semantic value as an “anti-word”, since the real
and meaning are mutually exclusive.
5 “Vociferate” means “to give a voice to” (from the Latin “vox” and “ferre”).
6 We recall the great spectacle that was made of the first Gulf war.
7 [Translator’s note: see Freud (1925, p. 237):
The other sort of decision made by the function of judgement – as to the real exist-
ence of something of which there is a presentation (reality-testing) – is a concern of
 UMHA 131

the definitive reality-ego, which develops out of the initial pleasure-ego. It is now no
longer a question of whether what has been perceived (a thing) shall be taken into
the ego or not, but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can
be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well. It is, we see, once more a question of
external and internal.]
8 It has been shown that the translation of the Russian term used by Lenin in Materialism
and Empirio-criticism as “reflet [reflection]” is incorrect.
9 [Translator’s note: See, for example, Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1954).]
10 Marx does not agree with this effacement of truth. For example, there is the truth of the
proletariat, which he makes a subject – and, moreover, a collective one – without wor-
rying that the “truth of the subject” might cover over an abuse of ethics.
11 Norifumi Suzuki’s 1974 film School of the Holy Beast illustrates this debasement with all
the cruelty that could be desired. The list of books dealing with the holy bond between
the priest and the witch is too long to mention here. It has become common to note that
a dash of the sacred adds spice to profane eroticism. Michelet’s (1862) classic, Satanism
and Witchcraft, can be mentioned, as can Michel Carmona’s (1988) Les diables de Loudun,
Robert Mandrou’s (1979) collection Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siècle, and finally, the
summa by Mario Praz (1933), The Romantic Agony.
12 Nerval’s (1855) Aurélia enables us to distinguish between being an author (which any-
one can become) and becoming a writer (which is not self-evident). On the basis of his
symptom, which can be qualified, from the outside, as a psychotic episode, Nerval opens
up a new relation to life, by means of an experience of writing that makes dreams, delu-
sions and even hallucinations into a sort of compass. Thus, from the inside, he constructs
a “reality”, a term that is usually taken to be inimical to dreams, delusions and hallucina-
tions, and highlights a dimension of reality that is ordinarily covered over.
13 Doesn’t the substitution of initiation for psychoanalysis correspond, in terms of the
extension of these words, to the substitution of institutions for associations? This is a
very important and relevant question that is not unrelated to “article 52” passed by the
French parliament in 2004. [Translator’s note: This controversial amendment to France’s
public health code, which is sometimes referred to as the “Accoyer amendment” after
the deputy who proposed it, set regulatory restrictions on the use of the term “psycho-
therapist” by clinicians practicing in France.] In any case, it is alarming when prominent
psychoanalysts start writing that an analyst is trained in and by the institution, without
mentioning that an analyst is produced, first of all, by his/her own treatment. It involves
a sort of pre-Kantian determination to suppress, as it were, the resistance of the air so as
better to clip the wings of the dove.
14 In the new French translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre notes
that the German term “Knecht” means “vassal”. [Translator’s note: The English translator of
this work, A.V Miller, renders the same term as “Bondsman” (see Hegel, 1807, p. 111).]
15 The “calculation” involved in Pascal’s wager is, in this respect, the strict computus of
the discourse of the master. As Lacan (2006a, p. 396) notes: “Pascal was a master and,
as everyone knows, a pioneer of capitalism”. This assertion has the value of dissipating
the misunderstanding that Pascal’s wager prefigured analytic treatment. For example,
see Michel Bousseyroux (2001, p. 31): “whoever wagers, like Pascal, from ‘nothing to
infinity’, wagers only from ‘dad’ to worse, a wager that will not be disappointing”. This
contradicts what Lacan (2006a, p. 396) says about the wager: “Every time there is a
wager about life, it is the master who is talking”. In other words, this misunderstanding
involves not seeing that the life that is at stake in the wager is never one’s own; it is the
slave’s.
16 In one of his final seminars, Lacan (1976–1977, 10 May 1977) clarifies this as follows:
“The S indexed as 1 does not represent the subject in relation to S indexed 2”.
17 The discourse of the hysteric in particular, is the one in which the double bind of the
master is revealed in its double meaning. Getting out of neurosis means getting out of
this double meaning.
132 The capitalist discourse

18 [Translator’s note: Russell’s paradox can be visualised as follows (Robinson & Groves,
2002, p. 28):

Let’s imagine a catalogues of all catalogues. Is it, or is it not, a member of itself?

– If the catalogue “of all catalogues” includes itself as a member, then
it is simply one more catalogue among all catalogues and is there-
fore not a catalogue of all catalogues.
– OR, to put the same idea in another way –
– It is simply one more class of catalogue among all other classes of
catalogues…
– If this (or any) class of all classes is a member of itself –
as a catalogue of all catalogues is a catalogue –then it
should not be in this class which is reserved for though
which are not members of themselves…
– however, if it is not a member of itself – as indeed a class of all
classes cannot be a class of itself – as, e.g., a “group of men” is not a
man – then it should be in this class and is therefore a member of itself.
Which is Russell’s point: any set “X” (e.g., a catalogue of all catalogues) is a member of
itself if, and only if, it is not a member of itself. This is self-contradictory.

19 [Translator’s note: Saussure (1911, p. 132) uses the analogy of a sheet of paper to describe
how thought and language cannot be separated from one another:
A language might also be compared to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side of the
sheet and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to take a pair of scissors and
cut one side of paper without at the same time cutting the other, so it is impossible
in a language to isolate sound from thought, or thought from sound. To separate the
two for theoretical purposes takes us into either pure psychology or pure phonetics,
not linguistics.]
20 This logic involves the One and the Other. “Other” means that it is not identical to
itself; if it were, it would not be Other. This places it in opposition to the “One”, which
is identical to itself. This “One” is the basis of repetition, i.e. of the fact that jouissance is
always lost yet again and lost without ever having been attained. This one (Freud’s unary
trait) comes each time to mark each new failure with a notch. (This is the opposite of
the notches made by prehistoric hunters to note their success in killing their prey.) This
marking by the One can only take place because of the existence of language, the sup-
posedly general murder of the thing. This justifies Lacan’s qualification of the Other (the
place from which language originates) as the empty set (∅). With each failure to reach
jouissance, the object a – surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] – emerges in the place of the
empty set. The object a indicates both that there is no longer any jouissance [la jouissance
n’est plus] and that, at the same time, because it has been reduced to nothing, it wants more
[elle en veuille plus]. Something else needs to be written: the One of the extra signifier
[signifiant en plus]; because it has not been proffered in new speech, it is not in the Other.
These actions give us some simple formulas: first 1 (1, ∅), then 1 (1, a). Within the
parentheses (1, ∅) or (1, a), we must read S2, knowledge, which is constituted not by
adding together 1 + 1, but by the pairing of the two heterogeneous elements. It was to
qualify these relations that Lacan, in one of his final seminars, made a clarification that
I have already quoted: “The S indexed as 1 does not represent the subject in relation to
S indexed as 2”.
4
THE CAPITALIST EXEMPTION

A discourse without loss

1
Here is the matheme of the capitalist discourse:1

(Place of the agent or S S2

semblance)

(Place of the truth) S1 a

The matheme is constructed by inverting the terms found in the places of the sem-
blance (or of the agent) and truth in the discourse of the master: S is now in the
position of S1 and vice versa. The direction of the arrow between S and S1 remains
unchanged, so that, in the capitalist discourse, it now moves from the top to the
bottom. As a final modification, the arrow that had gone from a to S1 moves from a
to S. The consequences of these changes require some comments.
Pleasure, like unpleasure, is a physiological reality. Jouissance is of a different
order; if it does not exist without the body – the body as organism – it also does
not exist without knowledge. In skipping the barrier of jouissance, it also skips an
obstacle, the nature of which gives rise to a promise that can be kept only through
annihilation. Jouissance is a “negative substance”. This means that by speaking,
I destroy myself as thing and that this self-virtualisation would provide me with
jouissance if I were not, as a candidate for jouissance, annihilated by this very can-
didacy.2 How can we get out of this infernal circle, even though those tormented
by Satan (and this may well be Satan’s hope) have the chance to participate in jouis-
sance through his dark side? This dark side, in turn, is not as bad as vanity, abandon-
ment or an emptiness of affect, to use the most common vocabulary. The central
134 The capitalist discourse

thread of this questioning has been woven in and out through the space/time of
thought; the relief and even enthusiasm of the postwar period went hand in hand
with a degradation, one that emerged through an emphasis on the absurd. Its herald
was Albert Camus’ (1951) The Rebel.

2
The Milan lecture, in May 1972, entitled, “On the Psychoanalytic Discourse”,
introduces the matheme of the capitalist discourse; through it, Lacan, brings out the
impact of this use of language and suggests a way out of this nightmarish Möbius
strip, provided that we are able to open this door. Perhaps an example – an unusual
one for this context – may help us grasp what is at stake in this problem. In an ana-
lytic session, you go deliberately against Freud’s advice not to look for information
about how things “really” happened; you say to a female analysand, “You could ask
your mother about this”. During the next session, she tells you, “I couldn’t ask my
mother anything”, and then adds, “It’s like the time when my mother asked me,
‘Whom do you prefer: your father or me?’” Nothing could stop her from hearing
the analyst’s words as coming from the Other of transference.The analyst’s enuncia-
tion was reduced to the mother’s, who, by her question, had closed the child up in
a transferential cage: either you prefer me, or you don’t really love me. If this analy-
sand were to ask the mother anything, no matter how small, it would become the
equivalent of the answer that she had not wanted to give at the time: I prefer you.
As a result, she could only see her analyst as her mother’s ally. The analyst, whom
she had wanted to become her liberator, became her jailer.
This slippage was not as unfortunate as it may seem, since it helped the analy-
sand to say something new about the closing-off of her relation with her mother.
In the present context, it can provide us with the prototype of a way of leaving
the capitalist discourse. In order to see how it can do so, we need to examine
things more closely. The demand contained in the analyst’s initial suggestion has
a signification and can be understood “objectively” by approaching it simply in
terms of its vocabulary and syntax. The analysand, however, apprehends it on a
different plane; she hears it in a specific context, thus modifying its “objective”
signification. As a result, following this suggestion would be the equivalent of
accepting what she has always refused her mother: to enter into a transferential
relation with her that would not be exclusive, but would take precedence over
others. This then leads her to take a further step: she thinks that the analyst was
asking her, indirectly, to treat her relation with him as more important than eve-
rything else. Let us say that every signification is heard on a level that always affects the
message: a meaning is produced that was not contained in the signification. The “slippage”
of the signifier means that the signifier is received on a plane that is always itself
slippery. It is slippery because receiving a message involves not only its content
and its emitter but also the relation between the receiver and the emitter, a rela-
tion called transference.
 The capitalist exemption 135

If we consider this fact in all its breadth, we can conclude, as Lacan notes, that
a word can be made to say something very different from what it says. Someone
who claims to be an atheist can be shown to believe in God, or psychoanalytic
theory can be shown to say something that is the opposite of what one thinks it
says, etc. Although in my anecdote, this slippage may seem to be a disadvantage –
perhaps an unacceptable one – for the treatment, it is really quite the contrary.
Through this misunderstanding, the subject can preserve, or rather bring into
existence, the margin of indeterminacy that will enable her to grasp the forced
choice of alienation and make it the symptomatic means of emancipating herself.
For the neurotic, this will occur through the separation produced by the fantasy;
for the psychotic, it will occur through the specific space that authorises him/her
to have a delusion. True separation can be encountered, however, only once the
fantasy has been dismantled and the delusion has been “stabilized in a . . . meta-
phor” (Lacan, 1959, p. 498).
These considerations take us to the heart of the questions posed by the capitalist
discourse. Hollywood films such as The Truman Show or Being John Malkovitch por-
tray people’s efforts to escape from a virtualisation that seeks to programme them
entirely.This virtualisation turns a stage or film set into reality, and thus reduces this
fiction to being nothing more than the mapping (in the mathematical sense) of a
linguistic function forged by an Other. The capitalist discourse seems capable of
generating this sort of universe:“me, clone; you, hologram”. In order to escape from
this virtualisation, we must make the barrier of jouissance – which the capitalist
discourse has rendered inoperative – function again. In psychoanalytic terms, the
capitalist discourse dissolves the drive into the unconscious. From Jean Baudrillard
to the multimedia artist Tony Oursler, the theme of the cunning triumph of virtu-
alisation has now been fully sketched out. This may also be what the psychoanalyst
Jean-Claude Maleval (2003) is evoking with his expression “foreclosure of refer-
ence”. I myself especially like the French children’s show, Bonne nuit les petits [Good
Night, Little Ones], in which Oscar, the nephew of Nounours, the Teddy bear,
turns himself off with a remote control; this shows us that virtualisation can only
succeed through the initiative of the agent who is also its object.
Let us look at this problem from a different perspective, that of Orwell’s Nine-
teen Eighty-Four (1949). Winston Smith, imputing to Big Brother a determination to
make him submit to a sacrificial castration, comes to love Big Brother. Love seems to
emerge alchemically from an annihilation to which one consents.This is not a baseless
notion, provided that we see that this transformation of the emotion does away with
Big Brother, since Big Brother is nothing other than the great persecutor as such.3
As we have seen, the unrestrained slippage of the signifier is connected with the
fluctuations of all signification. This slippage must also be examined in relation to
meaning. Lacan reminds us that S1, the One of the signifier, rotates through each of
the places in the discourse: those of the semblance, the other, the production and
the truth. Because it can be translated from one discourse to another, a meaning can
be born.This thesis is found explicitly in “L’étourdit”: “This touches on the fact that
136 The capitalist discourse

meaning is never produced except through the translation from one discourse to
another” (Lacan, 1973b, p. 480). Meaning, as distinct from signification, implies that
the signifier can be translated. There is meaning only to the extent that there exists
something that is outside a purely denotative language; this “outside” is speech itself,
inasmuch as it supposes a subject.
Several questions can be raised here. Was Lacan correct in using the term “dis-
course” to describe the functioning of capitalism? A first error must be eliminated
here: a discourse is not a set of words. The expression “capitalist discourse” des-
ignates the social bond that stems from the domination of the capitalist mode of
production. The term “discourse” has, as it were, been substituted for that of “rela-
tions of production” and throws light on certain aspects of these relations. A more
difficult objection can also, however, be raised: the disjunction that is internal to
jouissance – and which can be found in all of the four discourses – is absent from
the capitalist discourse.
Does this absence discredit the use of the term “discourse” in its Lacanian sense?
In order not to answer this question too hurriedly, I will simply remark that the bar-
rier of jouissance is not really the condition sine qua non of discourse. The necessary
condition of discourse, as Lacan reminds us in this lecture, is the semblance: there is
no discourse that is not of the semblance.4 The unchecked slippage of the signifier
has a positive aspect: it enables us to exit from the aporia of jouissance. It runs the
risk, however, of becoming so uncontrolled that it would destroy the bond assured
by the function of language. The semblance prevents this from taking place. The
semblance [semblant], or its French homophone, sens blanc [blank meaning],5 also
takes the side of this slippage; it does so in opposition to language, which claims to
make complete and absolute sense of everything. Instead, the semblance permits our
exchanges to have an acceptable level of misunderstanding.The objective of theatre
is to make this semblance implode, or rather to reveal the conditions that allow it
to function, conditions that would otherwise remain unperceived. It happens that,
in the capitalist discourse, S occupies the place of the semblance. If the absence of
the barrier of jouissance has a major consequence for this subject, the very fact that
it occupies the place of the semblance has a stabilising effect: the semblance enables
the capitalist discourse to ward off the inordinate slippage of the signified.
The semblance is what, despite both this slipping and the complete impossibility
of jouissance, enables language, through discourse, to create a bond and ensure a
regulation and circulation of jouissance; it is able, in principle, to distance us from
the spectres of mania or of a passage à l’acte, both of which are ways of putting an
end to this bond.The price of such regulation is the conventionality and artificiality
of our linguistic exchanges, which make the search for the truth of meaning into a
bargain; we get it at a cut rate.
In this context, I would like to introduce another unusual but, I hope, revealing
example, one that concerns the pharmacist from the preceding chapter. The capi-
talist subject believes that this figure can reveal what s/he desires, but surprisingly,
the pharmacist becomes important here by refusing to sell a product. Through this
trick, the capitalist discourse demonstrates its “superior” grasp of desire. It does not
 The capitalist exemption 137

satisfy need, for which it substitutes desire. The proletarian would like to have pub-
lic housing, but instead is offered a villa, thereby placing the subject as consumer
in command. From then on, the subject’s desire – as consumer and customer –
becomes the effect of the reformulation – or interpretation – of the demand by
the other, the pharmacist, who is located in S2. In the matheme of the capitalist
discourse, this circuit goes from S to S2, by way of S1, and thus via a master signifier.
This principle of authority is concealed (since it is under the subject), but it is always
necessary in order to certify the kind of knowledge that is in question. In experi-
mental psychology, its trace can be found in the Stockholm syndrome as well as in
those chilling experiments that show how submission to authority can turn almost
anyone into a torturer. In the matheme, the rising diagonal of the vector that goes
from S1 to S2 points to this power, which can be found anywhere at any moment.
Throughout history, only the discourse of science forged by Descartes’ dubito, sum
has been able to make it totter or tremble, without abolishing it.
The arrow, a → S is found in both the capitalist and the analytic discourses, but
it functions in them in completely opposed ways.6 In the analytic discourse, it is
marked by an impossibility. In the capitalist discourse, however, surplus-jouissance
(a) is supposed to saturate the lack-in-jouissance (S). Whereas the capitalist dis-
course promotes the submission of knowledge to a masked authority, the discourse
of the analyst writes a permanent disjunction between the master signifier and
knowledge, a disjunction that could only be removed if jouissance were to fill up
the place of the signifier.7 Finally, it should be remembered that in the analytic dis-
course (as in the other three original discourses), one place – truth – has a special
status. In the four discourses, you can start out from this place, but you cannot reach
it, since the two arrows move away from it. This inaccessibility of truth in discourse
does not mean that it does not exist. Truth exists and speaks, but you cannot speak
it. The capitalist discourse, on the other hand, is constructed in order to miss the
inaccessibility of truth. Not only is the place of truth accessible, but it must also be
passed through in order to reach knowledge. Truth, in the capitalist discourse, has the
same status as it does in astrology; it cannot be falsified.
The capacity of the mathemes to generate such readings and consequences may
be surprising, and this is especially true of the capitalist discourse, which has a
somewhat improvised quality. Lacan himself emphasised that these mathemes only
“imitated” mathematics, and he sought later, in topology, to find a way of making
judgements that would not be subjected to the caprices of language. It is also true,
however, that the choice of a (mathematised) writing is, in itself, a choice in favour
of science.8 Writing, with its terms, its signs, its punctuation and its rules for place-
ment in space, imposes orientations and leads to conclusions that limit, a priori, the
slippage of the signifier, on the condition that we resist any imaginary instrumental-
isation of writing, which, in the end, would involve magic. This is why it is false to
say that psychoanalysis, as Karl Popper (1974, pp. 254–255) claimed, is unfalsifiable
(an objection that Freud had already perceived). If psychoanalysis is problematic, it
is because it is always falsifiable, right up until the moment when it ends. Indeed,
it could be said that the end of an analysis is the end of the jouissance that comes
138 The capitalist discourse

from falsifying analysis: will [volonté] then becomes the safety catch [cran] of desire,
something that, in the same step, the will understands to be both indestructible
and discontinuous. It would not be too extreme to say that the analytic discourse
is constructed on the principle of the inaugural and irremediable loss of jouissance,
and that the nostalgia for falsifiability is only the ghost of this loss. The capitalist
discourse presents itself as a discourse that has no loss and no entropy.
In this discourse S2 is the slave-servant whose knowledge can be activated. The
relation S1 → S2 – the diagonal arrow that goes from the bottom left to the top
right – can be transposed onto the capitalist/worker couple, since what intervenes
in production is the savoir-faire of the labour force: the highly variable degree of the
worker’s skill, which goes from the status of being semi-skilled to that of engineer.
The S1 does not possess knowledge; it derives its capacity to command from
financial power. The worker obeys and produces surplus-value, which Marx dis-
covered. We know that for Marx, whom no one challenges on this point, capital-
ism is characterised by the fact that labour-power has become a commodity, just
like wheat or iron. Thus, with capitalism, surplus-jouissance (a) takes the form of
surplus-value. Surplus-jouissance also calls to mind Freud’s Lustgewinn, the “yield
of pleasure”, and already in Freud (1905a, p. 28), this yield makes up for the struc-
tural failure of jouissance, as is demonstrated by the fact that humour produces
a Lustgewinn. Mehrwert, then, is the extra value produced by the salaried worker,
throughout the working day, after having first reproduced the value or his/her
labour-power. In order to reproduce her/his capacity to work (education, food,
lodging), a worker needs to create a value of, let’s say, four daily hours of labour. If
s/he works eight hours, however, the difference – eight minus four – constitutes
the Mehrwert.
In this sense, capitalism precedes and conditions psychoanalysis in shaping jouis-
sance by means of value.This value is exchange-value, not the use-value that must be
renounced in order to make the primitive accumulation of capital possible. Some-
thing makes our ears prick up here: it is the “surplus”, the Gewinn (yield), rather than
the Lust (pleasure). Lacan retroactively introduces into Marx’s discovery of surplus-
value the element that explains the power of the capitalist discourse.Without substi-
tuting surplus-jouissance for surplus-value, it becomes impossible to explain the gap
between the “real” economy – which follows the principle of ­surplus-value – and
the economy that functions through globalised finance. Surplus-value only consti-
tutes the motive force of the capitalist mode of production as long as it enables there
to be jouissance; if it did not do so, no one would care about it.
Yet who gets off here? A Marxist could retort that the proletarian sells his/her
labour-power simply in order to survive: people eat to live rather than live to eat.
“The jouissance that you’re talking about”, this Marxist might say, concerns the
capitalist. This objection cannot simply be brushed off, for it comes from the real
of the class struggle. However, the “cunning” of the capitalist discourse involves
interesting the proletarian in jouissance, and in order to do so, it transforms the
proletarian into a consumer, a capitalist subject: the S is in the place of the agent.
Thus, money no longer serves as an instrument of measurement or as the universal
 The capitalist exemption 139

equivalent; instead, it is only valuable to the extent that it engenders itself or seems
to engender itself, in a parthenogenesis that excludes the productive process.
Marx, according to Lacan (2011b, p. 90), completed the capitalist discourse by
giving it “its subject, the proletariat. Thanks to this, the discourse of capitalism has
flourished in every nation-state that has taken a Marxist form”. This rather daring
judgment rectifies his assessment two years earlier, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
that the Soviet system functioned through the discourse of the university: knowl-
edge, taken as a unified whole, was its agent, and the “new man” was supposed to be
produced by it (Lacan, 1991, p. 206). In my opinion, this earlier judgment is correct,
but the subsequent collapse of this system gives weight to the later thesis. Concern-
ing this collapse, it would be comic, but fair, to argue that with the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, the capitalist discourse experienced its first real defeat. Why not
say that the Soviet system constituted the supreme stage of capitalism, for its axioms
did not challenge the functioning of the capitalist discourse? The appropriation of
­surplus-value did not stop. It was distributed differently, and apparently – or, in any
case, according to the ideology – S1 and S2, the capitalist and the worker, were no
longer in an antagonistic relation: the former tried to get people to work too much,
and the latter to diminish the amount of labour. Otherwise, the slogan, “we are all
capitalists” sapped the Soviet system like the “old mole” (Marx, 1852, p. 185). Since
the system was never able to acknowledge that this was its slogan, jouissance tended
to get a lot of bad publicity; the proletarians had to renounce it in order to have a bet-
ter future, while the bureaucracy transformed itself into a bureaucracy of jouissance.
In all this, there are strategies for obtaining jouissance, which can be distin-
guished in terms of the way in which we conceive of two couples within the dis-
course: S – S2 and S – S1. The first of these couples presents us with the two guises
of the proletarian: S is the proletarian whose desire yields to surplus-jouissance
(work more to get off more)9; S2 is the worker as producer (work less in order to be
less exploited). The other couple shows us the two positions taken by the capitalist.
The capitalist is also sundered between the figure who appropriates surplus-value
and commands the process, and the subject who consumes. Once this relation has
been established, it cannot be revoked. The worker, in S2, can go on strike, but
the capitalist, in S1, cannot. The capitalist philanthropist or patron of the arts will
never go so far as to question the capitalist discourse itself. On the other hand, the
capitalist can put him/herself in the ascetic position of subject, without thereby
modifying the process. If the proletarian withdraws, as far as possible, from the
position of subject of consumption, this will not have much of an effect. It is obvi-
ous, finally, that within the framework of the capitalist discourse, if the proletarian
consumes more – a change that would go against the grain of the capitalist mode of
production – this never puts a stop to the production of wealth.
From this, we must conclude that only the strike, a work stoppage, can constitute
the symptom. We must also conclude that highlighting the contradictions between
S and S2, and between S and S1 reveals not a splitting but a sundering. The key to
this discourse is the recognition that the necessity of surplus-jouissance is based on
the status of jouissance as a “hole that must be filled” (Lacan, 1970, p. 434).
140 The capitalist discourse

Marx fills this hole through surplus-value. This is why Lacan (1970, p. 434)
says that Mehrwert [surplus-value] is Marxlust, Marx’s surplus-jouissance”. Sur-
plus-value is the cause of desire, which the capitalist economy makes into its
fundamental principle: the principle of extensive production. Capitalist produc-
tion – the cycle M – C – M′ (Money – Commodity – Money + Money) – implies
that consumption must always increase, but this production would come to a
sudden stop if consumption actually procured jouissance. Consumption would
then halt, production would slow down, and this cycle would end. If this has not
occurred, it is because this economy, through a reversal that Marx did not foresee,
produces a lack-in-jouissance. The more I consume, the greater the gap between jouis-
sance and consumption becomes. Thus, there is a struggle involving the distribution of
this surplus-value, which “only leads those who are exploited to compete on the
basic principle of exploitation, in order to harbour their indisputable participation
in the thirst of lack-in-jouissance” (Lacan, 1970, p. 435).Vilfredo Pareto, one of the
theorists of neoclassical economics, forged an exquisite expression: the “ophelim-
ity” of a glass of water. Pareto made an incontestable observation: a drinker takes
less pleasure in a third glass of water than in the first. He then deduced a law from
it: the value of the water decreases in proportion to its consumption. The opposite
law, however, governs the capitalist economy, in which we do more than simply
drink without being thirsty. Beyond even the drunk who can’t say no, in the capi-
talist economy, “The more I drink, the thirstier I get”.

