Although Freud developed psychoanalysis as a clinical means of curing psychological pathologies, psychoanalysis after Lacan can be seen as another response to the discursive turn in both its clinical and socio-political forms. Following Saussure, for Lacan it was “the world of words that creates the world of things” (2006: 229) such that the subject did not use language but is rather constituted in language[1]. Lacanian theory thus suggests that the human subject is fundamentally alienated from within: language, the very stuff of our thoughts, feelings and (ego)identity comes from outside, from something Other that comes to invade, and define, our inner life (Fink, 1995: 7).

The seat of this inner life is the unconscious, which is both formed by language and structured like a language; it has a formal grammar which unfolds like a chain (Ibid.: 8). The unconscious then becomes, according to Lacan, “the discourse of the Other” (Lacan, 2006: 265), acting as the presence of the Other within the body. In this sense the human subject does not use language but is rather used by language through the unconscious discourse of the Other (Fink, 1995: 14). Moreover, the subject of language is alienated not only by the differential separation of the concept from the thing but also the material separation of the body from itself, otherwise known as symbolic castration. The human, unlike its fellow animals, cannot purely react upon instinct or enjoy its body. Instead, upon entry into the symbolic order, the subject loses access to total materiality. Thus, for Lacan in contrast to Marx, alienation is neither contingent nor political but, rather, an ahistorical condition of being.

Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore, offers an alternative interpretation of the discursive turn within which it is part. Through the restoration of the salience of materialism, many of difficulties I assigned to postmodernity in the previous chapter can be rethought. Against the differential contingency of the signifier, psychoanalysis emphasises the underlying fixity of being through a (partial) return to materiality of the body and the signifier.

Postmodernism has tended to reject essentialism, fixity, and emancipation as if they are all one mode of meta-narrative illusion. In some ways the postmodernists are correct – in the absence of any meta-narratives or essential foundations life is inherently fragmented and contingent. Where the post-modernists are misguided, however, is in dismissing the notion of a ‘human condition’ altogether, as if it implied a naturality that no longer applies after the turn to language. Rather, the ultimate lack of foundation that constitutes both the subject and the human community in language is the human condition: fragmentation at the hands of language which dominates meaning and human relations but is exceeded by a surplus materiality, both in terms of what Lacan calls jouissance, and the material necessity of reproducing the human animal.

The key error committed in much of the thought considered to be postmodern is that the consideration of the fragmentation which envelops language – the body, the subject (if the subject is given a presence) and human community – places the very existence of these objects in doubt. Conversely, Lacanian theory suggests that whilst language produces a fragmentation to social life from which there is no possibility of recovering, an excessive, materialist, remainder of existence persists. This materiality is not the determining stuff of historical materialism but, rather, a dialectical materialism evident only in the failure of language. Where Marx suggested a commonality to human existence based around the shared conditions of production, for Lacan intersubjectivity is based around the shared grip of language and its remainder, jouissance. If for postmodernists all that was solid had melted, Lacan suggested that the signifier does not melt social life into thin air but, rather, into a bodily substance called jouissance which ensures that politics is not just a matter of signification.

Here, the human condition is constituted by a complex dialectic between lack and excess: lack in the sense of the negativity at the heart of being caused by the subject’s essential separation from jouissance through the operation of the signifier, excess, because of the compensation the subject receives for this sacrifice, a surplus-jouissance located in the object cause of desire (objet a). Žižek, following Lacan and Freud before him, defines this movement between lack and excess as the death drive; being is never just being, such that; “Human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (Žižek, 2006d: 62).

As such, by conceiving of the problem of signification as one of symbolic castration – an issue as much of the body as the psyche – Lacanian theory has been able to restore structure, materialism, and fixity as key elements of theory once lost by Marxism to postmodernity and the discursive turn. In restoring these dimensions, Lacanian psychoanalysis – through Žižek in particular – has been able to rehabilitate Marxism as an explanatory device beyond any deterministic sense of history. What it has not been able to restore, however, is the emancipatory demand at the heart of the Marxist approach. In terms of the loss of this demand. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory – including its Freudian forbearer – can be considered perhaps more sceptical about the prospects of revolution and emancipation than postmodern thought. If postmodern ethics hold some optimism about human freedom – although dismissive of the universality required for widespread political change – psychoanalysis holds no hope; the death drive is not a concept for the sunshine theorists of the human mind.

For Lacanians, revolution entails rotation around a central point of impossibility rather than a reinvention of the wheel itself. As we shall see throughout the remainder of this thesis, this is not the last word on the role of psychoanalysis in politics. It does, however, suggest a vital question: If Lacanian theory is so deeply uneasy about the prospects of progressive politics, why should it be taken to offer any response to the material contradictions of the global economy? This question is complicated by the application of psychoanalysis to Marxist discourse. Communism, class struggle and the revolutionary subject appear quite divorced from desire, fantasy and the essential stability of the sinthome.

This disjuncture between the domains of impossibility and ‘positive politics’ is not easily bridged and produces analytic complications that reverberate throughout the remainder of this thesis. I shall argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis, as embodied by Žižek’s work, provides the most powerful strategic response to that disjuncture as it plays out in the context of problems around global sustainability. In order to come to this conclusion, one informed from a Marxist analysis of capitalism as much as the psychoanalytic clinic, we shall traverse questions of ethics, politics, economy, communism and utopia.

The focus of this particular chapter is twofold: primarily I detail the manner in which psychoanalysis has been a response to the discursive turn. Of particular interest is a consideration of the challenges this response presents for the practice of both Lacanian and Marxian politics. Furthermore, in this reflection I shall discuss the theoretical basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis that will determine much of the basis for future argumentation. As such, I shall consider the dialectical relationship between lack and surplus, embodied in Lacan’s notions of the Real and jouissance. Such a deliberation requires further development of desire, ideological fantasy, the symptom and subjectivity, along with the emblematic objet a[2].

In response we shall argue that the value of Lacanian psychoanalysis lies in its return to the materiality of discourse, which implies the existence of fixity to being, rather than the contingency which was the focus of postmodernity. Conversely, Žižek suggests that a re-reading of Marxism through Lacan results in a rejection of (the fantasy of) Marxian communism and the revolutionary subject. Thus, while Marxism and psychoanalysis make a powerful couplet, this fusion is particularly troubling for any sense of politics inspired by Marx. In considering the dilemmas inherited by Marxist politics after the discursive turn and symbolic castration, the chapters which follow focus on the political connotations of psychoanalysis, before returning to the economy and possible responses to its inherent contradictions.

Symbolic Castration, or, the Materiality of Language

Like postmodernity, Lacanian psychoanalysis responds to the dilemmas of the discursive turn, in particular the ontological side of the problematic of representation; that language has no outside from which to grasp itself. For the Lacanian subject, language as its own limit means that the subject has no access to the pure animal materiality of the body nor has any ability to access its situation outside of language. This is the crucial (materialist) paradox of humanity; to be human is to be cursed with both metaphysical concerns and moral anxiety, yet have no perch from which to consider these conceptual impositions. If all that is required is a sufficiently removed perch from which to objectivity view humanity – and the likes of Sachs may think they have found this perch (and called it economics[3]) – much of history entails a struggle to designate this privileged point of objectivity. This struggle, moreover, has mostly involved the battle to remove those who stand in its way.

The discursive turn produced a revolution in the search for a perch; the only possibility came within language itself through what modernity called reflexivity and postmodernity the last illusion (see Bauman, 1993). Late modernity came to suggest that the problem of objectivity lay within us not from some impossibly divorced vantage point. Psychoanalysis, however, was the bearer of bad news; language, as the discourse of the Other, not only alienates the subject from itself, creating a lack of being within the subjective realm but the objective sphere of the Other is lacking in itself.

For Lacan, lack was the precondition for any notion of the human condition; language fundamentally alienates the subject from the body. Moreover, Lack is not simply nothingness but has an ontological status beyond nothingness; it does not only imply negativity but also excessive attempts to compensate for this negativity. For Lacan, lack has the same status as an empty set – emptiness implying the possibility of fullness. Lack thus has the status of something missing, the necessarily awkwardly represented ‘presence of absence’.

Understanding Lacan’s conception of lack is made more difficult by the inadequate translation of the French signifier ‘Manqué’ as used by Lacan. Manqué is translated to lack in English because of the grammatical inadequacy of the English verb ‘to miss’ (Fink, 1995: 52). Missing, more than lacking, implies both the lack of something and attempts to regain what is lost. These attempts (the ‘missing’ of the object) characterises the operation of desire; a ‘lack of being’ which generates a ‘want to be’ (ibid.: 103). For Ernst Bloch (1986), this dialectic exchange between lack and longing is evidence of the utopian demand at the heart of being[4]. Lack, Bloch suggests, cannot be articulated other than by imagining its fulfilment. In psychoanalytic terms, lack is the performative presence of absence.

