LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM

Parker, I. (2007) Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Marxism, Lacanian Ink, 29, pp. 121-139. [New York: Wooster Press, ISSN: 1049-7749]NB: This version has full footnotes and references not included in the published version.LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND REVOLUTIONARY MARXISMIan Parker

Capitalism creates the conditions of possibility for the movements to develop that will be able to challenge it and, perhaps, replace it. This complex dialectical relationship, between a powerful and pervasive exploitative system and the forces that aim to make the world a place where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all, poses particular problems for those working for social and individual emancipation. On the one hand, Marxists have always been impelled as much by fury at the injustices that capitalist social relations wreak on individuals as by analyses of the illogic of this political economy; in that sense the socialist-feminist slogan that the personal is political recovered the collective memory of the type of struggle that the best of Marxist politics was always concerned with. On the other hand, psychoanalysts have often insisted that personal self-understanding is not enough to take us to the roots of human misery; reflexive interpretation of how we have come to be who we are in the world must be connected with collective action to change it.

Psychoanalysis as such is not necessarily anti-capitalist, and many analysts have followed Freuds own sardonic assessment of idealist promises for socialism and happier times, endorsing in the process a view of the end of personal analysis as entailing for the analysand scepticism if not cynicism about political activity. One of the paradoxes that operate to further separate and restructure the fraught relationship between the individual and the social under capitalism is that it has been the abstract academic forms of psychoanalytic theory that deepened our understanding of contemporary subjectivity and that have unfortunately succeeded in providing the main reference points for how we might combine psychoanalysis and Marxism. That they cannot be combined, that they are directly opposites, was recognised long ago by psychoanalysts, but the more interesting and fruitful question that still needs to be worked through is are they dialectical opposites? To answer that question we also need to be clearer about what the appropriate reference points might be. It is not enough simply to say that we can now address the question by comparing and contrasting the writings of Marx and Lacan.

Specifying the particular theoretical traditions Marxist and Lacanian can be helpful as a starting point; for there are two assumptions they hold in common that we must take seriously in order to ground the debate. First, there is an emphasis on the dimension of practice, an insistence that it is not enough to interpret the social world or the inner world; in the early psychoanalytic tradition this is apparent in the attention given to what characterises a mutative interpretation and for practising Lacanians it is evident in their focus on clinical training. The domains of practice are very different, but it is only from the work within each of these domains that we may arrive at answers that are both genuinely Lacanian and Marxist. Second, there is an acknowledgement that the location of the work is an accumulating tradition; a movement of activists or practitioners that read and re-read founding texts, but which collectively deliberates the trajectory of the writing and commentaries in order to assess what can be made of errors when theory is put to the test. In each case, of course, the task of retrieving and maintaining that tradition is necessarily figured against an understanding of the specific disastrous errors by which those who speak for the tradition psychoanalysis or Marxism have betrayed it.

There is, in addition, a close correspondence between the kinds of errors in practice that each of the movements has documented and then sought to avoid. Whether this correspondence signals more than an analogy between the Lacanian and Marxist tradition, and whether it then warrants the conclusion that the answers that the traditions have provided are homologous in nature is another matter, one that we will explore in due course. The similarity between the enmities that each movement has constituted in the process of its historical development has, in itself, appealed to enough commentators looking from one to the other and searching for a complementary relationship to make it worth identifying some of the errors and enemies internal to and spawned by the traditions. They include; first, the impact of certain cultural forms that systematically distort the critiques and the aims of the movement (consumer culture in general for many Marxists and US-American society in particular for Lacan), and, second, the crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste that regulates theory and practice in its own interests (the ruling apparatus in the Soviet Union for Marxists and the stranglehold of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) for the Lacanians). The various attempts to formulate sufficiently rigorous theories of culture and to construct alternative forms of organisation in response to these real problems that have beset the movements have all the more served to sharpen the work of their adherents, either as Lacanian psychoanalysts or as revolutionary Marxists.

Al tu sers rien

Let us turn to some more contentious internal enemies that Lacanians and Marxists have faced but dealt with somewhat differently. In both traditions there has been an appeal to forms of thought that promise to validate and improve the theory but which then threaten to irrevocably ruin it, and the dangers of this appeal and its consequences adherents of each movement can see clearly enough. However, there is a fatal dissymmetry between the traditions that mirrors at precisely this point the separation between the individual and the social, a separation that is very convenient to most psychoanalysts in their everyday practice but which then riddles and sabotages every attempt by Marxists to put the two aspects of the equation together again. Lacan knew what the stakes were here, using some existing theoretical frameworks from outside the Freudian tradition and refusing others in order to open the way to an articulation of what is intrinsically social about the individual. It was this strategic navigation through hostile ground to return to Freud that was repeatedly misunderstood by Althusser.