The choreography of love

As we have just seen, in the capitalist discourse, the accessibility of truth goes hand
in hand with a suppression of the disjunction between the places of truth and pro-
duction (on the bottom left and right). This suppression exonerates the capitalist
discourse from a requirement that was believed to constitute all discourses.
The other structural characteristic that we have examined is the creation of a
vector, a → S, which does not exist in the discourse of the master, from which the
capitalist discourse derives. This arrow is also not found in the discourse of the
hysteric, and although it does appear in the discourse of the analyst, it is marked
explicitly as impossible. Only in the discourse of the university, which has a special
kinship with the capitalist discourse, does this arrow function.
Within this framework, we can now approach another aspect of the capitalist
discourse. As Lacan stated:

What differentiates the discourse of capitalism is Verwerfung, the fact of

rejecting, outside all the fields of the symbolic. This brings with it the con-
sequence I have already said it has. What does it reject? Well, castration.
Any order, any discourse that aligns itself with capitalism, sweeps to one
side what we may simply call, my fine friends, matters of love. You see, it’s
a mere nothing.
 The capitalist exemption 141

This was precisely why, two centuries after this slippage, which after all we
may call a Calvinist slippage, castration finally made its irruptive entrance in
the form of the analytic discourse.
(Lacan, 2011b, pp. 90–91)

The heart of this statement is its connection between the setting aside of “mat-
ters of love” and the foreclosure of castration. Before we approach it directly, a few
remarks can place it in perspective.
First, according to Lacan, love is what makes up for the nonexistence of the
sexual relation (where the mere addition of man + woman would give one access
to a jouissance that is primary and absolute). There is no sexual relation because of
castration, and the acceptance of this nonexistence can authorise a sexual encoun-
ter that is contingent (see Lacan, 1975c, p. 145). The foreclosure of castration, on
the contrary, has a very different consequence: it makes the sexual relation possible
(which can then be indicated by the arrow, a → S, which can be read as “a woman
fulfils a man”). In consequence, love, as something that makes up for this impos-
sibility, becomes obsolete. The mechanics of sex would then become the physics of
love, and there would be no need to differentiate between sex and love; a manual of
sexology would be the same as the map of Tendre (see Lacan, 1957b, p. 339).
What is more subtle and difficult is an equivalence that Lacan posits in “L’étourdit”:
“Death [la mort] is love [l’amour]” (Lacan, 1973b, p. 475).This reminds us of the romance
of Iseult and Tristan, in which death does indeed signal love. Either there is love or
there is death. Or again, if love, which makes up for the nonexistence of the sexual
relation, is an inaccessible outcome, death will do quite nicely. Only death will be able
to make up for the situation in which castration has left us. Let us note, to strengthen
this reading, that Lacan attributes this equivalence between love and death to Freud.
What appears more directly in Freud’s work, however, is the equivalence between
death and jouissance. If, for Freud, jouissance is impossible for the living being, and is
always lost (whatever the status of primary jouissance may be), the sole virtue of love,
as distinct from desire, is that it brings with it the promise of something that can make
up for this loss. Its narcissistic structure lends itself to this, especially given the lethal
foundation of narcissism, and to realise this specularity of love can be deadly.
The foreclosure of castration, the other term involved, is distinct from that of the
Name-of-the-Father, which serves as the basis of the distinction between psychosis
and neurosis. He uses the arrow, a → S to indicate a subject that, in an asymptotic
accountancy, is completed by its surplus-jouissance. At the limit of this account-
ancy, we can hope to reach an unbarred subject: the “new man”, who will soon
be joined by the most valuable capital, woman. The cycle Money – Commodity –
more Money – which Marx had so impeccably taken apart – is homologous to the
Easter computus; by virtue of money, capitalism virtualises all living things through
money creation. In such an economy, even the cost of death would count for some-
thing, and, in contrast to Freud’s interpretation, the world would be loveless, with
the exception of a religious love for that highly abstract Other, the capitalist system.
142 The capitalist discourse

What is in question here is the status of death. On the side of psychoanalysis, this
is the for-nothing that makes it equivalent to the for-nothing of love, thwarting any
full accountancy of the real (what would it cost to buy the universe and who would
want to buy it?). On the side of capitalism, death would be transformed into a sub-
stance through its commodification, based on an unlimited linguistic virtualisation.
The real would be equal to reality and the sexual relation would be necessary; it
would be the law by which the world works. This world would be nothing more
than the reflection of the sexual relation.
As a result, when Lacan speaks of how castration irrupts back in through the
analytic discourse, we should take him at his word: castration, as revealing the ab-
sense of the sexual relation, only becomes for itself with Freud. It had already been
indicated, more or less, through the Oedipus complex, which was not, however,
enough to permit the Bejahung (the yes to . . .) of castration, even if this consent is
already present with language.
With the coming of capitalism, everything concerning the action of castration is
foreclosed from discourse, starting with “matters of love”: this could cause difficulty
for the Oedipus complex itself. To mention sexual criminality, which, in changing
forms, has always constituted something of the scandal of mores, there are two ways of
struggling against it: reintroducing castration or transforming the Oedipus complex
into a law. The effectiveness of the second solution is limited; only an acceptance
of castration can enable the subject to accept such a law. In counting on law, one
ends up forging a pseudo-castration, which would be complete and total. This
pseudo-castration would only feed the misunderstanding of sexual difference, since
it would reduce the feminine to a binary negative term in relation to the masculine.
The foreclosure of castration does not mean the manufacturing of psychotics,
for it also concerns neurotics, pushing both of them to seek through power – either
as masters or as those who benefit from the latter’s position – a way to keep castra-
tion foreclosed. Can the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic be said to foreclose
castration? In his case history of the Wolf Man, Freud (1918) threw light on this
foreclosure in a way that can accommodate neurosis (see Sauret, 2009).10 This sug-
gests that castration cannot be brought wholly and totally into the field of the sym-
bolic. The capitalist discourse transforms this partial restriction into a general rule.
It must be emphasised that a misunderstanding of castration is a structural, and not
an accidental, part of the castration complex. Such a misinterpretation is inevitable
when femininity is not apprehended as being beyond castration. Being beyond it
means that castration is necessary, but not sufficient.
Now let us examine the context. Lacan (2011b, p. 77) quotes a poem by Paul
Fort: “If all the lasses in the world were to join hands . . . they could make a ring around the
world”. Lacan does not content himself with pointing out that the lasses themselves
never dreamed of this. Unlike boys, they do not need to make a circle: a circle, for
example, of officers or even a Freudian circle. Boys go around in circles because
they are afraid of finding themselves alone with one girl. For this reason, it is up
to the girl to separate the boy from his circle, from his “Masse”. Nothing is missing
from this choreography of love, not even the fact that before she succeeds in taking
 The capitalist exemption 143

a boy out of his circle, a girl will go around with another girl, whom she will then
leave on the sidelines, as soon as she has succeeded in kidnapping a boy.
If girls tend to go “two by two”, this has its foundation in what Lacan (1962,
p. 619) refers to as a jouissance that is “enveloped in its own contiguity”. In this
respect, feminine homosexuality could be particularised as a relation of Other to
Other, and not of same to same. This is the case with the relation between Lol V.
Stein and Tatiana, in Marguerite Duras’ (1964) novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (also
see Lacan, 1965). Tatiana is the secret side of the other woman, the one who is sup-
posed to know how to make men desire, and who thereby finds herself transformed
into a potential companion in jouissance. Could the Female Homosexual’s beloved,
indeed, be interpreted as a woman who might have been desired by the father?
What can be said of these “matters of love” when they are approached from the
feminine side? First, they are different from Freud’s conception of Eros, as he pre-
sents it in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Eros and Ananke have become the parents
of human civilization too. The first result of civilization was that even a fairly large
number of people were now able to live together in a community” (Freud, 1930,
p. 97). Here, Eros proceeds by means of Vereinigung, a “making one” or unification
with which we are quite familiar. Unification contributes to civilisation, by consti-
tuting circles that become larger and larger, going from the clan to humanity.
In Freud’s words:

Since civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human

beings to unite in a closely-knit group, it can only achieve this aim through
an ever-increasing reinforcement of the sense of guilt.What began in relation
to the father is completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary
course of development from the family to humanity as a whole, then – as a
result of . . . the eternal struggle between the trends of love and death – there
is inextricably bound up with it an increase in the sense of guilt.
(ibid., p. 133)

According to Lacan, love does the opposite: it dissolves the circle by removing
an element from it. He thus envisions “matters of love” as a disunification and situates
love more on the side of Thanatos than of Eros. The mythography of Eros is not at
all unilateral.
Claude Lévi-Strauss deserves recognition for having emphasised the positive
character of the Oedipal prohibition in The Elementary Structures of Kinship:

If these modalities can be subsumed under the general term of exogamy . . .

this is conditional upon the apperception, behind the superficially negative
expression of the rule of exogamy, of the final principle which, through the
prohibition of marriage within prohibited degrees, tends to ensure the total
and continuous circulation of the group’s most important assets, its wives and
its daughters.
(Lévi-Strauss, 1969, p. 479)
144 The capitalist discourse

Lévi-Strauss thereby covers over matters of love in his own way. He reduces women
to values or assets and neglects exoandry, in which men leave their group and join their
wives’ group. As soon as women are considered as subjects, rather than as goods, this
kinship structure takes priority over the others.This angle itself justifies feminism.
The feminine requirement of a minus-one (which may serve as the basis of its
monandry) and of an “Homoinzun”11 who will be her own, rather than being a boy
like all the others, is not symmetrical with masculine exogamy.We will understand
this distinction better if we remember that in order to bear leaving the circle, a
man needs to transform a woman – the one who has chosen him – into Woman,
quite simply by locating the Name-of-the-Father in her. This is a law: in order for
a man – in this case, a neurotic man – to be able to attach himself to a woman, he
must discern a paternal signifier in her. This is how he deals with the trauma of
the encounter with the Other sex.12 In psychosis, this transformation of a woman
into Woman cannot be effected through the Name-of-the-Father as operator and
therefore implies that man himself must become Woman, “the woman that men
are missing” (Lacan, 1959, p. 472); without this woman, they are doomed to remain
in the circle (as the psychotic will not fail to denounce). For a woman, it should
be emphasised that she awakens the man by separating him from the group. This
dissymmetry between masculine exogamy and a woman’s choice of a man is a
part of the dissymmetry between what is generally attributed to man – the fantasy
of the Vereinigung – and what a woman reveals: love is an election, a choice that
implies a dissolution.
We know the extent to which, for Freud, the question of understanding femi-
ninity was both decisive and insoluble. He considered anatomical and psychological
determinations to be insufficient and concluded with an observation that – although
it does not give us a positive definition of what a woman is – does provide a dif-
ferential assessment: a woman differs from a man because she is not a woman from
the moment of her birth but becomes one. Man as being is opposed to woman as
becoming. This is Freud’s final lesson.13 We can wonder why Freud, who had written
about the choice of love-objects, did not try to define women through their mode
of choosing such objects. In any case, this is what Lacan did.
It can even be claimed that in the sexuation table in Encore, Lacan provides a
matheme for this mode of choice: the wall – erected by language – between the
sexes can be crossed over from left to right – from the phallic side to the side that
is not-all – by following an arrow: S→ a (Lacan, 1975c, p. 78). Lacan’s comments
on this arrow leave us in no doubt about how he schematises mens’ choice of a
love-object: “He is unable to attain his sexual partner, who is the Other, except
inasmuch as his partner is the cause of his desire” (ibid., p. 80). After this, if we had
the idea – and may God protect us from this – that there is a symmetry between
the sexes (which would suppress their differences), we would expect a woman’s
love-choice to be written as a → S; this could be the matheme for the masculine
cliché of woman as seducer. This is not at all, however, what Lacan writes. Through
her choice of sexual partner, a woman inscribes herself in the phallic function:
Woman → Ф.Yet, on the other hand, she has a relation with the Other, not through
 The capitalist exemption 145

the intermediary of the a, but as radically barred. It does not seem risky to me to
read the arrow, Woman → S(A) as indicating the feminine choice in love: it dis-
solves the set by extracting an element from it. Beyond this, it should be noted that
the capitalist discourse defines the vector, a → S, as the possible; the movement that
would have gone from the not-whole to castration is reduced to something like
a supermarket of love and desire, offered up for the subject’s consumption. Thus,
the capitalist discourse forecloses castration and, when all is said and done, also calls
sexual difference into question. The capitalist discourse is Jungian.
This consideration opens up a path for understanding how sweeping aside mat-
ters of love can be related to castration in the capitalist discourse. In his “Guiding
Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”, Lacan (1962) recognises the
anti-entropic effects of feminine homosexuality, as they can be observed, for exam-
ple, in the Précieuses. He also notes, in passing, that the Précieuses differed from
the Cathars, who in sundering good absolutely from evil, anticipated the capitalist
paradise, or – and this may be the same thing – fuelled a millenarianism the effects
of which are not always cheering.
The Précieuses organised themselves in salons at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century and there is no doubt that they took the initiative in choosing a
love-object. According to the classical analyses, such as Paul Bénichou’s (1948),
men who were admitted into the salon had been taken from the group of knights.
This is a fair, if cavalier view. Knights were gradually disappearing, thanks in part
to the Précieuses (and had, of course, been given their deathblow by Cervantes,
who had mocked the knight errant’s desire to preserve chivalry singlehandedly).
In the salon, such knights were taught how to speak, rather than to kill or rape.
It may well have been this “borrowing” of men that offended Molière, but this
does not discredit the Précieuses’ mode of choosing love-objects. They are a per-
fect example of the civilising work of women, which Freud had glimpsed: the
dissolving of the group of men and the constructing of a community that acted
through dissemination.
The Amazons, the other example that comes to mind, raise thornier questions.
They are known through Greek mythology, beginning with Homer. Historians
have said less about them, since their historical prototypes remain unknown, and
it is uncertain whether they really existed. One journalist-historian, Lyn Webster
Wilde (2000), in On the Trail of the Women Warriors, hypothesises that they had been
displaced from the southern to the northern edge of the Black Sea and beyond,
towards Ukraine, where numerous tombs of female warriors have been found. In
this connection, I find it interesting that the oldest tomb, dating from around 1200
BCE, of a female warrior to have been discovered was in Colchis, in present-day
Georgia, the home of Medea. She was accused of killing her two sons, just as cer-
tain Greek authors had accused the Amazons of infanticide. Whether or not this is
the case, there is one constant in this mytheme: the women chose the men whom
they had defeated in battle, after which there was a celebration, the Feast of Roses,
where each woman married the man whom she had conquered. The best-known
of the Amazons is Penthesilia, their queen, who fell in love with Achilles at the siege
146 The capitalist discourse

of Troy and would have done anything to defeat him and take him away from the
circle of the Greeks. If, according, of course, to ancient Greek authors, this circle
represented the progress of civilisation, then it is interesting that it was a barbar-
ian who introduced matters of love into civilisation. This is the paradox in which
Thanatos civilises Eros, the paradox that Giorgio Agamben (1995) seeks to account
for in his stimulating work, Homo Sacer. In the myth, it is Penthesilia who is defeated
and dies; Achilles, defeated in his turn by his love for her, embraces her, a rather
sensational case of male necrophilia.
Heinrich von Kleist’s play, Penthesilia, reverses this situation by having Penthesilia
kill Achilles. Once he is dead, she eats him raw, having the honesty to do so herself,
instead of giving this task to her dogs, as Artemis had done with Actaeon.

How many a maid will say, her arms wrapped round

Her lover’s neck: I love you, oh so much
That if I could, I’d eat you up right here;
And later, taken by her word, the fool!
She’s had enough and now she’s sick of him.
You see, my love, that never was my way.
Look: when my arms were wrapped around your neck,
I did what I had spoken, word for word:
I was not quite so mad as it might seem.
(Kleist, 1808, p. 146)

In such a context, it can be said that “A kiss, a bite,/The two should rhyme” (ibid.,
p. 145).
The radical character of these actions provides a dazzling insight into the myste-
rious cannibalistic primary identification discussed by Freud (Freud, 1940a, p. 103).
These women, in the throes of disgust, and whom Penthesilia judges correctly to
be mad, are not exempt from a condition that we find in bulimia: bulimics eat the
father again and again, because they have not dared really to eat him, as Penthesilia
does. We know that in psychosis, this “remake” of primary identification can take
the form of psychotic ingestion.
A moment ago, I mentioned Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which is as important a ref-
erence now as Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963) was in the 1960s.This
book discovers and analyses a logical paradox that can only be solved topologically.
Homo Sacer refers to a very specific Roman law formulated in Festus:

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a
crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not
be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted
that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will
not be considered homicide”.This is why it is customary for a bad or impure
man to be called sacred.
(Agamben, 1995, p. 71)
 The capitalist exemption 147

Agamben thus brings out a contradiction: death is a judicial punishment on the

condition that it not take the form of a judicial punishment. In logical terms, an
element is subtracted from a set in such a way that it becomes impossible to rein-
tegrate it into any set at all. This logic is the same as what presides over a woman’s
choice of a man as love-object. Once Achilles has been chosen by Penthesilia, he
can no longer be the Greek whom he had once been.14

Notes
1 This way of writing the discourses comes from Television (Lacan, 1974b, p. 13); it differs
from the version found in “Radiophonie” (Lacan, 1970, pp. 447–448) in the use of the
crossed arrows.The specific matheme of the capitalist discourse can be found in Lacan in
Italia (Lacan, 1978b, p. 40).
2 The definitive form of this thesis may perhaps be found in Lacan’s (1981b, p. 20) opening
statement at the 1980 seminar in Caracas: “It follows that the best thing la langue can do
is to demonstrate how it is in the service of the death instinct”.
3 George Orwell, who worked as part of the British secret services after spending the
Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades, was not unambiguous in his choice of
political camp.
4 [Translator’s note: In renaming the “agent” of discourse as the “semblance”, Lacan was,
in part, emphasising the close relation between this semblance – an “appearance” or
“seeming” – and truth. As he argues in D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (Lacan,
2006b, p. 26) “Truth is not the contrary of the semblance. Truth is the dimension . . .
that is strictly correlative to that of the semblance”. In discourse, truth is not accessible
directly, but something of it can appear or manifest itself through the vector that moves
from it to the semblance.]
5 [Translator’s note: See R.S.I. (Lacan, 1974–1975, 11 March 1975):
The Real is “blank meaning” [sens blanc], that is, the blank meaning by which the
body serves as a semblance [fait semblant; could also be read as “the body pretends”].
A semblance in which all discourse coalesces [se fonde], starting with the discourse of
the master, which turns the phallus into signifier index 1 (S1).]
6 Serge Lesourd (2006) emphasizes the rising diagonal of a → S and relates it to the math-
eme for perversion (a ◊ S), thus connecting capitalism with the epiphany of a subject
who is capable of experiencing “jouissance without any constraints”. Without discuss-
ing directly this identification of the two mathemes, I would note that in the matheme
of perversion, the ◊ of alienation/separation is placed between a and S, rather than an
arrow that is oriented in a single direction. It should also be recalled that, according to
Lacan (2013, p. 569), perversion involves a logical protest that goes against normalizing
identifications. I thank Marie-Jean Sauret for bringing this passage to my attention.
[Translator’s note: The injunction to experience “jouissance without any restraints” was a
slogan popular in May 1968.]
7 In this respect, moreover, the discourse of the master, as the discourse of the unconscious,
shows us the impossibility of commanding knowledge, whose real aspect is grasped by
the analytic discourse.
8 This writing can, moreover, be independent of any transcription of the spoken word, as
can be seen in the use of the little arrows in quantum physics (see Feynman, 1985).
9 [Translator’s note:This is a play on Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign slogan during the presiden-
tial campaign of 2007: “Work more to earn more”.]
10 It should, of course, be noted that certain analysts consider the Wolf Man to be psychotic.
11 [Translator’s note: “Hommoinzun” is a play on “au moins un [at least one]”, which introduces
a reference to “homme [man]”.]
148 The capitalist discourse

12 In “Medusa’s Head”, Freud (1940, p. 274) describes what he calls the “apotropaic” func-
tion: an image of castration, as terrifying as it may be, is better than the unthinkable
confrontation with a hole that has no boundaries, which would be an absolute absence.
13 [Translator’s note: See Freud’s late article “Female Sexuality”:
The sexual life of the woman is regularly split up into two phases, the first of which
is of a masculine character, whilst only the second is specifically feminine. Thus in
female development, there is a process of transition from the one phase to the other,
to which there is nothing analogous in males.
(Freud, 1931, p. 228)]
14 In psychoanalysis, there is the example of an element that serves as exception to the set:
this is the real father, who as agent of castration, re-imposes the primacy of the living
being over language.
PART III
On the symptom
5
THE SENSE OF SYMPTOMS

If the symptom raises decisive questions, this is not only because it brings Marx
and Freud together, while also separating them; this concept also does the same
for psychoanalysts. I shall argue that the symptom is a primal marker of the sexual
nonrelation – the constitutive failure of sexuality – which gives sexuality its libidi-
nal colour. Other psychoanalysts however, see it as masking the nonexistence of
this relation. In my opinion, this view is contaminated by a psychiatric conception
of the symptom, which emphasises the discourse of the master over the analytic
discourse. At the moment of its birth, the baby is already spoken of, and this lin-
guistic bedrock makes it exist, while also – in a contradictory way – annihilating
it as a thing, just as a word is supposed to replace what it designates. The inaugural
emergence of the symptom manifests the irreducibility of the “thing” that has been
brought into existence. “I don’t want the Other to get off on me” means that I do
not want to be reduced to what I am in the Other’s speech. Even before the mirror
stage has conferred an imaginary status upon it, “I” is defined by its alterity to the
figure whom the Other is speaking about. This is the symptom, and it can take the
form, for example, of an early refusal of the mother’s milk.
A second debate is also occurring among psychoanalysts. Some of them –
­relying on Lacan’s (2005b) development of the concept of sinthome in his seminar
on Joyce, which I shall examine below – treat the Name-of-the-Father as a particu-
lar case of the symptom. Others, among whom I count myself, take the distinction
between the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom to be essential, holding that
each of these terms implies an antagonistic relation between subject and Other.The
Name-of-the-Father ensures a phallic signification by which the One sets a limit to
the Other. This Other is a boundless alterity that can take the form of a manic use
of language, in which a stable meaning cannot be pinned down successfully. What
Lacan calls the sinthome is the product of an identification with the symptom, an
art of making do with the symptom (this is how Joyce transforms “imposed words”
152 On the symptom

into “epiphanies” [see ibid., p. 75]). The sinthome can certainly “make up for” [sup-
plée à] (ibid., p. 710) the absence of the Name-of-the-Father (at least in Joyce), but
this making-up [suppléance], which tames the violence of the signifier, is not the
sinthome’s primary function.
Its primary function is to provide an alternative to what presents itself as an
action that claims to be taken in the name of the Other; this is what occurs when the
Name-of-the-Father has been established or made up for. The does not imply that
the sinthome serves as the basis of an action taken in the name of the subject, but rather
that it ek-sists in relation to both the subject and the Other, a position that some call
“grace” and others the “muse”.

From Marx to Freud

The symptom has a meaning or sense (Sinn). This formula can be reversed: every
meaning-event is a symptom. This reversal can prevent the symptom from being
reduced to its pathological dimension. The real and meaning are incompatible, and
the symptom, through an inconceivable circuit, knots them together. In his lecture “The
Sense of Symptoms”, Freud (1916–17, p. 257) begins by saying that “the fact that
symptoms have a sense and are related to the patient’s experience” (and if they do
not, then they are not symptoms) was discovered neither by Breuer nor by himself.
Instead, Pierre Janet, and before him, the “great psychiatrist Leuret” had believed
that symptoms have a sense: Janet claimed this for neurotics and Leuret for the
“delusional ideas of the insane” (ibid., p. 257). Delusion has a very particular status,
which requires symptom and fantasy to be disentangled from one another. Delu-
sion could be defined as a fantasy in which access to the agent of castration – the
real father – has been closed off, because there is no symbolic key. When Lacan says
that the Name-of-the-Father is this key, we must first ask what a name is. It may
well be the specific word that replaces the concrete father, but it is also something
that starts out as real, before any signification has been deduced from it. It follows
that delusion is not solely or even principally an unconscious formation, whose
meaning could be brought out by translating it into ordinary language. Instead,
it is the very armature of the relation with the Other, inasmuch as the will-to-
jouissance would be located primally in the Other that is, first of all, language. As
soon as the subject – in what can be called a “theft” – takes the will-to-jouissance
away from the Other, this will define the truly Promethean process of the subject.
This theft divides both the subject and the Other: the partitioning-off of the
Other by which the subject accomplishes the translation of will continuously
implies that the subject must also excise a piece of him/herself. This will become
the currency exchanged for the piece s/he excises from the Other. For example, a
child with autism who could only “borrow” an object from me if he left me with
an equivalent object. The infernal circle of the melancholic subject involves identi-
fying with this object itself; the object is the means by which this will is translated,
and the subject becomes lost in an identification with it. The only way in which
s/he can limit her/his identification is by discovering a symptom that testifies to
 The sense of symptoms 153

the incompleteness of this identification. It should be noted that, for Freud, this
discovery implies the recognition of the unconscious. Nevertheless, this discovery
can only take place when one is in the throes of the symptom, a moment when its
meaning is successful.
This is decisive, for the gap between a symptom and its meaning, which Freud
names the unconscious, means that the real can only be defined as outside meaning.
This suggests that jouissance, the specifically human relation to being that language
both opens up for us and encloses us within, is never “whole”. As a principle, jou-
issance cannot bring about an adequation between the idea and the thing, which
was and remains the dream or fantasy of the University: from Plato to Spinoza,
from Spinoza to Heidegger. Marx belongs to this sequence: by not analysing the
jouissance in the symptom, he opened up the path to an interpretation made by
the discourse of the university. This was the notorious conception of the reflection.
Even breaking the mirror will not enable this unexamined jouissance to materialise.
What is the status of the symptom? In the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanaly-
sis, Freud chooses to take his examples from obsessional neurosis, which does not
involve a conversion from the psychic to the somatic. He defines the obsessional
symptom as a constraint of both action and thought, in which the neurotic finds
himself “obliged against his will to brood and speculate”, in ways that make no
sense for him (ibid., p. 258). Although such constraints can be displaced, it is “quite
impossible for him to omit” or suppress them (ibid., p. 258). Freud gives two exam-
ples, the first of which is more successful in making the symptom intelligible.
In this clinical sequence,1 it should be noted that, for a reason that Freud tells
us that he is holding back, the obsessional symptom does not disappear, even if the
patient herself interprets it. In the interpretation, the part of the symptom involv-
ing “desire” or a “wish” appears clearly: the symptom enacts the wish that the
wedding night had been successful, whereas her husband had, in fact, been impo-
tent. She wished to “make her husband superior to his past mishap” (Freud, 1916–
1917, p. 263). The “defensive” element of the symptom is more obscure, however,
although we are told that she has been separated from her husband, without learn-
ing the reasons for this separation. Freud thus emphasises an Oedipal wish, although
we could see in it a wish for sexual jouissance, which was not achieved because of
the husband’s impotence.
The defensive side could involve a refusal to be indebted to her husband for
this jouissance. Symptoms differ radically from dreams, in which wish-fulfilment is
sufficient: through the “figuration”2 in the dream, jouissance passes into the uncon-
scious. The page has been turned. The symptom operates at a different level, for
it must also, and especially, satisfy desire. For it to do so, wish-fulfilment must not
become a debt that reinforces the subject’s subjection to the Other. In both of Freud’s exam-
ples, there is something that points to this requirement: interpretations only have an
effect because the patients have made them themselves, rather than obeying Freud’s
suggestions. This requirement does not apply only to transference within analysis;
it occurs in every relation with the Other. For example, the Rat Man’s great obses-
sional fear does not go away through some element in his interpretative associations
154 On the symptom

that would serve as a sort of mathematical integral; instead, it disappears when he

remembers a sacrilegious thought that involved his father and his lady (specifi-
cally that they should go off together and have children) (see Freud, 1909, p. 218).
This leads us to think that the resolution of the symptom does not involve its pure
and simple disappearance: it is resolved when the wish that had been its motive is
authorised to be fulfilled.This authorisation occurs at the same time as a separation
between the subject and the Other: a separation not from the desire of the Other –
which cannot be accomplished – but from its jouissance.
Once again, the reader may find that these considerations are unrelated to class
struggle and capitalism. S/he would be wrong, however, for maintaining that the
homeostasis of the capitalist mode of production depends upon an economy of jou-
issance, one that neither the dictatorship of the proletariat nor the Cultural Revolu-
tion were able to undo. Capitalism succeeded, in different ways, in defeating the two
great Marxist revolutions of the twentieth century, the Soviet and the Chinese. We
can even wonder whether the personalities of Stalin and Mao, even more than the
often sombre policies of the capitalist world, were the Trojan horses that enabled
the capitalist discourse to be extended. Through Freud, Lacan – even before he dis-
covered or cobbled together his capitalist discourse – had a theory of the symptom
at his disposal. This served as the Archimedean lever by which he could begin to
explore Marx’s blind spot, even before history had made it dazzlingly obvious.
In the introduction, I mentioned that Lacan paid homage to Marx as the inven-
tor of the symptom. This homage is an interpretation that involves Marx’s relation
to Hegel. At each dialectical moment, Hegel’s teleological cunning of reason oper-
ates by introducing a negative aspect into the Aufhebung of knowledge: this aspect is
truth. Marx, as early as his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), responds to
this method by making a materialist assertion: “it isn’t like that at all”. Knowledge
can never achieve a definitive incorporation of truth (see Askofaré, 1989).
Lacan, who defines the symptom as “the return of truth as such into the gap
of a certain knowledge” (Lacan, 1966c, p. 194), credited Marx with a critique of
absolute idealism, one that invented a relation between knowledge and truth. The
symptom thus becomes an irruption of truth. On the one hand, anything that
shows that surplus-value has been extorted is fundamentally a symptom; this dis-
tinguishes it from ideology, in which the real appears in a deceptive form, masking,
perpetuating and hiding exploitation. Ideology presents the proletarian’s sale of
his labour-power to the capitalist as part of a contract that has been entered into
freely, one in which the capitalist pays for labour-power at its correct value. This
“mapping” of the symptom to exploitation highlights one way of characteris-
ing the symptom: a facade (the fair payment for labour-power) hides its status
as symptom. In this way, the symptom emerges in what is out of place, staining
this facade. It thus stands in an ambiguous relation with truth, for it is also true
that labour-power is paid for at its correct value. Yet to refuse to go any further
than this “truth” is to refuse to constitute as a symptom anything that calls it into
question – for example, a strike. Lacan is attentive on this point, since he alludes
admiringly to Marx’s (1867, pp. 301, 300) reference, in Capital, to the capitalist’s
 The sense of symptoms 155

“laughter”. In his 1968–1969 seminar, Lacan (2006a, p. 65) states that Marx’s men-
tion of this laughter unveils “the essence of surplus value”.
In Marx’s text, this laughter is related to the fact that the capitalist buys labour-
power at its value, in terms of the socially necessary labour time needed to train
and maintain the worker.The capitalist thus becomes the owner of the use-value of
labour-power; were it not for the symptom, which acts as a sort of killjoy, no one
would find fault with his “right” to use this now alienated power however he likes.
As Marx emphasises:

the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the
other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during
a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during the day creates
is double to what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of
good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller.
(Marx, 1867, p. 301)

