#cazdyn

... To retain the radical dimensions of revolution, cure, and enlightenment is at once to retain the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Buddhism.

This mention of revolution brings us to the question of why the relationship among Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis should be pursued in the first place. One answer: don’t do it. You’ll just end up playing the fool, reducing all three discourses, and decontextualizing so many concepts and principles. The other answer: why not, especially when we recognize that Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, at least in terms of the contemporary moment, share the historical context of global capitalism and, therefore, are struggling with similar limits. This is also an attempt to open up the three fields to those who feel alienated or excluded from them—experiences that are often quite legitimate, and which require serious attention on the part of those who still invest in these fields. Often, these negative feelings are simply our fantasy projections of what we think the three discourses stand for (reductive critique, opportunistic violence, smug moralization, idealism masquerading as materialism, ineffectual and gratuitous practice, failure), rather than a response to the genuinely capacious and indispensible analyses and modes of being that they are capable of producing. This is especially true at our contemporary moment. Once again, this is also an effort to understand Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis as problematics—as modes of engagement that prioritize the inextricable relation between their distinct forms of thought and action (and non-thought and non-action) on the one hand and the historical situation in which they are situated and generate new problems on the other hand.

We can now add another key problem to our list connecting Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, namely that of desire itself, and by extension the question of how the desire for enlightenment, revolution, and cure must return and be enlivened while the subject of this spiritual, political, and psychological desire must die—a desire without desire. It is only when such a desire without desire is realized that the radical core of Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis can be mobilized. I will argue that this core opens to a non-moralizing critique and to a radical future, both for individual subjects and for social collectives.

If there is a fidelity that the more intent adherents of Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis share, it is to the problematics themselves—of which the problems of enlightenment, revolution, and cure have moved toward the center, a center that is, and has always been, occupied by the fundamental problem of praxis. This implacable, irresolvable problem of praxis not only pressurizes the very coming-into-being of these three discourses and not only grounds the contradictions that kick-start each discourse, but also returns throughout their respective histories to breathe new life into them. [...]

... As for what comes after revolution, if we knew in advance what that was then it would not be revolutionary. Which is another way of saying that revolution is not a destination to be reached—like the last pages of a developmental narrative—but rather the spark that keeps thought and action fresh, and which reminds us that a radically different way of thinking andacting is possible only within a radically different historical formation . . . and that a radically different historical formation is always possible!

Revolutionary desire has come to mean a certain kind of transcendent or wishful thinking about impossibilities. But to accept this meaning is to misunderstand the significance of the concept of revolution both for Marxism and for understanding praxis. If revolutionary desire engages the impossible, it does so with the ultimate aim of shifting the realm of possibility. Since what is historically possible is shaped by—and shapes—that which is historically impossible, and the engagement with the impossible becomes at once an engagement with the possible. By crashing into the impossible—not the liberal impossible of, say, trying toproduce social equality within capitalism, but the radical impossible of imagining and struggling for a noncapitalist future within the limiting space of capitalism—Marxism mobilizes revolution as a sort of reality check, a reality check against so much cynical reason and gratuitous theory and politics.

In this same way we can view psychoanalysis less as an early twentieth-century theory of mind or psychology, and more as an allegiance to a reformulation of the problem of the unconscious in relation to the current logic of global capitalism. The unconscious flashes a radically different future (the unconscious actually comes from this future), and today points forward rather than backward. In this way, cure is not directed back at uncovering past traumas (however much this practice might be therapeutically effective); rather, it is reformulated so as to flash future traumas, most significantly the trauma of redefining the very category and possibilities of the future itself. This termination of the present-future in lieu of a radically different future (what might be called a future-future) necessarily includes a killing off of the subject, or at least a cure for the subject’s desire to manage the present-future. What is most productive in the psychoanalytic problematic today is its capacity to generate this new problem of cure—cure after we have given up on cure . . . cure after we have given up on the liberal-humanist subject that desires this cure. [...]

Something quite similar can be said about Marxism. Knowing that inequality and violence are built into the capitalist system itself, that they are objective facts of a mode of production organized around inexorable expansion and a structural rift between those who own the means of production and those who labor under it, will not keep us from reproducing the system, or from feeling that there is no escape from the present configuration of things. No matter how clearly we understand that crisis (or commodification, or dispossession) are the predictable effects of capitalism “going right,” rather than the exceptional and avoidable effects of it “going wrong,” and no matter how much we recognize that it is tactically counterproductive to moralize against so many bad actors (terrorists, crony capitalists, rogue leaders) or chance events (natural disasters, pandemics, random catastrophes), and blame them for disrupting our otherwise smooth sailing into the peaceful future, we are still no closer to changing the system itself. To resign ourselves to this paradox is not the answer either–not only because such settling strengthens the system and dulls our critical edges, but because the pleasure gained by a spirited and non-moralizing critique of capitalism is enlivening, and radical politics will always require a reclaiming of personal pleasure from the state, and a redirection of erotics away from the dominant order . . . a reclamation project that itself is another name for love.