Psychoanalysis and Marxism: From Capitalist-All to Communist Non-All

Abstract

Current influential attempts to bring together psychoanalysis and Marxism turn on the question of how to critique and move beyond capitalism without reverting to a utopian notion of communism. Taking this question seriously, the article explores the implications of psychoanalytic categories such as the real, fantasy, jouissance, and the formulae of sexuation, for Marxian economics and politics. Rethinking Marxism in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article aims to formulate a post-phantasmatic relation to the economy of surplus, and from there, to offer a new ethico-political stance around exploitation and communism.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2005) 10, 79–97. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100028

Full text

Article
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MARXISM:
FROM CAPITALIST-ALL
TO COMMUNIST NON-ALL
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra
University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA
Correspondence: Yahya M Madra, Department of Economics, Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway,
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA
E-mail: ymadra@skidmore.edu
Abstract
Current influential attempts to bring together psychoanalysis and Marxism turn on the
question of how to critique and move beyond capitalism without reverting to a utopian
notion of communism. Taking this question seriously, the article explores the implications of
psychoanalytic categories such as the real, fantasy, jouissance, and the formulae of
sexuation, for Marxian economics and politics. Rethinking Marxism in conjunction with
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article aims to formulate a post-phantasmatic relation to the
economy of surplus, and from there, to offer a new ethico-political stance around
exploitation and communism.
Keywords
class; surplus-labor; sexuation; Marx; Zizek
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2005) 10, 79–97.
doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100028
Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Marxism
In ‘‘Psychoanalysis and Marxism,’’ Ernesto Laclau (1990, pp 93–96)
cautions against a prevalent misconception of treating psychoanalysis as
a supplemental framework to remedy the shortcomings of Marxism.
According to Laclau, the possibility of a theoretically meaningful dialogue
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 2005, 10, (79–97) c2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1088-0763/05 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs

between Marxism and psychoanalysis is predicated upon a ‘‘radical question-
ing’’ of the rationalist and historicist reflexes of the former. Only then, Laclau
argues, will we be in a position to discern the possible points of convergence
between Marxism and psychoanalysis that will enable us to establish the
theoretical common space for a ‘‘true dialogue.’’ Indeed, this is what Laclau
embarks upon in this brief yet groundbreaking essay. He begins with locating in
Marxian tradition those moments of encounter with contingency that disrupt
the discursive closures governed by the logic of economic determinism. In this
way, Laclau opens up a space within Marxism to introduce the relevant
psychoanalytic categories such as ‘‘the logic of the signifier’’ and ‘‘the
constitutivity of lack’’ in order to amplify and bring into full relief the
haunting presence of a negative political logic that resides in Marxism (Laclau,
1990, p 96). Nevertheless, Laclau’s brilliant deconstruction of the Marxian
tradition and its key concepts remains incomplete as he leaves the economic
categories of Marxism unreconstructed – an oversight which results, in our
opinion, in the disappearance of Marxian political economy in his works.
Once the positivist logic that binds such Marxian economic categories as
abstract-labor, class exploitation, and communism is dissolved, not only these
concepts, but also the economic analysis that makes use of these concepts are
abandoned.
In this essay, we address this theoretical lacuna as we find its political effects
to be rather disarming; especially for those of us who are intent on devising
psychoanalytically inflected social strategies to move beyond capitalism. While
a psychoanalytic critique cannot be simply added to an unreconstructed
Marxian political economy, neither should the latter be treated as some
irredeemably essentialist framework that must be discarded. In fact, psycho-
analysis will be able to approach the Marxian tradition as an interlocutor only if
it acknowledges class analysis and its political aspiration to move beyond the
hegemony of capitalism as a living research agenda.
1
To this end, we begin the
essay by presenting the particular class analysis we deploy and juxtaposing it to
Laclau’s general critique of Marxism that paradoxically restricts class to an
essentialist imaginary. In the sections that follow we gradually reclaim central
Marxian notions of class antagonism, exploitation, and communism, while
simultaneously rethinking them through a set of psychoanalytic categories such
as the real, social fantasy, jouissance, and the formulae of sexuation. In
rethinking class analysis in conjunction with psychoanalysis, we find the
possibilities of not only repeating Marx’s critique of the political economy of
capitalism, but also of reformulating communism as an axiom without
resorting to a utopian social ideal as its phantasmatic support (Zizek, 2000,
pp 19–20).
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
80
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

Rethinking class
From Laclauy
What accounts for the abandonment of class in the post-Marxism of Laclau?
This is a puzzling question given the fact that Laclau motivates his
deconstructive analysis of Marxism with the aim of recovering the ‘‘originary
meaning of the categories of this tradition’’ (Laclau, 1990, p 93). We believe
that a conflation of logics with conceptual objects underlies the oversight of
class (Diskin and Sandler, 1993), a tendency we also observe in other post-
foundational appropriations of Marxism. More often than not, the essentialist,
economic determinist logic that has come to order the basic concepts of
Marxian tradition in some of its skeins is regarded to be an inherent quality of
the concepts themselves. This is, for instance, what Laclau seems to suggest
when he disapproves of those scholars who in their analyses habitually invoke
class in addition to other identities:
What the speaker does not realise is that what she has enounced is something,
which is radically incompatible with the Marxist theory of classes. The
Marxist notion of ‘class’ can’t be incorporated into an enumerative chain of
identities [of gender, race, ethnicity, etc.], simply because it is supposed to be
the articulating core around which all identity is constituted [y] The term
‘class’, by becoming part of an enumerative chain, has lost its articulating role
without acquiring any new precise meaning. (Laclau, 2000, p 297)
It is as if class, now that it is demoted from its privileged status as the essence
of social identity, is forever condemned to the fate of a ‘‘floating signifier.’’ It
remains inherently incapable of being theoretically reconstituted. But why
should class as a category defy the resignification to which other signifiers are
subjected? Reading further in the same text, we come across a possible
explanation. ‘‘Late capitalism’’ does not only spawn ever newer non-class subject
positions, it also dissolves and renders politically irrelevant ‘‘the last remnants’’
of unified class identities, such as those of industrial workers, the peasants, and
the miners. This tendency is made clear in Laclau’s following assertion:
There are still remainders of full class identities in our worldFa mining
enclave, some backward peasant areas– but the main line of development
works in the opposite direction. (Laclau, 2000, p 301)
In this quote, we locate what we think underpins Laclau’s occlusion of class.
On the one hand, we spot Laclau in the unlikely position of staging the
rationalist problematic of class when he entertains, to our surprise, the
impossible scenario for class to actually ever exist as a ‘‘full’’ and self-constituted
identity. On the other hand, we find him falling into empiricism when he reads
off the contemporary irrelevance of such a rationalist political logic from the
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
81
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