This luck may make the capitalist laugh, but this laughter also lays bare his cynicism:
he delights in cheating the proletarian by buying labour-power in this way. The
worker cannot contest the correctness and legality of the exchange, but through the
symptom, legality becomes the place of a conflict. Without the capitalist’s knowl-
edge, this laughter becomes a symptom for the proletarian: “Why would he be
laughing if he hasn’t played a trick on me – a trick that I can’t do anything about?”
This is the proletarian’s question.
It would therefore not be going too far to consider the discovery of surplus-
value as equivalent to the discovery of the symptom. The theory of surplus-value
establishes the necessity of the symptom and conditions its possible resolution; it
enables us to discover a truth – exploitation – that is truer than the truth of free
contracts. “A truth that is truer than truth” could be one definition of the real. In
this context, what is important is independent of economic calculations, which tell
us, for example, that buying labour-power for one day only costs the equivalent of
a half-day of work. The important point, instead, is that the symptom shows the
emptiness of arguments arising from the protestant work ethic: “Why don’t you
become a capitalist too?” Such arguments collide with the fact that, for the prole-
tarian, selling one’s labour-power is a forced choice. Only through such a choice
would the proletarian enter into a relation of production founded on exploitation.
How then can s/he get out of it? Can workers exit from it only when the devel-
opment of the productive forces has rendered exploitation no longer necessary?
Can the worker escape from it without waiting for this to happen, by modifying
her/his economy of jouissance: by taking leave of the iron law that governs the
cycle of the capitalist discourse? Can s/he do this not only through her/his status
as exploited worker, but also by questioning her/his status as consumer? Concern-
ing this alternative, Marx’s answer, and a fortiori, the answer of the various com-
munist parties, remains unclear. This vagueness can be explained in terms neither
of reformism (“Let’s wait for capitalism to end up profiting everyone”) nor of
156 On the symptom

voluntarism; instead, it results from the fact that something has not been understood
concerning what is at stake in the singular economies of jouissance.
This analysis can be continued from another perspective, which can throw light
on what seems to have been Marx’s prime and definitive inspiration: his attention
to the relations of production.This is the advantage of his analysis of commodity fet-
ishism. Why, he asks, in capitalist relations of production, are the relations between
commodities presented in a “mystical” form (Marx, 1867, p. 164)? In other words,
why does the “definite social relation between men themselves assume here . . . the
fantastic form of a relation between things” (ibid., p. 165)? This passage has been
discussed many times and almost everyone has been struck by the term “fetish-
ism”, which, for Freud, is the paradigm of perversion; it marks the victory of the
disavowal of maternal castration over its recognition. As is often the case, a truism
excuses people from taking a path that seems to lead to places that are so obvious
that they do not need to be explored.
Unlike them, I shall take this path. In his analysis, Marx highlights how relations
between things have been substituted for relations between human beings, thus
placing the difference between value and surplus-value in the background. Is it pos-
sible to go so far as to claim that this substitution would occur even in the absence
of exploitation? Would it occur if workers were paid the equivalent of the value
of what they produced? (This was one of the demands of Ferdinand Lassalle’s pro-
gramme, which Marx (1875) criticised.) In other words, would commodity-fetishism
disappear if exploitation disappeared?
Although Marx’s discussion of commodity-fetishism, in contrast to his treatment
of surplus-value, has the advantage of pointing to our fascination with consump-
tion, it also has its own weaknesses. In fetishism, commodities acquire a value that
seems intrinsic to them, although their value is actually determined by the social
relations between the human beings who produce them. The tension between the
fantastic or mystical thing-value of the commodity could well be homologous to
another tension: that between price and exchange-value. By approaching this ten-
sion through Lacan, we can bring out the weaknesses of the concept of commod-
ity fetishism: in psychoanalytic terms, we can say that this is a tension between a
commodity’s “agalmatic” value and its exchange-value. Marx, of course, had a simple
doctrine concerning exchange-value: in order for a commodity to have exchange-
value, it must first have a use-value. Sugar that does not dissolve has neither form of
value.Yet in this context, does the jouissance that is expected from a product count
for nothing? This expectation would give an agalmatic value to this commodity,
a value that would have no common measure with the cost of producing it. The
product’s brand (see N. Klein, 2000) could endow it with a price that is higher than
that of a product produced at the same cost and with the same characteristics.3 If
desire precedes the cause, one product does not prevail over another because it includes
surplus-jouissance as an intrinsic part of itself. What is primary, instead, is the desire
of the potential buyer. Commodity-fetishism covers over this priority, for desire is
said to arise from a cause that precedes it: the commodity’s “intrinsic” value.4 Only
later is this desire put to the test of whether or not it is satisfied.
 The sense of symptoms 157

Fetishism does not directly imply an extortion of surplus-value, even if it may

well mask this extortion. As a consequence, the end of exploitation would not imply
the end of commodity-fetishism. The endurance of the capitalist discourse (a → S, surplus-
jouissance → lack-in-jouissance [manque-à- jouir] is not only the result of the extortion
of surplus-value by a private power.
Lacan (1973a, p. 381) said that the symptom “only takes on its revolutionary” –
or insurrectional – “effect when it is not being conducted by the so-called Marxist
baton”; the symptom’s status is decided, instead, by the various threads that I have
been examining. In 1966, in “On a Subject Who Is Finally in Question”, one of
the intercalary texts in the Écrits, Lacan established Marx’s precedence in relation to
the symptom. I have already quoted from this text and shall do so again, this time
placing the citation more fully in its context:

It is difficult not to see that, even before the advent of psychoanalysis, a

dimension that might be called that of the symptom was introduced, which
was articulated on the basis of the fact that it represents the return of truth as
such into the gap of a certain knowledge.
(1966c, p. 194)

Immediately afterwards, however, Lacan distinguishes Marx’s symptom from Freud’s:

Freud sets himself apart from the rest by clearly linking the status of the
symptom to the status of his own operation, for the Freudian operation is the
symptom’s proper operation, in the two senses of the term. Unlike a sign – or
smoke which is never found in the absence of fire, a fire that smoke indicates
with the possible call to put it out – a symptom can only be interpreted
in the signifying order. A signifier has meaning only through its relation to
another signifier. The truth of symptoms resides in this articulation. Symp-
toms remained somewhat vague when they were understood as representing
some irruption of truth. In fact, they are truth, being made of the same wood
from which truth is made, if we posit materialistically that truth is what is
instated on the basis of the signifying chain.
(ibid, pp. 194–195)

This is a crucial statement. It is difficult not to read it as Lacan’s objection to Marx

immediately after his tribute to him. Marx and Freud are allied against Hegel; they
refuse the latter’s argument that the work of truth – of the particular – is absorbed into
absolute knowledge. Freud, however, is also to be distinguished from Marx. For Marx,
the symptom is the symptom of a truth: a strike is the symptom of the truth of capitalist
exploitation.This exploitation is, in turn, the symptom of the truth of the “free” contract
between the capitalist and the proletarian. For Freud, the symptom is truth. Because
Marx missed this subtle difference, his conception “remained somewhat vague”.
In presenting Freud’s thesis on the symptom and his account of how the Rat
Man’s major obsessional symptom is dissolved, I have emphasised that the sense
158 On the symptom

of the symptom includes a dimension that is related to transference. This may be

a common observation: interpreting the symptom will have no analytic effect if
it is imputed to the analyst as Other, without being appropriated by the subject.
We must therefore decide firmly that the question of meaning or sense – and not
simply of signification, which only concerns the statement [énoncé] – includes the
question of how the relation to the Other helps determine the message. In inter-
pretation, the Other and the subject must also not be commutative; it could even
be said that because of interpretation, they can cease to be commutative. Interpreta-
tion must extract the subject from this reversibility, from what Lacan ( 1976–1977,
15 March 1977) calls a “double meaning” or “double direction [double sens]. For
example, a man says, “You are my wife” and a woman replies, “I am your wife”.
The consequence of interpretation is to show, to both the man and the woman,
that “my wife”, in the first statement, and “your wife” in the second may denote
the same woman, but nevertheless have nothing to do with one another.To say that
the symptom is truth means that its formal envelope of signifiers always, in itself,
conveys the message that this single denotation involves a non-equivalence. “My
wife” and “your wife” do not coincide, even if they designate the same person.5
Two remarks can be made about this. First, in “On the Subject Who Is Finally in
Question”, Lacan shows how Marx and Freud differ in relation to the symptom.Yet
in saying that the symptom is truth, Lacan (1966c, p. 194) adds that “it represents the
return of truth as such into the gap of a certain knowledge”. In this way, he empha-
sises, like Marx, the impossibility of absolute knowledge, but he also shows that
this gap concerns the real rather than truth. It involves not an adequation between
the thing and the idea, but the impossibility of this adequation. The “gap”, as real,
conditions and authorises the “return of a truth”. As Lacan himself says, he is siding
with Kant against Spinoza, and Marx against Hegel.
Second, meaning must not be confused with signification. Meaning is not the
entirety of the successive significations taken by the symptom in the work of asso-
ciation; if it were, then the inflation of meaning could unfold ad infinitum. The
symptom does indeed have a sense, but it is only accessible if we grasp the angle
from which the Other, in giving the object, has established this sense. Grasping this
angle is one of the conditions for putting an end to the commutativity of meaning.
The subject recognises that his desire is the desire of the Other, while separating
himself from the Other’s jouissance (which is also his own jouissance, since “I is
an other” [Rimbaud, 1871, p. 115]).6 Sense involves direction and could thereby
become equivalent to orientation.
To find the sense is to find the symptom’s orientation, its clinamen,7 with
which I can then identify. Identifying with the sense of the symptom is the decisive
moment, for this sense can never be made objective. We cannot say, “I know the
meaning of this symptom”; if it becomes objective in this way, it becomes marked
by religion. It would be religious to say, “I know [je sais] the sense”; this would be
radically different from the atheism of the assertion, “I am and follow [je suis] the
sense”. It should be noted that to “be sense” is nothing less than an arbitrary deci-
sion; in order for “being sense” not to be arbitrary, it would have to figure the real.
 The sense of symptoms 159

Finally – and this remark knots the symptom to discourse – every symptom is
particular. When it is “resolved” – a term that includes the semantic resonance of
“resolving” to do something – it becomes singular.8 For Lacan, however, there is
one exception to this rule: the proletarian. In “La troisième”, Lacan (1975b, p. 187)
argues that the proletarian is the only social symptom. The proletarian has been
stripped of everything, becoming a “man without qualities”, who can be identified
with the subject as a lack-in-jouissance.This worker is the universal subject of “The
Internationale”: “we are nothing; let’s be everything [soyons tout]”. However, there
is a problem: this way of understanding the proletariat swings from having nothing
to being nothing, and its status cannot be resolved by reaching a state of “whole
being” [l’être tout] or of a being who is “everything” [un être tout]. The proletarian
is a social symptom, but a symptom can only be resolved through its particularity.
This is stated explicitly in R.S.I:

If we don’t make man into whatever conveys an ideal symptom, if we define

him in each case on the basis of his unconscious and the way that he gets off
on it, the symptom remains in the same place where Marx put it, but it takes
on another sense. Not a social symptom, but a particular symptom.
(Lacan, 1974–1975, 18 February 1974)

This is Lacan’s only definition of political action: the social symptom is only to be
interpreted in terms of each person’s particularity. This implies that the jouissance
of having nothing and being nothing must not be left unquestioned.This question-
ing, however, can lead to a remark that verges on sacrilege: whole being or being
everything could well make “The Internationale” the anthem of the capitalist ideal.
These considerations enable the social symptom – in a way that is slight but
valuable – to establish a connection between political action and discourse, the
social bond. The change in direction and meaning of the symptom – from the
social to the particular9 – does not make this connection obsolete. First, if we
return to the passage from “La troisième” in which Lacan (Lacan, 1975b, p. 187)
introduces the proletarian as a social symptom, he indicates explicitly that the indi-
vidual, rather than the subject, is a proletarian. If the individual is the subject minus
its unconscious, we can grasp more easily the significance of restoring to each of us
our unconscious and our way of getting off on it. One avenue for political action
would therefore be to restore to Hyde and Dark the unconscious that they have
been deprived of by the doctors of chemistry and capitalists, who are themselves
impelled by a passion for ignorance. It would also be tempting to present the pro-
letarian as the lack-in-jouissance of the subject figuring in the upper left corner of
the capitalist discourse, but there is a difficulty with this: the subject is not the indi-
vidual. Such an equivalence could only be valid, and unfairly valid, in the capitalist
discourse, if we remain within this discourse.
There is another perspective remaining here. If each individual, as Lacan (1975b,
p. 187) says, “is really a proletarian”, it is because s/he “has no discourse with which
to make a social bond, in other words, a semblance”. Does this mean that the
160 On the symptom

proletarian would be outside discourse, or that the capitalist discourse is one in

which there is no place for the semblance? First, we should remember that the sem-
blance is the name given to the figure who cannot be named or name himself: the
father (see Lacan, 1974a). The father can be named, but only through a semblance;
no one has the power to be both the father of names and to have “father” as name.
The semblance thus enables the subject, by resorting to the signifier, neither to
fall into the abyss of the absence of a name – a hole that cannot be brought back
into the symbolic – nor to efface the real of this hole by delusion or hallucination.
The capitalist discourse, like the others, is a discourse of the semblance. Although
the proletarian does not appear as such in this discourse, s/he is present in it indi-
rectly, as a consumer (S) or as a worker (S2). The capitalist discourse tends to fash-
ion a virtual subject: one that, being cut from its unconscious, imagines that it has
become unmoored from the real. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967)
located this aspect of capitalism definitively and almost prophetically.
Concrete manifestations of this discourse reduce the subject to a lack-in-­
jouissance. This subject’s only future involves the forced choice of diminishing this
lack through surplus-jouissance. Here the capitalist discourse displays its diabolical
quality, for the economy is governed by the principle “of the extensive, and therefore
insatiable production of the lack-in-jouissance” (Lacan, 1970, p. 435). Thus, those
who are exploited are led to “compete on the basic principle of exploitation, in
order to harbour their indisputable participation in the thirst of lack-in-jouissance”
(ibid., p. 435). While the extensive production of the capitalist economy is offering
more and more commodities to fill the lack-in-jouissance, this lack continues to
grow, and with it the thirst that makes this lack manifest. This formulation stands in
flagrant contradiction to the Pareto axiom, which posits that a drinker’s thirst will be
quenched less with the second glass than with the first. On the level of physical need,
this is certain; on the level of the drive, this is erroneous.Thirst is addictive: the more
I drink, the thirstier I become. Paradoxically, I drink in order to quench my thirst,
but I cannot do so without the jouissance that is thirst. It is thus that, by producing
these objects a, the capitalist discourse develops a “thirst of the lack-in-jouissance”
(ibid., p. 435, my emphasis), and the preposition “of ” can be understood in two
senses. Thirst is lack-in-jouissance, and thirst is a thirst for the object that embodies
this lack. Thus, this “thirst of lack-in-jouissance” operates on an inverted ladder of
satisfaction, hollowing out a feeling that “this isn’t enough, it’s never enough”, and
thereby separating a subject from any satisfaction.This situation resembles a train that
will never reach its destination because it is going in the wrong direction.
The subject is thus only a lack-in-jouissance in the capitalist discourse, and even
there, it only approaches this condition asymptotically. If it were entirely this lack, then
it would have to “lose its unconscious”, in the way that Christians speak of “losing
one’s soul”. Perhaps by abolishing itself as such, the subject would reappear as a symp-
tom, the sign that something does not work in the capitalist discourse.Yet if we follow
Lacan rigorously, the proletarian can only come into existence as a social symptom.
For this reason, there is no continuity between the subject, which is reduced to
lack-in-being, and the proletarian as social symptom. A Marxist would say, “This is
 The sense of symptoms 161

the proof that class consciousness is not automatic!” Yet the lesson goes beyond this:
there is no relation between the historical figure of the proletarian, who becomes
a social symptom, and the reality of the subject. The subject must give form to its
own particular symptom; it must not seek vainly to become subjectivated as a pro-
letarian. This is an absolute condition for preventing class warfare from becoming
for Marxists what the Parousia is for Christians.
Lacan rightly pointed out the irony of this shoddy Eden, which is not without a
certain piquancy, because of the anecdote about Marie-Antoinette’s cynical remark
that starving peasants should eat cake. There is no better way to announce the dawn
of capitalism: 1) there is no bread, and thus no jouissance; 2) therefore we should
eat cake, thereby getting more jouissance; 3) cake isn’t all that exciting, etc. It should
be noted that in the first step, “no bread” denotes both real privation – there is no
money to buy bread, and even no wheat to make it – and a lack of interest in bread,
since it is not as good as cake. Marx located the source of this problem not in the
thirst of lack-in-jouissance, but in unlimited exploitation, for which he employed his
famous trope of the chariot of the Juggernaut (see Marx, 1867, pp. 392, 799), under
whose wheels worshipers threw themselves, thereby proving their faith in a manner
that would have pleased Pascal. This image resonates with Lacan’s (1937, p. 89) allu-
sion to Moloch.These references involve incarnating the insatiability of both capital-
ism and the superego, through a reference to the “dark” side of God, who will always
require more sacrifices. God drinks like a drunkard at the beginning of religion, and
we find this again in the subject who does the same at the end of capitalism.
We know that Lacan (1973d, p. 275) analysed the question of sacrifice in relation
to the “dark god” of the Nazi holocaust. This “final solution” tried to put a stop to
the cycle that goes from thirst to lack-in-jouissance. The Nazi ideology of sanitisa-
tion was delusional, but also implacably logical. Nazis transformed the figure of the
“Jew” into the embodiment of surplus-jouissance: the commodity that capitalism
produces in order to create ever more thirst. The “Jew” does this by capturing the
“Aryan” proletarian, who thereby becomes the “victim”, in an economy of jouis-
sance that excludes any satisfaction. Nazism was not the highest stage of capitalism;
instead, it was an attempt to use death to go beyond capitalism. This explains the
unthinkable mixture of far right and far left that sometimes appears.
Yet, what are the roots of the belief that sacrifice is required? As we have noted,
the discourse of the master requires the master to sacrifice his jouissance, thus dis-
tinguishing himself from the slave. Yet the workers, by selling their labour-power
to survive, also renounce “jouissance” in a very particular sense: the enjoyment or
usufruct of the use-value of their labour-power. This connection suggests that it is
necessary to renounce use-value and its enjoyment, thus making an access to jouis-
sance possible, on the basis of the specific dialectic discovered by Freud and articu-
lated by Lacan, a dialectic that established our linguistic being. Jouissance, which
comes to be defined as what serves no good purpose, is excluded from the useful.10
Is this renunciation the essence of sacrifice?
What makes this question even more worth examining is that, in a rather strik-
ing passage from Capital’s unfinished chapter on social classes, Marx (1894, p. 1025)
162 On the symptom

asserts that there is a homology between capitalists and proletarians, both of whom
are owners.11 The first own capital while the second own labour-power; they must
both renounce the use of this “property” if they want it to be “capitalized on”.12 It
is tempting to consider this renunciation as the first stage of the sacrifice whose aim
will end up in a subjection to Moloch or Juggernaut. This would be an Orwellian
vision, in which the tortured Winston Smith can only escape torment by loving his
torturer. Neither Marx nor Lacan takes this position, but Lacan’s disagreement with
Marx centres on the latter’s conception of surplus-value as something that can be
counted. If surplus-value is the gap between the value of the goods necessary for
training and maintaining labour-power, and the value produced by this power, Marx
thinks of this gap in terms of an energetics of jouissance, implying that jouissance
can be measured as an exchange-value, so that the subject’s relation to jouissance
could be regulated through the “right” distribution of surplus-value. His arguments
seem to presuppose that the debt that the subject contracts as a being of language
introduced into the “marketplace” of jouissance can, as a consequence, be paid off.
This argument can be disputed. Capitalism profits and proliferates from the
“thirst of lack-in-jouissance”; if this lack is real, it is not possible to exit from capitalism
through a new distribution of surplus-value. This can only occur through a mutation in the
subject’s relation to jouissance.13 The basic principle of renouncing jouissance during
a first moment can easily be translated into a requirement not to sacrifice every-
thing on the altar of use-value. Somehow, we have expected that the exhaustion
of use-value could magically satiate the superego. In a second moment, we must
think through an alternative to sacrifice in order to escape the economy of jouis-
sance that is specific to the capitalist discourse, an economy that still characterised
the “real socialist” countries. In these countries, the recurrent debates over material
and ideological motivations ran aground because they were marked by the Man-
ichaeism that is internal to the capitalist discourse.
Indeed, as we know, Marx’s reliance on energetics in economics – which may
well contradict his political, historical and philosophical doctrines, and especially
his contention that the relations of production are determinant – had an impact
on his monetary theory. Marx’s blind spot was to take price as the duplicatum of
value, and Keynes, the friend of Wittgenstein, located this weakness and found a
way to transform it into an antidote for capitalism itself. This is not to say that the
duplicatum theory is not true “in the last instance”,14 but it forecloses the question
of credit: the question that introduces the possibility of making money (M-M′) by
means of a money that is only fictive. It thus appears that the social bond, and in
direct terms, transference, are part of the conditions for this virtualisation, which has
real consequences. The true disruption of the relation between money and value
does not occur in the stock market; crashes always enable things to fall back onto
their feet, or rather, onto the feet of the small investors. It occurred, instead, in the
socialist experiment, in which the linkage between prices and value was completely
undone. Perhaps this occurred, in part, in accordance with the principle that “to
each [shall be given] according to his needs” (Marx, 1875, p. 347); more fundamen-
tally, it was done out of a fatal mistrust of the symbolic.
 The sense of symptoms 163

Symptom and sinthome

In German, the term “Kultur” condenses the art of history and the history of art,
while the French terms, “civilisation” and “culture” keep these elements distinct.
Psychoanalysis can maintain that this combination of civilisation and culture is
inevitable, because of an axiom that I shall state immediately. This axiom could be
inscribed above the door from which all the woes of the world emerge, one by
one: there can be no worthwhile satisfaction of the subject without the satisfac-
tion of the other. This adage has nothing to do with oblativity, which only puts
a coat of varnish over our fundamental malevolence towards the other, without
realising the vanity of doing so; it cannot discover that the reverse of this malevo-
lence is a benevolence regarding the self. Yet as long as this realisation has not
occurred, this axiom only indicates an ideal direction.To make it more practicable,
we must not get bogged down in a theory of the symptom that will lead certain
crucial experiences – those that include but are not limited to psychoanalysis –
into an impasse. These experiences prepare and authorise an identification with
the symptom.15
In her work on phobia, Isabelle Morin (2009) distinguishes between a period
that, in terms of structure, comes first, one in which the phallic function and sec-
ondary repression have not yet come into play. I would argue that what she says
about phobia is also valid for the symptom; its primal emergence results because a
body – which will turn out, despite certain vagaries, to be my own – is pre-empted
by language. As I have shown, this mapping of language brings in Russell’s paradox,
which sets up a division between the master-signifier – which provides a quilting
point in the use of language – and the second signifier, which makes a cut in the
use of the body. In the present context, what is important is that jouissance comes
into existence in the process in which things are nihilated [se néantisent]. They sup-
posedly become “virtualised”, for we cannot forget that the second signifier is not
substituted for things; it only makes a cut in them and serves as an edge, thus consti-
tuting the drive.The problem is that the drive is acephalic: the master-signifier – the
One that could order it into a set of signifiers – is not a part of the drive. Yet on
the side of the master-signifier, the problem is just as serious, since the nihilation
of things does not stop at the threshold of the body, which is now inhabited by
language, and is thus also nihilated. In this conjuncture, the symptom is the body’s
response to language. It is an eternal response, which constitutes life itself: thou
shalt not kill. The subject wants the Other to be at its disposal. The subject does not want
to be at the Other’s disposal (see Bruno & Sauret, 2006). This structural dissymmetry
is neither acquired nor innate.16
In other words, the symptom, in its fundamental articulation, marks the lack of
existence of the sexual relation. If such a relation were possible, it would imply both
that the subject would want to get off on the Other and that s/he would consent
to the Other’s getting off on her/him. Instead, the symptom is a sort of uprising or
insurrection, but only on the condition that it does not march either to the “Marx-
ist baton” or to certain psychoanalytic ones.
164 On the symptom

In order to grasp the insurrectional quality of the symptom, I shall examine

“constituted symptoms”: these derive from the repression of the subject’s will to
get off on the Other. In them, we can see the place of anxiety, which signals a
fear of being at this Other’s disposal. Through the castration of the Other – and
first, of the mother – the subject ensures that she is not at the Other’s disposal. For
example, a young woman in analysis regularly experienced tachycardia on her way
to her analyst’s office. This is incontestably a symptom and it would be reasonable
to say it is the substitute for a relation that does not exist, just as a fetish is the sub-
stitute for the mother’s missing penis. From this perspective, the symptom masks
the nonexistence of the sexual relation. In the course of the analysis, however, it
turned out that this tachycardia had already appeared when, as a little girl, she
had accompanied her father on visits to dive bars; in order to buy her silence and
reward her for her collusion with him, he gave her candy, which she then started
to ask him for.Years later, during her treatment, this symptom returned when she
was considering whether to ask her father for money to buy a house. We can thus
see very clearly that, in the phase when the symptom of tachycardia first appeared,
it was linked to demand and showed that the analysand’s will-to-jouissance, a
will directed at the Other (in this case, the father) was being repressed. From that
moment on, such demands could only be made through this symptom. By the
time that she reached adulthood, the demand had been repressed and had been
replaced completely by the symptom. Her repression was only lifted through a
demand to the analyst. This repression, of course, was part of the repression of the
Oedipus complex, the libidinal bond with the father, which was then reactivated
in the bond with the analyst.
Yet if we give Freud’s final theory of anxiety its full weight, we should conclude
that this anxiety results from the consequences of the subject’s will-to-jouissance.
Her determination to get off on the father would make him passive, thus threat-
ening to render him unable to castrate the maternal Other. For this reason, the
conception of the symptom as the equivalent of a jouissance that would replace the
jouissance of the impossible sexual relation and would fraudulently authorise its
existence is doubly incomplete. First, this conception does not see that the libidinal
bond with the Other is not the sexual relation. Such a relation would require pre-
cisely the kind of commutativity that the symptom refuses. This refusal, however,
has to be interpreted in order to be discovered. Second, this conception also does
not see that the key to repression lies in anxiety: the anxiety that the real father –
the father who has not submitted to the subject’s will-to-jouissance and is therefore
immunised against castration – be annihilated.
Another woman, near the end of her analysis, mentioned her father’s answer
when, as a little girl, she had asked him, “why did you marry Mommy?” He told
her that her mother was the most beautiful of women and that he loved her. The
mother herself had confided several times to her daughter that she experienced
nothing during physical relations with her husband, a remark that the analysand
took to mean, “Your father will never be able to make me come”. She then men-
tioned a memory to her analyst. Once, while she was still a girl, she had found
 The sense of symptoms 165

an unused sanitary pad in her parents’ bed. When she asked her mother what this
was, the mother answered, “It’s for your father when he has a cold”. Later, she
presented herself in analysis with a persistent somatic symptom: vaginal secretions
that occurred for no organic reason. In this session, she discovered the meaning of
this symptom: “Through it, I wanted to make my mother come, since my father
couldn’t do so. At the same time, my vaginal secretions were also the equivalent of
semen. In wanting this, I was identifying with my father”.
Although the symptom is overdetermined, its meaning, which is what has been
dissolved within the symptom’s formal envelope by the enunciation, is singular.
In this case, meaning is strictly related to the analysand’s vaginal secretions. This
sequence can, of course, have other possible meanings: it could involve showing the
father’s impotence, taking the mother’s place, etc. and all of these could be pushed
to the point at which we could say that the symptom masks the nonexistence of
the sexual relation Yet if we stick to what this analysand says and avoid trying to
play the role of ventriloquist, the symptom has a single meaning: she is seeking to
rehabilitate the father so that he can maintain his place as agent of the mother’s cas-
tration. In this way, he could ensure that the maternal Other would not get off on
the subject.The symptom would thus signal the sexual nonrelation. Every symptom
is fundamentally a call, which cannot primarily be articulated, to something in the
father that cannot be castrated: its first task is to limit the will-to-jouissance that is
imputed to the maternal Other, and second, it must limit the subject’s own will-to-
jouissance. The condition for the symptom is that there must be another plane, on
which this x that cannot be castrated can nevertheless be named. As a consequence,
this call can only be articulated through an equivocation, a statement that comes
neither from the subject nor the Other, but from the real of the freedom that is
contained within structure.17
This analysis does not move us away from the problem – which also offers us an
opportunity – of how to move from the social symptom, in which the individual
is a proletarian, to the particular symptom, which cannot take the form embodied
by the statement, “I am a proletarian”. The social symptom is the symptom of the
capitalist discourse, which means that the only way to dissolve its formal envelope
is to leave the capitalist discourse. This can be done, first, by subtracting the subject
from the thirst of the lack-in-jouissance; this thirst transforms the subject into a
proletarian, stripping it of everything, and indeed the relative impoverishment of
the “middle” classes in the wealthy industrialised countries is not a fiction. Yet, nec
plus ultra, capitalism hopes to ensure its durability not by formatting consciousnesses
but by cutting the bond between the subject and the unconscious, between S and S2. This
cut can be read in the matheme through the absence of a connection between S
and S2 on the upper line.