On the one side of this ostensibly equivalent handling of convenient but potentially dangerous forces, Lacan drew upon structuralism; Lvi-Strauss to re-conceptualise kinship relations and the terms of the Oedipus complex as essentially empty, defined instead only by their position within a structure; and Saussure to arrive at an account of signifiers operating within a system of differences without positive terms. But, at the same time, Lacan never abandoned conceptual systems that were diametrically opposed to structuralist theory of which Hegels, read through Kojve, is the most important and he tactically employed other theories of linguistics, such as Jacobsons, to legitimise his own theoretical developments. And, at the same time, Lacan rejected the lure of psychology, the cluster of academic and empiricist studies of individual development that seemed to offer a solution to so many psychoanalysts who were called upon to provide evidence for the efficacy of their treatments. Often in his writing the signifier psychology stands for what is worst about the adaptation of individuals to US-American culture, an endeavour reluctantly accepted and then enthusiastically advertised by his opponents in the IPA. Lacans aversion to those practitioners of orthopaedics psychologizing analytic theory may be gratifying to Marxists, and his critique resonates with our suspicion that bourgeois psychology ratifies the individualisation of experience and explanations of oppression, but this hostility owes little to Marxism as such.

Lacans earliest psychiatric work on paranoia forms the core of his return to Freud and of his psychoanalytic reading of early twentieth-century cultural malaise as derived from the decline of the paternal imago, but the political consequences of this reading for an understanding of fascism, for example as perverse narcissistic imaginary identification with the father are bad news for Marxists looking to the revolutionary power of human creativity. The political position that flows from this analysis is more compatible with surrealist approaches which then do not much more than merely mimic this identification. Likewise, Lacans closest approach to joint action in groups once again offers little that will be of immediate comfort to Marxists; the temporal logic that he outlined in his paper on anticipated certainty is a critique more than an endorsement of intersubjectivity, and while that critique is useful if not necessary for clinical work with individuals, the most immediate connections with psychoanalytic group psychology are with the conservative psychiatric tradition in England during the Second World War that Lacan was so impressed by.

Notions of creative labour and collective activity as the two most powerful defining features of human nature assumed by Marxism are thus obscured by Lacanian psychoanalysis, and to take the line adopted by hard-line Althusserians that there is no human nature at all is simply to be swallowed whole by one particularly virulent anti-Marxist version of quasi-Lacanian social theory. We leave aside here the pathobiographical descriptions of the tactical moves that Lacan made to mobilise support from a range of different influential figures; entreaties and missives to church leaders and the French Communist Party (PCF) indicate that Lacan was neither Christian nor communist.

On the other side, to which we will now turn in vain for an adequate Marxist response to these issues, Althusser also adopted structuralist precepts to reinvigorate a theoretical practice that would comprehend history as a process without a subject, and grasp how ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. This enabled him to steer a course between the newly rediscovered humanism of the PCF and a supposedly scientifically rigorous account of the human subject. While it took some nerve to recruit Lacan to this task, against the background of pathetic self-criticism by communist analysts who had declared psychoanalysis to be a reactionary ideology, Althussers anti-humanism was still but one move within the network of machinations required by the Party. In addition, Althusser adopted ideas from Lacan that would, in this particular domain of theoretical elaboration, keep alive some version of the humanism that he ostensibly side-stepped; something uncannily close to the very psychology that Lacan pitted himself against.

The most striking manifestation of this psychologising element is to be found in the use Althusser makes of Lacans account of the mirror stage. For Lacan this stage the site upon which the Imaginary is constituted is embedded in, and necessarily intertwined with the Symbolic and Real. For Althusser, though, this is a self-enclosed point of imaginary unity with the mother treated as the original point from which the subject emerges as able to recognise and be recognised within ideological systems. The relation that the individual subject takes up with respect to the various Ideological State Apparatuses or to the Absolute Subject is an imaginary relation rather than always already being structured by the Symbolic; and the Real as the third necessary element is reduced by Althusser to consisting of real conditions, as if psychoanalysis was concerned with reality as a measure of distorted perceptions. Althusser thus presses Lacanian concepts into shape to understand ideology, but in the process he imaginarises them, and so turns the Imaginary itself into something that functions as a key concept; it appeared to open the way to a Marxist theory of subjectivity but actually locked us all the more tightly into ideology as something eternal and inescapable.

