Power to the Symptoms!

Pierre Bismuth, Following the Left Hand of Jacques Lacan—The Nonsense of the Sexual Rapport (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

Some years ago, a fellow university professor, perhaps irritated by my clumsy efforts to bring psychoanalysis and Marxism into dialogue, remarked: “How could it ever be possible to reconcile two disciplines so fundamentally different? For psychoanalysis, the source of every misfortune lies within the subject; for Marxism, society is to blame. Isn’t every attempt to make them ‘dialogue’ just a dialogue of the deaf?”1 As is often the case, jokes capture something real through paradox. And this frustrated professor, perhaps unwittingly, posed a question that is far from trivial: What is—if there is one—the point of convergence between psychoanalysis and Marxism? Or are they practices that, precisely because they run on parallel tracks, can only be “knotted” together without ever truly merging?

If we examine the history of efforts to forge an alliance between psychoanalysis and Marxism, optimism is hard to come by. When Soviet Marxism encountered Pavlov’s experimental psychology, it did so primarily to establish a positivist anthropology capable of providing a scientific foundation for Marxism and translating it into a natural science. Sartre’s and Politzer’s existentialist psychology, with its humanism, fared little better—despite several interesting elements. The Freudo-Marxist tradition, from Wilhelm Reich to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, attempted to fuse Freudianism and Marxism into a unified third discourse, one that conceived political and libidinal emancipation as part of the same project, merging psychic “repression” and political “repression” into a single concept. This is why the intervention of Lacan—who, at least in certain periods, found a significant ally in Louis Althusser in this debate—was the invention of a mediation that was, in many ways, unprecedented between Freudian and Marxian thought: an operation so original that it has remained fertile to this day.

Lacan’s implicit starting point concerns the disciplinary status of what, in fact, are not disciplines. One of psychoanalysis’ great innovations is precisely that it does not constitute itself as a positively defined body of knowledge. This is often overlooked by academic appropriations of Lacan, which frequently reduce him to just another philosopher within the Western or French tradition. Psychoanalysis is not based on a set of concepts, premises, or postulates; it is not a discourse that seeks to describe the world as an external empirical object. Consider the analyst’s actions during a session: rather than diagnosing the symptom as a doctor would, the analyst introduces cuts and shifts in the punctuation of the analysand’s discourse. Instead of accumulating knowledge aimed at increasingly accurate descriptions of an empirically defined reality, psychoanalysis intervenes in already established knowledge structures. It disarticulates and rearticulates them in unprecedented ways, for which only the subject can take responsibility. This operation should not be viewed in purely deconstructive terms; it represents a paradigm shift in how we understand knowledge itself: not as solely constituted by statements but also by cuts. Psychoanalysis introduces a new conception of knowledge—insubstantial, evanescent, and grounded not in representation (in what is said) but in the act (in the saying).

Thus, psychoanalysis is a non-discipline. It does not produce a knowledge that can be objectified or condensed into, say, a book to which the subject must conform (in the medieval sense of adequatio rei et intellectus). It is instead a knowledge internal to the subject, which can only be transmitted in a paradoxical, incomplete, and flawed form—as happens in the passe. Hence, the training of analysts cannot occur through the mere acquisition of empirical evidence or statements (which would introduce the logic of the “exam,” i.e., an objective, extra-clinical verification, as deployed in the discourse of the university). It can only occur through direct, embodied experience of that intangible, evanescent, subtractive knowledge—the knowledge of the subject of the unconscious.

This issue is of extraordinary importance. If psychoanalysis is not a discipline, it does not, strictly speaking, produce a positively defined knowledge or a “theory.” Lacanianism, in this strict sense, lacks a theory of the subject, the unconscious, the symbolic, or the social bond (or any other such object we encounter in psychoanalytic texts). Otherwise, it would risk becoming a doctrine. What can emerge, instead, is a transformed philosophical conception of what a subject, the unconscious, the symbolic, or the social bond might be—conditioned or even made possible by the experience of the unconscious. More precisely, it is the cut produced by the unconscious that allows the subject to articulate a different understanding of the world. Similarly, extending this logic to a more general level, it is starting from the historical emergence of psychoanalysis itself that new forms of knowledge and philosophies about the subject or the social bond can be constituted.

In short, psychoanalysis is not merely one more knowledge system that challenges older ones. It is a practice that produces a shift in subjective position—one that examines knowledge not by its statements about the world, but by its symptoms: the gaps, inconsistencies, and repressions within that knowledge. It is a position that recognizes knowledge not by what it declares but by what it disavows, hides, or suffers from—while potentially opening to an insubstantial, fleeting dimension constituted by the void within every rupture. A purely negative dimension sustained solely by the cut and the act.

In this sense, Marxism occupies a very similar space. Contrary to common assumptions, it is not a social science that seeks to explain capitalism as an empirical object. Marx does not aim to amend classical political economy by constructing a new economic theory. The subtitle of Capital is “Critique of Political Economy,” where critique does not merely mean correcting errors; rather it entails overcoming bourgeois political economy while preserving its kernel of truth (as found in Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo). The problem with classical political economy is not simply that it fails to grasp capitalism’s reality, but that it builds categories that participate in the concealment and naturalization of capitalist social organization. Marx’s critique does not yield a new, separate science, but instead calls for a critique of capitalist social relations themselves.

Marx’s operation is not the construction of a new discipline, but the exposure of how the categories of a historically determined discourse—bourgeois political economy, or bourgeois science more broadly—serve to naturalize and conceal the fundamental antagonisms within society. Like psychoanalysis, Marxism is not a discipline based on a set of transmissible concepts. It is a critical operation that denaturalizes disciplines which, despite their claims of neutrality and objectivity, participate in the concealment of the antagonisms at the core of the capitalist mode of production. Marxism does not provide yet another explanation of the world; rather, it cuts transversally across the social sciences and humanities, exposing their profound divisiveness and bias.

At the heart of Marx’s analysis is the concept of the fetish character of the commodity—the mechanism through which the modern world necessarily and inevitably (though not irreversibly) conceals and inverts its own reality. If the world of production is based on a fundamental antagonism and on the appropriation of the physical and intellectual energies of labor power—which is forced to live, work, and struggle in the world according to a modality that does not belong to it and over which it has no say—when all of this is transformed into commodities, it suddenly seems to be regulated by relations of equality and equivalence. How does this asymmetrical and conflict-ridden reality transform itself into a mere shadow? Why is the capitalist world necessarily inverted? And how do commodities and markets succeed in concealing the symptoms that nonetheless haunt the social sphere?

The problem, both for Marxism and psychoanalysis, is precisely that of taking symptoms and simply listening to them in their truth. The nonidentity of the unconscious translates into an empirical world populated by individuals and objects, which we call the imaginary. In the same way, the asymmetry of the world of capitalist production is transformed into the equivalence of the market and the circulation of commodities. Both in the imaginary and in market circulation, symptoms appear to be absent. And yet—this is the great undemonstrated and undemonstrable hypothesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis—symptoms continuously appear: slips of the tongue, panic attacks, anorexia, economic crises, war, poverty, and the maldistribution of resources. Everyone will say that these are merely temporary or localized malfunctions, that a minor adjustment in monetary distribution or a pill is all it takes to restore everything and get back to normal.

Yet these symptoms persist and insist. And it is precisely through their persistence and stubbornness that these two great subjective positions of modernity demand that we come to terms with them. Not to silence them and uphold a fragile imaginary or a naturalized market, but to allow them to speak. The symptoms exist. And they are the only chance we have for something unprecedented to emerge from the history of the subject—or for a different and more just social organization to rise from the ashes of capitalism.