S cut S2

S1 a
166 On the symptom

Once the association between the subject and the unconscious has been bro-
ken, the dialectic between the unconscious and the drive can no longer take place.
Thus, the following sequence occurs: the unconscious is unplugged – the drive is
unleashed – Stop – SOS Kultur. We would reach the epiphany of a new kind of
racism, one that would be less marginal: above, we would be mindless; below, we
would be primates. This perspective is especially threatening because it imitates,
as if in a deforming mirror, the outcome of analysis. We can measure this danger
through an ambiguous phrase: “being cured of thinking”. Is this the separation
from the unconscious, as brought about by an analysis, or is it instead something
that might be stated as “I don’t want to know anything about your little feelings”
(a cynical maxim that has always been used to attack any thought that refuses to
reduce itself to some kind of sales pitch)?18
In 1975–1976, in his seminar on James Joyce and related writings, Lacan
(2005b) distinguished between a “symptom” and a “sinthome”. Without going
over this in detail again, I would like to emphasise that it enables us to envision
a disconnection from the unconscious (in “Joyce the Symptom”, Lacan (1982a,
p. 141) refers to it as “having cancelled his subscription to the unconscious”),
which would not be synonymous with unmooring oneself from the drives. This
provides an answer to the old question raised by The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis: at the end of an analysis, “How can a subject who has traversed
the radical phantasy experience the drive” (Lacan, 1973d, p. 273), a drive that is
no longer incarcerated in this fantasy? This question can even be asked in another,
exaggerated way: because we have ceased to be perverse, how can we not imagine
that we are outside the law? Lacan’s answer in The Sinthome involves claiming that
Joyce’s art of writing involves both no longer subscribing to the unconscious –
a condition that an analysis, pushed to its end, enables one to achieve – and
“making-up for” (Lacan, 2005b, p. 71) the phallic function, which had failed in
his case. This means first, that with this sinthome, the art and process of writing
have a decisive weight; they are important because writing, unlike language, is not
representative but figurative,19 and the art of writing moves us from a particular
to a singular symptom.
Second, this means that, contrary to the dominant readings of Lacan’s work on
Joyce, the definition of the sinthome as a “substitute that makes up for” [suppléance]
the Name-of-the-Father does not mean that the sinthome is the general term, and
that the Name-of-the-Father is merely a particular case of it.20 It serves to make up
for the Name-of-the-Father because it does this in every case – not only in psycho-
sis, but also in neurosis and perversion. It makes up for the Name-of-the-Father’s
inability to open onto the right – feminine – side of the table of sexuation: the side
where phallocentrism fails, and where poetry becomes possible.
A key question can be found here. An analysis is finished when something
comes to replace the knotting of the symbolic, real and imaginary by the Name-of-
the-Father, a knotting that has involved a recourse to the Other. Instead, there is a
new knotting by the sinthome: the subject can be authorised through his/her sinthome.
Under what conditions of civilisation could such an operation become practicable,
 The sense of symptoms 167

as a priority, for the subject? This returns us to a question that has already been
posed: the distinction between a generational being as a son or a daughter and the
being of the symptom.

Notes
1 Freud (1916–1917, p. 261) describes the symptom as follows:
A lady, nearly thirty years of age, . . . ran from her room into another neighbouring
one, took up a particular position there beside a table that stood in the middle, rang
the bell for her housemaid, sent her on some indifferent errand or let her go without
one, and then ran back into her own room.
This enigmatic obsessional symptom became clear when the patient mentioned her hus-
band’s impotence during their wedding night. To hide his failure from the housemaid, he
had poured red ink on the bed sheets, but not at the location where one would expect
to find bloodstains. Now, in the room to which the patient summoned her housemaid,
there was a tablecloth with a big red stain that the latter could not miss seeing, given the
position the lady took.
2 [Translator’s note: “Figuration” is to be distinguished from “representation” here. “Rep-
resentation” refers not to the adequation of word and thing but instead to a situation
in which one term marks the place of another (for example, a signifier represents a
subject for another signifier). “Figuration”, on the other hand, concerns the process by
which elements of jouissance are shaped or encrypted (as in the writing of letters) by
the unconscious. The French verb “figurer” can refer to the action of giving something a
visual shape in drawings, paintings and sculptures; here it also includes the visual aspect
of dreams. This distinction leads to a change in the translation of Freud’s term “Darstell-
barkeit”, which can be defined as the “Requirement imposed on the dream-thoughts;
they undergo selection and transformation such as to make them capable of being rep-
resented by images – particularly visual images” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1974, p. 389).
The Standard Edition translated “Darstellbarkeit” as “conditions of representability” (Freud,
1900, p. 339); here, it becomes “conditions of figurability”.]
3 Even more decisively, the development of financial bubbles in contemporary capitalism
could be seen as a demonstration that expected gains – which do not take the real (or
productive) economy into account – are what drive financial markets, putting into play
an enormous financial mass valued in tera-dollars. See François Morin (2006).
4 We recall the difficulty Marx had in addressing the question of the price of works of art.
[Translator’s note: for a discussion of this, see Ali Alizadeh (2017).]
5 Lacan owes a great deal to Frege’s account of how one denotation [or Bedeutung] can
correspond to several “modes of presentation” of an object, that is, to several senses [or
Sinne], and this includes the point of view of the presenter; for example, one geometrical
point can be defined in different ways [Translator’s note: (see Frege, 1892, p. 152)].
6 This can also be read in reverse of the usual way, e.g. by identifying the “Other” with “I”
rather than “I” with the “Other”.
7 [Translator’s note: on the concept of “clinamen”, see Lacan (1973d, p. 63, 1975a, p. 58) and
Mladen Dolar (2013).]
8 This singularity, by rendering null and void all forms of comparison, is surely the only way
to get out of envy, which Melanie Klein held to be the obstacle that remains essentially
insurmountable at the end of analysis. Only by renouncing his/her position as subject can
the envious – unlike the jealous – subject replace the other who is believed to be fulfilled.
9 A definition of ideology can be deduced from this point: ideology is every mental opera-
tion that obscures the fact that social psychology is nothing but individual psychology.
10 A thinker like John Stuart Mill, who tried to rectify Bentham’s utilitarianism in order
to save its principal point, reveals the foundations of distributive justice, which can be
168 On the symptom

summarized as follows: everyone has a debt to the human community and justice con-
sists in each person’s repaying this debt (or at least reducing it to the lowest amount
possible) by means of just action: an action that serves to confirm that the person is a
member of this community. In this way, the virtue of a person is nothing other than his/
her ability to act in this way.The guiding principle of this sort of justice is “punishment”.
Mill sees only one possible alternative to his conception, which he attributes to the uto-
pian communism of Robert Owen: the idea that people are irresponsible. Mill is thus
unable to see how responsibility can be dissociated from debt. [Translator’s note: see Mill
(1863, pp. 40, 81).]
11 [Translator’s note: Marx (1894, p. 1025) writes: “The owners of mere labour-power, the
owners of capital and the landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages,
profit and ground-rent – in other words wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners –
form the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of
production”.]
12 Similarly, the analysand also must give up some of the use-value of his/her property to
pay for analytic sessions.
13 Readers familiar with the theoretical and ideological controversies of socialism might
find this proposition reformist. That would be incorrect, because reformists believe – as
much or even more than do revolutionaries – in solutions based on a more equitable dis-
tribution of surplus value; such an approach does not involve doing away with capitalism.
14 [Translator’s note: see Althusser (1965, pp. 111, 113).]
15 Lacan introduced the term “sinthome”, which makes use of the old French spelling of
“symptom”, quite late in his work, in his seminar on Joyce held in 1975–1976 (Lacan,
2005b). In an original way, he suggested that this is what mitigates the foreclosure of
the Name-of-the-Father.Yet he then proceeds to present a more positive conception of
the symptom, in which the symptom is no longer antinomic to its interpretation and
in which, once this interpretation occurs, the symptom does not go away; instead, it is
revealed as the salutary indicator of the impossibility of the sexual relation. Of course,
this transformation changes the formal envelope of the symptom, which makes way for
what can be called a style.
16 Only in masochism, which supposes that there is a contract, does the subject consent, to
some extent, to being at the Other’s disposal, for the sake of the jouissance of being the
thing that is going to disappear, without the threshold ever once having been crossed.
17 The debate concerning the question of the greater or lesser degree of indeterminateness
left by genetic factors is often confused with something very different: a freedom that
has nothing to do with any kind of free will, and which comes from the presence of
something that is logically undecidable in structure as such, or even from some “unfath-
omable” decision.This freedom of structure belongs only to the field of experience with
which psychoanalysis is concerned, and which psychoanalysis demonstrates in a way that
the hard sciences can only approach . . . asymptotically.
18 The consequences of this distinction between two conceptions of the symptom – one
in which the symptom is the mark of the nonexistence of the sexual relation, and one
in which its purpose is to hide this nonexistence – can be grasped in the way in which
analysis is conducted. This emerged in a discussion of a paper on Calamity Jane pre-
sented by Isabelle Morin at the “Midi-minuit des écrits de psychanalyse [Psychoanalytic
writings from noon to midnight]”, a conference held by the Association psychoanalyse
Jacques Lacan [Jacques Lacan psychoanalytic association] in Paris in 2005. Two opposing
readings emerged. For Morin, Calamity Jane’s decision to give her daughter up for adop-
tion was the sign of a “love beyond the object”. Discussants disagreed with this, suggest-
ing that Jane’s decision was more probably determined by a rejection of the castration
that would have been imposed on her in the task of rearing the child. While it would
be difficult to think of Calamity Jane as someone who had been able to remove herself
from the peristalsis of jouissance, is it certain that she really rebelled against the castra-
tion of the maternal Other? By allowing her daughter to be adopted, she may well have
been protecting her from the painful outcome that her mother had not spared her. It is
 The sense of symptoms 169

certainly possible that her decision expressed a belief that this course of action would
allow her to protect her daughter from all or part of the trial of castration. However, it
also, and especially, expressed her attempt to prevent her daughter from having to pay for
Jane’s own relation as a woman to jouissance, a relation that she knew to be nothing less
than exemplary.
19 Writing is on the side of the real and its own play prevails over its function of transcrib-
ing language. Without writing, the materiality of the signifier is forgotten.
20 This is asserted quite clearly by Miller (2005, p. viii): “[Lacan’s] calling into question of
the limits of the Oedipus complex and of the paternal myth continued . . ., going as far
as to reduce the Name-of-the-Father to the level of a symptom and utensil”.
6
EXITING FROM CAPITALISM

Can we take leave of capitalism, and if so, how? For Marx, capitalism is a mode
of production in which labour-power has been transformed into commodities.
Surplus-value could only be theorised after the arrival of capitalism made it pos-
sible – at least ideally – to give a numerical value to the socially necessary labour-
time used to produce a commodity.This value could then be compared to the value
that is necessary for training and maintaining labour-power. Marx’s political ideal
was that private ownership of the means of production had to be abolished, so that
surplus-value, which will always be appropriated, will give rise to a new logic, in
which the rate of profit will not be at the service of a sort of parthenogenesis of
money, but will serve each person’s economic development and satisfaction, first
“according to his ability” (socialism) and later, “according to his needs” (commu-
nism) (Marx, 1875, p. 347).
This vision is coherent and the concept of surplus-value, upon which it is based,
is scientifically valid, as capitalists were the first to recognise.What, then, can explain
the failure of two great and very different revolutions, the Russian and the Chinese,
after they had aroused such immense hopes? Historians have begun their own
expert work, which will probably continue for a long time. It would be pretentious
and ill-timed to start drawing conclusions, as if they would enable us to leave the
question behind us. It would also be simplistic to yield to the idea that capitalism is
the natural mode of production, and that Russia and China were finally converted
to it, after decades of indulging in an ideological mistake.This would be like claim-
ing that the France of the First Empire and the Restoration was simply returning
to the normality of feudalism, after having wandered in the desert of the revolution.
It is both possible and desirable, however, to draw certain conclusions about these
two major experiments on the basis of the preceding analyses of the splitting of the
subject, the discourses and the symptom. My first – rather trivial – remark runs the
risk of being judged to be of secondary importance. People will accuse me of being
 Exiting from capitalism 171

short-sighted and narrow. I would say, instead, that I am placing the ashes under a
microscope: not only Stalin and Mao, but also Ceausescu, Pol Pot and many others
were certainly psychotic. They were capable, with their left hand, of encouraging
revolutionary enthusiasm and, with their right hand and with all the innocence of
a paranoiac, of sending hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths. Neither
Soviet nor Chinese communists were spared, and they were often the most perse-
cuted. I have already quoted Lacan’s claim that the psychotic seeks to contain the
pulverulence of his delusion by taking the place of the master in discourse.
Thus, a question that is not trivial arises: why have societies that have attempted
socialism and communism been unable to deal with psychosis, other than by allow-
ing psychotics to establish dictatorships, in a way that, all things being unequal, led
the entire experiment to be condemned? Perhaps the already well-worn notion of
voluntary servitude could be put forward as an explanation, yet this is hardly suf-
ficient. What should be examined, instead, is the overestimation of desire, which
always gives a priority to the psychotic’s fixed desire and its correlative valorisation
of power. These remarks should not be seen as an attempt to segregate psychot-
ics. Psychotic subjects have more than their share of the spirit that extends and
enhances civilisation, but this spirit disappears as soon as they give up a question-
ing that has not been constrained by their generational being, and instead become
frozen in a position of power that bars every other and does so both symbolically
and in the real.
It may well be that “early” cultures did better than our own in offering psychot-
ics a place that is powerful but remains marginal enough not to impinge upon
politics as such. Religions – which are not, however, immune to mass extermina-
tions – have perhaps also been able to channel the innocence of torturers outside
politics. With the coming of capitalism, however, after a period of democratic con-
quests, these safety valves seem to have been closed, and as in the Roman Empire,
the monomania of power has ended up rivalling the pursuit of money.

When the saints go marching in

For Lacan, it may well be that the “new man” or woman – who has received bad
press – will be able to arise on the side of the mystics and the saints; capitalism can-
not “fit” these figures any more than Cinderella’s glass slippers could fit the wicked
stepsisters’ feet.1
Must capitalism be done away with or can we simply leave it? The answer is not
obvious. In 1972, Lacan foresaw the blowout of capitalist discourse; shortly after-
ward, he wrote a striking phrase in Television: “The more saints, the more laughter;
that’s my principle, to wit, the way out of the capitalist discourse2 – which will not
constitute progress if it happens only for some” (Lacan, 1974b, p. 16). This state-
ment is not finally, very original, and variations of it have been written throughout
the centuries. The most eminent thinkers have always, whether rightly or wrongly,
considered the saint and the poet as grains of sand in the coercive or segregative
machine that pushes civilisations forward towards their impasses. Lacan’s specific
172 On the symptom

addition, however, is that this cannot be “only for some”; he excludes the possibility
that an exit from capitalism will be progress if others are left inside it. Not surpris-
ingly, this is a reference to the parable of the three prisoners from “Logical Time and
the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (Lacan, 1945). Either they all leave together
or they all remain prisoners. To say that the way out will not only be for some does
not mean that everyone must be a saint in order to leave. There must, however, be
enough saints to make the capitalist discourse obsolete, so that no one, anywhere,
will be able to enter it. It would become a dead, uninhabited coral reef, a museum
open on Sunday afternoon.
This reflection does not, in itself, tell us what a saint is. Belief or its lack can only
be a trustworthy compass if we take seriously the theology that presided over the
birth of the saint.The definition of a saint remains constant in Lacan’s teaching: “the
saint is the refuse of jouissance” (Lacan, 1974b, p. 16). “Sicut palea” (Lacan, 1968b,
p. 8), to quote another passage in the same vein, where Lacan relies on Thomas
Aquinas in order to sketch a picture of a psychoanalyst: these figures are not frozen
in indifference or impassibility. Instead, they are open to their own impossibility. It
is difficult to deny the family resemblance between the saint and the psychoanalyst.
Think, for example, of a “minor” saint, such as Thérèse de Lisieux. Try also to take
seriously the idea that “there is no better way of placing” a psychoanalyst “objec-
tively than in relation to what was in the past called: being a saint” (Lacan, 1974b,
p. 15). We can also note that Lacan (ibid., p. 15) chose the example of Baltasar
Gracián for his “renouncing [of] personal brilliance”. Once again, the saint is refuse.
This implies that, for the saint, there is no jouissance in basking in the position of
being a piece of trash; nothing, however, prevents the saint from catching up with
this through ecstasy, if possible.
In this context, what is important is that saints act as a piece of trash, for their
“business [is] trashitas” (ibid., p. 15), thus enabling any subject to take them as the
cause of desire. Incarnating the object a, the saint sets up a discourse that goes
against the capitalist discourse.The vector a → S writes this “relation” on the upper
line of the analytic discourse.
a→S
If the social bond follows this path, it cannot follow that of the capitalist dis-
course, in which the same vector, which is now diagonal, exaggerates the lack-in-
jouissance by feeding the fantasy that the division of the subject can be suppressed
by complementing it with a.

In the analytic discourse, on the contrary, this vector is marked as impossible,

which means that the mutation of the subject in relation to jouissance is affected
by the “abjectness” of this cause. Such a cause is both abject and produces abject-
ness. This mutation of the subject makes the capitalist discourse inoperative. Such a
 Exiting from capitalism 173

mutation should not, however, be idealised, for as Augustine recognised, the saint, in
relation to God as jouissance, is always falling back into heresy. This is not a serious
problem if we remember both that saints are not alone and can do nothing when
they are alone.3
Let us suppose that our hope has been fulfilled: not a single person has not
left the capitalist discourse and there are enough saints. We can link this with the
symptom through the homophony between the French word “symptôme” and “saint
homme”, holy man. Let there be a saint homme for each according to his/her needs. If
this reading of the future is correct, only the capitalist discourse will become obso-
lete, and the other discourses will remain. The discourse of the master is the one by
which we enter language; we come into this discourse through an interior door,
since everyone is already inside language. This leads to a rather incongruous ques-
tion: when our holy people and our subjects of the unconscious come together,
what sort of agreement would they have come to?
Nachtrag is not a deferred action.4 At least initially, there has been no action at all,
so nothing can be deferred. The action only comes into existence later, and acts by
transforming the meaning of the initial moment. This is why “the meaning of the
symptom depends upon the future of the real” (Lacan, 1975b, p. 186). One aspect of
Lacan’s treatment of time has not been sufficiently emphasised: because of language,
our relation to time is never synchronic. Instead, it either takes the form of anticipa-
tion or occurs after the fact [après-coup]; thus, it introduces into science a dimension
that departs from any postulates about the self-identity of time.
Let us try to grasp the symptom in terms of this dual temporality and take psy-
choanalysis itself to be a symptom: not a social symptom, but a symptom whose
effect is as prosaic as possible on anyone who is undergoing or has undergone an
analysis. With these two postulates, we can ask what the “dissolution” of the symp-
tom means. The symptom comes into existence as an anticipation of the real: an
anticipation of the impossible sexual relation, which would seek to reduce two
to one, the not-all to the all, etc.5 This symptom is then interpreted after the fact.
Lacan thinks that interpreting the symptom does not involve stuffing it with mean-
ing. Instead, we strip the real out of meaning, which can only imaginarise it. I began
this section by quoting and agreeing with Freud’s statement that the symptom has
a sense. Have these considerations now rendered this formulation obsolete? If we
define sense as what, on the basis of the symbolic and language, creates an image
in the body in order to bring about the field of representation, then this formula-
tion has become obsolete. In this context, meaning certainly misses what is real
in the symptom. Yet there is another way to grasp meaning:6 by distinguishing it
from representation and connecting it, instead, to what enables the symbolic to be
transmuted by the letter itself. This is not at all a representation by the signifier, and
still less by the signified. It is generally a figuration, in the sense in which a figure is
the thing itself. Without this figuration, painting, poetry or music would have no
sense. This junction with the letter orients the subject along the curvature of the
symptom: the real. This movement led Lacan to adopt the obsolete way of writing
the French word symptôme: “sinthome”.
174 On the symptom

If psychoanalysis is a symptom, then this has several implications. Psychoanalysis

will succeed only at the price of abolishing the real. We must therefore hope that
it will fail, because in doing so, it will remain a symptom of this real. The pervert’s
deal – in which the subject enters a passive mode as a bargaining chip in the
demand that the Other also become passive – can only be proposed by the Other.
Such a proposition has to be delegated to the Other because castration operates,
first, at the level of the Other; this can assure the subject that there will be a limit
to the passivity to which the Other would like to reduce him. Yet since the sub-
ject can only propose this perverse deal by putting her/himself in the place of the
Other, s/he is exposed to castration. Structurally, this first odyssey can only have
two results: 1) the subject can occupy the place of what cannot be castrated, which
is necessary to certify that the Other can be castrated, and 2) the subject can move
into the locus where castration ceases to operate, a locus that is no longer covered
by the Other. Situating the priority of these two results is a true choice of Kultur:
returning to the father7 or going towards the feminine as unknown. This second
result will preserve the first, although the latter’s requirements will no longer be
considered as absolute.
I can therefore desire that the real disappear; this would be a paradise and psy-
choanalysis would be a purgatory that would quickly be forgotten. In desire, is there
something other than the desire for this disappearance? The real, however, does not
disappear, and therefore gives us the occasion to desire, a desire that is brought to life
by the ways of “making up for” [suppléances] that we have at our disposal; the dream is
their natural prototype. Anxiety then becomes a risk, for it threatens us with the lack
of lack. Can I live without the transitional object constituted by death? If life is full,
can I live by forgetting death? In this context, it is invaluable to discover that only I am
mortal and that the Other is not. The Other, beyond being the place of the “treasure
trove of signifiers” (Lacan, 1960, p. 682), beyond being its living support, beyond
Mount Olympus and its abstractions, is the white goddess, and it exists. It is the
infinite element from which my finite body, as a living and speaking being, is made.8

Association vs. Institution

Near the end of volume III of Capital, Marx writes:

Freedom, in the sphere [of the productive processes] can consist only in this,
that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabo-
lism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control
instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the
least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropri-
ate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The
true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself,
begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its
basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.
(Marx, 1894, p. 959)
 Exiting from capitalism 175

Marx’s remarks are rather general and, in a certain way, almost ordinary.Yet they are
interesting because they remind us implicitly that, in one sense, the capitalist mode
of production is civilising: it is a condition by which the productive process can
diminish the pressure of necessity. Once this task has been accomplished, however,
it must disappear, to make way for a mode of production in which the “associated
producers” could emancipate themselves from the “blind power” that had, until
then, “govern[ed] the human metabolism with nature”.
The problem is stated clearly but resolved less clearly: at what threshold does
freedom begin? Surplus-labour, the source of surplus-value, will not disappear.
What will change will be the mode of appropriating surplus-value, which will be
collective rather than private. Does freedom begin with this change? Yes and no.
At this level, freedom is still subordinated to the “empire of necessity”. “The true
realm of freedom” only begins when material production is accomplished in a
way that is satisfying for everyone, and when it becomes possible to envision the
primacy of free time over the time of obligatory labour. This condition remains
unquestionable, but the perspective needs to be defined more fully, for the work
that is called “free” remains without content. Furthermore, in another text in which
Marx (1875, p. 347) envisions the communist “utopia”, labour is defined as “a vital
need”. At least this way of putting the question keeps us from waiting for the pov-
erty of minimal consumption to produce a solution, because even if dry bread and
water could open the way to the kingdom of God, they run the more certain risk
of programming people so that they cannot defend themselves against boredom,
for they would tend to have no drives. Finally, in any event, this freedom, which is
expressed by the formula, “From each according to his abilities, to each according
to his needs” (ibid., p. 347) will, as the passage from Capital reminds us, remain based
on the “realm of necessity”.
This may be the moment to raise the question of the desire of the scientist and
theorist. It is certain that Marx was able to resist boredom and was left indifferent
by the trappings of power and wealth. As Lacan (1970, p. 434) says in “Radiophonie”,
surplus-value is “Marxlust, Marx’s surplus-jouissance”. This cannot be questioned
seriously. If we seek to open up the paths for this research, how can we not see
that the problem of surplus-value – once its discovery has given capitalism both
its sceptre and its cross – is how to redistribute it? From this perspective, what is
involved is not taking from some in order to give to others, but taking from eve-
ryone, so that the fact of possessing cannot be transformed into a thirst for posses-
sions. The “theologians” of the economy of expense, especially Georges Bataille,
saw this requirement, without being able to give it a suitable form. The goal is not
to promote an economy of privation for everyone, which would be paired with an
economy of waste for a God who has no needs. Instead, the diagonal vector of the
capitalist discourse, a → S, needs to be broken, for it traps desire in an alternation
between a “bulimia of consumption” and a destructive anorexia. Within the capi-
talist discourse, there can be no way out of this alternation. In a sense, the roman-
tic poet became the bard of capitalism when he wrote that “One single being is
wanting . . .” (Lamartine, 1820, p. 101, translation modified). From “I have a pair of
176 On the symptom

Adidas, therefore I am” to “A pair of Nikes is wanting . . .”, it is clear that placing
love in the consumerist prayer book has ennobled this book, but at the expense of
love; the partner’s departure, whether voluntary or not, becomes the cause of the
poet’s depression.
In the passage from volume III of Capital cited above, there is an invaluable
expression: “associated producers”. This is the green fruit that will ripen into the
contradiction that I have drawn attention to, and which we must not forget if we do
not want to remain stuck in the same place: what can be done about going beyond
the labour that belongs to the realm of necessity if we do not make free, uncon-
strained labour the primary need of life? We know that Freud treated the desire to
sleep as the first of all desires. Would the society that we dream of therefore be a
society that is asleep? Rather than criticising the romantic poet, perhaps we should
embrace him.When the poet writes “One single being is wanting . . .”, he is indicat-
ing the way out of capitalism by making the other, the “associated” other, the figure
who must be present as subject if our desire is not to be reduced to a desire to sleep.
Perhaps the principle of “association” could thus be a way of refusing the diagonal
arrow a → S in the capitalist discourse.
Here are the minimal consequences of this principle.

1 S is no longer cut from S2. The subject is no longer cut away from its
unconscious.
2 Relying on the re-establishment of this junction, the subject accepts the impos-
sibility of the vector, a → S. In other words, the foreclosure of castration ceases.
3 The subject can then cease to subscribe to the unconscious, to the extent that
the latter will no longer be what produces him or her, as it does in the dis-
course of the master.

