I was listening to an interview with Fredric Jameson recently and he said “I think I am too Lacanian to believe in identity.” The phrase was a bit glib: how can one not believe in identity? What does that mean? Jameson didn’t articulate what it meant. But if you have some familiarity with Lacan you can infer it means that Lacan’s theory of the subject is non-substantialist, Lacan reveals that identity is bound up with desire, and that desire upends the subject’s rational center or ego. But this insight requires an engagement with Lacan. I’m going to start a series of essays here on why Lacan matters for Marxists and why his thought helps us clarify political and specifically subjective problems that are essential to any Marxist practice and thus to any 21st century socialism. But first I want to start with an opening essay on why Lacan matters to me and why I believe that engaging Lacan—as Alain Badiou once remarked—is a mandatory activity for anyone that aims to be a philosopher.
I have been working on Lacan for over 15 years. My first engagement began in my early 20s as I was turning from an obsession with literature and poetry and towards an interest in philosophy. Believe it or not I first dived into the deep end by reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus because William S. Burroughs was my obsession and he called himself a “Reichian.” Not knowing much about psychoanalysis, I read Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism. I then engaged Freud and then Foucault and then found that Deleuze and Guattari were great supposed enemies of Lacan. All of this baffled me. My first experience reading Lacan felt downright formidable. But it was reading The Sublime Object of Ideology in 2007 and then encountering Žižek’s wider oeuvre that brought Lacan home for me.
Žižek opened the door for me to embark on an intensive study—not only of Lacan—of contemporary philosophy which introduced me to Alain Badiou and this then opened a path of study that culminated in my graduate studies. This began my formative intellectual years, an odyssey that entailed great struggle and sacrifice. But I was a believer and I was moved to study. I wrote several essays, got some of them published, was awarded for my papers at two different conferences, and then eventually I published my first book with the Palgrave Lacan Series in 2022. Through all of these years of study formation I built connections to a wider scholarly community and this led me to launch my podcast and study group network in 2020. Now you can see that the aim with my podcast and study collective is to help other students, scholars and a wider lay public to bridge Lacanian thought with contemporary socialist politics and Marxist practice.
I want to say a few things about what I have learned about how to apply Lacanian insights to political concerns and social critique throughout this time. In a part two essay on this Substack, I will describe how I have have come to see the foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in relationship to Marxist ideology critique and praxis, specifically I will elaborate on more recent work I have been doing on Lacan’s idealism.1
My first real lesson occurred in my own psychoanalysis. It proved to be a failed analysis—and hence a self-analysis—because I was too closely bound up with applying Lacan’s concepts and jargon to my own analysis.2 Currently, I have been engaged in a new attempt at psychoanalysis, this time with an analyst who was a student of Lacan himself. My failed attempt with psychoanalysis was a lesson in the division between the clinical and the theoretical application of Lacan and I have remained sensitive to this point especially when it comes to thinking Lacan with Marxism and Marxist politics. I now approach Lacan with greater discretion and I have struggled to separate the clinical from the theoretical, and I have learned that this is mandatory.
As I mentioned, Badiou says any philosopher working today must encounter Lacan and work through the entirety of his thought, and he adds the twist that such a task takes courage. And I think that he is absolutely correct, especially for Marxists. If you want to know what Marxists should read in Lacan’s work (as in which seminars and papers to read) please listen to my interviews and seminars where you will find many good leads and suggestions. We often say that Lacan is essential for Marxist ideology critique, a lesson that both Žižek and Althusser have shown us. This is because Lacan offers a logical account of a decentered subject bound up with the social field, and locatable—or localizable—as an effect of discourse and power. With Lacan’s understanding of the subject we are offered an entirely novel way to think about authority, social prohibitions and the function of symbolic power, and in Lacan’s turn to discourse he re-opens Freud’s group psychology and offers a way to think about the social bond, institutions and hence Lacan offers a plethora of lessons for political organization.
But we must also recognize that there is a potential danger in applying Lacan as Marxists and that danger revolves around what Gabriel Tupinambá refers to as “Lacanian ideology”. This is related to my personal experience with my first attempt at analysis in that I aimed to apply Lacanian concepts as stiff readymade formulas applicable in all instances. Tupinambá defines Lacanian ideology as follows: when Lacan’s formalisms and methods of thinking the unconscious and unconscious desire are taken up as readymade knowledge that is then applied to any and all social or political situations. The concept of Lacanian ideology reveals the brilliance of Tupinambá’s account of Lacan because it offers a warning to anyone who wishes to learn from Lacan for politics and social analysis. If we do not bring some epistemological discretion in applying Lacanian insights to politics, social concerns or ideology critique, we fall into a dogmatism in which Lacan becomes the master of every discourse, especially Marxism. But one thing that I now fully believe is that it is nonsensical to speak of a ‘Lacanian Marxism’ because this misapplies how Lacan should be treated. As Jameson’s comment above indicates, one can be Lacanian as a marxist, but this should not license us to apply Lacan in any sort of imperialist fashion.
