SUBJEKTILE

Edited by
Marcus Coelen and Felix Ensslin
Howard Rouse/Sonia Arribas

Egocracy

Marx, Freud and Lacan

diaphanes
Printed with kind support of
Comena Aid, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

1. Auflage / First edition

ISBN 978-3-03734-068-4

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 Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction 11

I. Marxs Trajectory; or, Three Ways of Splitting the Subject 17

1. The Imaginary and the Real (Part One): the Early Writings 33
2. The Imaginary and the Real (Part Two): from the Theses on
Feuerbach to the 1859 Preface 51
3. The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real: Das Kapital 83

II. From Freud to Lacan and Back to Marx; or,

How Psychoanalysis Slowly Discovers the Social 121
1. The Nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious: the Trauma of
the Social in Freuds Two Topographies 123
2. From the Transcendental Symbolic to the Historicity of
Discourse: Lacans Return to Marx 161
2.1 Two Contradictory Trends in the Early Lacan 163
2.2 Egocracy and the Discourse of Capitalism; or,
Rethinking the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real
in Seminar XVII 210

Abbreviations 273
Bibliography 275
 Acknowledgments

Howard Rouse and Sonia Arribas would like to thank Marcus Coelen
and Felix Ensslin for understanding that, if there certainly is a
moment to conclude, it is not always so easy to come by; Michael
Heitz and Sabine Schulz for allowing this project to finally come to
fruition; and Ellen Blumenstein, Germn Cano, Irene Domnguez,
Jos Enrique Ema, Felix Ensslin, Mario Espinoza, Florencia Fassi,
Erick Gonzlez-Guzmn, Neil Greenwood, Matthew Kenny, Mari-
bel Lpez, Kathrin Meyer, Jlia Morell, Jordi Mir, Alex Needham,
Andrew Poyner, Daria Saccone, Alejandro Velzquez and last but
not least Sascha Wolters for keeping on a tight track the train of
the everyday.
Sonia Arribas would like to thank her colleagues from the CSIC
and UPF seminars Mnima Poltica and Movimientos Sociales,
especially Paco Fernndez Buey, Antonio Gimeno and Jos Antonio
Zamora; and also, for the invaluable support that they have provided
at the CSIC, Jos Mara Gonzlez, Reyes Mate and Concha Roldn.
The book is dedicated to Rosa Mara Calvet and Carmen Cuat,
both of whom are supposed to know why.

7
The character of the bourgeois, like that of every decadent
class, is individualistic, egoistic; once it has attained its aims,
the bourgeoisie can understand only one thing: enjoyment!
[] The workers nature, on the contrary, inclines him to
group, to the Association.
Karl Marx, Paris Section of Workers Rights to the members
of the Hague Congress

The desire for a powerful, uninhibited ego may seem to us

intelligible; but, as we are taught by the times we live in, it is
in the profoundest sense hostile to civilization.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis

And they succeed. They make good employees. Thats what

the strong ego is. You obviously have to have a resistant ego
to be a good employee [] Even so, you have to ask your-
self if the ideal end of the psychoanalytic cure really is to get
some gentleman to earn a bit more money than before and,
when it comes to his sex life, to supplement the moderate
help he gets from his conjugal partner with the help he gets
from his secretary.
Jacques Lacan, The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching
 Introduction

This book, as its title makes clear, tries to bring together the work of
Marx, Freud and Lacan. It does this not by enumerating what might
stereotypically be considered to be the central theses of these authors
and then proceeding to combine them a method that is inevitably
doomed to failure but instead by confronting each one of their
uvres with what might best be described, as long as the arguments
that we make here are accepted, as its extimate1 core. (This confron-
tation not only allows us to avoid an enumeration of these stereotypi-
cal theses, but also, in a number of cases at least, effectively compels
us to engage in their thoroughgoing rethinking or rejection.)
In chapter 1, the whole development of Marxs thought is recon-
structed from the perspective of the problematic of the splitting, divid-
ing or doubling of the subject or, more precisely, from the perspective
of the problematic of the splitting, dividing or doubling of the subject
between and across the two opposing registers of the imaginary and
the real.2 (This problematic is certainly, as will later become clear,
immanent to Marxs thought. At the same time, however, it never
receives there an explicit formulation, perhaps because this formula-
tion can only be achieved when Marx is read through the lenses of
that inherent fracturing of the subject that Freudian and even more
so Lacanian psychoanalysis has so consistently brought to light.)

1 It was Lacan himself, of course as we will later see who first invented
this neologistic concept.
2 The reader will no doubt notice that, as the argument of this book pro-
gresses, this splitting, dividing or doubling of the subject increasingly comes
to be comprehended in the terms of a folding or knotting. As these two sets of
terms are by no means directly equivalent, it is perhaps worth emphasizing the
precise nature of our argument from the very beginning. The splitting, dividing
or doubling of the subject can only be coherently conceived, we want to claim,
as a folding or knotting. For it is precisely when Marx, Freud and Lacan
at least at certain points of their development erect a separation between
two terms (the imaginary and the real, for instance (Marx and Freud), or the
imaginary and the symbolic (Lacan)), without relating them to a fundamental
third (in accordance with the previous examples, the symbolic or the real), that
they run into a whole series of insurmountable obstacles. The book essentially
unfolds, then, as a fleshing out of the bare bones of this basic conceptual argu-
ment.

11
Marx first encounters this problematic in his early writings; but he
unconvincingly attempts to articulate it there in terms of a logic of
alienation. Either the (imaginary) political state, and the subject that
it produces, is seen to alienate the (real) economic fundament of civil
society even if modern civil society is itself contradictorily viewed
as the cause of this alienation or, in a later and gradually effected
displacement, (imaginary) civil society, and the subject that it pro-
duces, is seen to alienate the (real of the) human essence (famously
identified, of course, with the coming into being of the proletariat). In
Marxs middle period these terms receive another rather inadequate
inflection. The subject is either split, doubled or divided between
its (imaginary) ideological consciousness and its (real) social and
economic conditions of existence or, in a probable attempt to escape
from the inexorability of this rupture (in the case of the proletarian, at
least), it is split, doubled or divided between the (imaginary) social
relations of production and the (real) ever-expanding forces of pro-
duction that revolutionarily underlie them. It is only the late Marx,
then or, more specifically, the Marx of Das Kapital who can suc-
ceed in compellingly elucidating the division of the subject between
the two registers of the imaginary and the real. And he can only do
this by effectively introducing a third register, one that once it has
been conceived in accordance with the historical particularity that is
appropriate to it serves to combine the other two. For the mature
Marx, capitalism or the capitalist mode of production is nothing
more than a social or symbolic order that constitutes, and contin-
ues to reconstitute itself by effecting a separation, within the subject
(the proletarian subject!), between the (tendentially imaginary) com-
modity of its labor-power and its (real) labor proper. Capitalism is
nothing more, in its essence, than a particular subjective combina-
tion, a particular subjective imbrication, of the three registers of the
symbolic, the imaginary and the real. (The stereotypical theses that
our reading of Marx enables us to do away with, then, are far from
being inconsiderable. For what disappears from Marxs work when
one judges it according to its ability to coherently come to terms
with the problematic of the divided subject is nothing less than the
whole theory of alienation, the whole theory of ideology along
with that whole metaphoric of base and superstructure upon which it
relies and the whole theory of an inescapably revolutionary conflict
between relations of production and forces of production. It is only

12
the purging of these theories that allows us to properly conceptualize
the nature of proletarian subjectivity; and to overcome in this way
what is perhaps, despite the numerous pointers that he gives in this
direction, the fundamental blind spot of Marxs theoretical produc-
tion. Finally, the conception of this subjectivity as divided between
its labor and its labor-power also allows us to correct an idea that is
nowhere to be found in Marx, but that is endlessly repeated when
reference to his work is made (even by supposed Marxists them-
selves): the idea that commodities are only and exclusively objects.
For the late Marx, as we will see at least when he is talking specifi-
cally about capitalism the commodity is first and foremost a sub-
ject, even if this definition, in accordance with that logic of splitting,
doubling or dividing that we are here seeking to delineate, does noth-
ing to exhaust the very term that it describes.)
In chapter 2 (part 1), the development of Freuds thinking or, more
precisely speaking, of his metapsychology, is deconstructed from within
on the basis of his own absolutely revolutionary recognition of the fact
that the nucleus of the ego is unconscious (and from without on the
basis of what we have already said about Marx in chapter 1, which
itself anticipates what we will say about Lacan in chapter 2 (part 2)).
Freud attempts to present his metapsychology as developing accord-
ing to a simple narrative of progression. We advance, he tells us,
from a first, essentially inadequate and dualistic topography (which
opposes the conscious and the unconscious) to a second, much more
adequate and essentially ternary topography (which opposes the
coherent ego and the unconscious repressed and then, on the basis of
this, the ego, the super-ego and the id), precisely by passing through
the registration of the egos undeniable unconsciousness. This latter
registration, however, is much more radical than it seems to be. For,
in addition to undermining Freuds first topography, as he himself
is willing to admit, it also undermines his second which would
certainly come as much more of a surprise to him. And, in addition
to undermining Freuds second topography, it also undermines that
whole attempt to think the social or, more exactly, the impossible
transition from the pre-social to the social, that is so problematically
grounded upon it (and upon the equally problematic and cotermi-
nous idea of an absolutely transcendent beyond of the pleasure
principle). The only way to rescue Freuds metapsychology, and the
ternary opposition between the ego, the super-ego and the id that

13
it ultimately wants to introduce, is by directly socializing its funda-
mental insight into the egos essential unconsciousness. It is here
that the work of Marx and Lacan can be of indispensable assistance.
(The stereotypical theses that our reading of Freud does away with
hardly need to be, then, explicitly spelt out. For what disappears
from Freuds work when one judges it according to its own most
radical standards is nothing less than its first topography, its second
topography and that entire inadequate conception of the social that
seeks to erect itself upon this latter support.)
Finally, in chapter 2 (part 2), the development of Lacans thought is
internally interrogated according to its own adumbration of an essen-
tial interweaving, interlocking and imbrication of the three registers
of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real (and is externally brought
into line with what we have already seen Marx to reveal about the
coexistence of these three registers in the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, and with what we have already seen Freud to reveal, con-
sistently with this coexistence, about the nucleus of the ego being
unconscious). Lacans early work by which we mean here all
of that work that precedes the for us absolutely seminal Seminar
XVII can be seen to divide itself into two very different, conflicting
and contradictory, strands. According to the classical strand, the
(imaginary) ego is constituted in the mirror stage, and the (sym-
bolic) subject is constituted by its integration into a fundamentally
structuralist and transcendental symbolic order of language. The
problem with this conception and with all of the apparently more
subtle distinctions that effectively derive from it, especially, as we
will see, Lacans differentiation between the (imaginary) ideal-ego
and the (symbolic) ego-ideal is that it allows for no real interplay
between its two terms. For either, in a radically implausible man-
ner, the mirror stage is seen to entirely predate the later setting in
place of the symbolic order or, this time much more plausibly, it is
seen to be essentially defined and determined by this order itself;
the difficulty still being, of course, that there is nothing inherent in
a structuralist and transcendental symbolic order of language that
can itself serve to explain the irreducible specificity of the emergence
of the imaginary ego. This emergence can only be explained when
the symbolic order which now has to be seen to dissolve into
a number of symbolic orders is thoroughly destructuralized and
detranscendentalized, that is, in positive terms, when it is thoroughly

14
socialized and historicized. And the symbolic order can only be
socialized and historicized when it is itself brought into relation with
the third register of the real; a real that is no longer conceived, as in
the classically early Lacan, as the mere external and transcendent
limit of the symbolic, but instead as that which ineradicably informs
and deforms it from within. This is precisely the path that is opened
up, then, by the second and certainly less well-known strand of
Lacans early work. For what happens in this strand is that moder-
nity despite the persistent vagueness of this concept, and despite a
few false moves along the way comes to be comprehended in terms
of a socially and historically specific rupturing and co-implication,
within the very heart of the subject, of the three opposing registers
of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. This understanding of
modernity reaches its final consummation in Seminar XVII: The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis. For what Lacan sees here, even if only implic-
itly and in accordance with what Marx has said before him, and
with the implications of Freuds most fundamental insight is that
the source of this rupturing and co-implication is none other than
the capitalist mode of production itself; or what he at times calls, not
without entering into a whole series of ambiguities, the discourse
of capitalism. Capitalism is a social or symbolic order that produces
the imaginary ego hence the title of this book by continually
combining and recombining it with its own inherent excess, the real
of its labor or work (this is the real social and historical significance,
then, of Lacans third, and undoubtedly most important, theoreti-
cal register). And the strength of Lacans uvre as a whole, to put
it mildly, is that it shows this combination not to be without certain
extremely serious consequences. (The stereotypical theses that our
reading of Lacan allows us to do away with are once again, then, of
some moment. For what disappears from Lacans work when one
judges it according to its own immanent criterion of the thoroughgo-
ing intermixing of the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic
and the real, is nothing less than the whole theory of the mirror
stage, at least as it is classically formulated, the whole theory of the
symbolic order and of the coterminous idea that the subject is
simply the subject of the signifier and the whole theory of an exter-
nally limiting and transcendent real. We might also suggest that what
disappears from Lacans work is the famous and virtually omnipres-
ent affirmation that the subject of psychoanalysis is none other than

15
the subject of science. For what we ultimately want to argue here, of
course, is that the subject of psychoanalysis or, in other words, the
subject of the unconscious at least in its most acute form is none
other than the subject of capitalism. The subject of psychoanalysis is
only the subject of science, then, to the extent that science receives
its ultimate determination from within a capitalist framework.)

16
 I.

Marxs Trajectory; or,

Three Ways of Splitting the Subject
It is well known that the most striking interpretations of the develop-
ment of Marxs thought have tended to divide themselves into two
broad theoretical camps. On the one hand, there are those who have
conceived this development in the terms of a more or less linear and
continuous evolution. And, on the other hand, there are those who
have construed it as the subject of a single and decisive revolution-
ary break.1
Our aim in this chapter is to articulate and defend a very different
view. For Marxs development will be reconstructed here as the prod-
uct of a recurrent but also ever-changing confrontation with a single
problematic: that of the division, splitting or doubling of the sub-
ject or, more precisely, of its division, splitting or doubling between
and across the two opposing registers of the imaginary and the real.
Whereas in his early and middle periods, we will argue, Marx twice
fails to comprehend this division, in his later works, and especially
Das Kapital, he finally succeeds in precisely and concretely articulat-
ing the characteristics of its symbolic or, in Marxs own less arcane
terms, social production. Capitalism is essentially defined by Marx,
in these later works, as the symbolic or social production and repro-
duction of a (proletarian) subjectivity divided or, more precisely,
knotted along its imaginary and real registers. And, as the rest of this
book will try to make clear, this is certainly not something that can
be considered to be a matter of small consequence.
For a lot of people, however, the mere suggestion of such an inter-
pretation will undoubtedly be the cause of severe consternation. For
surely what we are attempting here is not an interpretation of Marxs
work at all, but instead something like its forced confinement within
the pre-established and, in fact, highly artificial parameters of a Laca-
nian schema; the notion of a subject split across the three registers of

1 As we will see shortly, the paradigmatic representative of the first tendency

is Lukcs, and of the second Althusser; although it would also be appropriate
to include under the former heading a whole host of other names: Korsch,
Lefebvre, Sartre, Goldmann, Colletti, Debord and Jameson; certainly, and also,
on occasion, Adorno and Horkheimer and Benjamin.

19
the imaginary, the symbolic and the real being one of or perhaps,
as we will later want to suggest, the fundamental tenet of Lacans
own reconstruction of the central terms of Freudian psychoanalysis?
For two overriding reasons, however, this suspicion cannot be said
to be justified; even if our ultimate intention in this book one obvi-
ously inspired by the later work of Lacan himself, which explicitly
and increasingly takes up Marxian themes is clearly to emphasize
the potentially enormous productivity of a sustained confrontation
between the respective anti-philosophies of these two thinkers.
Firstly, then, even the most cursory of glances at Marxs writings,
especially in their early and middle periods, will reveal that the terms
imaginary and real and their various cognates: illusory and
actual, formal and contentful, and so on and so forth prolifer-
ate there to an almost incredible extent, and almost always in explicit
or implicit connection with the problematic of a split, divided or
doubled subject (playing with the variations of the prefix Dop-
pel was undoubtedly, as we later come to see, one of Marxs most
favored occupations). And if the actual use of the concepts of the
imaginary and the real certainly becomes less frequent in Marxs
more mature work, then this should in no way be taken to mean that
they have simply ceased to function there. For, instead, what we will
discover is that their location within the presentation of the capitalist
mode of production has come to lend them a much more concrete
and specific valence. In Das Kapital, to anticipate the core of this
chapters most important argument, the place of the imaginary has
been taken over by the concept of the commodity of labor-power;
and the place of the real by that of the (proletarian) subjects actual
labor. The capitalist mode of production, once again and as the
phrase itself can be dtourned in order to suggest is nothing more
than a particular social or symbolic order or, better perhaps, process
of ordering that has to be seen to continually produce and reproduce
the (proletarian) subject by dividing, doubling or knotting it across
these two registers. Capitalism, as will become clear at the end of this
chapter, and even more so at the end of the second part of chapter
2, is a Borromean knot.
Secondly, an equally cursory glance at the history of Western
Marxism the only significant body of Marxian thinking to have
seriously grappled with the two interrelated questions of the nature
of the development of Marxs thought and of the philosophical con-

20
ception of subjectivity implicit in it;2 the classical tradition having
been more concerned to fathom its consequences, whether political
or economic, in the concrete confrontation with a concrete situa-
tion3 can leave little doubt that a lot of the weaknesses of this tra-
dition ultimately derived from an absolutely inadequate theoretical
approach to the problematic of the subject. Or, more exactly, and
moving the analysis in the direction of our own reconstruction, we
might say that many of the representatives of this tradition failed
to produce a coherent conception of the subject precisely because,
whether consciously or unconsciously, they erected a false and un-
breachable divide between its imaginary and real registers. A brief
discussion of the cases of Lukcs and Althusser both of them para-
digmatic in their own specific way will hopefully now make this
clear.

Lukcs and his Lacunae

Now, Lukcs does not have, of course as Althusser will so clearly

have after him an explicit account of the development of Marxs
thought. It is not unfair to say, however, that his major work, History
and Class Consciousness, is the first and best representative of what
we might call continuity theory (the theory that there is an essen-
tial continuity between the propositions of the early Marx and the
supposedly entirely homogeneous propositions of his later instantia-
tions). Lukcs is a continuity theorist, then, because the whole of
his work rests upon a fundamental equation between the commod-
ity-fetishism of the late Marx and the alienation or what Lukcs
famously re-terms the reification of the early Marx.
This equation, we want to suggest here, is the source of all of
Lukcs problems. For what it effectively allows him to do is divide

2 As our brief discussion of Lukcs and Althusser will shortly make clear,
one of the main problems with Western Marxism is precisely that it considers
Marxs conception of subjectivity to be philosophical. Or, more precisely, that it
supplements what Marx has to say with a philosophical theory of subjectivity.
This theory is Hegelian in the line that follows from Lukcs; Spinozist in the
case of Althusser.
3 For the best discussion of the distinction between the classical tradition of
Marxism and the tradition of Western Marxism, see Anderson (1979).

21
or, as we will see, only apparently divide the proletarian subject
between the two absolutely inadequately comprehended spheres of
the imaginary and the real.4 The proletarian subject is divided, for
Lukcs, between two forms of consciousness; or between what he
himself sometimes confusingly refers to thus giving the game away,
we might suspect as the unconscious and the conscious. On the
first, imaginary and unconscious, side and simply repeating here
that long list of terms that Lukcs himself so consistently employs5
we have the proletarian subjects tendentially bourgeois conscious-
ness, the consciousness that belongs to it as a product of capital. This
consciousness is immediate or false, psychological or mass psycho-
logical, depersonalized or dehumanized, fragmented, reified, com-
modified and contemplative. On the second, real and conscious,
side, we have the proletarian subjects authentically proletarian con-
sciousness, the consciousness that belongs to it as the result of its
inherent capacity to transcend the limitations of the capitalist mode
of production. This consciousness, as one would expect, is mediated
or true, imputed (zugerechnet) as an objective possibility, personal-
ized and humanized, totalizing, un-reifying, un-commodifying and
indisputably active or practical.
The question that Lukcs is confronted with in History and Class
Consciousness, then, is how the proletarian subject gets from one
form of consciousness to another (how it gets from the uncon-
scious to the conscious, or from the imaginary to the real). In
his own words, everything depends on closing the gap between the
psychological consciousness and the imputed (zugerechnete) one
(HCC: 74). The answer that Lukcs provides to this question the
account that he gives of the closing of this gap could not be any
clearer: for the more the first form of consciousness develops and
unfolds, he claims, the more does the second. Or, once again making
use of his own terms, the more that imaginary and unconscious
reification, commodification and dehumanization develop all of
which are at their most extreme, of course, in the limit-case of the

4 Lukcs himself does not, of course, employ these terms. But it will hope-
fully become apparent that our introduction of them is far from unfair.
5 For Lukcs use of these terms, see the two central texts of History and
Class Consciousness, Class Consciousness and Reification and the Conscious-
ness of the Proletariat, 4682 and 83222, respectively.

22
economic crisis the more does the real and conscious humanity
that this reification and commodification only serves to alienate in its
essentially totalizing tendencies.
This supposed shift of consciousnesses might already appear, then,
to be more than a little implausible. But what we want to do here is
try to put our finger on the precise cause of this implausibility by sug-
gesting that, in order even to put forward such an account, Lukcs
needs to turn what is intended as a theory of the division of the
subject into nothing more than a theory of the division between the
subject and the object (one of the central antinomies of bourgeois
thought6 returns with a vengeance, we might say, in that very con-
ception of proletarian subjectivity that is conceived to be their quite
definitive overcoming). In order to tease out this cause it suffices to
advance a very quick critical commentary of what are undoubtedly,
from the perspective being defended here, the most important pages
of History and Class Consciousness, the final pages of the second part
of the third section of its landmark essay, Reification and the Con-
sciousness of the Proletariat (HCC: 16472).
These pages revolve around a central opposition: if the bourgeoi-
sie always perceives the subject and object of the historical process
and of social reality in a double form, then [f]or the proletariat
social reality does not exist in this [same] double form. What does
this mean? It means that if the bourgeois is effectively merely the
object of the processes of capitalist production, he nonetheless per-
ceives himself to be their determining subject; a perception that is
precisely denied to the proletarian in his reduction to the status of the
pure object of societal events. Because the proletarian is cut []
off from his labour-power, forced to sell it on the market as a com-
modity, belonging to him (a description that, as we will shortly see,
tendentiously transforms what actually occurs in the capitalist mode
of production7), he is nothing more than the cipher of a special-
ised, rationalised and mechanised development.

6 This is the title of section II of Reification and the Consciousness of the

Proletariat. One of the central antinomies that Lukcs identifies here is a rigid
and insuperable opposition between the spheres of the subjective and the
objective.
7 To anticipate, Lukcs is confusing here at best the concepts of labor
and labor-power. It simply makes no sense to say that, in the capitalist mode

23
 It is fairly apparent what Lukcs wants to achieve by erecting this
strict distinction between the bourgeois or capitalist and the proletar-
ian or worker. For as he himself says:

It is true: for the capitalist also there is the same doubling of personal-
ity, the same splitting up of man into an element of the movement of
commodities and an (objective and impotent) observer of that move-
ment. But for his consciousness it necessarily appears as an activity
(albeit this activity is an objectively an illusion), in which effects ema-
nate from himself. This illusion blinds him to the true state of affairs,
whereas the worker, who is denied the scope for such illusory activity,
perceives the split in his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in
its whole tendency a slavery without limits. He is therefore forced into
becoming the object of the process by which he is turned into a com-
modity and reduced to a mere quantity.

If both the bourgeois and the proletarian are divided as subjects

if both of them experience a doubling of their personalities, a split-
ting of their humanities, a split of their beings then it is only the
proletarian, once again as a result of his denigration to the level of
a mere objectivity, who is capable of perceiving this division in a
disillusioned form. It is precisely because the proletarian becomes an
object that he is compelled to surpass the immediacy of his condi-
tion, that he possesses in Lukcs simple re-inscription of the logic
of Hegelian dialectic the immanent capacity to transform quan-
tity into quality. It soon becomes apparent, however if it is not
apparent already that if the proletarian can so easily carry out this
supersession and transmogrification, this is only ultimately because
his division as a subject is not really a division of the subject at all,
but instead a mere division between its subjective and its objective

of production, the proletarian is cut off from his labour-power, because it is

precisely this mode of production that first counts the proletarians labor as
the commodity of labor-power. It would make a little more sense, then, to say
that the proletarian is cut off from his labor, insofar as this labor is counted
as and, as we will see, tends to disappear into the commodity of labor-power.
But, in contradistinction to what Lukcs is saying here, this cutting off in no
way reduces the proletarian to the status of a mere object. Instead, it precisely
constitutes him as a divided subject.

24
aspects (with each of these being comprehended in a hugely unsat-
isfactory manner).
[A]s far as labour-time is concerned, Lukcs tells us, it becomes
abundantly clear that quantification is a reified and reifying cloak
spread over the true essence of the objects. And the true essence of
the objects is nothing more, in the end, than the subject in its pure
humanity, in its pure and unified personality: for the worker labour-
time is not merely the objective form of the commodity he has sold,
i.e. his labour-power (for in that form the problem for him, too, is
one of the exchange of equivalents, i.e. a quantitative matter). But
in addition it is the determining form of his existence as subject, as
human being; the worker is forced to objectify his labour-power
over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity. But
because of the split between subjectivity and objectivity induced in
man by the compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situ-
ation becomes one that can be made conscious. Consciousness is
the terminus ad quem of Lukcs whole construction because the
proletarian is nothing more than the self-consciousness of the com-
modity; [i]n this consciousness and through it the special objective
character of labour as a commodity, its use-value (i.e. its ability
to yield surplus produce) which like every use-value is submerged
without a trace in the quantitative exchange categories of capitalism,
awakens and becomes social reality.
Lukcs can only distinguish between the two forms of conscious-
ness of the proletarian subject between its consciousness and
its unconsciousness or, in our own critically introduced terms,
between its real and imaginary registers because this distinction
itself depends upon a more fundamental, and more fundamentally
inadequate, differentiation between the subjective and objective char-
acteristics of precisely this subject. And it is certainly not a coinci-
dence that in drawing out these supposed characteristics Lukcs is
compelled to engage as the above quotations reveal in a very
tendentious reading of Marxs comments on the commodity of labor-
power, in its relationship, of course, to the labor that it tendentially
conceals. For it is here that we can draw the strictest of dividing lines
between what Lukcs wants to say and what we will have to say in
the whole chapter on Marx that follows. For Lukcs, in nuce, the divi-
sion between labor and the commodity of labor-power is a division
between the subject and the object, between the conscious and the

25
unconscious and, once again accepting our importation, between
the spheres of the real and the imaginary so conceived. For us and
obviously only sketching out here the central terms of our analysis
the division between labor and the commodity of labor-power is a
division of the subject proper, in which the symbolic combination of
its real and imaginary registers does nothing less than constitute the
experience of the unconscious itself (as the experience of a strictly
non-substantial and strictly non-localizable domain that undoubtedly
does away with any simple reference to consciousness).

The Aporias of Althusser

For two main reasons, it is much easier to talk about Althusser in

the context of the discussion that we are beginning to advance here
than it is to talk about Lukcs. In the first place, then, Althusser
undoubtedly does have an explicit theory of the development of
Marxs thought. And, in the second place, both in the articulation of
this supposed development and in the articulation of the terms that
are supposed to be developed within it, Althusser undoubtedly does
take literal recourse to the critical categories of the imaginary and
the real (one might suppose that this is the result of the influence
of Lacan; but we will see that this influence is itself more imaginary
than real, and that, in any case, it is trumped by the much more fun-
damental influence of Spinoza, and especially of his absolutely rigid
opposition between the two entirely separate spheres of the ratio and
the imaginatio8).
Althusser makes use of these two categories and of Gaston
Bachelards notion of an epistemological break in order to dis-
tinguish between the imaginary or ideological problematic of the
early Marx (the problematic of Feuerbachian humanism and Hege-
lian dialectic) and the real or scientific problematic of the late or
later Marx (the specifically Marxian problematic of the mode of pro-
duction and its distinct and different determinations). And, in exclu-
sive relation to this latter problematic, he also employs the concepts
of the imaginary and the real in order to introduce a number of basic

8 See Spinoza (1992).

26
dividing lines and definitions. Two of these stand out (and the sec-
ond can in fact be understood as a more specific application of the
first). On the one hand, then and in direct opposition to the Hege-
lian idea of an expressive totality Althusser develops, by borrow-
ing from Freud,9 of course, the contrary conception of an overdeter-
mined totality in which the real last instance of the economy (and
here we hear the echo of Engels10) relates in a putatively complex
manner with the relatively autonomous or specifically effective
imaginary and ideological instances that apparently arise above
it. On the other hand and once again particularizing these more
general delineations he develops a real or scientific account of
the imaginary or ideological constitution or interpellation of the
subject by means of the ideological state apparatuses, an account
that is intended to explain how ideology, and the subject that it
produces, represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to
their real conditions of existence (LAP: 109).
We can deal very briefly with each of these articulations in
turn. Primarily by showing the problems that ensue from Althussers
inflexibly Spinozist counterposition of the two realms of the imagi-
nary and the real. And secondarily by showing in anticipation how
our own analysis of Marx will be able to overcome these, in fact,
quite severe limitations.
Firstly, then, it really needs to be said as opposed to Lukcs, for
instance, who, as we have seen, attempts to posit a simple theoreti-
cal identity between these two periods that there is an indisputable
element of truth in Althussers unremitting emphasis on the incom-
mensurability between the early Marx and the late or later Marx.
It would have been better, however we would like to suggest
if Althusser had not couched this incommensurability in the terms
of a fundamental opposition between the imaginary or ideological
and the real or scientific. In the first place, because he would not

9 For a useful overview of the Freudian concept of over-determination, a

concept that informs virtually the whole of his work, see the relevant entry in
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973).
10 Althusser is referring, of course, to the famous letters that Engels wrote to
Joseph Bloch, Conrad Schmidt and Borgius, on, respectively, the 21st Septem-
ber 1890, the 27th October 1890 and the 25th January 1894. All of them can be
found at www.marxists.org.

27
then have been compelled to engage in the eminently futile and fruit-
less task of defining Marxism as a science (a task that, as we will
later see, it is simply impossible to fulfill). And, in the second place,
because he would not then have been compelled to ignore the way
in which Marx actually uses the concepts of the imaginary and the
real. For rather than defining two entirely different problematics that
can be said to impose an essential rupture upon the evolution of
Marxs thinking, these concepts are in fact internal to a problematic
that traverses this thinking as a whole, but which it resolves in dif-
ferent and differently compelling ways. Both the early Marx and
the late Marx and also, as we will see, the middle period Marx, the
originator of distinct theoretical developments that Althusser quite
simply subsumes into the undifferentiated mass of his second, sci-
entific paradigm are concerned with the problematic of a subject
divided between the two registers of the imaginary and the real.
(The late Marx essentially resolves this problematic, by effectively
introducing the third register of the social or symbolic; and the early
or middle period Marx, precisely as a consequence of the effective
absence of this register, essentially fail to resolve it.) Marxs develop-
ment is even more nuanced, then, than Althusser is capable of giving
him credit for. For what disappears from the late Marx are not only
the problematics of Feuerbachian humanism and Hegelian dialectic
(as Althusser himself so clearly recognizes), but also that whole host
of problematics that are associated with his middle period, problem-
atics that can fundamentally be defined in terms of the opposition
between the economic base and the ideological superstructure and
the forces and relations of production (and which Althusser mis-
takenly conceives as being integral to the insights of the later Marx
himself).
Secondly, it also needs to be stated that Althussers conception of
an overdetermined totality in spite of its quite illustrious termi-
nological descent is little more than a pseudo-sophisticated form
of theoretical or, more precisely (as many people have recognized,
Althusser himself included11), theoreticist rhetoric. This rhetoric
is designed, whether consciously or not, as nothing other than a

11 In his later works, especially Marx in his Limits, Althusser subjects to

substantial criticism his own earlier theoreticist tendencies. See Althusser
(2006), 7162.

28
compromise formation. For if, on the one hand, Althusser wants to
acknowledge the tendency that Marxs metaphor of base and super-
structure has towards simplicity, reductiveness and downright vul-
garity, then, on the other hand, he also wants to escape from these
restrictions by perpetually pointing out that this metaphor in fact
operates according to a logic of irreducible complexity. The pure
postulation of complexity can prove, however, to be rather tiring;
because, when all is said and done, it serves to elucidate and explain
exactly nothing. And a lot of Althussers most famous conceptual
innovations seem to function as nothing more than catchwords for
this fundamental deficit of explanation (an explanation that, as we
will now start to see, cannot be provided in any case). Relative
autonomy and specific effectivity: what do these two terms mean
if not that there is a relationship between the base and the super-
structure, the real and the imaginary, that it is in no way possible
to concretely determine; hence the inescapably abstract appeal to
relativity and specificity (an abstraction that is only compounded
when we recognize that both of these qualities are still somehow to
be linked to the last instance of the economy)? In admitting that
this last instance never comes (FM: 113), Althusser undoubtedly
does acknowledge even if only unwillingly the real stakes of the
difficulties that he is faced with. Unfortunately for him, however,
this admittance will fatefully direct both the internal and the exter-
nal evolution of his own theoretical elaborations. For if the real last
instance of the economy simply cannot be structurally defined, then
why not give up on this definition completely and embrace instead
the celebration of an absolute randomness (as Althusser himself will
do in his later formulation of an aleatory materialism12)? And if
the relative autonomy or specific effectivity of the imaginary or
ideological instances of society simply cannot be precisely delin-
eated, then why not do away with the very characteristics that are
supposed to define this autonomy and effectivity, and allow it to
acquire instead an absolutely unrestricted scope that has nothing at
all to do with the economy itself, which can effectively be seen to
vanish from the theoretical picture (this, of course, is the path that

12 On this conception of aleatory materialism, see Althusser (1996). And,

for a fuller critique of this conception that is in accordance with the arguments
advanced here, see Rouse (2010).

29
will be followed by a lot of the post-Althusserians13)? Althussers
constructions would have benefited considerably then, we can con-
clude and emphasizing this point once again not from a further
complexification of the base-superstructure metaphor, but from its
rejection and repudiation tout court. If Althusser had carried out this
rejection, he would perhaps have been able to see as we ourselves
will later be arguing that the real and the imaginary do not neces-
sarily span out in the later Marx across the axes that he assumes; but
that instead they are categories that are immanent to the sphere of
the economic per se (which is never merely economic, as Althusser
himself seems to assume, and which can never be coherently con-
ceived, in fundamental consistency with this assumption, as an ever-
receding and ever-retreating last instance).
Thirdly and finally, it has to be pointed out that the basic prob-
lem with Althussers theory of interpellation is that it reduces the
subject to a purely imaginary or ideological status; the category
of the subject, Althusser says, is the constitutive category of all
ideology (LAP: 1156).14 Coterminously, the history that is sup-
posed to envelop this subject is reduced to the status of an undi-
luted real; history, Althusser rather implausibly informs us, is a
process without a subject (LAP: 61, 81; OI: 83).15 A fundamental
breach is established, in other words, between the real processes of
historical development and the imaginary or ideological subjec-
tive representation of them. Althusser might be thought to substan-
tially step across this breach in the properly Marxian recourse that
he takes to the conceptualization of class struggle (class struggle,

13 We are thinking most pointedly here of the work of Poulantzas, Laclau

and Mouffe and Hirst and Hindess; although an effective exclusion of the eco-
nomic from the sphere of political discussion and especially from the discus-
sion of the sphere of political subjectivity is also at work in the uvres of
Badiou, Balibar and Rancire. For a sample of the work of all these thinkers
see Poulantzas (2008), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Hirst and Hindess (2009),
Badiou (2006), Balibar (1994) and Rancire (1999). For a devastating critique
of the former set see Meiksins Wood (1986).
14 Althusser, of course, can only understand the subject as the supposedly
free, supposedly autonomous and supposedly self-identical individual of bour-
geois ideology. In Lacanian terms, he can only succeed in conflating the con-
cepts of the subject and the ego.
15 On Althussers definition of the subject this is naturally not an implausible
claim. But the problem, of course, is this definition itself.

30
he contends, is the real motor force of history, as opposed to those
imaginary or ideological representations that construe this force
in the form of man (OI: 79)). But this appeal to the primacy of
class struggle at least in the way in which Althusser articulates
it only succeeds in displacing the problem to a different level. For
the question that Althusser has to address is the following: if class
struggle is the motor of history, then what kind of subject is doing
the struggling? His answer can only reinforce his original series of
oppositions. For the subject of class struggle can only be divided, on
Althussers own account, between the real economic conditions of
its existence and its imaginary or ideological representation of its
relationship to them. The division of the subject is absolute; which
calls into question as we have already seen in the case of Lukcs
the very idea that it is divided at all.16 Althusser would have done
better, we would like to claim, if he had comprehended this divi-
sion in a very different manner; that is, if he had comprehended it,
once again, not as a division between the base and the superstruc-
ture, but instead as a division that is at work in the very core of the
economy itself. In order to do this, however, Althusser would have to
have expanded the significance of what lives on as perhaps his most
important analysis, the analysis of Marxs procedure of symptom-
atic reading (RC: 1334). For, as Althusser himself acknowledges,
this procedure revolves around the distinction between labor and
the commodity of labor-power. The symptom that Marx discerns in
the classical political economists (Smith, Ricardo, etc.) is that when
they should be talking about the commodity of labor-power a con-
cept that is beyond them, and that Marx himself will have to invent,
by filling in their absences they are in fact talking about nothing
more than labor per se. Althussers extrapolations here are elegant
and indisputable; but they are extrapolations that are confined to an
investigation of the real economy, in contradistinction, that is, to
the imaginary or ideological subjective representations of it. And
the whole significance of Marxs account as we will see in what
follows is that it overturns these very easy oppositions. The divi-

16 That is, although Althusser might be thought to make an advance upon

Lukcs in claiming that the subject of ideology is irredeemably unconscious
(FM: 2323), he can in no way coherently theorize that division of the subject
that itself gives rise to an experience of the unconscious.

31
sion between labor and the commodity of labor-power, an eminently
economic division (which can also be couched in the terms of the
real and the imaginary), is at the same time nothing more than a
division of the subject. Althussers insights, in this sphere at least,
should have exploded the whole basis of those theoretical elucubra-
tions that otherwise so sadly dominate his work.
We have seen, then, that both Lukcs attempt to construct a sin-
gle Marx and Althussers attempt, as against Lukcs, to construct a
double Marx must be considered to run into a whole series of more
or less insurmountable obstacles. And it is against this background
that we can now begin to reconstruct our own critical conception of
an essentially threefold Marx.

32
 1. The Imaginary and the Real (Part One):
the Early Writings

Any serious reader of Marxs early writings must surely recognize

today that even if their popularity was perhaps once understand-
able as an exaggerated reaction to the innumerable ossifications of a
putatively Marxist theory they nevertheless constitute a headily
irreconcilable mix of nascent, if radically incomplete, originality and
flatly incoherent derivativeness. The originality concerns the decisive
critical turn towards material interests and economic questions
(CCPE: 424), with the concomitant emergence of an embryonic cri-
tique of political economy and the infamous, if as we will see still
hugely problematical, discovery of the proletariat. These are well-
worn themes, and they will not concern us here directly, or at least
not yet.
For the moment, we will be taking a much greater interest in the
derivativeness, because it is precisely through this that Marx first
comes to grapple with the problematic of a subject divided between
the spheres of the real and the imaginary. This derivativeness stems,
of course, from two major sources: Hegels Elements of the Philoso-
phy of Right, the central terminological and conceptual oppositions
of which Marx preserves throughout his early work even after having
subjected this text to a sustained critical commentary;17 and Feuer-
bachs humanist critique of religion and philosophy, the perspectives
of which Marx adopts both negatively in criticizing Hegel and later
positively in articulating his own new economic conception of the
supposed alienation of the human essence.18
Although it is clearly impossible, then, to strictly divide the early
writings between these two sets of inherited motifs, each one being
present to some degree in almost every text, it is nonetheless fair to
say that the Hegelian influence is predominant in the Critique of
Hegels Doctrine of the State and the Critical Notes on the Article
the King of Prussia and Social Reforms. For Marxs central concern
here is to correct the inverted logic of the Hegelian couple of state

17 See Hegel (1991).

18 See Feuerbach (1989).

33
(the political) and civil society (the economic). Rather than the for-
mer being the truth of the latter, as it is in Hegels work, Marx will
show or at least attempt to show (for one of the central arguments
of this section is that he fails) the exact reverse. Feuerbach only
plays a role in this critique of Hegel as a lender of strategic devices:
Marx draws a number of parallels between the logics of religious and
political alienation, and constantly uncovers and objects to Hegels
idealistic twisting of the proper relationship between subject and
predicate. In other texts, however, Feuerbach clearly acquires for
himself the predominant influence. These are the Letters from the
Franco-German Yearbooks, the Introduction to A Contribution
to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, the Excerpts from
James Mills Elements of Political Economy and the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts. For here Marx is mainly preoccupied
with the idea of the economic rather than religious or philosophi-
cal, as in Feuerbach alienation of a supposed human essence, its
nature, species-being or intrinsic sociality. On the Jewish Question
is the one early writing that fairly evenly combines both the Hege-
lian and the Feuerbachian influences. It therefore provides the most
immediately compelling evidence of a transition between the two
moments.
Now, it is the nature of this transition, its implicit and unconscious
motive forces, that this section seeks to analyze. When Marx, in the
first moment, inverts the logic of Hegels split between the state (the
political) and civil society (the economic), but still follows Hegel in
comprehending the subject as essentially divided across these two
domains, he encounters, we will argue, a for the moment insur-
mountable problem. If, as he claims, the state is the mere imagi-
nary or formal (political) alienation of the real and material (eco-
nomic) content of civil society then how, as he also contends, can
the very fact of this alienation be explained as a consequence of the
specifically modern character of civil society itself? An explanatory
gap opens up here between the spheres of the real (economic civil
society) and the imaginary (the political state). And it is precisely
because Marx cannot fill this gap something that only the further
development of his work will allow him to do, by coming to compre-

34
hend the subject as divided within the very sphere of the social or
economic itself that he chooses instead either to simply ignore
the difficulty, by continuing to treat the state as the simple alien-
ation of a potentially transparent civil society or, more importantly,
through the positive recourse to Feuerbachs humanism, to actively
displace its central terms.
In the early Marxs second, positively Feuerbachian incarnation,
that which was previously real (civil society, now understood accord-
ing to the not yet properly articulated concepts of wage-labor and
money) comes instead to be comprehended as the source of imagi-
nary alienation. The real that it is supposed to alienate is now con-
ceived as the human essence, true, human sociality or species-being,
which communism will free from its imaginary fetters. The subject is
split between its false social form and its true social content; social-
ity will save society from itself. The inadequacy of this conception
should already be quite apparent. But before we condemn it let us
turn to the details.

Marxs Critique of Hegel: the (Real) Inversion of

the Imaginary and the Real

The general tenor of Marxs critique of Hegel, if little adhered to in

practice, is fairly well known in theory, and does not need to be
dwelt on here to any great extent. It perhaps suffices to say that,
rather than simply inveighing against the undoubted political con-
servatism of Hegels text, as did the so-called Left-Hegelians and the
vast majority of its original reviewers,19 Marx goes deeper by look-
ing to comprehend the ineluctable causes of this conservatism in the
distinctive method of Hegels approach to his object.
The chief characteristic of this method, Marx famously claims
already opening up with this that problematic of the real and the
imaginary that will concern us here is its idealism. But what does
it mean to define Hegels method as idealistic? It means that when
Hegel attempts to describe the modern political state, he does not

19 For the views of the Left-Hegelians see Lawrence S. Stepelevich ed. (1999).
For a summary of the first reviews of Hegels text see Allen W. Woods intro-
duction to Hegel (1991), viii-ix.

35
begin with the real relationship of differences inherent in it as a
social object, but instead with a certain imaginary conception of
the nature of this relationship, and thus of the differences that it
is seen to determine. Whereas in reality, Marx claims, the relation-
ship between these social differences is irreconcilably conflictual, in
Hegels imaginary conception, such differences only exist in the first
place in such a way that they can come to be harmonized by the
abstract principle of the political state.
Hegels idealism, then, is not merely false. Instead, Marx argues,
its falsity is ultimately the product of a (conscious or unconscious?)
harmonizing intention (which Marx, in a striking anticipation of
psychoanalytic vocabulary, sometimes even designates as fantasy
(CHDS: 142; CHPR: 244)). As Marx himself says, referring to the
real differences inherent in the political state, [t]he different pow-
ers each have a different principle. Each moreover is a definite real-
ity. To flee from the genuine conflict between them by taking refuge
in an imaginary organic unity, instead of proving them to be the
various moments of an organic unity, is therefore an empty, mystical
evasion (CHDS: 121). This is why the putatively radical critique of
Hegel is inadequate. For in too quickly drawing attention to the con-
servatism of Hegels constructions, it fails to recognize that at their
very motivational heart there lies a profound (unconscious?) aware-
ness of the real social antagonisms and contradictions that they are
(consciously?) supposed to overcome.
It is this genetic critique of idealism that explains the two more
concrete arguments that Marx repeats, in his long essay on Hegel,
again and again. Firstly, he contends, Hegels doctrine of the state
cannot be viewed as an independent work, because the method by
which its conception of the state dissolves and falsely reconciles the
real, antagonistic differences of civil society is nothing other than a
faithful reproduction of the movement of his Science of Logic.20 Just
as the absolute idea must sunder itself into its distinct moments in
order to ultimately recoup them under its wing, so must the state
develop its own differences in the concept of civil society in order
then to subject them to its finally pacificatory influence.

20 See Hegel (1969).

36
 Secondly, Marx claims, Hegel consistently enacts an imaginary
inversion of the real and proper relationship between subject and
predicate. Whereas any adequate concept of the state should be the
product of the real subject of the differences of civil society that it
contains, Hegel imaginarily turns these differences into the mere
appendages of a reconciliatory state-subject: the Idea is made into
the subject, the distinct members and their reality are understood as
its development, its result, whereas the reverse holds good, viz. that
the Idea must be developed from the real differences. The organic
is precisely the Idea of the differences, their ideal determination
(CHDS: 66). In Hegels work, then, the state is not the real state of
civil society; instead, and conversely, civil society is transmogrified
into the imaginary society of an imaginary state.
Marxs detailed analyses of Hegels argument are typically no more
than mere elaborations of these two fundamental claims. And we
only need to take a single example here in order to make it even more
clear that what is at stake here in any number of different senses
is the thematization of the relationship between the imaginary and
the real. Discussing Hegels infamous justification of monarchical
sovereignty, Marx tells us that:

Hegel regards the family, society etc. and the artificial person in
general not as the realization of the real, empirical person but as the
real person in whom, however, the moment of personality figures only
abstractly. His account, therefore, does not proceed from the real per-
son to the state, but from the state to the real person. Hence, instead of
representing the state as the highest reality of the person, as the highest
social reality of man, the highest reality of the state is said to be found
in the empirical person, and a single empirical man at that. Hegels pur-
pose is to narrate the life-history of abstract substance, of the Idea, and
in such a history human activity etc. necessarily appears as the activity
and product of something other than itself; he therefore represents the
essence of man as an imaginary detail instead of allowing it to function
in terms of its real human existence. (CHDS: 98)

The delegation of the ultimate sovereignty of the state to a single

individual (albeit one who does nothing more, in Hegels description,
than dot the is and cross the ts) is to tendentiously direct the real,
conflictual complexity of civil society towards the imaginary apex

37
of an arbitrary detail. The problem, however and here Marxs cri-
tique takes a crucial turn is that this imaginary and arbitrary detail
really and actually exists, as does that whole abstract mechanism of
the state that Hegels normativizing descriptions more or less slav-
ishly repeat and reproduce. Hegels doctrine of the state is not just
an imaginarization of a real state of affairs because this real state of
affairs in its erection of a separation between the state and civil
society is in fact guilty of imaginarizing itself: the German concep-
tion of the modern state, which abstracts from real man, was only
possible because and in so far as the modern state itself abstracts
from real man or satisfies the whole man in a purely imaginary way
(CHPR: 250).

Marxs Discovery of the Division of the Subject;

and the Difficulties of its Discernment

Now, it is precisely here, in the supposed separation between an

imaginary state and a real civil society, that Marx for the first time
and in quite explicit terms locates the problematic of a split,
divided or doubled subject. His words, at a number of points in the
early writings, could not be any clearer. It is perhaps best, then,
to let them speak fully for themselves: [t]he bureaucracy, Marx
informs us, is the imaginary state alongside the real state; it is the
spiritualism of the state. Hence everything acquires a double mean-
ing [eine doppelte Bedeutung]: a real meaning and a bureaucratic
one; in like fashion, there is both real knowledge and bureaucratic
knowledge [] Real knowledge appears lacking in content, just as
real life appears dead, for this imaginary knowledge and imaginary
life pass for the substance (CHDS: 108); the opportunity to join
the class of civil servants, available to every citizen, is the second
bond established between civil society and the state; it is the sec-
ond identity. It is highly superficial and dualistic in nature. Every
Catholic has the opportunity of becoming a priest (i.e. of turning his
back on the laity and the world). Does this mean that the priesthood
ceases to be a power remote from Catholics? The fact that everyone
has the opportunity of acquiring the right to another sphere merely
proves that his own sphere does not embody that right in reality
[] The identity [] established between civil society and the state

38
is the identity of two hostile armies in which every soldier has the
opportunity to desert and join the hostile army (CHDS: 112);
even more explicitly, [c]ivil society is separated from the state. It
follows, therefore, that the citizen of the state is separated from the
citizen as a member of civil society. He must therefore divide up his
own essence. As a real citizen he finds himself in a double organiza-
tion [einer doppelten Organisation] [] The separation of civil and
political society appears necessarily as the separation of the political
citizen, the citizen of the state, from civil society and from his own
real empirical reality; for as an ideal political entity [Staatsidealist]
he is a quite different being, wholly distinct from and opposed to his
actual reality (CHDS: 1434); [t]here is here an apparent identity,
the same subject, but it has essentially different determinations, i.e.
in reality there is a double subject [ein doppeltes Subjekt] (CHDS:
149); [h]ere the separation of the political person from the real one,
the formal from the material, the universal from the particular, of
man from social man, is expressed in its most contradictory form
(CHDS: 178); and finally, regarding the splitting of man into his
public and his private self (JQ: 222), Marx claims that [w]here the
political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a
double life [ein doppeltes Leben], a life in heaven and a life on earth,
not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality [] Man in
his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where
he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he
is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he
is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of
a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and
filled with an unreal universality (JQ: 220).
Everything, then, appears to be simple. The subject is split, divided
or doubled between the spheres of its real (economic) existence in
civil society and the abstraction and alienation of this existence in its
imaginary inhabitation of the (political) state. As even this brief for-
mulation suggests, however, it is the very simplicity of this division
that gives rise to a problem, one that resonates throughout Marxs
early writings. For in attempting to define the nature of the relation-
ship between the two spheres the real and the imaginary; civil soci-
ety and the state; the economic and the political Marx is compelled
to make two absolutely contradictory claims.

39
 On the one hand, as we have already seen, he conceives the state
as the merely imaginary or illusory abstraction and alienation of the
deeper, more authentic reality of civil society. On the other hand
and this is where the problems really begin he construes the alien-
ation and abstraction carried out by the modern, political state to be
itself a product of the existence of modern, economic civil society.
According to the first claim, the imaginary is the simple alienation
of the real; according to the second, it is the very product of it, or as
Marx himself puts it:

It is self-evident that the political constitution as such is only devel-

oped when the private spheres have achieved an independent exis-
tence. Where commerce and landed property are unfree, where they
have not yet asserted their independence, there can be no political con-
stitution [] The abstraction of the state as such was not born until the
modern world because the abstraction of private life was not created
until modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern
product. (CHDS: 90)

Marx poses here a problem that, for the moment, he does not pos-
sess the conceptual resources to resolve. If the imaginary abstraction
of the modern state is the product of the real abstraction of modern
civil society, then how precisely does this production of abstraction
occur (what, we might ask, slightly modifying the meaning of one of
Marxs own later terms, is its mode of production)? How exactly
does the real give rise to its own imaginarization? Or, in Marxs own
understated words, if the relationship of industry and the world of
wealth in general to the political world is one of the main problems
of the modern age (CHPR: 248), what are the analytical terms of
this relationship?
Because Marx temporarily lacks the resources to answer these
questions, he oscillates in the early writings between the provision
of false solutions and the skeletally proleptic outlining of true ones.
The false solutions, for those with even a slight awareness of Marxs
later development, are truly bizarre. On several occasions, as we
will see in more detail a little further on, Marx completely inverts
the terms of any possible explanation by describing the emergence
of modern civil society as the consequence of the modern political

40
revolution (CHDS: 146; JQ: 232).21 On this view, the economic real
would be the product of the political imaginary. On other occasions,
Marx identifies an abstract and ethereal Christianity as the cause
of the completion of modern civil society, which is then supposed
to revert, in its need for a more practical instantiation, to Judaism
(JQ: 240). Again, the real here just obediently follows the, this time
religious, imaginary, when in other places Marx had set himself the
much more reasonable task of using the former to explain the emer-
gence of the latter. Marx only comes close to suggesting such an
explanation when he twice intuits that the real problem confronting
him is not ultimately the split between the state and civil society, but
the split within civil society itself, and hence, of course within the
subject of this society (CHDS: 183; CHPR: 252).
Why, however, does this suggestion of a split within the very sub-
ject of civil society open up the possibility of a solution to the prob-
lem that Marx is confronting here even if he remains incapable,
for the moment, of properly articulating its terms? What we want to
argue here in anticipation of our reconstruction of the first parts
of Marxs Capital in section 3 of this chapter is that it is only by
means of the postulation of such a split that it is possible to account
for the modern (capitalist) separation and interaction between the
spheres of the economic (in Marxs Hegelian terms, civil society) and
the political (the state). The capitalist split between the economic
and the political has to be understood, that is, as the simultaneous
supplement and reinforcement of a more fundamental split at the
level of the social or economic itself.
The tortured development of Marxs thought which, to repeat,
it is the aim of this chapter to give an awareness of illustrates by
itself the difficulty of arriving at such a conception. In order that we
can begin to suggest an outline of its terms here, we want to do three
things. Firstly, look a little more closely at Marxs still inadequate

21 This modern political revolution is, of course, the French Revolution, and
the inversion that we are ascribing to Marx here is closely related to the central-
ity that this revolution assumes in all of his early thinking. It is an inversion
that is gradually overcome, that is, as Marx increasingly, in his later works,
starts to shift his attention to the distinctively and specifically English origins
of capitalism. For a brilliant discussion of this whole question, in both Marx
and Engels own work and a broad series of more contemporary accounts of
capitalist development, see Meiksins Wood (1991).

41
account of the modern separation of the economic and the politi-
cal in the early writings. Secondly, cast a glance at a more coherent
account of this separation one itself derived from Marxs own later
writings in the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood. And thirdly, suggest
that even this more adequate account runs into problems by failing
to explicitly comprehend this separation as both the supplement and
reinforcement of a separation already existing in the social or eco-
nomic sphere itself.

The Failed Articulation of the Separation between

the Economic and the Political

Marxs early account of the modern split between the economic and
the political, between civil society and the state, crucially depends
upon an analysis of the historical transition from feudalism to moder-
nity (as we will see, all of the weaknesses of this account stem from
the fact that it is not yet an analysis of the transition from feudalism
to capitalism). Under feudalism Marx claims, there simply was no
separation between the economic and the political. Every aspect of
the feudal economy was bathed in a political light or, as he himself
says: [w]hat was the character of the old society? It can be charac-
terized in one word: feudalism. The old civil society had a directly
political character, i.e. the elements of civil life such as property,
family, and the mode and manner of work were elevated in the form
of seignory, estate and guild to the level of elements of political life
(JQ: 232).
Modernity, by contrast, is defined by the existence of this sepa-
ration: this separation really does exist in the modern state. The
identity of the civil and political classes in the Middle Ages was the
expression of the identity of civil and political society. This iden-
tity has disappeared (CHDS: 137). Or again, in the terms that most
interest us here, the problematic of a divided class subject is one
that is specific to modernity: At a time when the structure of civil
society was political and when the political state was civil society,
this separation and duplication [Verdopplung] of the significance of
the classes did not exist. They did not mean one thing in civil society
and another in the world of politics. They did not take on new mean-

42
ing in the world of politics, they retained what meaning they had
(CHDS: 148).
So far, then, so good. In feudalism there was no separation between
the economic and the political; in modernity this separation comes to
the fore. The problem is that when Marx tries to explain the transi-
tion from one period to the other, he gets caught up in precisely those
difficulties that we have here been analyzing. For in the absence of
a social or economic explanation of this transition which is
what Marx demands of himself when he claims that the imaginary
abstraction of the modern state is the product of the real abstraction
of modern civil society he can only oscillate, once again, between
two contradictory positions.
On the one hand, he understands the modern separation of the eco-
nomic and the political to be the consequence of political (or, more
precisely, French) revolution: [n]ot until the French Revolution
was the process completed in which the Estates were transformed
into social classes, i.e. the class distinctions in civil society became
merely social differences in private life of no significance in political
life. This accomplished the separation of political life and civil soci-
ety (CHDS: 146); [t]he political revolution thereby abolished the
political character of civil society. It shattered civil society into its
simple components (JQ: 232). On the other hand, Marx conceives
the political as an abstract alienation of precisely that civil society
that the political revolution is supposed to have produced: the indi-
vidual members of the people became equal in the heaven of their
political world, though unequal in their earthly existence in society
(CHDS: 147). It is perhaps because Marx cannot comprehend civil
society in its own terms, but only as either the product of the politi-
cal or as that which it alienates, that, in first attempting to articulate
its class-based characteristics, he is forced to resort to an obviously
unsatisfactory language of undivided immediacy: [t]he principle
underlying civil society [] is a fluid division of masses whose vari-
ous formations are arbitrary and without organization [] The only
noteworthy feature is that the absence of property and the class of
immediate labour, of concrete labour, do not so much constitute a
class of civil society as provide the ground on which the circles of
civil society move and have their being (CHDS: 1467).
In Marxs early writings, then, the modern separation between the
spheres of the economic and the political is contradictorily viewed

43
either as the immediate result of the political (in the form of revolu-
tion) or in the terms of the political alienation of an immediate and
undivided economic reality. Marx could only have avoided this con-
tradiction, we want to suggest as he later does by calling into
question precisely this immediacy of the economic, that is; by com-
prehending the modern (or, more specifically, capitalist) separation
of the economic and the political as the product of a modern (capi-
talist) separation or split within the social or economic sphere
itself.

A Better Account of this Separation

It is here that the work of Meiksins Wood can be of some assistance

to us, because one of its overriding aims following the later Marx
of the Grundrisse and Das Kapital has been to emphasize the spe-
cifically or, indeed, uniquely capitalist character of this first sepa-
ration.22 Every pre-capitalist social formation, Meiksins Wood con-
tends, essentially relied upon extra-economic processes of surplus
extraction. Under such formations, surplus labor was forced out of
the direct producers by means of political, legal or military coercion,
traditionally reinforced by the traditional bonds or duties between
masters and servants. In nuce, it is impossible to meaningfully speak
here of a separation between the economic and political spheres.
Economic functions can only be carried out by directly political
means.
In capitalism, by contrast, a gap does open up between these two
domains. On the one hand, surplus extraction substantially divests
itself of its former, extra-economic appendages, and is instead
enforced according to a purely economic logic (although Marxs ulti-
mate point, of course, which Meiksins Wood reiterates, is that this
economy is thoroughly saturated by the political logic of class
struggle). Because the workers in capitalism are shorn of their own-
ership of the means of production, their labor can be extorted by
the compulsions of economic necessity alone. Forms of direct coer-

22 We refer especially here to The Separation of the Economic and the

Political in Capitalism, the first chapter of Meiksins Wood (1995), 1948.