The dialectic of language – of symbolic castration and the presence of absence – is such that the human being operates as a being of desire rather than biological need. Symbolic castration – the birth of the subject through their entry into the symbolic order – creates a division in the body which allows for jouissance; the signifier is both the cause and the limit to jouissance (Levy-Stokes, 2001:101). According to US psychoanalytic theorist Adrian Johnston, Lacan’s re-reading of Freud switched the focus of castration from the anatomy to the symbolic whereby the drives are alienated by the mediating affect of language (2005: 323). Just as Freud had suggested that the citizen must sacrifice bodily instinct – the drives – to become part of civilisation, Lacan contended that the human condition is marked by the internal imposition of the alien demands of the symbolic order. Importantly, where Freud considered the repression of bodily expression to be caused by political civilisation, Lacan conceived symbolic castration as an ahistorical necessity which has led to the occurrence of politics.

Symbolic castration means that desire becomes a biological property of the human animal, not one the infant is born with but, rather, one which impinges on the subject on account of its forced entry into language. The human being, like any animal, is subject to a number of biological needs. Indeed, Eagleton (2003:4) quotes Nietzsche in this regard as stating that; “whenever anybody speaks crudely of a human being as a belly with two needs and a head with one, the lover of knowledge should listen carefully”.

Need, or perhaps instinct, does exist but it is killed and over-written by the signifier (Fink, 1995: 12). We could argue, as does Terry Eagleton (2003) that this re-writing, and all the structural inconsistencies that come with it, is the nature of the human animal. If so, the human condition is of a paradoxical nature: the individual body is born with biological needs that are dependent upon their expression, recognition, and structural support through an Other that does not exist, yet provokes a distance between the body and itself.

I willl now move to the two concepts that dominate Žižek’s (Lacanian) conception of (dialectical) materialism, the Real and jouissance, in order to explain this paradoxical nature and its relationship to symbolic castration and the turn to language. In the section which follows I shall turn to the former, seeking to understand the manner in which the Real conceives of structure, materiality and the essential fixity of discourse.

The Lack of the Real

The Real can be most broadly defined as both that which resists symbolisation and the very distorting effect which prevents access to that distortion, both the presence of lack and that which provokes attempts to fill that absence. The Real is one of three Lacanian registers – the other two being the symbolic and the imaginary – which make up the rings of the Borromean knot. Within Lacan’s lifetime, it was the other two registers which dominated psychoanalysis; the imaginary was informed by the ‘Mirror-stage’ of the early Lacan and the symbolic through Lacan’s focus on semiotics, the signifier and the unconscious. The Real only came to the fore in Lacan’s latter work, and has been increasingly prevalent in readings of Lacan inspired by Žižek, who focuses much more of Lacan’s later work[5].

The Real is, according to Eagleton (2009: 141) “an enigmatic concept, as well as … an analogous one, working at several different levels simultaneously”. It is because of this simultaneous operation – one more akin to music than science[6] – that the Real is such a difficult term to grasp[7]. Certainly the Real is not reality in itself, some pure unadulterated access to materiality or biology. Rather reality, along with materiality, is a response to the Real. The difficulty is that the opposite is also true; the Real is a response to materiality that is a part of ‘reality’. For this reason considering a definition is a delicate affair[8].

The Real does not persist in and of itself: the effect of the Real plays out within a variety of different discursive positions such that one can only speak of the Real in the singular in terms of an abstract form. In terms of its instantiation in language, we can only represent different modalities of the Real[9]. Therefore we can refer to the Real in terms of desire or drive, in the operation of fantasy and objet a or in the antagonistic points of exclusion which sustain a discourse. Indeed, as I shall discuss in Chapter Six, Žižek suggests that the operation of global capitalism can be considered a modality of the (symbolic) Real.

Žižek introduces this enlarged notion of the Real, involving a symbolic Real, in the foreword to the 2^nd edition of For they Know Not What They Do (2002a: xi-xii). This distinction came as a response to Žižek’s own criticism of his first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), against which he claims he endorsed a “quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan” and the Real. That is, Žižek argues that his reading of Lacan implicitly constructed the Real as a point of failure with the consequence that ethics involves the acceptance of failure and finitude. Instead, Žižek insists upon the Real as not only symbolic failure but as a positive point of excess. In order to do this, Žižek contends that the Lacanian triad of ‘Real-Imaginary-Symbolic’ is reproduced within itself. That is, we can have an imaginary form of the Real as well as a symbolic form of the imaginary.

In a similar vein to Žižek’s enlargement of the concept of the Real, Bruce Fink suggests the Real can be considered as two modalities, the Real ‘before the letter’ (R₁) and the Real that is ‘after the letter’ (R₂). R₁ is the signifier given to that beyond language, an illusionary time and space generated by signification itself such that R₁ appears to be without absence. It is only R₂ that cuts up R₁ through the generation of ‘reality’ in the symbolic order. These cuts occur because the symbolic realm cannot fully grasp what is beyond its limits, creating a gap between reality and the Real. In essence R₁ exists only as an absence but this absence is given a name and thus an existence; without the operation of naming in the symbolic, R₁ would only be felt as an absence (Fink, 1995: 24 -25). The Real before the letter is thus an original trauma, the fantasmatic point of symbolic castration that turns the pleasures of animal into the torturous being of man. It is a phenomenon best described by Eagleton (2009:143-144) when he states:

We can grasp this alien phenomenon only by constructing it backwards, so to speak, from its effects – from how it acts as a drag on our discourse, as astronomers can sometimes identify a celestial body only because of its warping effect on the space around it…. This void is the precondition for the order’s effective functioning but can never fully be represented there.

Conversely, because absence can only by felt through the failure of presence, the Real cannot simply be considered to be external to symbolisation either in the form of R₁ or R₂. The Real is not just what is excluded from the symbolic but, rather, has what Lacan termed an ‘extimate’ relationship with the symbolic order, being both within and outside the symbolic at the same time. Thus, although the Real resists symbolisation, it is not alien to the symbolic.

The gap between reality and the Real is strictly internal to reality – there is no reality without the Real. This is the case for R₁ because it establishes the very limits of symbolisation but also for R₂. R₂ operates as the factor that distorts symbolisation from within; it is the disavowed ‘X’ that warps symbolisation in a manner in which we cannot be aware at the time of ‘understanding’. Thus, the Real is not simply a time or space before/outside language (this would be R₁). It is also the cuts within the symbolic order – that which cannot be symbolised from within a certain ideological constellation. What may be Real to me may not be to you; what is unsymbolisable within one matrix is not within another. Debate over the possible absence of a transcendental God may be have a Real affect on a pious church-goer – such that they feel anxious and destabilised by even such a thought – yet be a mundane signification for an atheist. Moreover, the presentation of a signifier may give it a Real presence. Poverty statistics, as an illustration, have such a ubiquitous status that they are no longer disturbing to many but coming face-to-face with hunger and suffering much more so.

Through this understanding of the Real, we are now in the position to assert a Lacanian response to the deadlock between modernist essentialism and post-modern fragmentation. Lacanian psychoanalysis rejects the former because of the failure of language to fully grasp and positivise that which it represents prevents the construction of any such universal essentialist positions. Any such attempts can only exist by way of exclusion – a point we shall build upon in the following section. The rejection of all encompassing universality does not lead, however, to fragmentation and particularly characteristic of postmodernity. Rather, although the universal is impossible, it is also necessary.

Žižek asserts in this same manner that plurality – and he includes false essentialisms in this category – is always a response to some excluded Real element which is simultaneously both a hidden essence and surface appearance. Thus, rather than choosing between universality and particularity, Žižek contends that both are historical responses to the impossible Real. This does not mean the Real is ahistorical but, rather, always takes an historical form. For this reason, Žižek contends that psychoanalysis is able to subvert the contingency-structure dualism. In response to a question from Judith Butler (Butler, Laclau, & Žižek, 2000: 5) in regards to the apparent tension between the (false) transcendentalism of the Lacanian Real and the contingency of hegemonic identification, Žižek states; “The opposition between an ahistorical bar of the Real and thoroughly contingent historicity is therefore a false one: it is the very ‘ahistorical’ bar as the internal limit of the process of symbolisation that sustains the space of historicity” (Žižek, 2000b: 214, original emphasis).

