Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

1. Though we often think of Aristotle as the more democratic thinker because he foregrounds political struggle in his philosophy and thereby confines economy to the household in a way that Plato does not, he cannot conceive of a society without slaves, whereas Plato can. This is undoubtedly why Alain Badiou decided to produce a modern version of the Republic and not the Politics.

2. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1964), 107.

3. Michel Onfray, Le crépescule d’une idole: l’affabulation freudienne (Paris: Grasset, 2010), 479.

4. Thinkers often tried to find a constitutive link between the thought of Marx and Freud. Here Erich Fromm provides a representative example. He claims, “Freud was a liberal reformer; Marx, a radical revolutionist. Different as they were, they have in common an uncompromising will to liberate man, an equally uncompromising faith in truth as the instrument of liberation and the belief that the condition for this liberation lies in man’s capacity to break the chain of illusion.” Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Continuum, 2009), 18.

5. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1978), 102–3.

6. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 103.

7. Otto Gross, “Zur funktionellen Geistesbildung des Revolutionärs,” in Werke 1901–20 (Hamilton, NY: Mindpiece, 2009), 355–56.

8. In David Cronenberg’s Dangerous Method (2011), Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) plays a prominent role in convincing Carl Jung (Michael Fassbinder) to have sex with his patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). Though the film seems to take up a critical view of Freud (Vigo Mortensen) and offer a positive portrayal of Jung (and Gross, to a lesser extent), the denouement of the film reveals that Freud’s emphasis on the uncontrollable distortion that sexuality produces on subjects trumps both Gross’s claims for free love and Jung’s belief in a balance of competing drives.

9. The key works are Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963) and Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).

10. Reich’s importance as a figure for the countercultural movement in the 1960s seems to follow implicitly from the original German title of his book The Sexual Revolution: Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf.

11. The allusion here is, of course, to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, a treatise, like Adorno’s Minima Moralia, that inveighs against the capitalist elimination of difference through enforced equality.

12. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (New York: Routledge, 1987), 46.

13. Throughout his work, Freud insists on the fundamental difference between sublimation and repression, even though both seem to share the same structure. He champions sublimation as fiercely as he critiques repression. The former enables subjects to find satisfaction and the latter leaves them dissatisfied with the satisfaction they find. The distinction becomes clearest in Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci, who achieves sublimation and escapes the trap of repression, despite the absence of any sexual activity in his life.

14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 5.

15. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson) tells Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) that he is spending $40,000 for a house for his daughter’s wedding present not as a way of “buying happiness” but instead of “buying off unhappiness.” This puts the promise in negative terms, and the inversion attests to the ubiquity of the promise within the capitalist domain.

16. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.

17. Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955), 2:7

18. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Stars Down to Earth,” in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Cook (New York: Routledge, 1994), 49.

1. This is the position of Allan Meltzer, who claims, “Capitalist systems are not rigid, nor are they all the same. Capitalism is unique in permitting change and adaptation, so difference societies tend to develop different rules and processes, often reflecting cultural requirements.” Allan H. Meltzer, Why Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. Meltzer, like other defenders of capitalism, applauds its adaptability to cultural difference, and in this way he makes clear the compatibility of capitalism with the insistence on a multicultural perspective. There is nothing about cultural difference that threatens the logic of capitalism because capitalism thrives on the introduction of differences.

2. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995), 29.

3. The rise of capitalism appears necessary rather than contingent simply because we observe it retroactively from the perspective of its historical victory. A key lesson of Hegel’s philosophy of history is that this perspective—and thus the impression of necessity—is inescapable. The retroactive perspective erects a barrier to distinguishing between the necessity and contingency of past events.

4. The great philosopher of mediation is Hegel, who wrote, improbably enough, before the rise of modern linguistics. Hegel contends that it is not even possible for us to identify the most basic element before us—to say “here” or “now”—without implying layers of a complex system of mediation that the philosopher must take the pain and time to work through. He nonetheless sees how easily we fall into the trap of failing to see these layers of mediation and thereby believing in our immediate access to what we perceive. The privileging of immediacy that occurs in philosophy after Hegel (with, for example, Kierkegaard) represents a case of thinkers succumbing to precisely the illusion that a prior thinker (namely, Hegel himself) warned against throughout his work.

5. The company Apple understands that this particular object doesn’t coincide with itself and that this noncoincidence creates an excess that subjects desire. The simplicity of the object hides its excess and enables subjects to enjoy this excess without recognizing the relationship between their enjoyment and the divided status of the object. Apple suggests to its clients that its brand name connotes wholeness while making possible an enjoyment of the excess attached to the name.

6. Jacques Lacan explains the distinction between need and desire in terms of the effect of the signifier. See Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 575–84.

7. Kant’s distinction between thing as it appears and the thing in itself is a way of articulating the difference that Saussure identifies. On the basis of the division introduced by the signifier, we can posit a thing in itself existing beyond the world of appearances. Though the division is not an illusion, the existence of the thing in itself is, which is why the subsequent German idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) work to expel this concept from Kant’s philosophy.

8. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 112.

9. Onomatopoeia seems to eliminate the gap between signifier and signified, but a comparison of the onomatopoeic words from different languages reveals that even these words emerge through a socially motivated estimation of the signified rather than an actual identity. Saussure points out that “they are only approximate and more or less conventional imitations of certain sounds.” Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 69. It is as if onomatopoeia exists only to enable us to disavow the gap between signifier and signified.