disappearance of ‘‘actually existing’’ groups that once embodied class.
Conceivable only as a fully formed and transparent identity – either as a
former logic of articulation or a disappearing social group – class drops out of
Laclau’s analyses, as it cannot sit easily with the negative logic of the social.
Laclau’s critique then, insofar as it can only read in Marxism an essentialist
notion of class, forecloses the possibility to carry class along to the post-
foundational context as a viable economic concept. We embrace Laclau’s
theoretical investment to expose the essentialist strain within Marxism to the
extent that it was imperative to critique the politically stifling implications of
Marxian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, we think that, over time, the emphasis on the
class essentialist moments of Marxism has produced a perverse effect;
identifying class as nothing but an essence has precluded the possibility to
glean a totally different reading of class from within the Marxian tradition as
well as from Marx’s own writings. Thereby, it has perpetuated, in the mode of a
critique, the very essentialism it sought to discredit. Now we would like to turn
to a different reading of class.
yto Resnick and Wolff
Following Marxian economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff’s (1987)
anti-essentialist reading of Marx’s Capital, we define class as an economic
process that is comprised of two distinct moments: the moment of appropria-
tion of surplus-labor, when the presence and the form of exploitation are
figured, and the distributive moment, when the appropriated surplus-labor is
dispersed to a variety of social destinations. In describing class as a process,
rather than a self-constituted political identity governed by an economistic
logic, we render visible the ‘‘multifaceted forms of identifications’’ and
interventions that can relate to it (Callari, 1991, p 205). For us, a relation to
class is enacted whenever there is an effect stemming from the extent to or the
form in which surplus-labor is produced, appropriated, and distributed.
Hence, there are continuous attempts to institute class relations at sites as
diverse as households, universities, neighborhoods, highways, and unions, as
well as within transnational corporations. Similarly, class relations are shaped
by a variety of discourses (gender, political, legal, religious, ecological, as well as
economic) that interrupt and re-channel the existing flows of surplus-labor or
attend the production of qualitatively new ones. In turn, relations to class
processes sustain certain political identifications and cultural claims at the
expense of others, which are restricted from or completely deprived of accessing
the flows of surplus labor. However, unlike its rationalist counterpart, this
notion of class imparts no centralizing mechanism of identification or ordains
no behavioral predispositions to determinate forms of struggle. Similarly, in
departing from the empiricist problematic, class as a process assigns to the
subject no positive and stable predicates of class-belonging in terms of property,
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
82
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

income, occupation, or localities like the factories, migrant neighborhoods,
miner towns, and what not.
Furthermore, in presenting class as comprised of two separate moments, we
highlight the singularity of the distributive moment of class, which is generally
glossed over in traditional class analyses. Conventional approaches to Marxian
political economy primarily center on Volume 1 of Capital, where Marx writes
about the tendencies and conditions that surround the production and
appropriation of capitalist surplus value. Unfortunately, this uneven emphasis
has perpetuated a truncated reading of Marx that comes at the expense of
ignoring the detailed explorations in Volume 3, where the focus of analysis
shifts to the distributions of capitalist surplus value. Decentering ‘‘the
conception of class politics from the capital-labor relation’’ (Gibson-Graham
and O’Neill, 2001, p 63), this shift in focus expands the range of struggles over
class and brings into existence a wide variety of social actors and sites, to which
surplus-labor is and can potentially be dispensed, or from which it can be
withheld.
Introducing psychoanalysis
The significance of the concepts of necessary- and surplus-labor for
social theory
Marxian economics measures the value of commodities through the concept of
abstract labor-time, and the value of each commodity is determined by the
amount of living and dead labor that is socially necessary for producing it at a
given moment in time. Differentiating between living labor and dead labor,
Marx defines the former as that which begets more value, and deploys the latter
as the stand-in for the value of the means of production. Living labor is ‘‘living’’
in the sense that it adds to the mass of abstract-labor that exists in society.
Because ‘‘the conditions of reproduction of the economy are not reducible to the
reproduction of the individual labourers’’ (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, p 27),
because the sociality is always more (or less) than the aggregation of its
individual parts, in every mode of production the direct laborers will need to
perform more living labor (i.e., surplus-labor) than what is socially necessary for
reproducing their own immediate conditions of existence as laborers (i.e.,
necessary-labor).
The concept of abstract-labor is essential for us not because we deem it to be
the true measure or the irreducible substance of economic value.
2
Rather, we are
interested in abstract-labor, and the class analysis it makes possible, for its
theoretical effects and political implications. When we view the economy
through labor-time accounting, we see social interdependency formed in
relation to abstract-labor production and distribution instead of an aggregation
of rational individuals who are engaged in self-maximizing market exchanges,
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
83
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