44
cion, political, legal and military etc., are no longer required. Surplus
labor and surplus value are compelled and created by the politically
unadorned logic of commodity exchange. On the other hand, how-
ever, this does not mean that the political simply disappears from
the capitalist mode of production, for, as Meiksins Wood continues,
a coercive power and a structure of domination remain essential
(DAC: 2930). This is the role that is allocated to the autonomous
capitalist state: the economic logic of commodity exchange cannot
continue to reproduce itself in the absence of legal forms, a coercive
apparatus and police controls and interventions. The capitalist state
serves as the guarantor of the order and stability that is so much
required by the capitalist economy. The economic and the political
ultimately function in capitalism according to a neat division of labor
between private capitalist appropriation and public state coercion.
Now, this account of the specifically capitalist separation between
the economic and the political, no doubt because it is itself derived
from the work of the later Marx, clearly makes an advance upon the
contradictory claims of the early writings. The separation between
the two spheres is no longer explained here as the simple conse-
quence of political revolution, nor is the political conceived as the
mere abstract alienation of an immediate economic reality. Instead,
this economic reality is understood in its specificity, that is, accord-
ing to the indivisible logics of commodity exchange and class strug-
gle, and the role of the political located in relation to it.

and the Difficulties it Encounters

The problem is that, in conceiving this role as essentially and exclu-

sively coercive, Meiksins Wood once again like the early Marx
seems to drive an explanatory wedge between the two spheres
whose simultaneous separation and interconnection she is seeking
to understand. For a crucial question immediately arises here: if the
functions of the capitalist state are purely coercive, why is this not
spontaneously perceived to be the case, that is, if this state consti-
tutes nothing more than the coercive arm of capitalist appropriation,
where does it derive its legitimacy from (for surely no one can deny
that this legitimacy poses a very severe problem for any putatively
Marxist analysis)? Meiksins Woods account seems to come danger-

45
ously close to ignoring this question by implying that the political
state serves as the merely coercive supplement to an economic logic
of commodity exchange which functions, more or less happily, on
its own terms.
This account, we want to suggest, is much too simple. Not because
the state does not ultimately fulfill a series of coercive functions, for
it certainly does this, but instead because in order for this coer-
cion, and the purely economic coercion that it supplements, even
to be accepted by those it coerces it must also serve a series of
legitimating or hegemonic functions. These functions can only be
properly comprehended, we would claim, when the political state is
conceived not only as the coercive supplement of the economy, but
also as the doubled political reinforcement of an economic logic, and
as an economic subject, that is doubled or divided within itself.
What does this mean? Once again, this is not an easy question to
answer. For a full and precise response we will have to wait until
section 3 below. For the moment, it suffices to say that the economic
logic of capitalism is doubled or divided because the principal subject
of this economy, the proletarian worker, is split between the com-
modity of his labor-power, which he freely and equally sells to
the capitalist for a wage, and the real or actual labor which he per-
forms, and which produces surplus-value for the capitalist by creat-
ing more value than was paid for it in its form as a commodity. It
is precisely this division of the economic subject, of the proletarian
laborer, that the political state reinforces, in two main ways.
Firstly, this state derives a great deal of its hegemony and legiti-
macy from those ideas of Freedom, Equality, Property and Ben-
tham (C1: 280) that are inherent in the economic reality of com-
modity exchange itself, and that inescapably determine the activity
of the subjects of this reality. Secondly, it reinforces the formal or
abstract legitimacy of these conceptions by framing its own activi-
ties within the pseudo-concrete context of nationality and its vari-
ous appurtenances (we use inverted commas here because it should
be obvious that formal legitimacy is the product of very real pro-
cesses of economic abstraction, and pseudo-concreteness of very
real, historical processes of identity formation; if this were not the
case, the capitalist division of the subject, the major theme of this
book, could not even be said to pose a real problem).

46
 What we have here, then, are the beginnings of the outlines of
an adequate account of the capitalist separation between the politi-
cal and the economic, between the two spheres that we have seen
Marx define in his early writings as the imaginary state and real civil
society. This separation can only be properly understood, we have
claimed in anticipation of one of the central arguments of section
3 of this chapter as the supplement and, more importantly, the
reinforcement of a separation, split or division already existing in the
subject of economic reality itself. In other words, it is only possible to
coherently comprehend the interrelationship between the spheres
of the imaginary and the real at least in its modern, post-feudal
form, which is exactly what Marx is concerned with when both
are located within the functioning of the capitalist economy itself,
as the respective concepts of labor-power (the imaginary) and labor
(the real). One of the fundamental consequences of this, moreover,
as we will see in section 3, is that it becomes impossible to think
of the imaginary and the real as two separate spheres with the
former being construed as the simple alienation (as in this section)
or ideological misrepresentation (as in section 2 below) of the lat-
ter or of the economy as a simple economy. Capitalism cannot be
defined in purely economic terms and this is the whole point of
Marxs critique of political economy because it is a social or sym-
bolic order, or mode of production, that produces and reproduces
itself by combining and recombining, knotting and re-knotting, the
imaginary commodity of labor-power with the real labor of the pro-
letarian subject, and hence by perpetually dividing and doubling this
subject along these very lines.

A Series of Evasions

We will be hearing much more of all this a little later on. All that we
need to do now, however, is return to our reconstruction of the early
Marx in order to see that, in the absence of such an account of the
social or symbolic combination and knotting of the imaginary and
the real, his attempt at an articulation of the relationship between
these last two concepts continues to falter. We have already seen
how, having recognized the necessity of an explanatory link between
the real of modern civil society and the imaginary of the modern

47
political state, Marx consistently fails to establish its terms. We can
conclude this section by quickly showing the two ways more or
less chronologically successive in the early writings in which Marx
symptomatically responds to this failure.
In the Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State, Marx retains
Hegels central distinction between the state and civil society, con-
ceives the former as imaginary and the latter as real, as we have
been emphasizing throughout, and somehow seems to think the real
is capable of liberating itself from its imaginary alienation in order
to simply emerge in an entirely lucid and self-transparent form. This
is the way in which the very early Marx conceives of both democ-
racy and a new conception of representation that he believes will be
brought to fruition by universal suffrage.
Democracy, we learn, is the solution to the riddle of every con-
stitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground:
real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in
essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus pos-
ited as the peoples own creation. The constitution is in appearance
what it is in reality: the free creation of man (CHDS: 87). Under a
universal suffrage that Marx still eagerly awaits civil society is the
real political society and the legislature entirely ceases to be impor-
tant as a representative body. The legislature is representative only
as in the sense that every function is representative. For example, a
cobbler is my representative in so far as he satisfies a social need,
just as every definite form of social activity, because it is a species
activity, represents only the species. That is to say, it represents a
determination of my own being just as every man is representative
of other men. In this sense he is a representative not by virtue of
another thing which he represents but by virtue of what he is and
does (CHDS: 18990). It only needs to be said here that the passage
of history has not been too kind on either of these quotations.
In the rest of the early writings, there occurs a progressive Feuerba-
chian displacement of the location of the terms of the imaginary and
the real. Rather than these terms continuing to designate the Hege-
lian couple of state and civil society, civil society itself increasingly
comes to be comprehended as imaginary, and the real is increasingly
posited as a putative human essence or species-being that this imagi-
nary society is somehow supposed to have alienated. We can only
mark here a few of the many signposts along this way.

48
 In the Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks and, even more
clearly, On the Jewish Question, the idea that the state imaginarily
alienates the real of civil society is still present, but this is now con-
ceived as the higher-level expression or complication of civil soci-
etys more fundamental alienation of true humanity. In the first texts,
where Marx first really begins to use a language of humanism, we
are told that the distinction between a system of Estates and a sys-
tem of universal representation only expresses at the political level
the distinction between the rule of man and the rule of private prop-
erty (LFGY: 208). In the second, Marx claims simultaneously that
human emancipation [will] be completed only when real, indi-
vidual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself, when social
force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force
(JQ: 234), and that [a]s soon as society succeeds in abolishing the
empirical essence of Judaism the market and the conditions which
give rise to it the Jew [] will have become humanized and the
conflict between mans individual sensuous existence and his spe-
cies-existence will have been superseded (JQ: 241).
In the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels
Philosophy of Right, the conflict between state and society gradually
exits the picture, in order that battle can be joined instead between
man and human society (and what, we might ask, is the essential dif-
ference between them?): [t]he role of emancipator therefore passes
in a dramatic movement from one class of the French people to the
next, until it finally reaches that class which no longer realizes social
freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet cre-
ated by human society, but rather by organizing all the conditions
of human existence on the basis of social freedom (CHPR: 2556).
In Germany, things are even clearer, or so Marx thinks when he
famously discovers the proletariat there as that sphere of society
which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a
human one, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and
which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption
of humanity (CHPR: 256).
Finally, in the Excerpts from James Mills Elements of Politi-
cal Economy and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
it becomes absolutely apparent that this real proletarian man (and
we can only wonder at the supposed compatibility of these last two
terms!) is being imaginarily alienated by an inhuman society of

49
wage-labor, money, credit and exchange. Marxs descriptions and
diagnoses of this alienation, and his poetic tirades against its dehu-
manizing effects, are so well known that they do not need to be
quoted here again. In their place, we can just cite a couple of exam-
ples of the contradictory formulations that Marxs construction com-
pels him to engage in. [J]ust as society itself produces man as man,
he claims, so it is produced by him (EPM: 349); or, a little later,
[m]y universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that
whose living form is the real community, society, whereas at present
universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such
in hostile opposition to it (EPM: 350). But how can society both
produce man and, at the same time, be preceded and determined
in its productions by nothing other than man himself? And, simi-
larly, how can universal consciousness simply express real com-
munity and society if, at the same time, it serves to function, at least
for the moment, as nothing more than the abstraction from and
hostile opposition to this real life? Marxs formulations seem to
presuppose the abstract opposition between two forms of society: an
imaginary or inessential form, which determines man accidentally
and inauthentically (this form corresponds, of course, to the society
of wage-labor, money, credit and exchange), and a real or essential
form which, paradoxically, both underlies these determinations and
always escapes from them in its indefatigable readiness to emerge as
an unadulterated sociality per se.
When the early Marx defines communism (EPM: 34858) and
the purely human production that is supposed to be coterminous
with it (EJME: 2778) in the very terms of this sociality, the unde-
niable beauty of his descriptions should not be allowed to blind us to
their fundamental theoretical nor, of course, practical-political inad-
equacy.

50
 2. The Imaginary and the Real (Part Two):
from the Theses on Feuerbach to
the 1859 Preface

In the preceding section, we saw how Marxs first confrontation with

the problematic of a subject divided between the spheres of the imag-
inary and the real resulted in a double impasse. In his early writings,
Marx either conceives the political state as the simple imaginary
alienation of the real of civil society, thus frustrating his own demand
for a compelling explanatory link between the two domains, or in
a complete displacement of the designated location of the imaginary
and the real he conceives civil society itself as the imaginary alien-
ation of a supposedly real human essence or sociality, with all the
theoretical inconsistency that this inevitably entails.
What we want to do in this section is examine the nature of Marxs
second confrontation with this same problematic. Once again, we
will be the witnesses to a crucial and symptomatic displacement.
The middle period Marx, we will claim, consistently veers between
two fundamental, and fundamentally incoherent, positions. On the
one hand, the subject is understood to be split between the real, eco-
nomic and material, conditions of its existence and its imaginary, or,
in Marxs new terms, ideological (mis)representation of them. On
the other hand, it is construed to be divided between the real forces
of production that represent it and the, at times, imaginary fettering
of these forces by existent relations of production.
In fact, as we will see, it is somewhat misleading even to talk here
of a splitting or division of the subject. In Marxs early writings, the
terms of such a splitting are clear and explicit, even if ultimately
inconsistent. Marx himself states, on a number of occasions, that the
subject lives a double life, an imaginary one in the state, and a real
one in civil society. In his middle period, however, things become a
little more complicated because the subject only ever really appears,
and this alternately, on a single side of each of the divisions that
are supposed to determine it. In the opposition between real condi-
tions of existence and their imaginary (mis)representation, the sub-
ject takes its place, as the seat of ideological consciousness, on the
side of the latter. In the opposition between forces of production and
relations of production, the subject is subsumed by the former, their

51
exponential growth serving as the putative guarantee of the unfold-
ing of its own historical powers.
In the combination of the two fundamental tenets of Marxs middle
period, then, the subject does not so much appear as split, divided
or doubled, but instead as the somewhat schizophrenic bearer of
a perpetual sliding between the two contrasting poles of the pure
imaginary of ideological consciousness and the pure real of
the forces of production. And it is of course not a coincidence that,
in Marxs view, all non-proletarian forms of subjectivity find them-
selves attracted to the imaginary pole, against which the supposedly
pure real of the proletariat is seen to exert its necessary pull.

The Theses on Feuerbach: the Human Essence is

the Ensemble of the Social Relations

Before we enter any further, however, into the intricacies of this

oscillation between the imaginary and the real, it is important to
briefly emphasize here that, in any attempted overview of the devel-
opment of Marxs thought, what we are referring to as its middle
period undoubtedly has to be understood as something of a theo-
retical relapse. For in 1845, just after the completion of the last of
his early writings, and just prior to the composition of The German
Ideology the first text of Marx in which the subject is simultane-
ously defined as both ideological consciousness and force of produc-
tion Marx had jotted down a series of elliptical but fundamental
fragments that would somewhat inappropriately come to be known,
following Engels description, as the Theses on Feuerbach.
With one short but devastating formulation, the culmination of
all the fragmentary arguments surrounding it, Marx both lays waste
here to the inconsistencies of his former theoretical humanism and,
more importantly, sets out the criteria by which to judge the theo-
retical consistency of all of his future research criteria which, as
we will very shortly see, he immediately begins to depart from: [i]n
its reality, Marx says, [the human essence] is the ensemble of the
social relations (TF: 423).
The negative effects of this statement are obvious. Marx can no
longer oppose real human essence and sociality to the imaginary
social forms of its alienation, because this essence is now seen to

52
consist of nothing more than the social structure of its own deter-
minations. Its positive influence is even more momentous. For what
Marx achieves with this formulation, as a number of other commen-
tators have definitively shown,23 is a thoroughgoing destitution and
replacement of every traditional philosophical opposition between
subject and object, or between the respective representation of these
two poles by idealism and materialism. The subjective can no longer
be separated from the objective because its very core is objectively
or socially constituted. And correspondingly, the objective can no
longer be separated from the subjective because according to its very
definition it includes and constitutes subjects.
It is precisely this revolutionary insight, however, that Marx ignores
in his middle period. For what he effectively does here is re-erect a
simple, and all too philosophical, division between the subjective
and the objective, with the important, and hugely paradoxical, pro-
viso that the subject itself is seen to hover between both poles. The
subjective proper, at least in its non-proletarian manifestations, is
redefined as imaginary or ideological consciousness. The objective is
redefined as the real movement of the forces of production, which is
implicitly seen to determine the evolution of a proletarian subjectiv-
ity supposedly free of all imaginary or ideological constraints.
What could have compelled Marx to enact such an astonishing
theoretical regression? The Theses provide the hint of an answer.
Feuerbach, Marx tells us, starts out from the fact of religious self-
alienation, of the duplication [Verdopplung] of the world into a reli-
gious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the reli-
gious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches
itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the
clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions
within this secular basis (TF: 422). If the human essence is nothing
other than the ensemble of social relations, this is nonetheless not
the whole story, because this ensemble is split, doubled and divided
within itself. Whereas Feuerbach presupposes the simple self-iden-
tity of the secular basis, and thus thinks it easy to collapse the
religious world back into it, Marx poses a new and different set
of questions: how is it that the secular basis becomes non-identi-

23 See Labica (1980) and Balibar (1995).

53
cal with itself, and how does this non-identity, this cleavage and
contradiction, give rise to an apparently independent realm in the
clouds? In what follows, we want to suggest that the theoretical
retreat of Marxs middle period, its thematization of a series of rup-
tures and breaks between imaginary or ideological consciousness
and real conditions of existence, between real forces of production
and their occasionally imaginary relational fetters, constitutes the
failed attempt at an answer.

The 1859 Preface and the Double Occlusion of the Subject

It is perhaps best, then, to begin at the end. Writing in 1859, and

summarizing his view of the interaction between the two conceptual
couples that dominate his middle period economic base and the
superstructure of ideological consciousness; forces and relations of
production Marx very famously tells us that:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into

definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations
of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their
material forces of production. The totality of these relations of produc-
tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which cor-
respond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production
of material life conditions the general process of social, political and
intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their conscious-
ness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces
of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production
or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms with the
property relations within the framework of which they have operated
hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such
transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the mate-
rial transformation of the economic conditions of production, which
can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal,

54
 political, religious, artistic or philosophic in short, ideological forms
in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as
one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so
one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness,
but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the
contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the
social forces of production and the relations of production. No social
order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is
sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of produc-
tion never replace older ones before the material conditions for their
existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Man-
kind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve,
since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises
only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or
at least in the course of formation. (CCPE: 201)

Now, any reasonably careful reading and interrogation of this pas-

sage which, from the later Engels to Stalin, to give only two of the
most notable examples, has been unfairly taken to encapsulate the
hard methodological kernel of the Marxian worldview24 will reveal
that it gives rise to a whole host of insoluble problems. As we obvi-
ously cannot consider all of them here, their scope being enormous,
we will confine ourselves instead to a single question, the one that
most clearly concerns us. In this grand scheme of historical develop-
ment and transformation with its three central terms (ideological
consciousness, relations of production and forces of production) allo-
cated according to two central conceptual oppositions between the
imaginary and the real (ideological consciousness versus relations
of production; relations of production versus forces of production;
with the relations of production appearing first as real and then as
imaginary) where is it possible to locate the subject? There are two
conceivable answers to this question, one of them explicitly stated in
Marxs text, the other only necessarily implied.

24 Marx himself undoubtedly contributed to this encapsulation. Firstly, of

course, by writing the passage. But, secondly, by referring to it as a summation
of his views in a footnote of Das Kapital (C1: 175). As will hopefully become
clear in the following section, the text is entirely inappropriate in this latter
context.

55
 The first answer, then, is that the subject or, at the risk of par-
ody, the true subjectivity of the subject belongs, as consciousness,
to the ideological superstructure of society. The evidence for this
is overwhelming: the relations of production are independent of
[the] will of men; the different forms of social consciousness cor-
respond to the legal and political superstructure that arises out of
the real economic foundation of society; the consciousness of men
is determined by their social existence, with the strange implication,
retained from the idealism that it is supposed to invert, that the two
belong to entirely different spheres; and finally, in revolutionary
transformations of society economic conditions advance according
to their own logic, which can be determined with the precision of
natural science, while men become conscious of it in an ideologi-
cal form.
Weighing against this evidence, however, and especially against
the very last claim, is another, diametrically opposed implication. If
social revolutions happen in the way in which Marx describes them
here with the fundamental development of the material forces of
production gradually overturning both extant relations of production
and the ideological superstructure accompanying them and if these
revolutions have to possess an agent, or, at the very least, a subjec-
tive bearer, something which Marx would surely not want to dispute,
then this agent or bearer must be equal to the development of the
forces of production themselves. In revolutionary transformations of
society a short circuit must occur between the subject, elsewhere
confined to the imaginary or ideological consciousness of this trans-
formation, and the pure unfolding real of the forces of production.
The subject appears here, then, in a double mode, once as imagi-
nary in the form of a superstructural ideological consciousness that
is seen to correspond to the real economic basis of the relations of
production and once as real in a form equivalent to that develop-
ment of the forces of production that is ultimately seen to dissolve
all those relations of production, and their corresponding ideological
superstructures, that have themselves now become imaginary fet-
ters. But the problem is that in neither case does Marx take the sub-
ject seriously as a subject. The metaphor that he uses is enormously
significant: [j]ust as one does not judge an individual by what he
thinks about himself, so one cannot judge [] a period of transfor-
mation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness

56
must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the
conflict existing between the social forces of production and the rela-
tions of production.
The first half of this sentence erects an absolute separation
between the reality of an individual and what he thinks about him-
self, between the real movement of transformation of a society and
the consciousness that its members have of it. Ideological conscious-
ness (accepting for the moment this hugely problematical term) is
reduced here, in a radically implausible manner, to the status of a
meaningless epiphenomenon. Are our judgments of a person really
indifferent to this persons opinion of himself? If an imbecile is con-
vinced of his genius, is this conviction not likely to confirm us in our
verdict of imbecility? Or, in a slightly different register, just imagine a
psychoanalysis in which the analysands take on himself can be said
to count for absolutely nothing. Similarly (and once again accept-
ing the distinction between the two levels only for the sake of argu-
ment), is it really possible to cleanly separate the reality of a period
of transformation from the ideas that people have of it? What, for
example, was the reality of German fascism?
The sentences second half demands that a consciousness already
effectively condemned as irrelevant be explained as a consequence
of the contradiction and conflict between forces and relations of
production. Essentially, however, even if there is a contradiction,
there is no real conflict. The real forces of production, and the rev-
olutionary subjectivity implicitly associated with them, just expo-
nentially increase until a point is reached when the now imaginary
relations of production can no longer support their pressure. In this
loaded contest between the imaginary and the real, social revolution
occurs no matter what.
In the 1859 Preface Marx explicitly treats the subject as purely
imaginary, and implicitly as purely real in both cases reducing it
to a condition of complete superfluousness. In the remainder of this
section, we want to make clear that this oscillation of the subject
between the two contrasting spheres of the imaginary and the real
is entirely typical of Marxs whole middle period. We will proceed
in two main stages. Firstly, we will consider the coherence of Marx
and Engels The German Ideology, the first Marxist text that attempts
to relate and oppose the real economic basis of society to the imag-
inary or ideological superstructural consciousness of it. And, sec-

57
ondly, we will briefly discuss The Communist Manifesto and two of
Marxs historical writings, The Class Struggles in France, 184850
and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In these texts, it
will become especially apparent how Marx opposes to the imaginary
and ideological forms of non-proletarian consciousness a revolution-
ary proletarian subjectivity implicitly conceived as the incarnation of
the undiluted real of the forces of production.

The German Ideology and the Irresolvable Problematic of

Economic Base and Ideological Superstructure

Let us begin, then, with The German Ideology. tienne Balibar has
claimed that the problematic of ideology articulated in this text can-
not properly be comprehended in terms of any supposed derivation
of the imaginary or ideological superstructure of society from its real
economic, material and productive base. The order in which the
text is presented, he contends, is extremely misleading. Because its
polemical part, a lengthy critique of Stirner, appears last (although
it was in fact written first), and because its account of the genesis of
ideology appears first (although it was in fact written last), the false
impression is created that the metaphor of base and superstructure
is the books centrally organizing motif. What this ignores is that
Marx and Engels are much more concerned with two problems that
Stirners radically nominalistic critique of conceptual domination,
albeit itself ultimately indefensible, had forced them to confront: the
problems, following Balibars terminology, of the power of ideas
and the power of abstraction, which come to include, for Marx and
Engels, the more concrete questions of the state, the dominant ide-
ology and the division between manual and intellectual labor (PM:
3356).
Now, the problem with this understanding of The German Ide-
ology, we want to suggest, is that it simply begs the most funda-
mental questions. For, as Balibar himself freely admits (PM: 356;
4253), the animating intention of the text remains that of providing
an account of the real material, economic or productive genesis
of both the power of ideas and the power of abstraction, or, if you
like, of the imaginary, and everything depends upon the nature and
coherence of this account. That is, although Balibar is certainly cor-

58
rect in his assertion that The German Ideology does not just baldly
state the supposedly explanatory metaphor of economic base and
ideological superstructure, but also takes up a whole series of more
concrete and specific questions, he is wrong to simply detach the
asking of these questions from the problematic of base and super-
structure, because it is ultimately according to this metaphor that
Marx and Engels attempt, and finally fail, to answer them.
Marx and Engels cannot provide any compelling account of the
real genesis of imaginary ideas and abstractions because, in their
ultimate dependence upon the metaphor of base and superstructure,
they allocate the real and the imaginary to two entirely separate lev-
els, the interrelationship of which must as a consequence remain
mysterious. In precisely this sense, Balibars interpretation of the text
is nothing more than a faithful reproduction, in microcosm, of its
own insoluble contradictions. Balibars descriptions of the state, the
dominant ideology and the division between material and mental
labor consistently rely upon exactly that simple and incoherent divi-
sion between the real and the imaginary between production and
ideas, reality and consciousness, materiality and thought that he
originally wanted to exorcise with the distinction between the eco-
nomic base of society and its ideological superstructure.25 Our pri-
mary concern here, however, is not the reproduction but the original,
so let us turn to the words of Marx and Engels themselves.
What these words immediately reveal, if any further confirmation
of this were needed, is that we are once again dealing here with an
absolutely explicit thematization of the simultaneous division and
relation between the two domains of the real and the imaginary. The
premises from which we begin, Marx and Engels tell us, are not
arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction
can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals,
their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both
those which they find already existing and those produced by their
activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical
way (GI: 42).

25 This division is in fact typical of more or less the whole of Balibars

work.

59
 On the one hand, Marx and Engels make a fundamental distinction
between the real conditions of individuals, which can be determined
in an empirically precise manner (we can hear an echo here of the
precision of natural science of the 1859 Preface), and the imagi-
nary abstraction of them, an abstraction that apparently takes place
in an alternative, non-empirical or ethereal realm (the echo here is of
the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this con-
flict and fight it out). On the other hand, the very strictness of this
distinction has to some extent be seen to dissolve, because imagi-
nary abstraction still has to be conceived as the abstraction from real
conditions, with all the implications of an explanatory link that this
necessarily involves.
It is the vacillation between these two conflicting presuppositions
that will centrally concern us here. As a result, we will ignore those
deservedly famous sections of The German Ideology that seek to
specify the real material and productive conditions of individuals and
focus instead on the problems that arise when Marx and Engels try
to explain how these conditions give rise to forms of consciousness
that imaginarily or ideologically reflect or invert them (as we will
see, there is another significant vacillation between the apparently
contradictory implications of these last two terms: reflection and
inversion). These problems emerge at four major points in the text.
Firstly, when Marx and Engels attempt to advance a general defini-
tion of ideological inversion and, in the remaining three cases as
we have already seen Balibar point out when they attempt to con-
cretize this definition by offering more specific analyses of the divi-
sion between material and mental labor, the state and the ruling or
dominant ideology. We can deal, then, with each point in turn.

The Insoluble Contradictions of Ideological Inversion

Marx and Engels general description of the imaginary or ideological

inversion of the real runs as follows:

definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter

into [] definite social and political relations. Empirical observation
must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any
mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and politi-

60
 cal structure with production. The social structure and the State are
continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but
of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other peoples
imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materi-
ally, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presupposi-
tions and conditions independent of their will. The production of ideas,
of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the
material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of
real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear
at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same
applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics,
laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men are the pro-
ducers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. real, active men, as they are
conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of
the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Con-
sciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and
the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology man
and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,
this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process
as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-
process. (GI: 467)

We can break this argument down into three separate claims

that fit rather awkwardly together. Marx and Engels first conten-
tion relying upon an unelucidated temporal connotation that runs
throughout the quotation is that originally there was no real differ-
ence between ideological consciousness and reality. The one is, at
first, directly interwoven with, the direct efflux of, the other;
consciousness is not removed from existence, it is, inescapably,
conscious existence. The word ideological only seems to serve
here as a neutral, non-pejorative designation of the realm of ideas. It
might even be better to talk, at this stage, of ideational conscious-
ness. In a second moment, however, this consciousness is said to
become ideological in the strict, pejorative sense, that is, it comes to
invert, distort or misrepresent reality; in all ideology men and their
circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura. Thirdly,
Marx and Engels conclude, if ideological consciousness does, in this
second moment, practice an inversion of reality, this is not the result
of its own entirely autonomous activity, but instead the simple rep-

61
etition, reinforcement or redoubling of an inversion already inherent
in reality itself; this phenomenon arises just as much from their
historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life-process. If the state, as an ideological con-
struct of which more below inverts reality, this inversion is con-
tinually evolving out of the real material and productive activity of
individuals.
Now, the main problem with these three claims is that the last
one thoroughly deconstructs the very distinction between ideological
consciousness and reality that organizes the other two (the second
claim explicitly states this distinction; the first, we would argue, pre-
supposes it even in its contention that there is no original difference
between the two domains, for if there is no real difference, why are
there two domains at all?) If the inversion that ideological conscious-
ness carries out upon reality ultimately depends upon an inversion
already existing in reality itself, then this reality in an enormously
paradoxical fashion must in some sense be said to contain or antici-
pate the division between itself and ideological consciousness. But if
this is the case, what is reality and what is ideological consciousness?
How is it possible to make a coherent conceptual distinction between
the two spheres in the first place?
In a purely negative sense, Marx and Engels third claim functions
as something of a deus ex machina. Having established an original
identity between consciousness and reality, and having asserted that
this later becomes a non-identity, they are confronted by the neces-
sity of accounting for the passage between the two moments. And
they can only do this by tracing the non-identity between conscious-
ness and reality back to a non-identity within reality itself, demolish-
ing in the process precisely that opposition that they are attempting
to articulate.
This demolition could also have, of course, positive consequences.
For what Marx and Engels are implicitly demanding here is an expla-
nation that their very own language functions to deny. If reality is
divided and inverted within itself, then what we require is a precise
account of this division, and not a falling back into the distinction
between ideological consciousness and reality that it is supposed to
produce, but which in fact we have already seen it to undermine.
Unfortunately, Marx and Engels choose to pursue the second course,
as the passages that follow the above quotation make abundantly

62
clear. We set out, they say, from real, active men, and on the
basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of
the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms
formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their
material life-process; [m]orality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest
of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus
no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no his-
tory, no development; but men, developing their material production
and material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their
thinking and the products of this thinking. Life is not determined by
consciousness, but consciousness by life (GI: 47).
Ideological consciousness leads a strange double life. On the one
hand, it is conceptually distinguished from reality, possessing an
undefined semblance of independence. On the other hand, this
semblance disappears, is revealed as a mere phantom, because
it is connected to reality by an explanatory link that is continually
posited but never, for reasons that we have already explored, seen
to arrive. The implication of all this seems to be that the content of
ideological consciousness is ultimately irrelevant. For if sometimes,
as we have seen, it is said to invert reality, here it appears as its
simple reflex or echo. Inversion or reflection, we can hear the
authors saying, does it really matter? After all, what we are dealing
with here are mere ideas.
In sum, then, Marx and Engels language of consciousness and
reality has to be seen to veer between two contradictory, but closely
intertwined, positions. Originally intended, as Balibar realizes, as an
explanation of how consciousness relates to reality (emerges from it,
reflects and echoes it, begins to invert it, etc., etc.), it ends up per-
haps necessarily, as a consequence of the philosophically unsustain-
able distinction between the two terms by simply opposing them
to one another as the spheres of the purely imaginary and the purely
real; or, as Marx and Engels symptomatically state, when [e]mpty
talk about consciousness ceases, [] real knowledge has to take its
place (GI: 48).

63
 The False Distinction between Mental and Material Labor

Marx and Engels more specific analyses do little more than con-
firm this contradictory pendulum-swing between the suggestion of
an explanatory relation and the ultimate frustration of it by means of
an opposition already inherent in the terms of the posited explana-
tion itself. Their first discussion of the division between material and
mental labor, for instance, again begins by establishing an original
and virtual identity between consciousness and social reality:

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical conscious-

ness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really
exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only
arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.
Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not
enter into relations with anything, it does not enter into any relation
at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation.
Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product,
and remains so as long as men exist at all. (GI: 51)

In a later and fundamental development, however, this original

and continuing social identity between consciousness and reality
opens out into an apparent conflict between them:

Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a
division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ide-
ologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards conscious-
ness can really flatter itself that it is something other than conscious-
ness of existing practice, that it really represents something without
representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a posi-
tion to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the forma-
tion of pure theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. But even if this
theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into contradiction with
the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social rela-
tions have come into contradiction with existing forces of production.
(GI: 512)

The difficulty confronting Marx and Engels here is, once again,
that of producing a satisfactory account of genesis. How do we get,

64
that is, from a first moment of original and fundamental identity to
a second moment of apparent or ideological non-identity or conflict?
Or how, we might ask, does the imaginary come to misrepresent
the real? Marx and Engels give the following response: there is an
apparent or imaginary division between consciousness and reality
because there is a real, social division between mental and material
labor. But how is it possible to distinguish between mental and mate-
rial labor in the absence of a prior distinction between consciousness
and reality?
Rather than providing an explanation of the way in which con-
sciousness comes to imaginarily or ideologically misrepresent reality,
Marx and Engels just displace the problem to another level by para-
doxically locating the very distinction between consciousness and
reality, or between the imaginary and the real so defined, within
social reality itself as a supposed division between two strictly dif-
ferent kinds of labor. Mental labor is defined as the imaginary work
of ideological consciousness; material labor as the real work that
is, at first, essentially free of ideology, but that in some way comes,
in turn, to be imaginarily misrepresented by it. The impression is
created that real, material work simply follows its own indepen-
dent and undiluted course, and that ideological or mental work is
only required in order to lend to it a second-order or supplementary
veneer of justification the designation of priests as the first form
of ideologists is, in this respect, extremely symptomatic.

The Ruse of the Ruling Ideology

When Marx and Engels use this account of the division between
material and mental labor in order to ground their description of the
dominant or ruling ideology, this impression of a clear-cut separa-
tion between the material sphere of reality and the ideal sphere of
ideas (even if it is supposed to exist within social reality itself;
and even if the latter sphere is supposed to function as the expres-
sion of the former) only receives a profound reinforcement:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time
its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material

65
 production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means
of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of
those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The
ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling
one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing
the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and there-
fore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the
extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in
its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as
producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the
ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch []
The division of labour [] manifests itself also in the ruling class as the
division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part
appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists,
who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their
chief source of livelihood), while the others attitude to these ideas and
illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the
active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions
and ideas about themselves. (GI: 645)

In both this quotation and the one cited above it, Marx and Engels
language of consciousness and reality upon which we have
seen their claim of a division between mental and material labor to
rely brings them dangerously close to a nave, Enlightenment con-
ception of ideology as the conscious and deliberate manipulation of
the powerless by the omnipotent powerful.26
On the one hand, of course, their words have to be interpreted as
being critical of this conception. For what Marx and Engels are con-
cerned to demonstrate is an organic connection between material
and productive reality and the conscious production of ideas a con-
nection that the typical Enlightenment critique of ideas is not even
remotely sensitive to. On the other hand, however, they seem to be
inexorably tipped back in the direction of such a conception by means

26 For more on this Priests and Despots theory of ideology, and Marx and
Engels relationship to it, see Althusser (1969 and 2001), 2345 and 100, respec-
tively, and Balibar (1995), 46.

66
of the very separation between the two levels that they are attempt-
ing to connect. This becomes clearest in the incredibly clumsy lan-
guage that the second quotation is occasionally compelled to lapse
into. Among other things, we are told, the individuals composing
the ruling class possess consciousness, and therefore think; some of
these individuals, as a consequence of the privilege of their thought,
have the time to perfect the illusion of this class about itself, the
others are too busy for this, all of their activity accounted for by the
apparently thoughtless engagement with an apparently illusionless
reality. Once again, social reality is seen to unfold according to its
own, real and material, logic; in addition, and for no apparent rea-
son, it receives the imaginary or illusory blessing of its consciously
aware apologists.
The problem with this implication of a distinction and division
between consciousness and reality is not only as we have been
continually stressing throughout this section that it renders impos-
sible any coherent explanatory link between the two domains, fill-
ing in the explanatory gap with unsupported assertion (the ruling
ideas are nothing more, Marx and Engels baldy state, than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the domi-
nant material relationships grasped as ideas; but why, we should
inquire, are certain material relationships expressed and grasped
by certain ideas?27) For what this distinction also, and relatedly, pro-
hibits is any properly historical understanding of the functioning of,
and difference between, in Marxs own words, modes of production.
Neither the capitalist mode of production, nor any of its pre-capital-
ist predecessors, can be analytically dissected, that is, in terms of a
separation between material, productive or economic reality and the
consciously ideological misrepresentation of it.
In pre-capitalist social formations, as we have already seen in sec-
tion 1 (and preserving the terminology employed by Marx and Engels
only in order to reveal its redundancy), the operation of the econ-
omy can in no way be comprehended outside of its determination
by certain hierarchical ideas. The slave, for instance, does not just
work for his master, and then discover that, ex post facto, his work

27 This is, of course, a rhetorical question, because the point is to do away

tout court with the very language of material relationships and ideas.

67
has been justified by his denomination as a slave; it is this very
denomination that first sets his labor in motion, and without which
it is unthinkable. Similarly, in capitalism, the ideas of Freedom,
Equality, Property and Bentham (C1: 280) to quote this shorthand
formulation once again are not used to ideologically misrepresent
and legitimate social or economic reality; they are inherent in the
very functioning of this reality, which in some sense has to be said to
misrepresent and legitimate (or, more precisely perhaps, reproduce)
itself.

The Semblance of the State

We will have much more to say about these issues later on. For the
moment, however, it suffices to say that Marx and Engels distinc-
tion between consciousness and reality is hopelessly inadequate for
both conceptual and historical reasons, the two being, of course,
ultimately indissociable. In The German Ideology, this twofold inad-
equacy reaches its apogee when Marx and Engels try to define the
state as the representative of a more specific instantiation of the dom-
inant or ruling ideology, the general interest:

The division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest

of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal
interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And
indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagina-
tion, as the general interest, but first of all in reality, as the mutual
interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided
[] And out of this very contradiction between the interest of the indi-
vidual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form
as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and commu-
nity, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based,
however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomera-
tion such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger
scale and other interests and especially [] on the classes, already
determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men
separate out, and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from
this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy,
aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are

68
 merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different
classes are fought out among one another. (GI: 53)

The conceptual failure of this argument should by now be easy

to see. For it results, once more, from the contradiction inherent in
the simultaneous claim of both a relation and separation between
the spheres of the imaginary and the real. The passage describes a
vertiginous zigzag from one contention to the other. At first, we are
told that the contradiction between the particular and communal
interest exists not in the imagination, but in reality. This real con-
tradiction is then said to give rise to the independent form of the
state, which represents an illusory communal life both divorced
from real interests yet, at the same time, based in real ties. Finally,
struggles within the state are defined as the illusory forms of real
struggles between classes.
A number of questions immediately arise, all of them focused
around the same problem of articulating the supposed transition
from the real to the imaginary, or vice versa; and all of them remain-
ing unanswered. If the communal interest exists in reality as the
mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour
is divided, why does this interest become illusory when it is repre-
sented by the state as the general interest? Similarly, how can the
state be both divorced from real interests and the product of real
ties? And if real class struggles appear in the state in an illusory form,
what is the precise process of transformation that occurs between the
two sides?
The consequence of the failure to answer these questions which
of course results from their being wrong and unanswerable in the
first place is an historically false universalization of the state as the
representative of the general interest. A very brief comparison of pre-
capitalist and capitalist modes of production will once again make
this apparent. For in pre-capitalist societies, if the state represents a
general interest at all, it is a general interest in a directly manifested
hierarchical ordering and subordination, something which turns the
adjective general, to say the least, into something of a misnomer.
In capitalist societies, by contrast, because direct hierarchical sub-
ordination is abandoned, the state can appear as the representative
of the general interest in a meaningful sense. But the problem for
Marx and Engels remains that the representation of this interest can

69
in no way be said to originally and fundamentally ensue either from
any real and simple mutual interdependence of individuals or from
any imaginary or illusory representation of this interdependence by
the state. Instead, as we will start to see in section 3, it has to be
construed as the product of one side of the division of the subject
within the capitalist economy itself which, to reiterate, can in no
sense be understood as a simple economy. More precisely, it is the
product of the Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham that is
inescapably attached to the subject as the seller of the commodity of
its labor-power; a sale ultimately compelled, of course, by an indirect
class hierarchy that its own functioning makes difficult to discern.

The Pure and Illusionless Real of

the Proletarian Subject; in The German Ideology

From the perspective of that problematic of the subject that centrally

concerns us here The German Ideology must ultimately be construed
as a massively disappointing text. As we have seen, Marx and Engels
repeatedly set themselves the task of explaining the genetic relation-
ship of the subject conceived as the bearer of imaginary or ideologi-
cal consciousness to its real, material and productive, conditions of
existence: the social organisation evolving directly out of production
and commerce, they say, in all ages forms the basis of the State and
the rest of the idealistic superstructure (GI: 57); similarly, the con-
ception of history that they defend depends upon their ability to
expound the real process of production [] as the basis of all history;
and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theo-
retical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy,
ethics, etc., etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by
which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its total-
ity (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on
one another) (GI: 58). It is precisely the separation between a real
economic basis and an imaginary or ideological superstructure of
consciousness, however, that renders impossible the very explana-
tion that they are looking for the real problem being, of course, the
very positing of an explanatory relation between two domains that
have originally been quite clearly and conceptually divided.

70
 The symptoms of this division, throughout Marxs middle period,
are prodigious. For if the subject is divided between its real condi-
tions of existence and its imaginary or ideological consciousness of
them, it is inevitably condemned to appear on either one side or the
other of this divide, that is, as either purely imaginary or purely real.
This is already pretty clear in The German Ideology itself. After having
earlier and explicitly located the subject at the superstructural level
of ideological consciousness, Marx and Engels go on to famously
claim that [c]ommunism is for us not a state of affairs which is to
be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the pres-
ent state of things (GI: 567). It quickly becomes apparent that this
real movement is nothing other than the movement of the ever-
expanding and increasing forces of production. As in the 1859 Pref-
ace, these forces of production enter into conflict with the relations
of production28 that are seen to fetter them, the cause or product of
this conflict being a propertyless mass (GI: 56) of proletarian labor-
ers whose really evolving revolutionary and communist conscious-
ness (GI: 94) will allow them to simply appropriate (GI: 92) the
forces of production that have developed alongside them. [T]hings
have now come to such a pass, Marx and Engels contend, that
the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive
forces; [t]his appropriation is first determined by the object to be
appropriated, and further determined by the persons appropriat-
ing. Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely
shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete
and no longer restricted self-activity (GI: 923). The ultimate point,
of course, has to be that the appropriating persons are absolutely
equal to that which they are supposed to appropriate. Proletarian
subjectivity far from being the product of imaginary or ideological
misrepresentation (even if it is still described as consciousness;
and even if the path from an absolute lack of self-activity to its com-
plete fulfillment remains totally mysterious) is the exact equivalent
of the real unfolding of the material forces of production. The subject

28 It should be mentioned here that Marx and Engels have not yet explicitly
developed in this text the concept of relations of production, but that the
concept of intercourse (Verkehr) already serves there essentially the same
function.

71
experiences a paradoxical collapse, from its superstructural heights
into its real and revolutionary economic depths.
In The Communist Manifesto, The Class Struggles in France and
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this paradoxical shut-
tling of the subject between the imaginary and the real is expressed
in equally unambiguous terms, and the implicit opposition between
the two spheres is granted a much more precise, but still hugely
problematical, political function.

The Communist Manifesto

The argument of The Communist Manifesto in the precise sense

that it interests us here can be divided into two strands that, at
first sight, appear to enter into contradiction with one another, only
in order to ultimately resolve themselves in favor of the first. On the
one hand, then, Marx and Engels effectively reduce the development
of the proletarian subject to the real evolution of the forces of pro-
duction. And, on the other hand, they seem to call the very political
simplicity of this reduction into question. As we will see, however,
the very terms of this questioning only serve to confirm the original
reduction.
The equation of the conditions of the proletarian subject with an
apparently pure and illusionless real is undoubtedly the motif that
dominates the main parts of the text. For Marx and Engels, of course,
it is the revolutionary bourgeoisie that bears the responsibility for the
production of these conditions, because for exploitation, veiled by
religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless,
direct, brutal exploitation (CM: 222); under the rule of this class,
[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of
life, and his relations with his kind (CM: 223). The bourgeoisie,
however, is itself only the bearer of the revolutionary forces of pro-
duction. Just as its own forces dissolved those feudal relations of
production that once acted as fetters upon them, so its own relations
will be destroyed in turn by their continuing expansion; [t]he weap-
ons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are
now turned against the bourgeoisie itself (CM: 226). Nevertheless,
a new class needs to arise that will perfectly represent these newly

72
expanded forces of production. Obviously, this is the role that is allo-
cated to the revolutionary proletariat; not only has the bourgeoisie
forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into
existence the men who are to wield these weapons the modern
working class the proletarians (CM: 226). This proletariat, unfold-
ing in frictionless harmony with the real forces of production that
it purely and simply harnesses and represents, will be happily and
healthily immune to any imaginary or ideological capture; competi-
tion between the workers will inexorably give way to their ever-ex-
panding union, the product of the inevitable equalization of their
wages and conditions (CM: 22930); [t]he proletarian is without
property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything
in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial
labour, modern subjection to capital [] has stripped him of every
trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so
many bourgeois prejudices (CM: 2312); the workers have nothing
of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all
previous securities (CM: 232); [t]he proletarians, most famously,
have nothing to lose but their chains (CM: 258).
In other parts of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels somehow seem to
recognize the radical implausibility of this thoroughgoing purification
of the proletarian subject. This recognition takes the form of a politi-
cal and organizational need to continually and consistently separate
the real interests of the proletarian movement from its potentially
imaginary or ideological overwriting. If this movement gets caught
up in the particularity of national struggles, for instance, the task is
to articulate the common interests of the entire proletariat, indepen-
dently of all nationality (CM: 234). Similarly, in every stage of the
struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, what urgently need to
be represented are the interests of the movement as a whole (CM:
234). Practically, there has to be an advanced and resolute com-
ponent of the working class that pushes forward all others (CM:
234). Theoretically, this component is strictly distinguished from
the remainder of this class by its clearly understanding the line of
march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the pro-
letarian movement (CM: 234), by an incisive capacity to separate,
within this movement, the wheat of the future from the chaff of the
present (CM: 257).

73
 The proletarian subject appears here, then, not as the simple
instantiation of the real, but in an apparently more realistic fash-
ion as divided between the real and the imaginary (or, in Marx and
Engels own words, the ideological). The problem, of course as we
have been consistently emphasizing throughout this section is that
the very nature of this division only functions in order to secure the
subjects ultimate reduction to the real. For, in the last instance, the
supposedly political capacity to distinguish between the imaginary
and the real is unequivocally said to be grounded in the putatively
real movement of history itself, which is seen to mercilessly overturn
all imaginary or ideological illusions. The communists, we are told,
merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an
existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under
our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all
a distinctive feature of Communism (CM: 235). The first sentence
of this passage not unreasonably equates historical movement with
class struggle; but the second sentence implicitly identifies the direc-
tion of this struggle with the ineluctably advancing movement of
the forces of production themselves a movement which Marx and
Engels ultimately construe, of course, as the deep cause of the aboli-
tion of both extant social relations and their supposedly imaginary or
ideological superstructural veneer.
The Communist Manifesto starts out, then, by reducing the prole-
tarian subject to the real logic of the forces of production. If it later
appears to query this reduction by suggesting that there is a poten-
tial imaginary or ideological capture of this subject that needs to be
politically combated it is only in order to finally confirm the very
separation and opposition between the imaginary and the real that
effectively determines it.

The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire

In the Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, the

analysis proceeds in a different direction, albeit on the basis of essen-
tially the same presuppositions. Both texts begin by reducing the
subject, this time in its non-proletarian manifestations (aristocratic,
bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and even at times peasant), to the sup-
posedly illusory or self-deceptive play of the political imaginary.

74
Against this apparently flimsy ideological background, the proletar-
ian revolution once again implicitly identified with the real unfold-
ing of the forces of production is gradually but necessarily, even in
the reverses that it experiences, seen to assert its seemingly irresist-
ible strength.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire, providing a theoretical summary of
his approach to the wide constellation of political forces confronting
him, Marx again takes recourse to the terminology of the imaginary
and the real, of ideological superstructure and economic base:

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of exis-
tence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed
sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire
class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of
the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they
are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that
they form the real motives and the starting-point of his activity [] as
in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says
of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one
must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations
of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their concep-
tion of themselves from their reality. (EBLB: 103)

Marxs language here is already very familiar to us. For it essen-

tially anticipates especially in the metaphorical line of separation
that it draws between what a man thinks and says of himself and
what he really is and does the much more definitive formulations
of the 1859 Preface. Because we have already interrogated these
formulations, we do not need to subject this language to any further
form of general critique. Instead, we want to show how it informs, in
a hugely problematical fashion, Marxs more concrete political and
economic analyses. And what is interesting here is that this language
emerges precisely in the context of such an analysis. Marx introduces
the concepts of the imaginary and the real, of the ideological super-
structure and the economic base, in order to thematize and theorize
the differences and also, as we will see, the similarities between
the Legitimists and the Orleanists, the two great factions, in the
sequence of historical events that he is dealing with, of the Party of

75
Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and
kept them apart from one another, he inquires:

nothing but lily and tricolour, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans,
different shades of royalism, was it their royalist faith at all? Under
the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and
lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-
scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and
smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate monarchy was merely the
political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the
July monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule
of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, there-
fore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions
of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast
between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed
property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities,
fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies,
convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the
other royal house, who is there that denies this? [] While Orlean-
ists and Legitimists, while each faction sought to make itself and the
other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which sepa-
rated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests
which forbade the unification of the two royal houses [] Orleanists
and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with the
same claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own
royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two
great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split landed property and
capital sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of
the other. (EBLB: 389)

If we read this passage carefully and the one that precedes it,
with which it is in fact intertwined (the parentheses that we have
introduced here mark the place of Marxs more general theoretical
reflections) we cannot fail to be struck by the peculiar inadequacy
of the claims that it is advancing. For if under the Bourbons, big
landed property had governed, if the Legitimate monarchy was
merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of
the soil; and if under the Orleans, capital had ruled, if the July
monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of

76
the bourgeois parvenus then why is Marx so keen to insist that,
in remaining attached to its particular royal house, each of these fac-
tions is illusorily or imaginarily deceiving itself about its real
motives and interests? Surely it would be much more appropriate
to recognize that there is a more organic connection between prin-
ciples and material conditions of existence than Marxs language
of base and superstructure is prepared to admit?
It is precisely Marxs continuing analysis of the Legitimists and
Orleanists that allows us to further draw out this connection, once
again in contradistinction, of course, to his directly stated theoreti-
cal pronouncements. For what Marx famously claims about these
two factions is that they are forced to become rpublicains malgr
eux (CSF: 140), republicans in spite of themselves: the only way
that each of these groups can successfully defend its class interests
is by allowing its royalism to give way, even at the same time as it
continues to be impotently pronounced, to the stuttering support for
the parliamentary republic (CSF: 889; 110; EBLB: 29; 845). Now,
according to the language of economic base and ideological super-
structure, what is happening here is that one form of the illusory
or imaginary representation of real motives and interests is being
replaced by another. We are moving, we might say, from a royalist
misrepresentation to a republican misrepresentation. How convinc-
ing is it, however, to claim that, in either case, real motives and
interests are being illusorily or imaginarily misrepresented?
Well, not very convincing at all, we want to suggest. For, in the
first case as we have already seen the peculiar royalist faith of
each faction serves as a perfectly adequate shorthand representation
of its peculiar material and economic interests (the Bourbon monarch
represents landed property and the Orleans monarch represents
capital). And, in the second case as Marx himself makes clear at
the end of the passage that we are quoting from here; thus implicitly
deconstructing the theoretical tenor of his entire argument this is
also true of their later republicanism (for this republicanism now
represents, also in a perfectly adequate shorthand form, a capital
that has effected a convergence between the two factions by coming
to determine the fundamental conditions of landed property itself):
[w]e speak, in speaking of the Legitimists and the Orleanists, Marx
tells us, of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed prop-
erty, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been ren-

77
dered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society.
Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusias-
tic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English
Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession
that they are enthusiastic only about rent (EBLB: 39).
If Marxs language of base and superstructure is obviously so inad-
equate to the task at hand, however, then why, we might inquire,
is he so very keen to insist upon it? What we want to argue here is
that Marx employs this language because it allows him to sublimi-
nally suggest whether consciously or not that all non-proletarian
forms of political and economic subjectivity are purely imaginary
and that, as against this, the proletarian form of political and eco-
nomic subjectivity is nothing more than a purely unfolding real. In
order to do this, however, Marx has to carry out precisely that fun-
damental displacement of terms that we have been critically analyz-
ing throughout this section. That is, he has to suggest that all non-
proletarian forms of political and economic subjectivity are illusory
or ideological because they correspond to relations of production
that have, to put it bluntly, passed their sell-by date. And he has to
suggest that the proletarian form of political and economic subjectiv-
ity is at least tendentially real29 because it corresponds to forces of
production that in the moment of their future triumph will explode
all now imaginary relations of production and their correspondingly
imaginary superstructures.
This displacement of terms undoubtedly constitutes the centrally
organizing leitmotif of both of the texts that we are dealing with

29 Marxs description of the various kinds of socialism bourgeois, petty-

bourgeois and doctrinaire (a list that corresponds to a famous and fuller
depiction in The Communist Manifesto (CM: 24558) makes clear that this
subjectivity can itself be subjected to a supposedly imaginary or ideological
capture. This obviously does not change the fact, however and, indeed, sim-
ply confirms that real or revolutionary socialism, which Marx calls com-
munism, unfolds in a simple accordance with the forces of production. This
socialism, Marx informs us, is the declaration of the permanence of the revo-
lution, the class dictatorship of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the
proletariat as the inevitable transit point to the abolition of class differences
generally, to the abolition of all the productive relations on which they rest,
to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of
production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social
connections (CSF: 1256).

78
here. And, because of this, it is clearly not possible to provide any-
thing near an exhaustive consideration of it. What we certainly can
do, however, is select a couple of examples that unequivocally illus-
trate its structuring logic. We can summarize Marxs attitude to all
of the non-proletarian forces arraigned before him by saying that he
describes them as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost
their bodies (EBLB: 36); ideological and superstructural shadows,
we can suppose, that have lost their reference to the firm body
of stably governing relations of production. And we can summarize
Marxs attitude to the proletariat itself by simply quoting two of his
most revealing extrapolations of its supposedly inherent revolution-
ary movement. The first passage is the opening passage of the Class
Struggles in France:

With the exception of a few short chapters, every important part of

the annals of the revolution from 1848 to 1849 carries the heading:
Defeat of the revolution! [] But what succumbed in these defeats was
not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages,
results of social relationships, which had not yet come to the point
of sharp class antagonisms persons, illusions, conceptions, projects,
from which the revolutionary party before the February revolution was
not free, from which it could be freed, not by the victory of February,
but only by a series of defeats [] In a word, revolutionary advance
made headway not by its immediate tragic-comic achievements, but on
the contrary by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution,
by the creation of an opponent, by fighting whom the party of revolt
first ripened into a real revolutionary party. (CSF: 33)

The second passage can be found towards the end of the Eigh-
teenth Brumaire, in the context of Marxs concluding discussion of
the coup dtat of Louis Bonaparte. Even if the immediate and pal-
pable result of this coup was the victory of Bonaparte over parlia-
ment, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force
without words over the force of words, it nonetheless contains
within itself, Marx claims, the germ of the triumph of the proletar-
ian revolution. For, as he very famously continues:

the revolution is thorough. It is still journeying through purgatory. It

does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 it had completed one

79
 half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First it
perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it.
Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces
it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole
target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And
when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will
leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: Well burrowed, old mole!
(EBLB: 1067)

In both of these passages and with a logic that can only strike us
today as being more than a little peculiar the proletarian revolution
is essentially seen to be responsible for its own opposition. Every
imaginary containment of this revolution, we are compelled to con-
clude (with this containment being effected by both obsolete ideolog-
ical superstructures and obsolete economic relations of production),
is nothing more than a straw man erected by the unstoppable power
of its real development (by the real development of nothing less than
the forces of production themselves).
Now, it should already be fairly apparent that this logic of a con-
flict or contradiction between obsolete ideological superstructures
and obsolete economic relations of production, on the one hand,
and inherently revolutionary forces of production, on the other, does
not provide a compelling picture of either the dominant or the domi-
nated classes in any social situation. With regard to the dominant
classes, for instance in this case the Legitimists and the Orlean-
ists we have already seen Marx reveal (contrary to his own theo-
retical intuitions) that, in the two distinct moments of their history
that he effectively describes, their political and economic subjectiv-
ity corresponds to neither of the two instances (obsolete ideological
superstructures and obsolete economic relations of production) here
defined. Instead, it corresponds both politically and economically,
with the point now being that it is impossible to separate these two
terms along the lines of base and superstructure to nothing other
than the extant, that is, far from obsolete, economic relations of pro-
duction themselves. In the first moment, the support for each par-
ticular royalist house that divides the two factions corresponds to an
underlying support for landed property and capital. In the second
moment, the support for a republicanism that now unites the two

80
factions corresponds to an underlying support for the capital that
has in fact served to carry out this unification.
And, with regard to the dominated classes, Marxs own illustrious
words on the peasantry could hardly be any clearer:

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which

live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations
with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one
another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isola-
tion is increased by Frances bad means of communication and by the
poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the smallholding,
admits of no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of sci-
ence and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent,
no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is
almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its con-
sumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange
with nature than in intercourse with society. A smallholding, a peasant
and his family; alongside them another smallholding, another peasant
and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few
score of villages make up a department. In this way, the great mass of
the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magni-
tudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as
millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that
separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those
of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter,
they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection
among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests
begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation
among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable
of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through
a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent them-
selves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same
time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited
governmental power that protects them against the other classes and
sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of
the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the
executive power subordinating society to itself. (EBLB: 1089)

81
 The political and economic subjectivity of a dominated class is
certainly not constituted here by the burgeoning of the revolutionary
forces of production. Instead, and just as in the case of the dominat-
ing classes before it, this subjectivity is constituted and, moreover,
divided; for we should remember that the peasantry both forms a
class and does not form a class by nothing other than the current
relations of production (the mode of production and economic
conditions of existence, in Marxs own terms). Marx will of course
later argue (EBLB: 1109) that the peasantry itself becomes subject
to a process of proletarianization, and that this proletarianization
will function to link its subjectivity precisely to the revolutionary
forces of production. But this argument only serves to beg, we want
to claim, the fundamental question. For what Marx ignores in his
discussion of the proletariat and of the proletarianization of the
peasantry is precisely the possibility that its subjectivity is as thor-
oughly constituted by capitalist relations of production as the sub-
jectivity of the peasantry was once constituted by feudal relations of
production (indeed, if one thinks through this possibility, the above
quotation can start to acquire accepting, of course, all the obvious
differences a strangely contemporary relevance). It is this igno-
rance, we now want to argue, that Marx at least implicitly will
correct in Das Kapital. And it is this correction that will allow him
to substantially transform, by introducing the third category of the
social or symbolic, the meaning that he has previously attached to the
two concepts of the imaginary and the real.

