When surplus enjoyment meets surplus value Zupancic

Lacan's theory of discourses (or social bonds) is among other things a

monumental and in many respects a groundbreaking answer to the question of
the relationship between signifier and enjoyment.
The theory of discourses is something else: it articulates the enjoyment
together with the signifier and posits it as an essential element of every
discursivity. Moreover, this recognition of the discursive dimension of
enjoyment brings forward the political dimension of psychoanalysis: "These
reminders are absolutely essential to make at a time when, in talking of the
other side of psychoanalysis, the question arises of the place of psychoanalysis
in politics. The intrusion into politics can only be made by recognising that the
only discourse there is, and not just analytic discourse, is the discourse of joui$
$ance> at least when one is hoping for the work of truth from it."2
The question of how enjoyment articulates with the signifier, and the fact that
it does so, is thus the very point where psychoanalysis intervenes in, "intrudes"
into, the political. Lacan makes a point of the fact that enjoyment is (or has
become) a political factor, be it in the form of promise ("make another effort,
work a little harder, show a little more patience, and you will finally get it!"), or
in the form of the imperative "Enjoy!" which often weighs down our
contemporary existence in a rather suffocating manner.
But firsthow does Lacan, in Seminar XVII, succeed in conceptually linking
enjoyment with the signifier? Via the following suggestion which he repeats, in
different forms, all through the seminar: the loss of the object, the loss of
satisfaction, and the emergence of a surplus satisfaction or surplus enjoyment
are situated, topologically speaking, in one and the same point: in the
intervention of the signifier
Lacan transposes this into his conceptual framework by interpreting the unary
trait as "the simplest form of mark, which properly speaking is the origin of the
signifier" (52). He links the Freudian unary trait to what he writes as Si.
Furthermore, he delinearizes and condenses the moments of loss and
supplementary satisfaction or enjoyment into one single moment, moving away
from the notion of an original loss (of an object), to a notion of loss which is
closer to the notion of waste, of a useless surplus or remainder, which is
inherent in and essential to jouis-sance as such. This thinking of loss in terms of
"waste" is also what leads him to introduce the reference to the
thermodynamic concept of entropy, to which we return below. So, jouissance is
waste (or loss); it incarnates the very entropy produced by the working of the
apparatus of the signifiers. However, precisely as waste, this loss is not simply
a lack, an absence, something missing. It is very much there (as waste always
is), something to be added to the signifying operations and equations, and to
be reckoned with as such.
One could say that for the Lacan of Seminar XVII jouissance is nothing but the
inadequacy of the signifier to itself, that is to say, its inability to function
"purely," without producing a useless surplus. More precisely, this inadequacy
of the signifier to itself has two names, appears in two different entities, so to
speak, which are precisely the two nonsigni-fying elements in Lacan's schemas
of the discourses: the subject and the objet a. To put it simply: the subject is
the gap as negative magnitude or negative number, in the precise sense in
which the Lacanian definition of the signifier puts it. Instead of being something
that represents an object for the subject, a signifier is what represents the
subject for another signifier. That is to say that subject is the inner gap of the
signifier, that which sustains its referential movement. The objet a, on the other
hand, is a positive waste that gets produced in this movement and that Lacan
calls the surplus enjoyment, making it clear that there is no other enjoyment
but surplus enjoyment, that is to say that enjoyment as such essentially
appears as entropy.
Si - S2 $
This part of the schema is thus the very formula of a "signifier represents the
subject for another signifier." In sociopolitical terms it could be also read as: it
is impossible to establish any sufficient reason for a master to be the master.
There is always a gap or a leap involved here (which is precisely where the
hysteric attacks the master), an arbitrariness on account of which a concrete
subject-master is instituted by the signifier, and draws its power not from any
of his or her inner abilities, but solely from this signifier itself. We know that in
the context of new (democratic) masters, it is precisely this leap that is under
the imperative of disintegrating into something linear and, above all,
accountable (counting the votes, knowledge, skill, wealth), as well as being
filled in with the question of merit, substituted for the chain of reasons
In other words, what we have is savoir faire, know-how, or, more precisely,
knowing-how-to-do, knowledge at work, (signifying) knowledge and work as
originally bound together (S2). We could also formulate this Lacanian claim by
saying that work is originally structured as a signifying network.