Whenever we say “association”, we imply that people have decided to associate

with one another. In the Lacanian psychoanalytic movement, the first and foremost
association was the École freudienne de Paris, which Lacan himself founded in 1964.
In this particular case, the foundation resulted from the desire of the analyst; Lacan’s
objective was to constitute a school that would be congruent with the purpose
of psychoanalysis and would function on the basis of this purpose. In 1980, at the
end of this school’s history, Lacan himself dissolved it, for the explicit reason that
it was functioning against psychoanalysis; the institution had taken precedence over the
association.
It should also be noted that at the moment of this dissolution, Lacan presented
himself as the one who, by withdrawing, would free the school’s component ele-
ments. He was referring to the structure of the Borromean knot, in which the
cutting of one circle frees the others. However, there was one difference in this
particular case: unlike the Borromean knot, Lacan was the only circle that could
free the others through the cut.This is far from being a negligible consideration, for
it leads us to the idea that an associative structure can only be Borromean if each of
the individuals who compose it is a founder of this association. “Founder”, in this
 Exiting from capitalism 177

context, means the bearer of the only desire – the desire of the analyst – that is not
a demand for identification.The next step would be to ask whether this association
became an institution precisely because it had a single founder and n members.
I shall leave to future historians of psychoanalysis the task of treating this question
dispassionately. When erosion and fossilisation have done their work, the archae-
ologists will come. In legal terms, an association is necessarily and by definition an
institution. Perhaps, furthermore, the association that had been dissolved left a sedi-
ment in the institutional configuration to which it had belonged.
The opposition between association and institution can be deduced from Lacan’s
final texts.9 Yet, the prototype of this distinction can be found in the binary opposi-
tion between group psychology (Massenpsychologie) and collective logic. Very early,
and at least as early as his famous article “Logical Time and the Assertion of Antici-
pated Certainty”, Lacan (1945) distinguished his conception from the cynical and
grumbling belief that psychoanalysis is something like a “sculpture of the self ”.10
Lacan’s entry into the psychoanalytic literature is often traced back to his fruitful
and astute treatment of the mirror stage.The most important of his “youthful” ideas,
however, is his conception of the act as an anticipation that is based entirely on two
principles: an act is not the result of an abstract deduction and it implies taking
the other as subject into account. Taking the subject into “account” has nothing
to do with altruism, since it involves “counting” on this other. Lacan’s early work,
which still belonged more to psychiatry than to psychoanalysis, is already marked
by a concern that never ended: the importance accorded to listening to and hear-
ing the patient’s message. This concern breaks completely with the idea, which,
unfortunately, is still very much alive, even within Lacanian analysis, that the patient
or – to put it bluntly – the analysand, can be reformed even when the practitioner
does not hear her/his message. What immediately characterises this collective logic
is that, in a very strange way, the fable of the prisoners treats the other’s “doing”
[faire] or “non-doing” [non-faire] as a saying [dire], even if saying is not always doing.
In collective logic, no process of identification with the other turns this figure into
an Other.
Louis Althusser pointed to a very important problem: an institution transforms
the association between one and (another) one by hypostasing the One into an
entity, which thereby becomes a norm that is independent of the associates. A sort
of sleight-of-hand occurs, which obliges each of the associates to obey this One –
even if the One has never given a command – while each of them believes that s/he
is only obeying her/himself. It is easy to show how this trick is performed. All that
is necessary is for some random person to become less the master than the “leader”
(I won’t mention the German word for this); he will then impose his own desire
through a structural fraud, since the condition for following him is to believe that
we do not have to follow him. Certainly, by setting himself up as One – while issu-
ing frequent denials of what he is doing – he will confront the associates with what
he considers to be their cowardly avoidance of any confrontation with the desire
of the Other.11 This desire must be cajoled and nourished, for if the Other did
not exist, what would my desire be made of? This reasoning is impeccable, except
178 On the symptom

that what belongs to me is the fulfilment – or not – of this desire, which turns my
dreams into something simultaneously impersonal and intimate; once these dreams
crystalise when I awake, I may be able to sign them in order to appropriate them.
The institution thus adds ideology to association. The practical question is
whether this turn is inevitable. Even if we suppose that an association is explicitly
governed by the principle that no one can enter it without (re)founding it, it is still
necessary to avoid a principle that has no content. Since this content is the discursiv-
ity that characterises the analytic bond, the desire of each person in such an associa-
tion can only be a desire without a demand: a desire that is regulated in terms of
each person’s satisfaction, a dephallicised desire.This, in any case, was Lacan’s (1982b,
p. 307) dream in the “Note italienne” where he suggested it would be possible to
form an association that would be composed only of AEs [Analysts of the School].
The difficulty with this position is not so much its extreme requirements as its
“set-theoretical” formalism, which thumbs its nose at hybridisation in its synchronic
and, even more fundamentally, its diachronic dimension. An analysand who is not
an analyst can belong to the group, even before the desire of the analyst comes to
her/him, if it ever does. S/he can be a member of it because her/his presence is
the condition for testing that very desire of the analyst. Consequently, the historical
question concerning the privileged place of exception that Lacan occupied in his
school returns in a new form: if a single member is not a founder – if he has not
become a member by having demonstrated that the desire of the analyst has acted
upon him, does this mean that the association is becoming sedimented into an
institution? Does this inevitably signal the moment when a reversal will take place,
and the institution will come to control the association? Should we then consider
that the founding criterion was not correctly based on the desire of the analyst?
This may be and is even without any doubt the case. The young generals of the
French Revolution put a definitive end to the idea that establishing an oeuvre is a
prerogative to be undertaken only at the end of one’s career. In addition, this would
involve recommissioning the idea of infallibility, making it conceivable and attain-
able for an association of analysts to display their desire out in the open, proudly, as
if it were the badge of honour of a military decoration. The problem needs to be
approached differently: no association can be pure – purged entirely of the insti-
tutional. For this reason, associations need to be sufficiently aware of the moment
when they are about to pass the point of no return: the point beyond which con-
flicts of interest cannot be dealt with because – to use Melanie Klein’s important
distinction – they involve envy, which is insurmountable, and not only jealousy.
In this context, the solution becomes dissolution; this would be a way of remov-
ing associations from their institutionalisation, at a point at which the latter threatens
to undo the associative foundation. Rather than waxing lyrical about institutionless
associations, an objective that is as idealistic as the aspiration to be a subject without
identifications, we must consent to associations in which the discourses of the hys-
teric, the university and the master will have a – subordinate – place.
This is certainly not a traumatic dream: a dream that is doomed to being
repeated constantly. When we reread Marx’s texts on workers’ associations, which
 Exiting from capitalism 179

he considered not as a force for overthrowing the state but as a result of its wither-
ing away, or hear the statement attributed to Lenin to the effect that “Any cook
should be able to run the country”, we see how they thought that such institutions
could operate smoothly. The reshuffling of positions becomes a permanent means
of dissolution, and dissolution becomes an act that gives such reshuffling another
chance.We know, however, that reshuffling can itself end up involving only a Stend-
halian “happy few”,12 or turning around a fixed hub.
Finally, and perhaps especially, in order to avoid turning what is new into what
is always the same, we need to take what Lacan called “swarming” [essaimage]13 seri-
ously. This includes being aware of what has happened in the Lacanian movement
since his death: the emergence of a constellation of associations whose only sun
had been extinguished – “Other at last”, as Lacan (1980c, p. 135) said before he
became it.
An analysis, as both experience and experiment, is founded on the rule that an
analysand must say everything or must speak in spite of everything. To make this
contention more concrete through a rule, the sexual encounter between analyst
and analysand is forbidden; the consequence of this rule is that if such an encounter
takes place, the experiment of analysis comes to an end. The fault lies less in sexual
activity itself than in the imposture of claiming that such activity is compatible
with analysis and would even be a way of continuing it. From this single example,
we can deduce the difference between morality and ethics: morality would have it
that a healthcare professional should not take advantage of his position of authority
by seducing the person under his care or allowing himself to be seduced by her/
him; ethics argues that giving up the rule of abstinence means giving up the desire
of the analyst.
In this field, psychotic subjects – whether or not they are analysands or ana-
lysts – may be the best able to question the modes of transference, not in psycho-
analytic action but in political action. This action involves deactivating the capitalist
discourse: making it obsolete because it no longer has any agents. Ideally, we could
think that reformism – which always involves the primacy of ethics over politics –
would be enough to bring about this transferral. Political action would consist in
winning potential agents over to the maxim: act according to your ethics and don’t
worry about the results. This formulation is rather close to what would be involved
in psychoanalytic action, but there is one problem with it. Since any maxim can only
be imposed by suggestion, an agent’s adoption of it would reproduce the primacy of
political over psychoanalytic action, which is the opposite of what is being sought.14
I have just mentioned the psychotic subject precisely because for him/her, the
Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed. This foreclosure prevents morality from operat-
ing, for the basis of morality is the possibility of identifying with the counterpart
and saying, “I don’t want to do to the other what I wouldn’t want him/her to do
to me”. The Name-of-the-Father underlies the possibility of identifying with an
other who has submitted to the law of castration; the law, in turn, decrees that every
x is either a man or a woman, and that no son or daughter can be the brother, sister
or father of his/her own father. If the psychotic subject lacks such morality, how
180 On the symptom

can s/he be located? The psychotic subject may be able to submit to morality as
a convention, without genuinely adhering to it. S/he can only locate her/himself
through the symptom, and can do so in a way that can show the core of the symp-
tom, stripped of any phallic embellishment. This core is the statement, “I want to
get off on the Other without the Other’s getting off on me”. For the psychotic, the
question is how to welcome becoming not-all, the margin in which castration does
not operate completely, and in which s/he can touch the real. This not-all would
allow the psychotic not to be forced into a push-to-woman [pousse-à-la-femme].15
For the psychotic, there can be a temptation here to realise the phallus – which
one cannot have symbolically (if one is a man) or which one cannot entirely be
symbolically (if one is a woman) – by becoming the living totem of a community,
a country, a family. The paranoiac has a special talent for this and finds it attrac-
tive. The schizophrenic sticks to a collateral tyranny, from which he tries in vain
to detach himself, for he can choose neither the Other nor himself as the tyrant.
Finally, those who suffer from mania and melancholia have difficulty mourning
for what they haven’t lost. Otherwise, if ethics triumphs and the subject decides to
identify with the symptom, to the point of being able to make up for the Name-
of-the-Father, from which s/he did not have to suffer, but which s/he also did not
know how to use, the solution s/he invents will express an authentic primacy of
psychoanalytic action over both political pragmatism and idealism.
As we have seen, Lacan, when speaking of the consequences of the capitalist
discourse, referred to the foreclosure of castration. This foreclosure does not dif-
ferentiate between neurotics, perverts and psychotics, since it subjects all of them
to a discourse that amputates them, as subjects, from their relation, whatever that
may be, with castration.They are all deprived of access to an unconscious that could
enable them to deactivate their fantasy or their delusion.16

Gelassenheit
This is the term that Lacan used when Catherine Millot (2001, pp. 12–14) reported
her experience of the “emptiness” of death to him.17 “Gelassenheit” can be translated
as “releasement”,18 “serenity” or “letting be” (ibid., p. 12). It is tempting to set it in
opposition to foreclosure – including this term’s legal sense – which indicates that
something has been rejected: thrown outside the field of the symbolic, after a phase
in which allowing it in would have been possible.
Does “letting be” permit the advent, not in the symbolic but in lived experi-
ence, of some bits and pieces of the real which, because of a temporal shift, have
not been able to make an imprint in the wax of the symbolic? In her book, Millot
(ibid., pp. 31–39) mentions the poet Henri Michaux’s experiments. Michaux made
a deliberate attempt to reach this experience through drugs, and was not content to
describe afterwards what happened to him. Instead, in the real time of the experi-
ment, he made graphemes that circumvented language, enabling what could not be
symbolised to be “written”. Becoming a living seismograph, he hoped to enlarge
knowledge, taking it beyond the borders of the linguistic and the symbolic.
 Exiting from capitalism 181

Alain Didier-Weill (2003, p. 32) examines the same kind of problems in refer-
ence to Emmanuel Levinas’ (1961) book, Totality and Infinity: “The newborn baby’s
absolute passivity is the position by which the human who is to come offers, in its
finitude, a place where what is infinite in the Other can be inscribed”.The problem
here is to understand the status of “what is infinite in the Other”, since in order for
the subject to be constituted, a step must be taken that goes beyond this original
passivity: an “act through which the subject responds” must constitute what Freud
calls primal repression (ibid., p. 32). This act involves an abolishing of the signifi-
ance that had been primally welcomed or received in an operation homologous to
the invention of zero in mathematics (see Seife, 2000). We could suppose that the
original receiving of signifiance, before it is cast out, in fact produces no signified-
effect. Perhaps, instead, this effect would only occur at the moment of the expul-
sion, which itself provokes whatever was welcomed to begin signifying. In any case,
I myself am inclined to think that the constitutive division comes about when the
“half a subject” (see Lacan, 1991, pp. 62–66) objects to accepting an original passive-
ness that would fully deliver the subject,“as a whole”, to the jouissance of the Other.
If this is correct, then the subject would come into existence at the same moment
as the symptom; these two advents would be two sides of one and the same event.19
This can shed light on two points. First, the foreclosure of castration that Lacan
links to capitalist discourse means that – whenever contingency emerges – this
discourse prevents unconscious knowledge from shaking the subject’s assurance of
being. It thus ends up foreclosing the space-time in which the law could cease to
appear as the immutable commandment of God or nature. This is the space-time
in which castration could cease to be abstract, and one could go beyond it. It is
certain that there is always an irreducible place in the psyche where castration has
not acted; Freud located this in his case history of the Wolf Man. When what is
impermeable to analysis in this place has been located, then an end to the talking
cure can be envisioned. Second, the foreclosure of castration has nothing to do
with the foreclosure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father; this first foreclo-
sure does not necessarily make the Wolf Man a psychotic. If we look for psychotics
among the “neurotics” discussed by Freud, it would be better to focus on Woodrow
Wilson (Freud & Bullitt, 1966), with his abstract and “unreasonable” love of power:
his marriage, without any possibility of divorce, to power. This “marriage” enabled
him to simulate a discursive position as master and was accompanied by a disavowal
of this position, which was authentic precisely because it was true. In this travel-free
odyssey, the worst is generally what becomes most certain.
To return to Gelassenheit, Catherine Millot seems to have perceived correctly
that the father’s position enabled the place of this experience to be brought out; at
one moment, her father authorised her not to go to school, thereby allowing her to
subtract herself partially from the Law. She writes that:

On that day, my father had the paradoxical function of exempting me from

the law that is common to all, of permitting me not to be wholly submitted
to it. If it is true, as Lacan claims, that love is giving what one does not have,
182 On the symptom

my father gave me the gift of his love, for he gave me what he did not have at
his disposal: the power to exempt myself from castration. And if it did not fall
within his scope to subtract me from it entirely, it is nevertheless certain that
he gave me a little leeway with the ability not to take the norm for the law.20
(Millot, 2001, p. 142)

This is a decisive remark, for it separates the submission to castration from the con-
sent to something beyond the law, but which is not disorder pure and simple. This
emphasises two requirements. First, there is no law without an interpretation: not
an interpretation of what the law means, but a decision about what is and what is
not law (see Agamben, 2003).21 Second, beyond the Law, there is the space for an
experience that does not fall within the jurisdiction of any law. At this level, the
classical debate between nomos and nomina has no object, and this brings us back
to the question of the “oceanic feeling”, a term that indicates that it touches the
infinite, and not only in a metaphorical way.
Through the context in which it occurs, we can see that this experience – which is
little more than embryonic when we approach it only as a “feeling” – does not require
the subject to be psychotic, and thus to have no relation with the naming [nomination]
of the father. Instead, it would be better to distinguish mystical experiences from astro-
logical and cosmological delusions, which have an inhibiting power that is as effective
as ordinary forgetting. (Mysticism, in this context, needs to be differentiated from any
religious connotations; it would include, for example, the experiences of the “experi-
menter”, Henri Michaux.) To keep to related references, we know that the writers in
the Grand jeu group, particularly René Daumal (see 1938), gave a pivotal place to this
experience, while working to preserve its secular status. Likewise, the writers associ-
ated with Acéphale – Georges Bataille (1986) and a few rare people whom he had
chosen – sought to force open the gateway to infinity by making Eros collide with
Thanatos. If we take Teresa of Avila – who reached an ecstasy that was stronger than
union – as the great paradigm of mystical experience, we can see that her very strong
anchoring in the phallus enabled her to bear the painful aspects of this experience.
There are, however, great poets, such as Hölderlin and Celan – as well as Artaud –
who cast themselves adrift from the phallus and found that this did not lead them
to ecstasy. Instead, at certain moments, it immersed them in an unimaginable anxi-
ety. Through writing, however, they succeeded in transmitting what someone like
Teresa of Avila had difficulty in being able to say: the imperfection of God that
founds life.We recall a line from Hölderlin (1801, p. 156/157) that was so enigmatic
to his contemporaries: “bis Gottes Fehl hilft/Till God’s being not there helps him.”

On messianism
We can see a decisive issue coming to the fore: what is the rightful place of the
transcendent, which was explicitly disregarded by Enlightenment thinkers because
it was too closely related to religious obscurantism? Can the transcendent accom-
modate any form of social bond or is it always a monadic activity?22 This is a difficult
 Exiting from capitalism 183

question, but – to start somewhere – I would say that a monadic stance in which
all other subjects are cast aside seems to be the prerequisite for having a one-to-one
relationship with God, with a “personal” God who, as experience shows, may rever-
berate through an ecclesiastical organisation that is more devoted to making sure
that only one head rises above the others. It may even be that, although dialogue
is an unusual occurrence, it can take place – however unpredictably – between an
analysand and an analyst, and such exchanges always have a transcendent dimension.
Beyond this, there may just be some finely-tuned misunderstanding.23
In his book Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida (1993, p. 74) refers to the possibility
of “a messianic without messianism”. In a later response to Marxist critics of the
book, Derrida elaborates on this idea as follows:

I find it hard to decide whether messianicity without messianism (qua uni-

versal structure) precedes and conditions every determinate, historical figure
of messianism . . . or whether the possibility of thinking this independence
has only come about or revealed itself as such by way of the “Biblical” events
which name the messiah and make him a determinate figure.
Derrida (2002, p. 255)

What is being theorised in this controversy? Without seeking to choose between

a messianicity with or without messianism, and without being too preoccupied
with Léon Daudet, who ironically used the term “messianism” against Marx, it may
well be necessary to examine the figure of the messiah. The Aramaic etymology of
“messiah” refers to the “anointed one” and confirms that this figure has been given a
divine mission.Yet if we remove the messiah’s ecclesiastical logo and approach Jesus
as an “important passand” rather than as a figure who was sent by God, then this
can have implications for the bond with another subject that the analytic discourse
itself promotes.This bond takes on a dimension that, unlike Freud’s statements in his
exchange with Romain Rolland, does not exclude the idea of the infinite.
What serves as the foundation of this bond? While Freud (Meng & Freud, 1963,
p. 126) thought that psychoanalysis needed to be protected from priests, he also
saw quite clearly – or at least said this in a letter to Oskar Pfister on 25 Novem-
ber 1928 – that psychoanalysts can be defined as “secular pastors of souls”.24 The
pastoral metaphor would seem to be insignificant, if we forget that it could lead
the analysand to change his/her identification with the herd. The bond between
the analyst and the analysand is held together by transference; it only takes on
its true significance when the analysand detaches him/herself from this couple.
Hence, we can grasp how, in the analytic discourse, the vector between the two is
qualified as “impossible”. Things could go otherwise, however, in the experience
of the pass. The pass is a mechanism that Lacan (1968b, 1978a) invented in 1967; it
seeks to provide a way to authenticate the desire of the analyst. It comprises a “pas-
sand [passant]”, the analysand who takes part in this, and two “passers [passeurs]”,
who each receive the passand’s testimony about his/her analysis, independently of
one another. They then transmit the testimony to a committee (the passand is not
184 On the symptom

present for this). It can be argued that, in this experience, the bond between the
passer and passand eludes, in principle, the alienating dimension of transference that
occurs in analytic treatment. The passer is not a pastor.
We can now return to the question of what founds the bond with the other sub-
ject in analytic discourse. The passand testifies to a movement through and beyond
the experience of Hilflösigkeit, a helplessness for which there is no solution (see
Freud, 1926a, pp. 141–142).This is a moment in which I am out of “sync” with the
other, and even a moment in which I am deprived of my ego, which is the product
of an identification with the image of the other. At this juncture, the treatment
proves the power that it has – or has not – had, for this helplessness is what provides
a buttress for the subject. This buttress constitutes what is real in life, and death can
only efface it in a false way, for life has occurred. Confronted with the passand, the
passer is not the other who will palliate the absence of any solution to helplessness.
Instead, the passer constitutes a sort of “secular address”, which is necessary in order
for the passand’s testimony to go beyond the chains of solitude. Is the mystic’s bond
with God or with those who are still afraid of their Hilflösigkeit?
The work of the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar is relevant in this context. In Kakar,
we find a questioning that indicates what is at stake when a non-religious tran-
scendence is allowed to enter psychoanalysis. This transcendence involves neither
a church nor an apparatus of initiation. Kakar locates himself outside any relation
to the three monotheisms and their common ecclesiastical space (although the
nature of the ecclesiastical model varies greatly from one monotheism to another).
His reference to the darshan – looking at and introjecting the benevolent power
of the guru through the gaze (see Kakar, 1982, p. 134) – may seem perplexing.
The analogy between the guru’s silence and the mother’s silence (see Kakar, 1991,
p. 66) may also appear puzzling, yet this is linked to the culture of India, where the
mother’s silence is associated with her presence; this situation is very different from
what usually happens in the west, where her silence signals her absence. His praise
of fantasy and its mythogeny, although written in terms that make it difficult to
distinguish between poetic creation and Jungian anagogy, is even more suggestive.
His interest in Bion, who dared to speak about the analysand’s “divinity” (see Bion,
1965, p. 159) is also a good sign. It converges on the improper encounter, on the
analytic couch, between the mystic, who “made the potatoes sing” and the poet
who brought out the acid of the word “lemon” (see Clément & Kakar, 1993).What
is unsatisfactory is his vagueness on the nature of the analytic bond: on what basis
can one say that this bond is conditioned by a transference that is only valuable if it
can be resolved, instead of being used for “worldly” ends?
In this respect, during the phase in which the analysand can envision an end to
analysis, Hilflösigkeit will take forms that can be articulated; precisely because they
can be articulated, they will be absolutely singular. The experience of the pass ena-
bles these forms to be collected, although we cannot know in advance what forms
they will take; this increases the importance of what is at stake. This experience is
still young, but it could lead to analyses in which the demon or daemon of transfer-
ence will no longer be Satan. Instead, this figure will be the very action of sharing
(the Indo-European word was daiethai) one’s own time and the “time of the other”.
 Exiting from capitalism 185

The chariot and the sphere

In 1930, Ludwig Binswanger wrote an article that was translated into English
under the title “Dream and Existence” (and published along with a lengthy intro-
duction by Michel Foucault [1954]). We know about both Binswanger’s friend-
ship with Freud, which lasted from 1910 until the psychoanalyst’s death (see
Fichtner, 2003), and his gradual distancing of himself from psychoanalysis; his
article testifies to this distancing. In its third part, he gives an interpretation of
a dream, in which it immediately becomes apparent that the dreamer’s associa-
tions (perhaps this was Binswanger’s own dream) were not asked for; instead, it is
interpreted according to a preformed ideological schema. As Binswanger notes:

This is a most interesting dream in many ways. Notice the trichotomy of

thesis (dreaming, tormented life in isolation), antithesis (death by total disso-
lution of individual life following total surrender to the overpowering objec-
tive principle of “otherness”), and synthesis (by “reclaiming objectivity in
subjectivity”). The dream thus pictorially mirrors the psychoanalytic process
as a progression from the individual’s defiant persistence in his isolation, to
the humble subjection to the (impersonal) “authority” of the doctor (“trans-
ference phase”) to the “resolution of the transference”.
(Binswanger, 1930, p. 100)

I am deliberately not going to give the text of this dream, in order to accentu-
ate the “chance” relation between it and its interpretation; it allows Binswanger to
apply a grid that, following Jung’s method, could be called “anagogical”. Conceived
in this way, the dream illustrates a process that, either partially or completely, is
always the same. In this case, it could be said that it illustrates the ideal end of an
analysis; the problem, however, is to know how this end can be reached other than
by the analyst-interpreter’s mental projection.
If we follow Freud, each dream should be considered as making present a par-
ticular movement from the jouissance of the drives to the unconscious, by satis-
fying the “considerations of figurability” [Darstellbarkeit]25 that enable the dream
to become a form of writing that can be deciphered (Freud, 1900, pp. 339–349,
translation modified). We can see the effect of this definition of the dream on
Binswanger’s conception.
The more interesting aspects of Binswanger’s account lie in his attack on the
theory of dreams found in Petronius, whom he describes as a “fine and free-spirited
confident of Nero”, but which also occurs in Lucretius, the great materialist poet
(Binswanger, 1930, p. 96). This theory claims that dreams are not sent by the gods
but that “Each man creates his own (sed sibi quisque facit)” (ibid., p. 96). Binswanger
criticises Petronius’ opinion, saying that he has “grasped only half the truth” and
reproaches him for forgetting that although “man steers his carriage ‘where he
wishes’” – and thus he agrees with Petronius – “‘beneath the wheels there turns,
unnoticed, the globe upon which he moves’” (ibid., p. 96). He believes that this
criticism places him closer to Freud than to Jung.
186 On the symptom

Concerning Freud, he is not absolutely wrong. For example, in his correspond-

ence with Freud, Binswanger asks him whether the unconscious is the equivalent of
Kant’s noumenon. In other words, does the existence of the unconscious point to
what is beyond phenomena? We also know that, to the great displeasure of Ernest
Jones, Freud was always secretly disturbed by the occult. Following Lacan, we can
say that this question suggests that there is a real that cannot be dissolved into phe-
nomenal reality. Binswanger’s argument is therefore not off track. Lacan’s distinction
between reality – which can be articulated entirely through language – and the real –
which is incompatible with meaning, except through an act that can confer meaning
upon it after the fact – goes in the same direction; this direction preserves psychoa-
nalysis from being simply another antidote or just the best science of the soul.
The difficulty is that it is impossible to reach Binswanger’s “globe” through his
“chariot”, and therefore he cannot avoid falling into the trap of spiritualism. To
prove this, we need only read the key sentences of his article: “no one has ever suc-
ceeded and no one will ever succeed in deriving the human spirit from instincts
(Triebe). These two concepts are, by their very nature, incommensurable, and it is
their incommensurability that justifies the existence of both concepts, each within
its own proper sphere” (ibid., p. 101). It may well be impossible to deduce the spirit
from “instincts”; this statement is related to the problem, which Binswanger men-
tions, of the transference and how it is resolved. We can even agree that these
are “incommensurable” concepts. Instead, however, of using these observations to
measure the extraordinary and novel character of Freud’s discovery, he concludes
that only a spiritualisation of psychoanalysis can save it. To save it in this way, how-
ever, would be to eradicate both the drive – the limit-concept between the somatic
and the psychic – and the signifier, which is material.
Binswanger’s reasoning involves the same dehiscence – a coming apart or open-
ing up – between an upper and a lower that, in the next section, we shall encounter
in relation to Jesus. First, however, we should note what is at stake for the symptom
here: if only the symptom knows, and therefore neither the subject nor the Other
knows, then it is surely only at the level of the symptom as “medium” that we can
grasp how impossibility inheres in the incompatible “relation” between the real and
meaning.26 On the basis of this, we can bring out a kind of knowledge that has no
author, a knowledge that, unlike the ideal of science, cannot simply be formalist.
“No author” does not mean “no signature”. Finally, we should give Binswanger
credit for having seen how the aporia of the relation between the human spirit and
the drive touches on transference, which we know that Lacan related to what is
transcendent in love.

The impossible supposition

In his erudite and perceptive book Le pur amour: de Platon à Lacan, Jacques Le
Brun (2002) paid the finest possible homage to Lacan’s interest in “pure love”
by providing us with its history. He shows that its centre of gravity is located in
the quarrel between Bossuet and Fénelon at the turn of the eighteenth century.
At the heart of this confrontation, which ended in Fénelon’s political disgrace,
 Exiting from capitalism 187

was the question of the “impossible supposition” (ibid., p. 44).27 According to Le

Brun (ibid., p. 53–54), this supposition originates in both a statement that Moses
makes in Exodus28 and these words of Paul to the Romans: “For I could wish
that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren,
my kinsmen by race” [Romans 9:3]. In other words, Paul envisions a situation in
which, in order for his brothers to be saved, he would himself be separated from
Jesus and deprived of salvation.
Le Brun discusses the different interpretations of this passage made by the saints
and ecclesiastical authorities before Fénelon, in whose work we find formulations
that presage the views that Bossuet would consider worthy of condemnation, and
which were condemned by the Church when published in the Maxims of the Mys-
tics (Fénelon, 1697b). Le Brun refers in particular to the following statement:

We can also inspire in belaboured and truly humble souls an obedience and
consent to the will of God, through what is, all the same, a very false sup-
position: rather than the eternal good that He promised to the righteous, He
instead would keep them in eternal torment by His own whim, yet without
depriving them of His grace and love.29
(Le Brun, 2002, p. 175)

In this passage, three decisive elements mark out Fénelon’s problematic:

1 A righteous soul can consent to eternal torment (as in Paul’s statement), if this
is God’s will.With a slight change, this affirmation rectifies the canonical thesis
that it is forbidden for a Christian not to want salvation.
2 However, God cannot want to condemn a just soul to eternal torment (the
“false” or “impossible supposition”). Therefore, the righteous soul supposes
wrongly that this is God’s will.
3 Finally, even if a righteous soul can consent to eternal torment on the basis of
a false supposition that this is God’s will, this soul cannot be deprived of God’s
grace and love.