82
 3. The Symbolic, the Imaginary and
the Real: Das Kapital

In sections 1 and 2 above, we have seen how, in the work of both the
early and the middle period Marx, an unbreachable divide is erected
between the two contrasting and contrary spheres of the imaginary
and the real. According to that displacement of terms that centrally
characterizes the early Marx, either the political state is conceived as
the imaginary alienation of the economic real of civil society, or this
civil society itself is construed as the imaginary alienation of a sup-
posedly real and essential human sociality. In the first case, the very
link between the imaginary and the real that Marx at times wants to
establish is rendered effectively unthinkable. In the second, Marx is
compelled to resort to a simple language of humanism that his entire
later development, if properly understood, has to be seen to abso-
lutely contradict.
In what we have been calling Marxs middle period, this displace-
ment takes a different form, being organized around two central con-
ceptual oppositions that are themselves derived from a certain con-
ception of the historically inevitable or, indeed, history-constituting,
interplay between three terms. The terms in the ascending order
of importance that, for Marx, determines their interrelationship are
ideological consciousness (or ideological superstructure), relations of
production and forces of production. According to the first opposi-
tion, between relations of production and ideological and superstruc-
tural consciousness, there is a fundamental discrepancy between the
real economic conditions of individuals and their imaginary (mis-)
representation of them. According to the second opposition, there is
a conflict or contradiction between the extant relations of production
and the real underlying forces of production that they have appar-
ently come to imaginarily fetter and restrain. The problem, in the
first case, is that if we accept the very distinction between conscious-
ness and reality that effectively structures the whole opposition, it
becomes impossible to comprehend how the former imaginarily or
ideologically represents or, even worse, misrepresents the latter.
If consciousness and reality are methodologically and conceptually
separated, the supposed link between them will forever resist eluci-
dation. The problem in the second case is that the very opposition

83
considered central to the first (and accepting this now only for the
sake of argument) in turn becomes a matter of complete indifference.
In an absolutely merciless fashion, the real expansion of the forces
of production undermines both the imaginary relations of production
and their conveniently flimsy layering of superstructural ideological
consciousness.
In short, then and in the terms that really concern us in this
reconstruction in both his early and middle periods, Marx system-
atically fails to articulate, in any compelling or convincing manner,
the division, splitting or doubling of the subject. In the early writings,
and on both sides of the displacement that Marx enacts, the subject
is divided between an imaginary or alienating realm (first the state,
and then civil society) and that deeper real that it is supposed to
alienate (first civil society, and then the human or social essence).
Any connection between the two spheres, which Marx is of course
compelled to presuppose, remains entirely mysterious. In the work
of the middle period, the subject appears once (explicitly) as the
imaginary bearer of ideological consciousness, absolutely divided
from its real economic conditions of existence, and once (implicitly)
as the real instantiation of the forces of production, completely split
apart from the imaginary relations of production that are seen to fet-
ter it. That is, in Marxs own heavily loaded terms, once as a non-
proletarian inextricably bound up with ideological illusion, and once
as a proletarian, tendentially and tendentiously free of all imaginary
constraints.
What we want to argue in this third and final section is that the
late Marx and this essentially means, of course, the Marx of Das
Kapital finally succeeds in precisely and compellingly elucidating
the division of the subject between the two registers of the imaginary
and the real. He does this, we will claim, by implicitly introducing a
third term the social or symbolic that allows for or, more exactly,
determines the articulation and combination of the other two the
imaginary and the real. For the late Marx, as we have already sug-
gested, the capitalist mode of production comes to be understood as
a social or symbolic order, or continuous process of ordering, that
both constitutes and continues to reproduce itself by enacting a divi-
sion or, better, knotting of the subject across the two spheres of the
imaginary and the real.

84
 What does this mean? In the terms of what is undoubtedly Marxs
central and fundamental discovery (as we will shortly see, he explic-
itly considered this to be the case himself), it means that capitalism
constitutes and reproduces itself by dividing and knotting the pro-
letarian worker between and across the price of the commodity of
his labor-power (Arbeitskraft), his capacity to work (Arbeitsverm-
gen) this being the source of the imaginary idea that labor has a
value and the actual or real labor that he performs in the exer-
cise of this capacity. This division or knotting constitutes capitalism
as a mode of production because it is precisely what allows for the
production of this systems raison dtre: surplus-value. The real or
actual labor of the proletarian worker produces more value for the
capitalist than it originally cost him as the price of the commodity of
his labor-power; the imaginary sting in the tail being, of course (and
this is a sting that has enormous effects), that the worker is in some
sense compelled to behave as if he were being paid not for his labor-
power, but for his labor.
Capitalism is nothing more, then, than a particular manner of split-
ting, doubling or knotting the subject. And our aim in this section
is to provide a fairly detailed exposition of both the way in which
Marx arrives at this conception and the way in which, once properly
understood, it can allow us to resolve some of the lingering ambi-
guities in the late Marxs thematizations of the nature of the prole-
tarian subject. The argument will advance in three stages. Firstly,
by means of a reconstructive commentary on the first two parts of
volume 1 of Das Kapital, Commodities and Money and The Trans-
formation of Money into Capital (C1: 123280), we will see how the
whole significance of Marxs analysis revolves around a fundamental
asymmetry in relation to what he refers to as the dual or double
character (Doppelcharakter) of the commodity. When it concerns
the subject, we will claim, the logic of this duality has to be com-
prehended as something very different than when it only applies to
objects. Whereas in the commodity as object, use-value and value
have absolutely nothing to do with one another, in the commodity
as subject they mix and intermingle (once again, with profound, and
not entirely sanguine, consequences). Secondly, we will show how
the understanding of this asymmetry allows us to complicate Marxs
rather misleading description of the logic of commodity-fetishism.
Rather than practicing, as Marx suggests, a simple inversion of the

85
social and the thing-like, the subjective and the objective, the fetish-
ism of the commodity at least in its particular form of manifestation
within the capitalist mode of production has to be conceived as car-
rying out a crossing and combination of these two domains within
the subject itself. If commodity-fetishism applies to subjects as well
as to objects, its function in the former case is to produce and consti-
tute the subject as a divided or knotted subject-object. Thirdly, and
finally, we will see how this complication of the logic of commod-
ity-fetishism enables us to discern some of the many ambivalences
and contradictions that still plague the late Marxs conception of the
proletarian subject. To the extent that Marx construes commodity-
fetishism as a simple inversion of the social and the thing-like, the
subjective and the objective, he experiences the temptation to revert
to some of the incoherent themes of his early and middle periods,
more specifically, the themes of alienation and of a simple conflict
and contradiction between the forces and relations of production. To
the extent that he understands that commodity-fetishism produces
and constitutes a divided and knotted subject, Marx resists this temp-
tation and (at least) implicitly recognizes the not necessarily revolu-
tionary consequences of his own, and capitalisms, dissection of the
proletarian worker.

The Double Character of Labor and

the Double Character of the Commodity

In two letters to Engels, written shortly after the publication of the

first volume of Das Kapital, Marx unequivocally draws attention to
what he considers to be the works most fundamental contribution.
Of [t]he best points in my book, he states, the most important is
the exposition of (1) the two-fold character of labour, according to
whether it is expressed in use value or exchange value (MECW42:
407). Or, similarly: the economists, without exception, evaded the
simple fact that, if the commodity has a double character the use-
value and the exchange-value then labour contained in the com-
modity must also be of double character, while mere analysis of
labour as such, as with Smith, Ricardo, etc., must everywhere come
up against the inexplicable. This is indeed the whole secret of the
critical conception (LC: 125). The simultaneously real and concep-

86
tual core of Marxs critique of political economy that which allows
him to symptomatically read its consistent confrontation with what,
in its own terms, is inexplicable is the discovery of the double
character of labor. If the commodity is split or divided between its
use-value and its exchange-value, then so is the labor contained
within it. In order to comprehend this claim and in order to see
how the labor of the proletarian subject only becomes contained in
the commodity (as object) precisely because it exceeds (as subject)
its own containment by the commodity-form, even as it appears to
succumb to it we need to turn to the text of Marxs magnum opus
itself.
As we have already suggested, the central argument of this text
crucially turns around an asymmetry with regard to what Marx des-
ignates as the dual or double character of the commodity, its split
or division into the two component parts of use-value and value.
This double character describes both objects and subjects, and in
the second case it functions according to a logic substantially differ-
ent from that which determines the first. In anticipation, we can say
that Marx distinguishes between two superficially similar, but in fact
fundamentally distinct, processes: a purely metonymic process of the
simple exchange and circulation of commodities as objects accord-
ing to which there is no relationship between use-value and value;
and a simultaneously metonymic and metaphoric process, this time
not confined to simple circulation, of the inclusion (and simultane-
ous exclusion) of the subject within (and from) the determinations of
the commodity-form and according to which use-value and value
begin to develop a strange and particular interaction.30 One of the
fundamental purposes of Marxs analysis is to show that it is only
the second process (the combination of the metonymic and meta-
phoric) that can actually ground the supposed universality of the
first (the purely metonymic). It is only the inclusion of the subject,
both within and without the sphere of circulation, that is capable of
explaining the generalized interchange of objects.

30 Our definition of the metonymic and the metaphoric follows here even
as it rewrites it in an entirely new context the seminal definition of Roman
Jakobson (which was itself so important to the work of Lacan). According to
this definition, metonymy serves to designate the combinatory aspect of lan-
guage, and metaphor its substitutive aspect. See Jakobson (1956).

87
 We can begin to unpack these lapidary claims by taking a closer
look at the first two parts of Das Kapital, Money and Commodi-
ties and The Transformation of Money into Capital. The first part
advances a description of the metonymic level; the second undoubt-
edly the books most important an analysis of the metonymic/met-
aphoric. We will therefore deal quite quickly with the former, and
with the latter in much greater detail.

C-M-C: The Metonymic Circulation of the Commodity as Object

Money and Commodities, and Das Kapital as a whole, famously

opens with the depiction of a seemingly infinite metonymic chain of
commodity-objects: [t]he wealth of societies in which the capital-
ist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection
of commodities; the individual commodity appears as its elemen-
tary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the
commodity (C1: 125). The repetition here is certainly designed to
attract our attention: it is the appearance (the Schein) of capitalist
society that Marx undoubtedly wants to emphasize. The capitalist
mode of production is not just, that is, and not even primarily as
we will shortly see an immense collection of commodities; but
nor as will also become clear can the objective falsity of this
appearance be simply and conceptually dissolved.
Before we turn to address these issues, however, before we seek
to move beyond the metonymic level of appearance in order to grasp
the metonymic/metaphoric production of its supposed universality,
we need to ask a crucial preliminary question. What exactly is it
that appears in the first place? What does the elementary form
of the commodity contain? This, too, can be a deceptive question
for, as Marx later tells us, the commodity possesses a dual [dop-
pelte] nature, a double form [Doppelform] (C1: 138), it is a two-
fold [doppeltes] thing (C1: 152), and, most importantly, the precise
nature of this duality is itself disguised. But how exactly?
On a first glance, the commodity seems to be defined by the divi-
sion between its use-value and its exchange-value. Its use-value (as
long as we are dealing only with objects, and Marx here defines the
commodity as being first of all [that is, not only], an external object
(C1: 125)) is easy to comprehend. In the use or consumption of its

88
particular qualities, every commodity serves to fulfill certain human
needs; and the latter can arise (in contradistinction to the silly, but
frequently aired, complaint that Marxs concept of use-value is
essentialist31) either from the stomach or the imagination (C1:
125). Exchange value, however which in the capitalist mode of
production, Marx tells us, use-value also functions as the material
bearer [Trger] (C1: 126) of is a harder nut to crack. For although
it allows certain quantities of commodities to be exchanged as equiv-
alents, it can only do this by locating the source of this equivalence
in a contentful contribution very different from its own merely rep-
resentative form. As Marx puts it: exchange-value cannot be any-
thing other than the mode of expression [Ausdrucksweise], the form
of appearance [Erscheinungsform], of a content distinguishable from
it (C1: 127). This content is average or abstract human labor, the
amount of which measured in the hours of labor-time actually
constitutes the value of the objects that it produces. Labor, in the
capitalist mode of production and only, of course, in precisely this
mode of production is the creative source of value. Closer inspec-
tion has therefore revealed, then, that the commodity is not essen-
tially split between its use-value and its exchange value, but instead
between its use-value and its value, with the latter being both formed
by labor and conventionally represented by the form of appearance
of exchange-value. There is a discrepancy, we might say, between
the form and that which forms. The twofold character of the com-
modity (its division between use-value and value) is concealed by
the existence of a third term (exchange-value).
Now, in what Marx calls the social metabolism (C1: 198) of the
simple exchange and circulation of commodities as objects the only
thing that really concerns him in this first section of Das Kapital
the effects of this concealment cannot be considered to be of any
great significance. Why? Because in the process of this circulation
any real and consistent discrepancy between exchange-value and
value remains a merely latent possibility. As we will see in a few
moments, the only thing that can produce such a fundamental dis-
crepancy is an interaction between use-value and value or, more

31 One could mention any number of texts here, but perhaps the most per-
niciously influential in this sense has been Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx.
See Derrida (1994), especially 14776.

89
specifically, between the very particular use-value of human labor
human subjectivity and the value that it creates over and above
its own exchange-value, its price as the commodity of labor-power.
Obviously, in the mere exchange and circulation of commodities as
objects the subject not yet having been included no such interac-
tion takes place. Use-value and value (in its form of appearance as
exchange-value) have here nothing to do with one another.
Marxs basic formula for this simple circulation is C-M-C: a com-
modity is exchanged for money and, in turn, this money is re-ex-
changed for another commodity; and so on and so forth, ad infi-
nitum. The particular use-value of commodities is undoubtedly an
indispensable factor of this process and, indeed, its very motivating
force; for in the absence of it there would be no need for commodi-
ties in the first place. This necessity should not be allowed to distract
us, however, from the fact that the particularity of use-value in no
way enters into the correct, and purely formal, description of the
process itself; for this is exclusively a process of the interaction of
exchange-values (once again, of course, as the forms of appear-
ance of values). As Marx himself says, in a famous piece of ven-
triloquism: [i]f commodities could speak, they would say this: our
use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects.
What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own
intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely
as exchange-values (C1: 1767). It is (exchange) value, irrespective
of the particular use-value acting as its inevitable bearer (Trger),
that fundamentally describes the movement traversing the formula
C-M-C. Money replaces commodities, and commodities money,
because each functions as the possessor of an equivalent value. The
process of the circulation of commodities as objects is essentially
metonymic: (exchange) value follows (exchange) value in an appar-
ently endless series.

M-C-M: the Symptom of Surplus-Value

Everything changes, however, when in the absolutely seminal sec-

ond part of Das Kapital, The Transformation of Money into Capital,
Marx slowly starts to turn away from this sphere of simple circulation.
What is it that compels this turning? Nothing less, we might say, than

90
the extrusion of a symptomatic excess. Marx begins by comparing
the process of the simple circulation of commodities with the, at first,
only formally distinct process of the circulation of capital. The for-
mula C-M-C, as we have seen, describes the first process; the second
is encapsulated by the precise inversion of these three terms: M-C-
M. In the first case, commodities are sold for money, which is then
used to purchase other commodities; in the second case, money buys
commodities, which are then (apparently) resold in order to recoup
what was originally advanced in the first place: money again. There
is, as Marx says, a reflux of money to its starting-point (C1: 250).
The purpose of the first process, recapitulating what we have already
said, is the consumption of use-value; commodities are bought and
sold because there is a concrete need for them. The purpose of the
second process, by contrast, is the abstract realization of exchange-
value; money purchases commodities only in order to ensure its own
ultimate reappearance. Now, as Marx quite crucially points out, this
reappearance would be absurd, empty, purposeless and tau-
tological (C1: 248; 2501) if it only served to recoup and repeat the
original sum of money prospectively advanced. The only thing that
can motivate the circulation of money as capital is the production
of an increment, an excess, which Marx famously denominates
as surplus-value (C1: 251). The proper formula for capital is not,
then, merely M-C-M, but instead M-C-M (where M serves to des-
ignate the production of a surplus). The formal difference between
the process of the simple circulation of commodities (C-M-C) and
the process of the circulation of capital (M-C-M) is revealed to pre-
suppose the inextirpable suggestion of a fundamental difference of
content (M).
A symptom, then, is seen to extrude, the index of a hidden content,
and the whole difficulty confronting Marx concerns the possibility of
its decipherment. For the only thing that he has really succeeded in
articulating so far, as the unexplained basis of this symptom, is the
form of circulation within which money is transformed into capital
(C1: 258). This form, however, precisely because it produces the sur-
plus of the symptom, has to be said to contradict [] all the previ-
ously developed laws bearing on the nature of commodities, value,
money and even circulation itself. What distinguished this form from
that of the simple circulation of commodities is the inverted order
of succession of the two antithetical processes, sale and purchase.

91
How can this purely formal distinction change the nature of these
processes, as if by magic? (C1: 258) Or, paraphrasing slightly: how
can an apparently purely formal difference both presuppose as its
purpose and produce as its consequence the ineradicable sugges-
tion of a substantial difference in content, surplus-value (M)? Any
attempt to answer this question must first of all recognize that the
purely formal inversion of the order of succession referred to here
(from C-M-C to M-C-M) cannot in itself in the absence of a proper
explanation of its increment be considered to carry us outside the
sphere of the simple circulation of commodities (for the second half
of the second formula is, in appearance, that is, ignoring the unex-
plained excess that adorns it, the exact equivalent of the first half
of the first; and, more simply, for in this case there is not even an
excess to explain, vice versa: C-M=C-M and M-C=M-C, wherever
each couple is located within the two chains of circulation). If the
circulation of capital has not yet, then, been definitively shown to
depart from the simple circulation of commodities, perhaps it is this
second circulation itself, Marx rhetorically inquires, that can actually
be seen to produce the defining characteristic of the first, surplus-
value? Can form not magically give rise to the symptomatic sugges-
tion of its own new content?
Marxs answer, unsurprisingly, is resoundingly negative. The sim-
ple exchange and circulation of commodities as objects, whether we
are concerned here with the pure form of the exchange of equiva-
lents or the impure form of the exchange of non-equivalents, can
never be seen to give body to an increment in value. When equiva-
lents are exchanged this is absolutely clear. For, as we have already
seen, this process of exchange is purely formal (the content of use-
value is certainly essential to it, but it in no way enters into the fun-
damental character of the process itself). The only thing that occurs
in the exchange of equivalents is a transformation of the form of
commodities. An equal amount of value, of embodied human labor
(represented, of course, by its form of appearance of exchange-
value), appears first as a commodity, then as the money that it is
sold for, and then again as a second commodity that this money is
used to buy. This simple metamorphosis of form presupposes no
increase in value. The same is true of the exchange of non-equiva-
lents, even if we are presented here with a superficial complexity.
A commodity-owner sells his commodities for more than they are

92
worth, and therefore seems to create surplus-value. But this seller of
commodities must in turn become a buyer, and what prevents the
other commodity-owners from selling to him at an equally extortion-
ate rate? Nothing, of course, and when they do this the apparent
creation of a surplus will be consistently leveled out. A situation in
which every commodity sells above (or, for that matter, below) its
value is practically the same as one in which all commodities are
purchased at their real value. In neither case is a surplus produced.
What if one commodity-owner, however, succeeds in selling too dear
and the others, for some reason, fail to react? Again, the result is the
same. For although our ingenious commodity-owner may well have
received more value than his competitors, the total amount of value
in circulation will not have changed. Selling too dearly in this way is
tantamount to stealing, and stealing certainly does not create a sur-
plus, but instead only a local redistribution of the value already in
existence. However much we twist and turn, Marx deduces, the
final conclusion remains the same. If equivalents are exchanged, no
surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, we still
have no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities,
creates no value (C1: 266).
If form cannot create (the symptom of a) content, then, if circula-
tion cannot produce surplus-value, perhaps content acts indepen-
dently of form, perhaps surplus-value is produced entirely outside
the sphere of circulation? This too, Marx contends, is impossible. For
the only thing that the commodity-owner possesses, outside of this
sphere, is his own commodity. This commodity contains, in its value,
a certain amount of the commodity-owners own labor. But, as Marx
emphasizes, this labor does not receive a double representation
(C1: 268). It cannot be counted once in terms of its value and then
once again in terms of a surplus or excess over and above this origi-
nal amount. Although the labor of the commodity-owner, taken by
itself, can certainly create value, it certainly cannot create value that
adds more value to itself. If I turn leather into boots, for example, my
labor has given rise to value, for the boots are undoubtedly worth
more than the leather (and precisely because they contain a greater
quantity of labor). The value of the leather, however, has not in itself
increased, that is, my labor has in no way annexed surplus-value to
it. The pure content of labor, extraneous to the formal sphere of cir-
culation, is clearly incapable of producing any symptomatic excess.

93
 The terms of the difficulty confronting Marx are, then, irrevocably
set. If neither form nor content, when taken in isolation, can bring
about the extrusion of a surplus, this surplus has to be seen to result
instead from a combination and coupling of the two sides. If surplus-
value is to be produced, form and content, circulation and its other,
its outside, need to cross and overlap:

Capital cannot [] arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible

for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in cir-
culation and not in circulation [] We therefore have a double result
[ein doppeltes Resultat] [] The transformation of money into capital
has to be developed on the basis of the immanent laws of the exchange
of commodities, in such a way that the starting-point is the exchange of
equivalents. The money-owner, who is as yet only a capitalist in larval
form, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value,
and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circula-
tion than he threw into it at the beginning. His emergence as a butterfly
must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation. These
are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!(C1: 2689)

Marxs solution to this problem constitutes, without the shadow

of a doubt, his most considerable achievement. If we take up, once
again, the basic formula for the circulation of capital (M-C-M), it
should be clear that the ultimate increment in value (M) can in no
way be produced either by the money originally advanced (M) (for
this only realizes (C1: 270), in Marxs own words, the price of the
commodity that it purchases) nor by the final resale of the central
commodity (C-M) (for this only converts the commodity back into
its monetary form). In the absence of these two possibilities, the
increase must instead be seen to arise within the commodity that is
originally purchased (M-C). This commodity, like all commodities, is
a twofold thing: it possesses a value and a use-value. Obviously,
its value cannot give rise to new value, for what we are concerned
with here is the exchange of equivalents. This leaves, then, only one
possibility: surplus-value has to be created through the consumption
of the commoditys use-value. And for this to happen:

our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the
sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value

94
 possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose
actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification [Vergegenstnd
lichung] of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money
does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for
labour [Arbeitsvermgen], in other words labour-power [Arbeitskraft]
[] We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of
those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form,
the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in
motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind. (C1: 270)

We will ignore here the historical conditions of the appearance

of this particular commodity, and focus instead on the process that
capital goes through once it has been definitively constituted by this
appearance.32 The trajectory of this process is described by the subtle
interaction of three terms (each of which now takes on a different
aspect than in the simple circulation of commodities): exchange-
value (labor-power), use-value (labor) and value (in its specific form
as surplus). This trajectory begins when labor is effectively divided
from itself, or doubled, by means of its representation in accordance
with the exchange-value of the commodity of labor-power. In this
second form, labor only appears as a capacity, as a power in the
precise sense of a potentiality. It is only this potentiality that can
be commodified, given an (exchange) value, for as we will see in
greater detail below it is meaningless to speak of the value of labor
itself. The value of labor (for the capitalist, of course) is not its
exchange-value but its use-value, its capacity to create value through
its own consumption. Labor is valueless because, in the capitalist

32 We obviously cannot enter into here the thorny historical question of the
origins of capitalism. But it perhaps suffices to say that, in our view at least,
the most compelling account of these origins the only account that does not
in some way presuppose the existence of capitalism in order to then go on to
explain its historical emergence can be found in Robert Brenners two articles
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
and The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism. See T. H. Aston and C.
H. E. Philpin eds. (1985), 1063 and 213327. For a very useful overview of
Brenners account, and of its superiority to its numerous alternatives, see Meik-
sins Wood (2002). Brenners work is of course indebted to Marxs own prelimi-
nary investigations of the origins of capitalism in the final part of volume 1 of
Das Kapital, So-Called Primitive Accumulation (C1: 871940).

95
mode of production, it is the source of value. It can only act as the
source of surplus-value, however, to the extent that it has already
been divided from itself in the first place. The trajectory of the capi-
talist process completes itself by actualizing labors potentiality. Or,
as Marx himself later says: [t]he use of labour-power is labour itself.
The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it
to work. By working, the latter becomes in actuality what previously
he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a worker
(C1: 283). The particular use-value of human labor now works to
produce more value. And the crucial thing to understand is that this
more can only acquire consistency when it is measured in rela-
tion to the original exchange-value of the commodity of labor-power.
Surplus-value is only created because the potentiality of labor is split
apart from its actuality, because the actual labor of the (proletar-
ian) subject brings forth a greater value than it originally cost (the
capitalist) as the commodity of labor-power. If, in the simple circula-
tion of commodities, value and exchange-value were fundamentally
homologous, then now, given their place in the circulation of capital,
they begin to experience the profundity of a divorce; the form of
appearance of value falls away from the real determinations under-
lying it.

and the Metonymic-Metaphoric

We want to emphasize here two things with regard to this specifi-

cally capitalist process. Firstly as we have been prospectively sug-
gesting throughout this section its structure has to be understood
not only as metonymic, but instead as both metonymic and meta-
phoric. In the simple exchange and circulation of commodities an
exclusively metonymic process, as has already been made clear the
two levels of (exchange) value and use-value remain fundamentally
set apart. The continuous sliding of (exchange) values follows its
course irrespectively of the particular use-values that bear it, that
function as its Trger. In the circulation of capital, by contrast,
there is an interpenetration of these two formerly separate spheres.
The particular use-value of human-labor plays its role here as the
creator of (surplus) value. What is it, however, that allows for this
interpenetration? Nothing less, we want to claim, than a metaphori-

96
cal substitution that presupposes as its basis that very metonymic
logic of exchange and circulation that we have already seen to be set
in place. What is the nature of this substitution? When the potenti-
ality of labor is sifted out from its actuality, an essentially valueless
phenomenon (labor, the source of value) does in fact come to pos-
sess (only as labor-power, of course, the capacity to labor) a value.
Labor (in its form as labor-power) is a commodity like all others.
It enters, under the halo of exchange-value, into the simple met-
onymic circuit of exchange and circulation. The metaphoric identi-
fication that begins the process of capital is, then, the identification
of labor (power) and (exchange) value. Like all such identifications
(for every metaphor presupposes its own conditions of impossibil-
ity) this one too is condemned to fail. But this can hardly be said to
constitute a problem, because the very completion of the capitalist
process precisely and crucially depends upon it. It is only because
the identification falters, because labor both does and does not have
a value (as potentiality and actuality, respectively, labor-power and
labor proper) that surplus-value can actually be produced. Real labor
can only create value when it has first been counted as the capacity
of labor-power.
In Das Kapital, the only thing that Marx chooses to stress as
regards this metonymic/metaphoric process is a certain paradoxical-
ity. That is, although the metaphoric identification of labor (power)
and (exchange) value certainly presupposes the prior existence of
the metonymic sphere of the simple exchange and circulation of
commodities, this sphere is only itself rendered universal, as Marx
puts it, by means of this very identification. The universality of
metonymy presupposes a metonymic/metaphoric exception, for it is
only this consistent exceptionality that can continue to universally
motivate exchange and circulation (naturally, under the watchful eye
of the capitalist) as the production of surplus-value. In Marxs own
words (and shifting the perspective to the position of the laborer,
something which we will shortly see to involve immense conse-
quences): [t]he capitalist epoch is [] characterized by the fact that
labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form
of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes
on the form of wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this
moment that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes
universal (C1: 274n). Or again, this time in Results of the Immedi-

97
ate Process of Production:33 [o]nly on the basis of capitalist produc-
tion does the commodity actually become the universal elementary
form of wealth (RIPP: 951).

Production of the (Proletarian) Subject

The second thing that we want to emphasize with respect to this par-
ticular, metonymic/metaphoric process of capitalism and here we
start to approach the apogee of this whole reconstruction of Marxs
thought is that it essentially includes and, moreover, fundamen-
tally constitutes, a subject. The bearer, the Trger, of the simple
exchange and circulation of commodities was the specific use-value
of various objects. As we have seen, this use-value in no way inter-
feres with the metonymic shifting of (exchange) values. The Trger
of the circulation of capital, by contrast, is the very specific use-value
of the human subject itself. The use-value of this subject is its labor,
which possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value.
When the subject acts as the Trger of the exchange-value of the
commodity-form, use-value and value can interact in order to pro-
duce a surplus.
This is certainly, then, the moment to discuss Marxs (in)famous
conception of the subject as a Trger. In the preface to the first edi-
tion of Das Kapital, he lets us know the following:

individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifi-
cations of economic categories, the bearers [Trger] of particular class-
relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development
of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural
history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for
relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much
he may subjectively raise himself above them. (C1: 92)

Typically, this standpoint is dismissed as the crux of Marxs so-

called economic essentialism.34 The wealth of subjective life, so the

33 The planned seventh part of the first volume of Das Kapital, that was only
published for the first time in Russian and German in 1933.
34 The work of Althusser (and Balibar) constitutes a clear exception here,

98
argument goes, is unjustifiably reduced to the hard determinations
of capital and class. In direct contradistinction to this claim, what we
want to argue here is that Marxs conception of the Trger implic-
itly contains a profound (or, if you like, non-reductive) theorization
of the production in both senses of this word of the (proletarian)
subject of capital. At its most basic level, this conception finally ful-
fills the fragmentary claim that we have already seen Marx make in
the Theses on Feuerbach: [i]n its reality [the human essence] is
the ensemble of the social relations. The subject, the individual,
can no longer be separated from the object or, more specifically,
from social relations, because it is itself essentially constituted by
them, their creature. Much more importantly, however, the spe-
cific subject constituted by the capitalist mode of production, the
specific Trger of its social relations, is very far from being a sim-
ple phenomenon. It has to be comprehended, rather and this time,
as we will see, Marxs terms are absolutely compelling as being
split, divided or doubled or, even better, knotted, across the two con-
flicting registers of the imaginary and the real. As a particular, that
is, historically specific, social or symbolic order, capitalism continu-
ally divides the (proletarian) subject between its real or actual labor
and the imaginary value that this labor has when it is counted as or,
more properly, reduced to the commodity of labor-power. Capitalism
is nothing more, we might say, than the apparently infinite, social or
symbolic knotting of this division; it possesses the characteristics of
a Borromean knot.

The Real of Labor and its Tendential Imaginarization

It is the labor of the (proletarian) subject, then, that inescapably con-

stitutes the real of capital.35 Why? Firstly, because it is only the real-

taking seriously, as it does, Marxs concept of the Trger. See Althusser and
Balibar (1970), 2078, 2323, 2523. Unfortunately, however, this concept is
made to fit into that absolute separation between the real and the imaginary
that we have already diagnosed.
35 It will hopefully become clear, in section 2.2 of chapter II below, that labor
constitutes the real of every mode of production, but that it is treated very dif-
ferently in pre-capitalist modes than in capitalism itself.

99
ity, the actuality, of this labor, as opposed to its potentiality (labor-
power), that is actually capable of producing value (once it has been
counted, of course, as a commodity). And secondly, because, as the
source of value, the reality of this labor is fundamentally valueless
or, as Marx implicitly claims, non-imaginary. It is as meaningful to
talk of the value of labor, Marx points out in volume 3 of Das Kapi-
tal, as it is to talk of a yellow logarithm (C3: 957). Or, a little less
succinctly, and returning to volume 1: [l]abour is the substance,
and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself []
In the expression value of labour, the concept of value is not only
completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its con-
trary. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth (C1:
677). Engels is only elucidating Marxs position when, in his preface
to volume 2, he tells us that [i]t is not [] labour that has a value.
Labour, as value-creating activity, can just as little have a particular
value as heaviness can have a particular weight, heat a particular
temperature, or electricity a particular intensity of current. It is not
labour that is bought and sold as a commodity, but rather labour-
power (C2: 101).
But if the labor of the (proletarian) subject irrevocably constitutes
the real of capitalism, the whole problem with this mode of produc-
tion is that, in its form of appearance (Erscheinungsform), this real
imaginarily tends to disappear. How? In the circulation of capital
(M-C-M), money purchases commodities in order to produce more
money. This surplus is only produced, however, because the cen-
tral commodity (C) the (proletarian) subject is itself divided in
two (or, more precisely, divided between its existence and its non-
existence as a commodity). It the subject has an exchange-value,
the price of the commodity of labor-power (determined like the
price of every other commodity) and a use-value, the specific use-
value that subjective human labor possesses as the creative source
of value. The difficulty that concerns us here arises because, in the
network of monetary signifiers that represent this movement of capi-
tal, the division of the commodity and hence of the subject that
it (fails to) contain(s) simply does not appear in its specificity. It
only appears, that is, as a symptomatic excess, surplus-value (M).
Because the labor of the (proletarian) subject, as we have already
seen Marx stress in a slightly different context, does not receive a
double representation, it only appears as the price of the commodity

100
of labor-power. The metaphoric process of the circulation of capital,
precisely because it depends in its content on the metonymic pro-
cess of exchange and circulation, is effectively swallowed at least
at the level of representation by the latter. The only thing that is
represented in the circulation of capital is a change in the form of
money. It is money that begins the process, money that temporarily
transforms itself into a commodity, and money that reemerges (with
a symptomatic increment) at the end. Although the whole movement
of capitalism is motivated by the hidden cause of this symptom, it
appears as if it is money itself that keeps the ball rolling.
Marx invents a variety of ways of describing this imaginary con-
cealment of the real. In the spiral (C1: 727), the perpetuum
mobile (C1: 227), of the circulation of capital, he claims, the money
originally advanced is a vanishing quantity (magnitudo evane-
scens) (C1: 734). If, in the process of this circulation, 100 becomes
110, there is no qualitative (C1: 252) difference between these
two amounts. One cannot smell the difference or, more importantly,
the difference in origin, between two sums of money: [s]ince every
commodity disappears when it becomes money it is impossible to
tell from the money itself how it got into the hands of its possessor,
or what article has been changed into it. Non olet, from whatever
source it may come (C1: 205). Nor will our sight be able to assist us:
[f]rom the mere look of a piece of money, we cannot tell what breed
of commodity has been transformed into it. In their money-form all
commodities look alike. Hence money may be dirt, although dirt is
not money (C1: 204). Or, similarly: [s]ince money is the trans-
formed shape of the commodity it does not reveal what has been
transformed into it: whether conscience or virginity or horse dung
(RIPP: 1073).
The important thing to bear in mind here, however, is the funda-
mental and specifically capitalist logic of this imaginary elision
of the real. It is only because the labor of the (proletarian) subject is
represented by the price of the commodity of labor-power that the
imaginary can first be imagined to cover the real. The price of the
commodity of labor-power is not in itself, that is, imaginary (indeed,
in the capitalist mode of production, labor-power really does pos-
sess a value). What is imaginary is the idea (much more coher-
ently conceived as the consequence of a recurrent practice) that this
value represents the value of labor. It is because labor (the real)

101
and labor-power are imaginarily identified that [e]vents which take
place outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between buy-
ing and selling, are not seen to affect the form of [the] movement
[of capital] (C1: 256). It is only this particular imaginarization of the
real that explains the significance of the elimination of every unwel-
come sign, all potentially confusing evidence of the actual process of
production (RIPP: 976).

The Separation of the Economic is the Separation of

the Economic and the Political

Within the capitalist mode of production, then, and within, of course,

the (proletarian) subject necessarily presupposed by this specific
social form, there is an undeniable tendency for the real to lose itself
in the hardenings and encrustations of the imaginary. We ought to
point out here that the thematization of this tendency allows us to
resolve a difficulty that we first confronted in section 1 above; and the
implications of which we continued to grapple with in section 2. This
is the problem of providing a convincing account of the specifically
capitalist separation of the economic and the political; an account
that refuses to get stuck in the methodological and philosophical
dead-end of economic base and ideological superstructure. As
we suggested in section 1, this separation can only be satisfactorily
explained when it is seen to presuppose a more fundamental separa-
tion already existing at the level of the social or economic itself
(which it is then, in turn, seen to both supplement and reinforce).
We can now see exactly what this separation is. It is the separa-
tion, the splitting, division or doubling, of the (proletarian) subject
between the interacting, or knotted, spheres of the imaginary (labor-
power) and the real (labor). And it is one side of this separation,
the imaginary side (labor-power), that is repeated and reinforced in
the capitalist separation between the economic and the political. Or,
more precisely and once again avoiding the suggestion that labor-
power is in itself an imaginary factor it is only the imaginary iden-
tification (itself the result of a real practice) of labor and labor-power
that can genetically explain the production of imaginary (but also,
in their conditions and effects, very practically real) political ideas.

102
As Marx unsurpassably argues, in a passage we have already (in sec-
tions 1 and 2) referred to:

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose

boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a
very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Free-
dom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer
and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are determined
only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal
before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint
will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters
into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities,
and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each
disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks
only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and
putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain
and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and
no one worries about the others. And precisely for that reason, either
in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the
auspices of an omniscient providence, they all work together for their
mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest.
(C1: 280)

It is the social or economic sphere of exchange and circulation,

of the sale and purchase of labor-power (appearing, of course, as the
sale and purchase of labor), that gives rise to and is, in turn, rein-
forced by the political ideas of Freedom, Equality, Property and
Bentham. There is no question here of a fruitless architectonic of
economic base and ideological political superstructure.36 Firstly,
because the economy is not just an economy. It is, rather, a partic-
ular, historically specific, social or symbolic mode of production (for
in no other mode of production has the working subject been divided
between its labor and its labor-power or, presupposing their iden-
tification, between the imaginary and the real). Secondly, because
the political ideas under discussion here are neither merely politi-

36 Although, as we have already seen, Marx himself continues to contradic-

torily appeal to such an architectonic by quoting in a footnote from his own
earlier 1859 Preface.

103
cal nor merely ideas. They are, rather, inherent in the practical and
economic reality of one side of the capitalist mode of production. It
is only because labor is imaginarily identified with labor-power that,
under the purifying light of the political ideas of Freedom, Equality,
Property and Bentham, a common refrain can sound: everything is
for the best in the best of all possible worlds (C1: 302).
Having explained how the capitalist mode of production tends
to imaginarily cover over (at the same time as it presupposes and
produces) the real labor, the real division, of the (proletarian) sub-
ject, we can now try to deepen our understanding of this divisions
knotted and continuously knotting logic. In order to do this, we will
interrogate two rather misleading tropes that Marx consistently takes
recourse to in Das Kapital (and other more or less contemporane-
ous texts). Firstly, we will consider the comparison he often draws
between his own discovery of the process of production of surplus-
value and the supposedly similar procedures of science. Secondly,
and more importantly, we will both question and ultimately compli-
cate Marxs famous, but all too frequently misunderstood, descrip-
tions of the character of commodity-fetishism.

The Critique of Political Economy is not a Science

On a number of occasions, Marx implicitly defines his discovery of

the division of the (proletarian) subject as scientific. In the con-
tinuation of a passage cited above, where Marx is stating that the
expression the value of labor is purely imaginary, he also con-
tends that [t]hese imaginary expressions arise, nevertheless, from
the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the
forms of appearance of essential relations. That in their appearance
things are often presented in an inverted way is something fairly
familiar in every science, apart from political economy (C1: 677). Or,
once again, a little later: what is true of all forms of appearance and
their hidden background is also true of the form of appearance value
and price of labour, or wages, as contrasted with the essential rela-
tion manifested in it, namely the value and price of labour-power.
The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously,
as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must
first be discovered by science (C1: 682). Finally, in Wages, Price and

104
Profit, a short text published two years before the first volume of
Das Kapital, Marx says the following about the fact that the produc-
tion of surplus-value fundamentally obeys the logic of the exchange
of equivalently priced commodities: [t]his seems paradox and con-
trary to everyday observation. It is also paradox that the earth moves
round the sun, and that water consists of two [] gases. Scientific
truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which
catches only the elusive appearance of things (WPP: 92).
In all three of these cases, Marx conceives his procedure as scien-
tific because it involves a shift from the mistaken level of everyday
appearance to the truthful level of a fundamental and essential real-
ity. In the first two cases, it appears as if labor possesses a value;
in essence, however, it is labor-power that has a value, and labor
itself is revealed to be fundamentally valueless. In the third case, it
appears paradoxical that surplus-value is produced without trans-
gressing the logic of the exchange of equivalents; but this is only
because it is mistakenly assumed, once again, that the commodity
actually being exchanged as an equivalent is labor itself, and not, as
is in fact the case, the commodity of labor-power.
In a purely formal sense, Marxs equation of his procedure with
the procedures of science is, of course, correct. Marx certainly does
reveal that, even if it appears to the (proletarian) subject that he is
being paid for his labor, he is in fact, that is, essentially, being paid
for the commodity of his labor-power. This is indisputable, and it is
not what we want to call into question here. What we want to ques-
tion are the potentially misleading consequences of a literal identifi-
cation of Marxs analysis with the particular inexorability of scientific
terms.37 What, then, is the fundamental difference between the two
types of procedure? In the procedure of the real or hard sciences,
we might say, the shift from the level of appearance to the level of
essence is purely and simply a question of knowledge. Once we know
that the earth moves around the sun, or that water is composed of
two gases, we know it, so to say. Nobody, that is (if we ignore the
rather insignificant exceptions), thinks otherwise and, much more
importantly in this context, nothing compels them to do so. Even if it

37 This should be understood, of course, as a critique of all those thinkers

from Engels to Stalin to Althusser who have attempted to carry out such a
literal identification.

105
still appears to us as if the sun goes around the earth, or that water
is not composed of two gases, this appearance in no way interferes
with our essential knowledge (after all, it is quite possible to drink a
glass of everyday water in the full awareness that one is imbibing
a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen).
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the capitalist mode of
production. For even if some people (Marxists, let us say) know that
it is not labor that has a value, but instead the commodity of labor-
power, this knowledge in no way simply prohibits the continual and
practical emergence and re-emergence of the former appearance
which this time crucially conceals and contradicts the essential real-
ity itself. In capitalism, that is, the (proletarian) subject (on literal
pain of survival) is continuously compelled to labor on the condition
that it is first prepared to sell the commodity of its labor-power. It
is continuously compelled to divide itself, we can say, as a subject.
Now, in spite of this division, the subject knows two things: firstly,
that it works (for who is going to deny this?); and secondly, that at
the end of the week (or whenever) it receives a certain amount of
money. It is only natural to assume, then, that the money is provided
for the work; but this is not, as we have seen, the case. Capital-
ism has to be seen to presuppose a certain practical compulsion of
the transformation of knowledge into non-knowledge, of the imagi-
narization of the real. It is precisely because the laborer knows that
he works, and knows that he is paid, that he does not know (at
least not necessarily) that he is paid for the commodity of his labor-
power. Capitalism both continually divides the subject between the
(potentially) imaginary and the real and (by activating this imagi-
nary potentiality; by appearing to identify labor and labor-power)
binds and knots it across these two conflicting registers. The level
of essence always simultaneously and practically produces or, more
correctly, is inextricably bound up with, that very level of appear-
ance that consistently disguises its own operations. As long as the
circulation of capital persists, this practical (and, in this sense, very
real) appearance will be maintained, irrespective of the theoretical
demonstration of its essential untruth.
At two points in Das Kapital, Marx shows himself to be extremely
sensitive to this rather thorny problematic, and thus implicitly starts
to deconstruct the strict scientificity of his own analytic procedure.
On the first occasion, Marx criticizes the nave Enlightenment idea

106
that value is a simple imaginary symbol: if it is declared that the
social characteristics assumed by material objects, or the material
characteristics assumed by the social determinations of labour on
the basis of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, then it
is also declared, at the same time, that these characteristics are the
arbitrary product of human reflection. This was the kind of explana-
tion favored by the eighteenth century: in this way the Enlighten-
ment endeavored, at least temporarily, to remove the appearance of
strangeness from the mysterious shapes assumed by human relations
whose origins they were unable to decipher (C1: 1856). Imaginary
appearances cannot be straightforwardly peeled off from the real,
for they are themselves, and just as much as this real, the practical
(and not merely reflective) result of social and economic reality.
Similarly, in Marxs second example, the scientific (for Marx still
uses this word, even as he decomposes its strict presuppositions)
decipherment of a social hieroglyphic in no way affects the continu-
ing social inscription of its objective reality:

Value [] does not have its description branded on its forehead; it

rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.
Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret
of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of util-
ity have of being values is as much mens social product as is their
language. The belated scientific discovery that the products of labour,
in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the
human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the his-
tory of mankinds development, but by no means banishes the sem-
blance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour.
Something which is only valid for this particular form of production
[] [the fact that labor appears to have a value, we can add, slightly
modifying Marxs argument] appears to those caught up in the rela-
tions of commodity production (and this is true both before and after
the above-mentioned scientific discovery) to be just as ultimately valid
as the fact that the scientific dissection of the air into its component
parts left the atmosphere itself unaltered in its physical configuration.
(C1: 167)

Marxs final comparison is once again somewhat misplaced. For

what he has just shown (especially if our slight modification is

107
accepted) is that in the capitalist mode of production appearance
conceals essence, that is, does not just exist alongside it, even when
it has been scientifically dissolved. And this is certainly not true of
the properly scientific example that Marx here gives.

The Confusions of Commodity-Fetishism

In the (proletarian) subject of capitalism, then, the real is continu-

ally and practically, that is, socially and symbolically, knotted and
bound up with its imaginary appearances (which are much more, of
course, as the product of social reality, than mere appearances). As
a particular social or symbolic order, or mode of production, capital-
ism continuously constitutes and reconstitutes a (proletarian) subject
folded across these two opposing registers. We can further develop
our comprehension of this peculiar logic of knotting and folding by
turning our attention to Marxs extremely famous, but also extremely
misleading, section The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret
(C1: 16377).
The first thing that strikes us about this section of Das Kapital is
that it is situated before Marxs uncovering of the very specific char-
acteristics of the circulation of capital; before, that is, his demonstra-
tion of the fact that capitalism is constituted, as a particular mode of
production, by the inclusion (and production) of the (proletarian)
subject, by the availability on the market of the particular commodity
of the subjects labor-power. As a consequence of this, Marxs discus-
sion of commodity-fetishism is only and exclusively concerned with
commodities as objects. The well-known example that he provides is
that of a table, an extremely obvious, trivial thing (C1: 163) ([c]
ommodities are things (C1: 178), Marx tells us a little later). There
is nothing mysterious, he claims, about this tables use-value; it
satisfies human needs (C1: 178), we eat at it, drink at it, talk at it,
whatever. Once the same table possesses an exchange-value, how-
ever, its character is absolutely transformed: as soon as it emerges
as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuous-
ness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation
to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its
wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to
begin dancing of its own free will (C1: 1634).

108
 It should be obvious on the terms of our reconstruction so far
that these comments cannot be simply transferred to the commod-
ity insofar as it is a subject. Firstly, of course, because Marx would
not have to resort to prosopopoeia; the brains of subjects can evolve
grotesque ideas all by themselves. But secondly, and much more
importantly, because there undoubtedly is something mysteri-
ous about the use-value of the (proletarian) subject. As we have
seen, this particular use-value creates surplus-value for the capital-
ist, as long as it has already been counted (as labor-power) by the
exchange-value of the commodity-form. This mystery (this criss-
crossing intersection of use-value, value and exchange-value) should
already alert us to the fact that commodity-fetishism is going to be
something very different when it concerns the subject than it is when
it only concerns objects. And the whole problem with Marxs analy-
sis is that it stops seriously short of any explication, or even aware-
ness, of this fundamental difference. Indeed in complete indiffer-
ence to what he will later point out about the subjective specificity of
capitalism Marx actually defines the logic of commodity-fetishism
as a simple inversion of the subjective (or social) and the objective,
the human and the thing-like:

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists [] sim-

ply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of
mens own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also
reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour
as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from
and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of
labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same
time suprasensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by
a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation
of that nerve but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In
the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing,
the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation
between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the
value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have
absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity
and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is nothing but
the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes

109
 here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order,
therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of
religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous
figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations
both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of
commodities with the products of mens hands. I call this the fetishism
which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are pro-
duced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the produc-
tion of commodities. (C1: 1645)38

The fetishism of the commodity is conceived here in terms of the

objective or thing-like aspect that subjective or social rela-
tions between people (men, the human race) acquire in any
commodity-producing society. Marx is saying nothing specific, that
is, about capitalist society (for such a society, as we have seen, is
not constituted by the simple production of commodities, something
which is common to many social forms, but instead by the inclu-
sion (and simultaneous exclusion) of the subject within (and from)
the logic of the commodity-form). We do not want to criticize Marx,
then, by saying that his analysis of commodity-fetishism is false. As
far as it goes, it is correct; it applies to every mode of production in
which commodities are produced. But, to repeat, it tells us nothing
about the particularity of capitalism, and in the context of Marxs
whole work and, even more, of the reconstruction of it that we are
advancing here this certainly has to be considered to constitute a
serious problem.
Why? Because in the specifically capitalist mode of production it
is impossible to speak of any simple inversion of the subjective or
social and the objective, of the human or personal and the
thing-like. Capitalism is constituted, as a particular social form, by
the inclusion of the subject within the objective logic of the com-
modity-form, by the reduction of the supposed humanity or per-
sonality of this subject to the thing-like status of an exchange-value
(the exchange-value of labor-power). This inclusion or reduction is
not, of course, the whole story, because it can only produce surplus-

38 It is not, of course, a coincidence that Marx returns here to the Feuer

bachian logic of the critique of religious alienation.

110
value for the capitalist when something (labor) resists it obviously,
at the very same time as it succumbs to it (as labor-power). Capitalist
society divides, folds and knots the (proletarian) subject, we might
say, between and across an objective and thing-like aspect (the
exchange-value of the commodity of labor-power) and a properly
subjective, but hardly simply human or personal, quality or
activity (the actual labor that it performs for the capitalist). Marxs
logic of commodity-fetishism, a simple inversion of the subjective
and the objective, the human and the thing-like, is redoubled,
that is, within the (proletarian) subject itself. The (proletarian) sub-
ject is produced by capitalism as an inextricably knotted subject-
object. There is a kind of objectivity inherent and inextirpable in
the subjectivity of this subject. And the profound problem with this
mode of production, as we have shown (and for the proletarians, of
course, not for the capitalists), is that the real social activity of this
subject (its labor) tends to be representatively swallowed up by its
imaginary, but at the same time very practically real, objectiv-
ity (the commodity of its labor-power). If Marx defines capital as a
social relation between persons which is mediated through things
(C1: 932), we can add the crucial qualification, and there lies here
a world of difference: a social relation between persons [somehow
produced as things] which is [itself] mediated through things.

and their Contradictory Consequences

There is an ambiguity, then, not to say a potentially very serious lack

and inadequacy, in Marxs conceptualization of the logic of com-
modity-fetishism. The idea of a simple inversion of the subjective
(or social) and the objective, the human and the thing-like,
because it applies to every mode of production in which commodities
are produced, fails to take account of that specific objective knot-
ting of the subject that uniquely characterizes capitalism. Through-
out Das Kapital, we want to claim in these concluding pages, this
ambiguity, and possible inadequacy, has to be seen to give rise to a
series of ambivalences and contradictions in Marxs numerous the-
matizations of the nature of the proletarian subject. (Ambivalences,
we ought to stress, which Marx never displays in his depictions of
the capitalist. The capitalist subject is always, for Marx, nothing more

111
than the personification (C1: 254), the bearer (Trger), of the
relentless desire to produce and accumulate his own raison dtre,
surplus-value; even if he is also, in a manner somewhat analogous to
the proletarian, irredeemably divided from himself in his fetishistic
failure or, more properly perhaps, self-interested refusal (and here he
would somewhat differ from the worker), to comprehend and articu-
late the actual basis of this production.) More specifically, we can
say that to the extent that Marx does not reflect upon the particularly
capitalist characteristics of commodity-fetishism, the redoubling of
its logic within the (proletarian) subject, he experiences the tempta-
tion to revert to some of the theoretical incoherencies that we have
already seen to afflict his early and middle periods. When Marx fails
to problematize the specifically capitalist knotting of the (proletar-
ian) subject, he again starts to resort, that is, to the humanistic lan-
guage of alienation or to the idea of a simple conflict and contradic-
tion between the relations and forces of production.
On the occasions that Marx conceives of commodity-fetishism in
terms of a language of alienation, he tends to veer as in his early
writings, in fact between granting to this term a purely technical
meaning and, in addition, apportioning to it a whole host of stronger
connotations. According to the technical meaning, which is indisput-
ably correct, the (proletarian) subject alienates his labor to the capi-
talist; this labor, and its product, are the sole property of the latter.
The problem already hinted at in the long quotation on commod-
ity-fetishism above is that, a lot of the time, this purely technical
meaning of the word gets inextricably entangled with its other, less
philosophically innocent, associations; as, for instance, in the follow-
ing passage from the Results of the Immediate Process of Produc-
tion:

the rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of things over man,
of dead labour over the living, of the product over the producer []
Thus at the level of material production [] we find the same situation
that we find in religion at the ideological level, namely the inversion
of subject into object and vice versa [] What we are confronted by
here is the alienation [Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To
that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from
the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and
finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker

112
 is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of
enslavement. (RIPP: 990)

It is hard to separate here the unobjectionable technical meaning

of alienation the rule of the product over the producer, the alien-
ation of man from his own labor from its theoretically unsus-
tainable, Feuerbachian-humanist inflection (something that we have
already subjected to criticism in section 1). According to this inflec-
tion, what the inversion of commodity-fetishism alienates is man
himself, a living being, an implicitly purely human (proletarian)
subject who, precisely because he essentially exists outside, on a
higher plane than, capital, can clearly and directly confront the
simple enslavement that it imposes on him as a victim and a
rebel.
Marx most notably flirts with the notion of a straightforward con-
tradiction between forces and relations of production in a very short
and, perhaps because of its exceptionality, almost freestanding chap-
ter of Das Kapital entitled The Historical Tendency of Capitalist
Accumulation (C1: 92730).39 We find here the following famous
claims and predictions, actually quite rare in Marx, about the inevi-
tably approaching end of the capitalist mode of production:

This [] is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws

of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals.
One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with
this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few,
other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the
growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious
technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil,
the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they
can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of produc-
tion by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized
labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market,
and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capital-
ist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist

39 And it is certainly not a coincidence that Marx also flirts here, much more
than in other parts of his text, with an unequivocally Hegelian language, the
language of antithesis, negation and the negation of the negation.

113
 magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process
of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation
and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the
working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained,
united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of
production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centraliza-
tion of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a
point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integu-
ment. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private
property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (C1: 929)

The revolt of the working class is blithely equated here in a

strange return to those teleological assumptions that we have already
shown to be indefensible in section 2 with a virtually logical incom-
patibility between the centralized and, relatedly but much more
importantly, socialized forces of production and the private capi-
talist relations of production that act as their fettering integument.
We do not want to dwell here on the radically unsatisfactory char-
acter of these two re-appearing motifs; for we have already done this
in our previous analyses. Instead, what we want to argue is that, at
a number of other points in Das Kapital (and related works), Marx
starts to call into question and, in fact, effectively demolishes, the
presuppositions that support them both. At a more general level,
Marx starts to interrogate the first motif when he suggests that the
capitalist mode of production does not alienate the proletarian sub-
ject at least not in anything more than a technical sense but
instead constitutes and produces it in what can only be described as
a degraded form. (Marxs various descriptions of this degradation,
both mental and physical, are virtually omnipresent throughout his
magnum opus, and they are well-known enough not to require here
any detailed repetition.) He starts to interrogate the second motif
when he suggests that collectivization and co-operation the cen-
tralization and socialization of the passage quoted above are not
revolutionary forces of production that resist the capitalist relations
of production, but instead characteristics that irrecusably pertain to
nothing less than these relations of production themselves. Being
independent of each other, Marx tells us, the workers are isolated.
They enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other.