In the master's discourse, the master signifier induces something similar to the
process of the distillation of knowledge (as savoir faire): knowledge becomes
detached from the work with which it is bound up upon entering this discourse
and is attached instead to the master signifier.
Lacan lays great emphasis on this point: a knowledge that "does not know
itself" and that works passes into articulated knowledge that can be written
down and thought independently of the work which it is bound up with at the
outset. This is why Lacan can go on to make the rather surprising claim that
what is thus being stolen from the slave (and appropriated by the master) is
not the slave's work, but his knowledge.
The lower level of the master's discourse displays precisely this: there is a
(non)relationship between the negative magnitude brought about by the
intervention of the signifier ($), and that other negativity that this system
produces as a waste or surplus (#), on account of which the whole of the
system never exactly equals the sum of its parts. The a, the surplus enjoyment,
can thus also be read as work that seems to go to waste and that nobody
knows what to do withexcept for trying to regulate it through the science of
ethics.4
The pure work is the entropy of this system (of the master's discourse), its
point of loss, something that wouldn't be there were the result equal to the
sum of its elements, something that wouldn't be there if the self-referential
work of the signifiers were to function perfectly, without that negative
magnitude ($) on account of which the apparatus of signifiers is also the
apparatus of enjoyment.
We have, as product of this discourse, a pure surplus work or surplus
enjoyment, a positive waste, which is not exactly the unaccounted-for work,
but rather the result of the knowledge-at-work being accounted for and
articulated. This is the point of the coincidence of loss and surplus, a
coincidence that is essential to the Lacanian notion of the objet a.
In Seminar XVII, Lacan formulates this notorious and persistent theme of his
teaching: "The only way in which to evoke the truth is by indicating that it is
only accessible through a half-saying [mi-dire], that it cannot be said
completely, for the reason that beyond this half there
is nothing to say. That is all that can be said One is not speaking of
the unsayable, whatever the pleasure this seems to give certain people" (57-
58). The way Lacan conceptualizes this claim in Seminar XVII could perhaps be
most simply summed up as follows. If truth is accessible only through a half-
saying, this is because of its specific topology, because truth is essentially a
place: the place, to be precise, where the signifier touches, or holds on to,
castration (and vice versa), the place of their constitutive conjunction, the lack
(or the negative magnitude) being the very pillar of the signifier. In other
words, the whole truth would be the signifier + castration/lack. Yet, since the
latter is constitutive of and inherent to the signifier, and not something existing
beside it, the truth is never "whole."
Let us now move on to the university discourse, which could be understood as
the predominant social bond that we live in today, following some of Lacan's
own indications that point, among other things, to a fundamental affinity
between the university discourse and the capitalist economy. I will thus
proceed by comparing what Lacan refers to as the discourses of "the old and
the new masters."
What Lacan recognizes in the university discourse is a new and reformed
discourse of the master. In its elementary form, it is a discourse that is
pronounced from the place of supposedly neutral knowledge, the truth of which
(hidden below the bar) is Power, that is, the master signifies The constitutive lie
of this discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension: it always
presents, for example, that which leads to a political decision, founded on
power, as a simple insight into the factual state of things (or public polls,
objective reports, and so on).
In discussing the master's discourse, we've seen that a distillation of
knowledge (as know-how) is central to it: knowledge becomes a pure signifying
knowledge, while pure work is produced by this discourse as its "indivisible
remainder"as waste or loss, something that is not covered by the signifier,
something that does not count (but can, precisely because of this, appear as
pure sign of the prestige of the masterprestige in the sense that it is
prestigious to take on something that serves no purpose and is not
immediately involved in the economy of exchange).
A very significant implication of this shift is that, in order for capitalist
exploitation to function, the entropy or loss, the amount of work not accounted
for, or simply not counted, has, precisely, to start to be counted (and "valued").
This is the whole point of the surplus value that Marx conceives as the core and
driving force of capitalism. The fact that labor-power appears as commodity or
object is what makes this possible. The revolution related to capitalism is none
other than this: it founds the means of making the waste count. Surplus value
is nothing else but the waste or loss that counts, and the value of which is
constantly being added to or included in the mass of capital.