as purported by neoclassical economic theory. Similarly, the split between
necessary- and surplus-labor is important for us as a discursive device to read
social interventions in terms of struggles over class processes. The distinction
allows us to politicize the economy around a classed understanding of social
conflict.
Let us take a closer look at this. For Marxian economics, neither the
respective quanta of necessary- and surplus-labor nor the potential destinations
of the appropriated surplus-labor could be determined a priori. Indeed, there is
no fixed and universally accepted way or logic of conducting and institutio-
nalizing the process of the performance, appropriation, and distribution of
surplus-labor. We perceive the numerous debates within Marxian literature over
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the relation between patriarchy and
capitalism, the articulation of the modes of production, the conceptual status of
the Asiatic mode of production, and the variations across different forms of
capitalism as attempts to grapple with this lack, to fix and distinguish among
the proper attributes and logics of class, and thereby, to temporarily stabilize it.
The fact that such debates remain largely unresolved, while continuing to recur
in different forms, attests to the impossibility of coming up with a neat
cartography for the multitude of class structures, and their defining conditions.
In fact, we think the very notion of class itself emerges as a consequence of
Marx’s repeated attempts to make sense of the changing forms of economic
organizations that existed side by side in the long process of the so-called
‘‘transition from feudalism to capitalism.’’ To argue otherwise and assert that
Marx constructed the concepts of class analysis exclusively through his focus on
capitalism (and then applied them retroactively to ‘‘pre-capitalism’’) would be to
neglect how Marx persistently studied, theorized, and compared with one
another the different economic forms (feudalism, primitive communism, simple
commodity production, capitalism) before he arrived at the concept of class. In
this precise sense, we consider ‘‘class’’ to be the ‘‘concrete universal’’ of the
Marxian tradition (Zizek, 1999, pp 101–102); while ‘‘class’’ as a concept
emerges out of Marx’s analyses of its variegated concrete manifestations, it
always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms.
It is this very absence of a pre-constituted/pre-given guideline that turns the
division of the living labor into its necessary- and surplus-labor components
(e.g. the extraction of surplus) and the distribution of the surplus into the loci of
hegemonic struggle. In fact, isn’t this splitting of living labor into its necessary-
and surplus-labor components another way of suggesting that ‘‘society does not
exist’’ (Laclau, 1990, pp 89–92)? Just as the subject and the social are never
given, but continually formatted in hegemonic struggles, what is ‘‘necessary’’
and what is ‘‘surplus,’’ as well as the distributions of the latter, are not set in
stone, but always negotiated and struggled over. Ironically, Marxian political
economy, with its distinction between necessary- and surplus-labor that installs
instability at the heart of economic analysis, has always already been
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
84
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

conceptually aware of the post-Marxist theoretical insight pertaining to ‘‘the
impossibility of society.’’
‘‘There is no class relation’’
To argue that living labor is constitutively split compels us to let go of the naive
belief in the possibility of a non-antagonistic and harmonious way of organizing
and regulating the processes of production, appropriation, and distribution of
surplus. In other words, Slavoj Zizek’s translation of the Lacanian formula
regarding the impossibility of sexual relationship into the context of class
analysis quite appropriately summarizes the unhappy predicament of those who
engage in the production and distribution of economic value: ‘‘There is no class
relation’’ (Zizek, 1989, p 126, 1990, p 251, 1998, p 81). We understand this
formula not to mean that there are no concrete class structures, but that any
attempt by participants in the class process (those who occupy the different class
positions of the performer, appropriator, distributor, or recipient of surplus-
labor) to institute a ‘‘normal’’ way of organizing class is bound to fail.
Here, we see the relevance of calling upon the psychoanalytic category of the
real in order to encircle the irreducible status of class antagonism: class
antagonism qua real does not refer to the particular antagonisms between the
serf and the lord, the proletariat and the capitalist, the slave and the master, or
any distributor and recipient of surplus. Rather, class antagonism is the very
impossibility of achieving an ideal class structure that can ultimately fix the
struggles over living labor:
[T]o grasp the notion of antagonism in its most radical dimension, we should
invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the external enemy
who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity
is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external
enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or
‘externalize’ this intrinsic, immanent impossibility. (Zizek, 1990, p 252)
The real of class antagonism, therefore, refers to the very impossibility of
instituting a class formation that would designate the quantum and the various
destinations of surplus-labor once and for all. In fact, various concrete
configurations of class positions (the lord and the serf, the employer and the
employee, and so on) are socially invented in order to make up for the non-
existence of the class relation. Each and every concrete classed site (a capitalist
corporation, a slave plantation, a feudal household, or a worker-owned
cooperative) is a complex assemblage of social devices, such as legal
constellations, cultural identifications, technologies of production and labor
management, accounting practices, social norms, and political ideologies.
Through these social inventions or institutional devices, concrete communities
try to make up for the absence of a set of rules that would realize a smoothly
functioning class relation. We propose to read the totality of the social
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
85
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