114
Their co-operation only begins with the labour process, but by then
they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour
process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as mem-
bers of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of
existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed by the
worker socially is the productive power of capital. The socially pro-
ductive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever
the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital
which places them under these conditions (C1: 451).
Marxs words become even more pointed when he really begins to
draw out the consequences of the specifically capitalist logic of com-
modity-fetishism, that is, following everything that we have already
said in this section, of the specifically capitalist division of the (pro-
letarian) subject. We can group these consequences, to conclude,
under four main headings (and the relative brevity of our remarks
will be justified by the re-elaboration that they receive in the ensu-
ing sections).
In the first place Marx shows how the division of the proletarian
subject between its labor and the commodity of its labor-power, a
division that tends to produce and reproduce itself at least from the
perspective of this subject in the form of the disappearance of the
former term under the ministrations of the latter, also corresponds,
and once again from the point of view of this subject, to an elision of
the fundamental difference between paid and unpaid, necessary and
surplus labor. Indeed, Marx refers to these two things as the double
[zweierlei] consequence of the specifically capitalist division of the
subject. For if, on the one hand, [t]he value or price of the labour-
ing power takes the semblance of the price or value of labour itself,
although, strictly speaking, value and price of labour are senseless
terms, then, on the other hand:

although one part of the workmans daily labour is paid, while the
other part is unpaid, and while that unpaid or surplus labour consti-
tutes exactly the fund out of which surplus value or profit is formed, it
seems as if the aggregate labour was paid labour [] This false appear-
ance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour.
On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to
be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his
labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work

115
 the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the
value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between
him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on
between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for noth-
ing [] Take, on the other hand, the peasant serf, such as he, I might
say, until yesterday existed in the whole East of Europe. This peasant
worked, for example, three days for himself on his own field or the field
allotted to him, and the three subsequent days he performed compul-
sory and gratuitous labour on the estate of his lord. Here, then, the paid
and unpaid parts of labour were sensibly separated, separated in time
and space; and our Liberals overflowed with moral indignation at the
preposterous notion of making a man work for nothing [] In point of
fact, however, whether a man works three days of the week for himself
on his own field and three days for nothing on the estate of his lord, or
whether he works on the factory or the workshop six hours daily for
himself and six for his employer, comes to the same, although in the
latter case the paid and unpaid portions of labour are inseparably mixed
up with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is com-
pletely masked by the intervention of a contract and the pay received
at the end of the week. The gratuitous labour appears to be voluntarily
given in the one instance, and to be compulsory in the other. That
makes all the difference. (WPP: 989)

In the final part of the following chapter, we will return to this

essential demarcation between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of
production (and especially to the example that Marx provides here of
the east European corve), in order to show how it really is a demar-
cation that makes, in terms of the theorizations of the subject that
it implies, all the difference. For the moment, however, it perhaps
suffices to say for this is also an issue that we will be returning to
later on that this elision of the distinction between paid and unpaid,
necessary and surplus labor is effectively redoubled in capitalism by
the further elision of the distinction between productive and indi-
vidual consumption. (Productive consumption, Marx informs us,
refers both to the means of production that are consumed by prole-
tarian labor in order to produce surplus-value and to the consump-
tion of this labor by the capitalist; individual consumption refers to
those means of subsistence that the proletarian consumes with the
money that he receives for the sale of the commodity of his labor-

116
power (C1: 7178).) In a nutshell, then, if the work of the proletar-
ian subject is inevitably made up a combination and intermixture of
the two inseparable moments of necessary and surplus labor, then
so too are the commodities that are finally produced by this work.
And, crucially and speaking of course, as Marx reminds us, of the
full social scale (C1: 717) of the capitalist mode of production it
is precisely these commodities that the proletariat consumes at the
same time as it produces them or, in Marxs own terms, that it indi-
vidually consumes at the same time as it produces them through
its productive consumption. The proletarian subject consumes, we
might say in an equally undifferentiated form the very conditions
of its own production.
Secondly, Marx links the appearance of voluntariness described
above to what it is only appropriate to call the free implication of
the proletarian subject in the perpetuation of the conditions of its
own subordination. Now, Marx of course famously defines this sub-
ject as being free in a double sense [in dem Doppelsinn]. That is,
if, on the one hand, it is free to sell the commodity of its own labor-
power, then, on the other hand, it is only free to do this because it
has already been freed from the ownership of the means of produc-
tion (C1: 2713), rendered, in Marxs shorthand designation, vogel-
frei (C1: 896). This latter freedom which is naturally nothing
more than a form of unfreedom does nothing to override, however,
the characteristics that are attached to the former (and which are cer-
tainly more difficult to describe in purely negative terms). For if we
quickly run through the long list of attributes that Marx provides in
Das Kapital, and also and especially in the Results of the Imme-
diate Process of Production, we can see that this former sense effec-
tively determines the free worker as individual, independent,
intensive and energetic; as self-controlled, responsible, dili-
gent and skilled; and as talented, competitive, flexible and
versatile (the fluidity of the proletarian subject makes it funda-
mentally indifferent, Marx claims, to the particular content of its
labor). All of these characteristics are essentially reinforced, more-
over, by local and specific variations in the market price of labor-
power variations that can increase, within strictly defined limits,
of course, the workers ability to do with his money what he sees
fit and by the fact that he is also free, as Marx succinctly puts

117
it, to periodically change masters (C1: 697; 7234; RIPP: 10134;
10314).
Thirdly and emphasizing now the inescapable inverse of all of
these attributes; emphasizing, that is, the determination of the pro-
letarian subject as vogelfrei Marx also shows how the freeing
of this subject from the ownership of the means of production must
also be seen to imply what we can only refer to as a deprivation of
its knowledge:

The knowledge, judgement and will which, even though to a small

extent, are exercised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman,
in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in
the exercise of his personal cunning, are faculties now required only
for the workshop as a whole. The possibility of an intelligent direction
of production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many
others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the
capital which confronts them. It is a result of the division of labour in
manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual
potentialities [geistige Potenzen] of the material process of production
as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This
process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist
represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole
body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates
the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is complemented
in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for produc-
tion which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of
capital. (C1: 482)

The paradox, of course, is that this deprivation appears alongside

all of those apparently contradictory definitions that we have given
above.
Fourthly and finally, we can effectively summarize everything that
we have been saying here by pointing out both following Marxs
own terms and introducing a new significance into them that cap-
italism ultimately implies not only a formal subsumption of the
working subjects capacities, but also, and much more radically,
their real subsumption (with this real subsumption entailing,
moreover, nothing less than a subsumption of the real). Marx defines
the formal subsumption of labour under capital in terms of the

118
harnessing or appropriation by capitalism of the modes and meth-
ods of an essentially pre-capitalist kind of work; and he defines the
real subsumption of labour under capital in terms of the penetra-
tion by capitalism into the very inner core of the processes of work.
(The first phase corresponds roughly to the period of manufacture;
the second to the permanent revolutionizing of production in the
modern factory.) (RIPP: 101938) If we inflect Marxs terms a little,
however, then it is not too difficult to suggest that the first form of
subsumption involves a harnessing or appropriation by capitalism
of precisely that real knowledge that is still attached to the worker
as a lingering consequence of his previous ownership of the means
of production; and that the second kind of subsumption involves
a deprivation and, in fact, as we have been arguing throughout
this section, a tendential imaginarization of this knowledge as the
result of the coterminous deprivation of the ownership of the means
of production, and of the thoroughgoing organization of the labor
process according to the terms of this deprivation. It is exactly this
real deprivation, then, we can conclude or, more precisely perhaps,
and as we will see more clearly in some of the sections that follow,
this tendential deprivation of the real that gets returned to the pro-
letarian subject in his imaginary (but also, in its effects, also very
real) sense of freedom. Or, as Marx himself puts it, the isolated
worker, the worker as free seller of his labour-power, succumbs
without resistance once capitalist production has reached a certain
state of maturity (C1: 412).40

40 Once one recognizes this, it becomes easier to understand why it is that

perhaps the greatest study of workers resistance, E. P. Thompsons The Mak-
ing of the English Working Class, essentially corresponds to the period of for-
mal subsumption. See Thompson (1991). For a fascinating discussion of this
question, see also the short essay on Thompson in Anderson (2005), 17787.

119
 II.

From Freud to Lacan and Back to Marx; or,

How Psychoanalysis Slowly Discovers the Social
 1. The Nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious:
the Trauma of the Social in Freuds
Two Topographies

In a very famous and very influential passage of Moses and Mono-

theism, Freud draws attention, with his characteristic lan, to that
intricate and interweaving logic of Entstellung by means of which
a text both symptomatically registers and, at the same time, symp-
tomatically covers over the unmasterably traumatic core of its own
motivation:

The text [] as we possess it [] will tell us enough about its own

vicissitudes. Two mutually opposed treatments have left their traces on
it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsi-
fied it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated it and amplified
it and have even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solici-
tous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as
it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus
almost everywhere noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious
contradictions have come about indications which reveal things to
us which it was not intended to communicate. In its implications the
distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpe-
trating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. We might well lend
the word Entstellung [distortion] the double meaning to which it has
a claim but of which to-day it makes no use. It should mean not only
to change the appearance of something but also to put something in
another place, to displace. Accordingly, in many instances of textual
distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been sup-
pressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else, though changed
and torn from its context. Only it will not always be easy to recognize
it. (MM: 43)

Now, anybody who has made a serious attempt to work through

the development of Freuds metapsychology will be indisputably
aware that the description advanced here turns, with an irony that
is perhaps specific to the psychoanalytic domain, quite beautifully
and quite cruelly back upon the very person doing the describing.
On the justifiable proviso that we treat this development as a single

123
text, that is, it too has to be seen to be dominated by the interlock-
ing traces, the closely imbricated vicissitudes, of two mutually
opposed treatments.
In the first place, as we will see and as a somewhat paradoxical
result of the solicitous piety of Freuds matchless intellectual integ-
rity this text is absolutely replete with noticeable gaps, disturb-
ing repetitions and obvious contradictions, all of which certainly
reveal things to us that they were not intended to communicate.
A theoretical murder has undoubtedly been committed perhaps
even unbeknownst, we will suggest, to the author of the deed him-
self but its effects keep rebounding and returning to disturb that
equally theoretical tranquility that he so clearly is longing for. Some-
thing has been changed, suppressed and disavowed, but only
in order that it might continually and repeatedly reappear elsewhere;
very significantly, one supposes, hidden away and torn from its
proper setting. All of these things, and of this we can be sure, will
not always be easy to recognize. Not least, of course, because in
the second place this text is also thoroughly saturated by the
secret aims of revision, falsification, mutilation, amplifica-
tion and reversal; aims that have quite vainly, but nonetheless
quite misleadingly, sought to drape a veil of consistency over and
around an otherwise radically inconsistent core.

The Supposedly Seamless Narrative of

the Development of Freuds Metapsychology

We can begin, then, by trying to grasp the nature of this second logic
the logic of the falsely harmonizing imposition of consistency first
(for it is only after we have done this that we will be able to turn our
attention to the much more interesting inconsistency that it attempts,
and ultimately fails, of course, to conceal). In the particular domain
that concerns us here, this logic is, we want to claim, the inescap-
able product of Freuds massively overweening desire to present the
development of his metapsychology as a development in the first
place, that is, as something that smoothly and seamlessly progresses
from a first and fundamentally inadequate psychical topography to
a second, much more coherent and convincing one. The narrative of
this development, which is fairly well-known, in addition to being

124
present in Freuds own texts, it is rather slavishly and unthinkingly
reproduced in every textbook introduction to his work quite natu-
rally tends to break itself down into three, apparently merely chrono-
logically successive, stages: a before, an after, and in between, as we
will see, a deceptively simple point of transition. These stages can be
very schematically represented in the following terms (and even here
there will be hints of the many obstacles to the putative smoothness
of the narrative progression).
Originally then, we are told, the fundamental hypotheses of psycho-
analysis were theoretically grounded upon a relatively simple and
essentially twofold or dualistic1 opposition between the conscious-
ness of the ego2 and the contradictory and countervailing tendencies
of a specifically unconscious thought. (We ought to stress in passing
here as this is certainly something that will become important for
our argument later on that this primordial opposition between the
conscious and the unconscious was of course seen to entail a whole
host of other antithetical couples. To name only the most important
here (and we will discuss the implications of these distinctions in
more detail a little further on): the primary process is counterposed
to the secondary process; the pleasure principle is juxtaposed with
the reality principle; the energy of mobile cathexes is contrasted with
the energy of bound cathexes; and thing-presentations (Dingvorstel-
lungen) are differentiated from word-presentations (Wortvorstellun-
gen). All of these oppositions, moreover, and this too is something
that we will later not fail to interrogate find themselves super-
imposed upon a more general, and certainly rather confused and
confusing, conception of the irreconcilable conflict between the pre-
carious achievements of human civilization and the endlessly disrup-

1 This dualism is complicated, of course, but at the same time essentially left
intact by the references that Freud makes to the domain of the preconscious.
For the defining characteristic of this preconscious is its easy access to con-
sciousness.
2 Freud only systematically developed his theory of the ego in his later
work, but it is certainly fair to say that its presence is implicit, and at times
even explicit, from the very beginning. Freud even provided a first theoretical
outline of this instance in his pre-psychoanalytic publication the Project for a
Scientific Psychology, which can be found in Volume I of The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 281397.

125
tive instincts or drives (Triebe),3 primarily those of a sexual nature
(although, as we will see, Freud later changes in this view), that
threaten them from beneath.)4
At a certain point, however, the story continues some time around
1920, the time of the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle
this simple, metapsychological opposition between the conscious
and the unconscious starts to run into insurmountable difficulties.
These were, by and large, the product of a single and rather troubling
(although, for Freud, not troubling enough, we might ultimately be
led to think) clinical experience. In the context of his analytic prac-
tice, that is, Freud was forced to recognize that a lot of the resis-
tances coming from his patients were of an undeniably unconscious
character. And because these resistances undoubtedly emanated, in
his view, from the source of the ego, part of this ego its nucleus,
Freud says had to be construed as fundamentally unconscious.
The consequences of this discovery are, Freud contends, obvious
(perhaps a little too obvious, we will inevitably be led to suspect). If
the nucleus of the ego is itself unconscious, and if (a very big if, this
one!) psychoanalysis still wants to oppose the repressive instance of
the ego to that which it is supposed to repress (formerly, of course,
what was repressed was the unconscious per se), then this opposition
can no longer be comprehended as one between the conscious (ego)
and the unconscious (repressed). As Freud himself rather neatly puts
it, if everything that is repressed is unconscious, then not everything
that is unconscious is repressed. The ego, in other words or, at the
very least, its nucleus must be paradoxically conceived as some-
thing that is both indubitably unconscious and, at the same time, cer-
tainly not repressed. (Here, of course, the alarm bells should really
begin to ring: for if the unconscious was previously defined as the
repressed, how are we supposed to understand this new and wholly
unrepressed unconscious instance?)

3 It is important when reading Freud not to presuppose that the concept of

instinct or drive (Trieb) already possesses the conceptual coherence that Lacan
would later introduce into it, by essentially translating it into linguistic and, in
our own view, ultimately social and historical terms.
4 See especially on this the 1908 essay Civilized Sexual Morality and Mod-
ern Nervous Illness, in Volume IX of the The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 177204.

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 Freuds narrative predictably concludes, then, with the introduc-
tion of a new set of metapsychological oppositions that are supposed
to do justice (but do they?, we will ask) to this simultaneously clinical
and theoretical registration of the egos essential unconsciousness.
Psychoanalysis will no longer simply oppose, the argument runs, the
conscious and the unconscious. Instead, it will start to work with an
apparently (but not, as we will see, in reality) entirely new opposi-
tion between the coherent ego and the unconscious repressed both
of which, to reiterate, can be construed as unconscious, but only one
of which, obviously the latter, can be conceived as repressed (the ego
itself, on the basis of what Freud has already said, necessarily hav-
ing to be understood as repressing). And finally, this new, and still
fundamentally twofold or dualistic, opposition will in turn be seen
to feed into (but how exactly? we will inquire) that equally new,
and now supposedly threefold or ternary opposition ego, super-ego
and id that famously defines Freuds later topographical thinking.
(We are said to advance, that is, from the more general perspective
informing our whole reading of Freud, from an incoherent thinking
of the two to a much more compelling thinking of the three.)

and its Hidden and Haunting Traumatic Core

Now, as the parenthetical hints above were obviously intended to

suggest, our ultimate aim in this section is to show that if one looks
a little more closely at Freuds metapsychological texts, from the very
early seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams to the much
later The Ego and the Id, and even beyond this apparently smooth
and seamless narrative of development quite inexorably begins to
unravel and dissolve. Or, in more precise terms, it starts to erode,
undermine, dismantle and even deconstruct itself from within.5 This

5 The terms of this deconstruction have absolutely nothing to do with that

other deconstruction of Freuds work that can be found in the uvre of Jacques
Derrida. See Derrida (1978), 196231, Derrida (1987), 257521 and Derrida
(1998). To sum things up in a single sentence: if Derrida, as always, wants
to deconstruct Freuds supposed impositions of order by showing how they
presuppose the background of a quasi-transcendental diffrance, then what
we want to do is show how Freuds orderings are always already ordered by a
social and historical frame that ultimately eludes him.

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narrative is nothing more, we want to claim, than the symptom of a
continually repeating and recurring trauma a trauma that it uncon-
sciously and unsuccessfully, and thus in a highly contradictory and
compromising fashion, seeks to cover over and repress. In the lan-
guage that we used to introduce this section, this narrative is the
murder, the Entstellung, of the very traumatic core of its own
motivation. This core, we will discover, has been distorted and dis-
placed; and its fate, as a consequence, is to return and reappear, this
time in a different form, elsewhere.
What, then the question inevitably arises is this continually
repeating and recurring traumatic core? It is constituted, we will
claim, by nothing other than that precise recognition that Freuds
self-imposed narrative of progression seeks to describe as a simple
point of transition. The recognition, that is, that the nucleus of the ego
is unconscious. Freud uncovers with this claim, we want to argue
in a manner that he himself was certainly entirely unaware of an
absolutely revolutionary folding or knotting logic which neither his
first topography (clearly, for he himself freely admits this) nor his
second topography (much less clearly) can compellingly articulate.
Rather than being a simple point of transition between these two
topographies as Freuds story of his own advancement is inevitably
bound to suggest the experience that produces this folding or knot-
ting logic has to be seen to explode from within the essential presup-
positions of both.
Our argument will advance, then, by paying attention to each
of these two topographies in turn; and in both cases what we will
seek to do is detain ourselves, to a much greater extent than Freuds
own narrative does, on both the difficulties and the simultaneously
implicitly dramatic insights produced by the experience and recogni-
tion of the egos fundamental unconsciousness. Firstly, and relatively
quickly, we will see that, very far from being the simple point of
transition that this narrative implies, this experience and recogni-
tion and the folding or knotting logic that it ineluctably entails, of
course is present in Freuds work, exceptionally, we might say,
from a very early stage (beginning, in fact, with his first major pub-
lication, The Interpretation of Dreams). Freuds first topography can-
not just be seen, then, to function happily for a certain time, and
then later on to run into those insurmountable difficulties that we
have already described. Instead, it and all of the oppositions that

128
it implies has to be understood as being subjected to a radical and
immanent subversion by these difficulties from the very outset.
Secondly, and much more importantly, we will see that even
when in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id this
experience and recognition is supposedly given a much more central
theoretical significance, and even when it is apparently dealt with
by the turn to Freuds second topography, its folding and knotting
logic still continues in its mischievously dismantling and deconstruc-
tive work. Freuds second set of topographical oppositions, and that
whole paradoxical idea of a beyond of the pleasure principle that
is somehow supposed to merge into them, have to be construed, we
will argue, as little more than a speculative flight from, a murder
and Entstellung of, the unparalleled radicality of this logic; and
hence also as a flight back into a lot of those essentially dualistic
oppositions that centrally structured the first topography. Freuds
two topographical models, we will contend, are not so dissimilar
after all. (Or, once again in those more general terms that essen-
tially define our reading, Freud does not in the end find it so easy
to advance from an incoherent thinking of the two to a much more
compelling thinking of the three.)
Ultimately, we will conclude and this is where this section will
most obviously meet up with what we have already said about Marx,
and with what we will say about Lacan (and Marx) in the following
section this flight must be comprehended as a flight from, a mur-
der and Entstellung of, the folding and knotting logic of the social.
For it is only the reference to the social or, much more precisely,
we will contend, to the specific social form of the capitalist mode of
production, that can provide an adequate account of that folding and
knotting logic that in fact constitutes and defines the nucleus of the
ego as unconscious. (It is only the introduction of a third term, that
can allow us to comprehend the combined articulation of the other
two; even if one of these two terms, the unconscious, is compelled
to undergo in the process a quite thoroughgoing, and this time quite
proper, displacement). The metapsychological we will argue and
this has to be seen to determine the absolute limit to Freuds think-
ing is just, in this very precise and, in the last instance, very histori-
cal sense, the social. Or, in other words, it is precisely because Freud
refuses to carry out this social dissolution of the metapsychological
that his own treatment of the social is compelled to adhere to that very

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double logic of Entstellung that he himself so brilliantly describes.
Because Freud first changes the appearance of, or suppresses and
disavows, the social by transforming it into the metapsychological,
he is later forced to displace it, to put it in another place, by con-
ceiving it not on its own terms, but instead in accordance with that
very metapsychology that has systematically occluded it in the first
place. Rather than making use of the social to explain and, in fact,
collapse the metapsychological, Freud uses the metapsychological to
explain, in a necessarily inadequate way, the social itself.

The Dissolution of Freuds First Topography

We can deal with the deconstruction of Freuds first topography

fairly rapidly then. As we have already seen, in our brief reconstruc-
tion of Freuds narrative of his own development, this topography
can essentially be said to be organized around a fundamentally two-
fold or dualistic opposition between the consciousness of the ego and
the supposedly strictly contrary trends of a specifically or uniquely
unconscious thought. It is only the primordiality of this opposition
and of that apparent discovery of the unconscious (in a grammati-
cally substantive sense) that is said to go hand in hand with it that
is capable of grounding and generating all of those other two-term
juxtapositions that famously define Freuds early (and, as we will
see, not so early) thinking. If the primary process is counterposed to
the secondary process, the pleasure principle to the reality principle,
the energy of mobile cathexes to the energy of bound or quiescent
cathexes, and thing-presentations to word-presentations, this can
only be because the former set of terms is allied with Freuds defini-
tion of the unconscious and the latter (circuitously, at least, via the
detour of what Freud denominates the preconscious) to his defini-
tion of the consciousness of the ego.
In summary, then, Freuds first topography has to be seen to pre-
suppose, as he himself says, the existence of two fundamentally
different kinds of psychical process (ID: 597). Unconscious thought
processes (those of or attached to the primary process, the pleasure
principle, mobile cathexes and thing-presentations) are fundamen-
tally situated by one set of characteristics; conscious thought pro-
cesses, the thought processes of the ego (those of or attached to the

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secondary process, the reality principle, bound or quiescent cathexes
and word-presentations), are definitively placed by another. Very
briefly (and imposing a little order ourselves on Freuds proliferating
list of descriptions), the former processes can be said to possess the
characteristics of orderlessness; or, in Freuds own terms: condensa-
tion, displacement, the absence of negation and the absence of time.
The latter processes, in a purely ex negativo fashion, can be said to
acquire the characteristics of order; or, following Freud once again:
lack of condensation, lack of displacement, the presence of negation
and the presence of time (ID: 588621; U: 186204). Orderlessness,
Freud explicitly claims, additionally possesses a chronological pri-
ority (ID: 603) over the apparently later imposition of order; and
this is why, finally, unconscious thought processes can also be con-
ceived to bear a more intimate or more privileged relationship a
relationship of representation (U: 186), Freud says6 with the sup-
posed originality of the instincts or drives (and especially at least for
the early Freud, with those drives of a sexual nature that constantly
threaten to undermine the fragile accomplishments of human civili-
zation and society).
On a fairly superficial reading, then one that sticks closely to
the conceptual and theoretical surface of Freuds texts the opposi-
tions that determine this first topography could not be more clearly
differentiated. The traits of the conscious ego and the contrary traits
of the unconscious stare uncomprehendingly at one another across
the immovable space of a definitional abyss. If one starts to pene-
trate a little more deeply, however, into the intricacies that surround
the apparent clarity of Freuds concepts, then all of the distinctions
referred to above quite ineluctably begin to dissolve and disintegrate
(not surprisingly for as the sensitive reader will no doubt already
have noticed, every one of them is absolutely ripe for deconstructive
dismantling). There are numerous examples of this dissolution, and
we obviously do not have time here for anything like an exhaustive
consideration of them. What we want to do instead, then, is focus
our attention on just a couple of passages in which Freud, more
or less explicitly, starts but, as we will see, only starts to call

6 Freud uses here the somewhat confusing concept of the Vorstellung-

sreprsentanz, which we will later see Lacan clarify in linguistic and also,
implicitly, social and historical terms.

131
into question that fundamentally anchoring opposition between the
consciousness of the ego and the supposedly strictly counterposed
trends of a specifically unconscious thought.

in the Seventh Chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams

The first of these passages can be found in the famous seventh chap-
ter of The Interpretation of Dreams (the chapter in which Freud first
systematically lays out the metapsychological terms of his first topog-
raphy7). Freud is talking here about punishment-dreams (dreams
that fulfill the dreamers desire to be castigated for the emergence
of a repressed or forbidden wish); and what he wants to emphasize
is the fact that the theorization of these dreams seems to require a
new addition to that very metapsychological framework that he is
in the process of constructing. Very briefly, if punishment-dreams
certainly resemble other dreams in the sense that they too origi-
nate from an unconscious wish, they also have to be said to differ
from such dreams to the extent that, in their case, this wish can
only be seen to emanate from the ego itself. If, in all other dreams,
the dream-constructing wish is an unconscious one and belongs to
the repressed, then in punishment dreams, although this wish is
equally an unconscious one, it must be reckoned as belonging not to
the repressed but to the ego. [P]unishment-dreams, Freud con-
tinues, indicate the possibility that the ego may have a greater share
than was supposed in the construction of dreams. The mechanism
of dream-formation would in general be greatly clarified if instead
of the opposition between conscious and unconscious we were to
speak of that between the ego and the repressed (ID: 5578).
Now, it should be obvious that the whole conceptual edifice of
Freuds first topography is teetering here on the brink of a rather
ignominious collapse (and in precisely the place, no less, in which
it is first systematically articulated). For if part of the ego, at least,

7 We ignore here the very early Project for a Scientific Psychology, where
this topography is certainly present in an embryonic form, but in a form ren-
dered unnecessarily confusing at least before Lacans linguistic clarifica-
tions by Freuds conviction that he is describing the movements of a neuronal
apparatus.

132
is unconscious if the ego itself is the originator, as Freud says, of
indisputably unconscious wishes then surely it is no longer feasible
to oppose its consciousness to that supposed negation of itself (the
unconscious) that it has now, somewhat paradoxically, come to wel-
come and include. Rather than continuing to simply oppose the con-
scious and the unconscious, do we not need to speak instead, Freud
suggests, of a new and in some way entirely different opposition
between the ego and the repressed?
But at this point in Freuds text, something very strange happens;
for no sooner has he raised this question one that will later come
back to haunt him, as we will see, in more ways than one than
he quickly proceeds to demolish its most troubling implications. In
the first place, he tells us, any new opposition between the ego and
the repressed cannot be erected without taking account of the pro-
cesses underlying the psychoneuroses; for that reason it has not
been carried out in the present work. The present work, Freud
quite happily appears to be accepting here, is theoretically grounded
upon a psychical topography that its own author has already recog-
nized, at least in exceptional cases, to be fundamentally inadequate.
Even more striking, however, is what Freud says next: [t]he essen-
tial characteristic of punishment-dreams would thus be that in their
case the dream-constructing wish is not an unconscious wish derived
from the repressed (from the system Ucs.), but a punitive one react-
ing against it and belonging to the ego, though at the same time an
unconscious (that is to say, preconscious) one (ID: 558).
Now Freud appears to be telling us that the unconscious wishes
originating in the ego are not really unconscious at all (or, in his own
rather technical and rather confusing vocabulary, that even if
they are descriptively unconscious, they are certainly not dynami-
cally unconscious8). The unconscious wishes of the ego are, he
says, preconscious, that is, according to his own definition of this
term, they are contingently unconscious but capable of being brought

8 The descriptively unconscious serves to designate for Freud everything

that lies outside the sphere of consciousness; as such, it includes both the
preconscious and the unconscious proper. The dynamically unconscious
serves to designate that which is removed from consciousness more than just
contingently, that is, by more than just its momentary absence from conscious-
ness; as such, it includes only the unconscious proper.

133
at any moment into an unproblematic relationship with conscious-
ness. If this is really the case, however, then why has Freud previ-
ously even bothered, on the very basis of these wishes of the ego,
to momentarily call into question the whole opposition between the
conscious and the unconscious (for if ego-wishes are only uncon-
scious in a preconscious sense, this opposition and the opposi-
tion between the ego and the unconscious that it inevitably entails
is just as secure as ever)? Freud seems to taking away with one hand
here what he has already given with the other; and one can only be
led to suspect that this sleight has enabled him to avoid a deeply dis-
turbing recognition. (Later on, we will be able to see that this gesture
of avoidance is quite typical of all of Freudss confrontations with the
particular problematic at hand).

and in the Metapsychological Paper on The Unconscious

The second passage that concerns us here is located in The Uncon-

scious; the third, and undoubtedly the most important, of Freuds
Papers on Metapsychology. (Once again, then, we are dealing with
a text generally considered to be a simple locus classicus of the first
topography). In this instance, Freud is discussing the difficulties
of which we have already had a small taste above of drawing a
compelling division between the supposedly distinct spheres of the
conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The reason for all
these difficulties, he wants to claim:

is to be found in the circumstance that the attribute of being conscious,

which is the only characteristic of psychical processes that is directly
presented to us, is in no way suited to serve as a criterion for the dif-
ferentiation of systems [] consciousness stands in no simple relation
either to the different systems or to repression. The truth is that it is not
only the psychically repressed that remains alien to consciousness, but
also some of the impulses which dominate our ego something, there-
fore, that forms the strongest functional antithesis to the repressed. The
more we seek to win our way to a metapsychological view of mental
life, the more we must learn to emancipate ourselves from the impor-
tance of the symptom of being conscious. (U: 1923)

134
 Freud certainly seems to have eliminated here any lingering doubts
about the real and proper unconsciousness of (at least a part of) the
ego; for some of its impulses, he states, are quite simply alien to
consciousness. The whole train of thought that he is engaged in is
nonetheless still marked by an absolutely peculiar quality of evasion.
For if the (partial) unconsciousness of the ego deprives the charac-
teristic of consciousness of any real metapsychological significance
(the ego previously having been defined, of course, as the simple
seat of consciousness), then it also seems to do the same for that
very characteristic of unconsciousness that is still supposed to define
it (for what can the unconscious possibly designate if there is no
longer any clearly conscious ego to juxtapose it to?). Perhaps not
surprisingly, then, in a text that has formerly sought to set out the
special characteristics of the system Ucs (U: 186), Freud once more
seems reluctant to push his thoughts through to their apparently logi-
cal, and certainly quite dizzying, conclusions. (In The Ego and the
Id, as we will see below, Freud comes one step closer to accepting
this apparent metapsychological meaninglessness of the quality of
unconsciousness; once again, however, he will turn away from the
theoretical abyss that seems to be opening up before him.)
We can see, then, that in the very same texts in which Freud is
constructing and adhering to his first topography a topography that
is essentially organized, of course, around an opposition between the
unconscious and the consciousness of the ego he is, at the same
time, already starting to interrogate the theoretical or metapsycholog-
ical viability of its central presuppositions; by drawing intermittent,
but nonetheless dramatic attention to the egos undeniable uncon-
sciousness. Freuds smooth and seamless narrative of his own pro-
gression is already beginning, that is, to slowly and surely fall apart.
(For on the terms of this narrative, the recognition of the egos uncon-
sciousness only appears as a simple point of transition between the
first and second topographies; and certainly not as something that is
always already undermining the former from deep within.) Our alter-
native story is only just getting underway, however, for as we hope
to show in what follows the self-dissolution of Freuds first topog-
raphy can only be said to pale in comparison with the self-dissolution
of his second. That is to say, it is precisely when Freud claims to
take proper theoretical cognizance of the egos unconsciousness in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id that he really

135
starts to tie himself up in a dense web of knots. (Indeed, we will
claim, this is the only thing that one can do when one is so obviously
running away from a folding or knotting logic.)

The Dissolution of Freuds Second Topography;

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is undoubtedly one of Freuds most

bemusing and bewildering texts. Not because, when approached
with the right attitude,9 it does not open up a whole series of funda-
mental questions, but because, in the end and in relation to these
questions it seems to do little more than render impossible that
very beyondness that it is so resolutely searching for. Indeed, in the
first three parts of the text (BPP: 723), having first struggled long
and hard to justify the hypothesis of this beyond, Freud almost
gets to the point of retracting and revoking the very basis for it. The
later parts (BPP: 2464), where Freud proceeds to speculate on the
instinctual or drive-like (triebhafte) confirmation of this hypothesis,
are hardly any clearer; for Freud appears to be intent here on decon-
structing all of the key theoretical distinctions that he has already
put in place. This is the peculiar textual movement that we can now
attempt, then, to briefly reconstruct.
Freud begins by advancing an oddly double-edged contention. If
the pleasure principle can undeniably be said to play a dominant role
in mental life, there are, nonetheless, enough reasons to suspect that
this dominance is not exactly total. Freud cites a number of these rea-
sons, the most important of which, at least at the outset of his text,
are constituted by the dreams of traumatic neuroses and the par-
ticular phenomena of childrens play. What both of these instances
inextirpably suggest is the existence of what Freud famously calls

9 The right attitude, to put it bluntly, is Lacans. For rather than dismissing
Freuds reflections on this beyond as a meaningless piece of metaphysical
speculation as so many of his followers did (with the notable, but still very
problematic, exception of Melanie Klein) Lacan seeks to ground these reflec-
tions in a conceptual coherence that they themselves could not quite manage to
attain. The following arguments should be understood as a further contribution
to the articulation of this conceptual coherence.

136
a compulsion to repeat. (The dreams of traumatic neuroses com-
pulsively return to the original scene of an accident; and childrens
play illustriously exemplified, of course, by the vacillations of the
fort-da repeatedly reenacts on its own terms the already registered
disappearance of the mother.) For Freud, however, these examples
remain problematic, for if they certainly can evoke the possibility of
a tendency operating beyond, that is, more primitively than and
independently of (BPP: 17), the pleasure principle, they just as cer-
tainly cannot provide any definitive or irrefutable proof of it. In both
cases, that is and even if Freud only really emphasizes this in the
case of childrens play the continuing repetition of an unpleasur-
able experience can in no way be fully dissociated from the simulta-
neous emergence of a substantial yield of pleasure.
How can Freud corroborate, then, his intuition of a primitive and
independent beyond? Only by proceeding, we want to suggest,
in a hugely diversionary manner. Rather than continuing to simply
evoke the evidential reasons for his intuition, Freud first decides,
that is, to revise the whole theoretical architecture of his mental or
metapsychological topography (and, as we will shortly see, it is only
this revision that will later allow him to claim discovery of those very
evidential reasons that he is looking for). Freud is talking now about
the resistances and the compulsion to repeat that are experienced
in analysis; and he makes the following rather striking and, let us
anticipate, certainly rather unsustainable claims and distinctions:

In order to make it easier to understand this compulsion to repeat,

which emerges during the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics, we
must above all get rid of the mistaken notion that what we are deal-
ing with in our struggle against resistances is resistance on the part of
the unconscious. The unconscious that is to say, the repressed
offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it
itself has no other endeavor than to break through the pressure weigh-
ing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a dis-
charge through some real action. Resistance during treatment arises
from the same higher strata and systems of the mind which originally
carried out repression. But the fact that, as we know from experience,
the motives of the resistances, and indeed the resistances themselves,
are unconscious at first during the treatment, is a hint to us that we
should correct a shortcoming in our terminology. We shall avoid a lack

137
 of clarity if we make our contrast not between the conscious and the
unconscious but between the coherent ego and the repressed. It is cer-
tain that much of the ego is itself unconscious, and notably what we
may describe as its nucleus; only a small part of it is covered by the
term preconscious. Having replaced a purely descriptive terminology
by one which is systematic or dynamic, we can say that the patients
resistance arises from his ego, and we then at once perceive that the
compulsion to repeat must be ascribed to the unconscious repressed.
It seems probable that the compulsion can only express itself after the
work of treatment has gone half-way to meet it and has loosened the
repression. (BPP: 1920).

What is happening, then, in this fantastically dense passage?

Firstly, Freud is insisting upon an absolutely clear-cut separation
between the forces of resistance and repression and the supposedly
directly countervailing energies of the unconscious or repressed. Sec-
ondly, Freud is emphasizing that this separation can no longer be
understood as in the explicit terms of his first topography as a
separation between the conscious and the unconscious. If the resis-
tances that arise in analysis are themselves unconscious and if the
nucleus of the ego that provokes these resistances is itself uncon-
scious too then it is surely more appropriate to speak of an abso-
lute and clear-cut separation between the (unconscious) coherence
of the repressing ego and (the unconsciousness of) the psychically
repressed. (We have a new separation, that is and a new or second
psychical topography in which both the repressed and the repress-
ing sides are characterized by the phenomenon of unconsciousness!)
Thirdly and finally, Freud is implicitly claiming, it is precisely this
new separation that will from now on allow us to justify the hypoth-
esis of a beyond of the pleasure principle. For if resistances can
now be said to emanate from the ego, the compulsion to repeat
the very index of this beyondness can just as unambiguously be
assigned to the workings of the unconscious repressed.
Freud continues by unpacking what for him is the significance of
this third and final claim. There is no doubt, he says, that the
resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under
the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure
which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed. (It
is worth stressing in passing that Freud is absolutely contradicting

138
here something that he has previously stated; for ten pages prior to
this he had asserted that under the influence of the egos instincts
of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the real-
ity principle (BPP: 10).) But how is the compulsion to repeat, he
asks, the manifestation of the power of the repressed, related to
the pleasure principle? This compulsion, he replies, must cause
the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed
instinctual impulses. We have already discussed, however, Freud
points out especially in the example of childrens play, of course
this particular kind of unpleasure, and it cannot be said to contra-
dict the pleasure principle; for it is always accompanied, as we have
seen, by a simultaneous yield of pleasure or, as Freud himself puts it,
unpleasure for one system and simultaneously satisfaction for the
other. But we come now, Freud concludes, to a new and remark-
able fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the
past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which
can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinc-
tual impulses which have since been repressed (BPP: 20).
Now Freud proceeds to describe the examples of the compulsion
to repeat that, in his view, have nothing to do with pleasure and its
principle; and the only thing that we can say is that they are just as
unconvincing, as examples of a supposedly absolute beyond, as
those that Freud has already considered to be so. In the situation of
analytic transference, Freud states, some patients are compelled to
repeat all the frustrations of their early or infantile sexual desires; and
even in normal life, the perpetual recurrence of the same thing
can lead us to believe that certain people are possessed by a par-
tially self-created daemonic power (BPP: 212). Do either of these
examples really exist, however, as Freud quite definitively wants to
suggest, in a domain entirely external to the subtle ministrations of a
paradoxical pleasure? Surely the whole problematic of psychoanaly-
sis is constituted by the fact that this cannot be said to be the case.
(And didnt Freud himself substantially contribute to his own inven-
tion of this discipline by paying special and contradictory attention
to an oddly suffering smile on the face of one of his first hysterical
patients?) (SH: 137; 1445) When people transferentially repeat the
sexual disappointments of their early lives or, this time outside the
sphere of analysis, continually run up against the same self-erected
obstacles, it is radically implausible to suggest just as much as in

139
the case of childrens play that they are effectively immune to a
heavily substantial yield of pleasure or satisfaction.
And if we grant this implausibility, it now becomes possible to
suggest that the only thing convincing Freud of the compellingness
of his examples is the prior reorganization of his psychical topog-
raphy. That is, it is only when Freud has definitively located the
compulsion to repeat within the unconscious repressed and
absolutely apart from the resistances of the coherent and repress-
ing ego that his examples begin to acquire for him a strong and
unshakable force. (It is certainly not a coincidence that these new
examples rely, in a presentiment of the remainder of Freuds text,
on a primordialist and even biologistic language of instincts or
drives (Triebe); these Triebe of course being considered to exist
in a privileged relationship with the still putatively original energies
of the unconscious repressed.) As Freud himself deduces, we can
now find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind
a compulsion to repeat which over-rides the pleasure principle; and
we can even retroactively introduce this assumption into the previ-
ously inadequate instances of childrens play and the dreams of trau-
matic neuroses (BPP: 223).
Not even now, however, is Freuds critical sense bowled over by
the strength of his theoretical or metapsychological desire. It is only
in rare instances, he says, that we can observe the pure effects
of the compulsion to repeat, unsupported by other motives. If chil-
drens play has already revealed to us the intimate partnership
between pleasure and unpleasure, then the phenomena of transfer-
ence phenomena already cited by Freud, we should remember, as
indisputable evidence of an absolute beyond of the pleasure prin-
ciple can also be said to hammer home the same point. These phe-
nomena, Freud now contends, are obviously exploited by the resis-
tance which the ego maintains in its pertinacious insistence upon
repression; the compulsion to repeat, which the treatment tries to
bring into its service is, as it were, drawn over by the ego to its side
(clinging as the ego does to the pleasure principle) (BPP: 23).
On a first reading of these sentences, it is hard to give credence
to what Freud is actually saying in them. Let us reiterate: the com-
pulsion to repeat [] is, as it were, drawn over by the ego to its
side (clinging as the ego does to the pleasure principle). That is,
although Freud is nominally as it were still adhering to his

140
new topographical opposition between the coherent ego and the
unconscious repressed, he is, at the same time, thoroughly and
radically undermining and exploding its very basis. For if the com-
pulsion to repeat is acting on the side of the ego, how can that
unconscious repressed that it is supposed to belong to still be said
to be opposed to this very same egos equally supposed coherence?
Similarly, if the compulsion to repeat is operating on the side of
the pleasure principle clinging as the ego does to the pleasure
principle how can this principle be said to possess an absolute
beyond (the compulsion to repeat being the only apparent index
of it)? Freud seems to be implicitly recognizing here that, if we still
want to talk about something like a beyond of the pleasure prin-
ciple, we will have to do this by articulating a new and very dif-
ferent, that is, non-oppositional, topographical logic; according to
which both the pleasure principle and the ego that clings to it will
have to be paradoxically but nonetheless very productively con-
strued as being beyond themselves. And we can only conclude that
Freud has been pushed in this direction even if he himself appears
to be entirely unaware of this by his prior recognition of the fact
that the nucleus of the ego is unconscious (for, after all, it is the
egos unconscious resistance that Freud is once again referring to in
the two indispensable sentences quoted here).
Freud has almost got to the point of admitting, then, that his new
topography a fundamental opposition between the coherent ego
and the unconscious repressed fails to do justice to the folding
or knotting logic of the egos essential unconsciousness. Once again
ignoring his own insights, however, he still continues to insist upon
the viability of his intuitions. Enough is left unexplained, Freud
says, to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat something
that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than
the pleasure principle which it over-rides (BPP: 23). In the next forty
pages of his text, Freud thus proceeds to engage in an infamously
far-fetched speculation (BPP: 24) on the existence of this transcen-
dently instinctual compulsion to repeat. And on the basis of what
we have argued here, it is not surprising to find that this speculation
gets tied up in a whole welter of ambiguities and contradictions.
We obviously do not have time here for a lengthy discussion of all
of these, so instead we will quickly run through their predominant
features. Firstly, Freud makes an inconsistent return to all of those

141
old oppositions that should have disappeared along with the oppo-
sition between the conscious ego and the supposedly entirely con-
tradictory trends of the unconscious (in particular, he keeps talking
about the primary and secondary processes and mobile and bound
cathexes (BPP: 345; 623)). Secondly, and undoubtedly because he
continues to think in terms of these oppositions or, more specifically,
in terms of a necessary transition or mediation between them, Freud
gets involved in a fruitless attempt to define a mental activity that
can be said to both precede the pleasure principle and, at the same
time, function on its very behalf (BPP: 323; 623). Thirdly, and
most importantly, when Freud is trying to spell out the particular
and general characteristics of the supposed beyond of the pleasure
principle, he can only succeed in deconstructing his own oppositions
at every turn.
In the first place, Freuds distinction between life instincts and
death instincts Eros and Thanatos seems only to reproduce, within
the putative beyond of the pleasure principle, the very distinction
between the pleasure principle and its beyond (with Eros function-
ing as a surrogate for the former, and Thanatos as a substitute for
the latter). And even on its own terms and certainly as a direct
consequence of the above the distinction between these suppos-
edly different kinds of instinct is not especially clear: they are rarely
identifiable in isolation, Freud says, because they are almost always
mutually mitigated or intermixed (BPP: 535); similarly, they can
be said to vacillate between one another (BPP: 401); and if the
life instincts are more or less clearly perceivable (one wonders how
Freud can possibly think this), the death instincts seem to do their
work unobtrusively (BPP: 63), often only appearing within the life
instincts themselves. At other times, Freuds statements adhering
to a self-destructive logic that we have already diagnosed seem to
render the very distinction between these instincts and the pleasure
principle that they are supposed to serve as the beyond of abso-
lutely unworkable: it is the very operation of the pleasure principle,
Freud claims or of its sister the Nirvana principle that leads us
to believe in the existence of those death instincts that, at the same
time, are said to function as its supposed limit (BPP: 556); or the
pleasure principle is already functioning, he says, in the instinctual
sphere of the primary process (BPP: 63) (when, if these distinctions
are to make any sense at all, it should only be able to function in and

142
as the secondary process); or again, the pleasure principle seems
actually to serve the death instincts (BPP: 63).
Finally and most significantly in the context of our discussion
all of Freuds central oppositions dissolve around the category of the
ego; for this ego appears once in the life instincts (BPP: 52; 601n),
once in the death instincts (BPP: 41; 44; 601n) and once again, as
we have already seen, in the pleasure principle itself (if we include
the earlier reference to the reality principle, also quoted above, then
it has to be said to appear four times and each time in a totally
different place!). Freuds simultaneous recognition and misrecogni-
tion of the egos essential unconsciousness a recognition insofar as
this unconsciousness is correctly registered; a misrecognition to the
extent that it is improperly or incorrectly placed, the compulsion
to repeat being wrongly confined away from it in the unconscious
repressed certainly seems to have caused him then, we can con-
clude, a whole host of irresolvable problems.

and The Ego and the Id

The Ego and the Id a work which Freud himself describes as a fur-
ther development of some trains of thought [] opened up in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (EI: 12) can just as certainly not be said to
solve these problems; nor, as we will see, can it be said to do away
with that simultaneous recognition and misrecognition of the egos
unconsciousness that fundamentally gives rise to them. Once more
here, then, Freud is discussing this unconsciousness in the context
of the resistance that arises during the analytic treatment. There is
no question, he says, but that this resistance emanates from [the]
ego and belongs to it; we thus find ourselves in an unforeseen situ-
ation:

We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also uncon-
scious, which behaves exactly like the repressed that is, which
produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which
requires special work before it can be made conscious. From the point
of view of analytic practice, the consequence of this discovery is that
we land in endless obscurities and difficulties if we keep to our habitual
forms of expression and try, for instance, to derive neuroses from a

143
 conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. We shall have to
substitute for this antithesis another, taken from our insight into the
structural conditions of the mind the antithesis between the coherent
ego and the repressed which is split off from it. (EI: 17)

On a first glance, Freud simply seems to be repeating here an

argument that he has already advanced, albeit with self-dissolving
results, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: if the resistances of the ego
are unconscious, then we can no longer oppose as the first psychi-
cal topography does the consciousness of this ego to the apparently
contrary trends of the unconscious; instead, we have to construct
a new antithesis between the coherent ego and the (unconscious?)
repressed. If we look a little more closely, however and think a
little more seriously about this rather conspicuous refusal to desig-
nate the repressed as unconscious we can see that Freud has in fact
introduced a new, and undoubtedly even more disturbing, reflection.
The ego, he states, behaves exactly like the repressed (even if, on
his own account, it is indisputably not repressed, but repressing). It is
precisely this peculiar behavior of the ego that now proceeds to push
Freud to the verge a theoretical black hole:

For our conception of the unconscious [] the consequences of our

discovery are even more important. Dynamic considerations caused us
to make our first correction; our insight into the structure of the mind
leads to the second. We recognize that the Ucs. does not coincide with
the repressed; it is still true that all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all
that is Ucs. is repressed. A part of the ego, too and Heaven knows how
important a part may be Ucs., undoubtedly is Ucs. And this Ucs. belong-
ing to the ego is not latent like the Pcs.; for if it were, it could not be
activated without becoming Cs., and the process of making it conscious
would not encounter such great difficulties. When we find ourselves
thus confronted by the necessity of postulating a third Ucs., which is not
repressed, we must admit that the characteristic of being unconscious
begins to lose significance for us. It becomes a quality which can have
many meanings, a quality which we are unable to make, as we should
have hoped to do, the basis of far-reaching and inevitable conclusions.
Nevertheless we must beware of ignoring this characteristic, for the
property of being conscious or not is in the last resort our one beacon-
light in the darkness of depth-psychology. (EI: 178)

144
 The insights that Freud is expressing here are just as astonish-
ing as his previous evocation of the possibility that the compulsion
to repeat is acting in the side of the ego and the pleasure prin-
ciple itself. If the unconscious ego, Freud is claiming, behaves
exactly like the repressed, whilst certainly not being repressed but
repressing, then we can no longer simply equate the instances of the
unconscious and the repressed; or, as Freud himself very tidily puts
it, all that is repressed is Ucs., but not all that is Ucs. is repressed.
The ego, in other words, sticks out; for part of this, in Freuds view,
eminently repressing instance and Heaven knows how important
a part is itself, undoubtedly, unconscious (once again, Freud
obliterates here his earlier attempt to confine this unconsciousness
to the preconscious). But if the ego is both unconscious and not
repressed but instead repressing we seem to run into a potentially
insurmountable difficulty. How can we possibly conceive, that is,
an unconscious that is not repressed (earlier in his text, we should
stress, Freud has unequivocally defined the repressed as the very
prototype of the unconscious (EI: 15); with the obvious implication
that the ego is a repressing instance unproblematically opposed to
it)? If we are forced to admit such an unrepressed unconsciousness,
Freud concludes or appears to conclude then the very concept of
the unconscious begins to lose significance for us.
We can surmise, then, that it is precisely because Freud so clearly
wants to oppose a repressed and a repressing instance that he is
compelled to confront the impossibility of locating the phenomena of
the unconscious. There is a solution, however, we want to suggest
or, more properly speaking, a dissolution of this impossibility.
For rather than simply counterposing a repressed and a repressing
instance, and then trying (impossibly) to locate the unconscious on
one side or the other, Freud could conceive the very act of repres-
sion and the collateral, but no longer locatable, existence of the
unconscious as the always already accomplished combination
and articulation of two different, but non-oppositional, terms. On
this account which we can only sketch the outlines of here the
ego (that supposedly repressing instance) would no longer have to
be said to behave exactly like the repressed, for what would be
repressed (and simultaneously repressing, of course) would be
its very unconscious constitution as an ego in the first place. It
is only this constitution, that is, that can simultaneously give rise

145
to the unconscious as a strictly non-localizable domain; or, in
Freuds own unsurpassably dialectical terms, the nucleus of the ego
is unconscious. (As we will see in the next section, this is exactly
the account of repression that Lacan provides; and it is precisely
this account, moreover, that enables him to enact such a power-
ful and convincing return to Marx.) As the last sentence of the
above quotation makes clear, however and as we will see in a little
more detail in what follows this is certainly not the path that Freud
chooses to follow.
Once again, then, we have seen how Freuds diagnosis of the fold-
ing and knotting logic of the egos unconsciousness has come very
close to dislodging his new set of topographical oppositions. For if
(given the experience of this unconsciousness) the simple juxtaposi-
tion of a repressed and a repressing instance makes it quite literally
impossible to locate the unconscious, how can Freud continue to
oppose the coherent ego which is still obviously construed as a
merely repressing force to the (unconscious?) repressed? (Freuds
earlier refusal to actually designate this repressed as unconscious
can now be seen to acquire an enormous, even if largely inadver-
tent, significance.) For one last time, however, Freud turns his back
on one of his own most revolutionary discoveries. Even if the qual-
ity of unconsciousness has become impossible to locate, we must
nevertheless, he says, beware of ignoring this characteristic, for
the property of being conscious or not is in the last resort our one
beacon-light in the darkness of depth-psychology. In the remain-
der of his text and in all of those later works in which he also
seeks to articulate his new topographical distinction between the
ego, the super-ego and the id (or, more correctly, to somehow join
this distinction together with that between the coherent ego and
the (unconscious?) repressed)10 Freud can only be said to remain
faithful to this hugely disappointing theoretical and metapsychologi-
cal retreat.

10 We are referring especially here to chapter XXXI of the New Introductory

Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, and
chapters I, VIII and IX of An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, The Psychical Appa-
ratus, The Psychical Apparatus and the External World and The Internal
World.

146
 What form, however, does this regressive faithfulness take?
Well, in the first place, when Freud is attempting to delineate his
new opposition between the ego and the id, he strangely seems to
have forgotten almost all of those difficulties that he has previously
described; not only the difficulties of flatly juxtaposing a repressed
and a repressing instance, and thus of locating the unconscious,
but also and this is really quite startling those of simply set-
ting against one another the conscious and the unconscious. That
is, although Freud occasionally reminds himself that part of the ego
is unconscious (EI: 23; NIL: 6870), and although he occasionally
emphasizes that the id cannot be equated with what was formerly
known as the unconscious (NIL: 712), both of these new terms
for the most part continue to function as direct synonyms of precisely
those psychical qualities of consciousness and unconsciousness that
they were supposed to have replaced.
The ego, Freud states, is closely tied to the superficial system of
perception and consciousness, and is once again in a head-spinning
retraction of a previous retraction said to embrace the precon-
scious. The id, by contrast and one can only throw ones hands up
in exasperation here behaves as though it were Ucs. (EI: 23); [t]
he sole prevailing quality in the id is that of being unconscious (OP:
163). And once these definitions have been (re)established, all of the
old oppositions can make their dutiful return: the id is said to be gov-
erned by the primary process, the pleasure principle and the energy
of mobile cathexes, and its operations are identified with those of
the instincts or drives (even if Freud states elsewhere that there
is no question of a simple direction of fit between these instincts
and the different topographical regions of the mind (OP: 14950);
the ego is predictably seen to come under the sway of the secondary
process, the reality principle and the energy of bound cathexes, and
to exist in a condition of irreconcilable conflict with the instincts or
drives (even if, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we have already
seen it to be at work within these supposed instincts themselves)
(NIL: 736; OP: 1634; 197200).
(We should also stress in passing here and in relation to that
wider context of discussion that is essentially determining our analy-
sis that it is precisely when Freud contrasts the ego and the id in
this way that he comes closest (without actually using the terms, of
course) to erecting a simple, and obviously radically unsatisfactory,

147
opposition between the two uncomprehending spheres of the imagi-
nary and the real; and even comes closest, one might dare to say, to
what the vulgar and unthinking mind might expect of psychoanaly-
sis. The ego, he says in a wild proliferation of metaphors that are
intended to suggest its subordinate relationship to the id is a con-
stitutional monarch, a helper or submissive slave who courts his
masters love, a man on horseback [] who has to hold in check
the superior strength of the horse; in attempting to remain on good
terms with the id, the ego clothes and cloaks the latters com-
mands with its rationalizations and diplomatic ingenuousness;
it pretends and disguises, dodges and conceals, is sycophan-
tic, opportunistic and lying, like a politician who sees the truth
but wants to keep his place in popular favour.11 The id, as against
all of this and in addition to retaining all those characteristics of
the unconscious already outlined in the texts of Freuds first topog-
raphy (in direct contradiction, that is, of his claim that the id is some-
thing different from the unconscious) is the dark, inaccessible part
of our personality; it is a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excita-
tions. In short, then, Freud rather ridiculously concludes, the ego
is a seat of reason and common sense, the id a store of untamed
passions (EI: 25; 556; NIL: 738).)
Freuds apparently new topographical opposition between the ego
and the id has thus fallen irreversibly back into a very old opposition
between the conscious and the unconscious; and it is hardly surpris-
ing to discover that, against the background of this opposition, Freud
finds it extremely difficult and ultimately, indeed, impossible to
coherently locate the, for him, still fundamental phenomenon of the
psychically repressed. (Freuds very commitment to this phenom-
enon, we will remember, was the result of an equally new but this
time much more significantly blurred distinction between the (par-
tially unconscious) coherence of the ego and the (similar uncon-
sciousness of the) repressed itself.) This repressed, Freud now
wants to tell us, has to be seen to belong to the id (even if the two
domains tied together in this way are very far from being defini-
tionally interchangeable). One can only wonder, however, about the

11 To anticipate our own argument a little, it is perhaps not a coincidence

that Freud falls back here upon a whole host of ineradicably social metaphors.

148
supposed ease, and the supposed character, of this belonging. For
hasnt Freud already come up at least inadvertently against the
impossibility of defining the repressed (or anything else, for that
matter) as unconscious? And hasnt he already implicitly identified
the id with what was formerly known as the unconscious (in bla-
tant disregard of his own insistence upon a conceptual differentiation
between the two terms)?
In summary, then, Freuds conception of the repressed seems to
be little more than a symptom and, at the same time, as we have
already suggested, a cause of his inability to adequately define
either the (old) unconscious or the (new) id (and by extension,
of course, the ego as well). It is surely not coincidental then that,
in Freuds new pictorial representations of the mental apparatus (EI:
24; NIL: 78), this repressed begins to acquire a quite peculiar form.
It can only be said to appear here as a mouth-like cavity or inlet that
diagonally intrudes into the ambiguous space between (separating
or uniting? we might ask) the ego and the id. That is, in contrast
to Freuds contention that it belongs exclusively to the id, it seems
to traverse both sides of the opposition (ego and id; repressing and
repressed?) that are said to determine it as repressed in the first
place.12 Freuds descriptions of his diagrams only serve to compound
the theoretical confusion: the repressed, he says, merges into the
id [] and is merely a part of it; but, at the same time, it is only cut
off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can com-
municate with the ego through the id (EI: 24). In insisting upon such
a sharp separation between repression and repressed, Freud
is only committing himself, once again, to the articulation of meta-
psychological incongruities. For if the repressed is part of the id,
and cut off sharply from the ego, how can it communicate with
the ego through the id? This communication would certainly seem
to imply a much more intimate relationship between the ego and
the id than Freud at least in his theoretically regressive mode is
prepared to admit.
Having sacrificed this intimacy, however, Freud can predictably
but still quite astonishingly go on to actually retract that intricately

12 In fact, in precisely these two diagrammatic representations, the concept

of the repressed appears once on the side of the id, and once again on the side
of the ego.

149
interweaving insight the revolutionary character of which we have
been consistently attempting to stress. The nucleus of the ego,
Freud now contends, can no longer be comprehended as uncon-
scious. Instead, [i]t starts out [] from the system Pcpt., which is
its nucleus, even if, as we have learnt, the ego is also unconscious
(EI: 23). Or, even more clearly, although this time half hidden away
at the end of a footnote: [s]ome earlier suggestions about a nucleus
of the ego, never very definitely formulated, also require to be put
right, since the system Pcpt.-Cs. alone can be regarded as the nucleus
of the ego (EI: 28). The fundamental regression of Freuds second
topography now appears to be complete.

The Social Supplementarity of the Super-Ego

Somewhat paradoxically, however, one of the things that enables

Freud to enact this regression is a simultaneous although, as we
ultimately want to suggest here, also extremely partial theoreti-
cal advance. For at exactly the point at which he rescinds his for-
mer claim about the nucleus of the ego being unconscious, Freud
decides to introduce the new idea of a grade or differentiation
within the ego itself something which he famously denominates, of
course, as the super-ego, ego ideal or even ideal ego.13 In rela-
tion to the metapsychological regression that we have outlined here,
it is precisely the introduction of this grade or differentiation that
allows Freud at least from his perspective to so easily shift the
quality of unconsciousness away from the ego per se. Because if, as
he now argues, the super-ego is less firmly connected with con-
sciousness, this consciousness can be essentially restricted to the
ego itself, with the super-ego, a conveniently separate or autono-
mous (NIL: 60) part of the ego, also very conveniently acquiring the
now oddly moveable characteristic of being unconscious (EI: 28).
But what of the theoretical advance constituted by Freuds inven-
tion of the concept of the super-ego? The last thing that we want to

13 Freud had, of course, first introduced this notion under the exclusive
title of the ego ideal in his slightly earlier text on Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego, which can be found in Volume XVIII of The Standard
Edition, 65143.

150
do here is call into question the simple and undeniable fact of this
advance. For, as is well-known and as the very development of
Freuds later writings makes abundantly clear what the theoriza-
tion of the super-ego opens up (in one direction, at least14) is the
whole crucial question of the supra-personal (EI: 35) or, more sim-
ply, the social; in inextricable interrelationship, of course, with that
other hugely thorny problematic of the Oedipus complex. The fact
that Freud wants to consider these questions is important in itself,
and, to reiterate, we certainly do not want to dispute the general
validity of this consideration; that is, we do not want to dispute the
absolutely pressing need for a thoroughly social articulation of both
the super-ego and the Oedipus complex. What we certainly do want
to interrogate, however, is the thoroughness of the specific social
articulation that Freud provides for these two concepts. More pre-
cisely, we want to suggest that Freud effectively treats the super-ego,
and by extension the Oedipus complex and by extension once again
the very existence of sociality as nothing more than a supplement
to an already existing, and thus completely naturalized, relationship
between the ego and the id.
Freud adheres to this logic of supplementarity in a number of differ-
ent ways. Firstly, in a kind of prelude to his introduction of the concept
of the (unconscious) super-ego, he erects a suspiciously clear separa-
tion between the phenomena of the unconscious sense of guilt and
the previously discussed phenomena of unconscious resistance. The
former, he says, the product of an entirely new discovery, have to
be seen to belong exclusively to the super-ego; the latter, as a conse-
quence and by contrast, pertain only to the ego (EI: 267).15 But isnt
the ego, and the unconscious resistance that inevitably accompanies
it, very implausibly cut off in this way from the implicitly social bear-
ing of the unconscious sense of guilt? Is it really possible to say
from the social perspective that Freud is starting to open up here
that unconscious guilt belongs only to the super-ego?

14 We will shortly see that Freuds thinking of the social also pursues another
direction, the direction opened up by his new theory of the life instincts and the
death instincts.
15 Freud himself, it should be noted, later undermines this separation by
claiming that the phenomenon of unconscious resistance pertains both to the
ego and the super-ego (NIL: 689).