In this sense psychoanalytic theory provides a distinctive step-change from both modernist and postmodernist ontologies. If modernism had spent much of its history trying to grasp, represent and tie down what Lacan called the Real, postmodernism had given up on the whole pursuit, preferring to drift in the semblances of appearances which are but a response to the persistence impossibility of the Real. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, rejects both these approaches in favour of what Stavrakakis calls an ‘encircling of the Real’ which entails the infinite process of considering the effect of absence upon presence and identifying the central cause that drives the production of structure (Stavrakakis, 1999: 130). We cannot, however, introduce a strict divide between cause and structure or causality – one cannot operate without the other. Moreover, as we noted earlier in this section, the Real exists in different modalities, from primordial trauma to the friction that exists between two contradictory discourses. This latter point has significant consequences for the practice of psychoanalytic politics and will thus be the focus of the next section.

The Real between Discourses

Discourse exists as chains of differentially connected signifiers such that the meaning of one is established by reference to another. These chains establish a logical connection in which signifiers form combinations which make sense only by reference to the remainder of the ideological chain. In this conception, the discursive system[10] exists as over-lapping chains that may or may not cross at certain points – points which Laclau labels ‘antagonisms’. In this sense the Real is still, as Lacan (2006: 388) stated, the “domain of whatever subsists outside symbolisation” yet parts of this domain can be symbolised in an alternative discourse and remain absent in another. This is not to suggest that discursive chains are always incommensurable but, rather, that terms cannot be simply transposed whilst maintaining the same meaning: certain chains of reasoning make sense only by reference to the exigencies of the signifying chain.

This circumstance occurs between Marxism and capitalist accounts of political economy. Marxism readily acknowledges that hunger and suffering are a necessary consequence of the interactions of the market. Such an acknowledgement would be a point of dislocation for capitalist political economy – it is a point that Sachs, for instance, struggles to account for – and is excluded from that discourse. Here we have a circumstance in which Marxist discourse can symbolise the operation of the Real within capitalism; a point which cannot be acknowledged within the latter[11]. Such an instance – as shall be the focus of Chapters Five and Six – allows for the effects of the Real to be mobilised in a political manner.

An example of this kind of parallel linguistic logic can be illustrated in the biological world. In January 2010, American Physicist Paul Davies argued that alien life may have co-existed since the beginning of what has become human life (Associated Press, 2010). Davies suggested that there was no necessary reason for all life on Earth to have evolved from a single origin. Instead, an ‘alien’ form of life could have developed concurrently but was unable to evolve past a certain point. Thus alien life might well exist, Davies argued, amongst currently unexplored forms of bacteria. In this case, multiple chains of life might be present on the planet, each with their own biological logic that prevents a connection between them. Moreover, each chain would have different logical impossibilities such that what is impossible within one form of life, say sexual reproduction, is part of the structure of another.

We must be careful here not to get caught up in the abstraction necessary to make this point. It is not as if discourses are self contained branches, never coming overlapping. The point, however, remains: language is not infinitely differential but, rather, is cohered into certain patterns through ideology – patterns which allow for some conceptual chains but not others. Thus, whilst the Real as R₁ is operational as the original trauma which produces discourse itself, within individual discourses unique patterns and impossibilities emerge which we have identified as a different modality of the Real – R₂[12]_. Indeed, Lacan suggests a similar logic in his concept of the four discourses – that of the hysteric, master, university and the analyst – each of which identifies a different logic of intersubjectivity.

Žižek suggests a comparable operation to the parallel universe approach to discourse analysis in his recent notion of the ‘parallax view’ – the apparent displacement of an object caused by a shift in the position of the observer. For Žižek, the philosophical twist is that;

The observed difference is not simply ‘subjective’, due to the fact that the same object which exists ‘out there’ is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently ‘mediated’, so that an epistemological shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself. (Žižek, 2006d: 17)

The parallax view then produces a ‘multiplicity of symbolic perspectives’ (ibid.: 18) around an ‘unfathomable X’ – a pure difference which is an object in and of itself. A parallax produces what Kant called a ‘transcendental illusion’; the illusion that there exists a point of mediation between two discourses. This mediatory point exists only as the presence of absence, the Real. Vitally, however, the Real becomes an object itself – the parallax Real. This modality of the Real is the gap which occurs in the parallax shift from one perspective to another. If we take the biblical-postmodern discussions on morality, the parallax Real is the incommensurable gap between the discourses – that barrier which prevents direct communication between them.

Again, the Real here is that point both to which access is not possible and the obstacle itself which prevents this access (ibid.: 26). Furthermore, Žižek goes on to state that the parallax Real brings with it a revision of the standard Lacanian notion of the Real as that which always returns to its place (Lacan, 2006: 17). Rather the parallax accounts for the multiple appearances of the Real itself – that the Real can be entirely different for neo-liberal and Marxist discourse, despite each responding to the same (Real) impossibility of class struggle.

The parallax Real is then itself a 2^nd order variation of the Real: it is not the trauma of symbolic castration but, rather, the impossibilities inherent in attempts to symbolise the absence born by castration. The R₂ is felt both through its absent presence – the primordial example being the Freudian slip whereby the limitations of a particular discursive structure are revealed only through the performative failure of that structure – as well as actually occurring elements of the Real that are incommensurable within an internal logic of a discourse, yet are able to be symbolised from another perspective. The key example of this process comes from the exceptional elements that each discursive perspective must exclude to establish itself as a set; every ideological formation has an exceptional blind-spot that simply cannot be included within the set if that set is to maintain its consistency. It is to these exceptions (and exclusions) that we now turn.

The Presence of the Real: On the Condition of Exceptionality

As I have noted, the Lacanian ontology suggests that the symbolic order is faced with dual pressures: a quest for the imaginary coherence of the body and the dislocatory effect of the Real. Language can never be objective – it can never be a closed system but, rather, requires the presence of other signifiers – but it is also always in the process of seeking objective closure, a process that Lacan associated with the body. The only way to achieve a fragile, ideological, objectivity this is by way of an exception to the discursive formation.

The notion of exception often causes confusion within psychoanalytic discourse. Much of this confusion comes from the conflation of different modes of exceptionality into one. This assumption stems from Lacan’s theory of sexuation; the manner in which men and women are structured differently in relation to castration and the lack of jouissance. Sexual differentiation has nothing to do with biological essence (Žižek, 1994a: 155) but is rather a structural position in regards to the cut of the signifier; it is entirely plausible to have subjects with female genitalia identifying with the masculine position[13]. From this distinction between the masculine and the feminine Lacan argued that “there is no sexual relationship”: this does not mean that sexual intercourse does not occur but, rather, there is no logical relationship between masculine and feminine positions. Not only do they represent different structural responses to castration but these responses themselves are not together compatible. As a consequence of the failure of the sexual relationship, Lacan identified sexual difference as the antagonism against which both sexuality and sociality is riven; sexual difference is the primary modality of the Real as all forms of discourse are a response to the wound of sexual difference.

Sexual difference can also be conceived of as a logical problem in relation to objectivity and exceptionality in language. The Other is lacking because it cannot complete itself – it cannot name itself within its own set. For there to be an inside there must be an exterior which designates the presence of the inside, otherwise what is internal ceases to be exclusive. By naming the inside that name then becomes part of the set and another exterior signifier is required to constitute the set. Thus, the complete Other, the complete set of signifiers cannot exist – there must be at least one exceptional signifier that names the set, thus exceeding the horizon of that set. Fink (1995: 29-30) here refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the paradox of the catalogues of all catalogues which do not include themselves as entries. If the catalogue does not include itself within the catalogue, then the list is incomplete – it has an exception, itself. If, however, the catalogue does include itself, then it should not be included within that category .

Such a paradox is the key to Lacan’s understanding of the masculine and feminine; from there to exist a masculine set (a set in which all are included), an exception to that set must exist in order to define the presence of a set. By contrast, the feminine set includes its own exception but loses the ability to define itself as a set and becomes an infinite series.

These positions are not just logical possibilities but, rather, responses to symbolic castration; they suggest both a different relation to the phallus[14] and to jouissance. The question of the exception in relation to sexuation comes by reference to the phallus. For Lacan, the masculine is altogether subject to symbolic castration and the phallus; man is subject to jouissance of the phallus, otherwise known as symbolic jouissance (I shall turn to the question of jouissance shortly). Man can only be wholly submitted to symbolic castration by the presence of an exception that is not submitted to these conditions. According to Lacan, that exception had the status of Freud’s primordial father in Totem and Taboo; the father that has not been subject to castration and was thus able to control and enjoy women fully (Freud, 1960).