conditions of in/existence of each form of appropriation of surplus to be
structured like a contradictory fantasy formation.
3
Put differently, each concrete
class structure, even a particular class antagonism like the one between the
‘‘bosses’’ and the ‘‘workers,’’ is ‘‘already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defense’ formation, an
attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacifyy) the trauma of class
antagonism’’ (Zizek, 1998, p 81).
Taking jouissance into account
Nevertheless, such domestication can never be fully accomplished. Sooner or
later, the real will always erupt and lead to the dissolution of a particular
configuration of the social order. This return of the real, however, should not be
imagined as an exogenous shock that undermines the smooth functioning of the
system. Rather, the destructive forces of the real emerge from within: the
Lacanian subject is the subject of jouissance and will do everything to make sure
‘‘to sustain and advance’’ her ‘‘particular relationship to enjoyment’’ (McGo-
wan, 2004, p 3); the subject will ‘‘sacrifice anything and everything (even life
itself) for [that] particular Thing’’ (p 5). This is the logic of what Freud called the
death drive, and we will return below to explore how it figures in the context of
capitalist competition.
However, precisely because the subject is a subject of jouissance, and not a
subject of rational calculation, this possibility of dissolution should not be
overstated. To begin with, we have to assert that there are no pure ‘‘economic
interests’’ that are not caught up within, shaped by, and colored with the smear
of jouissance. In fact, as class analysts, we find it necessary to take into account
the psychic ‘‘investments’’ and fantasy scenarios that organize and impart
coherence to the identifications of these classed subjects:
ypsychoanalysis [clarifies] the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the
payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for serving the Master. This
jouissance, of course, always emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the
crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to ‘traverse
the fantasy’ which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached
to the MasterFmakes us accept the framework of the social relationship of
domination. (Zizek, 1997, p 48)
By foregrounding the economy of jouissance, by taking into account the
particular ways in which classed subjects may also be implicated in the
reproduction of the relations of exploitation, psychoanalysis reminds us that the
dissemination of the knowledge of class exploitation in itself (e.g., the righteous
attitude of ‘‘Speaking truth to power’’) can seldom be enough to occasion class
transformation. Something extra, something that takes into account the
libidinal economy, something akin to what Zizek calls ‘‘the traversal of
fantasy,’’seems to be necessary to occasion deliberate social transformation that
will enable us to break into the future.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
86
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

Up to this point, we have argued that ‘‘class’’ should be conceptualized as the
process of performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-labor and
that there is no ‘‘normal’’ way of instituting it. Moreover, rather than tacking
particular modes of subjectivity onto a pre-constituted class structure, we have
maintained that particular modes of subjectivity and formations of fantasy
constitute the class structure. Yet, we have also argued that all attempts at
‘‘fixing’’ class are bound to fail. In what follows, we argue that there are two
distinct modalities of failure. In other words, we will ‘‘sexuate’’ the multiple
ways in which communities organize their relation to surplus. In doing so, our
aim is to formulate a feminine ethics of ‘‘non-all’’ that will enable us to move
beyond the capitalist present and its masculine logic of ‘‘all.’’
Exploitation as the exception
Masculine universe of the capitalist corporation
The status of surplus appropriation as the constitutive exception of the
capitalist-all is perhaps best elucidated in the passages on the joint-stock
company in Volume 3 of Capital, where Marx, avant la lettre, deconstructs the
‘‘profit’’ of the ‘‘modern’’ capitalist enterprise. In these extraordinarily potent
passages, Marx argues that with the advent of financial capital, the capitalist
‘‘entrepreneur’’ has dissolved into various functions that are now provided by
distinct entities. The capitalist no longer needs to be the manager, the
accountant, the marketing agent, and so on; it is possible to hire people who
could accomplish these tasks. Neither does the capitalist need to be the owner of
capital; capital can be borrowed from financial institutions or can be raised
through selling shares in the stock market. As the role, the justification, and the
need for ‘‘the capitalist’’ evaporates,
[p]rofit thus appears as simply the appropriation of other people’s surplus
labour, arising from the transformation of means of production into capital;
i.e., from their estrangement vis-a
`-vis the actual producer; from their
opposition, as the property of another, vis-a
`-vis all individuals really active
in production from the manager down to the lowest day-labourer. (Marx,
1894, 1991, p 568; emphasis added)
Note that the ‘‘all’’ in this paragraph refers not only to the direct laborers but
also to all the recipients of surplus (‘‘from the manager down to the lowest day-
labourer’’). The universal set of all that is subsumed under the ‘‘capitalist’’
enterprise is constituted by an exception, an entity that enjoys ‘‘other people’s
surplus’’ but gives nothing in return. To use the Lacanian language of the
masculine logic, the moment of appropriation, distilled into a purified form
under the capitalist joint-stock company, is the exception to the law of
‘‘exchange of equivalents’’ to which all other constituents of the capitalist class
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
87
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