151
 Secondly, when Freud is describing the origin of the super-ego
as the heir of the Oedipus complex (EI: 36), that is, when he is
defining this super-ego as the bearer of those identifications with
the parents (and especially the father, of course) that allow the child
to overcome the apparently deadly desires of the Oedipus complex,
he refers to these identifications as the forming of a precipitate in
the ego; as a modification of the ego that retains its special posi-
tion; [confronting] the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or
super-ego. The super-ego is quite clearly being conceived here as
something that is simply added to or superimposed upon an already
existing ego (even if this ego itself is somehow seen to be modified
in the process). Indeed, Freud even goes as far as to suggest that it
is the pre-existent infantile ego itself that represses the Oedipus
complex by erecting the ego ideal (EI: 34). And even when, in an
apparently contrasting line of thought, Freud wants to argue that
it is the character and form of the ego itself that is built up
and determined by the process of identification, it is still only its
character and form; that is, the ego is once again being seen
to paradoxically pre-exist its own process of determination (EI: 28).
Elsewhere, Freud is only taking this logic to the extreme when he
defines the very process of identification as the assimilation of one
ego to another (NIL: 63).
Thirdly and finally and as an inevitable consequence of the
above two maneuvers Freud is compelled to say some very pecu-
liar things about the ego, the super-ego and the id. Until the age of
around five, he states, the childs ego mediates between the id and
the external world; and only after this do the intersubjective effects
of the super-ego come into operation (OP: 2056). Or, similarly, the
id is said to represent the influence of heredity, and the ego to be
principally determined by the individuals own experience of acci-
dental and contemporary events; the super-ego, by contrast, is the
indelibly social residue of what is taken over from other people.
Still more bizarrely, Freuds general schematic picture of a psychical
apparatus may be supposed to apply as well to the higher animals
which resemble man mentally; even if the civilizing super-ego can
only be presumed to be present wherever, as is the case with man,
there is a long period of dependence in childhood (OP: 1467). And
again: [t]he differentiation between ego and id must be attributed
not only to primitive man but even to much simpler organisms, for it

152
is the inevitable expression of the influence of the external world; in
contradistinction and we will hear more of this below the social-
ity of the super-ego is assumed to have actually originated from the
experiences that led to totemism (EI: 38). Overall, the cultural []
differentiation of the super-ego from the ego [] represents the most
important characteristics of the development both of the individual
and of the species (EI: 35). Freuds words, in all of these quotations,
could not be any clearer. The ego and the id, he is contending, are
always already there, the human and equally non-human products of
nature and biology. The super-ego can only be said to emerge against
this naturalized background as the privileged carrier of an eminently
social surplus.
(It is extremely important to emphasize here and once again in
relation to the broader theoretical context of our analysis that, in so
conceiving these three instances (the ego, the super-ego and the id),
Freud is yet again effectively exploding his own painfully constructed
narrative of metapsychological development. For as should already
be quite clear what these conceptions make impossible is any sim-
ple transition from an incoherent thinking of the two (consciousness
versus the unconscious, etc., etc.) to a much more compelling and
convincing thinking of the three (ego, super-ego and id). Rather than
attempting to really think through this ternary relation, as we have
already seen, the only thing that Freud can actually be said to do is
superimpose a third term (the super-ego) upon an already existing
and still fundamentally dualistic opposition between the other two
(the ego and the id). In the terms that we have already introduced
in our discussion of Marx, and which will also be central to our dis-
cussion of Lacan in the following section, we might even say that
Freud systematically fails in this way to convincingly articulate the
closely imbricated interrelationship between the three registers of the
imaginary, the symbolic and the real (represented for him albeit
inadequately by the three psychical instances of the ego, the super-
ego and the id). For what this articulation requires as Marx has
already shown us, and as Lacan, after a long development, will only
confirm is that the two registers of the imaginary and the real be
located exclusively in their combined relationship to the third register
of the symbolic or social. It requires, that is, a thorough socializa-
tion of all three terms; and this is precisely, of course, what Freud is

153
incapable of considering (in his restriction of this socialization to the
supplemental instance of the super-ego).)
Once Freud has erected this super-egoic supplement, however,
and once he has thus failed to compellingly elucidate the mysteri-
ous interaction between the ego, the super-ego and the id he is
once again, with a by now rather dispiriting predictability, forced to
engage in a whole series of self-deconstructing gambits. The three
provinces of the mental apparatus are metaphorized as a landscape
of varying configuration [] with a mixed population, implacably
resistant to the geographical neatness of partition (NIL: 723).
Or, in another analogy, these instances cannot be painted in lin-
ear outlines, they are like the areas of colour melting into one
another as they are presented by modern artists (NIL: 79). If one
has read Freud carefully, one can only concur: there is, he says, an
originally undifferentiated ego-id (OP: 149); or [o]riginally, to be
sure, everything was id; the ego was developed out of the id (OP:
163); or again, the super-ego, as the heir of the Oedipus complex, is
the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important
libidinal vicissitudes of the id itself, which it also has to be seen to
merge into (EI: 36; NIL: 79). Given these confusions, it is scarcely
surprising to discover that Freud defines any attempt to localize
the super-ego as vain (EI: 367) (the only thing that is surprising,
we might think, is that he still considers it possible to localize the
ego and the id).16
We can save Freuds most outlandish reflections until last, how-
ever (and if they are outlandish, we should stress, it is because they
point to the solution of Freuds problems at the very same time as
they carry them through to their uttermost limit). When the expe-
riences of the ego, Freud says, have been repeated often enough
and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive gen-
erations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of
the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity; hence
in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured resi-
dues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms
its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of

16 Freuds comments do not prevent him from later attempting such a local-
ization himself. For in his second diagram of the mental apparatus, the super-
ego assumes its rightful place at the left perimeter of the ego itself (NILP: 78).

154
former egos and be bringing them to resurrection (EI: 38). Or, even
more strikingly: our cultural acquisitions have undoubtedly left a
precipitate behind them in the id; much of what is contributed by the
super-ego will awaken an echo in the id; not a few of the childs new
experiences will be intensified because they are repetitions of some
primaeval phylogenetic experience; the super-ego assumes then a
kind of intermediate position between the id and the external world
[to which the ego is closely attached]; it unites in itself the influences
of the present and the past. In the establishment of the super-ego we
have before us, as it were, an example of the way in which the pres-
ent is changed into the past (OP: 2067). Who can fail to discern
here, in the final and irrevocable collapse of all of Freuds topograph-
ical distinctions and beyond the biologistic appeal to heredity
and the primaeval that very logic of sociality and historicity that
might itself become capable of refounding them anew (even if, in
the process and as we will see, they will undoubtedly come to look
a little different)?

The Metapsychological Murder of the Social

If our reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the
Id has taught us anything, then, it is that Freud can only attempt
to construct his metapsychological and topographical oppositions by
living in denial of or, in the language that we used to introduce this
section, by murdering his own thoroughly radical recognition
of the egos essential unconsciousness. In Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple, Freud gets to the point of admitting that, in the unconscious
resistances of the ego, the compulsion to repeat is acting on the
side of the ego itself; and not, as he had previously claimed thus
justifying the very hypothesis of a beyond on the contrary side of
the unconscious repressed. He goes on, however, to blithely ignore
this insight, and to speculatively confirm his original intuition of an
instinctual transcendence. In The Ego and the Id, having supposedly
established that the ego is both unconscious and not repressed (but
repressing), Freud even goes so far as to say that the characteristic
of being unconscious is fundamentally meaningless (for this charac-
teristic was formerly identified, of course, with the phenomenon of
the repressed itself). But, once again, he turns away from his own

155
discoveries and continues to effectively oppose the ego and the id as
if it were still possible for them to be the unproblematic repressing
and repressed bearers of the conscious and the unconscious; and,
in explicit terms at least, the social supplementarity of the super-ego
only serves to confirm the centrality of this very opposition.
Now, what we want to emphasize in these final pages is that it is
precisely these two murderous logics that essentially determine the
nature of Freuds later social writings. These writings can be divided
up, that is, into two more or less separate strands (even if, as we will
see below, these strands ultimately have to be said to overlap). On the
one hand, then in The Future of an Illusion and, even more clearly,
in Civilization and its Discontents Freud attempts to understand the
logic of the social in terms of those life instincts and death instincts
that he has already located in the apparent beyond of the pleasure
principle. In this view which is extremely well-known, and which
we do not need to dwell on here in any detail the binding and civi-
lizatory powers of Eros are engaged in a permanent struggle with the
unbinding and anti-civilizatory forces of Thanatos or, more precisely,
of that instinct for aggressiveness and destruction that Freud rather
implausibly claims to constitute a piece of unconquerable nature in
our own psychical constitution (CD: 86).
On the other hand and most conspicuously in Group Psychol-
ogy and the Analysis of the Ego Freud seeks to comprehend this
logic in terms of the super-egoic supplement to an already existing
relationship between the ego and the id. In this context, it suffices
to simply quote Freuds famous formula for the libidinal constitu-
tion of groups (or at least of those groups with a leader that he very
symptomatically considers to be the most important): [a] primary
group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one
and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have conse-
quently identified themselves with one another in their ego (GP:
116). But who are these pre-existent individuals and pre-existent
egos, actively identifying themselves with one another solely as a
consequence of an objective transformation in the position of their
super-egos? Does one not need to be first socially and subjectively
constituted as an ego, we might inquire, in order even to desire that
supposedly necessary submission to the leader that Freud himself,
throughout his social writings, so faithfully reaffirms?

156
 We can express all of this in slightly different terms by saying
that, once Freud has murdered the folding and knotting logic of
the egos unconsciousness, and once he has thus deprived himself
of the possibility of overcoming the simple and undialectical opposi-
tion between a repressed and a repressing instance, he is irrevocably
condemned to discover the whole phenomenon of the social and
everything else, for that matter on either one side or the other of
this divide. In The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Dis-
contents, the logic of the social is implicitly located, that is, on the
side of the unconscious repressed; for it was the compulsion to
repeat supposedly at work in this repressed that originally served
Freud, we will remember, as the very index of a beyond of the
pleasure principle. In Group Psychology, by contrast, the logic of the
social is quite explicitly located on the side of the repressing; for,
as we have seen, this entire logic is explained in terms of an appar-
ent interaction between the pre-existent and repressing ego and its
new and effectively supplementary grade or differentiation, the
super-ego.
Freuds thinking of the social runs up then, we can conclude,
against its own self-imposed theoretical limits. For what it attempts
and ultimately fails, of course, to think is not the logic of the social
itself, in its necessary variety and specificity, but the (impossible)
logic of the transition from, and inescapable tension between, the pre-
social and the social or, if you like, the repressed and the repressing.
(Freuds fundamental and fundamentally lingering topographical
opposition between the characteristics of order and orderlessness (the
secondary and the primary processes, etc., etc.) can now be seen to
bear its thoroughly soggy theoretical fruit.) And, in addition to being
at work in the relationship between the two strands of Freuds social
thought with one strand representing the repressed and the other
the repressing this absolute limitation to Freuds thinking has also,
in an enormously paradoxical fashion, to be seen to operate within
each strand itself. In The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and
its Discontents, it appears that within the sphere of the uncon-
scious repressed itself it is the instinct toward aggressiveness and
destruction that is always unsuccessfully repressed by the civilizing
tendencies of Eros. And in Group Psychology, it appears that within
the very sphere of the repressing it is the pre-existent individual-
ity of the ego that is repressed by the social supplementarity of the

157
super-ego. Given the combination of these two appearances, it is not
surprising to find Freud claiming in a classically conservative man-
ner that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the pre-social
claims of the individual and the contrary and superimposed claims
of society (CD: 956).
And given all of these confusions surrounding the social and the
pre-social, the repressing and the repressed, it is equally unsurpris-
ing to discover that the dominant motif of the whole of Freuds social
thinking is the myth or, as he himself says, quoting an early review
of Totem and Taboo, the Just-So Story (GP: 122) of the primal
father. For what this myth attempts to explain, of course through
the idea of the sons and brothers coming together to assassinate this
unbridled and uninhibited figure of authority is the very passage
from the pre-social to the social, from the absolutely unrepressed
state of nature (FI: 15), we might say, to the repressing or repres-
sive condition of culture and civilization. Precisely because it is a
myth, however, this story is not itself immune to those contradictory
oscillations that we have already described. For, from the implicit
perspective of The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Dis-
contents, the father would have to appear on the side of the pre- or
anti-social, that is, on the side of the isolating or unbinding instinct
toward aggressiveness or destruction. From the explicit perspective
of Group Psychology, however, the father actually does appear on
the side of the social itself; [t]he primal father is, Freud incred-
ibly claims, the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of
the ego ideal (GP: 127). Such, then, we can surmise, is the fate of
Freuds (anti-)social fantasy.
If Freud had really wanted to come to grips with the irreducibly
specific problematic of the social, we want to conclude this section
by suggesting, he would have been much better served by remain-
ing faithful to his own absolutely revolutionary insight into the fold-
ing and knotting logic of the egos essential unconsciousness. For if
he had done this, he would have recognized as Marx had implic-
itly done before him, and as Lacan, at times implicitly and at times
explicitly, would do after him (but only, we should stress, after him-
self returning to Marx) that the very unconsciousness of the ego
needs to be produced by something; and that this something can
only ultimately be of a social character. (He would have recognized
in the broader theoretical terms of our analysis that the imaginary

158
ego and the real of the unconscious or, more properly speaking, as
we will see, the real of labor (the unconscious no longer being, of
course, discretely localizable), can only be combined through the
intervention and activity of a third, and unavoidably social or sym-
bolic, term.)
If Freud had followed this path, moreover, he would have been
able to rid himself both of his far-fetched speculations concerning
the beyond of the pleasure principle and of his above-mentioned
worries about the strict impossibility of locating the phenomenon
of the unconscious. For, as we have already suggested, what the
unconscious constitution of the ego reveals or better perhaps, the
constitution of the ego as unconscious is that the pleasure principle
that is undeniably attached to the ego is beyond itself (always imagi-
narily incapable, we might say, of totalizing or mastering its own
inescapably social or symbolic relationship to the real). And what
it also reveals is that the phenomenon of the unconscious does not
need to be located at all; for this phenomenon, as we will see more
clearly in the following section, is itself nothing more than the prod-
uct of a very particular social form: namely, the capitalist mode
of production (the unconscious just is, we might say, at least in its
experienceable form, an ineluctable effect of the capitalist imbrica-
tion of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real).
If Freud had really wanted to recognize all of this, however, he
would have had to have taken a much more radical step than he was
in fact capable of. For rather than simply using an inadequate meta-
psychology in order to inadequately explain the supposed logic of the
social, he would have had to have employed an adequate conception
of this logic in order to explain and ultimately, of course, dissolve
and collapse the sphere of the metapsychological itself. He would
have had to have explicitly renounced, that is, the rather dubious
benefits of that whole murder and Entstellung of the social here
described.

Coda: Fetishistic Disavowal and the Social Constitution of

the (Unconscious) Ego

In two very short and very late texts, Freud can nonetheless be seen
to move in a much more interesting direction (even if he remains

159
incapable of according to his insights anything even resembling their
properly social significance17). In Fetishism and The Splitting of
the Ego in the Process of Defence, Freud points out, that is, that
the ego itself can be or even in fact merely is the subject of a
division, splitting or rift (F: 156; SE: 276). (As Freud himself
admits, this realization disarrays everything that he has previously
said about the supposedly synthetic function of an ego still tied
to the definitional quality of consciousness (SE: 276).) Even more
importantly, however, this division and splitting of the ego is
described in terms of the simultaneous recognition and non-recog-
nition or disavowal (Verleugnung), Freud famously says of
an incontrovertible fact (in Freuds equally famous, and certainly
quite over-literal example, of course, the fact of the possibility of
castration revealed by the fearful sight of the female genitalia) (F:
1524; SE: 2757; OP: 2024).
If we ignore the specific details of this brilliantly discerned logic
of Verleugnung or, more correctly, if we try to generalize this
logic in a different direction then doesnt a really quite fascinating
perspective start to open out before us? If the ego itself can be or
even simply is split or divided in this way, then why not go one
step further and conceive the very social production of this ego the
social nucleus of its unconsciousness, we might say as a dividing
or splitting? This is the precise step, of course, that Lacan will later
take; although only really consistently and compellingly we want
to argue in the following section when he effects an unabashed
return to the social thinking of Marx or, more specifically, to Marxs
fundamentally unsurpassable analysis of the fetishistic constitution
of the proletarian subject of capital. For isnt the ego, we can ask
in anticipation, just the inherent and to put it mildly not easily
superable fetish of precisely this proletarian subject? And doesnt the
terminological homology between Freud and Marx for both of them
want to talk about fetishism, of course thus receive its properly
theoretical mooring? These are some of the questions to which we
now wish to turn.

17 Freud does hint at such a significance, however, albeit by confining his

comments to an apparently pre-capitalist context, when he compares the fetish-
istic disavowal (Verleugnung) of castration to the panic that a grown man
might feel when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger (F:153).

160
 2. From the Transcendental Symbolic to the
Historicity of Discourse: Lacans Return to Marx

In the previous section, we have seen how Freuds revolutionary rec-

ognition of the egos unconsciousness quite thoroughly dismantles
and deconstructs from within all of the central oppositions that gov-
ern both his first and, much more importantly, his second topogra-
phies. Indeed, one of the overarching conclusions that our analysis
of Freud has compelled us to draw is that the presuppositions of
the second topography are not in the end so different from the pre-
suppositions of the first; for, despite his own persistent claims to
the contrary, Freud finds it absolutely impossible to in any way rid
himself of his own fundamentally organizing but, even on his own
terms, obviously fundamentally inadequate opposition between
the (repressing) consciousness of the ego and the supposedly strictly
countervailing trends of a specifically unconscious (and repressed)
thought. It is through the open door of this inadequacy, of course,
that all of Freuds early dualisms can make their predictably late
and predictably easy return; for, as we have seen, the later Freud
still continues to insouciantly oppose the primary process to the sec-
ondary process, the pleasure principle to the reality principle, the
energy of mobile cathexes to the energy of bound cathexes and thing-
presentations (Dingvorstellungen) to word-presentations (Wortvor-
stellungen).
Now Lacan, of course, is famous for his linguistic reinscription of
the Freudian unconscious; and, on a first view one that is unfor-
tunately only reinforced by a lot of the rather uncritical Lacanian-
ism that surrounds us today this reinscription might appear to
solve all of the problems confronting Freud at a single stroke. For if,
as Lacan illustriously claims, the unconscious is structured like a
language,18 then surely it becomes impossible to simply oppose the
supposed primordiality of Freuds first set of terms (the primary pro-
cess, the pleasure principle, the energy of mobile cathexes and thing-
presentations) to the supposed secondariness of his second (the sec-

18 Lacan makes this claim so often that it is pointless to give a single refer-
ence for it.

161
ondary process, the reality principle, the energy of bound cathexes
and word-presentations). It surely becomes impossible, that is, to
oppose the putative orderlessness of the repressed unconscious to
the putative order of the repressing and conscious ego; for the sym-
bolic order of language is, so to speak, always already there, happily
immune to any meaningless speculations about what might be said
to have come before it. (This transcendental and a priori struc-
ture of the linguistic domain can obviously be most easily demon-
strated over against the incredible clumsiness of Freuds distinction
between Dingvorstellungen and Wortvorstellungen (with the former
apparently belonging to the unconscious, and the latter apparently
attached to the consciousness of the ego); for what Lacan essentially
does, of course, is generalize and universalize the exclusively sym-
bolic reach of the Wortvorstellungen. There are no Dingvorstellungen,
we might hear Lacan saying, in the absence of the prior existence of
Wortvorstellungen; with the obvious result that consciousness and
unconsciousness can no longer be counterposed along these hope-
lessly inadequate conceptual lines.)
But if Lacans linguistic rewriting of the Freudian unconscious
undoubtedly has to be seen to accomplish an enormously important
theoretical leap, we nonetheless want to argue in this section that
this leap is not in itself enough to do away with every one of the diffi-
culties that we have seen Freud face. And the difficulty that persists,
we want to claim, is the very one that is opened up by Freuds thor-
oughly radical registration of the egos essential unconsciousness.
For, to put it very simply, there is nothing about the transcendental
and a priori symbolic order of language that can be thought to
explain and determine and even, in fact, as we ourselves will want
to contend, produce the characteristics of the imaginary ego. And
a lot of Lacans early work (by which we mean here, once again,
everything that precedes Seminar XVII) remains committed precisely
to this transcendental and a priori conception. This is not the only
story, however, for there is also, we will be suggesting, another
early Lacan; a Lacan who detranscendentalizes and historicizes the
symbolic order (which now becomes pluralized) by relating it pre-
cisely to the third register of the real; and who locates the symbolic
or social production of the imaginary ego precisely by relating it to
this real. It is this second strand of the early Lacan that reaches its

162
consummation, we will be claiming, in the absolutely fundamental
formulations of Seminar XVII.

2.1 Two Contradictory Trends in the Early Lacan

i) The Missing Link Between the Imaginary and

the Symbolic; or, the Ego as the Historical Limit of
the Transcendental Symbolic Order

The early Lacan is undoubtedly best known, then, for what we

might call his classic articulation of the two opposing registers
of the imaginary and the symbolic. According to this articulation
which we only have the time here to telegraphically recapitulate19
the register of the imaginary can essentially be said to be defined by
the constitution of the ego, as a fundamentally misrecognized and
misrecognizing instantiation of self-mastery, in that famous play of
insufficiency and anticipation (MS: 78) that is confidently said
to characterize the vacillating maneuvers of the mirror stage. The
register of the symbolic, by contrast whose conspicuously tran-
scendental features Lacan more or less directly introjects from the
structural anthropology of Lvi-Strauss (and hence, moving even fur-
ther back, from a Saussurean linguistics whose basic terms he will
nonetheless subject to a rather substantial modification) is seen to
acquire its characteristics as a consequence of the subjects radically
decentering immersion in a signifying order of language over which
the imaginary graspings of its ego will never be able to assume any
meaningful mastery.
Now, the problem with most of the interpretative overviews of
Lacans development and we could speak here both of a whole
swathe of inevitably over-simplifying introductions to his work, as
well as of a number of supposedly more sophisticated attempts at its
narrative comprehension20 is that they tend to take the existence

19 For Lacans own classic account, of the imaginary and the symbolic,
respectively, see the two crits The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Func-
tion and The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanaly-
sis.
20 For an over-simplifying introduction see Sean Homers Jacques Lacan

163
or, more properly speaking, we want to argue, the co-existence of
these two spheres of the imaginary and the symbolic almost entirely
for granted. Pretty much every one of these interpretations tends
to assume, that is, that there is no significant conflict or contradic-
tion between the terms of Lacans theorization of the imaginary ego
(which is thought to be the product of the oscillatory movements of
the mirror stage) and the terms of his theorization of the symbolic
subject (which, for its part, is supposed to be the product of the struc-
tural or transcendental order of a signifying language). In theory,
at least if certainly not in practice the ego and the subject, the
imaginary and the symbolic, and the mirror stage and the order of
language can be said to sit quite happily side by side.
What we want to argue in this section in stark and direct contrast
to the peculiar emollience of these interpretations is that there is in
fact a very serious deficiency in the early Lacans classic elabo-
ration of the two opposing registers of the imaginary and the sym-
bolic; and that the ultimate cause or consequence of this deficiency
is a systematic failure to think the nature of the interrelationship
between these two counterposed and contrasting domains. In his
classic guise, we will contend, the early Lacan finds it absolutely
impossible (and, on most occasions does not even attempt) to pro-
vide a coherent and convincing account of the linkage, the coupling
or in a language that we have already started to become familiar
with the knotting between the two spheres of the imaginary and
the symbolic. Or, in other words and this time in a language that
will hopefully become clearer to us as the argument of this chapter
advances he finds it absolutely impossible to provide a coherent
and convincing account of the way in which the supposed imagi-
nariness of the ego is located, determined or even, as we ourselves
will later want to argue, produced by the supposedly purely symbolic
inscription of the subject.
In the final instance, we want to suggest, it is the very failure
to overcome these impossibilities that has to be seen to call into
question the precise and particular definitions that the early Lacan
classically gives of the imaginary and the symbolic (but also, as we

(2005); for a supposedly more sophisticated attempt at narrative comprehen-

sion see Jacques-Alain Millers famous resum of the six Paradigms of Jouis-
sance (2000).

164
will see, of the real) domains. If the classically early Lacan can only
systematically fail in his articulation of the interrelationship between
these two registers, then isnt this because the constitution of the ego
cannot be said to take place in anything even resembling the machi-
nations of the mirror stage? And isnt it because the constitution of
the subject cannot be said to occur through anything even resembling
the structural or transcendental symbolic order of language? And
isnt there, moreover, a subterranean link between the inadequacy of
the early Lacans classic conception of these two registers and the
inadequacy of his early and classic conception of the third reg-
ister of the real? Isnt there a subterranean link, that is, between the
early Lacans classically transcendental conception of the sym-
bolic with all that this necessarily implies about the impossibility of
properly situating the imaginariness of the ego and his classically
transcendent conception of the third register of the real, which is still
predominantly thought of at this stage as a purely external limit to
the linguistic determinations of the symbolic order?

The Mirror Stage: neither Primordial nor (as yet) Produced

We are starting to run, however, a little too far ahead of ourselves; so

why dont we take a few steps back and try to define more clearly the
serious deficiency that afflicts the classically early Lacans articula-
tion of the two opposing registers of the imaginary and the symbolic?
As we have already suggested, this deficiency results from, or is itself
perhaps the cause of, a systematic failure to think the nature of the
interrelationship between these two spheres. And what we want to
show here is that this failure has to be to seen to assume two main
forms (the second of which will undoubtedly prove more important
to our argument than the first). For, on certain occasions and espe-
cially in his very early work21 Lacan problematically seems to sug-
gest that the mirror stages constitution of the imaginary ego entirely
predates and precedes the subjects later entry into the very different
determinations of the structural and transcendental symbolic order

21 We are thinking here of everything that Lacan wrote or presented before

1948.

165
of language. And, on other occasions and after a certain point of his
early development pretty much exclusively22 Lacan equally prob-
lematically appears to claim that this very imaginariness of the ego
is itself located and determined, if not yet exactly produced, by the
instantiations of the structural and transcendental symbolic order
of language itself.
In his single most influential crit, for example The Mirror Stage
as Formative of the I Function Lacan says that [t]he jubilant
assumption of his specular image by the kind of being [] the little
man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exem-
plary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in
a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of iden-
tification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the
universal, its function as subject. This form would, moreover, he
continues, have to be called the ideal-I (of which we will hear
much more later on); and the important point is that this form situ-
ates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination,
in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any
single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach
the subjects becoming (MS: 76). Lacans language here is some-
what ambiguous, if not to say downright contradictory (especially in
its invocation of what, from the perspective of his own later develop-
ment, can only be understood as an essentially pre-symbolic sym-
bolic matrix). But even if we grant the existence of these ambigui-
ties, the basic tenor of Lacans argument remains rather drastically
clear: the constitution of the ego is primordial, it comes prior to
and before the social (and certainly also, we might surmise, the
properly symbolic) determinations of a universal dialectic of
language. The constituted ego is infans in a strictly literal sense,
antecedent to the powers of speech. Its imaginariness definitively
precedes the later setting in place of the symbolic.
In another important crit, however one so important, in fact,
that it stands at the head of this definitive collection of texts (we
are speaking, of course, of the famous Seminar on The Purloined
Letter) Lacan directly contradicts these claims by unequivocally

22 Consistently with the note above, we are thinking here of everything that
Lacan wrote or presented from 1948 onwards.

166
stating the following: [t]he teaching of this seminar is designed to
maintain that imaginary effects, far from representing the core of
analytic experience, give us nothing of any consistency unless they
are related to the symbolic chain that binds and orients them (SPL:
6). The imaginary and the imaginariness of the ego, we can infer
is no longer thought to predate and precede the symbolic, but is
instead said to be related to it or, in a much stronger and much less
ambiguous language, to be bound and oriented by it. It is this
view and certainly not the countervailing one that it contradicts
that Lacan will reiterate again and again both throughout his crits
and throughout his long sequence of early seminars. And it is this
view that will of course compel him to engage in his famous series of
rethinkings and rewritings of the fundamental characteristics of the
mirror stage. (For, very briefly, the more that Lacans conception of
this stage progresses and develops, the more the constitution of the
imaginary ego is itself seen to be mediated by the interventions of
the symbolic; without however, as we will see, this mediation ever
coming to be compellingly thought out at least prior to the crucial
innovations of Seminar XVII; which effectively do away with, or at
least substantially rewrite, the very existence of the mirror stage.)
We are confronted, then, by two absolutely incompatible claims.
For if, on the one hand, we are asked to conceive the constitution
of the imaginary (ego) as being primordial to the supposedly later
instantiations of the symbolic, then, on the other hand, we are told
to construe these instantiations as themselves locating and determin-
ing if not yet precisely producing the now decidedly non-original
characteristics of the imaginary (ego) itself. And, to reiterate, what
we want to do in what follows is not so much choose between these
conflicting claims as make clear that at least in the work of the
classically early Lacan both of them are equally unsustainable.
Lacans first claim, then the claim that the constitution of the
imaginary ego entirely precedes the later installation of the sym-
bolic is obviously the most implausible. In the first place, of course,
because it allocates the formation of one of the central axes of human
subjectivity (now using this term in a non-specific and specifically
non-Lacanian sense) to a mechanism, the mirror stage, that is itself
at least at the time of the formulation of this claim thought to have
nothing to do with the linguistic and symbolic determinations that
must surely be seen to invest this subjectivity all the way down. (It

167
is perhaps not a coincidence, we might suspect, that the evidence
that Lacan provides for the existence of this stage is itself primarily
derived from the definitively non-subjective sphere of ethological
experiment (MS: 778).) And secondly, and as we have already sug-
gested, this claim is implausible because it is itself contradicted by
what Lacan will later have to say about the symbolic location and
determination of the imaginary itself. (On the basis of what we have
said so far, the nature of this contradiction should already be fairly
apparent; in the next section, when we refer to Lacans comments
on the eminently symbolic and, more importantly, also eminently
social and historical production of the imaginary ego, its character-
istics will hopefully be rendered perfectly transparent.)
It follows, then, that Lacans second claim the claim that it is the
symbolic itself that fundamentally locates and determines the situa-
tion of the imaginary ego is, at least on the face of it, much more
promising. For if Lacans first claim posits an essential non-relation
between the imaginary and the symbolic, his second claim posits an
essential relation a relation, moreover, in Lacans own language,
of binding and orientation. The positing of a relation is not the
same, however, as the explanation of its nature; and it is the very
provision of such an explanation that the vast majority of Lacans
affirmations of a link between the imaginary and the symbolic seem
intended to avoid. For it is all very well to say as Lacan certainly
does say in his successive rethinkings and rewritings of the mirror
stage that the constitution of the imaginary ego is itself symboli-
cally mediated; and it is all very well to state as Lacan undoubt-
edly does state in the formulation of his famous schema L, as well
as in the elaboration of his equally famous optical model23 that
it is the axis or plane of the symbolic that itself unavoidably situ-
ates the axis or location of the imaginary. It is an entirely different
thing, however, to actually engage in an explanation or articulation
of this presupposed symbolic determination of the imaginary (ego);
and, once again, it is precisely such an engagement that is conspicu-
ously lacking in all three of those instances of Lacans work that we
have here briefly cited.

23 For a quick description of both this schema and this model see the relevant
entries in Evans (1996).

168
 The Ego-Ideal and the Ideal-Ego; a Modification of Freud

It appears, then at least following the terms of our analysis thus

far that what Lacans classically early work is sorely and centrally
missing is any kind of serious or sustained attempt at an explanation
or articulation of the supposed interrelationship between the regis-
ters of the imaginary and the symbolic. If one starts to look at this
work a little more closely, however, one will discover that there is at
least one such significant and recurring attempt. But, as we will try
to demonstrate in the remainder of this section, the only thing that
can ultimately be said to be significant about this attempt is that it
ineluctably ends up by reinforcing the absolutely strict separation
between the two very terms the imaginary and the symbolic that
it was originally intended to somehow bring together.
So what form does the classically early Lacans one real attempt
to think the co-dependency of the imaginary and the symbolic take?
Well, the only possible answer to this question is a very peculiar
form indeed. For what the classically early Lacan does when he
somehow wants to weld together these two registers is irrevocably
divide in two what is indisputably, in the work of Freud himself, a
single concept. Whereas Freud talks indiscriminately, that is (and
as we have already had a slight chance to see), of the super-ego,
the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal, and uses these terms rather loosely
as theoretical synonyms for one another, Lacan sometimes citing
Freuds authority for this, and sometimes contradictorily drawing
attention to his own ingenuity tries to draw a very strict distinction
between the last two terms: with the ideal-ego being allocated to the
realm of the imaginary and the ego-ideal taking up its place in the
contrary, but nonetheless supposedly closely imbricated, sphere of
the symbolic.24
It is not at all surprising of course that, in attempting to link up the
two registers of the imaginary and the symbolic, Lacan should take
recourse to a particular, and particularly idiosyncratic, reading and

24 The super-ego, it should be mentioned, follows its own peculiar path,

being allocated at different points of Lacans work to each of the three reg-
isters of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, something which our own
account, both in the previous section and the sections that follow, makes easier
to understand.

169
interpretation of the Freudian conception of the super-ego. For, as we
have already tried to make clear in our own previous discussion, it is
precisely by means of his own specific inflection of this concept that
Freud effectively sacrifices the possibility of any implicitly coherent
articulation of the three opposing but nonetheless interpenetrating
registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real (embryonically
represented in his work, as we have also tried to show, by the three
distinct conceptions of the ego, the super-ego and the id).
Because Freud essentially conceives the (embryonically symbolic)
super-ego as the mere instantiation of a social supplementarity, we
have argued, he can only succeed in naturalizing or, more precisely
perhaps, in re-naturalizing the supposedly pre-existent and pre-
social relationship between the (embryonically imaginary) ego and
the (embryonically real) id. But what this re-naturalization implicitly
contradicts, of course, is Freuds own revolutionary recognition of the
egos fundamental unconsciousness. For, as we have also claimed,
what this recognition would ultimately have to be seen to require
in order for its presuppositions to be rendered clear and convinc-
ing is some kind of account of the social or symbolic production of
the imaginary ego itself. What it would ultimately have to be seen to
require, that is, is some kind of compellingly social articulation of the
linkage, coupling or knotting between the symbolic character of the
super-ego and the imaginary character of the ego. (And this articu-
lation would also have to be seen to explain, moreover, the specifi-
cally social emergence of something somehow resembling the real
of the id. For if this id can no longer be construed, as Freud himself
occasionally admits, as a discretely localizable sphere of the uncon-
scious, it must instead come to be comprehended as an inescapable
and inextricable part and perhaps even as more than a part of this
now thoroughly ternary, and also thoroughly social, constellation.)
As we have seen, then, it is precisely such a compelling articulation
of the imaginary and the symbolic (and also, by implication, of the
real) that remains absent in Freuds work until the very end. And, if
we recognize this, it is not too difficult to suggest that it is some kind
of implicit improvement or correction of Freud that Lacan is aiming
at when he seeks to divide up the concept of the super-ego (and by
extension, of course, the concept of the ego itself) into two separate
and supposedly closely interrelated spheres: the imaginary sphere
of the ideal-ego and the symbolic sphere of the ego-ideal. As we hope

170
to make clear in our ensuing discussion, however, Lacans attempt
to distinguish between these two domains has to be understood to
be as radically unsatisfactory as Freuds previous reduction of the
super-ego to a mere instantiation of social supplementarity. For if
Freud (by conceiving of the social in these supplementary terms)
effectively cuts the (symbolic) super-ego off from the re-naturalized
relationship between the (imaginary) ego and the (real) id, then
Lacan (by essentially bypassing, in his own specific way, the whole
thorny question of the social) effectively removes both the symbolic
and the imaginary from any productively explanatory relationship to
the third register of the real.
But before we start to spell out the precise logic of the failure of
Lacans distinction, we ought to look a little more carefully perhaps
at the exact manner of its elaboration. And if we once again take an
overview of the whole of the work of the early Lacan, we will see
that this elaboration can be seen to move in two ultimately very dif-
ferent if, at this stage, equally unsatisfactory directions. For if,
on the one hand, Lacan often attempts to articulate his distinction in
purely theoretical terms, then, on the other hand, he is also on occa-
sion compelled to delineate it in a more colloquial and thus at least
implicitly, we want to argue, more social and historical sense.

that Falters; both Theoretically

Lacans theoretical elaboration, then after everything that we have

already argued in this section can only be said to be of limited inter-
est. For all that it does is repeat albeit in a significantly displaced
set of terms his original (and obviously unexplained) affirmation
of a simultaneous separation and conjunction between the two reg-
isters of the imaginary and the symbolic. The ideal-ego, Lacan tells
us, has to be seen to define the ego or the subject (and it is precisely
the ambiguous oscillation between these two terms that will con-
cern us here) in its imaginary aspect; it is the mirage of the ego,
an aspiration (and to such a significant extent), when not to say
[] a dream. The ego-ideal, by contrast, has to be seen to define
this very same ego or subject in its now thoroughly symbolic mode;
it serves to designate, as its name suggests, the formation of an
ideal, the imposition of and adhered attachment to a model (S7:

171
98; RDL: 562). And furthermore, we should stress, if this ego or sub-
ject can certainly be said to be afflicted by the dreams, mirages
and aspirations of the imaginary ideal-ego, this is just as certainly
only because, and to the extent that, every one of these phenomena
is ultimately located and determined by the models and ideals
of the symbolic ego-ideal itself; or as Lacan himself puts it (in terms
that are very far from being theoretically transparent), it is in the
[symbolic S. A. & H. R] Other that the subject is constituted as ideal,
that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal
ego which is not the ego ideal that is to say, to constitute himself
in his imaginary reality (S11: 144).
If Lacan originally distinguished, then as we have seen between
an imaginary ego and a symbolic subject, and experienced the impos-
sibility of explaining the combination between these two domains
precisely as a consequence of the strictness of the separation between
them, he now seems to want to escape this impossibility by introduc-
ing both a new set of terms and, more importantly perhaps (even
if only implicitly), a central vacillation within these terms between
their ascription to the spheres of either the imaginary (ego) or the
symbolic (subject). For if, on the one hand, the ideal-ego and the
ego-ideal still have to be said to unambiguously belong to the respec-
tive and opposing registers of the imaginary and the symbolic, then,
on the other hand, the very existence of these two terms seems to
suggest perhaps as an inevitable consequence of their simple and
chiastic inversion of one another both a symbolic intermingling of
the imaginary and an imaginary intermingling of the symbolic. The
ego, after all, which was initially supposed to be a purely imaginary
instance and which, to some extent at least, has to continue to
be so conceived (as the quotation at the end of the previous para-
graph makes clear) now also has to be said to appear on both
sides of the very division between the imaginary and the symbolic
(it appears once as ideal-ego, that is, and once again as ego-ideal;
or once under the auspices of the supposedly purely imaginary and
once again under the auspices of the supposedly purely symbolic).
And the same can also be said, of course, albeit this time in reverse
order, of the ideal itself. For if Lacan initially insists (in the very same
quotation) upon the purely symbolic character of this ideal, it also
has to be seen to partially escape from this denomination in order to
reemerge in a massively paradoxical double form (once as ideal-ego,

172
that is, and once again as ego-ideal; or to reiterate, once under the
aegis of the purely imaginary and once again under the aegis of the
purely symbolic).

and Socially and Historically

Lacans purely theoretical distinction between the ideal-ego and the

ego-ideal is obviously nothing more, then, than a sadly convenient
deus ex machina. (For in the absence of a proper explanation of the
interrelationship and interaction between the imaginary and the sym-
bolic, it only serves to introduce the mysterious implication of their
crossing and overlapping.) And if similar things can ultimately be
said of Lacans colloquial and thus also, by implication, thoroughly
social and historical extrapolation of this distinction, then it is also
certainly true that this extrapolation can be said to reveal, when read
quite firmly against the grain, the equally social and historical limita-
tions of the whole of the early Lacans classical position.
Lacans most extensive colloquial exposition of his distinction can
undoubtedly be found towards the end of his eighth seminar; and
precisely because it necessarily involves us in such a sudden and dra-
matic shift or series of shifts in both theoretical and thematic reg-
isters, it is worth quoting, if not in full, then at least at some length.
The ideal-ego, Lacan pontificates:

is the family son, at the wheel of his little sports car. With this hell
take you on a journey. Hell play the smart-ass. Hell exercise his sense
of risk, which isnt anything bad at all his liking for sport, as one
says and everything consists in knowing what meaning he gives to
this word, if sport cannot also be challenging the rules, and Im not
only referring to those of the driving code, but also to those of security
[] In any case, this is certainly the register in which he will have to
show himself, or not show himself, and know how it is to his advantage
to show himself, as being stronger than the rest, even if this consists
in making us say that he is overdoing it a bit. This is the ideal-ego. I
limit myself here to opening a side-door, because what I have to talk
about is the relationship with the ego-ideal. In effect, this doesnt leave
the ideal-ego alone and without an object, because after all, on certain
occasions, not on all, if our guy dedicates himself to these scabrous

173
 exercises, why is this? to pick up a girl [] Are we concerned here
with picking up a girl or rather with the form of picking her up? The
desire matters less here, perhaps, than the form of satisfying it. And in
this and because of this, certainly, as we know, the girl can be a com-
plete accessory, she can even be lacking.

So far, then, we might think, so good. The ideal-ego is possessed

of a certain conventional flair for brinkmanship and self-assertion.
Unfortunately, however at least from the perspective of its own
rather solipsistic motivations this flair, as its conventional nature
would suggest, is very far from being either discrete or isolatable.
For as Lacan once again reminds us, the (imaginary) flourishes of
the ideal-ego must always be related to the more fundamental deter-
minations of the (symbolic) ego-ideal. And if this latter ideal first
appears here under the banner of courtship and matrimony (even
when or precisely because! the wife or the girlfriend is always
potentially missing), this is not quite yet the whole story. For if the
imaginary maneuvers of picking up a girl undoubtedly play them-
selves out within a symbolic framework, this framework must also
be seen to be wider, of course, than what is designated by the name
of courtship itself. To what overarching symbolic instance, then, is
courtship subjected? Or, as Lacan himself continues by inquiring,
What, really, is the ego-ideal?:

The ego-ideal, which has the closest relationship with the play and
function of the ideal-ego, is clearly constituted by the fact that at the
beginning, if he has little sports car, this is because he is the child of a
good family, he is daddys boy and to change the register, if Marie-
Chantal becomes a member of the Communist Party, as you know, it is
to piss daddy off [] To know whether she doesnt misrecognize in this
function her own identification with what she goes after in pissing off
the father, this is another side-door which we will not bother to open.
But we certainly can say that both the one as much as the other, Marie-
Chantal and the daddys boy at the wheel of his little sports car, would
limit themselves to remaining englobed within the world organized by
the father if it were not precisely for the signifier father, which allows
us, let us say, to extract ourselves from him in order to imagine that we
are pissing him off, and even perhaps allows us to achieve this [] Are
we not also saying with this that it is the instrument thanks to which

174
 the two characters, masculine and feminine, can extroject themselves
from the objective situation? This is what introjection is, in sum to
organize oneself subjectively in a form in which the father, in effect,
under the form of the ego-ideal, not so bad in spite of all, will be a sig-
nifier from the perspective of which the young person, male or female,
can come to contemplate him or herself without too much disadvantage
at the wheel of his little car or brandishing the card of the Communist
Party [] In sum, if because of this introjected signifier the subject falls
beneath a judgment that reprimands it, it will acquire the dimension of
a reprobate, which narcissistically, as the whole world knows, doesnt
suppose any great disadvantage. (S8: 4013)25

So now we know what it is that is ultimately supposed to func-

tion as the symbolic anchor of the imaginary machinations of the
ideal-ego. It is the ego-ideal, of course, but only once this has been
rendered equivalent to the symbolic operation of the signifier of the
father. If our little fils de famille can imaginarily indulge in his pre-
dilection for dangerous driving, and if a very big leap, this one!
Marie-Chantal can imaginarily exercise her rather dubious right to
piss daddy off (by joining, no more and no less, the Communist
Party), then, in both cases, imaginarization is only made possible
because of a prior subordination to the symbolic name of the father
itself. It is only the symbolic identification with this name that
allows both of our protagonists to their own narcissistic advan-
tage, of course to imaginarily misrecognize the very desires that
they are momentarily pursuing. They can only imaginarily extract
or extroject themselves from the signifier of the father to the extent
that they have already symbolically introjected it. It is the symbolic
ego-ideal, we might say the symbolic instance of the father that
essentially opens up the space for the proliferating imaginarizations
of the ideal-ego. Or, once again, if the ideal-ego stands in possession
of a certain imaginary freedom of movement, this freedom can in the
last instance be defined as imaginary precisely as a consequence of
the previous and continuing intervention of the symbolic and fatherly
ego-ideal.

25 The translation of this passage and of all those citations from the original
French that follow is our own.

175
 We seem to have finally penetrated, then, to the core of the early
Lacans classic attempt to link up and combine the two distinct reg-
isters of the imaginary and the symbolic; to the core of his attempt to
couple and conjoin the two counterposed but always simultaneously
united spheres of the (imaginary) ideal-ego and the (symbolic) ego-
ideal. The imaginary and the symbolic are linked and coupled, Lacan
wants us to believe, because it is the symbolic itself under the aegis
of the father as ego-ideal that, in the first place, somehow enables
the hypostatizations of the imaginary even to emerge and, in the
second place (and also somewhat paradoxically, we might think),
ultimately serves to situate these hypostatizations in their truth as
imaginary. The symbolic both gives birth to the imaginary and, at the
same time, by functioning as its limit, works to dominate and master
it. The imaginary is nothing more than the apparently rebellious, but
in the end only firmly obedient, child and servant of the symbolic.
How convincing, however, is this attempted articulation? Well, not
very convincing at all, we want to argue; because the only thing that
Lacans constructions are doing for the umpteenth time now is
systematically begging the very questions that they are setting them-
selves up as being capable of resolving. For how can the symbolic
be said to be properly related to the imaginary in the sense of
both opening up the field for it and fundamentally locating it in its
limited truth when there is nothing inherent in this symbolic that
can be said to explain the very appearance of the imaginary in the
first place? If the symbolic must ultimately be conceived as being
absolutely distinct from the imaginary, even at the same time as it is
said to open up the room for it and one wonders how things could
be otherwise given the self-evidence of Lacans continuing desire to
reduce the imaginary to the purely imaginary, and the symbolic to
the purely symbolic then why, we might ask, does imaginarization
even occur at all (or, at the very least, why does it occur, as Lacan is
now compelled to assume, in a manner that can in the last instance
be said to be tied up with the supposedly higher determinations of
the symbolic itself)?
These are, of course, extremely abstract questions. But we can
try to render them a little more concrete by re-situating them within
the framework of the two examples that Lacan himself so helpfully
provides. Why is it, then, we can inquire, that the fils de famille
even wants to exercise his imaginary liking for sport, his imaginary

176
desire to be stronger than the rest, at all? And similarly albeit this
time moving in a direction explicitly opposed to the fathers puta-
tively symbolic will why is it that Marie-Chantal, by becoming a
member of the Communist Party, even wants to imaginarily piss
daddy off (assuming, of course, and it is in fact a very big assump-
tion, that this is all that she wants to do)? Lacan tries to answer these
questions, as we have seen, by claiming that it is the efficiency of
the symbolic itself or the efficiency of the fundamentally symbolic
signifier of the father that essentially opens up the space for the
possibility of imaginarization. But for two main reasons, we want to
suggest, this answer has to be seen to be grossly inadequate. Firstly,
then, because we seem to be talking here about something that defin-
itively exceeds the realm of the merely possible; we seem to be talk-
ing, that is, about nothing less than the symbolic compulsion of the
imaginary. And, secondly, because this compulsion can only be said
to assume both following Lacans examples, but ultimately turning
against what he wants to achieve with them a definitively social
and historical form.
What does it mean, then, to claim in accordance with the self-
transcending logic of Lacans examples that there is something like
a symbolic forcing or compulsion of the imaginary? Well, it means
as Lacans own words can perhaps be seen to admit that if the
fils de famille even first has his little sports car this is only and
precisely because he is the child of a good family, he is daddys
boy. And it means albeit now in a manner that unambiguously
pushes beyond the severe limitations of Lacans interpretation that
if Marie-Chantal becomes a member of the Communist Party []
to piss daddy off this is only and precisely because there is some-
thing about him that is worth pissing off in the first place. In both
of the cases that Lacan cites, that is, it is only possible to consistently
explain the imaginary by conceiving it as the more or less inevitable
consequence of an imaginarization that is always already at work
within the symbolic itself; and always already at work, of course,
within the very signifier of the father that is supposed to function as
this symbolics ultimate guarantee.
The fils de famille can only want to exercise his imaginary lik-
ing for sport, his imaginary desire to be stronger than the rest,
as a consequence of the fact that this imaginary liking and desire
is always already embedded in the soil of the symbolic itself; and

177
in the soil of the father as the ultimately signifying instance of this
symbolic. (For does the father not also possess, we might rhetorically
ask, the keys to his very own little sports car? Perhaps it is this very
same car, in fact, that his son is so ostentatiously borrowing? Or per-
haps the father has now traded it in, as the maturity of his symbolic
wisdom would require, for a more stately and respectable model?)
And Marie-Chantal can only want to exercise her imaginary right to
piss daddy off as a consequence of the fact that there is something
inherent in this symbolic daddy that itself imaginarily provokes,
in a now quite depressing double-sided logic, the very desire for its
own provocation. (Although we can also start to question here, on
the basis of this recognition of the peculiar interaction of the symbolic
and the imaginary, whether it is entirely correct to define Marie-
Chantals activity as purely imaginary. Would it not be more appro-
priate to say, in fact, that what she is looking for in joining the Com-
munist Party with all of the narcissistic dangers that this of course
entails, and with all of the more properly political dangers that such
a decision opens up is a new and different symbolic response to
the fathers (or to the signifier of the fathers) own symbolic imagi-
narization?)
The symbolic, then or the symbolic signifier of the father is not
quite as purely symbolic as Lacan would have us believe (and the
imaginary, of course, is not quite as purely imaginary). But once
we have accepted this, what does it mean to say that the symbolic
compulsion of the imaginary, and the imaginary contamination of
the symbolic, can only be adequately comprehended in social and
historical terms? Well, it means that it is impossible even to conceive
of Lacans examples outside of an essentially social and historical
framework. For it is naturally not every social order that would allow
the fils de famille to exercise his liking for sport, his desire to be
stronger than the rest (and indeed, we might reasonably suspect,
there is only one social order that would happily grant to him the
flirtation with these apparent liberties). And, even more obviously,
it is not every social order that would allow (and even, of course,
potentially disallow) Marie-Chantals becoming a member of the
Communist Party (for, indeed, there really is now only one social
order in which this activity can said to acquire a certain significance).
The behavior of both of our protagonists seems to presuppose, then,
in direct contrast to Lacans own theoretical presumptions, the exis-

178
tence of a social or symbolic world in which imaginarization is not
only possible, but also and to a very considerable extent neces-
sary; with this necessity being ultimately explained, of course to
emphasize this once again by the ministrations of the symbolic
itself.
(It is worth emphasizing in passing here that, on a number of other
occasions, the early Lacans discussions of the ego-ideal do seem to
unambiguously register in a manner that is pretty much diametri-
cally opposed to his own previous definitions of this concept the
unavoidably social and historical process of (at least a certain kind
of26) imaginarization of the symbolic. In Seminar V, for instance, The
Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan fascinatingly informs us that
Freuds discovery of the ego-ideal more or less coincided with the
inauguration in Europe of that type of personality that offers to the
political community a single and easy identification, that is, the dic-
tator (S5: 267). Or, once again, in Seminar VIII: The Transference:

Take the schema from the Massenpsychologie with which Freud origi-
nates for us the identification of the ego-ideal. From which side does he
approach it? By taking a detour through collective psychology. What is
produced, then, he asks us thus prefacing the great Hitlerian explo-
sion in order that everyone can fall into that species of fascination
that allows for the emergence of a mass, that gel, the gelling of what
we call a crowd? In order that all subjects can collectively have, at least
for an instant, the same ideal, which allows anything and everything
for a fairly short time, it is necessary, Freud explains, that all of these
exterior objects be considered to possess a common trait, ein einziger
Zug (S8: 462).27

26 It will hopefully become clear in the following sections that the symbolic
has never been purely symbolic; that is, to anticipate our own argument, that if
the capitalist mode of production is defined by one kind of imaginarization of
the symbolic, pre-capitalist modes are defined by another.
27 Lacans comments here should certainly be subjected to that critique of
Freudian group psychology that we have already developed in the previous
section, and, especially, to the critique of the idea that the group is first and
foremost constituted through the elevation of the figure of the leader. In Semi-
nar XVIII and anticipating a lot of the arguments that we are making here,
and that we will make even more clearly in the following sections Lacan has
already presented this critique in a perfectly precise manner. In every dis-

179
 The ego-ideal no longer appears here, then, as that calmly symbolic
signifier of the father that we have already seen Lacan describe as
being not so bad in spite of all. For it now serves to designate an
imaginarization of the symbolic and what could better exemplify
this imaginarization than the figure of Hitler himself? that could
not possibly be any worse.)

The Social and Historical Limitations of

the Transcendental Symbolic

But if we continue to confine our own discussion at least for the

moment to the predominant conception that Lacan entertains of
the ego-ideal, we can surely now see that the fundamental problem
with this conception is that it is essentially set out in structuralist or
transcendental terms. For, according to the ultimate presumption of
Lacans examples, the only thing that can really be said to define
the symbolic in a consummately tautological fashion is its very
symbolic nature. The symbolic, we can hear Lacan saying, just is the
symbolic; and the father, the overarching signifying instance of this
symbolic, just is a little like the God of the Old Testament exactly
what he is. And once the symbolic has been defined in these terms
terms which can be seen to stretch elastically across the putatively
unchanging course of history itself its supposed efficiency can of
course be made to override, or, more precisely perhaps, draw the
sting from, the very real social and political problems that this history
inevitably produces. For if Lacans examples undoubtedly contain an

course that appeals to the You, he says, something provokes a camouflaged

and secret identification, which is nothing more than the identification with
this enigmatic object that can be nothing at all, the little surplus jouissance
of Hitler, which perhaps went no further than his moustache. This sufficed to
bring together people who were not mystical at all, who were fully engaged in
the process of the capitalist discourse, with all that this implies about the ques-
tioning of surplus jouissance under the aspect of surplus-value. It was about
knowing whether on a certain level one would still have ones little piece,
which was enough to provoke this effect of identification (S18: 29). The leader
only brings people together, that is, to the extent that they have already been
brought together and set apart, we might say within the discourse of
capitalism.

180
implicit reference to these problems as we have been attempting
here to clearly demonstrate then they just as undoubtedly seek to
explicitly exorcise them by effecting their dissolution into the ethe-
real realm of the symbolic itself. (It is hardly surprising, then, that
the overwhelming tone of Lacans reflections is archly conservative;
for what the most subtle conservatisms do, of course, is effectively
embed themselves in history only in order to better accomplish this
historys terminal naturalization.)
If Lacans examples can be read against the grain, however, in such
a way that they can be said to reveal, at least implicitly, the social
and historical process of the imaginarization of the symbolic and of
the symbolic signifier of the father then we are of course entitled to
ask ourselves the following question: what is it that can ultimately be
said to explain this process of imaginarization? And what we want to
start to suggest here following what we have already argued about
Marx in our first chapter, and in anticipation of what we will have
to say about both Lacan and Marx in the following two sections is
that it is only possible to answer this question when we also turn
our attention to the so far essentially uncharted territory of the third
register of the real; and when we start to think this real in a man-
ner that is certainly implicit in the later Lacans work, but which is
never explicitly carried through there in terms that are analogous,
or even in the end homologous, to the terms of human production or
labor. We can only really understand the social and historical process
of the imaginarization of the symbolic and of the symbolic signifier
of the father when we start to think, that is, once again, about the
essential modus operandi of the capitalist mode of production. For
what this mode of production fundamentally does, of course, as we
have seen, is socially and symbolically compel the imaginarization
(or at least the tendential imaginarization) of the real. Capitalism
produces surplus-value by socially or symbolically compelling the
counting (and ultimately, of course, also the non-counting) of labor
(the real) as the commodity of labor-power (the at least tendentially
imaginary). The imaginarization of the symbolic can only be prop-
erly comprehended, that is, when the symbolic itself or, more pre-
cisely speaking, a particular historical mode of the symbolic is seen
to practically enforce the (tendential) imaginarization of the real.

181
 and the Social and Historical Limitations of
the Transcendent Real

We do not want to dwell too much here upon the implications of

this threefold logic; for, as we have already said, this is what we will
be doing to either a greater or a lesser degree for the remainder
of this chapter. We can perhaps conclude by suggesting, however,
that once we have some kind of awareness of the specifically capi-
talist imbrication of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real it
becomes relatively easy to see that one of the fundamental problems
with the early Lacans classic position is its thoroughly inade-
quate conception of precisely this third register of the real. For, as
is well-known, the early Lacan predominantly conceives this real
as the merely external limit to the structuralist and transcendental
determinations of the symbolic order itself. [T]he real, Lacan tells
us in Seminar I: Freuds Papers on Technique, is what resists sym-
bolisation absolutely (S1: 66); or, once again, and this time in the
Seminar on The Purloined Letter: the real, whatever [symbolic S.
A. & H. R.] upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in
its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being
nothing that can exile it from it (SPL: 25); and finally, and certainly
most strangely, in Lacans Response to Jean Hyppolites Commen-
tary on Freuds Verneinung: the real does not wait, especially not
for the subject, since it expects nothing from speech [the symbolic S.
A. & H. R]. But it is there, identical to his existence, a noise in which
one can hear anything and everything (RJH: 388).
There is a deep and intimate connection, then, we can surmise,
between the early Lacans classically transcendental concep-
tion of the symbolic and the early Lacans classically transcen-
dent conception of the real. The supposedly transcendental symbolic
seems to secrete, that is, as an inevitable consequence of its own the-
oretical inadequacies, the further theoretical inadequacies of a sup-
posedly transcendent real.28 So what Lacan needs to do in order to be
able to properly articulate his three registers and in order to be able
to provide a compelling account of the symbolic production of the
imaginary (ego) (one that surpasses, of course, or at the very least

28 Lacan is of course repeating here an essentially Kantian problematic.

182
substantially rewrites, the by now thoroughly inadequate hypothesis
of the mirror stage29) is detranscendentalize or historicize his con-
ception of the symbolic and immanentize (ultimately under the aegis
of the concept of labor or production) his conception of the real. And
as we will now begin to see, this is exactly what he does.

ii) A First Approach to the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real;
or, the Symbolic and Social Production of the Modern Ego and its
Delusory Discourse of Freedom

In the previous section, we have seen how, in one strand of his early
thinking the strand that focuses upon the supposed constitution of
the ego in the mirror stage, and upon the supposed constitution of
the subject in the structuralist or transcendental order of language
Lacan systematically fails in his attempt to articulate the interrela-
tionship between the two registers, the imaginary and the symbolic,
that are supposed to be indexed by these very terms. The classically
early Lacan either conceives the constitution of the imaginary ego
as something that occurs prior to the later setting in place of the sym-
bolic, thus condemning himself to an entirely pre-symbolic and pre-
social myth of the mirror stage; or, more plausibly, he conceives the
symbolic itself as something that locates and determines the position
of the imaginary ego, but without ever succeeding in the exposition
and explication of this determination. The classically early Lacans
one real attempt to think the co-implication of the imaginary and the
symbolic, his theoretical and colloquial elaboration of the supposed
interdependency of ideal-ego and ego-ideal, ultimately does nothing
more than erect an absolute separation between the two terms at the
very same time as it continues to vaguely and mysteriously suggest
their crossing and overlapping.
The ultimate cause of the absoluteness of this separation, we have
argued, is the classically early Lacans essentially structuralist or
transcendental conception of the symbolic order itself. Because this

29 Lacan himself suggests such a rewriting when, in Seminar V, he describes

Marxs analysis of the metonymic exchange and circulation of commodities as
nothing less than a precursor of precisely this stage (S5: 81; 97). And this sug-
gestion, as we will later start to see, comes to its full fruition in Seminar XVII.