Nonetheless, the naming of the set which must necessarily exceed the set is only one of the forms of exceptionality. The other is the universal exception, otherwise known as the excluded or the concrete universal. This form of exceptionality is the form predominately used by Žižek and is the key to his theory of universality, by which he uses Hegel to read Lacan. This conception of universality and the exception is vital to the remainder of the thesis, so we shall pause to consider it in detail.

Žižek, Hegel and Universality

In the Ticklish Subject (Žižek, 1999: 100-101) Žižek suggests – and rejects – three separate positions on universality. The first is the standard, neutral and positivised universal, indifferent to its particular content; that which is universal applies to all possible circumstances. This conception of universality relies upon a singular and essential foundation and has largely been the subject of critique from the discursive turn – the first question asked of this brand of universality is, from which perspective is this universal? – the very possibility of asking this question reveals the particularity of the universal. Nonetheless, it is the image of universality assumed by the likes of Sachs and those involved in the natural sciences (or economics).

This conception of universality has been partially negated by the second alternative: universality as an illusion generated by power relations. Here the universal is neither true nor neutral but, rather, a particular reflection of the existing hegemony. Typically, this version is marked by a Marxist conception of ideology, whereby the universal is a partiality, hiding the true, universal totality of social relations. Thus, this form of universality is not postmodern; theorists of a postmodern bent tend to assert that the only possible form of universality is an illusion. By contrast, this ‘Marxist’ form of universality introduces a split into universality, between an illusionary universal and a true underlying universal.

Finally, Žižek offers the universal as empty, as contingent yet always already hegemonised by particular content. This is the version proposed by Laclau. Laclau, in contrast to the previous two positions, acknowledges that the universal is impossible – language prevents a direct or neutral correlation between the universal and particular. Nonetheless, it is in this failure that universality exists. Here, universality occurs when a signifier is abstracted to the point where it represents nothing but itself: an empty signifier. The universal itself is empty but is always filled by particular elements in a battle of hegemony. These particular elements establish a ‘chain of equivalence’ which fills out the abstract universal horizon such that it coheres our understanding of shared social life. As an illustration, if we were to consider the concept of freedom, Laclau would argue that there is no essential, or universal, definition of freedom. Such a definition would enter into the first notion of universality, where there is one objective understanding of freedom. By contrast, as an example of the second option, Marx argued that ideology under the capitalist mode of production produced a conception of freedom – the freedom to sell one’s labour on the market – that masked its immanent contradiction;  that selling one’s labour on the market takes away one’s freedom. Nonetheless, Marx still maintained a universal concept of freedom in species being.

By contrast, Laclau comes to argue that there is no such thing as freedom in itself but, rather, freedom operates as an empty signifier such that any number of possibilities of freedom are possible, whether it is the freedom to vote, the freedom of an honourable death or Laclau’s freedom of dislocation in language. Thus freedom can become universal if it stands in for the empty place of universality. This universal, however universal in form (for Laclau, if not Žižek) can never be neutral in content – this being the major difference which separates Laclau’s conception from the Marxist notion of the universal as an illusion.

Thus, Laclau’s work on hegemony suggests that the universal occurs only through its abstraction from a chain of particular signifiers. This ‘abstract universal’ provides the hegemonic imaginary horizons – the signifiers and images the support any concept of shared social life – that people use to guides their actions, e.g. the concept of individual freedom or that of human rights. This universal imaginary stands in for the lack that constitutes the social domain. The abstract universal is normally based around an empty signifier, or an objet a, which in Lacanian terms provides a suture for that primal lack and, because of the sense of fullness that it gives, provides the subject with jouissance.

Returning to our example, liberal democratic discourses may be structured around the empty signifier ‘freedom’, which can be taken to mean any number of things. The content of these meanings is not important, unless you happen to be caught under its ideological grasp. In that case the freedom of avoiding the male gaze through a full body Burqa or being bombed into submission in the name of freedom may be of some consequence. In terms of our theoretical argumentation, however, what is important is the ideological form that allows ‘freedom’ to stand in for the presence of absence and structure the field of liberal democracy. In turn, the abstract universal extends this horizon as an ideological formation, taking on further signifiers in what Laclau terms the ‘logic of equivalence’. The condensation of particular elements around a central imaginary horizon through the logic of equivalence offers the prospect of a return to fullness and jouissance.

Such a process occurred during the 2008 US presidential elections. The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama attempted to mobilise support under the empty signifier ‘change’[15] e.g ‘Change we can believe in’, ‘Barack Obama is the leader who will bring the change our country needs’. The strength of this strategy was that change meant nothing in itself, save an opposition to the establishment Republican Party – it tapped into an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Moreover, it allowed for different political formations to identify with the signifier, whilst setting up a frontier against Republican candidate John McCain’s appeals to leadership and experience; ‘Country First’.

Žižek, however, rejects all three of these versions of universality. That said, although he holds that there is some value in Laclau’s work, particularly in the assertion that the universal is an impossible object. Despite this apparently radical conclusion, Žižek argues that Laclau is not radical enough – he leaves in place the exclusion which allows for universality in the first place. For Žižek, the question of universality is “not which particular content hegemonises the empty universal” but, rather, “which specific content has to be excluded so that the very empty form of universality emerges as the “battlefield” for hegemony?” (Žižek, 2000a: 110). As such, Žižek contends that rather than a split between the universal and the particular (causing the universal to be impossible) the universal itself is split between its empty abstraction and concrete remainder, otherwise known as the universal exception.

Žižek’s understanding of universality is exemplified in a defining chapter in his first major text, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 1989: 11-53). Here Žižek suggests that Marx ‘invented’ the Lacanian symptom by

detecting a certain fissure, an asymmetry, a certain ‘pathological’ imbalance which belies the universalism of the bourgeois ‘rights and duties’. This imbalance, far from announcing the ‘imperfect realisation’ of these universal principles – that is, an insufficiency to be abolished by further development – functions as their constitutive moment: the ‘symptom’ is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genius (ibid.: 20).

Here, Žižek is specifically referring to Marx’s understanding of freedom, an example I referred to earlier. If liberal capitalism is based around an empty signifier of freedom, which becomes universalised through an abstract hegemonic horizon, then this notion is subverted by the freedom to sell one’s labour on the market. Although this freedom is a vital element of liberal capitalism, the very act subverts that freedom – in selling one’s labour power, the worker loses their freedom (ibid.: 21). It is this freedom to sell labour power which is the universal exception to the abstract universality of bourgeois freedom.

Here then we have an abstract universal notion of freedom. It is one which is subverted by a concrete element that is simultaneously part of the set and beyond that set. It is this element that Žižek labels the concrete universal, or universal exception. The universal exception is thus the cut of the universal whereby one of these particulars does assert itself as universal by its very exclusion from the abstract universal. The universal thus encounters itself in the form of its opposite within itself. Universality proper thus becomes a struggle between the particular elements involved in a battle for hegemony and the singular element which belies this horizon (Žižek, 1991a: 33-36).

As such, Žižek states:

With regards to the opposition between abstract and concrete universality, this means that the only way towards a truly ‘concrete’ universality leads through the full assertion of abstract negativity by means of which the universal negates its own particular content: despite misleading appearances, it is the ‘mute universality’ of the particular content which is the predominant form of abstract universality. In other words, the only way for a universality to become concrete is to stop being a neutral-medium of its particular content, and to include itself among its particular subspecies. (Žižek, 1999: 92)

Further to this, the same symptomatic element exists in relation to the production of surplus value. Žižek argues that once labour becomes a commodity – that is, for sale on the market – ‘equivalent exchange becomes its own negation’ (1989:22). Although the worker is fully paid for their labour (according to the market), the very form of surplus-value is one of exploitation. The worker is exploited not because they are underpaid but because of the position in which the worker exists; having to sell their labour as a commodity.

The concrete universal is thus not only the exception to the false abstract universality but “persists in the very irreducible tension, non-coincidence, between these different levels” (Žižek, 2006d: 31) . One should not distinguish between the abstract and concrete universal but, rather, consider universality as the place of this split, not so much the exception itself but both the exception and the plurality of responses which occur in response to it – this is universality proper, universality as struggle (ibid.:34).

Thus, in Žižek’s reading of universality, difference does not occur between the neutral, mediating universal and its particular elements but, rather, between the universal and its own exception. This difference is experienced as an absence which in the analytic process is represented as the Real. It is by bringing this absence into the symbolic order, not in a manner in which it can be pacified by understanding but, rather, in direct contrast to the official horizon of understanding that a proper critique of universality can occur; by revealing the exceptions upon which the ‘false’ universality is founded (Žižek, 2000a: 102). Thus, the Hegelian triad of the universal, particular and singular (exception) is expanded in its Lacanian reading – a fourth element exists in the very gap between the universal and its particular, the Real (Žižek, 1991a: 43-48; 1999: 79).