To use psychoanalysis in this way to provide a theoretical grip on ideology is therefore to distort what Lacan was aiming at. In clinical practice it is crucial that the analyst tackles the role of the Imaginary for each particular analysand so that the analysand may be brought to the point where they are able to move beyond the painful repetitive circuits that hold them in thrall to certain objects of desire; analysis is the practice of speaking by which the analysand will break from the Imaginary as eternal and inescapable. However, the Lacanian psychoanalyst is also concerned with how they, the analyst, can position themselves within the Symbolic (as the Other to whom non-egoic unconscious true speech is directed) or in the Real (as the other, objet petit a, as enigmatic cause of desire that will open pathways of speech from the unconscious). In Althussers hands psychoanalysis becomes a treatment of ideology practised by analysts rather than a talking cure practised by analysands; what he overlooks is that analysands do change their own little worlds within the limits of capitalist social relations, and that process of change is what revolutionary Marxists should be more interested in conceptualising and connecting with. The term theoretical in Althussers work is actually a replacement for practice, whether political or psychoanalytic practice.

This curseThe next generation the post-Althusserians in the English-speaking world compounded this misreading of Lacan, with a displacement of interest from the Imaginary to the Symbolic; analysis of ideological forms could then more easily be directed at the domain of texts and discourse. Academic appropriations of Lacan in literary theory or film studies which tended to use Althusser as a filter then had to settle accounts with the image of the Symbolic as if it were a gigantic Imaginary system so that linguistically-structured cultural products could be read critically and the hope held out that texts could be dismantled and transformed. In the US, for example, Jamesons rather negative assessment of the work of the Symbolic in Lacan, which he had assimilated to his motif of the prison-house of language in his influential critical survey of structuralism and Russian formalism, was replaced five years later by a more positive account; even so, he was still wary of how the celebration of submission to the Law and subordination of the subject to the Symbolic Order meant that a conservative misappropriation of this clearly anti-Utopian scheme was unavoidable.

Jamesons use of psychoanalysis was more nuanced then reductive approaches in literary criticism that speculated about the motivations of individual writers and their creations, but it was precisely his insistence that analysis must be concerned with the production and appeal of complex ideological systems in texts that led him away from Lacanian psychoanalysis as such. The Imaginary slipped into the background as if it merely pertained to the idiosyncratic elements of personal history (of the author or characters in the text) that child psychologists might be concerned with a disciplinary demarcation that was anathema to Lacan and the Real, for Jameson, was simply History itself, a formulation that did at least still capture something of its incomprehensible traumatic aspect in psychoanalysis. To reduce the Real to History in this way, however, turned it into something that could, ideally, be narrated (as if it were the widest possible symbolic order and Ur-text for each particular local semiotic system).

The eventual slide into US-American-style pragmatism as the antithesis of historical materialism was actually accomplished by theorists in Europe melding analyses of ideology with the search for class-collaborationist historic compromises. If Althusser was one of father figures of the dissident Chinese faction of the crisis-ridden PCF busy elaborating a new humanist stance, then Laclau and Mouffe should be seen as inheritors of the line of the Italian faction. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy contained the barest of references to Lacan, but this academic manifesto of Eurocommunism which entailed a social-democratic interpolation of Gramsci as a theorist of discourse could now easily recruit signifiers and subject positions to its own readings of cultural texts.

Lacan had in fact outlined a theory of discourse, artfully presented to an audience of academics and activists during his seminar of 1969-1970 with a smattering of semi-Marxist concepts such as surplus jouissance as if it were the psychic complement to surplus value to flatter his Leftist interlocutors. But the main theoretical development in this seminar on the reverse side of psychoanalysis, was directed, once again, to the question of psychoanalytic practice and to the reactionary sedimentation of that practice in the IPA. Naming the worst of contemporary discourses the discourse of the university served to expose the way knowledge and career positions were formalised in such a way as to recruit and adapt potential bureaucrats and so turn psychoanalysis into part of the pyramid-selling apparatus of therapeutic culture. The description of a discourse of the master enabled Lacan to mobilise Hegelian categories a version of the master-slave dialectic borrowed from Kojve and to taunt the rebellious students that what they aspired to was a new master; their revolution would only amount to the revolving of terms from position to position in the four discourses.