183
transcendental conception of the symbolic inevitably secretes a tran-
scendent conception of the real (which the early Lacan predomi-
nantly conceives as the merely external limit of the symbolic order),
it can only systematically fail in its attempted articulation of the
location and determination of the imaginary ego. For as we have
already started to suggest, and as we will continue to suggest in what
follows the only way in which the symbolic can be convincingly
and compellingly linked to the imaginary is through the introduction
of a consideration of the third register of the real.
What we want to do in this section, then, is begin to show how
in other parts of his early work parts that are certainly less well-
known than the classic elaborations of the mirror stage and the
transcendental symbolic Lacan starts to sketch out, by essentially
detranscendentalizing and historicizing his own position in relation
to all of these terms, an embryonically much more coherent articu-
lation of the three registers of the symbolic, the imaginary and the
real. We will see how, in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan begins to thematize the modern (for want of a better word30)
in terms of a novel and essential rupture between the symbolic and
the real; without, however, properly comprehending that it is only a
distinctively modern practice and instantiation of the imaginary that
can be seen to account for this rupture in the first place. And we will
also see how, in earlier interventions or, more specifically, in the
very early text Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, and in the very
early seminars on the ego and the psychoses Lacan certainly does
start to come to grips with the fact that, if modernity is essentially
constituted by a rupturing of the symbolic and the real, then this is
only ultimately because it is also essentially constituted by a ruptur-
ing of the imaginary and the real; or, more precisely, that is, because
the very symbolic order of modernity itself has to be seen to compel,
in one form or another, the reals tendential imaginarization.
(We will obviously not be engaged here, then, in anything like
a simple reconstruction of the gradual and progressive detranscen-
dentalization and historicization of Lacans early work; for as the
non-chronological nature of our argument itself makes clear we

30 Rather than talking about the modern, we are suggesting, Lacan would
have done better as he later does by talking directly about the discourse of
capitalism.

184
will simultaneously advance and regress from Seminar VII to the
crits, to two very early seminars there simply is no such gradual
or progressive development to be reconstructed in the first place.
If Lacans early work can certainly be seen to subject itself to a
detranscendentalization and historicization, then it just as certainly
has to be seen to do this in a thoroughly uneven and even haphaz-
ard fashion. At times, as we will see, historical insights that have
already been formulated (in the earlier writings and seminars) will
later be ignored or forgotten (in Seminar VII); and, on other occa-
sions (in Seminar VII once again), historical insights will themselves
be expressed more or less alongside the simultaneous desire for
their own suppression; through the return, strangely persistent in
Lacans work, to the ahistorical comforts of both a transcendental
symbolic and an equally transcendental imaginary. It is some idea of
this uneven and haphazard development, then, that we are attempt-
ing here to give; but only in such a way that we can sift through it
in order to produce and reconstruct the outlines of a possibly more
coherent development.)

Seminar VII: the (Social and Historical) Rupturing of

the Symbolic and the Real

Any attempt to comprehend the detranscendentalization and histo-

ricization of Lacans early work would be well-advised to begin,
then, by taking a fairly close look at the famous Seminar VII: The Eth-
ics of Psychoanalysis. For it is precisely here and precisely through
the mediation of the categories of the imaginary, the symbolic and
the real; or at least, as we will see, precisely through the mediation
of the categories of the symbolic and the real (Lacans theorization of
the imaginary being strangely deficient in this seminar) that Lacan
starts to draw a fundamental line of demarcation between what we
might call, even if these terms are rather vague, the modern and the
pre-modern; or, in the terms of the seminar itself, between the social
and historical context of modern ethics (Luther, Kant, Hegel, Sade,
Bentham and above all Freud) and the social and historical context
of traditional or pre-modern ethics (Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans,
Saint Augustine, Aquinas and above all Aristotle).

185
 In the very first pages of Seminar VII, then, Lacan informs us that
his attempt to distinguish between the modern and the pre-modern
will take pleasure as its central topic. For it is the concept of pleasure
that both unites Aristotle and Freud (both of them taking an enor-
mous interest in what this concept designates, of course) and, at the
same time and more importantly, both for Lacans purposes and our
own, separates and disunites them: it is certainly not the same plea-
sure function, Lacan tells us, that is at work in both of these articu-
lations (the articulations, that is, of Aristotle and Freud). But [i]t
is almost impossible to isolate [the] difference between these two
articulations, he continues, if we do not realize what took place
in the interval. I will not [] be able to avoid, then, Lacan con-
cludes, a certain inquiry into historical progress.31
Now, what is especially interesting for us here is the fact that, as
soon as Lacan begins to chart the course of this historical progress,
he also begins to introduce the three very terms that will orient us
both following Lacan, but also turning against him in our reading
of this seminar. It is at this point, he says, that I must refer to
those guiding terms, those terms of reference which I use, namely,
the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. In the past, Lacan tells
us, when I was discussing the symbolic and the imaginary and their
reciprocal interaction (a reciprocal interaction whose terms we
have seen to always elude the classically early Lacan), some of
you wondered what after all was the real. Well, it is precisely this
real that Lacan now wants to elucidate; for [i]nsofar as Freuds posi-
tion constitutes progress here, the question of ethics is to be articu-
lated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the
real. In order to appreciate this, however, one has to look at what
occurred in the interval between Aristotle and Freud.
So what is it, then, that actually did take place in this obviously
rather momentous historical interval? Lacan, as we might expect,
is not at all afraid to tell us:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was the utilitarian

conversion or reversion. We can define this moment one that was

31 The concept of progress is of course to be understood here in an entirely

neutral sense.

186
 no doubt fully conditioned historically in terms of a radical decline
of the function of the master, a function that obviously governs all of
Aristotles thought and determines its persistence over the centuries.
It is in Hegel that we find expressed an extreme devalorization of the
position of the master, since Hegel turns him into the great dupe, the
magnificent cuckold of historical development, given that the virtue of
progress passes by way of the vanquished, which is to say, of the slave,
and his work. Originally, when he existed in his plenitude in Aristotles
time, the master was something very different from the Hegelian fic-
tion, which is nothing more than his obverse, his negation, the sign of
his disappearance. It is shortly before that terminal moment that in the
wake of a certain revolution affecting interhuman relations, so-called
utilitarian thought arose, and it is far from being made up of the pure
and simple platitudes one imagines. (S7: 1112)

We already stand in possession, then, of two fairly fundamental

and fundamentally social and historical ideas. According to the
first idea, what essentially distinguishes the modern from the pre-
modern is a radical decline, an extreme devalorization, of the
function and position of the master.32 If, in Aristotles time, the
master existed in his plenitude, then, by the time of Hegel, he has
been reduced to the status of the dupe and cuckold of history,
his role has been obverted and negated and he has essentially
disappeared.33 According to the second idea, this radical decline
of the function of the master has something to do with the emer-
gence into prominence of the category and, more importantly per-
haps, the experience of the real. For, as Lacan has already informed
us, what essentially distinguishes modern ethics from traditional or
pre-modern ethics is the fact that it must inescapably be articulated
as nothing less than an ethics of the real.

32 Lacan is already anticipating here, ten years in advance, what he will have
to say about the discourse of the master and the discourse of the university
(and by extension, we will argue, the discourse of capitalism) in Seminar
XVII.
33 It should be stressed here that Lacan will later call into question the Hege-
lian presuppositions of this decline and devalorization of the master. For,
as we will see in the following sections, there is nothing about this decline
and devalorization that inevitably implies the ascent and revalorization of the
slave, laborer or worker. See Hegel (1977), 1119.

187
 What we have to do, then, is try to effectively combine these two
conceptually distinct social and historical insights. And the best way
to do this is by interrogating a little more closely the essential charac-
teristics of the two periods that Lacan is attempting here to differenti-
ate between: the traditional or pre-modern period of an ethics of the
master (in which as Lacan has already suggested, and as we will
see further in what follows the real is essentially contained, sub-
sumed and domesticated); and the modern or contemporary period
of an essentially masterless ethics (in which as Lacan has also
suggested, and as we will also see the real essentially emerges as
an excessive and fundamentally disturbing protuberance or excres-
cence).
What then, very quickly, are the essential characteristics of the
period of pre-modernity, a period in which the terms of ethics are
fundamentally regulated by the indisputable authority and efficiency
of the figure of the master? Lacans longest sustained discussion of
the basic and underlying concepts of Aristotles ethics leaves us in
very little doubt as to the nature of these characteristics. For what
the function and position of the master above all ensures, he tells
us, is that this ethics tends to refer to an order; an order of the sci-
ence (the episteme) of what has to be done in accordance with the
norm of a certain character (ethos). The whole (more or less tau-
tological) question of Aristotelian ethics concerns the possibility of
the subjects establishment of an adequation between itself and the
deeper constraints of the order that always fundamentally contains
it anyway.
When man acquires habits (ethos), these habits have to be made
to conform with the very order of ethics (the ethos) itself, that is,
with an order that brings together, under the aegis of the cosmically
guaranteed Sovereign Good, both the particular and the universal
and the ethical and the political. In Aristotles thought, unlike in
Freuds of course,34 the notions of macrocosm and microcosm are
presupposed from the beginning. And the crucial thing about this
ordered presupposition, at least in the terms of our own reconstruc-
tion, is that it contains, subsumes and domesticates the potentially

34 We are referring to Freuds famous claim, in Civilization and its Discon-

tents, that there is no place for happiness, for the fulfillment of the pleasure
principle, in either the macrocosm or the microcosm (CD: 767).

188
severely troubling errancy and indiscipline of the real itself. Or, as
Lacan himself puts it: from within the perspective of this ethics, it is
a question of having a subject conform to something which in the
real is not contested as presupposing the paths of that order (S7:
223). In Aristotles ethics, we can conclude and, by extension, in
the ethics of the pre-modern as a whole the ordering of the real, its
quite literal mastery, is something total and without limit.
So what, then more fully now of the period of modernity itself,
a period in which the radical decline of the master serves to free eth-
ics from its traditional and pre-modern constraints and limitations
(without this resulting, of course, in anything even resembling an
authentic liberation, whatever this term might be taken to mean)?
Well, Lacan begins by defining this period in a double sense. Firstly,
he tells us, it is a period that is essentially organized by the principle
of the servicing or the economy of goods. I will try to discuss, he
says, the point of view not only of the progress of thought, but also
of the evolution of history, in order to demystify the Platonic and the
Aristotelian view of the good, indeed of the Supreme Good, and to
situate it on the level of the economy of goods (S7: 216).
This principle clearly does not suffice, however, to precisely define
a very specific period of social and historical development. For it
is obviously the case that every period of history is organized by
a certain principle of the servicing or the economy of goods. What
has to seen to distinguish the modern, then, in the second place, is
the fact that this servicing or economy has been effectively rendered
universal. And if the servicing or the economy of goods is effectively
rendered universal in modernity, that is because, Lacan continues,
as Saint-Just says, happiness has become a political matter. It is
because happiness has entered the political realm that the question
of happiness is not susceptible to an Aristotelian solution, that the
prerequisite is situated at the level of the needs of all men. Whereas
Aristotle chooses between the different forms of the good that he
offers the master, and tells him that only certain of these are worthy
of his devotion namely, contemplation the dialectic of the master
has, I insist, been discredited in our eyes for historical reasons that
have to do with the period of history in which we find ourselves.
Those reasons are expressed in politics by the following formula:
There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction
of all (S7: 292).

189
 Under the conditions of modernity, then, the servicing or the econ-
omy of goods applies (at least tendentially) to everybody, without
conceivable theoretical or practical exception. And the last thing that
can be said about this universalization of the economy of happiness
is that it resolves (as the liberals would like to have us believe) the
newly emerging problematics of an ethics of desire: [t]he movement
that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the
universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably pos-
sible, implies an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism
in the relationship to desire that has occurred historically. The estab-
lishment of the service of goods at a universal level does not in itself
resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual
man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and
his death (S7: 303).
As this last quotation starts to suggest, then, what is absolutely
fascinating about Lacans theorization of the modern universaliza-
tion of the servicing and the economy of goods is that it resolutely
refuses to conceive this servicing as anything that could ever come
to be completed or totalized. As far as the servicing or the economy
of goods is concerned, the universal will never be able to be made
equal to the complete or the total. For something always exceeds, or
stands outside of, the very principle of this servicing or economy. As
Lacan himself puts it (in terms that remain, for the moment, rather
mysterious and enigmatic): [b]eyond this place of restraint consti-
tuted by the concatenation and circuit of goods, a field nevertheless
remains open to us that allows us to draw closer to the central field
(S7: 216). Or, once again, and this time returning to the theme of that
utilitarian conversion or reversion that is supposed to determine
modernity, there is, in this very same modernity, the sign of a gap,
a beyond relative to every law of utility (S7: 81). It is this beyond,
of course, and that which it is understood to be the beyond of, that
constitutes the central theme of more or less the whole text of Semi-
nar VII; so perhaps the best way to continue is by advancing a brief
outline of the fundamental characteristics of these two closely and
inextricably interrelated realms or domains.
Lacan uses a number of terms to define what we can only describe
as being on this side of, opposed to, or in tension with the
beyond. This is the domain, he tells us, of repetition, fiction,
and the good (the same good, of course, that is serviced in the

190
economy as goods); it is the domain of the signifiers or, more
precisely, the Vorstellungsreprsentanzen35 that cluster together
so as to avoid a recognition of the essential void or emptiness that
organizes (or, more properly perhaps, disorganizes) them. Most
importantly, however, this is the domain of the symbolic pleasure
principle itself; a symbolic principle of order or ordering that essen-
tially retreats or defends itself from its own beyond in order to first
gain, and thus forever regain, the pleasures of a certain balance and
homeostasis.
What, however, of this beyond itself? Well, it is essentially
defined as the obverse of that which it is said to transcend. For
this second domain is the domain, Lacan tells us, of the limit of
repetition, the limit of fiction and the limit of the good (or once
again, of the servicing and the economy of goods); it is the domain
of jouissance, das Ding and the death drive, all of the things
around which, in fact, the signifying Vorstellungsreprsentanzen
are said to gravitate and circulate. Most importantly, however, in this
case, it is the domain of a real that, following Freuds own terms,
is beyond the pleasure principle. If the symbolic order or ordering
of the pleasure principle can retreat from and defend itself against its
own beyond, this is only ultimately because this beyond always
already functions as the real of the symbolic pleasure principle
itself (S7: 43230).
As even this brief summary of concepts makes clear, then, it is
extremely misleading to talk either of a beyond or of something
that it is supposed to be the beyond of. Indeed, one of the overrid-
ing purposes of Lacans subtly shifting analyses in Seminar VII is to
show that the real, the supposed beyond of the pleasure princi-
ple, is nothing more than the internally operational (S7: 103; 106;
137) limit of the symbolic, the pleasure principle, itself. If Lacan
undoubtedly on occasion defines this real as that which is excluded
from and exterior to the symbolic (S7: 71), then he also, on other
occasions, takes pains to point out, through the invention of a now
quite famous neologism, that the very thing that is excluded and
exteriorized possesses the qualities of something extimate (S7:

35 We will see in the following section how Lacan comes to define this term
more fully.

191
139). If the symbolic certainly does exclude and exteriorize the
real, then it only does this by excluding and exteriorizing what
is already immanent to its own operations. If the repetitions, fic-
tions and goods of the pleasure principle or, in a word per-
haps, its signifiers and Vorstellungsreprsentanzen certainly do
run up against the barriers and limits of jouissance, das Ding and
the death drive, the so-called beyond of the pleasure principle,
then this is only because these barriers and limits, this beyond, are
already at work in that which is attempting, and both succeeding and
failing, to set itself up against them. Or, in Lacans own rather pithy
formulation, one that effectively summarizes everything that we are
trying to say here, the field of the pleasure principle is beyond the
pleasure principle itself (S7: 104).
And if we now try to remind ourselves that Lacan is essentially
referring in all of this to the specific situation of the modern, we can
perhaps see a little more clearly what it is that fundamentally dis-
tinguishes this modern from the traditional or the pre-modern. The
symbolic order of the pre-modern,36 we can say, is constituted by
the fact that it contains, subsumes and domesticates the (only ever
potential) errancy and indiscipline of the real (under the ultimate and
unquestioned authority, of course, of the figure of the master). This
order is, as a consequence, entirely governed by the homeostatic
tendencies of the pleasure principle. (For what else, in the end, is
revealed by the fundamental presuppositions of Aristotelian ethics?)
The symbolic order of modernity, by contrast, gives rise (once the
figure of the master has been thoroughly destituted) to the reals fun-
damentally disturbing protuberance and excrescence. In modernity,
we can say, the real is always experienced as a symptom of excess;
a symptom of the excess, or of the limit, of the very symbolic order
of modernity itself. The symbolic order of modernity is beyond the
pleasure principle; or more precisely, as we have seen, under the
symbolic conditions of modernity the pleasure principle is beyond
itself; always already exposed to that underlying real that both limits
it and inhabits it as an extimate thing.37

36 There is, of course, more than one such order; but it is certainly fair to say
that all of these orders are united by some kind of subordination to the principle
of mastery.
37 At the risk of spelling things out a little too clearly we can now see that

192
 and the (Transcendental and Transhistorical) Rupturing of
the Imaginary and the Real

Lacans understanding of modernity and of its fundamental differ-

ence from the pre-modern might still be a little vague and impre-
cise, then, but it is also, in the very broad terms that define it, quite
compelling and convincing. (For who could deny that the modern
is essentially constituted by some kind of rupture between the sym-
bolic and the real or, more precisely, by some kind of rupturing of
the real38 that itself serves to punctuate and dissolve every longed
for symbolic consistency?) What is not so convincing in Seminar VII,
however somewhat paradoxically perhaps, because it is this cat-
egory that Lacan developed first is the elaboration of the imaginary
(for, as we will see, although Lacan is certainly trying to think here in
terms of a fundamental rupture between the imaginary and the real,
he is also systematically failing in the task of rendering this rupture
consistent with the more thoroughly historically understood rupture
of the symbolic and the real).
Somewhat peculiarly, then, Lacans discussion of the imaginary
assumes the form, more or less throughout Seminar VII, of a discus-
sion and a rewriting of the Freudian concept of sublimation. And,
from the beginning, Lacan makes clear that what is interesting for
him about this concept is that it cannot be comprehended outside of
a decidedly social (or symbolic, we might say, continuing to refine
this term) framework. [S]ublimation is characterized, he tells us,
by a change of objects, or in the libido, a change that doesnt occur
through the intermediary of a return of the repressed nor symptom-
atically, indirectly, but directly, in a way that satisfies directly. The
sexual libido finds satisfaction in objects; how does it distinguish
them? Quite simply and massively, and in truth not without opening
a field of infinite complexity, as objects that are socially valorized,
objects of which the group approves, insofar as they are objects of
public utility. That is how the possibility of sublimation is defined
(S7: 94). Sublimation is concerned with objects only to the extent,
then, that they are the objects of a social recognition (S7: 107), a

there is obviously no such thing as the symbolic order in itself.

38 This phrase is to be understood in both the subjective and the objective
genitive.

193
social consensus (S7: 145). Or, more frankly and cynically, this
concept literally means that man has the possibility of making his
desires tradable or salable in the form of products (S7: 293).
This irredeemably social or symbolic understanding of sublima-
tion also immediately opens up, however, onto a thematization and
theorization of a fundamental difference a fundamental gap or rup-
ture between the two opposing spheres of the imaginary and the
real. For, as Lacan does not hesitate to inform us, there are objects
and there are objects; or, more precisely, there are imaginary objects
which exist in an essential concordance with the narcissistic strivings
of the subjects ego, and there are real objects, or one real object,
das Ding, which cannot really be called an object at all (S7: 1102),
and which, furthermore, definitively exceeds and transcends (albeit
perhaps in an immanent or extimate way) every imaginary attempt
to limit or restrict its essentially illimitable and unrestrictable scope.
Between the object as it is structured by the narcissistic relation and
das Ding, Lacan says, there is a difference, and it is precisely on the
slope of that difference that the problem of sublimation is situated
for us (S7: 98). From here it is only a short step to Lacans famous
definition of the process of sublimation. For if the imaginary object
is not the Thing to the extent that the latter is at the heart of the
libidinal economy, then the only possible formula for this subli-
mation is that it raises an object [an imaginary object S. A. & H. R.]
[] to the dignity of the Thing [to the dignity of the real itself S. A.
& H. R.] (S7: 112). Sublimation a fundamentally social or symbolic
procedure essentially functions, then, by putting the imaginary in
the place of the real, or by elevating the imaginary, we might say, to
the status of the real.
But if this is the case, then how exactly does this elevation, this
putting in place of, actually work? Well, it works, Lacan tells us, by
means of the socially or symbolically imaginary operations of delu-
sion and fantasy:

At the level of sublimation the object is inseparable from imaginary

and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity
recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of relaxation
where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize
the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes. That is how collective,
socially accepted sublimations operate [] Society takes some comfort

194
 from the mirages that moralists, artists, artisans, designers of dresses
and hats, and the creators of imaginary forms in general supply it with.
But it is not simply in the approval that society gladly accords it that
we must seek the power of sublimation. It is rather in an imaginary
function, and, in particular, that for which we will use the symboliza-
tion of the fantasm ($ a), which is the form on which depends the
subjects desire [] In forms that are historically and socially specific,
the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlay
the subject, to delude it, at the very point of das Ding. The question of
sublimation will be brought to bear here. (S7: 99)

On a first reading, then, this account of social or symbolic sublima-

tion of the social or symbolic elevation of the imaginary to the status
of the real might appear to be entirely satisfactory. Every society,
Lacan is claiming, every collectivity, every symbolic order, imagi-
narily deludes itself about, or imaginarily erects mirages around,
the real of das Ding. Every society overlays this real thing and
overlays the subject itself as the bearer of this thing with imagi-
nary schemes and fantasms, even if the forms that these fan-
tasms assume have to be seen to be historically and socially spe-
cific.
If we think a little more carefully about this last phrase, how-
ever, we can see that Lacans argument is afflicted by a very serious
problem, and that this problem precisely concerns the question of
whether this argument is historically and socially specific enough.
For is it not too simple to claim, we might ask, that every society is
engaged in the same kind of imaginarization of the real, under the
basic proviso that this imaginarization must then be seen to assume
historically and socially specific forms? Lacans rather facile
understanding of society might even be seen to serve as an index
of this simplicity; for is it really possible to reduce the workings of
the social to the comfort that is provided by moralists, artists,
artisans, designers of dresses and hats, and the creators of imaginary
forms in general? Would it not be more correct to claim, in fact, that
it is the very form of the social or symbolic imaginarization of the
real that itself, from time to time (and in fact not that frequently at
all), undergoes significant transformation? Rather than conceiving
this form of imaginarization as universal, then, in such a way that
it can then be particularized through the inevitably abstract appeal to

195
its historically and socially specific forms, would it not be better
to conceive it as something that must itself, in its very form-giving
capacity, be irremediably historically and socially specific?
Lacans preceding analyses have already implicitly provided us
with an answer to these questions. For if there is undeniably some-
thing historically and socially specific about the modern rupturing
of the symbolic and the real about the emergence of the real, within
the very symbolic order of modernity, as a fundamentally disturb-
ing protuberance or excrescence then there must also be some-
thing undeniably historically and socially specific about the mod-
ern rupturing of the imaginary and the real (on the not unreasonable
assumption, of course, that these two conceptually different ruptures
need to be thought together in a consistent way). It is precisely this
second specificity, then, that Lacans account of sublimation of
the social or symbolic imaginarization of the real has to be seen
to deny. For, once again, if the form of this imaginarization is
understood as universal, and only then considered to assume, under
the very aegis of this universality, historically and socially specific
forms, there can obviously be nothing historically and socially
specific about the very form of social imaginarization itself. This
form is effectively left to hover above history and its supposedly
ever-changing but also supposedly ever-similar social and histori-
cal forms.
In summary, then, we can say that Lacans account of the social
imaginary remains, in Seminar VII, essentially transcendental and
transhistorical. Rather than being immanently embedded in the
changing course of social and historical development, the form of
social imaginarization is seen to essentially transcend this develop-
ment, and to essentially inform it, we might say, precisely from this
transcendental position of transcendence. And, as we have seen, this
transcendental and transhistorical account of the imaginary can only
enter into conflict with Lacans own definitively non-transcendental,
and in fact thoroughly historical, account of the symbolic and the real.
For, to reiterate, if there needs to be a thoroughly historical under-
standing of the modern dislocation of the symbolic and the real, then
there also needs to be a thoroughly historical understanding of the
modern dislocation of the imaginary and the real. We cannot have
history in one place (the symbolic and the real) and the transcenden-
tal and transhistorical in another (the imaginary and the real). Theo-

196
retical consistency demands that these two dislocations be thought
together under the same set of thoroughly historical terms.

Retranscendentalizing the Symbolic

It is just this consistency, then, that is lacking in Seminar VII; and

we can even go further than this and say that, once Lacan has effec-
tively conceived the imaginary in transcendental and transhistorical
terms, he also experiences the temptation to retranscendentalize and
dehistoricize the symbolic itself, in its very relationship to the real;
to retranscendentalize and dehistoricize, that is, what he has already
conceived, in other important parts of his text, in thoroughly non-
transcendental and thoroughly historical terms. For, on a number
of occasions, Lacan certainly does want to tell us that the consistent
rupturing and dislocation of the symbolic and the real is not some-
thing specifically modern, but instead something that pertains to the
order of the signifier, to the order of language, and to the order of
the symbolic sans phrase. I ask you to consider, Lacan says, the
break that, in the order of the manifestation of the real [] is intro-
duced by the simple fact that man is the bearer of language (S7:
223). Or again: the Thing is that which in the real suffers from this
fundamental, initial relation, which commits man to the ways of the
signifier by reason of the fact that he is subjected to what Freud calls
the pleasure principle, and which, I hope it is clear in your minds,
is nothing else than the dominance of the signifier (S7: 134). And
finally: [i]t is because the movement of desire is in the process of
crossing the line of a kind of unveiling that the advent of the Freud-
ian notion of the death drive is meaningful for us. The question is
raised at the level of the relationship of the human being to the signi-
fier as such, to the extent that at the level of the signifier every cycle
of being may be called into question, including life in its movement
of loss and return (S7: 236).
And once he has retranscendentalized and dehistoricized the sym-
bolic in this way, Lacan can even go on to retranscendentalize and
dehistoricize what we have already seen to be his thoroughly non-
transcendental and historical account of the (modern) servicing and
economy of goods; and to claim, with an astonishingly inappropri-
ate bravura, that the order of power represented by this servicing

197
is always and everywhere the same. [T]he order of things on
which it [the servicing of goods] claims to be founded, Lacan says,
is the order of power; and [a]s far as that which is of interest to us,
namely, that which has to do with desire, to its array and disarray, so
to speak, the position of power of any kind in all circumstances and
in every case, whether historical or not, has always been the same
[] What is Alexanders proclamation when he arrived in Persepolis
or Hitlers when he arrived in Paris? The preamble isnt important:
I have come to liberate you from this or that. The essential point
is Carry on working. Work must go on. Which, of course, means:
Let it be clear to everyone that this is on no account the moment to
express the least surge of desire. [] The morality of power, of the
service of goods, is as follows: As far as desires are concerned, come
back later. Make them wait (S7: 3145).
[I]t is quite unthinkable nowadays to speak abstractly of society.
It is unthinkable historically, and it is unthinkable philosophically
(S7: 105). These are Lacans own words in Seminar VII; and they are
words that we can now see to fall on the partially deaf ears of the
very person who enunciates them. For if one word can be said to
define Lacans understanding of the imaginary in this seminar and
a certain tendency of his understanding of the symbolic once this
transcendental and transhistorical account of the imaginary has been
set in place it is the word abstract. If Lacans understanding of
the rupturing of the symbolic and the real is, at least at times, quite
thoroughly historically and socially specific and concrete, then this
concreteness is also, at the same and at other times, substantially
covered over by a conception of the imaginary and the symbolic
that is essentially seen to pristinely overarch the very contingencies
of social and historical development itself. In Seminar VII, then, we
can conclude, Lacans conception of the imaginary and on occa-
sion his conception of the symbolic is, on his own terms, quite
unthinkable.

Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis; the Modern Imbrication of

the Symbolic and the Imaginary

In order to render this conception of the imaginary thinkable,

then in order to render it consistent, that is, with Lacans properly

198
historical conception of the modern rupturing and dislocation of the
spheres of the symbolic and the real we need to begin by taking a
look at some of Lacans earlier writings and seminars (for most pecu-
liarly, we might think, Lacan seems to forget in Seminar VII what he
has already quite clearly put forward in precisely these other places).
Perhaps the best way to start is by turning our attention to the final
section of Lacans early text Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis; for
as the somewhat unwieldy title of this section already suggests, it is
something that clearly wants to take up our central theme; that is,
the theme of the distinctively modern imbrication of the imaginary
(ego) with the symbolic or social itself (all of these terms ultimately
being conceived in their relationship to the third register of the real,
which remains essentially absent, at least at this early stage, from the
terms of Lacans discussion): This notion of aggressiveness as one of
the intentional coordinates of the human ego, especially as regards the
category of space, Lacan tells us, allows us to conceive of its role in
modern neurosis and in the malaise in civilization (AP: 98).
Lacan begins this section, then, by quite simply drawing atten-
tion in a manner that anyone would have difficulty disputing to
the absolutely central role of the imaginary ego, and its aggressive-
ness of course, in the contemporary form of social life; to the indis-
putably modern overlapping and co-implication, we might say, of the
two still separate39 spheres of the imaginary and the symbolic:

Here I want to merely sketch out a perspective regarding the verdicts

analytic experience allows us to come to in the present social order. The
preeminence of aggressiveness in our civilization would already be suf-
ficiently demonstrated by the fact that it is usually confused in everyday
morality with the virtue of strength. Quite rightly understood as indica-
tive of ego development, aggressiveness is regarded as indispensable in
social practice and is so widely accepted in our mores that, in order to
appreciate its cultural peculiarity, one must become imbued with the
meaning and efficient virtues of a practice like that of yang in the public
and private morality of the Chinese. (AP: 98)

39 As we will see in the following section, it is this separateness that can in

fact be considered to define the modern, as long as this modern is viewed
under the lens of the discourse of capitalism.

199
 The evidence that Lacan first adduces for this modern or contem-
porary preeminence or indispensability of aggressiveness for
this modern or contemporary conjunction of the social or symbolic
with the overstretchings of the imaginary ego is (at least when
judged from the perspective of his own later standards) fairly con-
ventional. And his description of the consequences that more or
less inevitably follow from the accumulation of this evidence is
certainly quite incredibly quick (none of which should be taken to
imply, of course, the invalidity of either this evidence or these con-
sequences. Indeed, all that we want to suggest here is that Lacans
treatment of both these issues continues to remain a little hazy and
abstract, if not to say, perhaps, quite self-consciously dilettantish).
Firstly, then, we have the evidence of the success of the Darwin-
ian theory of the struggle for life, a success attributable, in Lacans
own view, to nothing less than the projection on a different level
the level of the animals laissez-faire conquest of space of the
economic euphoria and social devastation of the Victorian age
(AP: 98). Secondly, we have the evidence of the Hegelian dialectic
of Master and Slave, a dialectic that deduced the entire subjective
and objective progress of our history from the aggressive conflict
between these two figures under the ultimate sign of the possibil-
ity of death, and under the ultimate sign of the order of desire
and labor that emerges when one of these persons (the Slave, of
course) retreats from the overwhelming fear of this possibility (AP:
989). And thirdly and finally, we have the consequences of this
preceding evidence, the emergence of Marxs and Marxist dis-
course itself, with everything that this implies about the necessity
of social and political practice, and with everything that this implies
about the translation of imaginary aggressiveness into the explicit
(and explicitly social or symbolic?) terms of class struggle: [t]he sup-
port this profound doctrine [the dialectic of Master and Slave] lent to
the slaves constructive Spartacism, recreated by the barbarity of the
Darwinian century, is well known (AP: 99).
Of much greater interest, then at least for the moment (for we
will obviously be making a more detailed return to these Marxian
themes a little later on) are the explanations that Lacan gives of
this modern or contemporary explosion of imaginary aggressiveness
(with the exception, it has to be said, of a disappointingly Heidegge-
rian emphasis upon the supposedly autonomous developments and

200
depredations of a self-evidently rampant technology (AP: 99)). In
the first place, then, Lacan informs us, imaginary aggressiveness has
grown exponentially in modernity because of the increasing absence
of all the saturations of the superego and ego-ideal that occur in all
kinds of organic forms in traditional societies. We no longer know
these forms, he continues, except in their most obviously degraded
guises. And in the second place, we learn, imaginary aggressiveness
has flourished because in abolishing the cosmic polarity of the male
and female principles, our society is experiencing the full psychologi-
cal impact of the modern phenomenon known as the battle of the
sexes (AP: 99).
These explanations might still be a little vague, then or, just as
importantly, they might even be a little nostalgic (for who would
really want to return, even if such a return were possible, to the
organic and traditional saturations of the superego, or to the
cosmic polarity of the male and female principles?) but this does
not mean that they are not also, in terms of the direction of explana-
tory fit that they set up, quite convincing and compelling. For what
Lacan is effectively doing here is providing the outlines however
sketchily, and however negatively of a properly and thoroughly
social or symbolic account of the modern or contemporary imagi-
nariness and aggressiveness of the ego itself. (The imaginary aggres-
siveness of the ego is so prevalent in modernity, Lacan is claiming,
precisely because the modern symbolic, or the modern social, sys-
tematically fails to saturate the previously apparently substantial
instance of the super-ego or the ego-ideal; and precisely because it,
the symbolic order of modernity, succeeds in doing away with the
cosmic polarity of the male and female principles.) Lacans explana-
tions are convincing, then, in nuce, because they open up without
yet really positively fulfilling the possibility of an inextinguishably
social or symbolic location and determination of the imaginary ego;
because they prospectively subordinate the understanding of the
imaginary ego to the understanding of the distinctively modern or
contemporary social or symbolic order.

201
 and its Imaginary Inversion

But this is really the last thing that could be said about the alternative
explanations that Lacan now proceeds to advance. For, as we will
see, these explanations try to move in exactly the opposite direction.
Rather than conceiving the imaginary in terms of the social or sym-
bolic, that is, they attempt to conceive the social or symbolic in terms
of the imaginary; or, more precisely and with predictably implau-
sible results they attempt to erect a conception of the social or sym-
bolic, or of some of the social or symbolic specificities of modernity,
upon the extremely fragile basis of Lacans own conception of the
supposed constitution of the imaginary ego in the moments of the
mirror stage.
What the mirror stage reveals, then, at least according to Lacan,
is the space in which the imagery of the ego develops, and which
intersects the objective space of reality. The notion of the role of
spatial symmetry in mans narcissistic structure is essential in laying
the groundwork for a psychological analysis of space. If [a]nimal
psychology has shown us that the individuals relation to a particular
spatial field is socially mapped in certain species, in a way that raises
it to the category of subjective membership, then it is the subjec-
tive possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the others
field that gives human space its originally geometrical structure, a
structure I would willingly characterize as kaleidoscopic.
Does this imaginary structuring of the ego provide us, however,
Lacan continues by inquiring, with a secure basis? Well, accord-
ing to Lacan again, the answer is no; because what this structuring
leads to and here Lacan can hardly be said to blink an eye is the
conception of Lebensraum, in which human competition grows
ever keener, and in relation to which an observer of our species
from outer space would conclude we possess needs to escape with
very odd results. And what this conception of Lebensraum leads
to, obviously, is war, a war that is increasingly proving to be the
inevitable and necessary midwife of all our organizational progress.
The conception of Lebensraum might inevitably have to be seen to
run up against its own internal limits (for, as Lacan rather obscurely
analogizes, the realized conceptual extension of the physicists
will vanish in turn in a roar of the universal ground); and the
egos temptation to dominate space might inevitably overcome its

202
own supposed instinct of self-preservation (just as the narcissis-
tic fear of harm to ones own body inevitably overcomes the more
abstract preoccupations with the possibility of death); but none of
this changes the fact that both this social or symbolic conception and
this social or symbolic temptation are essentially conceived here as
the more or less unavoidable consequences of the mere existence of
the mirror stage itself, as that which supposedly gives rise to the very
existence of the imaginary ego (AP: 99100).
It is extremely important to emphasize that Lacans argument here
is even more implausible than certain claims that we have already
seen him make in the previous section (section 2.1i). For if, in other
very early parts of his early work, Lacan is certainly guilty of believ-
ing that the constitution of the imaginary ego entirely predates and
precedes the later setting in place of the social or symbolic, then here
he goes beyond even this view, by claiming, with a simply astonish-
ing inadequacy, that it is possible to derive the logic of the social or
symbolic or, at the very least, of certain forms of the social or sym-
bolic from the logic of the imaginary ego itself, as this is supposedly
constituted in the deceptive maneuvers of the mirror stage. Lacan is
here guilty, that is, of a simply gigantic over-inflation of the signifi-
cance of his own, in fact rather problematic, theorizations. For rather
than being inserted into or, more precisely perhaps, rethought in
relation to a more adequate conception of the social or symbolic,
something that we will see occur later on, the conception of the mir-
ror stage, and of the imaginary ego that it supposedly produces, is
crudely and unsatisfactorily invoked here as the very underlying fun-
dament of the social or symbolic itself. The proper direction of fit
between the imaginary and the symbolic, which we have already
seen Lacan allude to, undergoes, in short, a quite spectacular inver-
sion.
And once Lacan has effected this inversion, it is hardly surprising
to see him concluding this section with a rather awkward mixture
of abstraction and concreteness (the abstraction reflecting the over-
inflation of the purported significance of the mirror stage; and the
concreteness reflecting at least implicitly the contrary attempt
to locate the imaginary ego that is supposedly produced by this
stage in properly social or symbolic, that is, also properly historical,
terms). The spatial dimension of the imaginary ego, Lacan claims
(abstractly), meets up with the temporal dimension of anxiety,

203
and [o]nly at the intersection of these two tensions should one
envisage the assumption by man of his original fracturing, by which
it might be said that at every instant he constitutes his world by
committing suicide, and the psychological experience of which Freud
had the audacity to formulate as the death instinct. Or (more con-
cretely now):

In the emancipated man of modern society, this fracturing reveals

that his formidable crack goes right to the very depths of his being. It is
a self-punishing neurosis, with hysterical/hypochondriacal symptoms
of its functional inhibitions, psychasthenic forms of its derealizations
of other people and of the world, and its social consequences of failure
and crime. It is this touching victim, this innocent escapee who has
thrown off the shackles that condemn modern man to the most formi-
dable social hell, whom we take in when he comes to us; it is this being
of nothingness for whom, in our daily task, we clear anew the path to
his meaning in a discreet fraternity a fraternity to which we never
measure up. (AP: 1001)

Seminar II; the Social or Symbolic Production of the Imaginary Ego

In his Seminar II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, Lacan finally gives us a precise idea of what this
social emancipation of modern man consists of. It consists of noth-
ing less than the social and historical emergence and production of
the ego itself, of the social and historical emergence and produc-
tion of a subject that is undeniably separated and divided from the
equally undeniable reality of its ego. I try to underline for you in a
thousand different ways, Lacan tells us, that it [the ego] is only
a historical contingency (S2: 58). Or, once again, it is only rather
recently that the ego has been theorised. Not only did the ego not
mean in Socratess time what it means today open the books, you
will see that the word is altogether absent but actually used here
in the full sense of the word the ego didnt have the same function
(S2: 13); if we do not know what a contemporary of Socrates might
have thought of his ego, even so there must have been something at
the centre, and there is no reason to believe Socrates ever doubted
that; crucially, however, [i]t was probably not made like the ego,

204
which starts at a later date, which we can locate towards the middle
of the sixteenth, beginning of the seventeenth centuries (S2: 7).
It is difficult to overestimate the absolutely revolutionary charac-
ter and consequences both inside and outside the narrow context
of Lacans work of this short series of statements. For, on the one
hand, what Lacan has effectively done here is provide the outlines
of a now fully positive account of the distinctively modern crossing
and overlapping of the two still separate spheres of the social or sym-
bolic and the imaginary ([t]he imaginary experience is inscribed,
he can now say, thus correcting his earlier failure to convincingly
articulate these two domains, in the register of the symbolic as early
on as you can think it (S2: 257)). Rather than pointing to the simple
absence of organic and traditional forms of the saturation of
the super-ego, or to the simple abolition of the cosmic polarity of
the male and female principles, this account now draws attention to
the indubitable presence of a specifically modern social or symbolic
production of the imaginary ego. (The dimension of the real remains,
for the moment, unthought on the terms of this account; but, as we
will shortly see, it can quite easily be reinscribed back into it.)
And, on the other hand, what Lacan has also effectively done here
is eviscerate or, at the very least, compel the fundamental rethink-
ing of the significance of his own theory of the mirror stage (a the-
ory which, not so long ago, we have seen him relying on in order to
develop a grossly inadequate conception of the modern social or the
modern symbolic). For if the imaginariness of the ego is indisputably
produced by something wholly specific to modern social or symbolic
forms by something wholly specific, that is, to the modern social
or symbolic order it is surely impossible to reduce this specificity
to the mere existence of something like the mirror stage itself (for
this would only serve to reintroduce the massive implausibility of
Lacans attempted derivation of social or symbolic forms from the
supposed pre-existence of the imaginary ego). If the mirror stage is
to be saved, that is, in some perhaps unrecognizable form then it
certainly needs to be inserted into, and consistently rewritten in rela-
tion to, a much broader conception of the social or symbolic emer-
gence and production of the imaginary ego itself.

205
Seminar III; the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the (Embryonic) Real;
the Modern Ego and its Delusory Discourse of Freedom

Now, in a really rather astonishing passage of his Seminar III: The

Psychoses a passage that is certainly worth quoting here at some
considerable length Lacan further deepens this account of the social
or symbolic emergence and production of the imaginary ego (and
he further deepens it, we should stress, by implicitly opening it out
onto what will become, in the work of the later Lacan himself, the
absolutely fundamental third register of the real; a register that we
have already seen to be partially adumbrated by Lacans reflections
in Seminar VII). Lacan begins this passage, then, by talking, once
again, about our contemporary social or symbolic order; although
what is striking now is that his descriptions of this order have started
to assume a much more concrete and specific form. For this order is,
when all is said and done, nothing other than the order of capitalism
itself. We live in a society, Lacan reminds us:

in which slavery isnt recognized. Its nevertheless clear to any sociol-

ogist or philosopher that it has in no way been abolished. This has even
become the object of some fairly well-known claims. Its also clear that
while bondage hasnt been abolished, one might say it has been gener-
alized. The relationship of those known as the exploiters, in relation to
the economy as a whole, is no less a relationship of bondage than that
of the average man. Thus the master-slave duality is generalized within
each participant in our society.

The slave side of this duality is relatively easy to comprehend

(although we should continue to bear in mind that it will later serve
as the basis for Lacans implicit extrapolation of the category of the
real). This slavery is constituted by the simple fact of the existence
of exploitation (or, in the case of the exploiters, by the simple
fact of their serving, with the same grim necessity that afflicts the
exploited themselves, the very system of exploitation).40 What is

40 Lacan is already anticipating here what he will have to say in Seminar

XVII concerning the castration, within the discourse of capitalism, of both
the laborer or worker and the capitalist. As we will see, he is quite faithfully
following here the ideas of Marx himself.

206
it, however, that can explain the master side of the equation; or,
anticipating Lacans terms a little, what is it that can explain, in a
(real) situation of generalized slavery or bondage, the (imagi-
nary) conviction of mastery that each participant in this situa-
tion more or less indubitably possesses? Well, as Lacan now tells us,
the necessary explanatory factor is the patent discourse of freedom
that this situation the situation of capitalist society inherently
supports; a discourse of freedom that continually runs up against
the walls that it has itself erected; or, more precisely perhaps, that it
has been compelled to erect:

Some time ago an imbalance was observed between the pure and sim-
ple fact of revolt and the capacity of social action to transform. I would
even say that the entire modern revolution was founded on this distinc-
tion and on the notion that the discourse of freedom was, by defini-
tion, not only ineffectual but also profoundly alienated from its aim and
object, that everything probative that is linked to it is properly speaking
the enemy of all progress towards freedom, to the extent that freedom
can have a tendency to animate any continual movement in society.
Nonetheless, this discourse of freedom is articulated deep within us all
as representing a certain right of the individual to autonomy.

But what does this right of the individual consist in? Well, in noth-
ing particularly substantial, Lacan informs us; for, when we really
start to think about it, it presents itself as a right to intimacy and
personality that is, strictly speaking, delusional (which should
never be taken to mean, of course, easily eradicable):

A certain mental breathing space seems indispensable to modern man,

one in which his independence not only of any master but also of any
god is affirmed, a space for his irreducible autonomy as individual,
as individual existence. Here there is indeed something that merits a
point-by-point comparison with a delusional discourse. Its one itself. It
plays a part in the modern individuals presence in the world and in his
relations with his counterparts. Surely, if I asked you to put this auton-
omy into words, to calculate the exact share of indefeasible freedom in
the current state of affairs, and even should you answer, the rights of
man, or the right to happiness, or a thousand other things, we wouldnt
get very far before realizing that for each of us this is an intimate, per-

207
 sonal discourse which is a long way from coinciding with the discourse
of ones neighbor on any point whatsoever. In a word, the existence of
a permanent discourse of freedom in the modern individual seems to
me indisputable.

This discourse of freedom, this right of the individual to auton-

omy, is not delusional in itself, however, but only in its relation-
ship to what Lacan now calls the discourse of the other. For when-
ever the discourse of freedom runs up against this discourse of the
other (a discourse that of course has to be seen to include and pro-
duce its own sense of freedom in the first place) it inexorably tends
to give way; that is, it inexorably tends to cede its rights at the very
same time as it impotently continues to believe in their permanent
and ongoing efficacy. For:

how can this discourse be matched up not only with the others dis-
course but with his conduct as well, assuming that he tends to base it
on this discourse at all? There is a truly discouraging problem here. And
the facts show that there is invariably not just a coming to terms with
what everyone effectively contributes, but actually resigned abandon-
ment to reality [] as soon as its a matter of acting, in the name of
freedom in particular, our attitude towards what in reality we have to
endure, or towards the impossibility of our acting together to further
this freedom, has entirely the character of resigned abandonment, of a
renunciation of what is nevertheless an essential part of our internal
discourse, namely that we have not only certain indefeasible rights but
that these rights are founded on certain primary freedoms, which can
be demanded for any human being in our culture [] We all remain at
the level of an insoluble contradiction between a discourse that is at a
certain level always necessary and a reality to which, both in principle
and in a way proved by experience, we fail to adjust [] Moreover,
dont we see that analytic experience is deeply bound up with this dis-
cursive double of the subject, his discordant and ridiculous ego? The
ego of every modern man? (S3: 1324)

Lacans argument here relies upon or, more precisely perhaps,

itself helps to give rise to a clear conception of the insoluble con-
tradiction, at the very heart of the discursively doubled subject
of modernity, between two fundamental terms. On the one hand,

208
we have the discordant and ridiculous ego of every modern
man, with the discourse of freedom and the individual right to
autonomy that the existence of this ego inescapably entails; and,
on the other hand, we have the reality (and Lacan has used this
word three times) that just as inescapably enters into conflict with
the claims of this ego, and that just as inescapably reduces these
claims to a more or less derisory status, by effectively compelling
their renunciation or resigned abandonment (something which
should not be taken to imply, of course, that these claims cease to be
in some sense essential or necessary).
If we allow ourselves a little license with the second of Lacans
terms (reality), we can now see that the subject of modernity is
essentially defined by a fundamental conflict or, once again, in
Lacans own possibly more pessimistic terms, by an insoluble con-
tradiction between the registers of the imaginary and the real.41
And if we now remember that this conflict or contradiction can
only be said to take place within an irredeemably social or symbolic
context the context of a still rather loosely defined capitalist order
or ordering it is surely also possible to see that Lacans three regis-
ters of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real are finally beginning
to fit together, to cross and overlap, in something like a coherent
fashion.
If, in Seminar VII, Lacan successfully identified the specifically
modern, that is, specifically social and historical, rupture between
the symbolic and the real (without properly grasping the fact that this
rupturing must also presuppose a specifically modern, and specifi-
cally social and historical, rupturing of the imaginary and the real);
and if, in Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis and Seminar II and
despite some false moves along the way (which consist in the attempt
to derive the social or symbolic from the logic of the imaginary itself,
as this is supposedly revealed in the primordial structurations of the
mirror stage) he successfully recognized that the modern imagi-
nary, the imaginariness of the modern ego, must itself be socially or
symbolically produced; then now, in Seminar III, he succeeds, for the
first time, in articulating all of these moments together. There is a

41 This license is perhaps justified here by the fact that Lacan has not yet
drawn, as he will later do, a distinction between the concept of the real and the
concept of reality.

209
modern rupture between the symbolic and the real, we can say, pre-
cisely because there is a modern rupture between the imaginary and
the real, and precisely because this rupture the rupture between
the imaginary ego and the real conditions that surround it (condi-
tions that, of course, at the same time, have to be seen to contain
and presuppose this ego in its very imaginariness) is itself socially
or symbolically produced; produced, that is, by the freedoms and
constraints or, a little more precisely perhaps, by the constraining
freedoms of its very capitalist framework.
In order to more fully and precisely work out this threefold imbri-
cation of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real; and in order, just
as importantly, to discover what exactly this third register of the
real has to be said to consist in (labor or work), we now need to
turn after this long, but hopefully enlightening, detour through the
inadequacies, ambiguities and eventual successes of Lacans early
work to the much more definitive sketches and formulations of
Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (and, undoubtedly in
much less detail, to the other later interventions of Lacan that can
be said to bear a direct relation to this seminars central themes).

2.2 Egocracy and the Discourse of Capitalism; or, Rethinking the

Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real in Seminar XVII

In the previous two sections, we have seen how after a consider-

able amount of reconstructive effort Lacans early work can be
seen to divide itself up into two fundamentally conflicting and even
contradictory strands. The first and, in the end, essentially struc-
tural or transcendental strand has to be seen to systematically fail in
its attempted (and at times even non-attempted) articulation of the
three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. For what
Lacan does when he conceives the symbolic in transcendental terms
is effectively cut it off from any potentially explanatory relationship
to the existence and emergence of the imaginary ego (Lacans con-
ception of the mirror stage, as we have seen, often serves as little
more than a convenient alibi for this deficit of explanation). And the
only way to solve these problems, we have suggested, is by introduc-
ing a consideration of the third register of the real; but, once again,
Lacans transcendental conception of the symbolic frustrates such a

210
solution by effectively secreting a transcendent conception of the real
as a form of pure exteriority.
The second and, in the end, essentially social and historical strand
of Lacans early thinking has to be seen to be much more produc-
tive although still quite imprecise in its working out of the dif-
ficult interplay between these same three registers. Because what
Lacan slowly and unevenly starts to recognize here in Seminar
VII, in Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, and in Seminars II and
III is that, to put things a little bluntly, the symbolic is never just
the symbolic. The symbolic order, we might say, is always thor-
oughly socialized and historicized, and it is precisely this socializa-
tion and historicization that has to be seen to account for both the
modern existence and emergence of the imaginary ego (something
that effectively does away with, or at least compels the fundamental
rethinking of, Lacans own conception of the mirror stage) and the
discordant and dissonant relationship that this ego maintains with its
own now thoroughly extimate real.
What we want to do in this section, then, is show how in Seminar
XVII (and other related texts) Lacan effectively consummates this
social and historical strand of his early work by implicitly opening
up the possibility of precisely thinking the symbolic, the imaginary
and the real in relation to the capitalist mode of production; or in
relation to what he himself might call, and on occasion even does
call, the discourse of capitalism.42 Lacan can only fully and consis-
tently think the interrelationship of these three registers, we want to

42 Lacan in fact only used this term once, in a conference Du discours

psychanalytique given at the University of Milan in 1972. See Lacan (1978).
He defines the discourse of capitalism there in the following terms:
$ S2
S1 a
It should become clear that we consider Marxs own formulations and even
Lacans discourse of the university, once it has been understood in accor-
dance with these formulations as providing a better representation of this
discourse. But what place does this leave for Lacans discourse of capital-
ism per se? This discourse is best comprehended, we would suggest, as pre-
senting capitalism from the fantasmatic perspective of the very (proletarian)
subject constituted by it. Once again, this suggestion should become clear a
little later on.

211
argue, when he has come to effect something like a return albeit
perhaps a critical return to the work of Marx himself.
The discourse of capitalism, we will see Lacan claiming and
we should not forget that this idea is already contained in the sub-
title of this famous seminar is nothing less than the other side,
the inverse or reverse, of psychoanalysis itself; and if we take
into account one of the many nuances of the French term that Lacan
actually uses here (lenvers), we can see that what this means is that
psychoanalysis relates to the discourse of capitalism as the outside
of a glove relates to its inside (what we discover here once again, we
might say, is precisely the peculiar logic of extimacy).43 That is, if
the imaginary, the symbolic and the real have to be seen to constitute
the three fundamental registers of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this is
only perhaps because, we want to claim, they also have to be seen to
constitute the three fundamental registers of the discourse of capi-
talism itself (for, to both repeat and anticipate, the capitalist mode
of production is nothing more than a Borromean knot: capitalism is
a social or symbolic order that produces and divides the subject in
relation to and across the two opposing registers of the imaginary
and the real; or, a little more precisely now and in more Lacanian
terms, it is a social or symbolic order that produces and reproduces
a subject divided between the imaginariness of its ego and the real
subjectivity of its labor).
We do not want to proceed here, however, by simply spelling out
the location of the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and
the real within the discourse of capitalism. In the first place, of
course and as we have already suggested because this is not
something that can easily be done on the basis of Lacans own direct
and explicit theoretical formulations. Lacan says very little in Semi-
nar XVII about the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and
the real, and he also gives nothing like a clear and concrete defini-
tion of something that we might want to call in an approximation
to his own terms both in this seminar and elsewhere the discourse
of capitalism (Lacan speaks instead, a little ambiguously as we will
see, of the discourse of the master in its contemporary capitalist

43 A little later, Lacan will implicitly refer to the discourse of capitalism as

that place which demonstrates the proper torsion of the discourse of psycho-
analysis (S18: 9).

212
form, or, this time a little less ambiguously, of the discourse of the
university that sits rather comfortably alongside the constraints and
compulsions of the capitalist mode of production itself). If we want
to speak precisely, then, of the discourse of capitalism, and of the
three registers of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real that this
discourse quite indubitably contains, then it should be made clear
from the outset that in order to do so we will have to introduce some-
thing new into Lacans work; something that can only perhaps be
introduced as the result of an attention to Marxs work that is much
closer than anything that Lacan himself is prepared to give. And, in
the second place, if we are ultimately justified in introducing these
new terms, this can only be on the basis of a detailed reconstruction
of the steps in Lacans own work that in fact render possible their
own clarification and completion.
We will identify here, speaking now in broad terms, three of these
steps. For, firstly, we want to interrogate the absolute profundity
of Lacans famous claim that the signifier represents the subject
for another signifier, a claim that immediately has to be seen to
open up onto the fact that the subject is always represented in this
way as working or laboring within a particular social and historical
discourse or social link. And, secondly, we want to show how
this very idea of discourse itself has to be seen to open up at
least implicitly onto a fundamentally social and historical distinc-
tion between two main discourses: what Lacan calls the discourse
of the master a discourse that we will see, perhaps a little more
clearly than Lacan himself, as serving to designate every pre-capital-
ist social formation and what, to reiterate, he should have called
with more conviction the discourse of capitalism (once again, it is
only the work of Marx that, once it has been combined with the work
of Lacan, allows us to articulate this discourse in anything like a
fully compelling fashion). Thirdly and finally, we want to investigate
the fundamental features of these two discourses, and especially
their fundamental differences. For, as we will see, these discourses
have to be said to produce or represent very different subjects; or,
more precisely, they have to be said to produce or represent sub-
jects who work or labor under very different discursive conditions.
Indeed, in the very terms that we want to introduce into Lacans
work in Seminar XVII thus remaining faithful to our whole recon-
struction here of Marx, Freud and Lacan each of these discourses

213
has to be said to accommodate the real of labor in a very different
way; that is, by means of a very different combination of the imagi-
nary and the symbolic. And, once again and as we will hopefully
come to see none of these differences can be considered to be of
negligible consequence.

The Signifier Represents the Subject for another Signifier; the

Numerous Implications of a Fundamental Phrase

Seminar XVII opens, then, with what, at first sight, might appear
to be another eminently structuralist and transcendental or purely
symbolic definition. The signifier, Lacan tells us, (S1), represents
the subject ($) for another signifier (S2) (S17: 13). Or, in the math-
eme that Lacan invents in order to represent this act of representa-
tion or, more properly speaking, as we will see, this act of repre-
sentativeness:
S1 S2
$

This altogether fundamental notation (S17: 198) simultaneously

implies, for Lacan, a number of different things. (And, to antici-
pate, what we ultimately want to suggest here is that none of these
things appearances notwithstanding can be coherently consid-
ered to be structuralist and transcendental, or purely symbolic. That
is, although all of these things can be correctly defined as transhis-
torical, this should in no way be taken to mean that they are struc-
turalist and transcendental. For, as we will see, it is their very tran-
shistoricality that in the end has to be seen to condition and explain
their equally thoroughgoing historicity.)
Firstly, then, Lacans notation has to be seen to imply what he
refers to both following Freud and, at the same time, introducing
into his work a linguistic sophistication that it did not itself pos-
sess44 as the inescapable reality of an Urverdrngung. For what
the signifier primordially represses, of course, in representing the

44 For a quick summary of the Freudian concept of primal repression, see

the relevant entry in Laplanche and Pontalis (1988).

