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The Marx through Lacan Vocabulary: A Compass for Libidinal and Political Economies
This essay offers a critical analysis of the literature on decolonization (and its correlates), from the studies carried out by colonial agents and administrators to the recent vogue for postcolonial and decolonial studies. It highlights the limitations of the top-down approach of most studies up to the 1970s, the binarism that has characterized contemporary studies, and the conceptual ambivalence as well as marketing perspective that distinguish the decolonial approach. Lastly, it considers the idea of using the conceptual framework of creolization studies and the ideas of Oswald de Andrade on anthropophagy to get a better understanding of decolonization.
This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or "practical solipsism" of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan "with" the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.
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