structure (‘‘all individuals really active’’) are subjected (Lacan, 1975, 1998, pp
64–89; for useful discussions of formulae of sexuation, see Copjec, 1994, pp
201–236; Fink, 1995, pp 98–125; Zizek, 1999, pp 273–306; Zupancic, 2000,
pp 282–296).
Without doubt, even under capitalism, there is still an infinite number of ways
in which the appropriated surplus can be put into use. Nevertheless, the infinite
here is a product of a limit, a ‘‘provided that’’ that prohibits the questioning of
the status of the constitutive exception (Zupancic, 2000, p 285). In other words,
‘‘provided that’’ the reproduction of the exploitative form of appropriation is
not jeopardized, ‘‘the capitalist system’’ will be ready to negotiate the
distribution of surplus to any recipient. Many different social agencies strive
to receive a cut of the surplus (including the performers of surplus, the workers),
and to this end, they need to struggle with one another and, on occasion, justify
their ‘‘necessity’’ for the continued existence of the capitalist form of extraction
and distribution of surplus value. This capitalist-all frames the field within
which a whole range of ‘‘competitive battles’’ takes place (Ruccio and
Amariglio, 2003, pp 239–244). The agencies of these competitive battles could
be different recipients of surplus distributions within a corporation, different
corporations (within and across industries), different forms of capital
(industrial, financial, and merchant), and even nation-states. To this long list
we can easily add the ‘‘class conflict’’ between ‘‘labor’’ and ‘‘capital.’’ To the
extent that it is centered on securing a ‘‘cut’’ of the surplus value without
challenging the ‘‘provided that’’ status of capitalist appropriation, even this
conflict cannot escape being caught up within the libidinal economy of
capitalist-all.
What, then, are the aspects of the libidinal economy of capitalist-all? Zizek is
fond of reminding us that Lacan modeled his notion of surplus-enjoyment – and
objet petit a as its embodiment – after the Marxian notion of surplus value
(Zizek, 1989, pp 49–53). The surplus, framed by the capitalist universe with its
constitutive exception, becomes the object cause of desire for each and every
subject of this capitalist-all: from the worker who demands a union premium
(efficiency wage) to the executive manager who demands a bonus. Within
this space, in the shape of endless struggles over surplus, we find ‘‘an
infinite movement of the desire within a finite, delimited frame’’ (Zupancic,
2000, p 289).
This homology between the logic of desire and the logic of capitalist
accumulation has recently been explored (Stavrakakis, 2000, 2003; Glynos,
2001; McGowan, 2004). For instance, Yannis Stavrakakis has argued that the
‘‘capitalist market economy’’ is predicated upon a particular libidinal economy:
‘‘ylack and negativity are inscribed within the social circuit of the dominant
individualist, consumerist culture regulating social relationships. [y] Negativ-
ity and the constitutive lack that it creates are related to the lack of particular
products; to a lack, in other words, that can be alleviated through consumption.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
88
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

Alleviated yes, but not satisfied. However, this non-satisfaction is actually
essential in perpetuating desire, and thus sustaining the consumerist circuit of
late capitalism’’ (Stavrakakis, 2003, p 60). The realization of surplus value is
indeed predicated upon the sale of the commodities, and the logic of desire
provides a meaningful frame to understand how ‘‘from product to product,
from purchase to purchase, from fantasy to fantasy,’’ (p 60) administration of
enjoyment has become constitutive of capitalism.
Nevertheless, for our purposes, because our emphasis is on the spheres of
production and distribution (loci of class struggles) rather than the sphere of
consumption (the realization of surplus value), we also find it useful to
introduce the logic of drive into the picture.
4
Unlike desire that moves from one
object to another, drive finds satisfaction in its repetitive circular movement.
According to Zizek, the circular loop of the drive closes on itself ‘‘the moment
when, in our engagement in a purposeful activity (activity directed towards
some goal), the way towards this goal, the gestures we make to achieve it, start
to function as a goal in itself, as its own aim, as something that brings its own
satisfaction’’ (Zizek, 1999, p 304). To see how the notion of drive figures in our
analysis, it will be enough to recall the well-known theme of political economy,
the qualitative change in the tonality of economic activity occasioned by the
transition from simple commodity exchange (C-M-C) to the expansion of value
(M-C-M0). The social agencies that circulate around the capitalist surplus – to
the extent that they struggle over the surplus with the aim of expansion of value
(M-C-M0), but not some other achievable goal – could be said to be caught up in
the deadly circuit of drive, willing to ‘‘sacrifice anything and everything’’ for
‘‘more’’:
Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the
capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the
unceasing movement of profit-making. (Marx, 1867, 1990, p 254)
The emphasis is on the passive voice (caught up) precisely because these
subjects of capitalist-all, in so far as they are to remain in business qua
profit-making enterprises, are compelled to struggle with one another for
surplus – even if this will mean going out of business (Cullenberg, 1994).
Nevertheless, contrary to what the fantasy scenario of ‘‘invisible hand’’ suggests,
these micro-level battles do not aggregate to macro-level regularities. Instead, at
the macro-level we have nothing but endogenous crisis tendencies that disrupt
the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy.
However, one should not rush to find the undoing of the capitalist-all in these
crisis tendencies. We have already established that the ‘‘competitive battles’’
listed above, to the extent that they do not question the exceptional status of the
‘‘something for nothing,’’ are all part of the ‘‘spectacle’’ of capitalism that
fascinates us. Even the mad dance of capitalist competition, the limitless
movement of capital, is yet another way of avoiding the negativity at the core of
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
89
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

the class process, namely the very absence of a ‘‘normal’’ way of instituting
class.
Beyond bourgeois morality
Marx’s point, then, in deconstructing the capitalist profit into its various social
functions, is to render ‘‘the capitalist’’ as an empty and senseless entity that has
nothing to give, and as such is not needed for the reproduction of the
community. By strategically marking the exceptional status of the capitalist
appropriator as completely unfounded, Marx exposes the violation residing at
the heart of the capitalist law of equal exchange: within the sphere of circulation
everyone is considered to be equal, but once one moves into the ‘‘hidden abode
of production,’’ the discourse of equality evaporates into thin air (Marx, 1867,
1990, pp 279–280). In the Marxian canon, this scandalous suspension of the
bourgeois order of formal (market) equality is nothing but the moment of
exploitation. This understanding of exploitation provides the background for a
‘‘social theft’’ formulation of Marxian ethics: ‘‘Some individuals ‘steal’ the
surplus-labor (or its fruits) from those who have produced it’’ (Wolff and
Resnick, 1987, p 125). Marx’s method of critique directed at the capitalist order
is analogous to one of the possible strategies discussed in Lacanian discourse as
a way of ‘‘crossing over the fantasy.’’ That is, one can argue that by making the
bourgeois order confront its exception, Marx’s critique in effect compels
bourgeois law to shed its constitutive lie and to identify with its ‘‘inherent
transgression’’ in the realm of production – which, of course, will also entail its
complete dissolution.
Seen in this light, the definition of exploitation as social theft is a successful
stab at the capitalist fantasy of equality (each factor of production, such as
labor, capital and land, receiving back their fair share, namely the ‘‘marginal
product’’ that they contribute to social production) and individual rights.
However, the subversive potential of such a strategy in terms of undoing the
hold of capitalist fantasy is not without its drawbacks. The act of exposing the
obscene (transgressive) supplement of the law may very well run the risk of
reinstating the very masculine logic that it seeks to repudiate.
In fact, many within the Marxian tradition have interpreted Marx’s critique
of capitalist exploitation in a way that has led to the prevalent conceptualization
of communism as a social system that is organized by the simple inversion of the
capitalist law. Through invoking a variant of the Lockean notion of the right to
the ownership of the fruits of one’s own labor, such interpretations in effect call
for the substitution of the capitalists by the new and ‘‘rightful’’ appropriators of
surplus value, namely the formerly exploited wage laborers (for a survey of
recent Marxian debates on ‘‘class justice,’’ see DeMartino, 2003).
It is not difficult to see how such a remedy for the social injustices of capitalist
exploitation can boil down to reinstituting the bourgeois morality of equality
and individual rights in the form of communism. From our psychoanalytic point
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
90
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