The distinctively Lacanian theory of discourse does give some more mileage to academics who make it their business to trace the pathways of the Symbolic and re-produce it as a form of knowledge, even critical knowledge, into which new students can be inducted. However, what the uptake of Lacans theory of four discourses conveniently overlooks is that he was primarily concerned with how the discourses of the university and the master structure and sabotage individual psychoanalytic work, the discourses of the hysteric and the analyst are therefore theoretical and practical conceptual frameworks for facilitating challenge rebellious questioning by the analysand and enabling difference, even personal transformation. It is true that the hystericising of the analysand does not immediately and inevitably produce a good revolutionary subject, but it is only the discourse of the analyst that can allow this hysterical refusal of mastery to emerge; and perhaps it is just such a hysterical refusal that is a precondition for revolutionary subjectivity. The juggling with signifiers by discourse analysts concerned with political and policy texts incites instead a bureaucratic orientation to language; it lies in the domain of advertising and focus groups rather than the domain of truth. It is the opposite of psychoanalysis, its reverse.

The worrying turn to language in this line of work, already been noted early on by Marxists, was finally brought to fruition in order to better lay the way for new political alliances that were forged through the resignification of the various terms of debate. In the subsequent turn to discourse that builds upon Laclau and Mouffes work, all categories of identity with class identity as the most suspect of all are dissolved into a conception of the Symbolic as an interweaving of texts, and the antagonism that makes any attainment of identity or resolution of differences between them impossible becomes the focus of cultural analysis; the signifier antagonism itself functions in this strand of academic research as a kind of fetish that might serve to ward off ideological closure. The political drift of Laclau and Mouffes work, which provided one local articulation of the Eurocommunist project as almost the last breath of Stalinism, was not surprisingly toward a position that would thenceforth be self-avowedly post-Marxist.

Those who have attempted to reassert Lacanian psychoanalysis within this version of discourse theory have, however, already followed Laclau and Mouffe too far down this relativist road to be able to forge any direct links with revolutionary Marxism. Instead, politics is itself caricatured and characterised as an impossible project, with Marxist politics presented as one of the obstacles to radical democracy. Then, when Laclau is taxed by his former students about the role of Lacanian concepts such as jouissance impossible pleasure beyond the pleasure principle and outside the Symbolic, in the Real Laclau is able to reply that he has, of course, been talking about jouissance all the time. By now in this strand of work everything has been absorbed into the Symbolic, and every disturbing and disruptive element of Lacanian theory has been recuperated into discourse.

The real thingThe inspiration for much of the recent psychoanalytically-inflected writing among discourse theorists has been Laclau and Mouffes one-time ally iek, and almost single-handedly he has put theoretical rapprochement between Marx and Lacan back on the agenda. ieks early work was part of in an intense theoretical struggle in Slovenia during the 1980s that was, at that time, embedded in political practice; a group of theorists were settling accounts with the bureaucracy and with Althusser, and using Lacan as key resource.

Many of the themes that reappear in ieks writing on ideology, for example, are apparent in Rastko Moniks comment that Althussers description of interpellation whereby ideology hails and constitutes individuals as subjects already presupposes that a subject is there to start with, one able to respond to the call of ideology. Here in this critique there is an elaboration of Lacans formula for transference in which the analysand attributes knowledge to a subject supposed to know now as the formation of an intersubjective structure in which there is the relation of identification to the subject supposed to believe. This is a motif which iek then employs in his own later work. For Monik, Lacan is one way of returning to Freud, the materialist for whom the whole is the untrue, and this materialism is thus supposed to be very close to a Marxist view of the illusion of totality as the result of ideological totalization. Against any illusion of coherence and the idea that there is a totalising knowledge to be discovered under the set of signifiers that constitute ideology and its concomitant fantasy elements, we come to see that there is nothing: nothing but the hiatus that makes the social structure unwhole, the hiatus of class struggle.

The lesson that there is nothing, that the ridiculous fantasies that glue us to our objects are the stuff of signifiers, is indeed something that a subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis may come to know. When the analyst is able to obtain absolute difference the analysand can then, perhaps, even drop them as a subject supposed to know and realise that nothing will come of nothing in a moment of subjective destitution as they traverse that underlying fantasy relationship with their objet petit a that structured who they were. But is this nothing really just another name for class-struggle, equivalent to the impossibility of any coherent totalisation of the social field? Why could the lesson to be drawn from the particular relationship that one constructs and deconstructs in analysis not also be that there is no such thing as class struggle, that the historical materialist critique of political economy itself serves to plug a gap or lack in the subject, and that political struggle draws activists into a fantastical relationship with their leaders who will fulfil the function of subjects supposed to believe? This is exactly the conclusion that some of the Lacanian advocates of radical democracy have drawn. For iek class struggle is used to mark an antagonism that cuts across any attempt to make the social into a wholesome complete system, a conceptual impossibility that will frustrate those who want to improve capitalism, but a necessary impossibility that will also block those who want to overthrow it. The working class is not, in ieks worldview, a class that will struggle to simultaneously take power and abolish itself in the very process of socialist revolution. For iek the obstacle or antagonism that he obsessively circles around is the condition of possibility for capitalism to exist; to remove this impediment would be to lose the very productivity that is generated by it, if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates Despite some ultraleftist rhetoric that is occasionally wheeled out to annoy the likes of Laclau, iek does not think beyond the horizon of capitalism.