In the false supposition, we can see the shadow of Big Brother, a figure who
tortures out of love, but this is not the essential point. If we follow Fénelon’s
distinction between condemnation to hell and the preservation of God’s love for
the righteous soul, and also the extreme criterion he uses in defining pure love
as loving God even while being damned, a question remains: what if, when God
condemns the soul to eternal torment, he also deprives it of his love? We thus see
that the impossible supposition raises not one but two questions. The first can be
formulated at once: is the supposition actually false? After all, nothing prevents
God from being, for reasons beyond our understanding, the Supreme-Being-in-
Evil, which Sade conceived of less than a century after Fénelon (Lacan, 1986,
p. 215). The second, and even more burning, question is: could a righteous soul,
in supposing wrongly that God wanted both to damn it and to deprive it of love,
still consent to God’s will?
188 On the symptom

Before examining the consequences of such questions for our own topics, two
more remarks are necessary. First, in the Maxims of the Mystics (Fénelon, 1697b),
there are several references to the impossible supposition. This seems to be the
simplest version: “We should love Him [God] as much were He even – to suppose
what is impossible – to see fit to take no notice of our love, or to wish to reward
with eternal misery those who had loved Him” (1697b, p. 37). It is interesting to
note that Fénelon considered this to be homologous to a remark by Saint Francis
de Sales, which he goes on to cite: “ ‘Purity of love consisteth in desiring noth-
ing for self; in considering only the good pleasure of God, for the sake of which
we should be ready to esteem eternal misery above the glory of heaven’ ” (ibid.,
p. 38). Francis de Sales was clearly not saying the same thing as Fénelon, because
he does not include any sort of false supposition in his account; it is as if the “good
pleasure of God” could in fact include damning a righteous soul to hell. In fact,
Francis de Sales was not interested in whether God’s will is good or bad; such a
will simply is.
Second, if readers are once again wondering how this impossible supposition,
however interesting it may be in its own right, could possibly be relevant to a book
on the theme of Lacan and Marx, I would like to highlight the strange similarity –
and even identity – between Fénelon’s major signifiers and those of psychoanaly-
sis: supposition, love, interest, soul, desire, will, resistance, equivocation, passiveness,
division, jealousy, impossibility, loss, disapproval, etc.
⁂
Perhaps the best way to proceed would be to begin by taking three steps that will
lead us to grasp the relevance of Fénelon’s questions for psychoanalysis. The pur-
pose of these steps is not to create the illusion of a teleology, but instead to recognise
that the solutions and impasses that Fénelon articulated in terms of theology are
also crucial for the Lacanian and Marxist fields. They are crucial because what is in
question is nothing less than the status of jouissance: the jouissance of God and of
the just or unjust soul.

1 This step involves articulating the relation between the impossible supposi-
tion and transference.What does the Other want? This central question, which
Lacan examined in terms of psychoanalysis, is incontestably present.
2 This step, which is just as easy, introduces a side of God that concerns the
will – whether imagined or real – of the Other. In this respect, it is worth
noting that in Saint Francis de Sales’ formulation, will is of the order of a real;
God is not gauged in terms of a scale that weighs good and evil. Instead, God
is identified with a will, and pure love is not supposed to judge the content of
this will. In this context, passivity becomes a virtue of the righteous soul in its
relation to God’s will; in light of what Fénelon says about the effacing of the
ego, one can wonder whether this passivity concerns the real side or the Other
side of God.
3 Finally, the third step: if, impossibly, God wanted evil, which would reveal that
the will of God is divorced from written law, how should Christians act?
 Exiting from capitalism 189

Fénelon was also attacking quietists such as the Beghards, who believed that reaching
pure love placed the righteous soul beyond the written law. This soul was no longer
concerned by the written law and the Church’s norms. In a sense, Fénelon’s position
was less courageous, since it held that the supposition of an evil God was impossible,
attributing it to an error of the soul. He admitted that this error could have its source
in God’s jealousy and desire to hide his will; nevertheless, the responsibility for such
an error is finally the soul’s own. The aim of his relative cowardice is to preserve the
value of the law, which is identical to God’s will. In other words, if God did not love
the righteous soul, then he would not be God, for he would be outside the law.
It is certainly a delicate matter to transfer these final considerations into psycho-
analytic terms. They can, nevertheless, be located in a dialectic between the Thing
(das Ding) and the father; in other words – and this is the guiding thread of my
argument – this involves the confrontation between the symptom, on the one hand,
and the Name-of-the-Father, on the Other.
Let us examine this point by point.

1 In response to the first question, “What does the Other want?”, we should
remember that Lacan’s definition of transference detaches it from simple rep-
etition. Beyond any duplication of infantile conduct towards the parents, trans-
ference includes the analyst’s presence and its effect on the analysand. The
fundamental condition for this presence is the introduction, in the analytic
relation, of what Lacan did not call the “Other-supposed-to-know”. Instead,
he called it the subject-supposed-to-know. This does not mean that this sub-
ject is some sort of tracing of the contours of the analyst. Lacan insists that this
subject plays the role of a third party in this relation; in the final phase of the
treatment, the analysand is tempted to incarnate such a subject, before accept-
ing, as a conclusion, that it be deposed [destitution].

How does this solution clarify and enable us to surmount the aporia of the “impos-
sible supposition”? In analysis, this supposition can be detected in a fantasy that takes
the form of a question: what if my analyst wants what is evil?30 Such a fantasy is
usually presented in whispers, and for the most part, does not affect the treatment;
in cases of negative transference, it most often takes the form of an accusation that
the analyst is stupid. The delusion that the analyst is fundamentally harmful arises
almost exclusively in psychosis. Whether it takes the form of a fantasy or a delusion,
no way out of this impossible supposition can be envisioned as long as the analysand
remains trapped in the alternative that either the subject knows or the Other knows.
If it is the subject who knows, then we end up making it the equivalent of the
Other, which had first been credited with knowledge, in a process that corresponds
precisely to the theses of the quietists, the Beghards and other “false mystics”. Féne-
lon had made a point of rejecting their ideas in order not to be taken by Bossuet
and the Church for one of their defenders. Thus, in article XLIII of the Maxims of
the Mystics, Fénelon (see 1697b, p. 103) explicitly disavows as false the notion that
the “transformed soul” can “pass judgement on all the truths of Religion and not
be judged by any person”.31
190 On the symptom

If, however, the analyst is the subject who knows, we are close to Žižek’s (1993b,
p. 71) thesis, in Tarrying with the Negative, that “I am what I am only for the Other”.
From this point of view, Žižek’s thesis is exemplary, for it allows the Other to deter-
mine the subject’s being. In other words, absolute obedience to the Other’s dictates
would enable us to go beyond this aporia. Fénelon makes it possible for us to read
this response implicitly in certain quotations from Saint Francis de Sales, who was
not worried about supposing the “impossible”. This immunity and indifference to
the pathology of transference would signal an authentic adherence to pure love.
As we shall see later, the aporia of whether it is the subject or the Other who
knows will remain as long as transference has not been resolved. If the soul obeys
God passively and absolutely, what guarantees that God is not the devil? It is at this
level that a solution is necessary in order to be certain that God’s will is identical to
the commandments of the law, as Paul stated them. The Church is founded on the
axiom that they are identical, and therefore the soul can never separate them, however
much it may have been transformed in its path towards salvation.This is how Fénelon
reconciles ecclesiastical orthodoxy with the radicalisation involved in saintliness.
For psychoanalysis, such a “response” can be called religious because it delegates
to the Other the responsibility for saying the subject’s truth. In this context, it is
interesting to note that in his book on Christianity and perversion, Žižek, without
dealing with the psychoanalytic dimension of this question, implicitly criticises
his own earlier conception. He does so when discussing the duping involved in
displaying castration; through this duping – “I am what you say” – the subject
simulates submission, thereby deceiving the Other. The position of Saint Francis de
Sales is certainly not to be interpreted in this way, as I shall argue, but this feigning
does indeed exist among the examples that Žižek mentions.

2 The second step is connected with the question of God’s will. In relation to
the question, “What does God want?”, Fénelon’s position is clear and always
remains the same: God can want me to be damned, even if my soul is righteous.
At the very least, he can jealously hide his will, so that the righteous soul will
imagine that it has been damned. However, God cannot want the just soul to
be deprived of his love, and therefore no soul can accept not loving God.

Fénelon’s propositions concerning God’s will are axioms, rather than theorems. As
I have emphasised, Saint Francis de Sales does not ask whether God is just. God’s
will is neither just nor unjust but simply is, and this is the only way of positing
a transcendence that cannot be qualified. As long as the debate does not reach
this extreme position, there are only three choices. The first is Bossuet’s, which is
located in the master’s political discourse, and holds that only the Church can make
theological judgements. The second is the choice of the quietists, among others,
who, while affirming absolute submission to God, make this submission into the
source of their equality with God. This step exempts them from obedience to the
Church, and for this reason, Madame Guyon was accused of quietism. Finally, Féne-
lon’s position seeks to frame this transcendence. For a human being, it is impossible
 Exiting from capitalism 191

to understand and reach this transcendence, and Fénelon takes this impossibility
into account. This problem led him to limit the freedom of God, who cannot want
evil, and to preserve a certain freedom for human beings. The free and meritorious
act remains indispensable, even in passive contemplation.
Fénelon’s position may well claim to be more faithful to Christianity than the
other options; it does not eliminate the fact that a human being is flesh as well
as soul. This ingloriousness of humanity justifies and necessitates the mediation
between the human and the divine. At the same time, his position has a limit, which
may be the limit of Christianity, but which is transgressed by the saint: Fénelon can
only posit God as Other.The real of God – God as unconscious – thus escapes him,
even if this is at the heart of the problematic of the saint.

3 We now reach the third step, which concerns the dialectic of the symptom
and the Name-of-the-Father. I have developed at length the thesis that only
the symptom knows. The analysand can be caught in a dilemma: “Either I (the
subject) know or s/he (the Other) knows”. As long as the analysand remains
in this position, there will be no satisfactory way out, except through a forcing
that leaves intact the fantasy that had motivated the entry into analysis. For
Lacan, equivocation was a paradigm of interpretation, whether the latter comes
from the analyst or the analysand. All too often, however, such interpretation
has been reduced to wordplay that has been cut off from the real. Interpreta-
tions only touch the real when the equivocation poses a question – who is
speaking, the subject or the Other? – and imposes an answer – neither one nor
the Other. What, then, is speaking, if not das Ding, the Thing, which, by the
grace of the symptom, turns out to be the real messenger? Thus, the symptom
escapes what seems to condemn the subject to a situation in which its being is
spoken entirely by the Other, because the Other is the place where, primally, it
speaks [ça parle] about this subject, in a kind of linguistic baptism.

The manifestation of the symptom says, “I don’t want the Other to get off on me”.
This function is then paired with another position,“I want to get off on the Other”,
which results from my primary identification with the Other. “I don’t want to be
under its thumb and I don’t want it to make me passive”. In this situation, the only
way not to become the slave of my own tyranny is the one that Freud discovered:
the murder of the father, which transforms his will-to-jouissance into law. I shall
not discuss the form of this discovery, except to recall that Lacan based it on a
logical existence that is connected to the human being’s linguistic status, without
employing Freud’s questionable anthropological myth. The Name-of-the-Father
serves as a guardrail against a general tyranny, but by conferring the status of excep-
tion upon the father who bears it, it includes a consequence that becomes religious
if it is accorded primacy or exclusivity: the expression “in the name of the father”
refers to an Other who is supposed to be infallible.
The Name-of-the-Father neither prevents the symptom nor dissolves it; at best
(or at worst), it hides the symptom. However, when the Name is foreclosed, the
192 On the symptom

symptom is given latitude to act without the law. In the first of these two cases,
there is a primacy of the Name-of-the-Father over the symptom. The second case
concerns psychosis, where the problem for the subject is to procure a sort of pros-
thetic law, which would enable this subject to carry out the sometimes very difficult
task of escaping from his/her own tyranny.
In this context, what kind of solution is offered by analytic treatment? To answer
this question, let us return to Saint Francis de Sales and to what enables him to
explain the impossible: that a saint would not be preoccupied with being damned,
and even – scandal of scandals – with being deprived of God’s love.Yet this can be
inverted. Fénelon asks a question that his membership in the Church imposes upon
him: how can a saint possibly want to be anathematised? While responding to this
question, he rejects the possibility that God can deprive the just soul of his love.We
need to ask the opposite question: perhaps saintliness involves the ordeal of encoun-
tering a God who is flawed or inadequate.The law does not thereby become a dead
letter, since, as we have seen, it fulfils a secular task: it prevents the subject from suc-
cumbing to his/her own tyranny. Yet if the saint does not get through this ordeal,
God remains the Other who knows, even if nothing knows, except the symptom.
In one of his final seminars, The Sinthome, Lacan (2005b) developed the transfor-
mation of the symptom into a sinthome. This movement, contrary to Freud’s thesis,
does not occur through sublimation; as Lacan (1971, p. 327) put it, Joyce “[went]
straight in it to the best one may expect from psychoanalysis at its end”. He detached
the symptom from its pathological interior, keeping only its envelope (see Lacan,
1966d, p. 53): instead of being invaded by manic ideas, he wrote Finnegans Wake
(1957), which is marked by a circular structure. Nothing is less certain than that he
ever believed in the father. In this sense, he had an advantage over neurotics, whose
movement from the symptom to the sinthome implies going beyond the defect of
God. Neurotics must separate the Name-of-the-Father – which remains necessary if
there is to be a law and a One – from the ransom required for this by religion. If neu-
rotics succeed in doing so, their achievement can be written in the following way:

sinthome
Name-of -the-Father

Lacan thought and said that Joyce himself was able to overcome the lack of the
Name-of-the-Father. Yet it remains to be seen whether this always happens in
psychosis.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the French Revolution van-
quished and the Napoleonic adventure at an end, the Catholic bishop Louis-­
François de Bausset wrote a four-volume biography of Fénelon, the Histoire de
Fénelon, published by the royal printer. Although de Bausset’s position within the
Church and his concern with avoiding ecclesiastical incorrectness led to a rigid and
constrained presentation of the material, he forcefully, and on the basis of first-hand
documents, presented the merciless combat between Bossuet and Fénelon.This was
a difficult task. He clearly supported and wanted to rehabilitate Fénelon, but he also
 Exiting from capitalism 193

did not want to attack Bossuet, who remained one of the Church’s great authori-
ties. He therefore took a line that involved a maximal accentuation of the gap
between Fénelon’s doctrine and the quietism of which he had been accused. Con-
demning quietism and attacking its founder, Miguel de Molinos, he attributes an
“abominable consequence” to de Molinos’ doctrine: “a soul that had reached a state
of perfect contemplation ceased to be guilty in its relation with God, and could
abandon itself to the most criminal of actions” (Bausset, 1817, p. 203). Whether this
portrait of de Molinos is true or false, we can see in it the contemporary face of the
perverse guru, who uses God – or even psychoanalysis – to satisfy his drives. What
escaped Cardinal de Bausset and remained unexamined in the theological debate is
precisely the key proposed by psychoanalysis: that which is higher (the spirit) and
that which is lower (the body of the drives) do not belong to two parallel worlds,
which could be stitched together by religion. We can also see how Binswanger, by
treating the human spirit and the “instincts” [Triebe] as incommensurable realities,
signalled his abandonment of Freudian knowledge.

Notes
1 The master of Jansenism, Pierre Nicole (1671, p. 385), conceived of a “republic of saints”,
but I am not sure that this was ever anything more than a fictional utopia.
2 The form of the question itself is decisive and unprecedented. It is not a question of get-
ting into “this” or “that”, but of getting out. Here, once again, is the parable of the three
prisoners! In this way, that story does not refer to a teleology, but instead to the future
anterior from which the subject has to detach itself. From this perspective, it would be
precipitate and naïve to think that the failure – a word that we cannot avoid using if we
think of what was hoped for – of the two great Marxist revolutions of the last century
has ended in a pure and simple rallying around the “natural” system, capitalism. Although
they may be difficult to read, several clues lead us to think that we are witnessing the
emergence of societies that are not clones of the illustrious civilisation of the “West”;
their gestation may well not involve an absolute obliteration of China and the Soviet
Union’s revolutionary experience.
3 Should analysts be saints? Certainly not, when they are not at work, but even in the
context of analytic practice, it would still be asking too much. The only requirement is
that the analyst’s pass – the passage from being an analysand to an analyst – can be authen-
ticated (whether or not it actually has been). The end of analysis is a different matter. In
any case, neither the pass nor the ending is a matter of grace, in the Jansenist sense, as
some would have us believe; such people are like sirens who would enjoy seeing Odys-
seus detach himself prematurely from the mast of his transference.
4 [Translator’s note: In La troisième, Lacan (1975b, pp. 185–186) describes how, when he
worked in psychiatric hospitals at the beginning of his career – long before he had come
up with his ideas about the imaginary, symbolic and real – he was already describing
the symptom as a Nachtrag or “addendum”. “Nachtrag” should not be confused with the
Freudian term “Nachträglichkeit” or “deferred action”.] Marie-Jean Sauret brought this to
my attention.
5 As Lacan (1975b, p. 200) said, “The symptom is an irruption of the anomaly that is phal-
lic jouissance, inasmuch as it lays out and opens up the fundamental lack that I consider
to be the sexual nonrelation”.
6 This distinction can already be found in La troisième, Lacan (1975b, p. 186): “The sense
of the symptom is not what one feeds it to make it propagate or die off; the sense of the
symptom is the real”.
194 On the symptom

7 There has been quite a bit of nostalgia for the Name-of-the-Father in psychoanalysis
of late; this is found to different degrees and in different forms in the work of a whole
range of analysts (see Legendre, 1989; Melman, 2002). Michel Tort (2005) tries to lay this
to rest, but unfortunately the severity of his judgements against Lacanian theory is more
ideological than psychoanalytic.
8 Alan Ginsberg once asked “What is death?” and William Burroughs replied: “A gimmick.
It’s the time-birth-death gimmick” (Hibbard, 1961, p. 1).
9 Lacan made an impressive number of efforts to create a nonrelation between association
and institution, thus breaking with the practices of old established organisations and
societies: cartels [a form of Lacanian study group], the Scilicet journal [which published
unsigned articles], the distance set up between gradus [or “rank”, as in the designations
such as “AE” or “Analyst of the School”, etc.] and hierarchy [or the status and institu-
tional power of rank] (see Lacan, 1968b, p. 1), and even the dissolution of the school itself.
The most decisive of these efforts was certainly the pass, which authorises the analysand-
subject to become a passant [that is, a “passand” (a neologism based on the combination
of “pass” and “analysand”)].
10 [Translator’s note: See Onfray (1993).]
11 Fortunately, the desire of the Other is not something that one can just avoid knocking
up against.
12 [Translator’s note: English in the original.]
13 See Essaim [Swarm], a psychoanalytic journal edited by Érik Porge.
14 In connection with this, it would be useful to explore the effectiveness, and relative
success or failure of significant political movements, such as the one led by Mahatma
Gandhi, in which ethics were more of a motive force than was the search for power.
15 [Translator’s note: see Lacan (1973b, p. 466).]
16 A number of psychoanalysts have disagreed with Freud’s (1918) diagnosis of the Wolf
Man, taking him to be psychotic. Perhaps they are right. In any case, their position ends
any discussion of the essential question that Freud asked: is it possible, even in neurosis,
that there are points of foreclosure that concern castration, rather than the Name-of-the-
Father? If so, does this provide a way to account for certain psychosomatic phenomena in
neurosis? It is clear that such phenomena do not have the same central role as in psycho-
sis, but they refer back – in their very marginality, which is sometimes quite insistent – to
something that cannot be symbolized. Further, what is the theoretical reason that castra-
tion cannot be foreclosed locally, supposing that: 1) castration is not-all [pas-toute], and 2)
it is to be distinguished from the division of the subject? Finally, could it not be said that
the condition of the possibility of what is known as “depersonalisation anxiety” which,
in neurosis, can indicate the beginning of the end of an analysis (even while continuing
to be experienced in other contexts) is the crossing over of a boundary beyond which
castration reveals its inability [impuissance] to guarantee ego-based identification? For
more on this, see the discussion of “Gelassenheit” in Millot (2001).
17 [Translator’s note: For an account of Catherine Millot’s experience, see the translator’s
introduction.]
18 [Translator’s note: Gelassenheit is a term used by Heidegger which is usually translated into
English as “releasement”. See Davis (2010, p. xi).]
19 On the concept of “event”, see Badiou (1988). An “event” involves an original encoun-
ter with the real of time. This originality does not, however, occur without the division
whose mark is the symptom. This is why I do not think that jouissance is, first of all,
primary, or that what is called “feminine jouissance” would constitute the return of this
primary jouissance, after the “accident” that would be sexuation located on the mascu-
line side.
20 This passage was brought to my attention by Pascale Macary.
21 See also the discussion of Benjamin and Schmitt in chapter 4 of this book.
22 In the twenty-first century, the question of the transcendent has been taken up again in
what promises to be a new way, for the transcendent is no longer completely fused with
 Exiting from capitalism 195

the religious. Thus, in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Jean-Luc Nancy

(2005, p. 177) sets the tone with his expression “transcendence of immanence”. In the
domain of psychoanalysis, the transcendent is also open for discussion, for example in
Les désarrois nouveaux du sujet edited by Jean-Pierre Lebrun (2001). Starting with the
observation that hierarchical society has been issued a “death certificate” (something that
does not seem self-evident to me), he explores how there is no longer a fixed, exogenous
point from which norms can be established. Along with this, he examines, quite rightly,
the paradox whereby any fixed, endogenous point, from the moment it becomes the
basis of a norm, is externalised. A full presentation of my disagreements with the solution
Lebrun proposes is beyond the scope of this footnote. However, I would like to note that
the chance of the transcendent is manifest in the unfillable gap between the totality [tout]
organised by the Names-of-the-Father and the non-totalisable symptom. This transcend-
ence is transference to the extent that the latter does not, on the basis of the nonexistence
of the sexual relation, draw the conclusion that love is inane.
23 This misunderstanding is probably the rule of love, but what Stendhal (1822, p. 6) called
“crystallisation” refers to the moment of encounter in which there is an epiphany of the
real between two people who are to become lovers.
24 [Translator’s note: In the English version of this letter (Meng & Freud, 1963, p. 126),
Freud’s term “weltlichen Seelsorgern” (see Noth, 2014, p. 263), rendered here as “secular
pastors”, is translated as “lay curers”.]
25 [Translator’s note: on figuration and Darstellbarkeit, see p. 167, note 2 above.]
26 The term “medium” is borrowed from Kierkegaard’s (1843) discussion of art.
27 [Translator’s note: On the “impossible supposition” of the mystics, also see Gorday (2012,
pp. 14–15):
then came the notoriously famous “impossible supposition”: if it were God’s pre-
destinating will that we be in hell, however saintly we may be, we should prefer
the delight of conforming to that will rather than the contrary position of being in
paradise without conformity to God’s will. The loving soul “would prefer hell with
God’s will to paradise without God’s will.” If God wants hell for me, I will out of
love for him take delight in that eventuality – which is to say that out of love for God
I will give up even the hope of my salvation! What makes the supposition “impos-
sible” (in theory) is the orthodox view that God could never have consigned to hell
a soul whose love for God was so perfect. Or differently stated in the orthodox view:
if I truly love God, the knowledge that God intends me for paradise will be present
as well. But the bare statement of the impossible supposition is a way of reinforcing
the idea that love of God must be radical. It must be a love of God, not of my own
salvation, if it is truly God that I love.]
28 [Translator’s note: “So Moses returned to the Lord and said, ‘Alas, this people have sinned a
great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if thou wilt forgive their
sin – and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written’” (Exodus
32:31–32).]
29 [Translator’s note: This is from the thirty-third article of Issy (Fénelon, 1695, p. 19).]
30 As mentioned earlier, the “Rat Man” thought that one of Freud’s brothers was a murderer.
31 [Translator’s note: The French text cited here, from the “Faux [False]” subsection of article
XLIII (Fénelon, 1697a, p. 39), seems not to appear in any English translation.]
FOUNDATIONS

For it is not a vain matter that astonishment may greet the fact that the name
of Freud alone, by virtue of the hope of truth it bears with it, is of an order to
confront the name of Marx, the still undissipated suspicion, even though it is
plain that its abyss is unfillable, that in the path opened up by Freud might be
perceptible the reason why Marxism fails to account for an increasingly immod-
erate and insane power insofar as politics is concerned, unless what is in play is a
reverse effect of its contradictions.
—Jacques Lacan, “Founding Act”1

I
The long epigraph that appears under the title of this final part will exempt me
from having to restate the aim of this book, which is now nearing its end: to remove
the non-encounter between Freud and Marx from the ideological dross that is
inseparable from a sense of frustration. Such frustration is born from the sense that
the gap between them is unbridgeable. This has covered over attempts to answer a
question: in what way is this gap, which is impossible to deny, becoming the sign of
something that is real? Taking the real into account can throw light on how politics
has been ravaged by a debasing inflation of power. In his hastily written The Ques-
tion of Lay Analysis, a text that opposes both the medicalisation of psychoanalysis
and the threat that psychoanalysis, as science, would be destroyed by an emphasis on
therapy, Freud does not hesitate to place psychoanalysis beside Christian Science.
Although the latter may be a sect, both it and psychoanalysis are ways by which
“each man” can seek “to be saved after his own fashion” (Freud, 1926b, p. 236) and
they should both be left free to pursue their respective quests.The only difference –
a decisive one – between them is that psychoanalysis is not religious and wagers
on science. This wager means precisely – and almost paradoxically – that it can free
 Foundations 197

itself from techniques that have been conditioned by science: techniques that can
easily be used by various powers, “bio-” and “psycho-” among others.
I have already opened up this can of worms by asking whether psychoanalysis
could be a science in which the subject is not sutured.To take a step forward, rather
than backwards, with this question, we can note that, as a form of theory or body of
doctrine, psychoanalysis is much more vulnerable than the hard sciences to arriv-
ing at mutually-exclusive positions (espousing both the black and the white at the
same time). It does not make use of strict experimental procedures, which, at least
in principle, are supposed to put a stop to the kinds of theoretical “flights of fancy”
that contravene well-established axiomatic foundations. Yet the science of physics
finds itself with relativity on one side and quantum theory on the other, even if
this explicative duality is not considered as a final position. It is not impossible that
Lacan’s titanic efforts to establish the foundations of Freud’s discovery will not ulti-
mately arrive at a kind of doctrinal consensus analogous to that in physics: one that
unifies the community – although without removing all disagreement and tensions
within it – by having all physicists agree on a very small common denominator.
However, whatever happens in that respect (because it is also possible that psy-
choanalysis will succumb to death by pulverulence), there will still be a fundamen-
tal “abyss” between the theory and the experience (rather than the “technique”)
that it makes possible. Only this experience – in the current state of things, analytic
treatment and the pass – is able not to suture the subject. On the other hand, as soon
as theory is transmitted, it supposes an Other that would guarantee it, thus undo-
ing the “Freudian uprising” of the symptom. To take the minimal example, we can
show that a round of string, once cut, is no longer closed; nothing, however, will
prevent a subject like Wittgenstein from suggesting, as he did about Russell’s para-
dox, that we should just pass it over in silence.
For psychoanalysis, it may well be practical to distinguish between theory and
experience. Nevertheless, this distinction should give way before another opposi-
tion, one that will take us further: structure and experience. Not everything can be
learned from either of these terms: this is the key to using them well. We are, how-
ever, allowed to say – and the reference to Wittgenstein here only seems to be the
opposite of our first reference – that just as the image and reality must have a com-
mon logical form if the image is to be able to “depict” reality,2 so structure must also
have the same logical form as experience. I would like to make it clear that the term
“common” does not imply truth; it can only imply the possibility that a truth will
emerge. (This statement breaks with any kind of psychoanalytic nominalism.) To
get a better sense of that which remains unheard of – or better, that which cannot
be articulated – without analytic experience, it seems both appropriate and neces-
sary to provide several concrete samples of this “mercurial substance”, even at the
risk of becoming a bit rhapsodic.

• A child of two-and-a-half begins to be toilet-trained. At this moment, the

word “poo” emerges as a metaphor for the child’s use of language, becoming
the source of an incontestable sense of jubilation: the world becomes “poo”.
198 Foundations

• A woman dreams that she goes into a store to buy a jumper, which then turns
out to be too small. Then, in the course of the day following this dream, she
buys a jumper that fits her.
• Another woman dreams that she is “assaulted” verbally by her sister and allows
herself to be mistreated.Then during the next day, when she has a problem with
a colleague, she finds the resources to prevent the same thing from happening.
  In two of the preceding sequences, jouissance – the name that Freud gave
to the movement towards self-annihilation – comes to be figured in the dream,
thereby moving into the unconscious; it passes into a knowledge that remains
unknown but is by definition articulated. Therefore, it no longer has to be
acted upon while we are awake. Because the dream has fulfilled desire, the field
is left free for something else.
• A female analysand dreams that she receives some empty boxes from her
father. The dream provokes anxiety in her. When she relates this dream, how-
ever, she interprets these boxes in a positive way: they make it possible for her
to place whatever she desires in them. The legacy of empty boxes is therefore
the good aspect of what her father has done for her. She decides to put letters
in these boxes.
• Another female analysand wonders whether she still wants her father to die. In
her analysis, she had learned that, as a girl, she had desired this unconsciously.
Does knowing now what had once been desired imply that this wish has now
been dissolved? Can we hypothesise that she no longer desires her father’s death?
• Yet another female analysand wrote to me that if her mother’s neurosis had
really decreed her own fate, then her mother’s husband and her own father
would be equivalent. Yet this was not true for her: “my mother’s husband” is
not the equivalent of “my father”, even if they are, in reality, the same person.
• A schizophrenic patient went to visit his parents without being able to put
down his suitcase, because as he said, there was no empty space.