214
subject for another signifier, is the very possibility of its own
and, more importantly perhaps, the subjects self-representation.
[T]he signifier, Lacan reminds us, is that which represents the
subject for another signifier; and I am surprised that nobody has
ever remarked that it follows as a corollary from this that a signifier
[and a subject S. A. & H. R.] would not be able to represent itself
(S16: 20). Or again: [t]he relation of the one to the other one makes
it necessary that the subject is only represented at the level of the
second one, of S2 [] The first one, the S1, certainly intervenes as a
representation of the subject, but this intervention doesnt imply the
appearance of the subject as such at anything other than the level of
S2 (S16: 381). From the mere fact of its representation in this mini-
mal relationship of signifiers, the subject finds itself tied, that is, to a
knot that will forever be beyond its reach (S16: 55).
Secondly, this Urverdrngung must itself be seen to imply what
Lacan identifies once again following Freud, and once again lin-
guistically clarifying him as the unimpeachable reign of the Vor-
stellunsreprsentanz. For if the subject of the signifier just like the
signifier of the subject is incapable of ever representing itself, it will
only ever be represented by another signifier, there will only ever
be, that is, representatives of what is to be represented. [I]t is
not a question of representation, Lacan informs us thus exploding
an entire philosophical tradition but of a representative (S17: 29).
Or, once again: [n]o representation supports the presence of that
which is called the representative of the representation [Vorstellungs
reprsentanz S. A. & H. R.] And we can only see here the distance
marked by this term. There is no equivalence between the one and
the other, between the representative and the representation (S16:
261). The subject, the support of this whole complex game of repre-
senting representation, is not, then, univocal, [i]t is represented,
undoubtedly, but also it is not represented (S17: 89).
Thirdly, this Urverdrngung and this Vorstellungsreprsentanz
must both be seen to presuppose, as their very condition of possibil-
ity, repetition. For the subject can only come to be represented by
certain signifiers (S1), in their relationship to other signifiers (S2)
and thus instantiated in the impossibility of its self-representation,
and in the impossibility of its ever coming to find a final or adequate
representation to the extent that this first set of signifiers can in
some way be seen to prize themselves apart, through the very act of

215
repetition, from the otherwise indifferent body of language. As Lacan
himself puts it, that which represents the subject only manifests
itself under the form of an infinite repetition (S16: 74).
Fourthly, however and certainly most importantly for the pur-
poses of our discussion this repetition, and the Urverdrngung and
Vorstellungsreprsentanz that it conditions, must itself be seen to
imply what Lacan refers to, a little ambiguously perhaps, as a loss
or entropy; a loss or entropy that he defines in Seminar XVII
evidently opening up with this the possibility of a whole series of
fundamental homologies with Marxs work as surplus jouissance
(S17: 19). And coterminously and just as importantly this rep-
etition must also be seen to imply that it is the subject itself that
essentially functions as the supposition, the hypokeimenon45
(S17: 13), of this entropic loss. (We will not yet write here the fourth
term that Lacan introduces into the bottom right hand corner of his
matheme so as to designate this loss: the famous objet a of surplus
jouissance. For, as we will see, to do this would be to already write
out what Lacan will come to refer to as the discourse of the mas-
ter; and the last thing that we want to do here is create the impres-
sion as Lacan himself sometimes does (S17: 188; 207) that this
discourse is coextensive with the mere existence of the order of
language itself.)
Repetition implies the entropic loss of surplus jouissance, then,
because it can only ever be the repetition of a certain number of sig-
nifiers. In order even to be repeated, that is and as we have already
seen these signifiers have to extricate themselves from the other-
wise indifferent mass of language; and what this extrication ineluc-
tably entails, of course, is the loss, the entropy, of the possible
repetition of other signifiers. Full jouissance is prohibited, we might
say, and reduced to the status of surplus jouissance, because
the simple fact of repetition makes it impossible for us ever to have
access to anything even resembling the whole of language, and to
anything even resembling the full range of possibilities that the use
of this language might be thought to evoke. As Lacan says, brilliantly

45 Lacan of course derives the concept of the hypokeimenon from Aristo-

tles Categories, where it is defined in an eminently proto-Lacanian fashion,
we might think as that which can be predicated by other things but not of
them. See Aristotle (1984), 324.

216
mimicking, it should be noted, the very process that he wants to
describe: [b]y virtue of being expressed and as such repeated, of
being marked by repetition, what is repeated cannot be anything
other, in relation to what it repeats, than a loss (S17: 46). Or simi-
larly: [w]hat becomes evident from this formalism [the formalism of
the signifiers representation of the subject for another signifier S. A.
& H. R.] [] is [] that there is a loss of jouissance. And it is in the
place of this loss introduced by repetition that we see the function of
the lost object emerge, of what I am calling the a [of surplus jouis-
sance S. A. & H. R.] (S17: 48).
The supposition, the hypokeimenon, of this entropic loss of
surplus jouissance, is nothing other, Lacan claims, than the subject
itself. For if the signifier represents this subject for another signifier,
and, if this very act of representation unavoidably carries with it a
certain loss, then it just as unavoidably follows that the subject itself
is the bearer of this loss. There is no way of escaping, Lacan con-
tends, this extraordinarily reduced formula that there is something
underneath. But precisely, there is no term that we can designate
this something by. It cannot be an etwas, it is simply an underneath,
a subject, a hypokeimenon (S17: 48). The subject emerges, that
is, from the entry into a relation, and it emerges from this entry
as precisely the subject that something, a certain loss, represents
(S17: 19). The signifying articulation always gravitates, we might
say definitively introducing in this way a pair of terms that will
be crucial, albeit in slightly different ways, to both Lacans analysis
and our own around the impossible real (S17: 103; 16393) of an
entropic loss; and it is the fate of the subject, as the supposition
or hypokeimenon of this articulation, to carry the weight of this
real in its very impossibility.

Discourse and the Social Link; Organizing the

Impossible Real of the Subjects Labor

We will be talking throughout this section about little more than

this entropic loss, this impossible real, of surplus jouissance; or,
more precisely, we will be talking about little more than the differ-
ent social and historical forms that this loss can be seen to assume.
Before we can do this, however and in order even to explain how

217
it is that this loss can be seen to assume different social and his-
torical forms; or how it is that it can be seen to presuppose different
social and historical subjects as the suppositions or hypokeimena
of these forms we need to make it clear that we are not dealing
here, in our reconstruction of Lacans fundamental notation, with
a set of structuralist and transcendental, or purely symbolic, defini-
tions. And the best way to do this is by saying something about that
conception of discourse that is inevitably opened up by Lacans
contention that the signifier represents the subject for another sig-
nifier. For even if, at first sight once again, this conception might
appear to be simply structuralist and transcendental, or purely sym-
bolic, it soon becomes evident, on a closer view, that this can in no
way coherently be considered to be the case. That is, in positive
terms, it becomes evident that this conception of discourse is itself
quite thoroughly social and historical.
How, then, does Lacan define his conception of discourse?
Firstly, to reiterate and to remain for the moment within the con-
fines of the apparently structuralist and the apparently transcenden-
tal he defines it in terms of that irreducible fact of ordering that
inescapably follows from the signifiers representation of the subject
for another signifier: [t]here are structures, Lacan tells us, and we
cannot describe them in any other way, for characterizing what
can be extracted from this [] fundamental relation, the one I define
as the relation of one signifier to another (S17: 13). Secondly and
still remaining within these confines Lacan describes discourse
as a discourse without speech; and what this somewhat oracular
formulation should be taken to mean is that discourse is a neces-
sary structure that goes well beyond speech, which is always more or
less occasional; for [t]he fact is that, in truth, discourse can clearly
subsist without words. It subsists in certain fundamental relations
which would literally not be able to be maintained without language.
Through the instrument of language a number of stable relations are
established, inside which something that is much larger and goes
much further than actual utterances [nonciations] can, of course, be
inscribed. There is no need of the latter for our conduct, possibly for
our acts, to be inscribed within the framework of certain primordial
statements (S17: 123). The subject only has to speechify himself,
Lacan continues elsewhere, to the fittings of discourse (S17: 51);

218
or, this time even more radically, speech is the carrion of dis-
course (S17: 1667).
Thirdly, however, Lacan claims moving more now in the defini-
tively social and historical direction that we here want to take him
discourse should in no way be seen to be suspended above or
alongside the real world; instead, it has to be seen to constitute this
world in its very reality; discourse is an arrangement that has
absolutely not been imposed in any way as they say, from a certain
point of view, nothing has been abstracted from any reality. On the
contrary its already inscribed in what functions as this reality []
the reality of a discourse that is already in the world and that under-
pins it, at least the one we are familiar with. Not only is it already
inscribed in it, but it is one of its arches (S17: 145). Fourthly and
finally and certainly most importantly in the context of our dis-
cussion discourse has to be seen to inhabit the world in order
to do something very specific; discourse, Lacan claims, is that
something which, within language, fixes, crystallizes and uses the
resources of language and there are many other resources so that
the social link between human beings functions (JLS). It is perhaps
not unreasonable, then, to reduce Lacans numerous descriptions
of discourse to this final definitional essence: discourse is what
explains, no more and no less, the functioning of the social link.
But how, we might ask, does discourse get the social link
to function? Well, what we want to argue here both following
Lacan to a certain degree but, at the same time, trying to conceptu-
ally clarify some of his ideas is that it does this by essentially orga-
nizing the entropic loss, the surplus jouissance, the impossible
real of the subjects labor or work; or, in other words, by essentially
representing or producing the subject as nothing more than the
supposition, the hypokeimenon, of precisely that real loss that
inevitably has to be seen to ensue from its own irremediably specific,
that is, thoroughly social and historical, ordering of the phenom-
enon of labor or work itself. (It is exactly at this point, we would
contend, that Lacans conception of the subject as a supposition
or hypokeimenon has to be seen to meet up with Marxs in fact
startlingly similar conception of this very same subject as a bearer
or Trger. For if, as we will remember from chapter 1, individu-
als are dealt with in Marxs work only in so far as they are the

219
personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Trger] of par-
ticular class-relations and interests, the subject at least from Semi-
nars XVI and XVII onwards, and at least tendentially is only dealt
with in Lacans work to the extent that it is the supposition, the
hypokeimenon, of a socially and historically particular discursive
ordering of the real loss of labor or work.)
What we are claiming here, then and it should certainly not be
ignored that this is a very strong claim is that the best way to pre-
cisely define Lacans third register of the real (a register that becomes
coterminous in Seminar XVII, as we have seen, with the category
of the impossible) is by conceiving it as the real of labor or work.
This is the only way to consistently avoid, we would suggest, the
apparently structuralist and apparently transcendental character of
Lacans fundamental notation. For it should be fairly obvious now
that the signifying articulation with its implicit Urverdrngung, its
implicit Vorstellungsreprsentanz and its implicit repetition never
just gravitates around, and never just represents the subject as
the hypokeimenon of, any old entropic loss, any old surplus
jouissance or any old impossible real. The signifying articulation
always gravitates around, that is, and always represents the sub-
ject as the hypokeimenon of, a very specific entropic loss, a very
specific surplus jouissance and a very specific impossible real; a
real that is always associated with a very specific kind of social and
historical labor or work; that is, with a kind of labor or work that is
itself articulated through a very specific social and historical dis-
course.
The two main social and historical discourses that we will see
Lacan describing here, then, the discourse of the master and
the discourse of capitalism (which, when properly understood in
Marxs own terms, has to be seen to underlie what Lacan has to say
about both the discourse of the university and the discourse of
the master in its supposedly contemporary capitalist form) are
best comprehended as two fundamentally different ways of dealing
with or managing the impossible real of labor or work.46 These dis-
courses are different, that is and, as we will see, in absolutely

46 If this sounds a little anodyne, then it should be remembered that this

management always takes place under the aegis of the struggle between
classes.

220
fundamental ways because they articulate the impossible real of
labor or work through very different combinations or admixtures of
the symbolic and the imaginary; or because they represent and
produce subjects that respectively condense and divide these three
registers in very different fashions.
If, then, as Lacan informs us, the real is not initially there to be
known, and if this is the only dam that can hold idealism back
(S17: 186), this is only ultimately because, we want to claim, the real
is always initially there at least for the linguistic, and thus indelibly
social and historical beings that we are to be labored or worked; and
because it has only ever been there, to be labored or worked at least
across the course of history so far, or at least across the course of the
different social formations that have populated this history under
the conditions of its varying symbolic-imaginary containments.

A Few Methodological Markers

Before we proceed to discuss, however, the intricate details of the

two main social and historical discourses that Lacan describes in
Seminar XVII, it is perhaps worth saying something more about his
general conception of discourse itself. For, as we now want to make
clear, this conception has to be seen to introduce or, at the very least,
entail when read both with and against certain formulations from
Marxs own work a number of absolutely crucial methodological
points and presuppositions.
Firstly, then, we can see how Lacans introduction of the concep-
tion of discourse allows him to substantially inflect his famous
claim that there is no such thing as metalanguage.47 On its own, of
course, this claim implies that we will never be able to erect a fun-
damental or formal language that in the limit case, from a position
supposedly outside language enables us to position and situate
the very phenomenon of language itself. Once this claim has been
tied together, however, with the notion of discourse with the
idea, that is, that the subject is always represented or produced

47 Again, Lacan says this too many times to make the provision of a single
reference purposeful.

221
within an irredeemably specific social and historical order of lan-
guage it can also be taken to mean, following, of all people, Stalin
(in his delayed but nonetheless rather biting response to the aberra-
tions of the linguist Marr48), that, as Lacan consistently reminds us
throughout his late work, language is not a superstructure.
The logos, Lacan tells us, is not a superstructure; indeed, it
is rather something like a substructure (DC: 3940). But the lan-
guage here should not be allowed to lead us astray. For if, in the pas-
sage we are citing from, Lacan is certainly continuing to flirt with the
concept of a substructure, his words ultimately have to be inter-
preted in such a way that they can be seen to render this flirtation
redundant. The very existence of language has to be seen to explode,
that is, Marxs (in)famous metaphor of (economic) base and (ideo-
logical) superstructure (a metaphor that we have already seen to be
inadequate in sections 1 and 2 of chapter 1 above; before definitively
doing away with it in the final section 3). If the operations of lan-
guage can never be reduced to the supposed security of a metalan-
guage, then it is just as impossible to conceive these operations as
the superstructural or ideological reflection or distortion of
a supposedly more fundamental base of social and primarily, of
course, economic relations. These social and economic rela-
tions are inseparable from, inextricably intertwined with, the very
operations of language itself; and, as an inevitable consequence of
this, the subject of these relations can in no way be considered to
simply super-structurally and ideologically hover above them in
its supposed consciousness (whether this consciousness is taken
to be true or, more probably it has to be said, false). Instead, this
subject has to be seen to inhabit (unconsciously perhaps, as we
will see) the inner structure of these relations themselves; which is
none other, of course, than the fundamental implication of Lacans
very notion of discourse. Discourse never divides the subject, we
might say, between the imaginary of the ideological superstructure
and the real of the economic base. Instead, as we will see, if there is
always something like a conjunction or disjunction between the two
registers of the imaginary and the real, within the subject, this has to
be comprehended as the result of a conjunctive or disjunctive logic

48 See Stalin (1950).

222
that is simply internal or immanent to (that is, neither superstruc-
tural or substructural in relation to) the symbolic, that is, thor-
oughly social and historical, specificity of discourse itself.
Secondly, we can see as we have been trying to emphasize
throughout this section that Lacans conception of discourse must
be construed as finally laying to rest any lingering suspicion that he
remains a merely structuralist or transcendental thinker. Or, speak-
ing more positively, we can see how this conception opens up the
possibility of a thinking of structure or, more correctly, of structures,
in their very ineradicable sociality and historicity. I hadnt thought
of myself, Lacan informs the rebellious students on the steps of
the Pantheon, as being all that transcendental (S17: 145); or, even
more clearly now, in the short oration My Teaching, its Nature and
its Ends: [y]ou know the nonsense theyve come up with now.
There is structure, and there is history. The people theyve put in the
structure category, which includes me, it wasnt me who put me
there, they put me there, just like that supposedly spit on history.
Thats absurd. There can obviously be no structure without reference
to history. But first, you have to know what you are talking about
when you talk about structure (MT: 68). It is impossible, then, to
peel structure apart from the density of history; because structure
just is, or structures just are, historical through and through. There
is no such thing to repeat this absolutely fundamental point for one
last time as a purely symbolic order. For what history inevitably
entails or what it has inevitably entailed so far is that the symbolic
or social ordering of the world must proceed through different combi-
nations of the symbolic with different combinations of the imaginary
and the real.
Thirdly and finally, then, we can see that in order to round off
this short series of methodological statements; and in order to make
clearer something that we have been hinting at from the beginning
of this section we need to comprehend history (in precisely its dif-
ferent combinations of the three registers of the symbolic, the imagi-
nary and the real) as nothing more than the result of a never-ending
interplay between the historical and the transhistorical. It has to be
said that this idea is much more clearly expressed in Marxs work
than it is in Lacans (although what we want to argue here is that
it is the very clarity of Marxs expression that allows us, in turn, to
clarify the work of Lacan himself). Labour, then, Marx tells us, as

223
the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human
existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal
natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and
nature, and therefore human life itself (C1: 133).
Labor or work, we might say translating Marxs insight into the
more Lacanian language that we are employing here is the transhis-
torical real, the transhistorical impossible, of every social and histori-
cal formation. (And it is the transhistorical necessity of labor or work
that accounts for the fact that there will always be an Urverdrngung,
a Vorstellungsreprsentanz, a repetition and a loss, with the subject
itself always appearing as nothing more than the hypokeimenon,
the Trger, of this loss.) It is precisely the transhistoricality of this
impossible real that has to be seen to give rise, however, to the very
necessity of history itself or, more precisely, to the very necessity of
the history of different social formations (with their Urverdrngungen,
their Vorstellungsreprsentanzen, their repetitions and their losses,
and with their different subjects as the hypokeimena or Trger of
these losses). For what is strictly impossible about the real of labor
or work is the idea that it might ever appear as it is in itself, purified,
so to speak, of all its symbolic and imaginary contaminations.49 The
impossible real of labor or work only does appear, that is, in the dif-
ferent social formations of history, under the aspect of its different
symbolic and imaginary containments and constraints. And the task
of a properly social and historical thinking, of course whether it be
Marxs or Lacans or, as here, a combination of the two is to discern
the precise nature of these containments and constraints, and the
precise nature of their various effects and consequences.

The Four Discourses (Halved)

Now that we have succeeded in extrapolating Lacans conception of

discourse from the fundamental notation that defines the signi-
fier as representing the subject for another signifier; and now that we
have claimed in anticipation drawing a number of methodologi-

49 Marx himself makes this very clear in Results of the Immediate Process of
Production (C1: 9981000).

224
cal conclusions from this that this conception of discourse must
always be seen to assume socially and historically specific forms
(that is, that it must always be seen to involve or have involved a
specific symbolic and imaginary articulation of the (transhistorical)
impossible real of labor or work, and that it must always be seen to
represent or produce or to have represented or produced the
subject as the hypokeimenon or Trger of this symbolic imagi-
narization of the real), we can finally start to take a look at the two
main social and historical discourses that Lacan talks about in Sem-
inar XVII: the discourse of the master and the discourse of capital-
ism. (Lacan speaks of course, once again, about the discourse of
the university, or about the discourse of the master in its suppos-
edly contemporary capitalist form; but what we want to argue here
is that both of these references the first being a lot clearer than the
second can only be properly comprehended on the basis of what
Marx says, using now a Lacanian terminology, about the discourse
of capitalism.)
We certainly ought to make it clear here that, in concentrating
our attention on the discourse of the master and the discourse
of capitalism (as the essential underpinning of the discourse of
the university), we will only be talking about two of the four dis-
courses that Lacan introduces in Seminar XVII; and precisely about
the two most obviously social and historical discourses. For Lacan
also speaks, of course, about the discourse of the hysteric and the
discourse of the analyst. And it is perhaps because these last two
discourses are not so obviously social and historical that, at times,
Lacan can be a little more ambiguous than we are claiming that he
should be about precisely the social and historical import of his own
work. I wont say, he demurs, that this [the introduction of the
four discourses S. A. & H. R.] is Archimedes lever. I will not tell you
that this makes the slightest claim to a renewal of the world system,
or of thinking about history (S17: 173). Or, even more definitively:
[m]y little quadrupedal schemas I am telling you this today to alert
you to it are not the Ouija boards of history. It is not necessarily the
case that things always happen this way, and that things rotate in the
same direction. This is only an appeal for you to locate yourselves in
relation to what one can call radical functions, in the mathematical
sense of the term (S17: 188).

225
 It suffices to say here that we do not consider these comments to
be particularly fruitful. Much more fruitful, we would suggest, are
those passages in which Lacan draws attention to the thoroughgoing
sociality and historicity of both the discourse of the hysteric and
the discourse of the analyst; in which he implicitly draws atten-
tion, we would claim, to the fact that both of these discourses can
only ultimately be coherently conceived as the product, the effect,
of the very social and historical passage or transition from the dis-
course of the master to the discourse of capitalism. The hyster-
ics discourse, Lacan now affirms, is what made the decisive shift
possible by giving its meaning to what was historically elaborated
by Marx. That is, that there are historical events that can only be
judged in terms of symptoms (S17: 204). Or, continuing the anal-
ogy, but at the same time making it clearer that the hysteric responds
to a passage or transition between the discourse of the master and
the discourse of capitalism: [s]he unmasks [] the masters func-
tion, with which she remains united, despite, or precisely because
of, the fact that she is not a slave, by going on a kind of strike
(S17: 94). The discourse of the analyst, for its part, is more or less
always conceived by Lacan as we have seen in implicitly social
and historical terms, as the inverse or reverse, the other side,
of the discourse of the master in its contemporary form, that is, of
the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the university.
In one crucial passage of his short presentation on The Triumph of
Religion, however, Lacan further specifies exactly what it is that this
analytic discourse is the other side of: [t]here was a little flash
of lightning between two worlds, if I can put it this way, between a
past world and a world that is going to reorganize itself as a superb
world to come. I dont think that psychoanalysis holds any key to the
future. But there will have been a privileged moment during which
we will have had a fairly just measure of that which I call in my dis-
course the parltre (TR: 878). The discourse of the analyst, we
can surmise, just like the discourse of the hysteric, has to be seen
to trace its historical emergence back to the still lingering passage or
transition between the discourse of the master and the discourse
of capitalism.

226
 and their Four Fundamental Positions

Lacan gives a formal definition of these two main social and his-
torical discourses, then (with the discourse of the university, we
will argue at least in its contemporary and hegemonic form only
essentially being definable as that which arises on the basis of the
discourse of capitalism, as this is explicitly defined in the work
of Marx himself), by distributing them like all of his discourses
across the four interrelated positions of a fundamental matheme.
And it will certainly be much easier to orient our discussion if, from
the beginning, we can give some idea of what it is that each of these
positions is intended to represent; or, just as importantly, if we can
give some idea of what the fundamental relationships between these
positions are supposed to be. On one occasion, then, Lacan identifies
the four positions as follows (S17: 93):
desire Other
truth loss

And, on another occasion, he specifies them thus (S17: 169):

agent work
truth production

If we pay attention now to each of these positions in turn, moving

clockwise as Lacan intends from the top left hand corner to the
bottom left hand corner (or moving, from left to right, across the top
line, and from right to left across the bottom), we can see a number
of very interesting things. Firstly, then, we can see that the desire
of every discourse is instituted by its agent, by what Lacan else-
where calls the order or command (S17: 117) of its dominant
(S17: 434) or master. [T]he reference of a discourse, Lacan tells
us, is what it acknowledges it wants to master (S17: 79); without
this implying, however, either that the master is in a position of
complete mastery the agent is not at all necessarily someone
who does, Lacan elucidates, but someone who is caused to act
(S17: 169) or, as we will see in the case of the discourse of the
university or the discourse of capitalism, that it is the master
himself who in fact occupies the position of explicit mastery in the
discourse. Secondly, we can see that what every discourse wants
to master or at least serve as the agent of is the work of the

227
Other. Every discourse gravitates, that is as we have already
suggested around the impossible real of the subjects labor or work.
[T]he structure, Lacan informs us, is real, and [t]his is generally
determined by a convergence towards the impossible. This is why it
is real; and this is why the real that pertains to this real structure
the real of labor or work has to be seen to function as the cause of
the discourse itself (S16: 30). Bringing these two moments together,
then, we can now see that the upper storey of Lacans mathemes
must always be seen to represent a relationship of impossibility per se
(for what effectively is impossible which does not mean, of course,
that it does not in some sense happen all the time is the mastery
of the impossible real of the subjects labor or work): [t]he first line,
Lacan confirms for us, comprises a relation, indicated here by an
arrow, which is always defined as impossible (S17: 174).
Thirdly, then, we can see now reiterating this point in this
slightly more precise context that every discourse must be con-
sidered to involve the production of a loss or, alternatively per-
haps and with a little more pungency for the laboring or working
subject concerned, the loss of a production; every discourse
must be considered to entail, that is as we will see in more detail
in what follows its own particular form of entropy. And, fourthly
and finally, we can see that every discourse must be thought of as
being suspended above and around the hiddenness, the obscurity
or, more radically perhaps, the undisclosability of its own truth.
No discourse, Lacan aphoristically puts it, can say the truth (S16:
42). What really needs to be emphasized here is that, if the truth
of a discourse is hidden, obscure or undisclosable or, in Lacans
own words, unsayable this is only ultimately because of the rela-
tionship that it maintains with the production of a loss (or, once
again, with the loss of a production). For this relationship the
one that defines the bottom storey of Lacans mathemes can no lon-
ger be construed as a relationship of simple impossibility; instead
as we can now see Lacan arguing in a passage that is certainly worth
citing here in full it has to be comprehended as something much
more radical: as a relationship or, more correctly, a non-relationship,
of nothing less than impotence:

at the level of the second line there is no suggestion of an arrow. And

not only is there no communication, but there is something that acts

228
 as a block [] What is it that is blocking? It is what results from the
work. And what a certain Marxs discovery accomplished was to give
full weight to a term that was already known prior to him and that
designates what work occupies itself with its called production [].
Whatever the signs, whatever the master signifiers that come to be
inscribed in the place of the agent, under no circumstances will produc-
tion have a relationship to truth. One can do all one wants, one can
say all one wants, one can try to conjoin this production with needs,
which are the needs one fashions there is nothing doing. Between the
existence of a master and a productions relation with truth, there is no
way of getting it to work []. Each impossibility, whatever it may be,
between the terms that we put in play here is always linked to this if
it leaves us in suspense over its truth, it is because something is protect-
ing it, which we shall call impotence. (S17: 174)

This dense and difficult passage is bursting with the most profound
implications; but the problem is that these implications are still only
formulated in essentially abstract terms. If the impossibility of a dis-
course, Lacan is arguing this being represented, of course, by its
upper storey effectively leaves the very truth of the discourse
in a state of suspense, then this is only ultimately because on
the bottom storey this impossibility is itself protected (made pos-
sible, we might suspect, in its very impossibility) by a relationship
or, more properly speaking, a non-relationship, a block, of impo-
tence; an impotence that is itself defined by the fact that that which is
produced within a discourse (and we should think here perhaps
both of the product of the subjects work, and of the subject itself
as the product of a certain kind of discursive work) will never
have just like the impossibility that it protects a relationship to
the truth of the discourse itself.
It is in order to further concretize the consequences of Lacans
comments, then, that we now want to turn after this fairly long
series of preliminary remarks to the definitions and descriptions
that he advances of the discourse of the master and the discourse
of the university (always remembering, of course, that this last dis-
course will have to be seen to be sustained by what Marx himself
has to say about the discourse of capitalism).

229
 The Discourse of the Master

Lacan defines the discourse of the master, then as we have already

suggested by adding a fourth position, the position of loss, pro-
duction, entropy or surplus jouissance (a), to the matheme that
is intended to designate the signifiers representation of the subject
for another signifier:
S1 S2
$ a

Much more is going on here, however, than the mere, apparently

structuralist or transcendental, representation of the subject for one
signifier by another. For Lacans definition of these terms whether,
once again, he fully recognizes this or not is quite thoroughly social
and historical. (This is why we earlier refrained, of course, from add-
ing this fourth position to Lacans primordial, three-pronged math-
eme; for what happens when one does this is that one immediately
creates the impression, the mistaken impression, it has to be said,
that the discourse of the master in its irredeemably social and his-
torical sense is simply coterminous with the supposedly structural-
ist and transcendental logic of language itself. On certain occasions
Lacan appears to strongly contest this impression: the function of
the master signifier, he says, is not in itself inherent to language
(S18: 137); and, on others, he seems to do his best to prop it up:
there is no contingency, he firmly states, in the slaves position.
There is the necessity that something be produced that functions in
knowledge as a master signifier (S17: 188).)
The S1, then in the position of the agent or the institutor of
desire is the master himself; or once again remembering
that we need to purge this claim of any structuralist or transcenden-
tal implications it is the signifier, the signifier function, that the
essence of the master relies upon (S17: 21). The S2 in the posi-
tion of the Other that works is the slave; or in less socially
and historically loaded terms it is the laborer, the worker per
se; and, crucially, this laborer or worker or, in Lacans terms,
slave (which we will henceforth use as a conventient shorthand)
is considered to be the possessor of knowledge: the slaves own
field, Lacan tells us, is knowledge, S2; the laborer or worker
is the one who has the know-how [savoir-faire] (S17: 21). The a

230
in the position of loss or production is the surplus product that
the laborer or worker produces for the master; and this product
is of course tied up, for both the laborer and the master albeit,
as we will see, in very different ways with the entropy of a sur-
plus jouissance. And the $, finally in the position of truth is
that very barring or division of the subject that the whole opera-
tion of the masters discourse serves to render hidden, obscure and
even from a position within the discourse itself undisclosable;
the structure of this discourse, Lacan informs us, works to mask
[] the division of the subject (S17: 103).
(Looking forward a little, then, we can see that the impossibility
of the discourse of the master will have to be thought to concern
the relationship between the master (S1) and the slave (S2); and
that its impotence functioning, of course, to protect this impos-
sibility will have to be thought to concern the relationship or, more
correctly, the non-relationship, the block, between the slaves
product (or between the slave himself as product, a product of
surplus jouissance (a)) and the truth of the barring or division of
the subject ($).)

is Coterminous with Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production;

the Example of the Corve

Now, what we want to argue here both clarifying Lacans work and
even, where necessary, correcting it is that this simple, four-footed
schema can essentially be seen to represent, in purely formal terms,
of course, the manner of functioning of every pre-capitalist society;
or, in more explicitly Marxian terms, that it can essentially be seen to
characterize the fundamental logic of every pre-capitalist social for-
mation or mode of production. Lacans language the language of
masters and slaves makes it clear that his own favored example
of such a social formation or mode of production is the Greece of
a supposedly classical antiquity (as this is displayed, and no doubt
also distorted, in the work of Plato and Aristotle or, more specifically,
in Platos Meno and Aristotles Politics). But what we want to briefly
show here is that the scope of Lacans mathematical reduction is
in fact much broader than his own overwriting of it might at times
appear to suggest. And the best way to do this, we want to claim, is

231
by picking up the thread left dangling a long time ago, at the end
of Chapter 1 above of one of Marxs own especially clear examples:
that of the corve.
The corve, then, was a form of peasant labor widely practiced, or
enforced, in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the middle of the
nineteenth century. But we are obviously not concerned here with
the wealth of its historical details. Instead, what we are concerned
with is the way that, as Marx himself puts it, this social formation
or mode of production presents surplus labour [and thus also per-
haps surplus jouissance S. A. & H. R.] in an independent and immedi-
ately perceptible form (C1: 345); that is, with the way that it can be
seen to reveal, with particular clarity, the basic underlying logic of a
pre-capitalist society or, in Lacanian terms, a discourse of the mas-
ter. For what happens in the corve in a typical week, let us say,
for the sake of simplicity is that the peasant works for three days
on his own land, or on communal land, producing a product either
for himself and his family or the community, and for three days on
the land of the landlord, producing a surplus product, of course, for
the sole benefit and consumption of this latter figure.
The positions of Lacans discourse of the master can be plot-
ted here with a satisfying ease (and we might suppose that this has
something to do with the easy or, at the very least, easily map-
pable satisfactions produced by this discourse itself). The land-
lord, then, the person for whom the three days of surplus labor are
performed, is the master, S1. The peasant, the person who performs
this three days of surplus labor, is the slave, S2 (and, following
Lacans indications, we can say that he performs this labor precisely
because he knows how to do it, precisely because he stands, that
is, in possession of a certain knowledge, know-how or savoir-
faire. It is perhaps also fair to assume, introducing with this a more
explicitly Marxian twist, that this knowledge is in some sense bound
up with his at least partial ownership or, in the case of the slave per
se, his full identification with the means of production). The sur-
plus product that the three days surplus labor on the landlords land
produces is a. (And we might also suppose that the production of
this surplus product will be tied up with an equally clear-cut division
between two kinds of surplus jouissance: a surplus jouissance of con-
sumption, we can say, which pertains, of course, only to the landlord
(S1), for it is he who is allowed to consume the surplus; and a surplus

232
jouissance of production, which pertains, of course this time with
less obviously benign consequences only to the peasant (S2), for it
is he who is compelled to produce the surplus, and to take, as we will
see, some kind of enjoyment in this production.) The only position
that Marxs example does not elucidate, then, is the $, the barring
or division of the subject. (But this is simply because as we will
also come to see, thus comprehending the particular impotence at
play here this barring or division is always effectively concealed or,
more properly speaking perhaps, excluded by the directly hierarchi-
cal ordering of pre-capitalist societies themselves (represented here
by the corve.) The fact that such societies do conceal and exclude
the subjects barring or division only becomes visible, that is, in a
paradoxically nachtrglicher fashion. In order to see that the subject
always effectively was barred and divided, without, of course, ever
coming close to realizing it, we need to have lived through that very
particular barring and division that is relentlessly imposed by capi-
talist society itself. The barring and division of the subject is itself a
thoroughly social and historical phenomenon (which should in no
way be taken to suggest that one day this division might be quite
happily overcome50)).

Surplus-Value and Surplus Product

We can already see, then, that Marxs example of the corve will
allow us to more precisely discern the way in which pre-capitalist
societies or discourses of the master have to be said to pre-
suppose, give rise to or produce a certain kind of, working or non-
working, subject. But before we proceed to analyze in more detail
the characteristics of these subjects, we ought to point out that
Marxs example also allows us to identify one of Lacans more sig-
nificant conceptual confusions. For, on a couple of occasions, Lacan
wrongly contends that the position of the a in the discourse of the

50 As Lacan himself says, it is a mirage to think that all the problems of

jouissance are related in an essential manner with the division of the subject;
and that consequently, if the subject were no longer divided, he would reen-
counter jouissance (S16: 115). It is only possible to imagine, that is, different
social and historical divisions of the subject.

233
master can be defined as the position of the production of surplus-
value. I have already shown you, he maintains, that in the mas-
ters discourse the a is precisely identifiable with what the thought
of a worker, Marxs, produced, namely what was, symbolically and
really, the function of surplus value (S17: 44); or again: [w]hatever
way you come at things, whatever way you turn them, each of these
little four-legged schemas has the property of leaving its own gap
[] At the level of the masters discourse, the gap is precisely that of
the recuperation of surplus value (S17: 203). Lacan is mistaken, of
course, because there is no suggestion in pre-capitalist societies the
only societies that can be consistently represented, we are claiming,
by the discourse of the master of the production of surplus-value.
What is produced in the corve, for example, by the three days of
surplus labor that the peasant performs on the landlords land, is not
surplus-value, but instead a surplus product (and the same would
have to be said, of course, of Lacans own favored example of the
slave of classical antiquity). As we will see, the consequences of this
distinction are very far from being academic; and this is precisely
because the production of surplus-value has to be seen to produce a
very different subject than the production of a mere surplus product.
The production of surplus-value is the key, that is, to the fundamen-
tal subjective transformation that takes place between the discourse
of the master and the discourse of capitalism.

A Long Series of Subjective Suppositions

How are we to understand, then, that subject or those subjects

that function as the hypokeimena or Trger of pre-capitalist soci-
eties, or of the discourse of the master? We want to make here five
essential points. (And it should be borne in mind that, at the very
same time as we are making these points, we will be outlining, in a
purely ex negativo fashion, of course, the basic characteristics of the
subject or subjects produced by the discourse of capitalism;
for, as will later become clear, this last discourse has to be seen to
enact, in each of these five spheres, an absolutely fundamental trans-
formation of what occurs in the discourse of the master itself.)
Firstly, then, we can say, further concretizing with this a point
that we have already made in the abstract, that the repetition, the

234
repeated assertion (S17: 79), of the discourse of the master the
fact that, to put it simply, labor or work is done for the master day
after day, week after week, year after year always entails for the
very subject(s) produced and presupposed by this repetition a certain
loss or entropy; a loss or entropy that is always bound up, of
course, with a certain surplus jouissance. (We will later see that,
although it is certainly possible to speak of an entropy within the
masters discourse, this term can only really be said to acquire its
full and proper metaphorical meaning when it is seen as functioning
within the discourse of capitalism.)
Lacan first approaches this loss or entropy, then, from the
place where one might least expect to find it, that is, form the posi-
tion of the master himself. For full jouissance is as fundamentally
prohibited (S17: 108) for the master as it is for the slave, sur-
plus jouissance is the function of the renunciation of jouissance under
the effects of the discourse (S16: 19) for both the slave and the
master; the master signifier, Lacan tells us, determines castra-
tion (S17: 89), and not only for those who work or labor under
it; for the very person who gives the order to work must himself be
seen to suffer (although not quite in the same way, we might expect,
as those to whom he gives it) from its jouissance-prohibiting effects:
what constitutes the essence of the masters position, Lacan firmly
concludes, is to be castrated (S17: 121).
The master is castrated, then, he is the subject of a loss or
entropy precisely because he has to give the order to labor or
work; and it is precisely the giving of this order that guarantees for
him his own particular kind of surplus jouissance: [t]he master
[] makes a small effort to make everything work, in other words,
he gives an order. Simply by fulfilling his function as master he loses
something. It is at least through this something lost that something
of jouissance has to be rendered to him specifically, surplus jouis-
sance (S17: 107). It is precisely because the master gives the order
to the slave to produce a surplus that, once this surplus has been
produced, it is the master himself who consumes it. Or, returning
to the example of the corve, it is precisely because the landlord gets
the peasant to perform three days surplus labor on his own land that,
once this labor has been performed, its benefits can accrue solely to
the landlord himself. The surplus jouissance of the master, ren-
dered possible by the loss or entropy entailed by his giving of an

235
order an order of production is essentially, then, a surplus jouis-
sance of consumption. (And Lacans explanations of the masters
right to command and consume the surplus product are at times
mythical, and at times not. For, on certain occasions, Lacan sim-
ply repeats the Hegelian and Kojvian fantasy about the masters
willingness to assume the overwhelming risk of death: the master
to whom this surplus jouissance is owed, he says, has renounced
everything, and jouissance first up, because he has exposed himself
to death, and because he remains firmly fastened to this position
whose Hegelian articulation is clear (S17: 107); and, on other occa-
sions, which are certainly more consistent with the critique of both
Hegel and Kojve that Lacan develops elsewhere in Seminar XVII
(S17: 143; 16971), he explicitly dismantles the central presupposi-
tion of this fantasy: [i]t would be quite false to think, he claims,
that this [the differentiation of the master] occurs at the level of a
risk. This risk is, despite everything, quite mythical. Its the trace of a
myth that still remains in Hegelian phenomenology. Isnt this master
nothing other than the one who is the strongest? This is certainly not
what Hegel records. The struggle for pure prestige at the risk of death
still belongs to the realm of the imaginary (S17: 152).)
We are not really concerned here, however, with the particular
conditions that explain the masters ability to consume the surplus
product. For what we want to emphasize is that, in giving the order
to produce this product to the slave that is, in subjecting himself
to his own particular (and, in the end, not too unpleasant) form of
loss, entropy and surplus jouissance the master is essen-
tially fulfilling, in Lacans own terms, an impossible task (this impos-
sibility corresponds of course, as we have already seen, to the upper
storey of Lacans discourse (S1 S2)): [i]n the masters discourse,
Lacan informs us, it is effectively impossible that there be a master
who makes the entire world function. Getting people to work is even
more tiring, if one really has to do it, than working oneself. The mas-
ter never does it. He gives a sign, the master signifier, and everybody
jumps. Thats where you have to start, which is, in effect, completely
impossible. Its tangible every day (S17: 174). The master fullfils
an impossible task, we might say, because the (imaginary-symbolic)
signifier of his hierarchical ordering manages to subsume, to give
sense to, to make possible in its very impossibility, the impossible
real of the subordinate subjects labor or work. The master gives

236
the order to work, and everybody works. Impossible, it might be
thought, for nothing necessitates that the impossible real of labor or
work be subsumed in precisely this (imaginary-symbolic) way; noth-
ing necessitates, that is, that the slave obey the masters order.
But possible nonetheless, for under the conditions of the discourse
of the master this is what happens on any and every day.
It is the fact that the master performs this impossible function,
in precisely the way that he does, that allows us to explain another
of Lacans hugely significant conceptual and historical confusions.
For what the masters hierarchical ordering of the phenomenon
of labor or work makes clear is that he the master can never
even come close to conceiving of himself as a self-identical subject.
(It is this strict impossibility of self-representation, for both the mas-
ter and the slave, that can be seen to define, as we will now see,
the very specific Vorstellungsreprsentanz of the discourse of the
master.) But Lacan contradicts this conclusion in a number of dif-
ferent places: the masters discourse, he tells us, begins with the
predominance of the subject as, in fact, tending to be supported only
by this ultra-reduced myth of being identical with his own signifier
(S17: 90); or similarly, what is found, on the horizon of the rise of
the master subject is a truth which asserts itself on the basis of his
equality with himself, on the basis of this I-cracy I once spoke of,
and which is, it seems, the essence of every affirmation in culture
that has seen this masters discourse flourish over all others (S17:
7980); and finally, the principle of the discourse of the master is
to think of oneself as univocal; it is precisely for this reason that
this discourse masks the division of the subject (S17: 103).
This simply cannot be considered to be the case, however; for what
masks the division of the subject within the masters discourse
is not the myth of the masters self-identity, but instead the very
hierarchical ordering of the discourse itself, the fact that its sub-
jects are explicitly divided up into the two camps of masters and
slaves (or laborers and workers). It is this hierarchical order-
ing that explains, of course, the strict impossibility of even the myth
of self-representation within the discourse of the master. For it is
clear, we can surmise, to everybody involved in this discourse,
that the master only exists through the mediation of the slave,
and that the slave only exists through the mediation of the mas-
ter. The landlord knows that he is the landlord only and precisely

237
because the peasant comes to perform three days surplus labor on
his own land, and the peasant knows that he is the peasant only and
precisely because he performs this three days surplus labor on the
landlords land. As Lacan himself puts it, emphasizing even more
with this in contradistinction to his previous assertions the abso-
lute dependency of the master: in the discourse of the master it
is only the slave that is real []. If the slave dies there is nothing
left. If the master dies everybody knows that the slave is always a
slave (S16: 385). This, then, is the master discourses very specific
form of Vorstellungsreprsentanz: the signifier even the master
signifier cannot represent itself because it represents the subject
for another signifier; or, more concretely now, the master cannot
represent himself because he is only represented by and through the
slave, and the slave cannot represent himself because he is only
represented by and through the master. Within the discourse of
the master, the myth of the masters self-representation must itself
be seen to be a myth (as we will see later, it is only the discourse
of capitalism that can coherently be considered to give rise to the
mirage of the subjects self-identity).
Having identified the loss or entropy that the discourse of the
master entails for the master himself, we can now turn our atten-
tion to the loss or entropy that it imposes on the slave. And in
many ways, of course, this loss or entropy is much more obvi-
ous and much more pressing. For what the slave loses in working
for the master is, firstly, his time, secondly, the surplus product
that he produces over this time and, thirdly and in this case a little
more speculatively perhaps the possibility of his using this time by
not working for the master. In the corve, for example, the peasant
loses the three days work on the landlords land, the surplus product
of this work (the work of his own hands), and the possibility of using
these three days to work for himself, his family and his community.
The loss or entropy experienced by the slave is clear, then;
but what is not so clear is the particular form of surplus jouissance
that it must necessarily be seen to entail, a surplus jouissance that
we have already defined in stark contrast to the masters enjoy-
ment as a surplus jouissance of production. What people usually
say, Lacan tells us, is that jouissance [and we should think here
only of surplus jouissance S. A. & H. R.] is the privilege of the mas-
ter. What is interesting on the contrary, as everyone knows, is what

238
belies this within it; what is interesting, that is, is how the slaves
position is articulated with respect to jouissance (S17: 22). For if the
master must certainly be said to enjoy his consumption, the slave
must also be said to enjoy his production. But how exactly? Lacans
answers to this question might at times appear to be a little face-
tious: the whole of the literature of antiquity testifies to us, he says,
that being a slave was not that troublesome at all (S16: 115). The
simplicity of this statement should not be allowed to blind us, how-
ever, to its absolutely serious animating intent. For what Lacan is
implicitly claiming here is that the surplus jouissance of the slave
consists precisely in the fact of his knowing that he is working for
the master: [t]he slave knows many things, but what he knows
even better still is what the master wants (S17: 32); or again, the
masters desire is the Others desire, since its this desire that the
slave anticipates (S17: 38). The slave has to be seen to derive his
surplus of satisfaction, then, from nothing more than the continuing
state of his own subordination. If [t]he master was satisfied with
his little tithe of surplus jouissance, then there is also no indica-
tion that in himself the slave was unhappy to be giving it (S17: 79).
Within the hierarchical ordering of the discourse of the master, the
surplus jouissance of consumption is supported, held in place, by
the surplus jouissance of production. It is the surplus jouissance
of the slave that guarantees and grants consistency to the surplus
jouissance of the master.
Secondly, then and following on rather neatly from this last
point we can see that if the slave certainly loses something in
the discourse of the master, what he certainly does not lose is his
knowledge. For, as we have already seen, it is knowledge, in Lacans
view, that has to be said to define the essence of the slaves posi-
tion. Knowledge serves the master, he informs us, but it is born
from the slave himself (S16: 393). And, as we have also started to
suggest, this knowledge can be seen to fan out in a number of differ-
ent directions.
In the first place, then, the slave stands in possession of the
knowledge, the know-how, the savoir-faire that informs his very
work. If the slave is working for the master then this is obvi-
ously only because he knows how to do this work. If the peasant is
performing three days surplus labor on the landlords land, this is
clearly only because he knows how to perform this surplus labor.

239
And, in the second place, it needs to be pointed out this time in
more explicitly Marxian terms that this knowledge, this know-
how, this savoir-faire must essentially be seen to stem either from
the slaves partial ownership of the means of production, as in
the case of the peasant of the corve, or, in the case of Lacans own
preferred example of the slave of classical antiquity, from his abso-
lute identification with and reduction to the level of these means of
production. The peasant of the corve partially owns the means of
production, and this is why his work is informed by a certain knowl-
edge. The slave of classical antiquity just is a means of production,
but this is also what explains the impossibility of detaching his work
from the knowledge that informs it. In the third place, then and
as we have tried to make clear only a short while ago the slave
can also be seen to stand in possession of another kind of knowl-
edge: the absolutely indubitable knowledge that, at least as far as
the production of a surplus is concerned, he is working only for the
master. It is from this knowledge, of course, a knowledge that also
has to be said to inform every minute of his work, that the slave
must be seen to derive all the ambiguity of his surplus jouissance.
For knowing that one is working for the master certainly has to be
said to constitute a very peculiar form of enjoyment (a form no more
peculiar, however, as we will later have a chance to see, than other
more contemporary models and manifestations).
Thirdly, then, we can see that it is precisely this last kind of knowl-
edge, and the surplus jouissance attached to it, that can be said to
explain the particular form of impotence that is at play within the
discourse of the master. We have already seen Lacan define impo-
tence, as opposed to impossibility, as that characteristic that stretches
out across the bottom storey of every discourse or, more precisely,
as that characteristic that results from the non-relationship or block
between what is lost or produced within a discourse and the
truth of the discourse itself (a truth that always remains, of
course, for the very subjects involved and implicated in the structure
of the discourse, essentially hidden or undisclosable). In the dis-
course of the master, then, impotence has to be seen to define the
non-relationship or block between the production and loss of
a surplus product (a) and the hidden or undisclosable truth of the
barring or division of the subject ($).

240
 What does this mean, however? Well, it means, to further develop
this point, that if a surplus product (a) is produced within an explic-
itly hierarchical ordering of discourse within a discourse that
explicitly distinguishes, that is, between masters (S1) and slaves
(S2) it is precisely this hierarchical ordering that must be seen to
conceal or, more properly speaking, even exclude the barring or divi-
sion of the subject ($). The subject is not really divided, we might
say, within the discourse of the master. Instead, it is the discourse
itself that is divided between or across two entirely different kinds of
subjects: masters, of course, and slaves. In retrospect, of course,
from the nachtrgliche perspective that is opened up by nothing less
than the demise of the discourse of the master (a demise that can
only be accounted for, as we will see, on the basis of the emergence
of the discourse of capitalism), it certainly becomes possible to
see that what this division the division between masters and
slaves conceals or excludes is nothing more than the barring
or division of the subject itself; but what really needs to be empha-
sized is that it only becomes possible to see this precisely from this
nachtrglichen perspective. We can certainly see today that what the
discourse of the master conceals or excludes is the barring or divi-
sion of the subject; but we can just as certainly only see this because
we ourselves have been subjected to that very particular barring or
division that is so consistently and continually imposed by the dis-
course of capitalism itself (and we will, of course, be further specify-
ing this division a little later on).
From a position within the discourse of the master, then, any-
thing like an awareness of the barring or division of the subject is
quite strictly inaccessible. The slave simply knows that he is a
slave, and he simply knows that, at least as far as the production of
a surplus is concerned, he is working only for the master. It is this
knowledge that has to be seen to bar any awareness that the slave
might have of his barring or division as a subject (for knowing that
one is dependent upon the master, and thus not self-identical, is
not the same as knowing even if unconsciously, as we will see
that one is barred or divided). And something similar, of course, is
also true of the figure of the master himself. For what the master
knows, in an inverse repetition of the tautology of the slave, is
that he himself is the master; he knows, that is, that when a sur-
plus is being produced the slave is working only for him. It is this

241
knowledge that renders the master as immune as the slave to any
awareness of his own barring or division (for, once again, to know
that one is dependent on the slave to know that one is not a self-
identical subject is not to know, even if unconsciously, that one is
barred or divided as a subject). As Lacan himself puts it, implicitly
hinting in this way at that very link between knowledge, the limits of
knowledge and impotence that we are here trying to explain: there
is no relationship between what will more or less become the cause
of desire for a character like the master who, as usual, fails to under-
stand anything about it and what constitutes his truth. As a matter of
fact, there is a barrier here [of impotence] on the lower level [of the
discourse of the master S. A. & H. R] (S17: 108).
For both the master and the slave, we can surmise, there is
no relationship between the cause of desire of the discourse of
the master the production of a surplus (a) and the concealed or
excluded truth of the barring or division of the subject ($). It is the
barrier or block of impotence the absolute unawareness that
the subjects (and especially the slaves) of a hierarchical ordering
entertain with regard to their own effectively excluded barring or
division that functions to protect the very impossibility of this hier-
archical ordering itself; that explains, in more everyday terms, how it
is that the master can come to fulfill the completely impossible task
of getting the slaves to work for him. It is the impotence imposed
by hierarchy that renders it possible in its very impossibility.
We can express all of this in slightly different terms by saying that
what the discourse of the master fundamentally forecloses is any
irreducibly specific experience of fantasy. In its fundamental begin-
ning, Lacan tells us, the masters discourse excludes fantasy. And
thats what makes [both] him [and the slave S. A. & H. R.], funda-
mentally, completely blind (S17: 108). Lacans famous formula for
fantasy is, of course, $ a: the barred or divided subject both con-
ceals and confronts or, more properly speaking perhaps, confronts
by concealing the enigmatic excess of its surplus jouissance.51
It is precisely such a relationship that is sealed off, however, by the
barrier or block of impotence that arises on the bottom storey of

51 Once again, Lacan spells out this formula so many times that it is impos-
sible to give a meaningful individual reference for it.

242
the discourse of the master. For, as we have seen, this barrier
or block is erected between the loss or production of a surplus
product, and the loss or production of a surplus jouissance (a),
and the concealed or excluded truth of the barring or division of
the subject ($). The barrier or block of impotence is a barrier or
block between the two very terms that serve to define the function
of the Lacanian fantasy.
All of which is to say, of course, that there is nothing enigmati-
cally excessive about the surplus jouissance that takes place within
the discourse of the master. The slave, as we have already said,
enjoys as nothing more than a slave; he enjoys, that is, only by
producing the surplus product. And the master enjoys as noth-
ing more than a master; he enjoys, that is, only by consuming the
surplus product. It is this strict partition of surplus jouissances that
explains, then, why nothing like a specific experience of fantasy is
possible within the masters discourse (for although we can cer-
tainly imagine the slave fantasizing about being a master, there
is nothing specific about this fantasy that can be seen to regulate the
slaves most essential activity, his work itself). The specificity of
fantasy is excluded from the discourse of the master, we can con-
clude, precisely because the entirety of this discourse is bathed in
nothing more than fantasy itself, the fantasy of a hierarchical order-
ing. (From a contemporary perspective, we can see that the central
division of the masters discourse the division between mas-
ters and slaves is nothing short of fantasmatic; but this does
not mean, of course, that within the specific social logic of this dis-
course this fantasy does not function as the firm and fundamental
basis of reality itself.)
Fourthly, then and drawing out with this the more general impli-
cations of our last point it is now possible to see what it is that
has to be said to constitute the very specific form of Urverdrngung
that is at work within the discourse of the master. For what this
discourse primordially represses in rendering the self-representa-
tion of its subjects impossible by means of an explicitly hierarchical
ordering is nothing less than the barring or division of the subject
itself. (We can only become aware of this repression, as we have
already pointed out, from the privileged historical position of our
Nachtrglichkeit.) And what this means, of course, is that, from a
position within the discourse of the master, anything like an expe-

243
rience of the unconscious is strictly impossible. For what opens
up the possibility of this experience is nothing other than the bar-
ring or division of the subject. It only becomes possible to experi-
ence the unconscious, that is as we will see in more detail when
we later start to discuss the discourse of capitalism when it also
becomes possible to experience something like the supposed (but
only supposed) self-identity of the subject. The experience of the
unconscious is constituted by the barring or division of the subject
between its apparent self-identity (an appearance that, as we have
seen, has no place within the discourse of the master) and every-
thing that serves to render this identity nothing more than derisory.
Or, in more Lacanian terms, the experience of the unconscious is
constituted by the barring or division of the subject between its ego
and its subjectivity proper (and this barring or division can only be
comprehended, we will claim, on the basis of the discourse of capi-
talism itself).
None of which should be taken to mean, of course, that there is
no place for the unconscious within the discourse of the mas-
ter. For, in an absolutely fundamental sense, everything about this
discourse is unconscious. (Where is the place for consciousness,
we might ask, in the hierarchical relationship between the master
and his slaves?) The fact that everything is unconscious does not
mean, however, that the very subjects of this unconsciousness are
capable of experiencing it as such. For, as we have already tried
to make clear, in order to experience the unconscious something
needs to have emerged that functions as its apparent but obvi-
ously only apparent counterweight. If this counterweight has not
emerged then the experience of the unconscious is nothing short
of impossible. Or, as Lacan himself says, in a concise but nonethe-
less wonderfully pregnant phrase: the slaves labor the labor that
determines the whole structural logic of the discourse of the mas-
ter constitutes a non-revealed unconscious (S17: 30).
Fifthly and finally, we can provide a shorthand summary of every-
thing that we are saying here by stating that, in the discourse of the
master, the three registers of the symbolic, the imaginary and the
real essentially constitute a closed whole or sphere. [T]he idea
that knowledge can, in any way or at any time, even as a hope for
the future, form a closed whole, Lacan tells us, is something that
didnt have to wait for psychoanalysis for it to appear questionable.

244
But the idea that knowledge can make a whole is, if I may say so,
immanent to the political as such. This has been known for a long
time. The imaginary idea of the whole that is given by the body, as
drawing on the good form of satisfaction, on what, ultimately, forms
a sphere, has always been used in politics by the party of politi-
cal preaching. What is more beautiful, but also what is less open?
What better resembles closure of satisfaction? (S17: 301). Political
preaching is wholly unnecessary in the discourse of the master,
we can conclude, because the satisfaction and the knowledge of
this discourse simply is spherically organized:
SI R
$ a

The symbolic-imaginary signifier of mastery (SI) fully subsumes,

that is, the real (R) of the laboring subjects work (and this is why
the surplus produced by this work (a) returns directly to the mas-
ter, rather than being bound up with the barring or division of the
subject ($)).

The Discourse of Capitalism

We have seen, then with all of the various consequences for the
subject that this carries in its train that Lacans discourse of the
master can essentially be considered to be coterminous, at least in a
purely formal sense, with every pre-capitalist mode of production
or social formation. And one of the implications of this claim is
that, if we now want to speak of the discourse of capitalism and
conceive this discourse as the fundamental support of what Lacan
has to say about the discourse of the university we will certainly
not be able to speak of it as a simple contemporary modification or
transformation of the discourse of the master. The discourse of
capitalism, we want to argue, has to be understood, in relation to
the discourse of the master, as a very new and very different kind
of discourse; and it is only this newness and difference this irre-
mediable specificity of the discourse of capitalism that will allow
us to properly account for the functioning of the discourse of the
university.

245
 It should be made clear from the outset that this understanding
of the discourse of capitalism is not always and not even pre-
dominantly shared by Lacan himself. For, on a number of occa-
sions, Lacan wants to suggest that the discourse of capitalism (if
it is even appropriate to employ this designation here) is nothing
more than the modern or contemporary form or instantiation of the
discourse of the master itself. In order to see certain things, he
informs us, one hasnt had to wait for the masters discourse to fully
develop and reveal its last word in the capitalists discourse, with its
curious copulation with science (S17: 110). Or again: I am speak-
ing of this capital mutation [] which gives the masters discourse
its capitalist style (S17: 168). And this time in a little more detail
(in a passage whose historical imprecision it is important to bear in
mind; and we refer here to things that we have already said in chap-
ter 1): [s]omething changed in the masters discourse at a certain
point in history. We are not going to break our backs finding out if it
was because of Luther, or Calvin, or some unknown traffic of ships
around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean sea, or anywhere else, for the
important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance became
calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is called
the accumulation of capital begins (S17: 177).
On a number of other occasions, however as we will see in more
detail in what follows Lacan certainly does suggest, without per-
haps following this insight through in its fundamental consequences,
that the discourse of capitalism is an absolutely specific social form.
Typically, this suggestion is bound up with the idea that there is a
very close link or relationship or, even more strongly, a fundamental
homology between the discourse of capitalism and the discourse
of the university. It is this relationship or homology, then, which we
now want to investigate. The discourse of the university, we will
claim and emphasizing this very important point once again can
only be properly comprehended upon the basis of the discourse
of capitalism. And the discourse of capitalism can only itself be
adequately understood given all of those ambiguities in Lacans
work that we are here trying to draw attention to if we once again
take a short detour though the much less ambiguous work of Marx
himself.
In the third and final part of chapter 1 above, we have already dis-
cussed in great detail the way in which Marx both defines and deter-

246
mines that which he refers to as the general formula for capital.
And, on the basis of this discussion, it is certainly not too difficult to
convert this formula into its own very specific kind of discourse.
We can write this discourse out in the following way:
M C(LP) M
(L)

Money (M) buys a commodity (C) in order to produce more money

(M): surplus-value. But surplus-value can only be produced when
this central commodity (C) is itself effectively divided in two (in
such a way, of course, that its two sides can be seen to develop a
peculiar interaction). This central commodity (C) is none other than
the (proletarian) subject itself (and this subject, we can surmise, is
the Trger, the hypokeimenon, of the discourse of capitalism).
The discourse of capitalism produces surplus-value by dividing
the (proletarian) subject between its exchange-value, the price of
the commodity of its labor-power (LP), and its use-value, the real
labor that it actually performs (L) (with this labor only possessing,
of course, a use-value for the capitalist). It is the difference between
the potentiality of labor, once this potentiality has been counted as
the commodity of labor-power, and its actuality, once this actuality
has been seen to give rise to more value than was originally paid for
it as the commodity of labor-power, that accounts for the generation
of surplus-value. It is the discrepancy between the exchange-value
and the use-value of the (proletarian) subject that itself gives rise to
the final increment in value. Or, in the slightly more sophisticated
terms that we introduced in chapter 1, the discourse of capitalism
produces surplus-value by metaphorically reducing the (proletarian)
subject and also, of course, metaphorically failing to reduce it to
the metonymic chain of commodity values. Marxs account of com-
modity-fetishism, when understood in this way, has to be seen to
constitute an absolutely compelling theorization of the specifically
capitalist division of the (proletarian) subject (for it is precisely this
division that such fetishism seeks to deny).