iek is not a Marxist, but this is not the main issue that concerns us here. Although he addresses political-economic phenomena in commentary and critique and with a rhetoric that is infused with Marxist terminology, this is merely the opportunity to play out themes from German idealist philosophy. And although Lacan is often invoked, this is as a theoretical framework to read Hegel (and, at times, Schelling). So, when iek appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis as a practice of self-examination through which the truth of the unconscious may be but half spoken as a template for political action we are being led well away from revolutionary Marxism.

At the same time as there is a relentless desubstantialisation of social categories in this line of work, there is also often a romanticising of heroic individual gestures of refusal, and here Lacans notion of the Real becomes the touchstone for something that might be an explosive force outside the Symbolic and the Imaginary. This is nowhere clearer than in ieks characterisation of the ethical psychoanalytic act which will touch the real and so change symbolic coordinates of a life-world. The example of militant figures true to a cause is then conjured time and again in a bizarre series that runs from Saint Paul (true to Christ), to Lenin (true to Marx) and Lacan (true to Freud). This conceptual separation of individuals from historical context thus obscures what is genuinely revolutionary about Marxism its emphasis on creative collective action which prefigures socialist forms of organisation and it draws iek into some of the most reactionary identifications with those he admires most. Insofar as he is faithful to psychoanalysis it is to the institution rather than the clinical practice, and in particular to the present leader Jacques Alain-Miller, the good Stalin. iek is a consummate Stalinist, lurching from pragmatic politics to ultraleftism, and each time with sectarian denunciation of those he characterises as hysterical rebels or conformist liberals. In the landscape of French Communist internecine struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, iek stands among the Chinese Althusserians and the Italian Laclau-Mouffe post-Marxists as the bourgeois caricature of the Russian totalitarian, in favour of the reassertion of the party apparatus and fidelity to the cause.

Dialectical differenceThese three attempts to connect Lacan with Marx failed; once theoretical explication was prioritised over clinical and political practice it became possible to separate one of the three orders Imaginary, Symbolic or Real from their necessarily knotted relationship with each other, and to then forge ahead with false questions that would inevitably give rise to answers that would be neither Lacanian nor Marxist. There is an important aspect of psychoanalysis that is neatly glossed over in the appropriations of it by social theory, one that we have not so far attended to, which is that it is as much a theory and practice of sexuality and sexual difference as it is of the unconscious. How could we bring this sexual element to play in political theory and practice? One way is by noticing that the antagonism between the domains of the individual and the social might well be characterised as being like the famous impossibility of rapport that Lacan used to describe sexual difference, but even then this highly abstract formulation only answers to an already too-generalised puzzle. Instead, if we were to ask what Lacanian psychoanalysis might be useful for as one specific element of class struggle, and in relation to what specific facets of Marxist revolutionary activity, it might then be useful to focus on the role of sexual difference and its intersection with class struggle. The separation of the public and private spheres of life under capitalism and the corresponding separation between stereotypical masculinity and femininity is the key here. This intersection between the overlapping and mutually-reinforcing axes of capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression has, of course, been worked at more intensively by feminists than by Marxists.

Earlier generations of radical psychoanalysts who had attempted to develop theories of personal change linked with revolutionary politics had, of necessity, made the thematic of sexual revolution a key part of their work. But all too-often the sex that would drive the revolution was essentialised, turned into a self-sufficient force that could and should be brought to the surface. Lacan shows, in contrast, how the constitution of a speaking subject is also, at the same time, the constitution of another side to speaking, another place which is the unconscious, in which representations tied to libidinal forces enjoy their power by virtue of the very process of their expulsion from everyday language and ordinary consciousness. The superego, for example, then feeds upon the guilty awareness that there is something desired that is not being fully realised and continually sends back the command to enjoy; sex is incited as much as it is prohibited.