10. It would be incorrect to align the emergence of absence with the introduction of the signifier. Though the signifier makes our confrontation with absence evident, absence or negativity makes signification possible. That is to say, without some absence or negativity within being itself, we could never begin to speak and thereby render absence present to us. This is what leads Hegel in the famous opening of The Science of Logic to assert that being and nothing are identical. He claims, “Being, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59. Without positing nothing within pure being, Hegel argues, we could not account for our capacity to speak, since speech requires the interruption of pure being with negativity. In other words, we can formulate an ontological claim about the relation between being and nothing or presence and absence on the basis of the foundational role that nothing plays within signification. If nothing did not inhere in pure being, we couldn’t have casual conversations about the weather. The role that nothing plays in signification attests to the role that it has in being itself. But signification effectively brings absence to the fore and confronts us with its ubiquity.

11. Psychoanalysts often make the error of addressing themselves to frustration (the loss of a real object due to the exigencies of the social order) rather than castration (the constitutive loss of an imaginary object). Frustration is loss produced by injustice, but castration is the loss of nothing or of the object that embodies nothing, a loss that is not unjust but necessary for subjectivity itself. Psychoanalysis can do nothing about frustration. Instead, it must focus on the subject’s relation to its castration and to the subject’s efforts to retrieve what it never had in the first place. For more on this important distinction, see Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964–1965, unpublished seminar, especially the sessions of March 3, 1965, and March 10, 1965.

12. W. R. D. Fairbairn, “Object-Relationships and Dynamic Structure,” in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 138.

13. In the case of Melanie Klein (to whom Jacques Lacan owes an enormous debt), a similar sense of dealing with actual objects that are lost occurs. The child is not dealing with a constitutively lost object but with empirically good and bad objects. As Klein notes, “The development of the infant is governed by the mechanisms of introjection and projection. From the beginning the ego introjects objects ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ for both of which its mother’s breast is the prototype—for good objects when the child obtains it and for bad when it fails him.” Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986), 116.

14. The recognition of foundational status of loss for the subject can lead either to a severe depression or a sense of genuine freedom. The necessity of unending loss might prompt one to end one’s life or view each empirical loss with complete equanimity.

15. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 179.

16. Recently, several voices championing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as cinema’s greatest achievement, even surpassing Citizen Kane, have arisen. For instance, in the Sight and Sound poll of 2012, Vertigo took over the top spot as the greatest film from Kane. Like Kane, Vertigo also explores the contrast between the lost object and its replacement. Scottie (James Stewart) begins the film desiring Madeleine (Kim Novak), and her death only increases his desire as she becomes an inaccessible object. When she reappears as Judy (Kim Novak), he lives out the fantasy of obtaining the lost object. The discovery that Madeleine never existed, that she was just Judy playing the part of Madeleine, deprives both Scottie and the spectator of the fantasy of obtaining the lost object by making clear that the lost object exists only as lost. The superiority of Kane, however, consists in its formal rendering of the distinction between the satisfying lost object and the dissatisfying replacements, while Hitchcock plays out the difference primarily in the film’s content.

17. The conflict between psychoanalysis and deconstruction takes place precisely over the terms of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy. For psychoanalysis, metaphor has primacy over metonymy. The metonymic movement from object to object obscures the loss that transpires during metaphoric substitution. Deconstruction, in contrast, views the movement within signification as primary and the marking of a foundational loss as a secondary attempt to arrest this movement.

18. Though Citizen Kane relies on a final twist—“Rosebud” is the sled—it is not what Hugh Manon (Clark University) calls a spoilerfilm, that is, a film that one can destroy for a first-time viewer simply by revealing the twist. Many of M. Night Shyamalan’s films fit into this category, but what saves Citizen Kane from it is that the object presented in the final twist is just the embodiment of nothing, an absence that has been present throughout the film. One can freely give away the ending and inform the neophyte viewer of Citizen Kane that Rosebud is the sled without ruining the film.

19. In the early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx first advances the idea that capitalism works through the production of new needs, which he links to the ruin of the subject who acquires these new needs. He notes, “every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore economic ruin.” Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1964), 147.

20. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 347.

21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 334.

22. The fact that Grenze is not just a term for boundary but also the word for the border between nations lends even more importance to Marx’s claim. The national border is never a border for capital. As Marx himself points out, capitalism was global capitalism from the beginning.

23. Martin Heidegger’s name for the Other is das Man or “the they.” Das Man manipulates us into an inauthentic relation to Being and to death by stripping away the uniqueness or individuality of that relation. The problem with Heidegger’s formulation is that the escape from das Man and its demand for conformity enables one to access a successful being toward death, while for psychoanalysis proper the escape from the Other leads only to the confrontation with the necessity of failure.

24. The idea that the Other does not exist is precisely what Hegel is aiming at when he says in the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 10. We believe in substance and take it as foundational, while subject is at odds with itself and completely uncertain. Hegel’s contention here is that even what seems most foundational, even the surest form of the Other, must assume the status of subject for the philosopher and thus must prove to be ultimately unreliable. The point of this statement is not some type of subjectivism but rather an assertion of the groundlessness of our existence. No existentialist could push the idea of groundlessness any further than Hegel does at this moment.

25. Of course, all fashion trends seem strange and even idiotic in retrospect. Henry David Thoreau offers the definitive account of our relation to past fashions when he notes that we mock those of the past while slavishly following those of the present.

26. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967, unpublished manuscript, session of June 14, 1967.

27. The existence of secret societies like Skull and Bones functions as a site for societal disavowal. When we encounter a secret society, we implicitly fail to see that society as such operates according to the logic of the secret society. Secret societies thus permit us to disavow the fantasmatic entrance requirement for the social order itself.

28. The description that Claude Lévi-Strauss provides of marriage rules in The Elementary Structures of Kinship shows how these rules regulate social activity, but it is less clear how these strict rules affect the desire of the subject. Desire can gain a measure of freedom amid strict social rules, a freedom not available under the regime of capitalism. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1969).

29. In Debt, David Graeber offers a representative statement of the role that faith plays in sustaining the value of money. He notes, “a gold coin is not actually useful in itself. One only accepts it because one assumes that other people will.” David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 47.

30. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2d ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 179.

31. Milton Friedman states this directly. He notes, “I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to the free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.” Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9.

32. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 257.

33. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955), 18:63.

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 113.

2. The danger that any public institution poses to capitalism becomes visible whenever a reformer introduces a new public program in a capitalist nation. One can see this clearly in the history of the United States. With Franklin Roosevelt’s introduction of Social Security, Lyndon Johnson’s creation of Medicare, and Barack Obama’s passage of universal health care, opponents consistently brought up the specter of socialism or communism, even when the program, like Obama’s health care law, had its basis in the market. The construction of a new public program opens up the question of privacy as such, which is why the partisans of capitalism rightly see such a grave danger in this act.

3. Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 89.

4. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5. Arendt devalues the pure reproductivity of labor not out of a simple hostility to capitalism but because her ontology grants priority to the act of creation. Giving birth to the new represents, for Arendt, the essence of humanity, and the reduction of humans to laborers alienates them from this essence. In her eyes, communism is as much guilty of this reduction as capitalism.

6. Despite their joint critique of the turn away from the citoyen, there are significant disputes between Agamben and Rancière. According to Rancière, Agamben, following Arendt, desires a pure politics, a politics uncontaminated by any private concerns, and this is part of the evisceration of the political realm rather than part of the critique of that evisceration. Though he mentions only Arendt in the following passage, it is clear that Agamben is also a target: “the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is actually the ultimate consequence of Arendt’s archi-political position, that is, of the attempt to preserve the political from contamination by the private, the social or a-political life.” Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 66.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 138–39.

8. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2008), 21–22. The morality that Smith develops in his other famous treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, appears initially at odds with his inability to theorize a public world in The Wealth of Nations. In the former (and earlier) work, Smith argues for the sacrifice of private interest for the sake of the public. He claims, “The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, 2009), 277. But even here, the ruling presupposition is that the private world and private interest come prior to the public, even if private interest must ultimately be sacrificed. The ontological priority of the private remains the same through Smith’s intellectual career and separates him from thinkers like Hegel and Marx.

9. Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 97. Because economics as a field takes private self-interest as an indisputable first principle, it is able to achieve a level of predictive accuracy that the other human sciences cannot. This is the contention of Alfred Marshall in his classic study Principles of Economics, where he claims, “the motive is supplied by a definite amount of money: and it is this definite end and exact money measurement of the steadiest of motives in business life, which has enabled economics far to outrun every other branch of the study of man.” Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 9th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 14.

10. Richard H. Thaler, The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (New York: Free Press, 1992), 198.

11. Barack Obama’s passage of the health care act was, in contrast to his underfunded stimulus package, a genuine political act. Against a recalcitrant opposition, he managed to lay the groundwork for a future public health care system in the United States, and, in this sense, Vice President Joe Biden was correct tell Obama, as he signed the bill, that it was a “big fucking deal.” But that said, Obama had to accomplish it by expanding the market for private insurance companies, which is why many leftists view Obama’s great victory as a pyrrhic one.

12. Habermas views modernity as an unfinished project because there are still those left out of the public sphere, but the project of modernity is itself, for him, one of universal inclusion. If the public sphere became truly universal, we would reach the point at which communicative rationality—the basis for the ethical system that Habermas develops in his later works—would be realized. This is the connection between the young Habermas who theorizes the decline of the public sphere and the mature Habermas who champions communicative rationality.

13. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 160.

14. Marx points out that what appear to capitalists themselves as purely private acts of exchange are always public as well because capitalists relate to their workers not as individuals but as part of a whole. The universal relation mediates the particular one. In the third volume of Capital, Marx notes, “each particular capital should be viewed simply as a fragment of the total capital and each capitalist in fact as a shareholder in the whole social enterprise, partaking in the overall profit in proportion to the size of his share of capital.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 312. By explaining the universal dimension of every particular capitalist relationship with the worker, Marx hopes to show that what passes for a private exchange is actually thoroughly involved with the public. Or, for Marx, there is no private exchange.

15. The problem with the private police force came to a head in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, in March 2012, where George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, part of a neighborhood watch group organized as a form of private police, confronted Martin for what he deemed suspicious behavior. The fact that Martin was black was clearly the basis of the suspicious behavior, and Zimmerman’s shooting of him can be traced to his paranoid reaction to Martin’s skin color. But the equally dramatic cause is the private community itself and its private neighborhood watch group. No matter how abusive (or even deadly) a public police force becomes, it is always preferable to the private version. Of course, the public police force is never free from the intrusion of privacy (most often today in the form of racist violence), but because it is public it is easier for subjects to seek redress. A public entity is almost always more accountable than a private one.

16. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 228.

17. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1991), 72.

18. This is why we can imagine the idea of enjoying one’s symptom as a radical political strategy. When one identifies with and enjoys one’s symptom, one sides with the part of oneself that resists ideological interpellation, even though this resistance implies suffering.

19. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:140.

20. As Freud points out in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, “It can in fact be said quite generally that everyone is continually practising psychical analysis on his neighbours and consequently learns to know them better than they know themselves.” Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953), 6:211.

21. Throughout the course of his intellectual career, Lacan’s understanding of the relationship between the analyst and the public changed dramatically. Early on, he believed that the analyst should identify with the public itself or the Other, but in the late 1950s this idea underwent a shift. He came to see identification with the objet a or desire of the Other, not the Other itself, as the essence of psychoanalytic practice.

22. Molly Rothenberg makes clear how the internal disjunction of the subject has an inextricable connection to the social field. She claims, “In producing the social subject, extimate causality also leaves a remainder or indeterminacy, so that every subject bears some unspecifiable excess within the social field.” Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 10.