Politically, the central value of this particular identification of the exception is that the concrete universal operates as a modality of the Real. If we consider the concrete universal to be the place of a constitutive exception – an element of the set which is excluded from that set – then we see that it takes a material form and yet does not have a presence within the abstract horizon: its intrusion produces a dislocation. Thus the Real can have an existence, or at least a non-existence in Lacanian parlance, outside of the discursive construction of a certain narrative; the concrete universal threatens the horizon from which it is excluded and also constitutes the point of the distortion which prevents its own appearance.

In terms of our previous example in which we identified the freedom to sell labour as the exceptional element of freedom, not only does this dislocating element exist in form – we can identify the formal structure of the wage-labour system to have an element incommensurable with its ideological narrative that cannot be acknowledged within this narrative – but the political operation of this structure produces actually existing exceptions which are excluded from an ideology. It is these points of exclusion which provide the strongest tension within ideology.

As such, if the effects of the Real are only felt as an absence then, alternatively, the Real can be an already symbolised or symbolisable element that is unable to be acknowledged within the dominant perspective. Moreover, that element can be signified within the discourse but attributed to a different cause or within a separate chain of equivalence.

In regards to the wage labour system, as we have already noted, in order for this system to operate a surplus of labour must be excluded from employment. This excluded surplus exists as an exception to the operation of capitalism and more pertinently the ideological narratives of freedom and justice around which capital functions. In this case surplus labour is not universal itself – the universalism of capital lies in the gap between its abstract and concrete instantiations – but reveals the concrete existence of a point that cannot be included, or properly acknowledged, within the abstracted horizon of understanding.

Nonetheless, we can see that surplus labour positioned as the concrete universal becomes a point of dislocation – the effect of the Real within an ideology. This effect is a bodily one which has not been accounted for thus far in this rather abstract description of Lacanian theory, based around lack, absence and exceptionality. This reading – with the exception of the previous expedition through universality – is not far divorced from Laclau’s Marxism and has given no hint as to the distinctive psychoanalytic reading of materialism discussed in the beginning of the chapter. For this reason, it is now time to turn to the other side of the dialectic of lack and excess that is at the basis of the Lacanian conception of the human condition – jouissance.

Jouissance

Jouissance is Žižek’s ultimate (Lacanian) answer to the question he poses in The Sublime Object of Ideology: “What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyond all possible variations of its positive content?” (1989:87). Žižek begins to answer this question by suggesting that Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy provides an answer to this question in the conception of the nodal point or empty signifier; that

the multitude of ‘floating signifiers’ proto-ideological elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning. (ibid; original emphasis)

As the discussion extends, however, it becomes clear that Žižek’s answer goes beyond discourse into the materiality which sustains the empty signifier. If Laclau’s schema works only at the ‘level of meaning’, than the full Lacanian analysis of ideology also requires the ‘level of enjoyment’ (ibid.: 121). Enjoyment dominates meaning and the symbolic field, bending discourse to its perverse will; the paradoxes of enjoyment are perhaps the most original, intriguing and powerful insight of the Lacanian response to the discursive turn. As such, the materiality of enjoyment also has profound consequences for the practice of Marxism. We shall soon turn to these consequences but let us first consider the level of enjoyment.

Jouissance, in all its paradoxical forms, is the central force of the human condition. It produces an excessive ‘enjoyment’ centred in the body and experienced via language, through a dialectic of excessive jouissance and the lack of the Real. Along with the anchoring effect of the exception, for Lacanian psychoanalysis jouissance is the ultimate reply to the contingency suggested by forms of postmodernity and post-structuralism. If Lacan’s analysis of the symbolic register has much in common with post-structuralism, such that Lacan has at times been mistakenly categorised in this group, then jouissance allows Lacan’s work to go beyond the confines of the symbolic order. This transgression has occurred because Lacan did not conceive of the cut of the signifier as a discursive act alone but, rather, one of symbolic castration; meaning is a bodily function. As such, Lacanian theory has little in common with the likes of Jacques Derrida; indeed the Lacan/Derrida schism is one of the most fundamental within continental philosophy.

Jouissance is a specifically Lacanian – as opposed to Freudian[16] – concept and one that carries all the inherent brilliance and difficulties that stem from Lacan’s work. Although sometimes translated into enjoyment, Jouissance is the paradoxical state of suffering/enjoyment that lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Evans, 1996: 92). Jouissance is not simply enjoyment or pleasure but, rather, it goes beyond this into a kind of troubling, excessive pleasure that includes elements of transgression and suffering; jouissance is excessive because it serves no purpose, relating more to the death drive than any sense of ‘biological instinct’, evolutionary or otherwise (Levy-Stokes, 2001b: 101). As such, jouissance, like the Real, exists both beyond language and as an intimate part of language.

As with the Real, Fink (1995:60) argues there are two orders of jouissance, before (J₁) and after the letter (J₂)[17]. J₁ is the pure unmitigated jouissance that is thought to be sacrificed with the castrating entry into language – it is the subject’s unmediated connection with their body. This original enjoyment is thought to be held by the Other, as if symbolic castration is a unique experience. It is for this reason, Žižek (1997: 64-65) suggests, that we become so resentful of the explicit enjoyment of our neighbour. As such, the ultimate narrative of ideological fantasy is that castration has not occurred; language produces the impossibility of moving outside of itself and allows for the illusion that this is possible, that we can return to a time before castration. This illusion is supported by attributing lack to an obstacle ‘out-there’ that is blocking the fullness of society. The immigrant often holds this position; their very presence is that antagonistic exception which prevents the full expression of nationality. These signifiers, such as ‘Wall Street’ or ‘Jew’ become signifiers of lack and the posited reason for the failure of J₁ jouissance and thus a source of jouissance in and of themselves; J₂ .

Signifiers of lack or antagonisms are just one element in the operation of J₂ ,which occurs when an object comes to substitute for the loss of J₁. The compensation which is thereby enacted occurs through fantasy in the staging of impossible acts to regain this original jouissance (J₁ being impossible because the subject cannot return to a time before language). Such a failure sustains an unconscious instinct for a time without a sense that there is something missing from being. As J₁ is a creation of language, Žižek contends that there is no jouissance for the subject before J₂, surplus-jouissance; if the surplus is removed from jouissance, it is jouissance itself which is lost (Žižek, 1989: 52). For this reason Lacan suggested that lack must always be accompanied by excess; the lack of jouissance creates an excessive response. Jouissance is not a primordial and absolute enjoyment of the body, broken by language, culture and civilisation before being bastardised into compensatory forms. Rather, jouissance occurs only because of the failure of our bodies to obtain this imagined utopia through our forced choice into language and the reign of the signifier: it is nothing but this failure, sustained by an unconscious fantasy of unmediated bodily enjoyment.

Paradoxically then, jouissance, according to US psychoanalyst, Adrian Johnston, is “enjoyable only insofar as it doesn’t get what it is ostensibly after” (2005: 239). The structure of language is such that jouissance (J₂) is only able to be enjoyed in its own failure, a failure which keeps alive the prospect of an enjoyment beyond that experienced through the structure of language; the only thing worse that the ce n’est pas ca of surplus jouissance is the prospect of meeting (surplus) jouissance in its bare naked form, and worst of all, knowing it. Such a horror turns the desire of ‘that’s not it’ into the melancholic horror of ‘that is all there is’. In this sense Oscar Wilde famous statement – there are two tragedies in life; not getting what you want and getting it – looks positively Lacanian.

Furthermore, Johnston (ibid.: 240-241) contends that the choice of jouissance mirrors the ‘Highway man’s choice’: your money or your life. Of course, this choice is no choice at all; choose ‘life’ and lose your money, choose ‘the money’ and (one can only assume!) lose your life and your money. For Johnston, the choice of the subject of language is ‘your jouissance or your life!’ If the subject choices life, which they must, then jouissance is lost; the subject is destined to spend their existence in the trauma of this loss[18]. The ‘crazy/impossible’ choice is jouissance, to go for full enjoyment, which is naturally impossible after the subject’s entry into language. Taken to the end, the subject can only lose their life in search of more extreme forms of jouissance. Perhaps more sedately, by choosing jouissance and refusing the limitations of human existence, one could suggest the subject loses their life by not experiencing the possibilities for enjoyment inherent in the human condition, the possibilities of surplus-jouissance.