This list could be extended ad infinitum.These reported statements are factual, and
I hope that it can be seen immediately that they sketch out a strange scene; the
term “desire”, which Freud and Lacan have bequeathed to us as a central concept,3
flickers and fluctuates in ways that are difficult to pin down.
It is here that Wittgenstein’s “dis-philosophy [dé-philosophie]” will turn out, for a
third time, to be extraordinarily valuable, even if I do not agree with what he says
in this context. According to the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1921, p. 76, 6.124), “logic
is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather
one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself ”. It would
certainly be possible to attenuate the a-subjectifying implications of this proposi-
tion – which can be read as both pro- and anti-Freudian – by emphasising that it is
restricted to the field of logic. In any case, as Wittgenstein admits in his Philosophical
Investigations, it is a requirement.
This way of diluting the subject into an anonymous thinking machine (even
if it is not transformed into a substantive) is open, however, to an objection: the
 Foundations 199

bodily organism, by being the place where the symbolic is incorporated, becomes
the means by which the symptom, which exceeds the symbolic, transforms itself
into an event. The symptom is a “body event” (Lacan, 1979, p. 569). I have tried to
show two ways in which the symptom exceeds the symbolic: 1) it makes the gap
between the drive and the unconscious manifest; 2) it brings out the dissymmetry
between activity (I want to get off on the Other) and passivity (I do not want the
Other to get off on me). Although Lacan came upon this doubling of the symptom
and the symbolic relatively late in his work, it is a discovery that retroactively recasts
the foundations of the entirety of psychoanalysis. Further, it is something that can
be recognised on a completely different level, in terms of the relation between
language and writing.
In terms of its semantic dimension, language can claim to be incorporeal (what
theologians would call “glorious”). Lacan thus begins by showing the ways in
which language is not incorporeal, because it is phonetic and acoustic. However,
this leads to a second phase of showing how the representative-descriptive func-
tion of the signifier must be distinguished from its figurative function (as discussed
by Freud in reference to the dreams).4 This “figurability” refers less to speech than
to writing. For example, because proper names are translinguistic, they are both
included in and excluded from the symbolic. That is how the proper name allows
the symptom to ek-sist in relation to the symbolic, although with the trade-off that,
because it is equivalent to the exception that founds the rule of the symbolic, the
proper name can, spontaneously, be deified. This is the opposite of what could be
called the symptom’s insurrectional quality, which excludes any kind of Other that
would guarantee itself.
If there is a kernel of desire, a soul – in the topological sense – in the symptom,
and this would include the symptom’s defensive aspect – the defence of desire
against the death drive, against the jouissance of being annihilated – then there are
three major consequences for psychoanalytic experience.
First, it is necessary to undo the confusion between the symptom and its jouis-
sance. This confusion is not rare and leads analytic discourse to swerve into the
discourse of the master, which can be observed among both “post-Freudian” and
“Lacanian” analysts. In the name of the opposition between jouissance and desire,
analysts hunt down jouissance and end up putting the symptom to death, instead
of leading the analysand to devalorise the jouissance of the symptom, so that this
symptom can be transformed into a sinthome.
Second, we encounter, once again, the question of the transcendent. In Television,
Lacan (1974b, pp. 28–29) used the term “transcendental” to characterise what is
“novel” in analytic discourse, explicitly in the sense that the term is used in number
theory: to describe any number belonging to a nondenumerable set (the proto-
typical transcendental number being π). The “novel” aspect concerns transference:
“through the transference the subject is attributed to the knowledge that gives him
his consistency as subject of the unconscious, and it is that [knowledge] which is
transferred onto the analyst” (ibid., p. 29). How can transference be called “tran-
scendental”? It is transcendental in the sense that the subject to which knowledge
200 Foundations

is supposed, by the very operation of transference, can never be affixed to the sub-
ject to which this knowledge has been transferred. This unconscious knowledge
transcends every subject, whether the latter is the analysand, the analyst or God. In
this respect, the vocation of the poet may well consist in becoming the voice of the
saying [dire] of the transcendent, which cannot be reduced to any specific subjec-
tivity. In other words, perhaps this transcendence makes itself most fully present in
the desire that, paradoxically, belongs to no subject, and to which the mystics testify
so well.
The third consequence is the last but not the least. Since the symptom is “a body
event” (Lacan, 1979, p. 569) – a form that can be articulated by saying something –
affect, in all of its modes, going “from anxiety to ecstasy” (see the title of Janet’s
(1928) book), could be defined as a corporeal state, as determined by its relation
to the symptom. Thus, a young woman who had experienced an incestuous rela-
tion with her father had, since then, lost her “zest” for life. She recovered it when
the real fact of incest was detached from the jouissance of meaning, which was still
enigmatic, and which had been conferred upon this real in order to ward off the
unbearable trauma.

II
These preliminary formulations are not superfluous, for they will make it possible
to review retroactively the results that I have reached.
The Capitalist Discourse can be defined in terms of three parameters.

1 It entrusts the relation between the subject (S) and unconscious knowledge
(S2) to a hidden master (S1), thereby transforming the splitting of the subject
into a sundering; this will always prevent the subject from realising that this
unconscious cannot be mastered.
2 It institutes a mode of jouissance in which the “thirst of lack-in-jouissance”
becomes the principle of an economy in which consumption serves as the
motor for more consumption. Such a system transfers the agalma from the
human being to capital.
3 It forecloses castration, that is, the matters of love. The “starting point” of capi-
talism, as Lacan (1974b, p. 30) says, was “getting rid of sex”.

Such statements need to be clarified one last time. The origin of the expression
“foreclosure of castration” can be found in Freud’s (1918) account of the Wolf
Man’s infantile neurosis. Freud considers this to be a case of neurosis, which has
never failed to bewilder Lacanian psychoanalysts, who are puzzled to find fore-
closure connected to neurosis. Instead of considering this as an error in diagnosis,
I have argued that it should be recognised as one of Freud’s major discoveries.
Whatever the particular psychic structure may be, every structure contains a blind
spot in which castration does not operate; this spot can vary according to the sub-
ject. Capitalism is the discourse that gives precedence to this blind spot, by making
 Foundations 201

it command discursivity; unlike it, the other discourses are organised in order to
counter this blind spot. The capitalist discourse does this by “getting rid” precisely
of the aspects of “sex” that can activate the castration complex. “Sex”, in this con-
text, refers to what can make the sexual relation fail, a failure that can perhaps lead
to a true encounter.
I have sought to throw light on the matheme of the capitalist discourse through
my readings of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Saint Joan of the Stock-
yards. Stevenson’s short novel depicts the sundering of the subject from his uncon-
scious. Dr Jekyll is the bearer of unconscious knowledge while Hyde is the subject.
This sundering is so radical that the moral of the text becomes, as the puritanical
morality of Fanny Osbourne would have it, the death of the subject; Hyde kills
himself by, and in, his unconscious. This strange ending reminds us that the eradi-
cation of evil (represented incontestably by Hyde) must turn out badly if “I”, as
subject, wants to know nothing about evil, even if this “I” is the bacillus that carries
this evil. Instead, the “I” wears itself out through a racist mechanism: it imputes evil
to the other. It would not be difficult, at our current historical moment, to locate
precisely this segregationist simplification in the “clash of civilisations”. This clash
does more than stigmatise the Hyde of terrorism. It goes to the point of reviling
and treating as treasonable a tendency of Jekyll’s that actually demonstrates his cour-
age: the courage to learn and to be tested by evil, a courage that is limited by his
refusal to let Hyde be the true subject.
This same sundering occurs in Bertolt Brecht’s play, with the difference that
Joan Dark, despite her name, is pure good. This difference does not really affect
the plot. It does, however, modify the way that the story is organised, since Brecht
accepts Joan Dark as the true subject, who has been deprived of her unconscious
knowledge, which is located in Pierpont Mauler. At the end of the play, Brecht
exalts splitting over sundering, but takes the side of neither Mauler nor Dark, in a
way that no doubt seemed heretical to more conventional “Marxists”. Here, once
again, the subject is the one who pays with her life, thereby paying the debt that
she could not or did not know how to acquit in relation to the capitalist discourse.
Mauler himself gets by, unlike Dr Jekyll, who dies as Hyde and thus finds himself
posthumously in the place of the subject. At most, Mauler may suffer from the
authentic pain caused by the loss of a woman whom he had begun to love.Yet this
is where we can locate the author’s tour de force: when we try to make an ethical
judgement on Mauler, Brecht prevents us from deciding whether he is a talented
and cynical fraud or has, despite everything, experienced spiritual changes. Are his
actions determined by the exchange rate or by his sensitivity? Nothing can resolve
this uncertainty. The only thing that we can be sure of is that in the capitalist dis-
course, Mauler is torn between S1 and S2, pulling the strings of his own puppet; he
could only get out of this position by allowing matters of love to take precedence
over everything else. This he does not do.
Let us return, finally, to the four thinkers who are all emblematic of a certain
relation to Lacan, from the 1970s until today. Yet what can “certain” mean in this
context? Can the same position really be imputed to all of them? Yes and no. I can
202 Foundations

answer yes because Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari and Žižek are all animated
by the question of transference: will the subject who is entering transference be
allowed to envision a way out of it? This question is the smallest common denomi-
nator among the four thinkers, and they give divergent responses to it. For Althusser,
a subject can only exit from it by being a “bad subject”. For Deleuze and Guattari,
the schizophrenisation of transference makes a way out possible. For Žižek, who is
either the most optimistic or the most pessimistic, there is no solution, except by
deactivating the Other: reducing oneself to being what the Other says.
These three ruses are not the ones that are chosen by psychoanalysis, even if, in
a sense, they are ways of criticising certain psychoanalyses. Any subject can separate
itself from the Other who has brought it into existence; we can do this, first, by
allowing ourselves to be guided by an assent to the symptom – which is the only
real relief against helplessness. Second, this can be done by recognising our division
between castration and womanhood, or what is beyond the phallus.
If distinctions between psychosis, neurosis and perversion are relevant, it is
because each of these can become the basis of a particular mode of division. In
psychosis, in order for castration to be brought back into play through division, this
implies that the psychotic subject can count on something that could name him/
her, in the place of and instead of the nonexistent Names-of-the-Father. If this does
not occur, an unsymbolised castration will manifest itself in various elementary
phenomena, from hallucinations to delusions. There is, however, another possibility,
the least desirable of all: a psychotic subject will locate his delusion within a politi-
cal architectonic.This subject will close off all castration-effects, employing a police
state to fix things in their proper places.
For the neurotic, the mother’s castration has taken place through the paternal
metaphor; what must be avoided is a situation in which the means of this castration
is taken to be a guarantee of women’s privation. In the latter case, the Names-of-
the-Father would become an excuse for submitting to God the Father, a figure that
the psychotic subject could incarnate without any compunction.
In perversion, the recognition of the mother’s castration is neutralised through
disavowal; the consequence of this is to authorise a transference only to the same
sex, a transference for which Lacan (1975c, pp. 84–85) wittily used the term “hom-
mosexual”. There is no question of risking one’s love for an object that would not
respond in specular terms; such an object would remind the pervert of castration,
and he knows how to freeze what is at stake in that.
In these cases, the phallic function, on the basis of whether or not it operates,
demarcates psychosis from neurosis and perversion. A long time ago, during the
brief romance between Marx and Freud after May 1968, it was suggested that there
is a homology between the phallic function and the function of money as general
equivalent.5 This was a structural short-circuit, but it contained an element of truth.
Language organises the symbolic order, without being reduced to it – this is the
limit of structuralism – and in this order, both the symbolic phallus and money
are operators and emblems of the One and of its functioning in what is denumer-
able. History, through a witticism rather than a farce, set two theories of money in
 Foundations 203

opposition, although they are actually two sides of the same coin. The first is finan-
cial capitalism, in which money is believed to be capable of producing more money
(M → M′). The second is Stalinism, in which the linkage between price and value
was entirely undone. Because of this, for a number of people of “good will”, finan-
cialisation, which had been condemned for its speculative excesses, could “liberally”
be taken as the best antidote for a disorder produced by sundering price from value;
we know from experience that this disorder generated a ruthless order. It may well
be that this good will – which, from one perspective, can be appreciated – reaches its
limit and secretes a danger in missing that which, in history, has ended up producing
this reversal: where M → M′ works for some and M-C-M′ works for others, there
will be a temptation – which can never be eliminated – to replace some by others,
or vice versa. This good will ended up in maintaining two separate versions of the
status quo: the first enabled Stalinism to endure in conditions that made it peril-
ous and difficult to choose another option. Another made the capitalist discourse
endure by refusing to see that, even if the powerful deserve to be criticised, the worst
example comes from below: in a servitude that has involuntarily become voluntary.
In this context, questions about the decisive status of the symptom became nec-
essary, in order to place a radical distance between two conceptions, one of which
will lock us into the capitalist discourse, while the other can dismantle it. Either
the symptom emerges in order to mask human sexuality’s lack of harmony and the
objective is to get rid of it or the symptom is the inaugural marker that the subject is
not a product that was “made in the Other”. The purpose of psychoanalysis would
then be for the subject to undergo a transformation that will lead to an identifica-
tion with this symptom. According to this conception, the symptom, which has
become a sinthome, knots the symbolic to the aspect of the real that remains out-
side the symbolic. This would happen if we follow and generalise the solution that
Lacan proposed in relation to Joyce.
How then can we exit from capitalism, or rather make it exit from us? Marx,
if we reduce him to the vulgate, which can indeed be found in his work, answers
that the private means of production must be abolished. Historical experience has
proven that this solution was insufficient and Marx himself glimpsed its limits, for
example, in his discussion of fetishism. Lacan’s critique of the concept of surplus-
value, however, opens up a new perspective. He does not challenge the relevance of
this extraordinary discovery; instead, he points out that it misses the force that makes
capitalism effective: the relation to jouissance.This is both enormous and razor-thin.
At the end of this book, I examined several of Lacan’s hints concerning the
appropriate form of association for psychoanalytic societies; in doing so, I sought
to rehabilitate a transcendent dimension that would no longer be tied to religion.
This involves the kind of satisfaction that is acquired at the end of an analysis; this
satisfaction is incompatible with the mode of jouissance inherent in the capitalist
discourse. I have tried to mark out some of the components that could give us a
direction to follow, components that are hardly more discernible than the traces of
the wind in the reeds. This may be a message in a bottle, but the sea is smaller than
it seems.6
204 Foundations

Notes
1 Lacan, J. (1964a). Founding act. In J. Copjec (Ed.), D. Hollier, R. Krauss, & A. Michelson
(Trans.), Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (pp. 97–106). New York,
NY: Norton, 1990. p. 104
2 [Translator’s note: See Wittgenstein (1921, p. 11): “What any picture, of whatever form, must
have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it – correctly or incorrectly – in
any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality”.]
3 Freud uses the terms “Wunsch” and “Begierde”, although the latter appears much less fre-
quently in his writing.
4 [Translator’s note: on “figuration” and “figurability”, see p. 167, note 2 above.]
5 [Translator’s note: see Goux (1973, pp. 16–34, 55).]
6 As a final touch, a citation from L’étourdit (Lacan, 1973b, p. 454): “Because Freud did not
use the discourse of the analyst to forge the bond that would have enabled psychoanalytic
societies to sustain themselves, he located them within other discourses, which necessarily,
block [barrent] his saying [dire]”.
APPENDIX 1: LACAN’S PORTRAIT
OF MARX1

In D’un Autre à l’autre, Lacan (2006a, p. 64) tells us that, when he was twenty, he read
Marx while taking the metro. This was in the 1920s. Judith Miller has confirmed
to me that Lacan read the old edition translated by Jacques Molitor and published
by Costes (Marx, 1924–1939). You will not be surprised that he read Marx’s great
work in its entirety, rather than contenting himself with anthologised selections. It
would therefore be incorrect to think that his interest in Marx dates only from two
seminars, D’un Autre à l’autre and The Other Side of Psychoanalysis or to think that
he was motivated only by the enthusiasm for Marx’s work that marked the period
between 1968 and 1970.
Who – or even what – was Marx for Lacan? This is the question to which
I hope to give a first response, and it legitimates the use of the word “portrait” in my
title. As you know, in “Radiophonie”, Lacan (1970, p. 434) dared to say that “Mehr-
wert [surplus-value] is Marxlust, Marx’s surplus-jouissance”. I shall seek to present a
portrait that is illuminated by surplus-jouissance. This may be what is necessary in
any true portrait.
The references that interest us are those that concern Marx and the origin of
the symptom; for the most part, they occur over the course of ten years of Lacan’s
teaching, between 1966 and 1975.The first is found in one of the interpolated texts
in the Écrits, “On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question”, which immediately pre-
sents us with the problem of bringing out both the homage that Lacan pays to Marx
and his reservations about the status of the symptom in his work. Lacan writes:

It is difficult not to see that, even before the advent of psychoanalysis, a

dimension that might be called that of the symptom was introduced, which
was articulated on the basis of the fact that it represents the return of truth
as such into the gap of a certain knowledge. . . . One can say that this dimen-
sion is highly differentiated in Marx’s critique, even if it is not made explicit
206 Appendix 1: Lacan’s portrait of Marx

there. And one can say that a part of the reversal of Hegel that he carries out
is constituted by the return (which is a materialist return, precisely insofar as
it gives it figure and body) of the question of truth.
(Lacan, 1966c, p. 194)

His reservation can be found in his reference, in relation to this first step, to what
he calls the “jump” constituted by the “Freudian operation” (ibid., p. 194). With
this operation,

Freud sets himself apart from the rest by clearly linking the status of the
symptom to the status of his own operation, for the Freudian operation is the
symptom’s proper operation, in the two senses of the term. Unlike a sign – or
smoke which is never found in the absence of fire, a fire that smoke indicates
with the possible call to put it out – a symptom can only be interpreted
in the signifying order. A signifier has meaning only through its relation to
another signifier. The truth of symptoms resides in this articulation. Symp-
toms remained somewhat vague when they were understood as representing
some irruption of truth. In fact, they are truth, being made of the same wood
from which truth is made, if we posit materialistically that truth is what is
instated on the basis of the signifying chain”.
(ibid., pp. 194–195)

In both cases, the symptom is the “return of truth”. This provides the founda-
tion, at least in this area, for Marx’s compatibility with Freud; it is built upon an alli-
ance against Hegel, who reduced the work of truth – the work of the particular – to
a cunning of reason; this reduction was necessary in order to found absolute knowl-
edge, a form of knowledge that has no gaps.Yet Freud’s jump must not be made to
disappear, and the effect of his difference from Marx’s position can be stated simply:
whereas for Marx, the symptom is the symptom of a truth, for Freud it is truth itself.
I will therefore take the risk of placing the words, “With Marx” at the beginning of
Lacan’s sentence: “[With Marx] symptoms remained somewhat vague when they
were understood as representing some irruption of truth”.
Without this conclusion, there is no way of making sense of the gap, which
Lacan emphasised in a second moment of this elaboration – in RSI, “La troisième”
and his lectures in the United States in 1976 – between Marx’s social symptom and
Freud’s particular symptom.
We can get a sense of this gap at the level of interpretation, for as Lacan (2011b,
p. 45) says, in a sweeping statement: “A symptom is not cured in the same way in
Marxist dialectic and in psychoanalysis”. In psychoanalysis, indeed, the movement
of interpretation unfolds by beginning with the particularity of truth and expand-
ing into the demonstration of a real: that of the primal loss of being implied by
the constitutive division of the subject. This is why, when interpretation seeks to
reduce the symptom through knowledge alone, it fails: it feeds the symptom instead
of resolving it. Marx’s limit was to have incarnated this loss in the proletarian: the
 Appendix 1: Lacan’s portrait of Marx 207

figure who has been “stripped of everything and the messiah of the future” (Lacan,
1974–1975, 18 February 1975). After having brought the real out into the open, he
covers over the real aspect of the loss of being that is made present by the symptom.
Perhaps the source of this limitation lay in his inability to detect where this loss
of being insists in the return of the repressed.Yet this formulation is only a way of
harping on the truism that Marx is not Freud. It would be more relevant to grasp
that this limitation is a consequence of what Marx does a priori with the proletar-
ian: he identifies this figure with the norm of humanity, the custodian of a meaning
of the real. In this context, it would not be out of place to wonder what becomes of
those who were once revolutionaries when this identification becomes oppressive.
Psychoanalysis does not treat the proletarian as the essence of humanity, into
which the meaning of the real would crystallise; therefore, for psychoanalysis, the
symptom remains where Marx located it – the place of truth – but takes on another
meaning. For Lacan, it is not a social symptom, but a particular symptom. I would
like to emphasise Lacan’s prudence in assessing this gap. He is concerned less with
refuting the existence of the social symptom than with constructing an axiom.
This is an affirmative change, which in my opinion gives it its rightful significance:
whoever makes the human being into the vehicle of an ideal future, while giving
the symptom the place of truth, transforms the content of this ideal into a social
symptom. This formulation knots Marx’s doctrine to the effect of his desire.
This is not certain, but perhaps the distance between the discontents of civilisa-
tion and what Freud and then Lacan call the “Gospel According to Marx” should
be located here. Perhaps in this context, we must also wonder what place the con-
cepts of the superego and repetition would have in historical materialism.Whatever
this place may be, I hope that, by examining the status that Lacan gives to the
symptom that Marx invented, I have opened up the space in which I can introduce
the kernel of Lacan’s critique of Marx. This critique, which is explicit, bears not
on his conception of surplus-value, which Lacan considers to be irreproachable –
including the denunciation of capitalism that it leads to – but on what Marx does
with it. Let us say that this involves two separate “fields”: the Marxist field and the
Lacanian field.
The problem can be framed simply and correctly by noting that Lacan accom-
plishes this task in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, the seminar in which he set up
the four discourses. There, the Danaides and their sieve become a metaphor for
jouissance (Lacan, 1991, p. 72), which is primally lost in the attempt to repeat it; for
this reason, the basic function of discourse is to signify this loss, to give a meaning
to this structural entropy. It does so by forbidding the jouissance that, if it were
not forbidden, would leave the subject entirely in the grip of the fallacy that this
much-vaunted vessel – phallic jouissance – can be filled. This is the meaning, from
beginning to end, of the Oedipus complex.
The homology between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance – the object a –
intervenes here. Surplus-jouissance is brought about when discourse, by constitut-
ing the object a as non-subject [hors-sujet] of jouissance, confers upon this object the
power to make up – by desire – for the jouissance that has been lost. Surplus-value
208 Appendix 1: Lacan’s portrait of Marx

is brought about when the transformation of labour-power into commodities pro-

duces an object that is composed of the loss of the surplus-labour. This labour, as
Marx discovers, is not paid to the worker, thereby conferring an additional value
upon this object.
This is the point at which Lacan disagrees with Marx. He reproaches Marx for
striving to enter surplus-value into the account books: to reason in terms of an
energetics of jouissance, as if the subject’s relation to jouissance could be regulated
by a new distribution of surplus-value. In more precise terms, it is as if the debt that
the subject attributes to the loss of jouissance could be acquitted simply by destroy-
ing the “juggernaut of capital” (Marx, 1867, p. 799). For those who have not read
Capital, this Juggernaut was the chariot of the statue of Vishnu, which trampled the
faithful during the annual procession to the Jagannath temple. This implies that the
cause of desire could be dissolved in a new distribution of its object. In what I am
seeking to transmit to you concerning Lacan’s portrait of Marx, I am not sketching
a picture that has been contaminated by the post-Freudians. Instead, I am seeking
to delineate the basis of our own situation: we are trying, through the procedure of
the pass, to know a little more about the movement from the impasse of desire to a
support that is found in being. This support, by being outside the subject, leaves us
confused about our apparatus of identifications.
Now we can go directly into the final question, which involves Marx’s position
as the inspirer of revolution. Lacan’s diagnosis can be grasped through a few illu-
minating sentences:

It is odd to observe that a doctrine such as Marx’s whose articulation onto

the function of struggle, the class struggle, which he instituted has not pre-
vented it from giving birth to what for the moment is, indeed, the same
problem that confronts us all, namely the persistence of a master’s discourse.
To be sure, the present one does not have the structure of the old, in the
sense in which the old is installed in the place indicated under this big M.The
present one is installed in the place on the left, the one capped by the U. . . .
What occupies the place there, which we will provisionally call dominant [on
the upper left], is the S2, which is specified as being, not knowledge of every-
thing (savoir de tout) – we’ve not got to that point yet, but knowledge taken
as a whole (tout-savoir). Understand this as what is affirmed as being nothing
other than knowledge, which in ordinary language is called the bureaucracy.
It cannot be said that there are no problems created there.
(Lacan, 1991, p. 31, translation modified)

This stupifyingly lucid text, which dates from 17 December 1969, seems to
confirm what I have been saying about Lacan’s relation to Marx. The opposition
between knowledge taken as a whole and knowledge of everything is extremely
valuable. The first of these terms, which occupies the dominant position in the
discourse of the university, does not mean that one claims to know everything. It is
a guarantee that provides vulgar materialist Marxists with a sense of comfort: if we
 Appendix 1: Lacan’s portrait of Marx 209

don’t claim to know everything, then we are materialists. This is obviously insuf-
ficient. If knowledge is conceived of as a whole, it means that no place has been
left for truth; to approach knowledge in this way is to contradict and even to annul
the step that Marx took in inventing the symptom. If we relate this expulsion of
truth to what we know about the consequence of expelling truth from analytic
experience, we can explain why this form of knowledge, placed in the dominant
position, is incompatible with the development of transference.This can also enable
us to assess what can be called a false transference: a transference that will only end
up being destroyed by hatred. Transference, the motive force of treatment, is only
addressed to knowledge if there is a margin in this knowledge – a margin in relation
to its “wholeness” – in which truth can act as cause.
A final question then arises: does the absence of a place of truth result from sub-
stituting the proletarian for the real of the loss of being? The proletarian both marks
the appearance of this loss and closes it up. This is a crucial question. To answer yes
would mean – and this is not to be ruled out – that just as the Hegelian dialectic
becomes frozen in the misunderstood gap of knowledge, so also Marx’s dialectic
becomes paralysed in a tyranny of knowledge. In the course of the movement of
history, this paralysis makes it impossible for it to reach the place of truth, “as we
were perhaps hoping” (ibid., p. 32). From then on, more than ever, the sign of truth
ends up being in the keeping of those who, in the discourse of the university, have
taken over from the ancient slave in the place of the other: the “human material”
(ibid., p. 32). The times are indeed a-changing. In the folds of the flag of the Octo-
ber revolution, what we now see is not the “golden dream” but an empty circle,
from which the revolutionary emblem in the red flag has been cut out.This is a fact.
Some will rejoice, and others will be upset by this; others will both rejoice and be
upset.This may well give us a proper sense of the symptomatic character of this cut-
ting out, which is both particular and collective, and we may even see in the con-
tour of this void the living truth of Lacan’s portrait of Marx: confronted with the
discourse of the master, whoever he may be, some lack of satisfaction may persist.

