One of the greatest challenges for Marxist theory in the present is to overcome what I take to be one of its most baleful influences: Lacanianism. Not an exaggeration to say that “Lacanian Marxism” represents the self-annihilation of critical theory. 1/
Lacan’s basic picture is very sophisticated. He radicalizes Freud’s notion of the unconscious by grasping it as discursively structured. There is no brute, mindless desire in Lacan. Likewise, he rightly grasps the dynamic of intersubjective recognition as fundamental. 2/
Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic shares certain key features with the Hegelian-Sellarsian idea of “the space of reasons” - with the major caveat that Lacan lacks a robustly inferential account of the determinacy of conceptual content. He is held back by his structuralism. 3/
Structuralism tries to theorize the determinacy of the signifier strictly in terms of a relation of “negative difference” (i.e., “hot” is not “cold,” and vice versa) and reduces the signified to a “mental image.” This is a classically Bad Idea. 4/
The structuralist view already gives rise an image of language as a “prison-house,” and in Lacan, this metaphor is extended to encompass discourse and institutionality as such (“the big Other”). For Lacan, to be a speaker of a language is to be self-alienated, caught in a web. 5/
For Lacan, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” This is to say that all action and belief (all norm-bound activity) divides the subject into the conscious ego that believes it’s in control and the unconscious discursive constraints “really” behind the wheel. 6/
On this picture, the best one can hope for is recognition - through the therapeutic process - of the discourses by which I am constituted. But discourse as such (“the chain of signification”) remains, a priori, an alien constraint that impedes me from being “really” me. 7/
According to noted Lacanian Marxist David Cuéllar, Marx and Engels were right in their account of capitalist modernity but wrong to historicize and thus restrict the generality of that account. This is where Lacan comes in (in one, influential version of this story). 8/
According to Cuéllar, what Lacan enables us to see is that “proletarianization” is not just an effect of modernization restricted to wage labors. Rather, proletarianization is a function of the initiation into discourse as such. “Everyone in society is a proletarian.” 9/
There are, of course, different versions of this account, some of which are more “optimistic” (e.g. Zizek). But the least common denominator is the understanding of social self-externalization in language and action as constitutively self-alienated. 10/
The irony is that we have long had a powerful critique of this account, which is premised on an “asymptotic logic” of approaching some ideal of emancipation that can never be achieved. In 1807, Hegel diagnosed this Lacanian logic as that of the “unhappy consciousness.” 11/11
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