Surplus-jouissance (J₂) should not be considered a secondary effect – all jouissance is secondary – but, rather, as the central focus of analysis. Nonetheless, neither should the fantasmatic form of jouissance be dismissed; the operation of jouissance can only be understood as a relationship between modalities; an excessive compensation for an original lack, one which is simultaneously an imaginary illusion and very Real. It is the task of fantasy to maintain the dialectic between the two modes of jouissance, constructing the ‘lure’ that the semblance of jouissance in the symbolic order may lead to something greater.

This analysis has thus far been limited to the masculine mode of enjoyment. As noted earlier in this chapter, Lacan’s theory of sexuation produced a incompatible couplet; the masculine and the feminine. The masculine structure was entirely submitted to symbolic castration, such that any enjoyment can only be a secondary, surplus-jouissance. The feminine, however, posits a different and somewhat mysterious alternative that has led some to suggest that in the feminine lies the prospect of a radical reshaping of the political.

If all of the masculine subject is submitted to castration – with an exception – then the feminine is not-all submitted to the effect of castration. The feminine subject is also castrated but some part escapes, allowing for the possibility of an ‘Other’ jouissance beyond the phallus (Levy-Stokes, 2001a: 48). Conversely, because there is no exception to the feminine in itself – the feminine is ‘not-all’ – Lacan argued that ‘Women does not exist’. By this he meant not that there is no such thing as woman but, rather, that women cannot be universalised. What Lacan claimed did not exist was the definite article that precedes women – in the original French it is not ‘Women’ that is under erasure but, rather, the feminine definite article ‘La’ (Kay, 2003: 82). There is no set of ‘Women’, rather the feminine is structured as an infinite series from which an element can be added or subtracted without affecting the structure of the set.

In regards to jouissance, the feminine is able to expand beyond the realm of the phallus, although it is still subject to castration and the phallus. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of the feminine. Feminine enjoyment is not an alternative structure, strictly divorced from the masculine – rather it occurs as an impossible supplement to the masculine beyond the boundaries of the signifier (Levy-Stokes, 2001b: 105). Feminine jouissance, according to Carmela Levy-Stokes (2001c: 175) “goes beyond that which can be signified”, and it is the texts of mysticism that best describes this jouissance. Renata Salecl (1997), for example, uses the myth of the Sirens to describe feminine Jouissance and in Seminar XX, in which Lacan thoroughly discusses feminine jouissance, he makes regular reference to the Lewis Carroll’s fable of logic of ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’.

Feminine enjoyment, however, remains more of a logical possibility than a symbolic reality. As Salecl (1997:27-28) contends, Lacan speaks to it mainly to emphasise the impossibility of its conception . Indeed, it is only because language contains terms such as ‘unnameable’ that we can speak of feminine jouissance at all (Levy-Stokes, 2001c: 179). According to Fink (1997:120), the Otherness of the feminine jouissance speaks suggests that “The Other is not just an outside relative to a particular, determinate inside; it is always and inescapably Other, ‘outside’ any and all systems”.

For Žižek, however, what is important is not the beyond that the feminine signifies but, rather, that “beyond it there is nothing” (1994a: 151, original emphasis). Žižek insists that this distinction is ontological, not epistemological: what we perceive as beyond is purely a fantasmatic projection of the possibility of an eternal jouissance beyond the signifier, or, as we shall see in regards to Stavrakakis’ notion of democratic enjoyment, a radical alternative to the masculine. Žižek emphasises, however, that the feminine offers not the prospect of a beyond but in a typical Hegelian twist, “there is nothing beyond … the feminine is the structure of the limit as such, a limit that preceds what may or may not lie its beyond”(Žižek, 2005: 71). i shall return to this conception in Chapter Five in which I consider Stavrakakis attempt to mobilise the feminine in support of his ‘democratic theory of enjoyment’. For now, I will move on with our understanding of masculine jouissance through the embodiment of surplus jouissance in objet a.

Objet a and the contingent essentialism of desire

Objet a is the ultimate Lacanian answer to the stability of meaning and ideological formations. Generally untranslated, objet a refers to the A that represents the Other in Lacan’s algebra. In The Parallax View (Žižek, 2006d: 19) , Žižek argues that objet a is; “The object of psychoanalysis… the core of the psychoanalytic experience”. Likewise, Richard Boothby (2001: 242) considers objet a to be perhaps Lacan’s greatest original contribution to psychoanalysis and certainly the most significant element of his work.

Objet a has a transitional status, split between the subject and the Other/Object. Moreover, it is both the object of desire and cause of desire. Moreover, objet a is integrated, yet not completely found, within each of the three Lacanian registers; although often considered primarily as an imaginary object because of the coherence sought by the subject through the object, objet a also exists in symbolisation (Boothby, 2001: 241-244). Recently, however and primarily through Žižek’s work, objet a has been considered to be most productively thought of as an element of the Real. Here objet a operates as the little remainder of the Real within the symbolic order, the unknowable ‘X’ that forever eludes the symbolic and produces a multitude of symbolic responses through which the subject seeks to give it form. As such, objet a can be considered to be the residue of symbolisation, the last remainder of unity produced with the breakdown of jouissance. In this sense it is the positive ‘waste’ of symbolisation (Zupančič, 2006b: 159).

Objet a thus takes the position of the missing element in being, the void at which the symbolic order remains perpetually riven. As such, via a fantasmatic relation, objet a connects the lack of the Real and the excess of jouissance by becoming both the object-cause – the gap that sets of the symbolic chain of being – and the logic of desire as objet a becomes embodied in specific objects which signal both the limit point of the symbolic order and the possibility of its suture. The paradoxical logic of objet a is such that whilst an object may appear to be the cause of desire, that object is actually a largely arbitrary – and certainly unconscious – embodiment of the hidden cause of desire (Kay, 2003: 166). Objet a becomes attached, embodied, in a particular signifier. It is this attachment which overwhelms the signifier with jouissance that makes language materialist. An object, say a commodity item like a pair of shoes, may appear to be the cause of desire; ‘I have to have those shoes, they are perfect for me because…’ The illusion, however, is that this object has taken the place of objet a which is causing the desire for the object. As such, desire has no object – only a cause, objet a (Fink, 1995: 90-91).

Objet a functions as both the object of desire and the object-cause because it is the remnant of the Real, of R₁. It is an element that remains in the subject after the subject enters the symbolic order while remaining an element of the Other, a lack that persists on account of the inability of language to connect with material reality[19]. The manner in which objet a functions is thus dependent upon the manner in which lack is constructed in fantasy. This fantasmatic construction creates the illusion of consistency in the subject. For this consistency to operate, some object must be postivised such that it can stand in for the inherent lack that would otherwise threaten consciousness (Žižek, 1997: 81).

There is, however, always a gap between the cause and object of desire, a gap which further prevents the satisfaction of desire; the object can be obtained but when it is it ceases to be the object of desire. Instead desire continues on its metonymical chain. This impossibility is the central element of the role of fantasy in desire; fantasy supports the subject’s desire, maintaining an appropriate distance from the object This object is then retroactively posited as the cause of desire. Thus we can consider objet a to be the embodiment of surplus-jouissance, the “coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus… the left over which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack” (Žižek, 1989: 53; 2001: 149). In this sense, as Fink suggests; “Desire is an end in itself: it seeks only more desire, not fixation on a specific object” (Fink, 1997:26). Such is the emptiness of desire that the subject does not really want to obtain the object of their desire, instead what is desired is desire itself, a distance which is maintained by the construction of fantasy (Fink, 1995: 90).

Desire and Ideological Fantasy

Objet a allows Lacan to understand why meaning is not entirely contingent, even if there is no transcendental ultimate referent. Jouissance adds a material weight to the signifier; meaning does not simply drift from signifier to signifier but, rather, gets fixated upon certain nodal points. These points anchor the field of meaning. This conclusion, however, is no different from the dry analysis of Laclau’s discourse theory. What lends power to Lacan’s analysis is the ability to understand why these points hold a hidden power that operates beyond linguistic structure – his answer was objet a. Through the logic of objet a certain signifiers-objects become embodied with the power of jouissance, a power which suggests the possibility of a traversal of symbolic castration and a return to the fullness of the body. This power allows certain signifiers to not only take a structural role in discourse but a determining function in the body. For this reason, radical change can only occur through a break with the ideological fantasy that structures political enjoyment. Thus, although Laclau’s approach to hegemony reveals the manner in which political struggles can occur within a pre-established horizon (although without taking into account the materiality of this battle), Žižek’s psychoanalytic reading suggests that because of the grip of jouissance and the stability provided by the exclusion of exceptional points, radical change can only occur by ‘traversing’ ideological fantasy. Although the politics of this break will be discussed in some detail in Chapter Seven, it is worth signalling here that the most effective strategy for achieving this radical change with capital come through the intrusion of the exceptional element into the (fantasmatic) discursive frame.

