Redemption: Lacan Avec Marx

Specifically, I would like to take up the question of the Sabbath which appears in a very provocative section of Julia Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard’s discussion of Lacan and “Revelation”; however, I would like to shift the domain of this “subject” somewhat in order to address this question from the perspective of the writings of Marx. To justify this shift, I underline the fact that the name of Marx appears in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, to a degree that is unusual for Lacan (with the exception of a later seminar, L’Envers de la psychanalysis) and that this in itself should solicit us to listen a little closer concerning the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism that Lacan addresses in his seminar, even if it is only for the benefit of certain members of his audience to whom Lacan speaks directly at several points.[^1] I would like to take up what most would agree is Marx’s most fundamental concept: the mode of production as determinant of the division of labor. This is such a fundamental concept and has become, I think everyone would agree, the axiomatic principle for any materialist analysis subscribing to the theory of Marx. As Althusser later defined it, any analysis that appeals to the political economy first of Marx must, in some way, be founded on this principle, even if it only takes the form of something that will appear only “in the last instance” ’ a moment that is suspended according to the promise of the contingent future first raised by Marxist historiography ’ and must, therefore, correspond to the advent of a “History” that is still, so to speak, waiting in the wings. ↩︎ ↩︎

Many critics have already established that the convergence of the history of Judaism in the West and the history of Marxist thought happens precisely around the role of a world historical actor who is identified with the realization of “the last instance” (that is, with the completion of an historical project that is itself historical, since it exists in the form of “a promise”). This actor has been identified in Marxist and Jewish traditions by an equivalent figure: for the Jewish tradition it is the “Messiah,” while for Marxism it is the messianic role played by “the proletariat.” The fact, arguably, that neither have appeared on the world historical stage points to an intimacy between post-diaspora Jewish thought and what is called “late-Marxism.” It is this intimacy, which has been remarked many times and most forcefully by Walter Benjamin, that can explain the almost ritualistic aspect of the many “returns” to Marx’s original texts and of the endless commentary this has produced, because these returns enact a kind of ritualization of a “promise” that Marx’s writings contain concerning what he calls in The Grundrisse “The End of Capitalism” (Sect. H).[^2] My guiding question is whether we might ever understand Marx’s “promise” outside the original order that was introduced into human history by the “sign” of the Sabbath. ↩︎ ↩︎

Turning to the seventh seminar, Lacan defines the Sabbath as the “sign of a gap” or “void” that is installed in the heart of an cyclical or economic order of time (81). As Lacan says, it is an order that is “relative to every law of utility,” which signals, first of all, an alienation from an economical order that gives rise to the discourse of History in the West. The relationship of this moment to the “end” of a certain history that inspired Marx’s thought is clear: first, that what in The Grundrisse he called the “End of Capitalism” (i.e., the overturning of the vicious cycle of production that capitalism installs in society) could never have taken place outside the advent of a notion of time that is fundamentally “alienated” from a purely natural or cyclical order of sowing and reaping; and second, what Marx describes as the “history of capitalism,” in fact, refers to the possibility of this arbitrary order suddenly undergoing a radical re-arrangement that is brought about by Capitalism itself whereby the discourse of the Master, suddenly acceding to its own internal limit, casts-off its own mode of production like “a snake shedding its skin.” ↩︎ ↩︎

At this point, we might note a certain parallelism between the principle of “rest” that is inscribed both in the commandment of the Sabbath and in the heart of Capital itself, which Marx defines as a violent and even “fatal” point of contradiction. We might note also an implicit correspondence between the contradiction within these first two principles and yet another form of contradiction that Freud discovers operating at the heart of “the pleasure principle,” which leads “beyond” the latter, that is, to the positing of the “death drive.” It is here, I want to argue, that the fields of psychoanalysis and Marxism make an historical encounter, even though this encounter would later be missed by many who followed in the steps of Marx and Freud. (Here I am thinking of Marcuse in particular.) It is Lacan, I think, who first set his foot upon the exact spot where both systems are founded by a common principle, the principle of “homeostasis.” This principle appears in each analytic in the form of a potentially violent contradiction that must be fully accounted for and even, in the case of Marx, theorized as the basis of his “political economy.” Yet, we must ask, is the principle of homeostasis, which can be located in the moment that Marx defines as “the end of Capital” (if not the end, then the absence of work, the time of abjection, when the machinery of production is left idling, even only momentarily, “out-of-use”), the same as the principle that Freud described as the “end of pleasure,” i.e., the restoration of an earlier state of things? Turning to Marx’s description in The Grundrisse, this fundamental contradiction cannot be defined outside a series in which it emerges in human time. In other words, this contradiction in the system of capital is deployed as a form of repetition, by which this contradiction itself becomes “historicized,” as Marx writes, in the different crises, explosions, cataclysms that belong to the transformations of Capital itself (291-292). However, in each repetition we find that, according to Marx, the same contradiction must be led back to the point where it receives its primary meaning in an earlier state of things, enabling it in each instance to go on with a fresh burst of energy. Here we cannot help but to discern in this description the function that Freud first ascribed to the death drive. ↩︎ ↩︎