of view, we find ourselves dismayed with this particular understanding of
communism, since such an understanding is still too close to the fantasy
scenario that informs the capitalist-all. To begin with, it reinscribes the
capitalistic economy of jouissance in relation to the surplus as a thing to be
possessed. A corollary conviction is that the laboring individual would recover
an idealized relation with herself and with her constitutive exterior if only the
direct laborers reclaimed that which was always deservedly theirs, namely the
surplus value.
Rather than locating the real of class antagonism in the very impossibility of
achieving an ideal class structure that can ultimately ‘‘fix’’ the struggles over
‘‘living labor,’’ Lockean morality seems to resurrect the utopian/ideological
notion of communism. In contrast, we believe that communism needs to be
thought of as inaugurating a new mode of subjectivity, a different ethico-
ontological ground, that moves beyond and dissolves the hegemony of the
categories of bourgeois economics (the individual, proprietorship, and equality)
and at the same time reconfigures the relation of social agents to surplus value.
In what follows, we speculate on what this new ethics of communism might
look like by extending and generalizing Marx’s critique of the arbitrary and
empty, yet constitutive, status of capitalist appropriation.
The axiom of communism
Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme
We believe that Marx himself was steering towards a conceptualization of
communism as a new mode of relating to the void of appropriation, and
thereby, to surplus, when, in Capital, he desubstantialized the entity of capitalist
appropriation in regard to any concrete social functions and, hence, dynamited
the symbolic efficiency of the capitalist law. We see the seeds of such a
formulation of communism in his famous Critique of the Gotha Programme
(Marx, 1875, 1966; for similar readings, see Hindess and Hirst, 1975; Resnick
and Wolff, 2002; Gibson-Graham, 2003). In his critique, Marx launches a
devastating attack on the predominant communist morality underpinning the
Programme of the German Worker’s Party. Specifically, Marx dissects in great
detail the opening party statement that ‘‘the proceeds of labor belong
undiminished with equal right to all members of society,’’ and he regards this
formulation as a remnant of the bourgeois ideology of equal exchange:
‘‘To all members of society’’? To those who don’t work as well? What remains
then of the ‘‘undiminished’’ proceeds of labor? Only to those members of
society who work? What remains then of the ‘‘equal right’’ of all members of
society?
But ‘‘all members of society’’ and ‘‘equal right’’ are obviously mere phrases.
The kernel consists in this, that in this communist society every worker must
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
91
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

receive the ‘‘undiminished’’ Lassallean ‘‘proceeds of labor.’’ (Marx, 1875,
1966, pp 6–7)
Embarking on a deconstructive analysis similar to that to which capitalist
profit was submitted in Volume 3, Marx goes to great pains to strike at the
hollowness of the assertion that workers have rights over the whole proceeds of
their labor. To do this, he unpacks the notion of ‘‘undiminished proceeds’’
enumerating in detail the necessary deductions from ‘‘the total social product’’
that will inevitably diminish the portion that is supposed to go back to the
workers. These deductions include the replacement of the means of production
used up, an additional portion for the expansion of production, reserve or
insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural
calamities, the general cost of administration not belonging to production, the
social fund intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools,
health services, and funds for those unable to work, and so forth. One should
refrain from reading these social expenditures that Marx lists as a positive
prescription of what Marx thinks communism should look like. Rather, we
approach the enumeration of these successive social expenses as a negative
discursive strategy that Marx employs in order to defamiliarize a predominant
understanding of communism which is all too readily equated to worker
ownership of surplus. In contrast, Marx’s description of communist society
betrays an uncanny resemblance to the feminine logic of non-all: neither is there
a ‘‘provided that,’’ nor is the list completed, finalizedFit tolerates addition and
subtraction.
In order to elucidate the difference between the capitalist ‘‘all’’ and the
communist ‘‘non-all,’’ it may be useful to devote some more consideration to
Marx’s mode of exposition in each occasion. When describing the joint-stock
company in the passage quoted earlier, Marx begins with positing the exception
to the series (the capitalist appropriator) and situates the rest (as an ‘‘all’’)
against this exception. In contrast, when describing his vision of communist
society, Marx begins with enumerating a number of social expenses only to
arrive eventually at the means of consumption that are distributed to ‘‘the
individual producers in the co-operative’’ (p 8). But, Marx does not quite stop at
this point, and moves to question the criterion that is to regulate this ‘‘final’’
distribution. We regard the principle, ‘‘[f]rom each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs,’’ that Marx invokes here (p 10) as his final stab at
those attempts that seek to preserve the value equivalence between what the
individual worker contributes to society in terms of labor-time and what she is
to receive back in the form of means of consumption. As such, the latter is no
longer an exception but just another item within a truly infinite set. While the
capitalist-all does constitute an ‘‘all’’ at the expense of an exception, the number
of social expenses that are to be deducted from the total social product fails to
constitute an ‘‘all.’’
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
92
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