Fantasy helps the subject maintain a manageable distance from the cause of desire (objet a), supporting desire but not getting burnt by the empty horror revealed by the substituted object. This fantasmatic construction creates the illusion of consistency in the subject. For this consistency to operate, some object must be positivised such that it can stand in for the inherent lack that would otherwise threaten consciousness (Žižek, 1997: 81). This substitute can occur in either a positive or negative manner. In terms of the latter, there becomes a signifier of lack, one that either signifies the cause of this lack, the reason why negativity has entered the order. ‘Wall St’ has recently functioned as this signifier, although ‘Jew’ is the more powerful historical example (this exception is the masculine mode exception discussed earlier in this chapter).

On the other hand there exist positive ‘place-fillers’, or empty signifiers, which suggest the possibility of full enjoyment. Barack Obama functioned as this signifier in the 2008 US Presidential campaign, largely staying away from detailed policy issues, using signifiers like ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ which enabled a multitude of (often contradictory) signifiers to identify with his campaign. In this sense Obama became the signifier which suggested a fantasised return to the true (and great) fullness of America, a fullness and certainly greatness which is an historical fantasy[20]. It is interesting to note that in 2009, once it had become apparent that Obama’s Presidency was not going to restore America – at least in a fantasmatic sense – an equally passionate reaction was experienced on the opposite side of the political spectrum. During ‘town-hall’ debates over Health Care reform, protestors were seen – often yelling and crying hysterically – platitudes such as ‘This is not my America!’ Furthermore, impassioned attempts have been made to position Obama as an outside, both through the ‘birther’ movement (which argues, despite all evidence, that Obama was born in Kenya; these arguments often insinuate that he is also a Muslim) and by labelling Obama a socialist, communist or Nazi[21].

Desire is constituted in fantasy, which for Lacan acts as a defence against symbolic castration and the lack in the Other. Because there is no sexual relationship, no naturally occurring formation between the subject and jouissance, fantasy is unique to the subject, although it can take a myriad of forms, each producing a different relationship to castration and jouissance. In this sense fantasy offers the prospect of reuniting the subject with jouissance through the remainder of jouissance, objet a. The fantasmatic relationship mediates between objet a, the remainder of jouissance after the letter, and the idea of J₁, providing the subject with a (relatively) coherent sense of being through the possibility that these objects could fill the empty spaces in the symbolic order (Fink, 1995: 60; Žižek, 2006d: 40).

Fantasy is ultimately a narrative about the deadlock of symbolic castration. Fantasy responds to castration and antagonism, explaining the lack of jouissance, teaching the subject to desire through language. Because language is inherently intersubjective, so too is fantasy and desire. Fantasy is never singular but, rather, responds to the desires of others – the ultimate question of fantasy is Che Vuoi? , What does the Other want from me? (Žižek, 1989: 118). Indeed, the most powerful logic of fantasy is that the Other is responsible for my jouissance. That is, it is the Other who has stolen my jouissance ­– the jouissance owed to me exists in the Other (Žižek, 1997: 7-44). For this reason fantasy is also social – fantasy is always ideological fantasy – and politics itself is often a battle to defend fantasmatic enjoyment. Nonetheless, both terms remain important. Fantasy does not simply become ideology. Rather the implications of fantasy upon ideology has led Žižek to produce a theory of ideology which breaks strongly with the traditional Leftist-Marxist version.

Ideology, like history, is often stated to be on the wane. Nonetheless, if it appears that big power battles are over, Žižek’s notion of ideology suggests that this is the surest sign that we continue to live in an ideological world. Ideology, in this sense, comes from the illusion that there is no ideology; that society exists. British psychoanalytic theorist Jason Glynos (2001a: 196) distinguishes this ontological sense of ideology from the two approaches which dominate ideology today; Marxism and liberalism. Classical Marxism assumes that society exists; it has a positive essence which is distorted by the partial perspective of ideology. Ideology here is an illusion, dominated by power relations which Marx attributed to the essence of class relations.

The major difference between the Marxist and the Lacanian-Žižekian sense of ideology is that for Marx ideology consists of a partial representation (dominated by class-power interests) of a total reality. Alternatively, for Žižek (1989: 30-33) ideology entails a totalising attempt to represent partial social relations. As has been insisted throughout this chapter, society does not exist – it is punctuated by the Real – but the human process involves various attempts to compensate for this lack. In the social, as opposed to clinical domain, these attempts can be included under the umbrella concept of ideological fantasy. Ideology shapes cultural relationships to jouissance – as Daly states; “The central paradox of ideology is that it can only attempt closure through simultaneously producing the ‘threat’ to that closure” (1999: 220). In this sense we can link ideological fantasy to the abstract mode of universality identified earlier in the chapter.

Žižek’s distinction of the Lacanian reading of ideology from its Marxist equivalent signals the major Lacanian critique of Marxian politics: the impossibility of jouissance. In relation to our previous example of freedom and labour as the universal exception of capitalism, Žižek argues that Marx’s utopian illusion was that universality – full and equivalent exchange – could occur without a symptom (1989: 23). Žižek argues that Marx’s mistake was to “assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expansion of productivity) would remain even when it was deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus value)” (2000d: 21). For this reason, although psychoanalysis and Žižek in particular has restored both political economy and materialism to Marxism and radical Leftist politics, rehabilitating Marxist politics has proven a tougher task. To explore the difficulties posed by psychoanalysis, we shall turn to a homology to which both Lacan and Žižek draw our attention.

What can Surplus-jouissance teach us about Surplus- value?

Lacan identified a homologous logic between the logic of jouissance – that there is no jouissance without the obstacle that propels it – and the logic of surplus-value that was missed by Marx in his work on surplus-value and productivity. Marx believed that by removing the obstacle – the private appropriation of surplus-value – the productivity generated by surplus-value would remain and could be utilised for the good of all. Marx’s notion of communism relied upon the development of productivity and surplus so that the worker could be freed from the alienation of specialisation to pursue their own sense of species being. Today, it is only the wealthiest that are able to enjoy ethical benefits of Marxian communism.

Ultimately, for Marx, the production of surplus-value was the key to capitalist productivity and the expansion of capital through circulation that ‘realises’ surplus-value, turning it into profit: it is surplus-value, based upon the historical over-supply of workers, which is the goal (object) of capital. Essentially, although the worker is fully compensated from their labour-power, the nature of labour as a commodity is that its use value produces greater value than its own; a constitutive surplus which is appropriated by the owner of the means of production (Žižek, 2006d: 57) .

 Žižek takes the fundamental logic of surplus-value – an element of lack that generates more than itself – and extends it to the operation of capitalism as a totality. In this definition, capitalism is characterised by a dialectical circulation of lack and excess which corresponds to the relationship within the psyche of the Real and jouissance. Žižek’s (Marxist) point is that under capitalism there is a commodity that, through exchange, produces more than itself; the natural operation of labour is surplus. The appropriation of this surplus by the owner is expanded through the circulation of commodities which turn money into capital; capital is embedded with a quality which makes it capable of producing a surplus which we can now label profit.

Because surplus-value acts as the core driver of capitalism, Žižek contends that the production of surplus has the same structural role in capitalism as objet a has in the psyche. Indeed, surplus-value is the objet a of capitalism. However, by labelling surplus-value as objet a, Žižek suggests that there is more to surplus-value (profit) than a simple goal. Rather, profit embodies the logic of objet a, in that it simultaneously operates as the condition of possibility and impossibility of the logic of capital. Žižek signals this when he describes surplus-value as an inner contradiction within capitalism but one that operates as the condition of possibility of the system.

However, it is not only Marx who believed that capitalism needs to rid itself of these symptoms. The whole capitalist edifice is driven to avoid its own inner contradiction but in doing so only produces more. Capitalism cannot be stable; rather it has to operate in a state of constant revolution of its own conditions in order to function, generally either by producing new commodities or selling existing commodities in new markets (Jameson, 1996). Hence, the World Bank acknowledgement of the world’s poor as the ‘customers of the future’ (Moore, 2002). Capitalism is in essence a system in crisis but a constitutive crisis which produces the upwards spiral of productivity which is its basis (Žižek, 1989: 52).