23. The great advance in Jacques Lacan’s thought occurs in his seminar on anxiety (Seminar X) when he definitively privileges what he calls the objet a over the object of desire. There are hints of this distinction in his Seminar VI on desire, but at this earlier epoch in his thought Lacan also fails to sustain the distinction at certain points, as he labels the objet a the object of desire. See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004) and Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Martinière, 2004).

24. As anyone who has ever drank Coke knows, a single can of Coke, despite its small size, provides infinitely more satisfaction than a two-liter bottle, even if one drinks the whole bottle oneself. One enjoys the limit the can creates. In this sense, the advertising cliché that the packaging counts more than the product is absolutely true. The package as a limit gives the product a sublimity that it otherwise doesn’t have.

25. Unfortunately, in the four sequels to Les quartre cents coups, Doinel returns to the form of capitalist subjectivity and seeks an object that would provide him the ultimate satisfaction. These films count among Truffaut’s failures because they fail to grapple with the insight he arrives at at the end of his first feature. In contrast, many of Truffaut’s other films—Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968), and his masterpiece La sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969), to name just the most important—reveal that he had the ability to integrate the perspective of the necessity of the obstacle into his filmmaking project even after his first feature. The return to Doinel was a temptation that Truffaut should have thoroughly rejected.

26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 338.

27. The role that surveillance plays in changing the way that subjects think of themselves requires that everyone knows that surveillance is occurring. Though governments prosecute whistle-blowers who expose clandestine surveillance activity, this exposure plays a crucial part in the elimination of the public world.

1. Baudelaire says this in his prose poem “Le joueur généreux.” He writes, “la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas” (“the devil’s most beautiful trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist”). Charles Baudelaire, “Le joueur généreux,” Le spleen de Paris, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), 191.

2. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 139.

3. Another thinker who attacks the prevailing depoliticization, Agamben, tries to bring economy to bear on his call for politicization in The Kingdom and the Glory. In this work, Agamben examines how economic thinking came to prevail over political thinking in the realm of theology. An economic theology paved the way, as Agamben sees it, for today’s triumph of the economy over politics. See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

4. Marx’s error with regard to the possibility of revolution does not consist, as so many opponents of Marxism claim, in underestimating human selfishness. It lies rather in the opposite direction. Because Marx hadn’t read Freud, he mistakenly viewed subjects as inherently self-interested beings and assumed that they could come together to seize the forces of production when it became clear that the contradiction with the relations of production impeded the social and individual good. If Marx is wrong, it is because subjects are not self-interested enough.

5. Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955), 2:305.

6. Ayn Rand turned to fiction as a vehicle for her economic thinking because she understood that this form would have the effect of further naturalizing the capitalist system that she defended. It is no accident that Rand is far more well known for her fictional works like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead than for her economic treatises like The Virture of Selfishness or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

7. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Penguin, 1999), 411.

8. Rand repeatedly invokes Aristotle as her only philosophical master, but this is disingenuous on two counts. It requires an absurd reading of Aristotle that obliterates his insistence on the primacy of political contestation and his corresponding thoroughgoing denunciation of economy, which he associates with the subhuman (slaves and women) and the household. This claim also obscures Rand’s profound debt to Nietzsche and his vitalistic celebration of the master’s pure productivity. Though Rand recoils from Nietzsche’s irrationalism, he is her true intellectual parent figure, not Aristotle.

9. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács takes the journalist as the model for capitalist reification. The journalist who pretends to report objectively fails to see the acceptance of capitalism’s rules of the game that undergird this objectivity. The point is not that all journalism is subjective, but that its objectivity depends on a political decision. One can either avow this decision or obscure it. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).

10. Even Adam Smith notes that humanity is not simply a more developed form of animality, but qualitatively different. This difference consists in what Freud would call humanity’s premature birth—the human individual’s fundamental dependence on its fellow humans. This dependence renders the human an unnatural being. As Smith describes, “In almost every other race of animals, each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2008), 21. Smith moves quickly here from human difference to an ideological justification for capitalist relations of production, but nothing necessitates such a turn.

11. Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2008), 100 (translation modified).

12. For a discussion of the nefarious effects of this reading of the gaze, see Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).

13. As Lacan puts it, “as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented there as caught.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 92.

14. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 35.

15. The difference between the gaze understood as a mastering look and the gaze understood as a traumatic object is perhaps most clearly manifested in the opposing interpretations of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). For the former position, the gaze is either the voyeuristic look of Jeff (James Stewart) on the courtyard behind his apartment or the threatening return look across the courtyard that Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) gives to Jeff when he realizes that Jeff has discovered that Thorwald has murdered his wife. For the latter position, the gaze manifests itself in Thorwald’s window insofar as this window arouses Jeff’s desire and thereby colors the entire visual field of the courtyard. As Miran Božovič notes, “Thorwald’s window gazes back at him differently from any other because Jeff sees it in a different way: in it, there is something that intrigues him, something that all other windows lack, something that is ‘in the window more than the window itself’ and has always been of some concern to him—in short, the object-cause of his desire. Faced with the window, Jeff can see himself only as the subject of desire.” Miran Božovič, “The Man Behind His Own Retina,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1992), 169. The gaze distorts the visual field by showing us how the entire field constructs itself around our desire. The gaze is always present as a founding absence, but it only appears to the subject when the visual field loses its stability.

16. One might interpret the difference between The Searchers and Drive as the result of the historical distance between the two films. The change in positioning of the camera—from inside to outside, from shelter against the gaze to identification with it—would represent an increasing refusal of prohibition and an attempt to inhabit directly the promise of enjoyment embodied in the gaze.

17. Though gold does occur in nature and appears to have a substantial value, its value is every bit as contingent as that of paper currency. One could have all the gold in Fort Knox, but if everyone ceased believing that gold had a value, this gold would instantly become worthless. But gold seems more secure than paper currency because it permits a fetishistic disavowal of its dependence on collective belief for its value.

