#capitalist discourse

In the name of what is one considered sick? How is it that a neurotic is sicker than a normal being, a being said to be normal? If Freud brought out something, it was precisely in demonstrating that neurosis, finally, is strictly inserted somewhere in a flaw that he names, that he designates perfectly, that he calls sexuality, and he speaks of it in a way that what is clear is precisely . . . this is why man is not at all at ease.

The capitalist discourse follows a different logic, in that it takes desire as if it was a frustrated demand. It translates desire into solutions, meaning desire is not seen as the support of subjectivity, but merely seen as a demand that should be gratified. Why all the misery, the capitalistic logic would ask: caviar or salmon can simply be bought, right? In this way, what the discourse of the capitalist fills is the space for questions pertaining to love and desire: Lacan states “Any order, any discourse that resembles capitalism leaves aside what we will simply call the things of love, my friends. You see, that's just nothing” (Lacan, 1971–1972, 6 January 1972 lecture). Within this discourse subjective division is not seen as a manifestation of subjective truth along the lines of the unconscious, but as a state of permanent crisis the subject needs to get rid of.

Where and in which way should we celebrate the entrance of psychoanalysis in the 21st Century? Where is nowadays the place of psychoanalysis? Maybe in the studio of an old analyst in Paris where an upper-class obsessional neurotic still continues his analysis started in the heyday of the late Sixties? Or in the meeting of a small psychoanalytic school where due to ambitiousness of the two leading analysts another scission is decided? Or in decreasing demand for “traditional” analysis expressed by a marginal group of urban and educated people in order to self-represent a certain kind of enlightened aristocracy of the unconscious? Let’s imagine for a moment that those are not the places where psychoanalysis will have its home in the 21st Century. Let’s imagine for a moment that psychoanalysis will concern a 15 year-old kid from the Paris suburbs who destroys his father’s car during riots; or a bulimic teenager who is vomiting in the toilet during a high school class; or an impotent middle-aged man who is not able to have sex with his wife but instead sees a prostitute three times a week; or a 26 year old psychology majored student who is doing an internship for free in a psychiatric hospital and for the first time faces the enigma of psychosis. What psychoanalysis would we find in those places?

Paraphrasing Lacan’s famous statement about the political nature of the structure one could say: psychoanalysis should walk the streets. Especially because there, in the streets, it has always found its proper place. Faced with the capitalist discourse which increasingly enables contemporary subjects to bypass castration through various forms of ready-made enjoyment (what Lacan called proliferation of gadget-objects), psychoanalysis should therefore confront the increasing decline of demands for analysis not as a symptom of its decay, but rather as an opportunity to reinvent itself. Rather than a questioning subject, the metaphor of contemporary capitalism is an enjoying subject: a subject that does not address a question to the Other, but rather enacts a solution through a certain practice of enjoyment. What does it therefore mean, at the gates of the 21st Century, to say that we should return to the discipline invented over a century ago in Vienna by Dr. Freud? Which kind of psychoanalysis do we need in the context of contemporary capitalism and hypermodernity?

In seminar XIX, the position of the other is described as the position of jouissance (Lacan, 1971–1972, p. 193). Here Lacan defines jouissance as a disturbing dimension in the experience of the body, which renders the subject unable to experience itself as a self-sufficient enjoying entity. Jouissance is immensely disruptive. It is a dimension of otherness that we all have to deal with. Indeed, the very idea of “dealing with it” bears witness to discourse; that is, to the fact that we treat jouissance by making an appeal to an agent or semblance, which is expected to manage it: jouissance provokes the mobilization of semblance. The root of jouissance is in the structurally dysfunctional status that the body has for the human being (Lacan, 1971–1972, p. 217). What is typical for discourse, is that it envelopes a semblance around jouissance, and as a result jouissance is no longer unlimited, but conditioned by the element occupying the position of semblance. In this maneuver, a social bond is created: “What is discourse? It is that which, in the arrangement of what might be produced because of the existence of language, makes up the function of the social bond”