247
 the Discourse of the University

Now that we have briefly recapitulated our most important recon-

struction of Marxs work in chapter 1 and now that we have extrap-
olated from this reconstruction the basic coordinates of the discourse
of capitalism we can start to consider how this last discourse can
be seen to function as the fundamental underpinning of what Lacan
refers to as the discourse of the university. (The discourse of the
university, Lacan at times wants to tell us, is a relaxation that the
discourse of capitalism can afford to allow itself; but this relax-
ation turns out, if we decide to embrace it, to be nothing more
than a terrible trap (S17: 168)). Lacan defines the discourse of the
university, then, as a quarter turn (S17: 14), a ninety-degree rota-
tion, of the discourse of the master, which means that it is written
out in the following terms:
S2 a
S1 $

What are the four positions here intended to represent? The S2

which has now come to occupy the place of the desire or agency
of the master is none other than knowledge itself; and the hyper-
trophy of knowledge that defines this discourse stems, Lacan
claims, from progress, from this seesaw that I describe as a quarter
turn, which brings an unnatural knowledge out of its primitive local-
ization at the level of the slave into the dominant place, by virtue
of having become pure knowledge of the master, ruled by his com-
mand (S17: 104). Knowledge functions here as a sign of what Lacan
very presciently describes as the absolutization of the market of
knowledge (S16: 47), it is a price (S16: 39; 200), a value (S16:
19; 160), an exchange-value (S16: 2845), a commodity (S16:
39), a commodity that typically takes the form of that little piece
of paper (S16: 42) that is made up of credit points (S17: 2001).
All of which means, of course, that knowledge (S2) functions within
the discourse of the university more or less exactly as the com-
modity of labor-power (LP) functions within the discourse of capi-
talism. There is a fundamental homology, we might say, between
these two discursive instances. Or, in more Lacanian terms terms
that chime with our own interpretation of Marx as long as surplus

248
jouissance is a surplus jouissance of knowledge, its support will
be the perpetual sliding of a monetary metonymy (S18: 49).
Just as, within the discourse of capitalism, the commodity of
labor-power (LP) serves to count the irredeemable surplus of labor
itself (L) a surplus that gives rise, of course, once it has been
counted, to the symptom of surplus-value so, in the discourse of
the university, knowledge (S2) serves to count the equally irrecover-
able surplus of the Others work: a. In all the [] little squares or
schemas with four legs, it is always the one up here on the right that
does the work [] In the masters discourse this place is occupied
by the slave, in the discourse of science [synonymous here with the
discourse of the university S. A. & H. R.] it is the a student (S17:
105). The student does not study knowledge, as he himself might
like to think, but is instead studied by it. It is knowledge, once again,
that counts and covers over the surplus of his work. The student
feels astudied. He is astudied because, like any worker get your
bearings from the other little orders he has to produce something
(S17: 105). There is another fundamental homology, that is, between
the student and the proletariat: [i]n the articulation that I describe
as the university discourse the a is in the place of what? In the place,
lets say, of the exploited in the university discourse, who are easy
to recognize they are students (S17: 148); at the level of the uni-
versity discourse the object a comes to occupy a place that is in play
each time it moves, the place of more or less tolerable exploitation
(S17: 178). In the same way that the proletarian subject is produced
by the division between the commodity of labor-power (LP) and the
labor that it counts (and also, of course, fails to count) (L), the stu-
dent is produced by the division between knowledge (S2) and its own
(uncontainable) containment of a surplus of work (a).
(But this homology between the student and the proletarian is not
perhaps as simple as it seems. For, at least while he is studying, or
being studied that is, as long as he has not yet definitively entered
the more fundamentally constraining arena of the capitalist mode of
production per se the student experiences, occasionally, we might
say, the strange temptation to apportion himself to the ranks of the
egregiously excluded: the student has the feeling, Lacan states,
that he is the brother, as they say, not of the proletariat but of the
lumpen-proletariat (S17: 190). This feeling is surely a little out of
place, however; for if he is studying, or being studied, then this is

249
certainly only because he wants to avoid the abnegations and depre-
dations of a purely proletarian fate. If we are all the miscarriages
of the discourses that produce us as subjects, then there is still a
world of difference between the miscarriage of the high bourgeoisie
and that of the proletariat. After all, the miscarriage of the high bour-
geoisie, as miscarriage, is not obliged to constantly carry its incuba-
tor around with it (S17: 178).)
Both the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the univer-
sity have to be seen to produce, then, a divided subject. The explicit
product of the discourse of capitalism is, of course, surplus-value;
but, as we have seen, this product can only be produced when the
(proletarian) subject is divided in two, split between the commodity
of its labor-power (LP) and its labor proper (L). The discourse of the
university makes this production of a divided subject even clearer,
by placing this subject ($) in the very position of loss or produc-
tion. Which is to say as we will shortly see in more detail that,
at the very same time that this discourse produces a divided sub-
ject, the precise nature of this division tends to be lost. The divi-
sion of the subject ($) is lost because the surplus of the students
work (a) is counted by the commodity of knowledge (S2) (just as,
within the discourse of capitalism, the surplus of the proletarians
labor (L) is counted by the commodity of labor-power (LP)): [y]ou
are the product, Lacan once again tells the agitating students, of
the university, and you prove that you are the surplus value, even
if only in this respect which you not only consent to, but which
you also applaud and I see no reason to object which is that
you leave here, yourselves equivalent to more or fewer credit points.
You come here to gain credit points for yourselves. You leave here
stamped, credit points (S17: 201). The division of the subject ($)
is still produced, however, even in the midst of its apparent loss,
because if the students are surplus-value (at least prospectively),
this is only because it is in fact impossible to fully reduce the surplus
of their work (a) to the simple status of credit points (S2) (just as
it is impossible, within the discourse of capitalism, to fully reduce
the surplus of proletarian labor (L) to the commodity of labor-power
(LP)): I would homologize knowledge with the function of price.
Price certainly doesnt establish itself by chance, no more than any
other effect of exchange. But it is certain that price in itself doesnt

250
constitute a work, and this is the important point, because knowl-
edge doesnt either, no matter what is said (S16: 200).
The fourth and final position of the discourse of the university
should by now be perfectly clear (even clearer, perhaps, than it is in
Lacans own explicit formulations). The hidden truth of this dis-
course is the master (S1), and this master is none other than the
discourse of capitalism itself. For what the fundamental homology
between these two discourses reveals is that it is the discourse of
capitalism that functions as the basic support of the discourse of
the university. The discourse of the university is overwritten on
top of the discourse of capitalism.52 Or, continuing the analogy
one that will prove crucial to our later discussion if the discourse
of capitalism hides its truth by counting the (proletarian) subjects
labor (L) as the commodity of labor-power (LP), then the discourse
of the university hides its truth by counting the (student) sub-
jects work (a) as the commodity of knowledge (S2), with this
knowledge (S2) essentially being subordinated by the imperatives of
capital itself (S1): it is [n]ot that the knowledge that you are given,
Lacan continues to inform the students, is not structured and solid.
On the contrary, you have only one thing to do, which is to weave
yourselves into it along with those who work, that is with those who
teach you, under the banner of the means of production and conse-
quently, of surplus value (S17: 2034).
(Once again anticipating Lacans description of the relationships
that obtain between these four positions, we can say that the impos-
sibility of the discourse of the university will have to be seen to
concern the relationship between knowledge (S2) and its counting
and simultaneous failure to count the surplus of a work (a). (Or,
continuing the homology with the discourse of capitalism, that it is
impossibility that will have to be said to define the always unequiva-
lent relation between labor (L) and the commodity of labor-power

52 The discourse of the university can, of course, quite literally be written

on top of the discourse of capitalism:
M(S1) C(LP)(S2) M
($) (L) (a)
Which throws a lot of light upon that quarter turn, that ninety-degree rota-
tion, that we are here discussing. The discourse of capitalism is the quarter
turn of the discourse of the master.

251
(LP).) For its part, the impotence of the university discourse
which serves, once again, to protect this impossibility will have to
be seen to concern the relationship or, more precisely speaking, the
non-relationship, barrier or block between the barring or division
of the subject ($) and the hidden truth of the discourse itself, the
truth of its determination by the mastery that is constituted by
the discourse of capitalism (S1). (Or, in the terms of the homol-
ogy with this discourse, it is impotence that will have to be said
to define the non-relationship, the barrier or block, between the
(proletarian) subject, divided between its labor and its labor-power,
and the hidden truth of that whole capitalist system that exploits
this division not least by concealing it in order to give rise to the
supplement of surplus-value.) This impotence is only strengthened,
moreover as this last comment starts to suggest; and as we will
certainly see in more detail in the discussion that follows by the
persistent and practical mirage-effect of its own disappearance).

and another Long Series of Subjective Suppositions

In what manner, then, can we comprehend those divided subjects

the proletarian and the student (and also, of course, the capitalist)
that serve as the Trger, the hypokeimena, the products, in fact,
of the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the university?
At the end of the last part of chapter 1, we have already seen how,
in his more lucid moments, Marx describes that very specific divi-
sion of the subject that is so relentlessly imposed by the operations of
the capitalist mode of production or, more precisely, by its centrally
informing logic of commodity-fetishism. (We discussed there, it will
be remembered, four main themes: the unavoidable intermixture of
necessary labor and surplus labor; the necessary implication in capi-
talism of the desires of a free subject; the detachment of knowl-
edge from the place and function of the worker; and the real, that
is, not merely formal, subsumption of labor.) Now that we have
combined the discourse of capitalism with the discourse of the
university, Marx with Lacan, we can start to approach this division
from a more fundamentally Lacanian perspective; and we can start
to make a point by point comparison between the divided subjects
produced by these two discourses and the very different kinds of

252
subjects produced and presupposed by the discourse of the mas-
ter. (There will obviously be some overlap between what we have
already said from a Marxian perspective and what we now want to
say from a more explicitly Lacanian point of view; but we will try
to avoid any simple repetition; and, indeed, we will also try to bring
out, with much greater clarity, what is undoubtedly this books most
important proposition.)
Firstly, then, we can say that the repetitions of the discourse of
capitalism and the discourse of the university the fact that, within
these discourses, labor (L) is continually counted as the commod-
ity of labor-power (LP), and knowledge (S2) continually counts the
surplus of a work (a) have to be seen to imply, for the very sub-
jects produced and presupposed by these repetitions, an entropy or
loss; an entropy or loss that will always be recuperated through
the now (in comparison with the discourse of the master) much
more fragile consistency of a surplus jouissance. (Indeed, we will
now start to see that Lacans employment of the concept of entropy
can finally be said to acquire in this context its full and proper meta-
phorical meaning. Entropy, in the two discourses that we are
referring to here, serves as the index not only of a loss, but of
something much more radical and profound in its subjective effects:
the loss of a loss, its tendential disappearance.)
We can once again begin by approaching this entropy or loss
from its least expected side. For if full jouissance is prohibited for
the master, as we have already seen, then it is also, of course,
prohibited for the capitalist (the effective master of both the dis-
course of capitalism and the discourse of the university). If the
master is castrated, then so is the capitalist. The capitalists sole
function within the discourse of capitalism is the governance and
guaranteeing of the production of surplus-value (M-M), and it is
precisely the exercising of this function that liquidates his freedom
just as effectively as it liquidates the freedom of both the proletar-
ian and the student. In Marxs own words (which tend, as we have
already suggested in chapter 1, to be much less ambiguous when
they concern the capitalist than when they concern the proletarian,
with the following quote constituting something of an exception):
[t]he self-valorization of capital the creation of surplus-value is
[] the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capi-
talist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact

253
it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder a
highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that
the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as
is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner
(RIPP: 990).
The capitalist is enslaved or castrated, then the subject of an
entropy or loss because, in giving the famous order to work,
in giving the order to produce surplus-value, he is effectively fulfill-
ing, in Lacans own terms, an impossible task (the direct exploita-
tion of labor, Marx pointedly reminds us reiterating Lacans own
comments in a different (capitalist) context itself costs labor (C1:
741)). Within the discourse of capitalism, the capitalist performs
the impossible task of getting labor (L) to be counted as the commod-
ity of labor-power (LP); and, within the discourse of the university,
he (the hidden master of this discourse) performs the equally
impossible task of getting the surplus of a work (a) to be counted
as the commodity of knowledge (S2) (it is the upper storey of this
discourse (S2 a) that Lacan, of course, explicitly identifies as
being impossible). It is precisely because the capitalist performs this
task, moreover, that once surplus-value has been produced it returns
to him in the form of surplus jouissance. (Although, as we will
later come to see, it is no longer possible to define this surplus jou-
issance as a simple enjoyment of consumption. The capitalist only
receives the surplus on the condition that at least if he wants to
keep the discourse of capitalism going he put a very good part of
it back into production.53 And he also only receives this surplus on
the condition that the very people who have produced it the pro-
letarians are willing and, more importantly, capable of completing
this production by consuming what they have produced.)54
We can put all of this in slightly different terms terms that we
will be expanding upon below by saying that, within the (symbolic)

53 Marx himself provided, of course, a peerless description of the historically

varying combination of these two forms of surplus jouissance within the capi-
talist class (C1: 73846).
54 Marx implicitly refers to this condition as the salto mortale of the cir-
cuit of capitalist production (C1: 200). The experiences of the last few years
have revealed, once again, that, at certain times, this jump is deadlier than at
others.

254
context of the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the
university, the capitalist has to see to it that the impossible real of
the subjects labor will be subsumed, made sense of, rendered pos-
sible in its very impossibility, by its subordination to what is on
the assumption that this subordination is even possible in the first
place a thoroughly imaginary instance. On the one hand, of course,
this appears to be an impossible task. For nothing necessitates that
the impossible real of the subjects labor be subordinated in precisely
this tendentially imaginary way. (And, indeed, the very conditions
of this subordination make clear that it can only ever be imaginary.)
On the other hand, however, this impossible task is eminently pos-
sible. For, in the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the
university, it is carried out on each and every day.
What is nonetheless very specific about the discourse of capi-
talism and about the discourse of the university that it funda-
mentally supports is that, in performing this impossible task, the
capitalist does not necessarily appear as a master; and does not
necessarily appear as being enslaved and castrated (this is why
the master (S1) (the discourse of capitalism) constitutes the hid-
den truth of the discourse of the university; and this is why the
function of the capitalist, we might surmise, constitutes the hidden
truth of the discourse of capitalism, a truth that Marx deci-
phered in his discovery of the distinction between labor (L) and the
commodity of labor-power (LP)). The capitalists only role in the
discourse of capitalism is the production of surplus-value (M), and
if we ignore the (proletarian) labor (L) that is necessary for this pro-
duction (once it has been combined, of course, with the commodity
of labor-power (LP)), it can appear to be nothing more than a simple
self-expansion of monetary value (M-M). The capitalist himself can
appear, that is and is certainly quite happy to appear as nothing
more than the simple and autonomous embodiment of this expan-
sion: [a]s the dominant subject [bergreifendes Subjekt] of this pro-
cess [M-C-M S. A. & H. R.], in which it alternately assumes and loses
the form of money and the form of commodities, but preserves and
expands itself through all these changes, value requires above all
an independent form by means of which its identity with itself may
be asserted. Only in the shape of money does it possess this form.
Money therefore forms the starting-point and the conclusion of every
valorization process (C1: 255). Or again:

255
 in the circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-mov-
ing substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which
commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to
come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it
now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differ-
entiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God
the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although
both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by
the surplus-value of 10 does the 100 originally advanced become capi-
tal, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been cre-
ated and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again,
and both become one, 110. (C1: 256)

As the embodiment of the bergreifendes Subjekt, the self-mov-

ing substance, of monetary value (M-M), the capitalist, we can
surmise, asserts his identity with himself, enters into a private
relationship with himself. Rather than appearing as that enslaved
and castrated master who performs the impossible task of giving
the order to work, of getting the proletarian to produce surplus-value
by counting his labor (L) as the commodity of labor-power (LP), the
capitalist appears, in his simple monetary form, as the entrepreneur-
ial engineer of this production. This, then, is the particular entropy
or loss that defines the capitalist; and it is an entropy or loss
that exists, of course, as a form surplus jouissance (with this jouis-
sance serving as a very significant supplement to the subtraction of
surplus-value).
The entropy or loss experienced by the capitalist the source
of his entrepreneurial surplus jouissance has to be seen to pale
into insignificance, however, when it is compared with the entropy
or loss the surplus jouissance experienced by the proletarian
or student (primarily, of course as we have just started to suggest,
and as we will certainly be continuing to claim in the remainder
of this section because this entropy can be said to operate in
the capitalists interests; whereas, for those whose labor he com-
mands, it has to be said to acquire a much more ambiguous consis-
tency). Lacans many descriptions of entropy in Seminar XVII are
best comprehended, then, we want to claim, as an implicit and
explicitly metaphorical (something which Lacan does not recognize
enough) thematization and theorization of the nature of the prole-

256
tarian and student subject. These descriptions are metaphorical, we
will argue, because while there is no real entropy within the dis-
course of capitalism and the discourse of the university, there is
certainly something that can come to look a good deal like it.
In its literal sense, the concept of entropy is obviously intended
to designate, then, that obscure and incalculable quantum of energy
that vanishes, gets lost, in the very process of its own neatly numer-
ical ordering. Lacan gives the following rather illuminating example:
I defy you to prove in any way that descending 500 meters with
a weight of 80 kilos on your back and, once you have descended,
going back up the 500 meters with it is zero, no work. Try it, have
a go yourself, and you will find that you have proof of the contrary.
But if you overlay signifiers, that is, if you enter the path of energet-
ics, it is absolutely certain that there has been no work (S17: 489).
There is, he continues, something that disappears in the interval,
or more exactly does not lend itself to a return to, to restoring, the
starting point. Or, once more, this discourse [the discourse of ener-
getics S. A. & H. R.] [] essentially [] gives primacy to everything
at the beginning and at the end and neglects everything in between
(S17: 80).
How are we to let this example inform, however, the two inter-
related instances of the proletarian and the student? What the pro-
letarian does, of course, in the discourse of capitalism, is perform
a work, a labor (he runs up and down a mountain, we might say,
with a weight of eighty kilos on his back). Naturally, this labor (L)
gives rise, once it has been counted as the commodity of labor-power
(LP), to the increment of surplus-value (M). But once this value has
been produced, it can appear as we have already seen in the case
of the capitalist that we are only dealing here with the mere move-
ment of monetary values (M-C-M). If the division of the subject
(L-LP) is (impossibly) excluded from the very process that it moti-
vates, that is, if the proletarian subject is (impossibly) reduced to the
value of the commodity of its labor-power (LP), then it can appear as
if money (M) is just buying a commodity (C) in order to miraculously
give rise to more money (M). In the series of monetary signifiers
that overlay the proletarians work, it can appear and not least,
of course, to the proletarian himself not that there has been no
work (for this would be stretching the bounds of credibility), but
that this work (almost as incredibly) is equivalent to the commod-

257
ity of labor-power (LP). The specificity of labor (L) disappears, at
least tendentially, into its representation by the commodity of labor-
power (LP).
Similarly, in the discourse of the university, what the student
does is carry out a task of work. (He runs up and down one moun-
tain, we might say, in order that, in the future, he will be able to run
up and down another mountain, not with a weight of eighty kilos
on his back, but with a weight, let us say, of forty.) Although this
work (a) does not yet give rise to surplus-value, its subordination
to the commodity of knowledge (S2), which is itself subordinated
to the imperatives of the discourse of capitalism (S1), will, in the
vast majority of cases, allow this surplus-value to be produced at
some future point. And, once this value has been produced, it might
appear that the only thing that we are dealing with here is the mere
circulation of the commodity of knowledge (S2). (People might start
to speak, for instance, of a knowledge society or, just a little less
shamefacedly, of a knowledge economy.) Rather than being seen
to produce a divided subject ($), that is, a subject divided between
the commodity of knowledge (S2) and the surplus of a work (a),
the discourse of the university can be considered to concern and
not least, of course, by those very divided subjects whose activities
are tangled up with it a pure subject of knowledge (S2). In that
network of signifiers that overlays the divided student subject
($), the surplus of a work (a) tends to disappear into its own com-
modification as knowledge (S2).
What all of this means, of course, is that any talk of entropy
within the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the uni-
versity can only ever be metaphorical. For although there certainly
is a tendency, within the discourse of capitalism, for labor (L) to
be counted as the commodity of labor-power (LP), this counting can
never be complete. And, indeed, in the very monetary signifiers
that overlay the proletarian subjects work (M-C-M), there will
always be a sign, a symptom, of this incompleteness: the sign, the
symptom, of surplus-value (M). Similarly, in the discourse of the
university, there certainly exists a tendency for the surplus of a
work (a) to be counted as the commodity of knowledge (S2), but
nothing will ever succeed in fully disguising the fact that what this
counting effectively produces is the division of the student subject
($) (the problem with this discourse, Lacan claims, is that [a]

258
subject has emerged from it, the [s]ubject of what? A divided sub-
ject in any case (S17: 148)). In both the discourse of capitalism
and the discourse of the university in contradistinction to the case
of entropy per se the very process that conceals a loss is only
ever capable, then, of simultaneously revealing it. In both of these
discourses, the loss of a loss functions as a sign, a symptom, of
the loss itself.
It really needs to be said here that Lacan himself is not always
capable of comprehending this merely metaphorical instantiation of
entropy in the proletarian and student subject. At times, indeed
and in complete contradistinction of his own previous recognition
of the fact that price and knowledge will never constitute a
work Lacan even wants to criticize Marx for effectively failing to
register that this entropy is complete:

Marx denounces this process [the process of the creation of surplus-

value S. A. & H. R.] as spoliation. Its just that he does it without real-
izing that its secret lies in knowledge itself, just as the secret of the
worker himself is to be reduced to being no longer anything but a value.
Once a higher level has been passed, surplus jouissance is no longer
surplus jouissance but is inscribed simply as a value to be inscribed in
or deducted from the totality of whatever it is that is accumulating
what is accumulating from out of an essentially transformed nature.
The worker is merely a unit of value an indication for those for whom
this term produces an echo55 [] What Marx denounces in surplus
value is the spoliation of jouissance. And yet, this surplus value is a
memorial to surplus jouissance, its equivalent of surplus jouissance.
Consumer society derives its meaning from the fact that what makes
it the element, in inverted commas, described as human is made the
homogeneous equivalent of whatever surplus jouissance is produced
by our industry an imitation surplus jouissance, in a word. (S17:
801).

Lacan is committing here a signal error. The secret of the worker

himself, he says, is to be reduced to being no longer anything but

55 Lacan is alluding here to the designation, in the French university system,

of the number of courses or subjects that a student takes for a degree: units de
valeur.

259
a value; or, once again, the worker is merely a unit of value. This
can in no way be considered to be the case, however; for as we
have already seen in chapter 1, and as we are effectively repeating
here all of the time the proletarian worker can only give rise
to value or, more exactly, of course, to surplus-value, precisely
because he is not exclusively a value.
Proletarian labor (L) does have, of course, a value or, more pre-
cisely speaking, an exchange-value, the price of the commodity of
labor-power (LP). But it only has this value in order to produce more
value, surplus-value (M). And it can only produce this value as the
result of a discrepancy, a disjunction, between its exchange-value
and its use-value. This use-value is the use-value of labor itself (L),
its capacity to produce a greater value than it originally cost as the
commodity of labor-power (LP). This use-value produces value,
then, but is not itself a value (or at least not in the sense that Lacan
intends. It is a use-value for the capitalist, an ineradicably social use-
value, that is, not merely a value to be inscribed in or deducted from
the totality of whatever it is that is accumulating. The use-value
of capitalism for the capitalist, even though it produces value, can
in no way be simply inscribed in or deducted from that appar-
ently infinite series of values that this system erects. The use-value
of class struggle, we might say, is irreducible to that very network
of monetary signifiers that are its own result.) Labor, then, we
can conclude, within the discourse of capitalism, is not a value,
but instead the very source of value. Or, in stark contrast to what
Lacan is claiming in the above quotation, surplus jouissance is still,
without the shadow of a doubt, surplus jouissance. For, as long
as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, nothing will
ever succeed in doing away with that irredeemable surplus of labor
(L) that itself gives rise to surplus-value (M). Capitalism can obvi-
ously not abolish its own indispensable reason for being.
At least in the passage just cited, then and in fact at a number
of other points in Seminar XVII Lacans literal understanding of
the entropic disappearance of the workers work into the crys-
tallizations of value appears to be premised upon nothing more
than a fundamental occlusion of what is most socially specific about
the discourse of capitalism: its recourse, under the ministrations
of value, to the value-creating capacity of the proletarians (and,
by extension, also the students) labor. It is this effective eviscer-

260
ation of social particularity or, once again, this failure to recog-
nize that within the discourse of capitalism (and, by extension,
of course, the discourse of the university) entropy can only ever
be metaphorical that explains the unavoidable oddness of some
of Lacans remarks. Marx does not realize, Lacan contends, that the
secret of the expropriation of surplus-value lies in knowledge
itself. But what does it mean to reduce this expropriation to a ques-
tion of knowledge? Well, it means to reverse that very order of
determination that we have been arguing for throughout these final
sections. Rather than conceiving capitalism as the secret of the pro-
duction of knowledge, that is, rather than erecting the discourse
of the university upon the basis of the discourse of capitalism,
Lacan is claiming here that this latter discourse is a mere effect of
the ever-increasing spiral of scientific knowledge itself. It is hardly
surprising in this context that he comprehends accumulation, the
accumulation of surplus-value no less, not as a consequence of the
depredations of labor, but instead as a consequence of that which
allows for an essentially transformed nature. And once labor has
been shuttled out of the door like this, it is also of course very easy to
believe under the commonplace protection of the banner of con-
sumer society that there is a something like a simple homoge-
neous equivalence between production and consumption (an
equivalence, an equilibrium, that has only ever existed in the fanta-
sies of the economists56).
The fact that entropy is only metaphorical within the discourse
of capitalism and the discourse of the university should in no
way be taken to mean, however, that its effects are merely minimal.
Indeed, what we want to argue here tying together in this way
the threads of all the arguments that we have been making in this
book is that these effects are nothing short of being monumental.
For what this entropy entails is nothing less than the constitution,
and the continuing reproduction, of the ego itself (as a phenomenon
that, even if it is conceptually distinguishable from the subject, is
nonetheless always inextricably intertwined with it). In the previous
section (section 2.1 ii), we have already seen Lacan draw attention

56 This fantasy constitutes the basis of Says famous law, which Marx sub-
jects to a devastating critique (C1: 2089).

261
to the inescapably social and historical origins of this ego: it dates,
he claims, form the middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of
the seventeenth centuries; or, once again, and this time a little less
precisely, it is the ego of every modern man. Now we can see what
it is that essentially has to be seen to underlie these origins: it is the
emergence of the discourse of capitalism itself (and of that particu-
lar form of the discourse of the university that it will eventually
come to sustain and support).
The ego emerges, that is to put it in very abstract, although none-
theless quite enlightening terms out of a more or less ineluctable
tendency to entropically confuse and identify the commodity of
labor-power (LP) with the labor (L) that underlies it (or, once the
discourse of capitalism has given rise to its own specific form of
the discourse of the university, out of a more or less ineluctable
tendency to entropically confuse and identify the commodity of
knowledge (S2) with the surplus of a work (a)). The ego comes
into existence, we can say, as always already exceeded by its own
subjectivity. (For what its supposed self-identity is attempting and
always, of course, ultimately failing to conceal, in both the dis-
course of capitalism and the discourse of the university, is nothing
other than the division of the subject: its division between the two
very terms of its ego and its subjectivity proper.) The ego is nothing
more, then, than a very specific form of surplus jouissance. For
what it does is count and simultaneously, of course, fail to count
that irrevocable surplus of subjectivity, its labor, that itself gives rise
to surplus-value. In Freuds still unsurpassable terms terms that
we will be seeking to elucidate, in relation to both Marx and Lacan,
in the remainder of this section the nucleus of the ego is uncon-
scious.
The myth of the subjects self-identity is not, then, as Lacan him-
self contends, a product or effect of the discourse of the master.
For, as we have already seen, the particular form of Vorstellungs
reprsentanz that is at play within this discourse in no way allows
the subjects that it determines to conceive of the possibility of their
self-representation. (The master exists and, moreover, knows
that he exists only through the slave, and the slave exists
and moreover, knows that he exists only through the master.)
The Vorstellungsreprsentanz that is at work within the discourse of
capitalism (and by extension the discourse of the university) cer-

262
tainly does, however, allow and even, in fact, compel this myth
of self-identity to automatically arise.
For what happens in the discourse of capitalism, we might say
confining ourselves only to the proletarian subject is that a signifier
represents this subject for another signifier: money (M) represents
a commodity (C) in order to produce more money (M), surplus-
value. In reality, of course, this act of representation like all acts
of representation according to Lacan makes it impossible for the
subject (the central commodity C) to represent itself. The subject
(C) is only represented by money (M) in order to give rise to more
money (M) (with this increase in money only being explained as a
consequence of the division of the subject between its representation
as a money-commodity, the commodity of labor-power (LP), and the
simultaneous failure of this representation, its definitive transcen-
dence by the actual labor (L) that the subject performs). Reality is
one thing, however, and the appearances that it gives rise to and
that in fact serve to substantially constitute it are another. For it is
the fact that the subject is represented as a money-commodity and
only in fact as such a commodity (with the surplus of its labor only
appearing as a failure of this representation) that accounts for the
persistent and practical mirage-effect of its self-representation. In the
apparently simple chain of money values, the subject can appear to
be just one more value, equal to itself and autonomous in its exer-
cise of this equality. The commodity of labor-power (LP) at least
in this practically effective realm of appearances can succeed in
subsuming the in fact unsubsumable surplus of its labor proper (L).
(Similarly, in the discourse of the university, it can appear as if the
commodity of knowledge (S2) is fully subsuming the surplus of a
work (a), even if this subsumption is always only fractured by the
production of a divided subject ($)). If there is something like a mir-
ror stage, then, we can conclude a fundamental underpinning of
the subjects illusory, but nonetheless more or less inextirpable sense
of its self-identity it is here that it has to be ultimately located: in
the indispensably social and historical determinations of the dis-
course of capitalism itself.
Secondly, then and on the basis of this account of the entropic
constitution of the ego as a form of surplus jouissance we can see
how Lacan essentially follows Marx (or at least, as we have already
pointed out, Marx at his most consistent) by conceiving the dis-

263
course of capitalism, and the discourse of the university that it
sustains and supports, in terms of a rather devastating deprivation
of the proletarian and student subjects knowledge. We have already
seen that in the discourse of the master the slave stands in pos-
session of knowledge (S2) in a number of different ways. (He is only
working for the master because his work is informed by a certain
knowledge, know-how or savoir-faire; this knowledge results
from his partial ownership of or full identification with the means
of production; and it is fundamentally underpinned by another form
of knowledge, one that functions as an ineluctable form of surplus
jouissance: the knowledge that, as a slave, laborer or worker,
one is working only for the master.) What we need to understand,
then, is the way in which, in the discourse of capitalism and the
discourse of the university, the worker comes to be deprived of
precisely that knowledge that previously served to constitute the
very core of his being.
This deprivation of knowledge is obviously most clearly expressed
in that quarter turn, that ninety-degree rotation, that defines, for
Lacan, the transition from the discourse of the master to the dis-
course of the university. For what happens in this transition is that
knowledge (S2) moves from its former position as the work of the
Other (in the top right hand corner) to its new position as the
desire and agency of the master itself (in the top left hand cor-
ner). Knowledge, in the discourse of the university, is no longer
the knowledge of the worker. (For this worker has been reduced, as
we have seen, to the mere embodiment of the surplus of his work
(a).) Instead, it is the knowledge of the master, in a double sense:
knowledge itself (S2) is in the position of mastery, but it is only held
in place there by the hidden truth of the master itself (S1). This
hidden master, as we have already suggested, is the discourse of
capitalism; and this is what Lacan is implicitly claiming, we would
contend (thus sifting out all of those ambiguities in his work that we
have here been describing), when he once again discerns a funda-
mental homology between this discourse and the discourse of the
university: what happens between the classical masters discourse
and that of the modern master, whom we call capitalist, he states,
is a modification in the place of knowledge; the proletarian has
been dispossessed of something, and of nothing less than his knowl-
edge, [c]apitalist exploitation effectively frustrates him of his knowl-

264
edge by rendering it useless (S17: 312). Or again, in response to
a question from the students about where the proletarian is to be
located within the discourse of the university: [h]e can only be in
the place that he has to be in, on the top right-hand side. In the place
of the big Other, dont you think? Very precisely, there knowledge
no longer has any weight. The proletarian is not simply exploited, he
has been stripped of his function of knowledge. The so-called libera-
tion of the slave has had, as always, other corollaries. Its not merely
progressive. Its progressive only at the price of a deprivation (S17:
149).
What does it mean, however, to say that both the proletarian and
the student have been deprived of their knowledge? Well it means,
we want to argue, three main things (which can once again be
closely counterposed to that state of affairs that exists within the
discourse of the master). In the first place, then, it means that,
if one is working within the discourse of capitalism or the dis-
course of the university, this is not because one possesses a certain
knowledge, know-how or savoir-faire. Instead and obviously
only in the majority of cases57 if one is working within these dis-
courses it is because one has succeeded in integrating oneself into
the knowledge, know-how and savoir-faire that they themselves
both determine and require. Knowledge does not emanate from the
worker, but from that system of imperatives to which he must more
or less inescapably choose to submit. In the second place and as a
clear consequence or presupposition of this last point if the worker
is deprived of his knowledge, this is only because he has been previ-
ously deprived of his ownership of the means of production. It is the
deprivation of the means of production that accounts for the depri-
vation of knowledge. Or, once again, it is the discourse of capital-
ism that essentially underlies the discourse of the university. In
the third place and perhaps most importantly this deprivation of
knowledge is made worse, compounded, by its conversion into the
appearance of knowledge. In the discourse of capitalism, we might

57 It is still possible, of course at least for the moment, to work within the
discourse of the university without fully subordinating oneself to its funda-
mental requirements. But the knowledge produced by this work will always
have to question itself about the place that it occupies with regard to precisely
these requirements.

265
say, the proletarian knows that he is being paid for his labor (L); but
this is not in fact the case: for what he is being paid for is the price of
the commodity of his labor-power (LP). Similarly, in the discourse
of the university, the student knows that he possesses knowledge
(S2); but this is not in fact the way things are: for what possesses
knowledge is that hidden mastery of the discourse of capitalism
(S1) that keeps it in its place. The proletarian and the student do not
know, then, we can conclude (or, as we will later start to suggest,
only know unconsciously) that they are working for a master. Or
in the terms that we are introducing here, and that Lacan anticipates
at a number of points in Seminar XVII the ego knows a bit about
it only insofar as it is not known (S17: 30); and only insofar as it
does not know what is [really] doing the work (S17: 35).
Thirdly and following on rather neatly from this account of the
deprivation of the proletarian and student subjects knowledge we
can now see what it is that has to be seen to constitute the particular
form of impotence that is at play within the discourse of capitalism
and the discourse of the university. Lacans descriptions of this
impotence can appear, at first sight at least and in addition to that
series of ambiguities that we have already disentangled (and that we
will continue to disentangle in the parentheses that we introduce into
the following quotation) to be a little confusing. For, on the one
hand, he certainly wants to suggest that impotence essentially disap-
pears from these two discourses and, on the other hand, he just as
certainly wants to suggest that it is only ever reinforced within them,
in the form of what he now calls unassailability (an unassailabil-
ity that, like impotence, is seen to fundamentally protect impossibil-
ity). We have to begin, Lacan tells us:

by seeing why it is that the masters discourse [for which we should

read, of course, the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the
university S. A. & H. R.] is so solidly established, to the point where
few of you, it seems, judge how stable it is. This stems from something
Marx demonstrated without, I have to say, emphasizing it concern-
ing production and which he calls surplus value, not surplus jouissance
[] Something changed in the masters discourse at a certain point
in history [or, at a certain point in history, we should say, the mas-
ters discourse changed into the discourse of capitalism and the dis-
course of the university S. A. & H. R.]. We are not going to break our

266
 backs finding out if it was because of Luther, Calvin, or some unknown
traffic of ships around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean sea, or anywhere
else, for the important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance
became calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is
called the accumulation of capital begins [] Dont you feel, in relation
to what I said before on the impotence of conjoining surplus value [or,
more precisely put, a surplus product, surplus-value only being itself a
product of the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the uni-
versity S. A. & H. R.] with the masters truth, that ground is being won
here? I am not saying that it is the most recent step that is the decisive
one, but the impotence of this conjunction is all of a sudden emptied.
Surplus value combines with capital not a problem, they are homo-
geneous, we are in the field of values. Moreover, we are all up to our
necks in it, in these blessed times in which we live [] What is striking,
and what no one seems to see, is that from that moment on, by virtue of
the fact that the clouds of impotence have been aired, the master signi-
fier only appears even more unassailable, precisely in its impossibility.
Where is it? How can it be named? How can it be located? other than
through its murderous effects, of course. Denounce imperialism? But
how can this little mechanism be stopped? (S17: 1778)

Now, in one sense, at least, Lacan is certainly correct to suggest

that, in both the discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the
university, the conjunction of impotence is emptied, that the
clouds of impotence are aired. For, as he himself points out, the
product (or, as we will see, one of the products) of the discourse
of capitalism, surplus-value, links up with the truth of the mas-
tery of this very discourse: surplus-value combines with capi-
tal not a problem, they are homogeneous, we are in the field of
values. Similarly, in the discourse of the university, we might say,
the product (or, once again, one of the products) of this dis-
course, knowledge (S2), links up with the truth of that fundamen-
tal mastery (S1) that determines it, and which is none other than
the mastery of the discourse of capitalism itself.
The whole value of Lacans transcription of the discourse of the
university is to show, however, that it is not knowledge (S2) that
constitutes the real product of this discourse, but instead the very
barring or division of the subject ($). And if we really want to talk
about impotence it is with the relationship between this subject and

267
the hidden truth of mastery of the discourse (S1) that we should
be concerned. (For Lacan of course defines impotence, as we have
seen, as traversing in this way the bottom storey of the discourse,
in the form a non-relation, barrier or block between its two
terms.) If we start to think about this relationship, then, we can see
in significant contrast to what Lacan himself says that it preserves
impotence at the very same time as it appears to do away with it, that
is, that there is both a relation and a non-relation, a barrier and a
non-barrier, a blocking and an unblocking between and of pre-
cisely these terms. (It is perhaps for this reason, we would suggest,
that, in addition to talking about the abolition of impotence, Lacan
is also compelled to introduce, and to place alongside it, the entirely
new notion of unassailability.) For how, we should inquire, in the
discourse of the university, does the divided (student) subject ($)
link up with that truth of mastery (S1) that ultimately determines
it? Only by counting the surplus of its labor (a) as the commod-
ity of knowledge (S2), only by living in denial of and in this way
perpetually continuing to reproduce, of course its very division as
a subject. And similarly, in the discourse of capitalism, how does
the divided (proletarian) subject link up with the masterful truth of
that very discursive framework that determines it? Only by count-
ing the surplus of its labor (L) as the commodity of labor-power (LP),
only by living in denial of and in this way perpetually continuing
to reproduce, of course its own division. In both the discourse of
capitalism and the discourse of the university, then, the barrier
of impotence is crossed only on the condition that it is simultane-
ously maintained. For it is the very (and apparent) omnipotence of
the ego, we might claim drawing this conclusion from everything
that we have previously stated that confirms it in its irrecusable
impotence. The impotence or, in Lacans terms, unassailability
of the discourse of the university, and by implication, of course,
of the discourse of capitalism, functions to protect its impossibility
because, in both cases, the ego itself carries out the impossible task
of counting the subjective surplus of its own work. The production
of a divided subject consistently with the descriptions that Lacan
provides of the positions within his discourses is also, tenden-
tially, its loss.
We can put all of this a little differently by saying that it is precisely
the emergence of the discourse of capitalism and of the discourse

268
of the university that it serves as the support of that constitutes, for
the very subjects produced and presupposed by these discourses,
nothing less than the irreducibly specific experience of fantasy (as
opposed, that is, to that non-specific and non-experienced fact of fan-
tasy that bathes the whole hierarchical ordering of the discourse of
the master). For what is it that sustains the discourse of capitalism
if not the fundamental fantasy of the (proletarian) subject, the fan-
tasy of an equivalence or identity between the surplus of a labor (L)
and the commodity of labor-power (LP)? And what is it that sustains
the discourse of the university if not the fundamental fantasy of the
(student) subject, the fantasy of an equivalence or identity between
the surplus of a work (a) and the commodity of knowledge (S2) (it
is the right hand side of this discourse that contains, of course, the
exact terms of the Lacanian fantasy ($ a), and we can now see that
this fantasy essentially functions by subsuming and always, at the
same time, failing to subsume; for the experience of fantasy is only
constituted at the same time as its limit, its symptom its second
term under the very instantiation of the agency and desire of the
discourse itself (fantasy is a response, we might say, to nothing
less than the desire of the Other). And this experience of fantasy
is only compounded in the discourse of capitalism by the disap-
pearance of that strict partition between surplus jouissances that
we have already seen to define the discourse of the master. For if
the master was defined by the surplus jouissance of consump-
tion, and the slave by the surplus jouissance of production, then
in the discourse of capitalism both of these surplus jouissances
must be seen to cross and overlap. The capitalist, as we have seen,
partially consumes surplus-value; but he is also, if he wants to keep
the capitalist ball rolling, compelled to throw it back into produc-
tion. And the proletarian, as we have also pointed out, produces
surplus-value; but he is also, in order to realize it and, even more
importantly, in order to perpetuate his own existence, compelled to
consume those very products whose sale will ultimately give rise to
it. The proletarian can fantasize about the equivalence or identity
between his labor (L) and the commodity of his labor-power (LP)
precisely because on a wide social scale, of course he appears to
be working for his own benefit, producing, that is, for nothing more
than his own consumption.

269
 Fourthly and in close connection with the foregoing analysis of
fantasy we can now see what it is that constitutes the specific form
of Urverdrngung of the discourse of capitalism and the discourse
of the university. For what both these discourses primordially
repress, for the (proletarian and student) subjects working within
them, is the very awareness or, as we have already suggested, the
knowledge that this work is done for a master. (This is why, of
course, the master occupies, in the discourse of the university,
the position of the hidden, undisclosable or unsayable truth
of the very discourse.) It is precisely the primordial and continu-
ing repression of this awareness that compels it to return, however,
in an unconscious form, as nothing less than unconscious knowledge.
And we would even go further than this and suggest that it is pre-
cisely the primordial and continuing repression of this awareness
that constitutes the experience of the unconscious per se. For the
unconscious is only experienced, as we have already tried to make
clear, when it is brought into the light or, more properly speaking
perhaps, the half-light by an (obviously only apparently) counter-
vailing force; when it is brought into the half-light by the experience
and the failure of the apparent self-identity of the ego itself. If the
nucleus of ego is unconscious, in Freuds still unsurpassable terms,
this is because the experience of the ego constitutes the irrevocable
condition of possibility of the experience of the unconscious. The
one is the other side of the other, in exactly the same way and
drawing now all the consequences from this in which Lacan speaks
of the discourse of capitalism, and the discourse of the univer-
sity, as the other side of psychoanalysis.
Fifthly and finally, we can carry out a formalistic reduction of all
of the above by saying that, in the discourse of capitalism and
the discourse of the university, the three registers of the symbolic,
the imaginary and the real (which were spherically united, we will
remember, in the discourse of the master) have to be seen to quite
unequivocally split apart, whilst always at the same time remaining
inextricably intertwined. We have already discussed at great length
the way in which capitalism can be defined as a combination of these
registers. But it is now possible to reduce this combination to a sim-
ple formula (once again taking as our basis for this Marxs general
formula for capital):

270
 (S)M C(LP)(I) M
(L) (R)

Similarly and not surprisingly, given that it is supported by this

discourse of capitalism the discourse of the university can be
rewritten as follows:
I R
S $

The discourse of capitalism and the discourse of the university

break apart that closed sphere of satisfaction that fundamentally
defined the discourse of the master (and constitute, in the process,
the divided subject of the unconscious ($)). We have to struggle
against the collusion of this image with the idea of satisfaction when-
ever we encounter anything that forms a knot in the work in ques-
tion, which is the work of bringing things to light via the paths of
the unconscious. It is the obstacle, the limit, or rather its the hard
road on which we lose our bearings, and where we find ourselves
blocked (S17: 31).

271
 Abbreviations

Louis Althusser
FM For Marx
LAP Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
OI On Ideology

Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar

RC Reading Capital

Etienne Balibar
PM The Philosophy of Marx

Sigmund Freud
BPP Beyond the Pleasure Principle
CD Civilization and its Discontents
EI The Ego and the Id
GP Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
F Fetishism
FI The Future of an Illusion
ID The Interpretation of Dreams
MM Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays
NIL New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
OP An Outline of Psycho-Analysis
SE Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence
SH Studies on Hysteria
U The Unconscious

Jacques Lacan
AP Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis
DC Discours aux catholiques
JLS Jacques Lacan Speaks
MS The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience
MT My Teaching
RDL Remarks on Daniel Lagaches Presentation: Psychoanalysis and
Personality Structure
RJH Response to Jean Hyppolites Commentary on Freuds Vernei-
nung
SPL Seminar on The Purloined Letter
S1 The Seminar. Book I. Freuds Papers on Technique, 19531954
S2 The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Tech-
nique of Psychoanalysis, 19541955
S3 The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 195556
S5 Le Sminaire. Livre V. Les formations de linconscient, 19571958
S7 The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 195960

273
S8 Le Sminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 19601961
S11 The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, 1964
S16 Le Sminaire. Livre XVI. Dun Autre lautre, 196869
S17 The Seminar. Book XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969
1970
S18 Le Sminaire. Livre XVIII. Dun discours qui ne serait pas du sem-
blant, 1971
TR Le triomphe de la religion

Georg Lukcs
HCC History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Karl Marx
C1 Capital. Volume 1
C2 Capital. Volume 2
C3 Capital. Volume 3
CCPE A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
CHDS Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State
CHPR A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right.
Introduction
CSF Class Struggles in France 18481850
EBLB The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
EJME Excerpts from James Mills Elements of Political Economy
EPM Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
JQ On the Jewish Question
LC Letters on Capital
LFGY Letters from the Franco-German Yearbooks
RIPP Results of the Immediate Process of Production
TF Theses on Feuerbach
WPP Wages, Price and Profit

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

GI The German Ideology
CM The Communist Manifesto
MECW42 Marx and Engelss Collected Works. Volume 42

Ellen Meiksins Wood

DAC Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism

274
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279
Quentin Meillassoux
Nach der Endlichkeit. Versuch ber die Notwendigkeit der Kontingenz

Aus dem Franzsischen von Roland Frommel

224 Seiten, Broschur
ISBN 978-3-03734-024-0
20,00 / CHF 30,00

An der Wurzel des modernen Denkens liegt die Frage nach der Beschrn-
kung der universalistischen Ansprche der menschlichen Vernunft. Seit
Kant wacht ein universelles, transzendental genanntes Subjekt ber die
Notwendigkeit der Naturgesetze und weist die Kontingenz der empirischen
Erfahrung zu.
Quentin Meillassoux entwickelt in diesem, seinem ersten Buch ein ande-
res Verstndnis der Kritik, das grundlegend verschieden ist von der Les-
art, mit der die Moderne sich ausgehend von Kant zufriedengibt. Er weist
nach, dass nur eines absolut notwendig ist, nmlich die Kontingenz der
Naturgesetze selbst. Diese ganz neuartige Verknpfung der einander ent-
gegengesetzten Modalitten Notwendigkeit und Kontingenz versetzt
das Denken in einen Bezug zur Welt, an dem sowohl die klassische Meta-
physik als auch die kritische Trennung von Empirischem und Transzen-
dentalem zerbrechen.

Es ist nicht bertrieben zu behaupten, dass Quentin Meillassoux in der

Philosophiegeschichte einen neuen Weg erffnet, welcher der kanonischen
Aufteilung Kants in Dogmatismus, Skeptizismus und Kritik nicht folgt.
Ja, es gibt absolute logische Notwendigkeit. Ja, es gibt radikale Kontin-
genz. Ja, wir knnen das, was ist, denken, und dieses Denken ist kei-
neswegs von einem vorausgesetzten konstituierenden Subjekt abhngig.
(Alain Badiou)
Isabell Lorey, Roberto Nigro, Gerald Raunig (Hg.)
Inventionen 1
Gemeinsam. Prekr. Potentia. Dis-/Konjunktion. Ereignis. Transversalitt.
Queere Assemblagen

280 Seiten, Broschur

ISBN 978-3-03734-153-7
26,90 / CHF 40,00

Das einflussreichste Theoriegefge des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts ist

in die Jahre gekommen: Entstanden im politischen Kontext und den sozia-
len Milieus der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, war der Poststrukturalismus
keine Schule, und seine ProtagonistInnen arbeiteten nicht notwendiger-
weise zu den selben theoretischen Fragen. Er war vielmehr eine intellek-
tuelle Hochkonjunktur, die mit tiefgehenden Umformungen der Lebens-
stile und Wissensformen, mit neuen diskursiven Ordnungen und sozialen
Praxen einherging.
Viele seiner bedeutenden AutorInnen, unter ihnen die Theorie-Stars Fou-
cault, Deleuze und Derrida, sind heute nicht mehr am Leben. Umso leich-
ter gelingt es in unterschiedlichen Zusammenhngen, ihre Theoriebildung
zu vereinnahmen, zu dekontextualisieren, zu entpolitisieren, nach Jahr-
zehnten der Hegung an den subkulturellen Rndern politisch zu zerreiben
oder im akademischen Mainstream zu verharmlosen.
Der erste Band der Reihe Inventionen prsentiert aktuelle Positionen post-
strukturalistischer Theorie und versucht eine Neuzusammensetzung ihrer
Strme. Deren Basis ist die Wiederaneignung zentraler Begriffe der zeitge-
nssischen politischen Philosophie wie Potenzialitt, Ereignis, Transver-
salitt oder Assemblage. In der Zusammensetzung dieser Begriffe und der
mit ihnen verbundenen Theoreme soll ein erster Schritt getan werden, je-
nes neue Begriffsgefge zu entwickeln, das ber das Label des Poststruk-
turalismus hinausgeht.

Mit Beitrgen von Christoph Brunner, Antke Engel, Katja Diefenbach,

Maurizio Lazzarato, Isabell Lorey, Boyan Manchev, Erin Manning, Brian
Massumi, Angela Mitropoulos, Antonio Negri, Roberto Nigro, Stefan
Nowotny, Jasbir Puar, Gerald Raunig, Judith Revel, Encarnacin Gutirrez
Rodrguez und Thomas Seibert.
Isabell Lorey
Figuren des Immunen
Elemente einer politischen Theorie

336 Seiten, Broschur

ISBN 978-3-03734-151-3
26,90 / CHF 40,00

Die republikanischen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Plebejern und Pa-

triziern bilden ein Urszenarium politischer Theorie. Anders als die klassi-
sche Altertumswissenschaft versteht Isabell Lorey die Stndekmpfe als
Kmpfe zweier politischer Ordnungen um eine neue Konstituierung, und
anders als in der zeitgenssischen politischen Philosophie (etwa bei Agam-
ben) erhlt der homo sacer bei Lorey eine widerstndige immunisierende
Funktion. Diese Neuinterpretation der rmischen Geschichte dient als Hin-
tergrund fr eine umfassende politische Theorie der Immunisierung.

Es sind im Wesentlichen drei Figuren des Immunen, die diese Theorie aus-
machen: Bei Thomas Hobbes entwickelt sich eine herrschaftssichernde Fi-
gur des Immunen, die die Einzelnen in der politischen Gemeinschaft ber
die Abwehr des Bedrohlichen schtzt. Neben dieser Figur der juridischen
Immunitt entsteht im 18. Jahrhundert eine zweite herrschaftssichern-
de Figur, jene der biopolitischen Immunisierung. Hier dient nicht mehr
nur die Abwehr des bedrohlichen Anderen, sondern auch seine Domesti-
zierung und Inkorporation der Immunisierung einer politischen Gemein-
schaft. Die Geschichte der Plebejer liefert schlielich den Hintergrund fr
eine dritte Figur und deren Aktualisierungen: Im Exodus und in der Kons-
tituierung durchbricht die konstituierende Immunisierung die auf Herr-
schaftserhalt ausgerichteten okzidentalen Immunisierungsdynamiken.
Alain Badiou
ber Metapolitik

Aus dem Franzsischen von Heinz Jatho

194 Seiten, Franz. Broschur
ISBN 978-3-935300-39-1
19,90 / CHF 30,00

Badious Metapolitik setzt sich dezidiert von einer politischen Philoso-

phie ab, die sich lediglich darauf beschrnkt, die allgemeinen Bedingungen
politischer Urteilsbildung zu analysieren und sie schlielich, in kantischer
Tradition, zu einem geschwtzigen Meinungsaustausch degradiert. Sein
Verstndnis von Politik als Wahrheitprozedur rhrt nicht zuletzt daher,
dass er die militante politische Aktion und den Widerstand zum Ausgangs-
punkt seiner berlegungen nimmt. Neben einer grundstzlichen Kritik am
Verstndnis von Politik und politischer Theorie stellt er in den Aufstzen
dieses Bandes u.a. berlegungen zum Egalitarismus, zur Massenbewe-
gung und zur revolutionren Praxis an, und dies in Auseinandersetzung
mit wichtigen Autoren wie Althusser und Rancire, deren Rezeption im
deutschsprachigen Raum noch eher zgerlich ist.

In der Verbindung einer radikalen Philosophie der politischen Handlung

und des Widerstands vor ontologischem Hintergrund ist ber Metapoli-
tik ein anregendes und zugleich anstiges Buch, gerade fr eine derart
vom Paradigma der Kommunikation bestimmten Diskussionslandschaft
wie die deutsche.
Louis Althusser
Materialismus der Begegnung

Herausgegeben und bersetzt von Franziska Schottmann

144 Seiten, Broschur
ISBN 978-3-03734-112-4
18,00 / CHF 27,00

Der Band versammelt spte und unvollendete Schriften Althussers, die zu

den eigentmlichsten und verstrendsten Texten gehren, die das Denken
des spten 20. Jahrhunderts hervorgebracht hat. Im Leben des marxisti-
schen Philosophen markieren sie einen schmerzhaften Bruch: Sie sind Teil
eines Denkens der Krise, das eine radikale Philosophie der Praxis zu ent-
werfen sucht.
Bekmpft, verdrngt und gerade darum stets gegenwrtig, zieht sich ein
untergrndiger Strom durch die Geschichte der westlichen Philosophie.
Von den antiken Atomisten ber Spinoza und Machiavelli bis zu den Zeit-
genossen Derrida und Deleuze arbeitet ein Denken der Leere, des Zufalls
und der Abweichung, das jede Wesensphilosophie, ja Philosophie ber-
haupt im Prinzip unmglich macht und schlielich auch den dialektischen
Materialismus berwinden soll.

Die Ausgabe dieser erstmals auf Deutsch zugnglichen Schriften macht

die Brche und Anstrengungen nachvollziehbar, die in den Begriffen die-
ses neuen und zugleich ltesten Materialismus liegen. Althussers Diffe-
renzierung zwischen Materialismus der Begegnung und aleatorischem
Materialismus bezeugt die produktive Kraft eines einzigen beharrlichen
Gedankens, der das Denken bricht: Weder wird je ein Wrfelwurf den
Zufall aus lschen noch wird je der Zufall einen Wrfelwurf vereiteln.
Das Portrt des materialistischen Philosophen gibt einen Vorgeschmack
auf das Abenteuer eines Denkens, das im Wilden Westen nach Auf- und
Umbruch sucht
Eric L. Santner
Zur Psychotheologie des Alltagslebens
Betrachtungen zu Freud und Rosenzweig

Aus dem Englischen von Luisa Banki

224 Seiten, Broschur
ISBN 978-3-03734-129-2
22,90 / CHF 34,50

Eric L. Santner hat mit Zur Psychotheologie des Alltagslebens ein inhalt-
lich wie methodisch magebendes Buch geschrieben. Es prsentiert eine
vorbildliche Verbindung freudscher Texte mit philosophischen Grundfra-
gen der Moderne, die Santner am Leitfaden des Sterns der Erlsung von
Franz Rosenzweig entwickelt.
Mit Rosenzweig erffnet Santner die Frage, ob nicht der Alltag in der Mo-
derne, unter der Herrschaft eines von traditioneller Einbindung und selbst-
verstndlichem Ethos befreiten ber-Ichs, selbst eine permanente Fehl-
leistung ist bzw. eine fehlgehende Orientierung bietet, die das Subjekt in
der zwanghaften Position untoter Erfahrungsarmut gefangen hlt. Dagegen
setzt Santner eine Subjektposition inmitten des Lebens, eines Lebens, das
nicht mehr unbewusst durch das Versprechen einer Ausnahme gesttzt
wird, sondern sich ausnahmslos auf das Alltagsleben einlsst.

In nur scheinbar paradoxaler Umkehrung ist es gerade die Annahme der

Unverfgbarkeit des Wollens, Sprechens und Handelns, die Verantwortung
ermglicht. Diese Verantwortung bildet das Alltagsleben. So findet Santner
in Freud eine theologische Dimension und in Rosenzweig die Analyse der
Psyche, um mit ihnen gemeinsam eine Basis gemeinschaftlichen Lebens zu
errichten, die der Totalitt moderner Heilsversprechungen entgeht.
Kathrin Thiele
The Thought of Becoming
Gilles Deleuzes Poetics of Life

200 p., paperback

ISBN 978-3-03734-036-3
20,00 / CHF 30,00

A concern for this world lies at the heart of discussing the relation between
philosophy and ethics. Kathrin Thiele elaborates in this book that in such
endeavor one has to argue against two common misperceptions. Instead
of understanding philosophy and ethics as abstraction from the world, she
shows in what sense both are constructive of it; and instead of following
the opinion that the poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze cannot
contribute anything to the debate at stake, she shows that his whole work
is speaking but one formula: ontology = ethics. While this formula might
estrange at first, the author, by approaching it through the conceptual fig-
ure of becoming, not only manages to carefully develop the Deleuzian
thought-universe via its coordinates Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche, but
shows in her argument as well that the substitution of becoming for Being
is no insignificant matter but rather the preparation for a new thought of
ontology as an ontology of becoming and as such for a new thought of
ethics as a poetics of life.
Indirection is the movement of becoming into this world, brought forth
here as the most compelling dimension of Deleuzes thought. Such a posi-
tion dares to conceive of thought as practice without collapsing the gap that
always persists between thinking and acting.
Mark Potocnik, Frank Ruda, Jan Vlker (Hg.)
Beyond Potentialities?
Politics between the Possible and the Impossible

216 p., paperback

ISBN 978-3-03734-152-0
22,90 / CHF 34,50

Nearly the whole history of political thought is spanned between two po-
les: one of founding, establishing and justifying a stable and just order
on one side and one of justified transformation, necessary break with the
same order on the other side. Between institution and emancipation, re-
form and revolution in politics the question of possibility is always arising.
Are there possibilities to change the order of society? Are there possibilities
of a different justice? Where to find and how to define them? Are they al-
ready installed in the situation, or do they have to be actively created? Or
does one have to rethink collective emancipation in a way that it does not
rely upon given possibilities?
The question of possibility is raised in philosophy itself in different terms:
as a question of potentiality and potentials but also as a question of im-
possibilities of changing political order. In recent political discussions this
question is more present than ever and is newly posed in a fundamental
way by thinkers such as Agamben, Badiou, and Deleuze, or Lacan and
iek. The present volume assembles articles that investigate this question
and the new guise it took from different perspective and highlight its rele-
vance for contemporary political thought.

With contributions from: Alain Badiou, Friedrich Balke, Bruno Bosteels,

Lorenzo Chiesa, Felix Ensslin, Peter Hallward, Mark Potocnik, Frank Ruda,
Jason E. Smith, Jelica umi, Jan Vlker.