From psychic letting go to social reclaiming
In these passages, we find a Marx that traverses the Lockean fantasy that
organizes our relationship towards surplus qua objet petit a. When he
enumerates the series of social expenses one by one and refuses to impose an
exception that would condition the list, we find a Marx that lets go of the
surplusyThe relation to surplus that Marx describes in these passages is
neither one of desire (for surplus qua lost object) nor one of deadly drive (for the
expansion of value). In this sense, we read Marx’s Critique as an invitation to
communists to re-orient their relation to surplus, to traverse the fantasy of
‘‘fixing’’ class. But how can we concretize this vision? How could it inform
concrete political struggles today?
To begin with, we should refrain from defining communism as a social utopia
that promises to deliver what the bourgeois program of equality has failed to
achieve. Why should we turn communism into an unrealizable ideal, an
unachievable end point, a utopian destination, that promises to accomplish
something that no conceivable social order – let alone bourgeois – can ever
fulfill? Why should we burden the communist project with such an unattainable
task of delivering the impossible fullness of community?
In contrast, we propose to define communism explicitly as a starting
point, a principle, an axiom that asserts that no one can have exclusive rights
over the dispatching of the surplus.
5
An important condition of possibility of
this social reclaiming of surplus is precisely its psychic letting go. Blatant
presumptuousness that makes exploitation possible will become perceivable
only if we let go of the idea that the right to enjoy surplus can be exclusive. This
is what we mean by traversing the fantasy in the context of class
transformation.
Once this shift in perspective is achieved, it would become possible for us to
assert the axiom of communism on each occasion when communist class
structures are being instituted, rendering each concrete communism always
inconsistent and ultimately a failed attempt. In fact, we think that the axiom of
communism is already addressed in many of the decisions of collective
enterprises that pertain to the division of labor, business expansion, use of
workspace, remuneration, and distribution. In some cases of worker coopera-
tives, for instance, decisions are rigorously debated and assumed with reference
to a contestable notion of ‘‘fairness’’ that implicates not only the existing and
potential members, but also the broader community (Byrne and Healy, 2003).
In fact, such cooperatives are distinguished from others by their fidelity to a
‘‘politics of antagonism’’ (Byrne and Healy, 2003) and commitment to an
‘‘ethical economy’’ (Gibson-Graham, 2003). For us, such characterizations of
collective enterprises are intimately linked to the question of whether and to
what extent the axiom of communism is exercised over the appropriation and
distribution of communal surplus.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
93
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

Equally important though is to hold up the axiom of communism against the
capitalist-all, that is, on each occasion when someone or some social group
claims his/her/their right to participate in the negotiation of the capitalist
surplus. Since there is nothing inherently wrong about surplus, it is possible to
make use of it for purposes that do not necessarily reproduce the capitalist-all.
In fact, such acts of reclaiming are always happening within contemporary
capitalist formations. Whenever governments levy taxes on corporate profits to
finance public services, or whenever ecological movements force corporations to
clean up, the surplus is socially reclaimed.
While it is quite tempting to read these ‘‘acts of reclaiming’’ to be in the
service of an enlightened and ‘‘green’’ capitalist-all, the struggle, as we see it, is
precisely over how these acts are socially signified. In the absence of a counter-
hegemonic nodal point, these disparate ‘‘acts of reclaiming’’ could indeed easily
be co-opted by the capitalist-all. We believe that the axiom of communism could
serve as a useful counter-hegemonic nodal point that would impart a ‘‘surplus’’
meaning to each and every act of reclaiming. Overdetermined by the axiom of
communism, each act of reclaiming will have at least two meanings: on the one
hand, it will be a particular act of reclaiming with a concrete goal, and on the
other hand, it will be a particular instance of the universal contestation of the
exception of appropriation that sustains the capitalist-all.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the participants at the 2003 Fifth Annual University of
South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference for their welcoming
reception of an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks are due to Lynne
Layton for issuing the invitation for this contribution,to Julie Graham and Jack
Amariglio for their generosity, guidance, and intellectual support, to Todd
McGowan for pushing our thinking further, to Kenan Erc¸el, Maliha Safri, Burak
Bener, and our friends at the Subjects of Economy study group, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst for making the paper possible. We also thank the
editors, Lynne Layton and Simon Clarke, for their helpful comments and
criticisms.
About the author
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk is completing her dissertation, ‘‘Class Politics of Social
Movements and Community,’’ at the Department of Economics, University of
Massachusetts Amherst.
Yahya M. Madra teaches economics at Skidmore College and is currently
completing a dissertation on the dualism of subject and structure in economic
theory, at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
94
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