18. Jodi Dean stresses that the main achievement of the Occupy movement consists in politicizing the economy and in bringing social antagonism to the fore. See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).

19. For those who couldn’t afford to buy a vacant house, the housing crisis is a crisis of scarcity rather than one of overproduction. But in almost every case within the capitalist economy it is overproduction that leads to scarcity.

20. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 5.

21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 374.

22. Emancipatory politics has the advantage of promising subjects equality, but fascism has the far more valuable advantage of promising them an external enemy on which they can blame their lack of equality. The figure of the external enemy gives the fascist leader an appeal that is often decisive. If the emancipatory leader resorts to evoking an external enemy, this leader immediately cedes the terrain of emancipation. There is no emancipation that relies on an external enemy to constitute itself.

1. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 2008), 83.

2. The fact that Schumpeter is not really theorizing the role of sacrifice in capitalism is evident in the emphasis that he places on creation in the act of creative destruction. It is not as if the system, as Schumpeter sees it, produces satisfaction through destruction but rather that the destruction is necessary for the process of creation, which is the real aim of the capitalist system. Within capitalism, overt sacrifice, when it exists, must occur for the sake of future growth.

3. The realm of the sacred doesn’t simply exist. The act of sacrifice constitutes the sacred, which is why every religion, even the most lenient, demands some form of sacrificial act, even if it is just sacrificing one’s time for the socially useless endeavor of worship. Through the act of sacrifice, we create an absence that serves as a placeholder for the beyond or the sacred.

4. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 329–49.

5. I accept the shared belief of Sigmund Freud, René Girard, and Marcel Mauss that society cannot sustain itself without sacrifice, but this sacrifice does not necessarily have to remain openly acknowledged. In modernity the obfuscation of sacrifice is a necessary condition for it.

6. As Richard Boothby puts it, “sacrifice serves to constitute the very matrix of desire.” Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 189.

7. The essential role that vitalist thought plays in the defense of capitalism renders it incapable of playing any part at all in constituting an alternative. This is the problem with the political thought that comes from Gilles Deleuze and his followers (like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). When they begin with a vitalist belief that life has an inherent value, they have already bought into a philosophy that justifies capitalist relations of production. Their objection to capitalism—and this is always the case if one examines works like Anti-Oedipus or Commonwealth—can only be that capitalism hasn’t gone far enough. Hence, they will say, capitalism deterritorializes, but we need more deterritorialization; capitalism breaks down borders, but we need to break them down more thoroughly; capitalism produces hybrid identity, but we need more hybridity; and so on.

8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 84.

9. Both Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben make a point of noting that the Greeks had two distinct words for life—bios and zoē. The latter designates the life that humans share with animals, while the former applies specifically to the capacity for political acts.

10. Entrance into the system of signification constitutes the first act of human sacrifice. The human animal gives up a part of itself in order to enjoy through the signifier, which constitutes a system of absences. But in this act of sacrifice the subject individual sacrifices what it never had and only comes to have retrospectively after having lost it.

11. The inability to see sacrifice as inherently enjoyable runs through the Marxist tradition, beginning with Marx himself. He cannot imagine that workers would continue to invest themselves in the capitalist system when the system simply demanded sacrifice from them without any recompense. Marx doesn’t grasp that the very irrationality of the sacrifice can constitute the source of its appeal.

12. Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 3d ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 15.

13. Even the most conscientious companies, like Levi Strauss, must succumb to outsourcing their labor and using workers who earn in a week what former American workers used to earn in an hour. If Levi Strauss had failed to take this step out of concern for their workers, no one would be wearing Levi’s today. For a personalized account of this trajectory, see Kelsey Timmerman, Where Am I Wearing? A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 126–29.

14. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 200.

15. Public perception of Apple, like public perception of Google, has undergone a shift. The trajectory is always the same. Companies begin by presenting themselves as conscientious producers and eventually transform into firms that act just like the manufacturers in Manchester in the nineteenth century. We should not look at this transformation as the loss of founding ideals but as the inevitable trajectory that capitalism demands. Apple must become Microsoft, and if it doesn’t, it will disappear.

16. For more on Apple’s relationship to mining in the Congo, see the Enough Project at http://www.enoughproject.org/.

17. For an account of some of the horrors associated with the mines in the Congo, see Lydia Polgreen, “Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troups,” New York Times, November 15, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/world/africa/16congo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

18. David Renton, David Seddon, and Leo Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance (London: Zed, 2007), 208.

19. Ironically, the attempt to avoid entirely minerals from the Congo has had the effect of worsening the situation there for the impoverished. With no one to buy the minerals that they mine, workers suddenly found themselves even more destitute than they were when they were working indirectly for Apple. The consumer of the iPhone can feel better now that the product most likely no longer contains conflict minerals, but the Congolese are worse off.

20. Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” New York Times, January 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all.

21. Duhigg and Barboza conclude their article on the manufacturing of iPads in China by citing an anonymous Apple executive who makes the situation perfectly clear. He claims, “You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards.” Duhigg and Barboza, “In China.”

22. Modernity begins with the critique of unnecessary sacrifices that premodern society demands, sacrifices that most often include the sacrifice of knowledge. The Inquisition burned Giordano Bruno in 1600 as the embodiment of knowledge that it had to sacrifice in order to sustain the structure of traditional society. But even though he died, time was in fact on Bruno’s side.

23. The fetishistic disavowal at work in consumption becomes especially evident during holiday sales. Consumers can say that they awaken at 3 AM and stand in line for hours in order to save money, but the situation is actually the reverse. The alibi of saving money enables them to enjoy sacrificing their sleep and free time standing in line for products that they might not even desire otherwise.

