Lacan’s Lenin

Sometimes I have wondered whether the field of political philosophy is a sort of psychology before there was psychology itself as a separate field of study. Clearly, such a wide scope would not fit into any historical definition, but the intriguing aspect of this is the way that politics can be explained using how the mind works. Leviathan provides a good example of this. Written by Hobbes, this famous book explains the history of the transcendental machine, i.e., the state, based on the mind’s ability to sense, imagine, think, and feel passion. He described the state as an “artificial man” to produce the socius. The definition of reason as reckoning provided by Hobbes in his Leviathan is a good example of using computation in the process of thinking. He proposed that “in what matter soever there is place for addition and subtraction, there also is place for reason; and where these have no place, there reason has nothing at all to do.”1

Spinoza makes this connection between psychical life and political existence more difficult to contain. What interests me is how his geometrical method creates an illusion about the power of consciousness. Desire is what constitutes our essence, and the knowledge of our appetite does not guarantee sufficient understanding of the causes. Spinoza emphasized that “we can take no action from mental decision unless the memory comes into play; for example, we cannot utter a word unless we call the word to mind.”2

This must be regarded as an affinity between Spinoza and Lacan and enables me to justify how Lacan was able to see a counterpart in Spinoza, in dialogue with whom he could keep a certain distance at the same time. Indeed, Lacan directly refers to Spinoza’s concept of desire and love of God in its intellectual form in his eleventh seminar.

What, quite wrongly, has been thought of in Spinoza as pantheism is simply the reduction of the field of God to the universality of the signifier, which produces a serene, exceptional detachment from human desire. In so far as Spinoza says—desire is the essence of man, and in so far as he institutes this desire in the radical dependence on the universality of the divine attributes, which is possible only through the function of the signifier, in so far as he does this, he obtains that unique position by which the philosopher—and it is no accident that it is a Jew detached from his tradition who embodies it—may be confused with a transcendent love. This position is not tenable for us.3

According to Lacan, Spinoza’s exceptional serenity represents the limit beyond which psychoanalysis will not be able to move forward. The concept of jouissance introduced by Lacan raises a different problem: what remains in the symptom is also satisfaction of a sort which refuses interpretation. Deleuze and Guattari emerge into this context, in my view, because I consider that what they try to do through their theory is to radicalize the discovery of the unconscious, even at the cost of a break with the psychoanalysis tradition.

If such a radicalization is successful in all respects is another issue that is still to be seen from my perspective. It is rather the conviction of theirs that the desire already exists in the field of society. They refer in their book Anti-Oedipus to Spinoza’s statement that people fight for their servitude as though it were their freedom. It means that domination does not derive from ignorance alone. This is where the relation emerges that leads me back to Lacan’s treatment of Lenin. What is in question is what happens to an inheritance when the implications of its discovery challenge the practices legitimized through it.

In a seminar held on March 20, 1973, Lacan juxtaposes the pair of Marx and Lenin to the pair of Freud and Lacan, with the bond between them being in the letter in the Other rather than any identity of being.

Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan are not coupled in being. It is via the letter they found in the Other that, as beings of knowledge, they proceed two by two, in a supposed Other. What is new about their knowledge is that it doesn’t presume the Other knows anything about it—certainly not the being who constituted the letter there—for it is clearly on the basis of the Other (de l’Autre) that he constituted the letter at his own expense, at the price of his being, which, by God, is not nothing at all for each of us, but not a whole lot either, to tell the truth.4

In his discussion of this, Lacan associates knowledge with the jouissance involved in acquiring and exercising it. Such a brief juxtaposition does not constitute an endorsement of Leninism. But it does pose a question which I find more intriguing than an attempt at uncovering Lacan’s politics: What is it to inherit an idea whose implications the author has not exhausted?

Preservation of a text is possible without its force getting renewed. We can understand its vocabulary, make defenses for its claims, and differentiate ourselves from those who do not get it. All these activities do not imply in themselves any information about what needs to be done in the situation which we are in. My interpretation of Lacan’s pair is a suggestion to reflect on a fidelity which has to come to terms with this challenge. The relationship between Lenin and Marx would have been the practical implications of such reading.

The Lacanian theory of transmission supports this formulation of the relationship between theory and practice. The letter cannot reinscribe the same being of knowledge, and political or psychoanalytical knowledge cannot be transferred, as it should be produced through practice.5 The idea is that there is a certain political dimension in inheritance once it becomes involved in creating a collective capability. The circulation of a doctrine can facilitate this process but does not provide any guarantee that anything has really been changed in people’s relations.

This is precisely where jouissance adds another layer to the problem. In Lacan’s seminar on the symptom at Geneva, he draws attention to the leftovers of the child’s contact with language and their involvement with sexual reality.6 Speech carries implications that go beyond what it says. It is possible to apply the same issue to political speech, but not without turning the collective into an individual patient. One could use slogans that represent demands and provide rhythm to the meeting. The name of the philosopher is able to hold onto the history of struggle and becomes the sign under which one recognizes oneself as a part of the community.

This is the moment which should be considered in the specific case regarding the problem, that is to say, its relevance from the point of view of the criticism. Though we may know how the institution functions, we will have to deal with the problem of the criticism as the part of this institution. Our language is what provides us with the possibility to possess the power; our diagnosis is what helps us realize that we are the people who do criticism too. Absence of any chances may be regarded as the satisfaction.

That being said, the invocation of Lenin opens up the question in terms of what can be done with the inheritance. However, organization cannot be seen as the simple solution. While it is capable of generating collective intelligence by concentrating the power to speak on its behalf, it is also capable of maintaining institutional memory and ensuring its own survival becomes the one overriding necessity. The question raised by Deleuze and Guattari regarding the investment of desire in the social field persists.

The fact that, as the source of knowledge, the Other is itself unaware makes things even more complicated.7 What this means politically is that there is no guarantee in the correctness of our practice, no text that would justify what we do in its name. This lack of a guarantee entails increased accountability on our part for the results of our intervention, which necessitates a response to the needs of the people affected and our ability to revise a practice that has become part of our identity.

And here, I think, is where my reflections on the connection between political philosophy and psychic life return. The history that I have outlined above is not the history of a steady march from Hobbes to psychoanalysis. I am more interested in the puzzle of what passes between them: how we belong to a form of life in the conditions of which we are not fully aware, and how this belonging may be transformed. Lacan’s Lenin gives us one means of engaging with this puzzle in terms of the condition of knowledge itself. The question is whether inheritance gives us the possibility of developing new capacities of collective action, including the capacity to challenge our enjoyment of inheriting.

Originally published on Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Substack.