On Not Being Able to Build: Thinking Space, Boundaries and the Other with Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist

Abstract

Jacques Lacan’s fifth Discourse, or Discourse of the Capitalist, suggests that relations of difference are being immobilized or rendered redundant. What individuals are left with is a variety of strategies with which they try to cope, upholding a modicum of consistence and reality. Drawing on cultural examples and Bernard Stiegler’s use of psychoanalysis, this paper examines the relationship between experiences of space, the feeling of nonbeing and the encounter with the Other. If controlling space and enforcing spatial boundaries is the last strategy for keeping vestiges of the Other in working order, a radical re-thinking of space/milieu and objects/designs is necessary for individuals to starting imagining a future beyond capitalism’s creative stagnation and catastrophe.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• capitalism
• Lacan
• interiority
• exteriority
• Other

Notes

1. Zejlka Matijasevic, “Lacan: ustrajnost dijalektike” [Lacan: The Persistence of the Dialectic], https://www.academia.edu/12662265.

2. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996).

3. Fabio Vighi, “Ontology of Crisis and Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 20, no. 1 (2015): 1–19.

4. Bernard Stiegler, “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy,” New Formations, 72 (2011): 151.

5. Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1948. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01948.

6. Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan on the Capitalist Discourse: Its Consequences for Libidinal Enjoyment and Social Bonds.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 11, no. 1 (2006): 77.

7. Slavoj Žižek, “Four Discourses, Four Subjects,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 80.

8. Ibid., 77.

9. Ibid., 79.

10. Alenka Zupančič, “When Surplus Enjoyment Meets Surplus,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on Seminar XVII (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 163.

11. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the (human) subject comes into being upon entering language and the Symbolic order (Other), that is, the complex network of psychosocial relationships. Upon entering language everything we do and say is mediated by and represented through language. The immediacy of bodily experience and the pre-linguistic oneness with the mother are lost forever. What is lost is jouissance. The subject is therefore said to be effectively separated from this prior state of being and alienated in language/Symbolic order. Desire is the effect of separation and alienation (and loss of jouissance). This means that while specific desires can be satisfied, Desire as such can never be met as it stems from something irretrievably lost, removed. Thus, the subject can always seek to satisfy their Desire in the only domain available, in the Other, but remains forever divided and/or incomplete. In this context, castration is the “coming to terms” with the loss of jouissance, rather than try to circumvent or deny it in different ways. For a detailed account see Paul Verhaeghe, “Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan’s Revision of the Oedipus Complex,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on Seminar XVII. (Durham: (Duke University Press, 2006), 38.

12. Slavoj Žižek, “Object a and Its Social Links,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on Seminar XVII (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 117, emphasis added by author.

13. Vighi, “Ontology of Crisis and Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist,” 5.

14. Ibid., 7.

15. Ibid., 10.

16. Ibid., 10

17. Diagram based on Lacan 1972, p. 40. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XIX, Ou pire (Paris: Seuil, 1971–72).

18. Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 219–229.

19. Lorens Holm, “What Lacan said Re: Architecture,” Critical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2000).

20. Ibid., 33. See also Note 11.

21. For a detailed discussion of the role of psychoanalysis in Bernard Stiegler’s work see Angie Voela and Louis Rotchschild, “Creative Failure: Stiegler, Psychoanalysis and the Promise of a Life Worth Living.” New Formations, 95 (2018): 54–69.

22. Jason Glynos, “Capitalism and the Act: From Content to Form and Back Again,” in Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy, ed. Ian Parker and Davod Pavan-Cuéllar (London: Routledge 2014), 158.

23. Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (London: Polity Press, 2004).

24. Vighi, “Ontology of Crisis and Lacan’s Discourse of the Capitalist,” 11.

25. Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (London: Polity Press, 2013), 48.

26. Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.

27. Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.”

28. Stiegler, “Pharmacology of Desire,” 156.

29. Stiegler, Acting Out, 23.

30. Andre Green, The Work of the Negative (London: Free Association Books 1999), 16.

31. Stiegler, Acting Out, 18.

32. Holm, “What Lacan said Re: Architecture,” 58.

33. Stiegler, Acting Out, 26.

34. Ellie Ragland, “The Hysteric’s Truth,” in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 78.

35. Holm, “What Lacan said Re: Architecture,” 58.

36. See, for example, Goeffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press and Columbia University Press, 1988), and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

37. Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angie Voela

Angie Voela is a Reader in Social Sciences, University of East London. She is the co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and the author of Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Myth in Contemporary Culture: After Oedipus (2017). She has published on gender, feminism and philosophy, psychoanalysis and philosophy, space and politics, individual and society.