Recalling the phrase I had borrowed earlier from Althusser, in each instance we also find the potential of the “last,” the end. In other words, the moment when the entire series comes to its final term and the contradiction that the system of capital is founded upon is fully realized precisely as the contradiction between the time that precedes this moment and the time that follows and is situated beyond it. As Marx writes, “the violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but as a condition of its self-preservation,” is the most striking contradiction that should serve as the principle that it be replaced with “a higher form of social production” (291). Of course, here, Marx is putting on a rationalist argument in the sense of putting on a farce, since we know full well that what he calls “the end of Capitalism” will not come about by “merely thinking through a given collective order in terms of the satisfaction of desires” (Lacan 225). ↩︎ ↩︎

Now let us situate this moment in relationship to the understanding that has been provided by Lacan. What is this place “beyond” but that which, “according to the laws of the pleasure principle, the signifier projects into this beyond equalization, homeostasis, and the tendency to the uniform investment of the ego as such, [a tendency] that provokes its failure” (119)? In this sense, the principle of homeostasis occupies an equivalent place in both analytics; the place of the beyond, which is projected there by the signifier that, in the register of desire and of capital alike, is introduced to put man in relationship “to an object that represents the Thing” (119). Lacan reminds us that this Signifier, like all signifiers, is primarily “fashioned by man, and probably more by his hands than his spirit” (119). Moreover, it is the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or hole in the real that is fundamentally identical (121). It is for this reason that the signifier representing the principle of homeostasis in each system cannot be situated in a natural realm, which according to Lacan would be identified with a tendency to return to a state of absolute rest, or equilibrium, but rather must be situated in the historical domain (as above, in the series of failures and gaps that historicize this system and make it heterogenous to a function of nature); “since it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain ’ [which] as a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature” (211). It is in this “beyond,” Lacan argues, that the radical meaning of the death drive can be located as the most violent contradiction: “Will to destruction; . . . But also a will to create from zero, a will to begin again.” In other words, to go on. Again, I want to emphasize the importance of the fact that Marx discovered this tendency toward destruction as the fundamental contradiction ’ the “end” (the goal, or but) of work is both the destruction of the work and its momentary interruption, or pause ’ that structures all human activity defined as work. ↩︎ ↩︎

I have highlighted the nature of this primary contradiction, which Lacan calls “a scandal,” since it will play a major role in my reading of the significance of the Sabbath for two reasons: first, it would seem that the order announced in the Sabbath would appear as something “dumb,” in the sense that it gives “no response” to the first order, or that it has no knowledge of the order of economy or nature. This scandal can easily be highlighted by returning to a certain footnote in the first volume of Das Capital, where Marx describes the arrangement of breaks in the workday when the process of production is paramount in determining the “time of rest” for the worker (400). For anyone who has worked a day in his or her life, a question naturally emerges: when is lunch time? It seems a very simple question, but one that I hope to prove is at the center of Marx’s theory of the division of labor. For Marx, the order of Capital is the discourse of the Master (the place of the S1), and the master responds to this question: lunch is whenever I say it is! Actually, it is not at all that arbitrary, since this is how the command appears in “the Imaginary” of the worker who mistakes the position of the Boss as the point of the command’s emission. On the contrary, for Marx, “lunch” will be determined by the “momentary end” that belongs to the process of production itself (i.e., the finished product). ↩︎ ↩︎