Genie out of the Bottle: Lacan and the Loneliness of Global Capitalism
Abstract: The article argues that Lacan’s understanding of the capitalist discourse should be framed within the ongoing crisis of valorisation, where for the first time in the history of capitalism the impact of automation causes the economy’s operating logic to backfire. Contemporary capitalism’s crippling inability to generate the necessary mass of economic value required for the reproduction of our societies can be fully appreciated by reconstructing Lacan’s critique of labour qua value-fetish, the specific ruse through which capitalism fictionalises the uncountable (unconscious) dimension of any “knowledge at work”. By triangulating between Lacan, Marx and Hegel, this piece seeks to reflect on the empty core of the capital-labour dialectic. The next step will be to explore the capitalist symptom as obdurate form of resistance to the transformation of an exhausted and increasingly self-destructive mode of production. Keywords: Lacan, capitalist discourse, Marx, Hegel, mode of production, labour, value critique. ‘Nothing can change our life but the gradual insinuation within us of the forces which annihilate it.’1
Fabio Vighi
1. Bad news as good news? In the Introduction to his latest book, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight, Slavoj Žižek engages with, among other things, the impact of technoscientific development on the resilience of our big Other, Jacques Lacan’s name for the commonly shared, unwritten and naturalised symbolic rules sustaining our social space. As he explicitly puts it: ‘The progress of today’s sciences destroys the basic presuppositions of our everyday notion of reality’.2 After listing various reactions to this calamitous predicament – the ideologically worst of which being New Age obscurantism – Žižek performs his most cherished Hegelian manoeuvre: the speculative pirouette from negativity (our ‘New World Disorder, this gradually emerging word-less civilization’)3 to transformation via retroactive resignification (the opening up of the space of an event which signals the possibility of radical emancipation). At the risk of oversimplification, it can be argued that Žižek’s standard Hegelian reasoning lies in his claim that only the confrontation with the void/emptiness of our situation will encourage us to think again, i.e. to 1 Cioran 2012, p. 16. 2 Žižek 2018, p. 4. 3 Ibid, p. 5.
391
Lacan and the Loneliness of Global Capitalism
C R I S I S & C R I T I Q U E / Volume 6 / Issue 1