Note
1 This article was presented at the Rencontre Jacques Lacan conference in Paris in 1991 and
first published in Cahiers psychanalytiques ACF-Est, no. 3, December 1994.
APPENDIX 2: THE INSATIABLE1

The object of psychoanalysis is not man; it is what he lacks – not an absolute

lack, but the lack of an object. . . . It is not to scarce bread but to cake that a
Queen sent her people in time of famine.
—Jacques Lacan, “Responses to Students of Philosophy”2

I am not really qualified to talk about political economy, for I have only really
read – and a long time ago – the work of Marx, especially the first volume of
Capital. I was also surprised at first to find my presentation placed under the section
“Speculation” – which could be understood as financial speculation. Since then,
I have changed my mind. In looking over Jean-Joseph Goux’s (2000) book, Frivolité
de la valeur, I realised that financial speculation is very much one of the essential
preoccupations of “neoclassical” economics.This is an interesting, although uncon-
vincing, way of introducing a consideration of desire into economics. Through this
book, I also discovered Vilfredo Pareto’s exquisite expression, the “ophelimity” – the
desirability – of a glass of water. Pareto begins with the incontestable observation
that we take less pleasure in the third glass of water than in the first and deduces a
law from this: the value of water decreases in proportion to its consumption.Yet the
guide provided by the pleasure principle is misleading, and the entire clinic of desire
goes against this pseudo-law. We have only to mention bulimia and anorexia to
understand that the “value of the last unit consumed” can be higher than that of the
first, or that the first can have no value, at least if value is measured, as Pareto does,
in terms of a scale of consumption. In fact, the flaw in this neoclassical reasoning
can be found not in the counter-example of the drunk who cannot stop drinking,
but in his/her underlying axiom: I consume, therefore I desire. We can, however,
understand intuitively, even without being Freudians, that “I consume, therefore
I do not desire” is also an acceptable axiom.
 Appendix 2: The insatiable 211

I am going to try to take up such commonplace observations through a cri-

tique of Marx’s conception of surplus-value, a critique that I shall develop on the
basis of Lacan’s remarks in his seventeenth seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
(1969–1970) and his text, “Radiophonie”, which he wrote in the first half of 1970, as
well as of several other statements that he made two or three years later. My critique
does not call the economic relevance of Marx’s discovery into question; instead, it
seeks to reveal the hidden side of this discovery, a side that founds capitalism, and
to bring out the reasons for a misunderstanding that exists within the system in
which we still live.
I shall first examine briefly what I am criticising, beginning with what Marx
referred to as a “decisive point”:

The value of the labouring power is determined by the quantity of labour

necessary to maintain or reproduce it, but the use of that labouring power is
only limited by the active energies and physical strength of the labourer. . . .
Take the example of our spinner. We have seen that, to daily reproduce his
labouring power, he must daily reproduce a value of three shillings, which he
will do by working six hours daily. But this does not disable him from work-
ing 10 or 12 or more hours a day. But by paying the daily or weekly value of
the spinner’s labouring power, the capitalist has acquired the right of using
that labouring power during the whole day or week”.
(Marx, 1865, pp. 130–131)

This passage provides a clear exposition of the sale and purchase of labour-power,
as well as the transformation of labour-power into commodities. It is relevant here
because it can serve as a support for dealing with a problem that is more difficult
than that of the expression of labour-power in terms of the yarn produced: the
establishment of what Lacan calls jouissance.This is a prerequisite for understanding
what he will then call “surplus-jouissance” or Mehrlust, a term modelled on Marx’s
term Mehrwert, surplus-value.
In order to talk about jouissance, it is necessary to find the right distance: to
speak of it simply, without thereby leaving out any part of what is at stake in it.
There are two requirements, which can sometimes pull us in opposite directions.
First, there is the origin of the term “jouissance” in Freud’s work. In Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920) discusses psychic processes that have been revealed
through our experience, and which are not a part of the pleasure principle, or of
its complement, the reality principle: the traumatic dream, the neurosis of failure,
masochism and the compulsion to repeat. Through the death drive (Thanatos), he
is able to order these facts and make them intelligible by linking them explicitly
to a jouissance of annihilation. From the beginning of his teaching in the 1950s,
Lacan relates this jouissance of annihilation to the principle of language. The thing
produces the word, which consumes it. Act I.
If jouissance emerges with the signifier, the lektón of language (in linguistics,
Lacan was a Stoic before he was a Saussurian), then this jouissance is immediately
212 Appendix 2: The insatiable

lost; the meaning-effect – whatever it may be – that is produced by the signifier does
not concern the signifier’s being. Lacan refers to contemporary logic, which rec-
ognises the impossibility of self-reference. I shall add, however, that what objects to
this is not intrinsically language, but rather speech – which anticipates language.The
word is less the murder of the thing than the de-reification of the speaker. Act II.
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan refers not to Pareto’s glass of water but
to the sieve of the Danaides, which enables him to describe a specific aspect of jou-
issance: it is like the water that leaks out while the sieve is being filled (Lacan, 1991,
p. 72). Images must be distrusted, and this one is no exception, but, in any case, we
can see that the sieve can never be filled, and this is a major characteristic of jouis-
sance. As Lacan notes (ibid., p. 72), “once you have started, you never know where
it will end. It begins with a tickle and ends with a blaze of petrol.That’s always what
jouissance is”. It would be interesting to restore the series of figures, which includes
Marx, Freud and Lacan, who created this category of the “insatiable”; “modern” –
or “postmodern” – critics of the great “obsolete” ideologies would, in part, have us
forget this category.The figure of Moloch is emblematic of the superego, just as the
wagon of Juggernaut (under whose wheels worshippers of Vishnu were crushed) is
emblematic of capital. It is therefore all the more surprising that Marx ultimately
went in another direction.
Thus, jouissance is lost, and is not even preserved in masochism, despite the
masochist’s deference to Thanatos. What Freud calls repetition is the process in
which the signifier, in its fundamental form as “unary trait” – 0–0–0 – becomes
both a means of jouissance and the vector of its loss. Repetition functions as a
homeopathic defence against the volatility of jouissance by repeating a loss. This
can be observed in everyday life when, in order to remobilise desire, I repeatedly
lose objects. I am using very few words to summarise monumental theoretical con-
structions: at the place of the loss introduced by repetition, the lost object, object
a, arises. We can therefore speak of the object a as two-sided: on one side, there is
entropy, while on the other, surplus-jouissance [plus-de-jouir] can be recovered. The
double character of the French word “plus”, which can mean both “more” and “no
more”, has often been noted. In renaming the object a “surplus-jouissance”, Lacan
was proposing a general theory of what Freudians call a part-object and Winnicott
calls a transitional object. Lacan himself, in his own earlier teaching, had called it
the object-cause of desire.
⁂
Act III. We can now approach Lacan’s criticism of Marx. Lacan argues that “If, by
means of this relentlessness to castrate himself that he had, he hadn’t computed
this surplus jouissance, if he hadn’t converted it into surplus value, in other words if
he hadn’t founded capitalism, Marx would have realized that surplus value is sur-
plus jouissance” (ibid., pp. 107–108). This is Lacan’s major reproach: Marx treated
surplus-jouissance as something that could be entered into an account book. It is
strange and remarkable that this was the same reproach to Pascal, who wanted to
enter the losses and gains of his wager into an account book in order to demonstrate
 Appendix 2: The insatiable 213

that there was no risk in his wager. As Lacan notes in passing in The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, it is “worth the effort of playing double or quits with surplus-jouis-
sance . . . only . . . if the A is not barred”. (ibid., p. 100, translation modified.) In both
Marx and Pascal, the result is that what is incalculable in loss, which is its determi-
nant and irreducible character, is masked, along with its reverse side, insatiability.
All of this has a consequence that concerns capitalism: what Marx conceives of
as the appropriation of surplus-value is only, for Lacan, the recovery, in the form
of surplus-value, of the jouissance that the capitalist had to renounce in order to
start the process (Max Weber’s (1905) book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism provides valuable support for this argument). In reality, this appropria-
tion should be located somewhere other than where Marx had situated it: in the
reduction, which Marx endorses, of labour-power to a commodity. Exploitation,
therefore, will end not through a new distribution of surplus-value, but rather by
going beyond this reduction. Marx was certainly not naive enough to believe that
all surplus-value could be spent in non-productive consumption (see Marx’s (1875,
pp. 343–354) criticism of Lassalle). End of Act III.
⁂
Act IV. Lacan wrote “Radiophonie” while he was concluding The Other Side of Psy-
choanalysis. Similar remarks appear in this text but in a new form, which would soon
lead him to introduce a fifth, capitalist discourse, one that, as we shall see, departs
from the structure of the other discourses. For Lacan (1970, p. 434), one point has
been established: surplus-jouissance is necessary because jouissance is a “hole that
has to be filled”.
Through surplus-value, Marx filled this hole, at least to the extent that a hole can
be filled. (I would like to indicate in passing that the function of fantasy is to provide
a removable stopper, which does not abolish the hole.) This is why Lacan (ibid.,
p. 434) states that “Mehrwert [surplus-value] is Marxlust, Marx’s surplus-jouissance”.
Surplus-value is the cause of desire that capitalism takes as its principle – the
principle of extensive production. Capitalist production, the M-C-M′ cycle, implies
that consumption is always growing. Yet if this consumption could procure a jou-
issance that would bring the call for jouissance to a halt, this would slow down
production and the cycle would come to a sudden stop. This has not taken place
because this economy, through a reversal that Marx did not foresee, produces a lack-
in-jouissance. The more I consume, the greater is the gap between the jouissance
that I get and the jouissance that I expect to obtain. This is precisely the opposite
of Pareto’s theorem. Thus, to quote Lacan one last time, the struggle over how to
distribute surplus-value “only leads those who are exploited to compete on the
basic principle of exploitation, in order to harbour their indisputable participa-
tion in the thirst of lack-in-jouissance” (ibid., p. 435).3 Perhaps this could provide
a basis for explaining why, although price can only derive from value, it does not
reflect value. Perhaps this could also enable us to enter into the enchanted – or
bewitched – empire of financial capital, where credit gives birth to money. In the
capitalist economy, the object a, surplus-jouissance, tastes like exotic spices that are
214 Appendix 2: The insatiable

sweet to the tongue but burn the stomach. This brings us to a question: how is this
reversal possible? Thus, Act V begins.
⁂
I anticipated this a bit when I referred to the fifth discourse. I am not sure that
Lacan’s matheme for the capitalist discourse resolves the question that I have just
asked. Yet at the very least, it brings out the right components – which, frankly,
are rather surprising. In 1972, in his series of lectures The Psychoanalyst’s Knowl-
edge, Lacan puts forward the thesis that the capitalist discourse forecloses castration,
which thus exempts us from the structure of discourse. In the capitalist discourse,
the barrier of jouissance is abolished. In other words, something is missing: the
apparatuses controlled by this barrier, which enable the hole to be filled in – even
if the hole continues to exist – are missing. From now on, the recovery of surplus-
jouissance puts an end even to the short break that we have been allowed in relation
to the imperative to experience jouissance and our submission to its insatiable god.
This change only increases lack-in-jouissance, and, thereby, the thirst of this lack.
Enrichment turns out to be deprivation [dépouillement]. Integration, the tendency
of the life drive to create ever greater unities (Freud’s Vereinigung), turns out to be
a force for segregation. In this context, the “new man” of the capitalist order is
someone who possesses holy cunning; there is no more convincing portrayal of the
new human than Brecht’s capitalist, Pierpont Mauler in Saint Joan of the Stockyards.
He turns out to be a saint because, in the name of a sudden aspiration towards
asceticism, he sells his stocks before they go down; he is cunning because, in order
to provide labour to his workers, he buys them back again before they go back up.

Notes
1 First published in 2004 as L’insatiable. In M. Drach (Ed.), L’argent: croyance, mesure, spécula-
tion (pp. 141–145). Paris: La Découverte.
2 Lacan, J. (1966f). Response to students of philosophy concerning the object of psychoa-
nalysis. In J. Copjec (Ed.), D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson, & J. Mehlman (Trans.),
Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (pp. 107–114). New York: Norton,
1990. p. 113.
3 On the basis of Marcel Mauss’ ethnographic work on the potlatch, Georges Bataille (1933)
had an insight into how an economy based on expenditure, while being the antithesis
of an economy based on acquisition, would reveal the hidden nature of the capitalist
economy: spend in order to increase the lack-in-jouissance. In addition, this was precisely
the mode of operation that Bataille wanted to subvert by transforming it into a passion
for pure loss, which he made into an ideal. Note that, in this article, Bataille also came up
with an excellent definition of poetry: “creation by means of loss” (ibid., p. 171).
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INDEX

Adler, Alfred 4 capitalism xi, 1 – 2, 21, 24, 27 – 28, 207; and

Althusser, Louis 6, 15, 18, 25, 62, 202; the discourse of the master 124; exiting
Althusser’s comet 61 – 72; on the bad from 170 – 193; and the failure of Marxist
subject 104 – 105n8; and the capitalist revolutions 193n2; and financial bubbles
discourse 111; and exiting from 167n3; and the insatiable 211 – 212; and
capitalism 177; and Lucien Sebag Lacan’s discourse 118; and Pascal 131n15;
104n4 and perversion 147n6; and reformism
Amazons 145 – 146 168n13; and the splitting of the subject
analytic discourse x, xv, 25, 28, 199; and 45 – 45, 54, 58; see also capitalist discourse
the capitalist discourse 111, 113, 116, capitalist discourse 11, 20, 60n5, 61n12,
119, 125 – 130, 137 – 142; and knowledge 111 – 112, 200 – 203; and Bruno
147n7; and the splitting of the subject vii – viii, xii – xiii, xv, xix, xixn2; and the
37 – 38, 59, 60n4, 60n5, 85; and the choreography of love 140 – 147; and
symptom 151, 172, 183 discourse without loss 133 – 134; and the
Artaud, Antonin 27, 74 – 76, 82, 107n33, 182 insatiable 214; and the slippage of the
Augustine 123, 173 signifier 134 – 140; and the splitting of the
subject 35 – 39, 46 – 52, 56, 77 – 78, 95; and
bad subject 62, 68 – 71, 104n8, 111, 202 the symptom 154 – 162, 165, 171 – 176,
Balint, Michael 5 180 – 181
barred subject ix, xii – xiii, xix, 24, 35 causality 1 – 4
Barthes, Roland 6 chariot: Binswanger’s 186; Marx’s 161, 208
Bataille, Georges 84, 100, 115, 124, 175, choreography of love 140 – 147
182, 214n3 Christian Science 196
Benjamin, Walter 19, 115 Claudel, Paul 60n8, 63, 100 – 101
Bentham, Jeremy 18 – 19, 96, 167 – 168n10 clinamen 158, 167n7
Berlin Wall 1 Comte, Auguste 13, 63
Binswanger, Ludwig 30n15, 185 – 186, 193 countertransference 64, 66 – 67
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 13, 28, 186 – 187,
189 – 190, 192 – 193 Dali, Salvador 74, 82
Brecht, Bertolt see Saint Joan of the Stockyards Daumal, René 55, 182
Bruno, Pierre vii – viii, x – xix Dean, Jodi vii
de Bausset, Cardinal 192 – 193
Camus, Albert 134 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 62, 82,
Canfora, Luciano 21 86, 88, 105n13, 111, 202; Anti-Oedipus
 Index 229

73 – 80, 83 – 84, 127; A Thousand Plateaus Freud, Anna 5, 35

73 – 74, 76, 127 Freud, Sigmund, works of: “Analysis
democracy 21, 29, 30n23 Terminable and Interminable” 35,
de Molinos, Miguel 193 60n1; “A Child is Being Beaten” xi, 49,
Descartes, René 10, 12, 17, 86, 137 78 – 79; Civilization and its Discontents
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 71 – 72 30 – 31n24, 143; “A Disturbance of
devil 41, 45, 59, 60n8, 190 Memory on the Acropolis” 31n24;
Diatkine, René 64, 66 The Economic Problem of Masochism 115;
Didier-Weill, Alain 181 “Female Sexuality” 148n13; Group
discourse 204; xvi, 13, 22 – 23, 26, 29; of Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
the hysteric 118, 123, 126 – 127, 131n17, 18, 28, 103; “From the History of an
140; and the insatiable 213; and Lacan Infantile Neurosis” 142, 194n16, 200;
112 – 121; and Lacan’s portrait of Marx Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 67, 184;
207 – 208; and the semblance 147n4; and “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” 3; The
the splitting of the subject 43 – 44, 53, Interpretation of Dreams 29n4, 128, 167n2,
63 – 64, 67 – 72, 89, 98; and the symptom 185; “Jokes and Their Relation to the
153, 170, 178, 184, 190; and the theatre Unconscious” 138; Medusa’s Head ix, 146;
104n1; of the unconscious 147n7; of “Mourning and Melancholia” 30n15;
the university 105n9, 121 – 123; see also Negation 130 – 131n7; “New Introductory
analytic discourse; capitalist discourse; Lectures” 17; “Notes Upon a Case of
discourse of the master Obsessional Neurosis” 9, 95 – 96, 154;
discourse of the master 14 – 15, 20, 28, 199; “Observations on Transference-Love”
and the capitalist discourse 112, 118, 66; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
121 – 126, 133, 140; as the discourse of 92, 211; “The Psychopathology of
the unconscious 147n7; and Lacan’s Everyday Life” 120; “The Question
portrait of Marx 209; and Pascal 131n15; of Lay Analysis” 196; “Remembering,
and The Real 147n5; and the splitting Repeating and Working-Through” 9;
of the subject 36, 38, 68, 103; and the “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological
symptom 151, 161, 173 Neurosis” 60n8; “The Splitting of the
Duras, Marguerite 23, 143 Ego in the Processes of Defence” ix, 35;
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
École freudienne de Paris xv – xvi, 28, 64, 1905b 22, 153, 167n1; Totem and Taboo 6;
104n6, 130n1, 176 “The Uncanny” xii
ego ix – x, xv, xx, 4 – 5, 7, 18; and the
capitalist discourse 112, 130 – 131n7; and games 30n14, 39, 51, 80, 83; Fort-Da 92,
exiting from capitalism 184, 188, 194n16; 100 – 101
and the splitting of the subject 35, 40, 74, Gelassenheit xvi – xvii, 180 – 181, 194, 194n18
76, 103, 106n21 Gödel, Kurt 6, 217
empty subject 62 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles
Engels, Friedrich see under Marx, Karl guise 111 – 112
enunciation (énonciation) 6, 8, 12, 15, Guizot, François 37, 77 – 78
23; and the capitalist discourse 116,
119, 124 – 125; and Lacan’s portrait Haizmann, Christophe 60n8
of Marx 207; and the splitting of the Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 15, 26; and the capitalist
subject 48, 64, 70, 93; and the symptom discourse 118, 127; and Lacan’s portrait
161 – 162, 165 of Marx 206, 209; and the splitting of the
erratic 4 – 7 subject 54, 86 – 92, 94, 98, 106n22; and
the symptom 154, 157 – 158
Fénelon, François 28, 186 – 193, 195n29 Heidegger, Martin xviii, 153, 194n18
figuration 153, 167n2, 173 Herodotus 21, 30n23
Foucault, Michel 6, 22, 117, 146, 185
freedom 2, 7, 9, 27, 125; and the splitting of impossible supposition 186 – 193
the subject 63, 74, 104; and the symptom insatiable, the xiii, 160, 210 – 214
165, 168n17, 174 – 175, 191 International Psychoanalytic Association
Frege, Gottlob 128 (IPA) 5, 10, 31n29, 40, 79
230 Index

Jakobson, Roman 19 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19, 100, 187;

Janet, Pierre 152, 200 L’étourdit 8, 17, 106n20, 128, 136, 141,
jouissance xi – xii, xv, xviii – xviii, 23 – 24, 204n6; The Four Fundamental Concepts
198 – 199, 203 – 204; and Althusser 64, of Psychoanalysis 2, 11, 30n16, 72 – 73,
68 – 70; and analytic discourse 60n5; 87, 105n11, 115, 161, 166; “On Freud’s
and Baudelaire 29n3; and the capitalist ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire”
exemption 133 – 136, 143; and Deleuze 11, 82; “The function and field of speech
and Guattari 73 – 76, 80 – 86; and the and language in psychoanalysis” 13, 20,
discourse of the analyst 127 – 129; and 93; “Homage to Marguerite Duras”
the discourse of the hysteric 126 – 127; 143; “Intervention sur l’exposé de J.
and the discourse of the master 125; and Picard” 161; “Joyce the Symptom” (I)
the discourse of the university 121 – 122; 166; “Joyce le Symptôme” (II) 199 – 200;
and exiting from capitalism 173 – 175, “Kant with Sade” 7, 18, 91, 107n27;
181, 185, 188 – 192; feminine 6, 194n19; “Letter of Dissolution” xv – xvi, 104n6,
and figuration 167n2; and the insatiable 130n1; Lituraterre 192; “Logical time and
211 – 212; jouissance without any the assertion of anticipated certainty”
restraints 147n6; and Lacan’s discourse 5 – 6, 28, 172, 177; “Monsieur A.” xvi;
115 – 117, 121; and Lacan’s portrait On the Names-of-the-Father 123; “The
of Marx 205 – 206, 208; and Lacan’s Other is Missing” 16, 179; Overture
references to Marx 14 – 16; and Lacan to the first international encounter of
vs. Marx 18 – 19; lack-in-jouissance xiii, the Freudian field 147n2; “Position of
77, 123 – 124, 137, 140, 157 – 162, 165, the Unconscious” 17; “Presentation on
172, 200, 213 – 214, 214n3; and language psychical causality” 12; “Proposition of
107n29; and masochism 168n16; and 9 October 1967” 119, 172, 183, 194n9;
the One and the Other 132n20; phallic La psychanalyse et son enseignement 13;
193n5, 207; primary 141, 194n19; “La psychanalyse, raison d’un échec” 3;
and the resilience of capitalism 2 – 3; “La psychiatrie anglaise et la guerre”
and the sense of symptoms 153 – 163, 28; Radiophonie xiii, 10 – 11, 13, 47, 84,
166 – 167; and the splitting of the subject 112, 117, 121, 139 – 140, 160, 175, 205,
36, 39, 45, 49, 53 – 59; surplus 105n16; 211, 213; “On a reform in its hole”
and two conceptions of the symptom 105n16; “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s
168 – 169n18; will-to-jouissance 62 – 63, presentation” 9, 143, 145; “Responses to
152, 164 – 165, 191; and Žižek 86 – 87, Students of Philosophy” 129; “Response
99 – 101; see also surplus-jouissance to Jean Hyppolite’s commentary on
Joyce, James xiv – xv, 96 – 97, 151 – 152, Freud’s ‘Verneinung’” 92 – 93; “Science
166 – 168, 192, 203; sinthome of 106n21 and Truth” 10 – 11, 13; Seminar IV x – xi,
Jung, C.G. 4, 17, 24, 72, 145, 184 – 185 97; Seminar VI 147n6; Seminar VIII 60n8,
Jungianism 17 100, 127; Seminar X ix, 24; Seminar XI
14; Seminar XIV 14; Seminar XV viii, 35;
Kant, Immanuel 52, 86, 88, 92, 158, 186 Seminar XVI: Seminar XVII xi, 15, 36,
Keynes, John Maynard 18, 95 – 96, 162 49, 70, 105n9, 117, 122, 126, 139, 181,
Klein, Melanie xvi, 5, 11, 156, 167n8, 178 207 – 208, 212; Seminar XVIII 15, 147n4;
Seminar XIX 15, 73; Seminar XX 23, 83,
Lacan, Jacques, works: L’acte psychanalytique 97, 130n1, 141, 144, 202; Seminar XXII
22, 125, 157; D’un Autre à l’autre viii, 15, xv, 16, 147n5, 159, 207; Seminar XXIII
131n15, 155, 205; Autre écrits 12, 14, 178, 30n20, 96, 106n21, 151, 166, 168n15,
183; Conférence de Louvain 120 – 121; 192; Seminar XXIV 93, 122, 131n16, 158;
“Du discours psychanalytique” 61n12, “The Signification of the Phallus” 7;
112; Écrits: “The Freudian thing” 141; “Spring Awakening” 106n24, 160; “On
Écrits: index of proper names 12; Écrits: the Subject Who is Finally in Question”
“The instance of the letter” 6; Écrits: “On 158, 192, 205; Talking to Brick Walls 73,
my antecedents” 12, 116, 154, 157 – 158, 139 – 142, 206; Television 13 – 14, 19 – 20,
205; Écrits: “On a question prior to any 28 – 29, 36, 171 – 172, 199 – 200; La
possible treatment of psychosis” x – xi, troisième 159, 173, 193n4 – 6
135, 144; Écrits: “The subversion of the lacanisme 17
subject” 80, 112, 114, 129, 130n1, 174; langue, la 147n2
 Index 231

Laplace, Pierre-Simon 52 potlatch 84, 124, 214n3

Laplanche, Jean 29 – 30n10 practical reason 52 – 54
Laval, Christian 18
Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre 131n14 Rancière, Jacques viii, 21
Lesourd, Serge 147n6 Reich, Wilhelm 4, 67, 71 – 72, 78, 82
Levinas, Emmanuel 181 rhizome 62
Lévi-Strauss, Claude x, 6, 143 – 144 Russell, Bertrand viii, 94 – 95, 128 – 130,
lysis 31n24, 111 – 112 132n18, 132, 163, 197

Marx, Karl, works of: Capital 15, 19, 48, 52, Sade, Marquis de 18, 36, 100, 107n27,
154 – 56, 161, 208; Capital III 161 – 162, 187
168n11, 174 – 175; “Critique of the Saint Joan of the Stockyards, xii, 25, 111, 201,
Gotha Programme” 156, 162, 170, 175, 214; and the splitting of the subject 36,
213; Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 46 – 47, 51 – 59
154; “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis science 68 – 71, 196 – 197; psychoanalysis
Bonaparte” 13; and Engels: The German and 7 – 12
Ideology 1, 71; Grundrisse 38; Letter scinder see sunder/sundering
to Otechestvenniye Zapiski 16; Oeuvres Sebag, Lucien 64, 104n4
complètes 205; Speech at the anniversary sentimentality 54
of the People’s Paper 20; “Value, Price and sinthome x, xv, xviii, 23, 29, 199, 203; and
Profit” 211 exiting from capitalism 173, 192; Joyce’s
Marxism vii, 14, 17, 21, 196 106n21; Lacan’s introduction of 168n15;
messianism 182 – 184 and the sense of symptoms 151 – 152,
Mauss, Marcel 84, 124, 214n3 163, 166; and Žižek 96
Miller, A.V. 131n14 socialism 1, 20, 27 – 28, 122, 162, 168n13,
Miller, Jacques-Alain xiv, 64, 87, 89, 100, 170 – 171
169n20 Société psychanalytique de Paris 40, 66
Miller, Judith 205 Soler, Colette xiv, 105n17
Millot, Catherine xv – xvii, 106, Spinoza, Baruch 52, 64, 153, 158
180 – 181, 194 spiritualism 6, 23, 45, 98, 186
moi xvii, 76, 106n21; see also ego Stevenson, Robert Louis see Strange Case of
monopoly 57 – 58 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Morin, Isabelle xi, 163, 168 – 169n18 Strachey, James 105n14
Musil, Robert 4 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
xii – xiii, 25, 36, 38 – 43, 60n7, 111, 201;
Name-of-the-Father x, xv – xvi, 27, 29, 78, and the change of voice 43 – 45; and the
94; and the capitalist exemption 141, 144; devil and science 45 – 49; and Saint Joan of
and the discourse of the hysteric 128; the Stockyards 51, 54 – 55
and the symptom 151 – 152, 166, 169n20, structuralism 6, 29n9, 70, 114, 130, 202
179 – 181, 189, 191 – 192, 194n7 sunder/sundering (scinder) xix, 25, 36 – 40,
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre 40 46 – 47, 200 – 201, 203; and the capitalist
Nazis 3, 6, 99, 116, 161 discourse 111; and the choreography of
need 136 – 137, 160, 175 – 176 love 145
Nietzsche, Friedrich 103, 123 surplus-jouissance xv, 14 – 15; and the
capitalist discourse 111, 114, 120 – 121,
Orwell, George 88, 135, 147n3, 162 123 – 124, 126, 137 – 141; and the
insatiable 211 – 214; and Lacan’s portrait
panopticon 96 of Marx 205, 207; and the splitting of the
parêtre, the 106n20 subject 37 – 38, 44, 47 – 48, 84; and the
Pascal, Blaise 82, 131n15, 161, 212 – 213 symptom 156 – 157, 160 – 161, 175
Pavón-Cuéllar, David vii surplus-value xiii, 13 – 15, 19, 203 – 208;
Peirce, Charles Sanders 29n9 and the capitalist discourse 121, 124,
perversion 26, 80 – 81, 99, 102, 147n6, 202; 138 – 140; and the insatiable 211 – 213;
and the symptom 156, 166, 190 and the splitting of the subject 37 – 38,
Pfister, Oskar 22, 183 44, 71, 84; and the symptom 154 – 157,
poet 1, 171, 175 – 176, 180, 184 – 185, 200 162, 170, 175
232 Index

symptom, the vii–xvi, 3–8, 12–16, 20–29, theatre 51, 63, 104n2, 113, 116,
62–63, 151–152, 197–203; and Althusser 136
63–65, 67, 72; and association vs. therapy 107n30, 196
institution 174–180; and the capitalist transcendent, the 22, 28 – 29, 98, 199 – 200,
exemption 135, 139; and the chariot 203; and the symptom 182 – 183, 186,
and the sphere 185–186; and Deleuze 194n22, 195n22
and Guattari 75–77, 80–83, 85; and the
discourse of the analyst 128, 130–131; and utilitarianism 19, 167 – 168n10
the discourse of the master 126; and the
discourse of the university 122; and the voice 43 – 45, 47 – 48, 54, 59, 88
drives Eros and Thanatos 45, 48; and the
event 194n19; and exiting from capitalism Wallace, Alfred Russell 60n10
170–174; and Gelassenheit 180–182; and Weber, Max 30n20, 213
the impossible supposition 186–193; and White Goddess 97, 106n24, 174
Lacan’s discourse 116; and Lacan’s portrait Winnicott, D.W. 5, 212
of Marx 205–207, 209; from Marx to Wittgenstein, Ludwig 128, 162, 197 – 198,
Freud 152–162, 167n1; and Mauler’s 204n2
sentimentality 54; and messianism World War II 6; see also Nazis
182–184; as Nachtrag 193n4; and the
Name-of-the-Father 169n20; and phallic Žižek, Slavoj vii; Absolute Recoil vii;
jouissance 193n5; and practical reason Hegel avec Lacan 89; Incontinence of the
53; and the real 193n6; and sinthome Void vii; The Puppet and the Dwarf 98,
163–167, 168n15; Soler on 105n17; and 100 – 101, 106 – 107n26, 107n28 – 29;
therapy 107n30; and the transcendent Subversions du sujet 86; Tarrying with the
195n22; two conceptions of 168–169n18; Negative 86 – 89, 92, 95 – 96, 98, 103,
and Žižek 88–91, 93–94, 96–98, 100–101 106n22, 190