Notes
1 A vibrant vein within the research agenda of rethinking Marxian political economy is the prolific
work coming out of the Amherst School, institutionalized around the journal Rethinking Marxism
(see, for instance, Resnick and Wolff, 1987; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Gibson-Graham et al, 2000,
2001; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg, 2003).
2 The Marxian labor theory of value is often critiqued for essentializing labor and production at the
expense of other possible factors that may also contribute to the formation of value. A growing
literature on socially contingent labor theory of value counters these criticisms without jettisoning
the concept of abstract-labor. Rather than casting the category of abstract-labor as the objective and
ultimate determinant of commodity values, the literature takes abstract-labor as the suturing point in
the overdetermination of values by market demand and capitalist competition (Wolff et al, 1982;
Biewener, 1998; Kristjanson-Gural, 2003).
3 If, as Zizek argues, ‘‘the social reality itself [is] an escape from some traumatic, real kernel’’ (Zizek,
1989, p 45; emphasis added), then the psychoanalytic notion of social fantasy is neither the negation
of what we consider to be social reality nor a mere subset of it. Rather, structured like a fantasy
formation, social reality is a heterogeneous and contradictory multitude of social inventions,
pragmatics, and devices that protects (as it constructs) communities from confronting the multiple
manifestations of the real (including, but not only, class antagonism).
4 Without doubt, the logic of drive may even be useful in the context of consumption: What if the
source of jouissance for the subject is the act of shopping as such? Barbara Kruger’s well-known
‘‘Untitled (I shop therefore I am)’’ (1987) could be read to suggest that we may have begun to derive
jouissance from the act of shopping itself.
5 In using the notion of axiom, we are inspired by Alain Badiou’s (1999) formulation. We find Copjec’s
reading of Badiou to be helpful: ‘‘ythe adoption of the axiom of equality ensures that we will not be
indifferent to the consequences of our actions, but will seek to protect the equality of all through
political actionyBadiou’s axiom does not project an image of a just society as one where conflict
would or could ultimately be resolved, where dissent, in effect, would be silenced and everyone
would know his or her place’’ (Copjec, 2002, p 175).
References
Badiou, A. (1999). Philosophy and Politics. Radical Philosophy 96, pp. 29–32.
Biewener, C. (1998). Socially Contingent Value. In Bellofiore R. (ed.) Marxian Economics:
A Reappraisal, Vol. 2, Price, Profits, and Dynamics. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp.
57–69.
Byrne, K.and Healy, S. (2003). Working in the Gap: Co-operative Subjectivity, Democracy,
and Negativity. Intervention at the Marxism and the World Stage Conference.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 6–8 November.
Callari, A. (1991). Economic Subjects and the Shape of Politics. Review of Radical Political
Economics 23 (1/2), pp. 201–207.
Chakrabarti, A. and Cullenberg, S. (2003). Transition and Development in India. New
York: Routledge.
Copjec, J. (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Copjec, J. (2002). Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Cullenberg, S. (1994). The Falling Rate of Profit: Recasting the Marxian Debate. London:
Pluto Press.
DeMartino, G. (2003). Realizing Class Justice. Rethinking Marxism 15 (1), pp. 1–32.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
95
Psychoanalysis and Marxism

Diskin, J. and Sandler, B. (1993). Essentialism and the Economy in the Post-Marxist
Imaginary: Reopening the Sutures. Rethinking Marxism 6 (3), pp. 28–48.
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique
of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class.
Critical Sociology 29 (2), pp. 123–161.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. and O’Neill, P. (2001). Exploring a New Class Politics of
the Enterprise. In Gibson-Graham J.K., Resnick S. and Wolff R. (eds.) Re/presenting
Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
pp. 56–80.
Gibson-Graham, J.K.,Resnick, S. and Wolff, R. (eds.) (2000). Class and Its Others.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, J.K.,Resnick, S. and Wolff, R. (eds.) (2001). Re/presenting Class: Essays
in Postmodern Marxism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Glynos, J. (2001). ‘There is no Other of the Other’: Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic
Faith. Paragraph 24 (2), pp. 78–110.
Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. (1975). Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production.. London: RKP.
Kristjanson-Gural, D. (2003). Demand and the (Re)distribution of Value: An Over-
determined Approach. Rethinking Marxism 15 (1), pp. 117–140.
Lacan, J. (1975, 1998). The Seminar. Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The
Limits of Love and Knowledge, (translated by B. Fink). New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Laclau, E. (1990). New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso.
Laclau, E. (2000). Constructing Universality. In Butler J., Laclau E. and Zizek S. (eds.)
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London:
Verso, pp. 281–307.
McGowan, T. (2004). The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society
of Enjoyment. Albany: SUNY Press.
Marx, K. (1875, 1966). Critique of the Gotha Programme. New York: International
Publishers.
Marx, K. (1867, 1990). Capital Vol. 1, (translated by B. Fowkes). Harmondsworth:
Penguin/NLR.
Marx, K. (1894, 1991). Capital Vol. 3, (translated by D. Fernbach). Harmondsworth:
Penguin/NLR.
Resnick, S. and Wolff, R. (1987). Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political
Economy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Resnick, S. and Wolff, R. (2002). Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism
in the USSR. London: Routledge.
Ruccio, D. and Amariglio, J. (2003). Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stavrakakis, Y. (2000). On the Critique of Advertising Discourse: A Lacanian View. Third
Text 51, pp. 85–91.
Stavrakakis, Y. (2003). Re-Activating the Democratic Revolution: The Politics of
Transformation Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism. Parallax 9 (2), pp. 56–71.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
96
Ceren O
¨zselc¸uk and Yahya M. Madra

Wolff, R. and Resnick, S. (1987). Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wolff, R.,Roberts, B. and Callari, A. (1982). Marx’s (not Ricardo’s) Transformation
Problem: A Radical Reconceptualization. History of Political Economy 14 (4), pp. 564–
582.
Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1990). Beyond Discourse-Analysis. In Laclau E. (ed.) New Reflections on the
Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, pp. 249–260.
Zizek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1998). Four Discourses, Four Subjects. In Zizek S. (ed.) Cogito and the
Unconscious, Sic 2. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 74–113.
Zizek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (2000). The Fragile Absolute. London: Verso.
Zupancic, A. (2000). The Case of the Perforated Sheet. In Salecl R. (ed.) Sexuation, Sic 3.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 282–296.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
97
Psychoanalysis and Marxism