It is this that provides us with a new way of thinking the problematic of sexual difference, so that the impossible sexual relation is one that is constitutive of fantasies about what men and women really are; and, on the side of the man, fantasy about what woman has access to as something beyond the Symbolic order, something beyond the always failing phallic jouissance to which man is confined. There is, of course, the temptation in this account to idealise woman a motif that all the more efficiently holds in place her degradation and so an attention to the historical constitution of this impossible sexual relation and the idealisation that goes along with it is necessary to take this account forward.

For example, feminisation is part of the logic of capitalism that dissolves nuclear-family relationships and the traditional roles accorded to men and women; alongside the recruitment of women to the workforce as honorary men and the destruction of the private sphere accorded to women there are corresponding, sometimes desperate, attempts to find again that lost femininity; it is present in motifs of child-rearing to which men are seeking access almost as fervently as women, and in emotional labour through which men imagine that they will learn to be as competent as women in performing sensitivity and so really feeling something deep inside.

The feminisation of capitalism is also accompanied now by the rise of psychotherapy, a sphere of work traditionally associated with women but in which men are becoming more powerful, and even in psychoanalysis as a more rigorous, stereotypically masculine, activity in which men and women try to rediscover the feminine side of themselves. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, this process of feminisation is simultaneously mobilised and problematised; worked with and worked through in what it would be possible to see as a personal-political process that opens a way to femininity as something that is necessarily repressed for capitalism to work, but in such a way that refuses to essentialise or idealise it. The hystericisation of the analysand, for example, is a feminisation of the position of the subject who challenges the master, and it builds upon the earliest crucial observations in the history of psychoanalysis, that hysteria was not confined to women. But this feminisation is not bewitched by fantasies about what a woman really is, for the sublation of femininity is the point at which the analysand of whatever sex knows not only that there is no harmonious sexual relationship but also that the woman does not exist.

In the process of this challenge and transformation this rebellion against the normative and pathologising symbolic material that has constituted the individual subject some of the individualised and self-defeating images of happiness under capitalism are also subject to close examination and change. Stereotypical allocation of aggression and subjection to masculine and feminine roles, possession of socially-valued commodities, and illusory freedom from intrusion by others strange to us, could each be analytically conceptualised as if they were ideological, but these images are chained together in different ways at different times. Even if the political projects here are not complementary, there are ways in which they may coincide; Revolutionary Marxists, for example, are not against ideology as such, but in the way collective creative activity is suffocated, sometimes by those who see ideology everywhere, and Lacanian psychoanalysts are concerned with the lies that ideological motifs might enable a particular subject to tell themselves, lies that attach them to their symptom.Psychoanalysis provides a rich vocabulary to describe subjectivity, but not as a set of signifiers that could be used to supplement or replace political analysis. Perhaps there is something prefigurative about being able to attend to and share with others aspects of emotional existence that are usually suffocated, suppressed and often-times repressed as a function of wage-labour. The almost impossibly tense dialectical relationship between Marxists and feminists has led to changes in political practice among Marxists, and perhaps it is only that relationship so briefly flagged here that would enable Lacanian psychoanalysis with individuals to contribute to revolutionary Marxist practice.References

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Laclau, Ernesto 2003, Discourse and Jouissance: A Reply to Glynos and Stavrakakis, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 1, 2: 278-285.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1985, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 1987, Post-Marxism Without Apologies, New Left Review, 166: 79-106.

Lagache, Daniel 1953, Some Aspects of Transference, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34: 1-10.

Lvi-Strauss, Claude 1963, Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.

Long, Andrew and Tara McGann 1997 Slavoj iek Interviewed by Andrew Long and Tara McGann, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 1, 2: 133-137.

Macey, David 1994, Thinking with Borrowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan, in Althusser: A Critical Reader edited by Gregory Elliott, Oxford: Blackwell.

Mandel, Ernest 1971, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, London: New Left Books.

Mandel, Ernest 1978, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of Socialism in One Country, London: New Left Books.

Mandel, Ernest 1979, Revolutionary Marxism Today, London: New Left Books.

Metz, Christian 1982, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Miller, Jacques-Alain 1994, Extimit, in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society edited by Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Ronald J. Corthell and Franoise Massardier-Kenney, New York: New York University Press.

Mitchell, Juliet 1974, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Monik, Rastko 1993, Ideology and Fantasy in The Althusserian Legacy edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, London: Verso.