24. It is no accident that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia compared President Obama’s mandate to purchase health care (part of the 2009 Affordable Heath Care Act) to a demand that citizens eat broccoli. Scalia and other conservatives objected to the forced expenditure because of its association with utility rather than with enjoyment and sacrifice. If Obama had proposed a mandate that everyone purchase a handgun for sport hunting, one can guess that Scalia might have found this compulsion justifiable.

25. Marxist economist Ernest Mandel believes that capitalism’s excessive waste renders it existentially untenable as a system. In Late Capitalism, he claims, “The dynamic of the wastage and destruction of the potential development that is henceforward involved in the actual development of the forces of production, is so great that the sole alternative to the self-destruction of the system, or even of all civilization, is a higher form of society.” Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (New York: Verso, 1978), 222. Mandel’s mistake here lies in his failure to recognize the enjoyment associated with waste. The “wastage and destruction” of capitalism is not an argument against the system, but an argument for it.

26. Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man, ed. and trans. M. Epstein (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), 351.

27. The negative effect of future abundance on investment drives companies to constantly invent new products. The new product, at least temporarily, avoids the trap of future abundance that inheres in every commodity. But the invention of the new must take place at a rapid enough pace to outstrip not just the realization of abundance but even the envisioning of it. This is necessary to counteract a negative impact on investment in the company.

28. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 105.

29. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy make this point about useless military spending from a more critical perspective in their Monopoly Capitalism. Despite its age and the inaccuracy of some of its analyses, their work retains value for its insights into capitalism’s necessary destructiveness. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

30. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, 131.

31. Contemporary conservative economists who attack Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt by arguing that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that rescued the American economy fail to realize exactly what this statement indicates about the essence of capitalism. While they defend capitalism as an inherently just and moral system (that rewards the hardworking and punishes the lazy), the claim that the senseless sacrifice involved in war was necessary for economic recovery gives the lie to any pretense of an ethical capitalism.

32. Léon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, or the Theory of Social Wealth, trans. William Jaffé (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), 73.

33. This profound limitation of the capitalist economist becomes evident in what seems like an uncontroversial statement by Lionel Robbins. In the midst of arguing that economics does not import moral valuations into the objects of its study, he proceeds to do so and consequently display capital ism’s profound aversion to unnecessary sacrifice. He says, “it is not legitimate to say that going to war is uneconomical, if, having regard to all the issues and all the sacrifices necessarily involved, it is decided that the anticipated result is worth the sacrifice. It is only legitimate so to describe it if it is attempted to secure this end with an unnecessary degree of sacrifice.” Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 144. Robbins’s claim that capitalist economics can allow for sacrifice when it is necessary and worth the price represents a complete misunderstanding of the nature of sacrifice. Sacrifice cannot be a good bargain and remain sacrifice. It is only under the deformation of capitalism that sacrifice undergoes this dramatic transformation.

34. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 92.

35. The number of failed commodities produced each year is astonishing. Because so many different commodities surround us all the time, it is difficult to remember those that have not caught on among consumers. With carbonated sodas, the various failures stand out more clearly: Pepsi Free, New Coke, Cherry Pepsi, Vanilla Coke, and many others.

36. David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 5.

37. Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, “Every time a desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendental ideal.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 154.

38. Georges Bataille, “The Jesuve,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 73.

39. For Bataille’s most sustained discussion of the role that sacrifice plays in human society, see Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991).

1. Spinoza’s effort to maintain God as the only substance in the Ethics occurred in response to this threat. This theological turn was not an acceptable solution for Church authorities, however, who essentially prevented the publication of Spinoza’s masterpiece in his lifetime. The problem with Spinoza’s extension of God as the sole and unique substance is that it does not correct the uprooting of social authority that the heliocentric theory enacts. God does not regain a place in Spinoza’s thought. But neither does Spinoza adequately come to terms with modernity’s dislocation of God. It would fall to Hegel to recognize the implications of this dislocation when he grasps that substance is itself subject, that substance suffers from the same self-division as the subject.

2. The through line that leads from the dislocation of God to the execution of the monarch supports Albert Camus’s statement in The Rebel that God, not Louis XVI, is the real target of the guillotine.

3. Perhaps the greatest difference between liberal and dialectical philosophers concerns the definition of freedom. For the former, freedom is simply the ability to do what one wants. For the latter, it requires a break from the substantial order that produces the subject and its desires. If I act just how the social substance ordains me to act, the dialectical thinker believes that this cannot be freedom.

4. In the Third Meditation, Descartes grants to God the attributes of an Other that he as a subject lacks. This represents a clear failure to accede to Hegel’s dictum from The Phenomenology of Spirit that we must grasp substance as subject. For Descartes, substance is really substance—and thus a substantive Other on which one can rely. Even Descartes’s lack of knowledge about God is not a barrier to this reliance. He states, “It does not matter that I do not grasp the infinite, or that there are countless additional attributes of God which I cannot in any way grasp, and perhaps cannot even reach in my thought; for it is in the nature of the infinite not to be grasped by a finite being like myself.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 32.

5. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000), 61.

6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 190. Kantian morality not only eliminates God as a starting point, but it reverses the relationship between the good and morality. The good doesn’t determine morality, but the moral law determines the good.

7. Kant sees that our role in determining the moral law constitutes us as free subjects, and he thus reverses the typical relationship between freedom and morality. It is not the moral law that depends on our freedom but our freedom that depends on the existence of the moral law. As Henry Allison puts it, “freedom is actual, or better, actualized, in the interest that we take in the moral law.” Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 248. Without the existence of the moral law, the question of our freedom would simply remain an open question, as it does for all philosophers who fail to account for the radical break that the very existence of the moral law introduces.

8. For a more thorough argument for Kant as the inventor of modern freedom, see Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012).

9. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 280.

10. The defenders of capitalism almost without exception frame their defense in terms of the trade-off between freedom and equality. They sacrifice some equality for the sake of complete freedom. But this very way of conceiving the problem hides the absence of freedom in the free market.

