In the Beginning … Was the Act! Money, Analysis, Party

Abstract

Acknowledging commodity fetishism as the form of ideology in capitalist economies rather than simply one form of ideology among many can be used to clarify the structural link between psychoanalysis, Marxism, and party politics as seen in the work of Slavoj Žižek. Relying as he does on the articulation of commodity fetishism and enjoyment, Žižek is able to suggest (1) that the form of psychoanalysis is historically linked to capitalist money; (2) that there is no capitalist economy without the fantasy of value, which is embodied in money; and (3) that the “perversion without perversion” that is the discourse of the analyst thereby shares a social form with the Leninist party. Conceiving of Žižek's take on the party in this way (as against other readings) serves to place perversion and drive at the center of the discussion.

Key Words:

• Actuality
• Commodity Fetishism
• Contingency
• Karl Marx
• Slavoj Žižek

Notes

1. This assertion, made by Lutz (2009) within the pages of RM, claims that Lacan's usefulness is limited because ahistorical. See also Dean (2006), discussed below.

2. This is elsewhere described as the “concrete materialization of publicity in contemporary technoculture,” where publicity stands as “the ideology that constitutes the truth conditions of global, information age capital” (Dean 2002, 11, 4). Whereas in Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies the root of technology fetishism appears to be attributed to a “trauma” felt almost exclusively by the Left, Publicity's Secret offers a more plausible account of the rise of such an ideology, one that could equally apply to all political stripes in the global North (79–113).

3. See Harvey (2002) and Starosta (2012) on this note. For a critique of Hardt and Negri more generally, see Camfield (2007).

4. See also Žižek (2012, 384n24).

5. For a brief polemic on seeing the light through the cracks in the Chinese case, see Amin (2013).

6. This should not be limited to the “genius” but should be extended to the work of the party itself; in Piatnitsky's words, “The Bolsheviks always showed the connection between the maltreatment of factories, and the rule of autocracy … At the same time the autocracy was connected up in the agitation of the party cells with the capitalist system, so that at the very beginning of the development of the labour movement the Bolsheviks established a connection between the economic struggle and the political” (quoted in Molyneux 1978).

7. See also Lih (2008, 204, 301, 338, 365, 420, 581–2).