ODonnell, Paddy 1982, Lucien Sve, Althusser and the Contradictions of the PCF, Critique, 15: 7-29.

Parker, Ian 2004, Slavoj iek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.

Reich, Wilhelm 1972, Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, New York: Vintage Books.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth 1990, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, London: Free Association Books.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth 1997, Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Saussure, Ferdinand de 1974, Course in General Linguistics, London: Fontana.

Segal, Lynne 1999, Cautionary Tales: Between Freud and Feminism, Constellations, 6, 1: 61-79.

Stavrakakis, Yannis 1999, Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge.

Strachey, James 1934 The nature of the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 15: 127-59.

Strachey, John 1937, Introduction, in Reuben Osborn, Freud and Marx: A Dialectical Study, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Valente, Joseph 2003, Lacans Marxism, Marxisms Lacan (from iek to Althusser), in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabat, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zaretsky, Eli 1976, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, London: Pluto Press.

iek, Slavoj 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

iek, Slavoj 1990, Eastern Europes Republics of Gilead, New Left Review, 183: 50-62.

iek, Slavoj 1998, Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2: 235-63.

iek, Slavoj 2002a, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917: V. I. Lenin, edited with an Introduction and Afterword by Slavoj iek, London: Verso.

iek, Slavoj 2002b, The interpassive subject, http://www.lacan.com/interpass.htm (accessed 2 December 2002).

iek, Slavoj 2002c The Real of Sexual Difference, in Reading Seminar XX: Lacans Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, New York: State University of New York Press. Mandel 1971.

See, for example, Kovel 1988.

a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature (Freud 2001a, p. 143).

Strachey 1937, p. 7.

Strachey 1934.

Mandel 1979; Roudinesco 1990.

Paris 1968 student slogan, cited by Macey 1994, p. 146.

Only through the articulation of their difference can their relation be adequately expressed (Adorno 1967, p. 70).

In the individuals mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model , as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well (Freud 2001b, p. 69).

Lvi-Strauss 1963.

Saussure 1974, p. 120.

Through Kojve 1969.

Jacobson 1975.

See, for example, Lagache 1953.

Lacan 1973, p. 23.

Lacan 1980.

See, for example, Greeley 2001.

Lacan 1988.

Lacan 2000.

See, for a Marxist case against this aspect of Althusserianism, Geras 1983.

Roudinesco 1997.

See Althusser 1976.

Althusser 1971, p. 153.

The least one may say of the analytic approach is that it blocks at the highest point the freedom of ascribing to the facts any causes other than those postulated by psychoanalysis itself. the analytic technique can only lead the patient to the halfway mark, at the point where he becomes conscious of the myth which weighed on him but not of its profound sources. It only offers him an artificial liberation in an imaginary world (Eight French Psychiatrists 1949, p. 19).

Althusser advanced a philosophy of history which allowed acknowledgement of the political distortions existing in the superstructure of the USSR, while preserving the economic categorisation of the country as socialist. Theoretically this was a major political advance over the cult of the personality explanations proferred [sic] by the PCF leadership. Politically it allowed a degree of criticism of the USSR and permitted the PCF a degree of independence from the CPSU (ODonnell 1982, p. 25).

Althusser may seem to reject psychology but re-introduces it via the Ideological State Apparatus (ODonnell 1982, p. 29).

First outlined in English, in New Left Review, as if it were indeed a mirror-phase that could be part of a developmentalist account (Lacan 1968). Compare this with Lacan 2002.

Lacan 1998.

At the root of the problem is Althussers invocation of an individual who is pre-ideological and indeed must be pre-ideological if Althussers most fundamental thesis (that ideology is the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects) is correct. Althusser has given us the worst of all possible worlds in presenting a model of the subject that manages to strip away or weaken adult powers of political agency at the same time that it retains metaphysical and essentialist assumptions about pre-social capacities of the individual child (Barrett 1993, pp. 178-9).

the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning (Althusser 1971, p. 168).

This positioning is posed differently in Lacans earlier and later work, with a shift of emphasis from the Symbolic to the Real.

The work of Castoriadis could be contrasted with this position, though his later work at the point where he turned to psychoanalysis was neither Marxist nor, in the end, Lacanian; Castoriadis was an activist from the Socialisme ou Barbarie group (writing as Paul Cardan) who trained as a Lacanian, then broke away from Lacans school to practise as a psychoanalyst, in the Fourth Group, and went on to elaborate an overarching theory of the imaginary institution of society. See, for example, Castoriadis 1987.

See, for example, Metz 1982.

Jameson 1972.