Let’s not forget that Lacan is a strident liberal in his politics. But what does this mean? It means that Lacan has to be read as a gadfly, a provocateur, as a Socratic figure, especially to the leftwing reader and to the desire of the left. Lacan is not politically reactionary and there is not something embedded within Lacanian thought that is somehow inescapably reactionary. Not only do I find this a false reading method and a vulgar perspective on Lacan, my position on reading reactionary thought proposes an entirely different sort of engagement.3
In this presentation responding to Tupinambá’s book I propose a reading method of Lacan and politics, see “Psychoanalysis in Close Touch with Psychoanalysis.” Here I discuss how Lacan’s politics affect his theory and one of the key points I think worth stressing is that Lacan places the logic of subversion of norms and authority ideals at the very center of his teachings. This is why his thought has historically attracted the left, communists, the avant garde, and feminists, and this is also why even Jacques Alain-Miller, one of Lacan’s most conservative liberal followers, has recently noted that if Lacan were alive today he would not be hostile to the LGBTQ+ but would maintain ties with them.4
Why Lacan is Worth Engaging
We must engage Lacan because he diagnoses our present, to read Lacan helps us to develop clarity into our time, its distinct power relations and the symptoms that plague modern civilization. Lacan has an aloofness to the present despite the fact that he is one of the most savvy commentators on the contemporary conjuncture. This is because he touches a much grander set of problems that plague the modern condition; he aimed for nothing less than a diagnosis of our civilization.
To read Lacan is to understand the changing social condition of the new society that emerges following the war, a society of limitless pleasure, a society that has lifted taboos once placed on enjoyment and pleasure. Lacan helps us understand the new configuration of consumption-based capitalism, its new authority structure, and how it alienates us. Jean Claude Milner, one of Lacan’s most interesting students has rightly argued that Lacan’s seminars are far from esoteric but stand as a fundamentally clear oeuvré, if anything it is in Lacan’s seminars where we find profound clarity, not obscuritanism.
Lacan engages the desire of the left, he poses a grand confrontation with the meaning of rebellion, alienation and ultimately of revolution. When May 68 kicked off Lacan was swept into this grand dialogue about the changing meaning of revolt and he stood as a profound educator to the left, not only in his time but beyond it. There is a confrontation with Marx in Lacan’s work beginning in 68 that extends up to his later teachings. The brilliance of this period of Lacan’s work is found in the latent political content and insight that he brings out. One way to state this is that from 1968 to the mid 1970s Lacan diagnoses the desire of western Marxism. This is because he stood as a profound skeptic and critic of the possibility of revolution, although he is not hostile to revolutionary desire. He analyzes it in stark ways and he prods that very desire, he helps us recognize the limits that capitalism places on our demands and how enjoyment comes to override our political wherewithal.
Lacan re-opens what he at one point calls the grand dialectic on courage and justice to which he saw modern man falling shot on truly encountering. There is an ethical and political core in Lacan that Marxism, as the leading force of the revolutionary tradition, can benefit from engaging, particularly in the postwar conjuncture, and the post-May 68 moment. As Marxists, we should not shy away from saying that we are Lacanian. This does not have to represent a dogmatic idealism, to the contrary we should insist that there is a materialism implicit in the Lacanian orientation because of its treatment of desire as a socially constituted ground of negativity. Lacan must be read in a way similar to how Marxists encounter Hegel, and only after passing through him can we truly re-open a dialectical account of the subject, and hence learn how to construct the revolutionary subject in our time.
To get a better idea of a more Marxist materialist critique of Lacanian thought listen to this talk I gave with Subset of Theoretical Practice, “Is Lacanian Ideology Theory Passive”?
I began my first analysis with a Lacanian analyst and you can read about my 10 key learning lessons which I wrote about back in 2012.
I develop this reading method in my book on Nietzsche where I argue that as Marxists we must avow Nietzsche’s reactionary core and continue to learn from him but with the understanding that his reactionary thought is not incidental or marginal, but central. Unlike Lacan, Nietzsche’s reactionary thought is deeply embedded in his concepts and that is why only a negative and parasitical approach to his thought can extract insight for the left from Nietzsche. The same is not true when it comes to Lacan, i.e., Lacan is not an ‘arch-political’ thinker. Lacan’s thinking rather runs adjacent to political concerns.
In an interview in lacan.com Jacques Alain Miller recently wrote: “After 68, Lacan was held to be one of the leaders of the youth revolt, he was driven out of the rue d’Ulm. He then found shelter at the Faculty of Law in the Pantheon. At Saint-Anne, he had 100 auditors, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists; 300 at the l’École Normale, with students and passers-by from the Latin Quarter, and nearly 1,000 at the Faculty of Law, an elusive, baroque, often socialite public. He wondered about this strange crowd. The group Psychoanalysis and Politics, later MLF, Movement for the Liberation of Women, was formed around Lacan and his doctrine of female jouissance, as expounded in Seminar 20. Today, he would have done, I bet, what it takes to keep in touch with at least some LGBTQ+ people.”
I have been meaning to work through Lacan at some point and have mainly been deterred by his intentionally horrific prose. Would love to see more introductory content on Lacan aimed at historical materialists!