11. Von Mises, Human Action, 259.

12. In her discussion of the relationship between capitalism and religious belief, Kiarina Kordela points out that the belief that capitalism demands is far more oppressive than earlier forms of belief because it is wholly unconscious and irrational, though it exists within a rational system. She says, “the epistemological fact that the Other of a secular society is not logically grounded hints not to any liberation of the subject from it. Rather, it is an indication of the nonrepresentable, subliminal, and unconscious character of the containment of the subject within the social Other. When reason and representation fail, belief takes over—belief in something irrational, not accountable by means of reason, and as such absolute.” A. Kiarina Kordela, “Political Metaphysics: God in Global Capitalism (the Slave, the Masters, Lacan, and the Surplus),” Political Theory 27, no. 6 (1999): 790.

13. Even the greatest capitalist heretic, Karl Marx, accepts the fundamental premise of the capitalist system. Marx envisions communist society as a society of unlimited productivity, which is a reformulation of the capitalist ideal itself rather than a rejection of it. Though Marx does reject the free market, he remains within the logic of capitalism at the central point of his alternative economic conception. He fails to be heretical enough.

14. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 151. In addition to giving the lie to Hayek’s professions of absolute devotion to freedom, his statement has the additional virtue of illustrating the heavy lifting that utility does for the great defenders of capitalism.

15. Hayek writes, “‘freedom’ refers solely to a relation of men to other men, and the only infringement on it is coercion by men.” F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 60.

16. When Nietzsche proclaims the death of God in The Gay Science, he is simply describing the process that capitalist modernity has unleashed, not arguing for disbelief in God. We don’t recognize the event and remain removed from it because we moved so quickly to the new manifestation of God, what Nietzsche would see as the Last Man, a social authority that refuses to avow its authority.

17. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 59.

18. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), 167.

19. Not only do advertisements offer us relief from freedom by erecting a new figure of the Other, but they also simultaneously transform freedom into choice. This transformation removes freedom from the level of the ontological and turns it into an empirical question about particular commodities. The question of freedom is a question, as existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre understand, of the project that defines my existence. I am free to decide what project will define me, even if external forces conspire to limit my possibilities for realizing this project. This ontological freedom represents a heavy burden for the subject because no Other can define my project for me. Capitalism provides an Other who could do so, and it deflects the terrain of this freedom onto that of empirical choice. The capitalist subject does not have to confront the question of what project will define its existence. Instead, it must decide what brand of cough medicine to purchase. Anyone who has tried to purchase cough medicine will know that this decision is every bit as vexed as that of one’s existential project, but one has the support of the Other when making it, a support that does not exist for one’s existential project.

20. David Wilson and William Dixon, “Das Adam Smith Problem: A Critical Realist Perspective,” Journal of Critical Realism 5, no. 2 (2006): 251.

21. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, 2009), 13.

22. Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 57.

23. Though Smith could not have read Kant, the converse is not true. Kant was acquainted with and appreciated Smith’s moral philosophy, even though Kant’s emphasis on the moral law departs significantly from Smith’s reliance on sentiment. Kantian morality is thoroughly unsentimental, which is why the question of Adolf Eichmann as a figure of Kantian moral duty could ever arise. It is clear that Eichmann fails the standards of Smith’s morality of compassion, but less clear (though ultimately the case) that he fails from a Kantian moral perspective.

24. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel claims, “This may be called the cunning of reason—that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays the penalty, and suffers loss.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 33. For Smith, the pursuit of wealth creates suffering rather than joy for those engaged in it, but this activity ends up providing society with its material needs. Smith argues that it is the particular that “pays the penalty” for the sake of the general interest, which puts him at odds with capitalism’s emphasis on the individual.

25. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 215.

26. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2008), 345.

27. In his appendix to The Kingdom and the Glory, Giorgio Agamben points out the undoubtedly “biblical origin” of Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand. He then goes on to note how capitalist modernity remains within the constraints of a divine authority. Agamben writes, “when modernity abolishes the divine pole, the economy that is derived from it will not thereby have emancipated itself from its providential paradigm.” Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, trans Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 285.

28. In a revelatory passage from Seminar VI, Lacan states, “the desire of the neurotic, I will say, is that which is born when there is no God.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Martinière, 2013), 541. Lacan identifies the emergence of neurosis with the death of God because neurosis relies on a psychic investment in the existence of an Other that evidently doesn’t exist. Prior to the death of God, the Other did really appear to exist, which obviated the possibility of neurosis. This is why psychoanalysis did not form until after the development of capitalism and its installation of a new form of the Other.

29. Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: Norton, 1937), 188.

30. The idea of an unknowing Other becomes thinkable for the first time in the capitalist epoch, but this provides the possibility for rethinking the concept of God itself in these terms. Rather than an omniscient God, we should posit an unknowing God. This is the conception of God developed by Richard Boothby (Loyola University, Maryland). According to Boothby, it is only by reconceiving God as unknowing and not by rejecting the God hypothesis altogether that we can see the possibility of human freedom. Boothby accomplishes this through an astonishing interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, where Boothby identifies the first philosophical formulation of the figure of the unknowing God. See Richard Boothby, “Hegel with Lacan: On the Other in Question,” unpublished MS.

31. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964–1965, unpublished seminar, session of June 16, 1965.

1. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 565.

2. Lukács’s investment in Hegel’s dialectics would force his retraction, under Stalinist pressure, of his early thought as too idealist. Nonetheless, it is only the early Lukács, the Hegelian Lukács, that retains today any theoretical importance.

3. The translation of die schlechte Unendlichkeit as “spurious infinite” for decades chagrined Hegel scholars. The implication of the term spurious infinite is that this form of infinity is not infinite at all, whereas Hegel’s point is that it is in fact infinite, but bad insofar as it remains dependent on its other in a way that it cannot avow.