Thus, capitalism, like the hysterical psyche of capitalist consumer subjectivity, is never at a state of rest, there is never just value or jouissance; capitalism is a system based on movement (circulation) and the production of excess that hides an ultimate lack. Capitalism’s inherent and disavowed strength is its ability to revolutionise its own conditions, which is to create markets out of its own failings. The threat of global warming and the capitalist response of sustainable development and the ‘Green Dollar’ is perhaps the strongest contemporary example of this logic. This has led to what Alenka Zupančič (2006b: 175) describes as a “paradoxical convergence of power and resistance” where threats to the system are now simply opportunities for profit. It does not take long for 21^st century marketers to commodify the latest counter-culture movement. Indeed, some would argue that the marketers are generating this culture.

Thus, the structural homology between surplus-value in capitalism and the surplus-jouissance of the psyche can tell us much about the operation of capitalism. In both, the surplus is not an excess which is tagged onto the normal state of affairs. Rather, this surplus is the normal state, the cause which drives the excessive balance of the system. Just as in the logic of objet a (the object of surplus-jouissance) in surplus-value there is produced what appears to be a waste, an unaccounted for surplus, in the normal operation of the system (Zupančič, 2006b: 162). For Zupančič, surplus-value comes about when this waste is valorised, accounted for, not as waste but as an integral part of the system; profit (ibid.: 170). Thus, in capitalist ideology, there is never surplus; all things are accounted for as profit is simply the appropriate return for the investment of capital. Capitalist surplus excess cannot be tamed, nor integrated into a new form, such as Marx’s communism. Instead, the question is, as Žižek suggests:

The theoretical task, with immense practical-political consequences, is here: how are we to think the surplus that pertains to human productivity ‘as such’ outside its appropriation/distortion by the capitalist logic of surplus value as the mobile of social reproduction? (Žižek, 2007a: 55)

This is a question, it seems, that Marxism is no longer equipped to handle. If Marxism has been unable to respond to the contingency of the discursive turn, it fares little better with the materialism of psychoanalysis – politically at least. What can be taken from the psychoanalytic response to the discursive turn is a deeper and more productive analysis of capitalism. If the deterministic essentialism of classical Marxism had proven unfeasible at best, the turn to language and culture removed any sense of structure, history and emancipatory drive that held Marxist discourse together. Lacanian psychoanalysis has not been able to restore the latter but through a reading of Marxism has been able revive the concepts of structure, of history and of a rehabilitated sense of determinism and causality. This rehabilitation of Marxism has allowed for a stronger critique of capitalism, in particular an exposure of its symptomatic structure, exceptionality and relations of enjoyment. It has not been able, however, to develop a form of politics that might match communism and the revolutionary subject. If the question is of our relation to surplus, then Marxism has no answer.

Psychoanalysis, however, is built on the question of the subject relation to surplus-jouissance. It is to this response that we shall now turn, considering the psychoanalytic conception of ethics as a response to jouissance both moving onto the question of politics. In doing so we shall begin to consider how the Lacanian response to surplus might inform a rehabilitation of Marxism and ultimately a response to capitalism.

[2] Whilst being aware of the difficulty in defining and utilising Lacanian concepts in a manner divorced from his own clinical concerns, this chapter does not specifically seek to discuss the historical and dialectical movements and controversies inherent in the Lacanian oeuvre. Lacan’s work is notoriously obscure, Lacan himself using various concepts inconsistently across the length and content of his work. The basis of this chapter (the dialectics of the human condition) could not only be the subject of a thesis but is a life’s work in itself. Whilst acknowledging the difficulties of using these concepts without fully exploring the possible depths of discussion, such are the inherent limitations of a thesis project that does not take these concepts as its specific focus. There is certainly value in this discussion, and one should be very careful – as I seek to be in this thesis – not to reify any notion. Conversely, in the context of this particular thesis and its ultimate subject (the crisis of global political economy) such discussion is not especially pertinent. Thus, whilst it is vital to further argumentation to divide Lacanian thought into several central concepts, the construction of these concepts must be read with the preceding proviso in mind.

[3] Indeed Sachs (2005a) has constructed what he calls ‘clinical economics’ which can be applied across a number of different contexts based upon a number of central ‘truths’ about the operation of markets. Whilst the standard Marxist approach is to reject this doxa offhand, as we shall expand on in detail in Chapter Six, these approaches do ‘work’. That is, the exigencies of the market do have a reproducible logic which allows the interpretation of a number of laws. The vital difference between this interpretation and that of neo-liberalism is that whilst the latter conceives these laws to be a reflection of natural human behaviour our reading is that they are a reflection of the non-arbitrary operation of capitalism.

Moreover, whilst this chapter will suggest a wholly different interpretation of the human condition from that inferred by neo-liberalism and the economic subject, this is not reflected in a corresponding theory of ideal economic behaviour. Nonetheless, in Chapter Six we will discuss Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselcuk’s attempts to transpose the Lacanian theory of feminine subjectivity onto an alternative reading of class structure in an attempt to suggest an alternative conception of economic subjectivity.

[4] Utopia, as shall be the focus of discussion in Chapter Eight, can be read in two different manners. The Utopian demand could refer to the ‘perfect society’, or in Laclau’s terms, that society exists. This form of utopia would certainly be rejected by Lacan as an ethical or political position, although he would suggest that this form of utopia could be translated in jouissance. It would, however, remain equally impossible. The sense in which Bloch is referring, however, is a demand for the very impossibility of utopia; utopia as the very form of the suggestion that another mode of being is possible.

[5] Indeed this chapter, orientated by Žižek’s work, begins with the Real in its examination of Lacan’s central concepts.

[6] I thank Wendy Bolitho for her insistence upon this point.

[7] Indeed, whether it is possible or desirable to represent the Real is a matter for discussion.

[8] Perhaps the best way to understand the Real is through the very failure to produce a definition. What these attempts do is encircle a certain impossibility, a point of failure in the discourse. It is this point that can be considered the Real; the Real can never be fully represented but can be felt as the failure to account for its presence. This is perhaps what the reader should seek to take out of this section.

[9] Indeed, this signals the operation of the Real – a singular impossibility which produces a plurality of responses

[10] The reference to discourse as a system is not a reversion to a form of structuralism but, rather, a recognition that a system is still established even at the moment of its failure.

[11] Žižek (2006d) acknowledges a similar point in relation to objet a: that what for one person may be an ordinary object can for another by the absolute object of desire

[12] Fink (1995:16-19), following a model given by Lacan, gives an excellent example of this logic in the coding of a coin-toss game.

[13] Although, as Sarah Kay (2003: 87) notes the link between biological sex and sexuation is a difficult issue in Žižek’s work. It is not immediately clear why biological men tend to be subjected to the masculine position.

[14] Lacan broke with Freud in identifying the phallus not with the penis but, rather, the signifier. Again, however, there is a major ambiguity in psychoanalysis around the link between the symbolic phallus and the biological penis, the pertinent question being why the biological penis comes to represent the symbolic phallus – the link appears more than ‘radically contingent’

[15] Early in his campaign, Obama utilising ‘Hope’ as this empty universal signifier. Although Hope remained prominent throughout the campaign, it largely gave way to ‘Change’. This move was most likely inacted inorder to avoid splitting the energy of the campaign. Conversely, this example shows that such signifiers are not strictly empty but, rather, carry with them a long history of associations – what Laclau calls a chain of equivalence. The switch from the aspirations of hope to the more mainstream change is not simply a contingent move between equal signifies but signaled a change in political strategy. Nonetheless, this does not change the fact that – once in place – each ‘empty’ signifier can be articulated by any number of discourses.

[16] Nonetheless, although Freud did not use this term, the beginnings of its Lacanian composition can be noted in Freud’s work on the death drive and the dialectical relation between Eros and Thanatos.

[17] Adrian Johnston makes a similar distinction between jouissance expected and jouissance obtained (2005: 297).

[18] As we shall examine in more detail in regards to ethics in the following chapter, much of the clinical process involves coming to terms with this choice and learning to enjoy the possibilities for enjoyment which remain. The vital switch is between the subject as the tragic victim of language and the comedy of actively accepting that over which we had no control; the entry into language

[19] Although, as Žižek notes, to define objet a as the which emerges at the point of loss is to stay within the realm of desire, as opposed to drive, which we shall expand upon latter (2006c).

[20] The greatness of America being a fantasy no matter our political position. Even if a nation was once somehow empirically the ‘Greatest’ and had now fallen from grace, any attempt to return to that position remains a fantasy.

[21] On a side note to our ‘American’ theme, globally the most powerful signifier of lack for those outside of the global hegemony of the West is ‘America’, often preceded by ‘death to’.