According to Kolya Ludwig’s letter “Retreating from the Subject,” my critique of Slavoj Žižek dispenses with his “political conclusions without addressing the deeper problem of enjoyment and its relationship to the social order.” Enjoyment consists not in the attainment of the object of desire but in the repeated failure to do so. The fact that the commodity never satisfies our desire is the very way through which we are libidinally attached to capitalism. In my article, I fully acknowledge the validity of this psychoanalytic point when I write that the dynamic of “inconsistency and impossibility is true…for the individual subject.” However, when we move beyond this individual level, we encounter the social totality that circumscribes the validity of this psychoanalytic insight. When we are dealing with the structure of class struggle, the negativity of enjoyment has to be articulated with other practical categories dealing with political exigencies. Ludwig tends to ignore the necessity of this articulation. For instance, they say that the Hegelian-psychoanalytic method doesn’t “try to surpass contradiction.” Instead, it tries “to sustain it (to derive enjoyment from it).” That’s why “perhaps our task should be, at least in part, to fantasize a society with more interesting contradictions.” This task, when not circumscribed by the pressure of the social totality, can lead to an absurd politics.
In his book Universality and Identity Politics, Todd McGowan, an author whom Ludwig cites, produces a sweeping dismissal of 20th century upheavals as “the story of the egalitarian revolution gone awry.” He thinks that communist revolutions failed “because of their fundamental misconception about what universality was.” They conceived of universality as a project of total belonging, where there should be no possibility of a gap or lack. McGowan revises the misperception of these communists by declaring that universality consists only in non-belonging, in the failure to gain a sense of wholeness. Since the old revolutionaries of the 20th century failed to comprehend this psychoanalytic insight, they ended up creating the “formula for the gulag.” In Enjoyment Right and Left, McGowan continues with this inflated use of psychoanalysis by propounding a universal principle: “When one enjoys power, one enjoys giving it up.” This principle is then used to explain various historical events: “When we look at the catastrophic decisions of political leaders in modern world history – Robespierre’s turn against Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, Lincoln’s policy of appeasement with the white South, Lenin’s appointment of Stalin as General Secretary, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, or Putin’s war in Ukraine, just to name a few – it becomes clear that those in power do not enjoy retaining their power.”
McGowan exemplifies the idealist tendency present within an overweening psychoanalytic method. The failure of revolutions is explained by their lack of comprehension of universality; successful revolutionaries are those who have imbibed the correct theoretical knowledge of universality. Power shifts are caused not by a multitude of global and local factors but by the desire of leaders to sabotage themselves. In this way, politics is reduced to the level of the individual, to the libidinal workings of the subject. This is inevitable if we only ask what psychoanalysis can contribute to politics. Psychoanalyst Gabriel Tupinamba remarks that this standpoint is focused on the “unilateral contribution” that psychoanalysis can make to politics: “politics is thought from the standpoint of psychoanalysis: there is nothing of the analytic practice or theory at stake in this contribution; the object of intervention – political practice – is localized outside of the analytic domain.” In other words, politics become an inferior domain that can only function as an object of psychoanalysis. As Tupinamba notes, “psychoanalysis is always present as the place from which one thinks, never as what is given to be thought.” In order to localize psychoanalysis as a field of thinking with its own limits, we need to start not with the subject but with the dynamic totality that is constituted by class struggle. This is indeed a form of Marxism that retreats from the centrality of subjectivity. But it is my wager that only a subject-less Marxism can reveal how both psychoanalysis and politics are relatively autonomous fields capable of influencing each other in constructive ways. If we don’t undertake this endeavor, we will end up with the theoretical arrogance that presides over Žižek’s declarations on politics.
-Yanis Iqbal