On the other hand, if we recall that for Lacan submission to the Law designates, not repression, but rather something quite different, namely alienation in the ambiguous sense in which Hegel, as opposed to Marx, conceives of this phenomenon then the more tragic character of Lacans thought, and the dialectical possibilities inherent in it, become evident (Jameson 1977, p. 373).

Jameson 1977, p. 384.

Just as the Real, for Lacan, is that which is impossible to bear, History, for Jameson, is what hurts (Homer, 1998, p. 52).

Laclau and Mouffe 1985.

See, for example, Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000.

Lacan 1969-1970.

What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one (Lacan 1987, p. 126). This comment too is a return to Freud: Theoretical Marxism, as realised in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the energy and the self-contained and exclusive character of a Weltanshauung, but at the same time an uncanny likeness to what it is fighting against (Freud 2001c, pp. 179-80).

See, for example, Bracher 1993.

See, for example, Callinicos 1982, and Anderson 1983.

social antagonisms occur because social agents are unable to attain fully their identity. the task of the discourse analyst is to explore the different forms of this impossibility, and the mechanisms by which the blockage of identity is constructed in antagonistic terms by social agents (Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000, p. 10).

Mandel 1978.

Laclau and Mouffe 1987.

See, for example, Stavrakakis 1999.

without taking into account enjoyment, the whole Lacanian framework loses most of its explanatory force (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2003, p. 120).

by discourse I do not understand something restricted to the linguistic conceived in its narrow sense, but a relational complex of which enjoyment is a constitutive element (Laclau 2003, p. 283).

the strictly dogmatic Lacanian approach combined precisely with a not-post-Marxist approach is what is needed today (iek 1997, in Long and McGann, p. 133).

See, for example, iek 1989.

in this case, the constitution of the subject would escape the epistemic power of historical materialism (Monik 1993, p. 139).

Whenever this function may be, for the subject, embodied in some individual, whether or not an analyst, the transference is established (Lacan 1979, p.233).

Monik 1993, p. 141.

the fundamental, constitutive feature of the symbolic order (iek 2002a).

Monik 1993, p. 149.

Monik, 1993, p. 152.

Lacan 1979, p. 276.

Lacan 1979, p. 273.

This is one of the ways in which democracy identifies with the symptom (the constitutive antagonism of the social which is usually presented as a mere epiphenomenon) and traverses the fantasy of harmonious social order: by instituting lack at the place of the principle of societal organisation (Stavrakakis 1999, p. 136).

iek, 2002b, p. 275.

if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it! (iek, in Butler, Laclau and iek 2000, p. 326).

See Parker 2004.

The concept of extimacy exterior intimacy, intimate exteriority that Jacques-Alain Miller (1994) usefully elaborates from Lacans writing to explore the theft of enjoyment in racist fantasy, for example, is mined and put to work by iek (e.g., 1990).

See, for example, the assertion that we should interpret instead of attempting to change the world, the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things (iek, 2002b, p. 170).

This is the Lacanian act in which the abyss of absolute freedom, autonomy, and responsibility coincides with absolute necessity: I feel obliged to perform the act as an automaton, without reflection (I simply have to do it, it is not a matter of strategic deliberation) (iek 2002c, p. 69).

iek 2002b, p. 316.

See, for example, iek 1998.

Badiou is a relevant point of identification for iek to sharpen his own position here; Badiou, who does offer some new ways of thinking the relationship between ethics and community in relation to the Real, bases his work on what he accepts to be the historical defeat of Marxism, and his use of Lacan is as a philosophical resource for a new logic of political action, not as a way of connecting personal change with socialist revolution. See, for example, Badiou 1988; Hallward 2003.

Lacans Marxism never existed, in recognition of this intractable discord; Marxisms Lacan did exist as the jubilant but finally alienating misrecognition of a projected harmony (Valente 2003, p. 172).

Zaretsky 1976.

See, for example, Haraway 1991.

See, for example, Fenichel 1977.

See, for example, Reich 1972.

The parent of the same sex appears to the child at once as the agent of the sexual interdiction and as the example of its transgression (Lacan 1980, p. 191).

we must take issue with the philosophical premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis without denying the social fact of phallic privilege in language and representation (and hence the difficulty of affirming the feminine) (Segal 1999, p. 67).

There are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality have become properly fused; the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object (Freud 2001d, p. 185).

psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one (Mitchell, 1974, p. xv).

See, for example, Hochschild 1983.

Verhaeghe 1999.

Lacan 1998, p. 81.

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