4. As W. T. Stace puts it in his classic commentary on Hegel, “True infinity is the self-limited.” W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (New York: Dover, 1955), 146.

5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119.

6. Of course, many people acknowledge the possibility of the eventual heat death of the universe but remain capitalist subjects insofar as they engage in a fetishistic disavowal of it. They know it will come, but they act as if they don’t know.

7. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 18. Georgescu-Roegen speculates, on the basis of the Entropy Law, that the destiny of humanity will reach its inevitable conclusion sooner rather than later. The problem is not just the eventual exhaustion of all energy, but the rapidity with which the capitalist system runs through what Georgescu-Roegen calls the human “dowry” of energy by transforming it into waste.

8. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 128–29.

9. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: Penguin, 2008), 358.

10. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001), 17. See also Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-Run Comparative View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

11. The great exponent of the fear of surplus population is, of course, Thomas Robert Malthus, who is also a fervent believer in capitalism. Malthus reconciles these contradictory positions by blaming the lower classes, not the laws of capitalism, for the problems of overpopulation. At the key moment in his thought, he turns from an economist into a moralist and thereby misses what might have been a groundbreaking insight into the relationship between capitalism and population. This turn also earned him the enmity of Marx.

12. David Harvey explains the necessity of expansion as a product of the competitive nature of the capitalist economy. If one capitalist doesn’t reinvest capital and expand, another will, and this will eliminate the former qua capitalist. There is no such thing as a static capitalist. Harvey says, “If I, as a capitalist, do not reinvest in expansion and a rival does, then after a while I am likely to be driven out of business. I need to protect and expand my market share. I have to reinvest to stay a capitalist.” David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 43.

13. Even if the earth’s population begins to decrease in the future (as current prediction models suggest), this will not spell the death of the capitalist system, but it will mark a radical change. Though capitalism feeds off the expansion of population, it doesn’t require it. One can envision a form of capitalism that operates by vastly expanding the number of necessary commodities to compensate for a diminution of laborers and consumers.

14. Many critics of the capitalist system point to the statement of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver’s Stone’s Wall Street (1987), “Greed…is good,” as evidence of the immorality of unrestrained capitalism. In addition to the difficulty that the film presents Gekko as only an isolated immoral capitalist and not as a capitalist as such, the problem with this indictment is that Gekko is correct. Within the capitalist system, greed is good and contributes to the expansion of productivity. But greed undermines itself. That is, the greedy capitalist fails to see how greed constructs the very obstacles that it tries to eliminate.

15. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 16.

16. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 93. In order for the bad infinite to guide capitalist production, this production must constantly encounter limits that it can overcome.

18. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2008), 412.

19. This is even true of many on the left. The critique of capitalism that Thomas Piketty announces in Capital in the Twenty-First Century takes Smith’s assumption of infinite movement forward for granted. He criticizes capitalism as a system because it doesn’t have enough growth, because the rate of return on investments in capital outpaces growth. This dynamic enriches those who have capital to invest at the expense of those—such as the working class—who must depend on their wages for income. Piketty’s solution for fixing this problem of allotment of wealth involves limiting returns through taxes in order to give growth a boost. He doesn’t evince any skepticism about the prospect of infinite growth. Piketty doesn’t see the divergence between return and growth as an anomaly in the capitalist system but rather as its standard operating procedure. Inequality is the necessary outcome of capitalist relations of production. He says, “the fundamental r > g inequality, the main force of divergence in my theory, has nothing to do with any market imperfection. Quite the contrary: the more perfect the capital market (in the economist’s sense), the more likely r is to be greater than g.” Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 27.

20. The task for the behavioralist is, as Dan Ariely puts it, to provide “tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire.” Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shapes Our Decisions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 241.

21. The failure of behavioral economics to grasp that subjects might find satisfaction in loss rather than mistakenly opt for it manifests itself in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman recognizes points at which people ensure their own defeat, but such acts must be anomalous for him. He writes, “people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters. The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut one’s losses. This is where businesses that are losing ground to a superior technology waste their remaining assets in futile attempts to catch up. Because defeat is so difficult to accept, the losing side in wars often fights long past the point at which the victory of the other side is certain, and only a matter of time.” Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 318–19. One might respond to Kahneman that the losing side often fights when defeat is certain because they find satisfaction in the defeat itself. But such an understanding is impossible for the behavioral economist, who, despite modifications, believes in the pursuit of the good.

22. Bruno S. Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 3.

23. A placard on the wall of the gym where my high school football team trained announced, “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” This little bit of propaganda could nicely serve as a mantra for capitalism as such.

24. The moments in Mad Men when we see Don attain some genuine satisfaction occur when he directly courts failure or embraces his own status as an outsider in relation to the capitalist system. Perhaps the high point of the series in this regard takes place in the final episode of the sixth season when Don unconsciously sabotages a pitch to Hershey’s Chocolate and then takes his children to see the dilapidated whorehouse in which he grew up, a childhood that he had previously hidden from them. Unfortunately for Don, the series concludes not with his own satisfaction in loss but with him serving up satisfaction for the sake of advertising Coca-Cola.

25. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1962), 129.

26. They proclaim, “A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret.” Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 153.

27. When Hegel conceives of nature as the self-externalization of spirit, this is his way of articulating nature as spirit’s inherent and yet contingent obstacle. In contrast to the caricature often used to describe his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel is in fact perfectly ready to admit natural contingency into his understanding of nature, and he attacks those who insist on imposing a rigid system on the natural world.

28. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 28.

29. Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois, Chicago), “Do Not Give Ground on Infinity,” unpublished MS.

30. The sole virtue of the misguided Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), other than the stunning scene of a self-abortion, is that it shows how far a wealthy capitalist subject will go to extend his expiring life. Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) finances a deep-space voyage on the basis of a speculative hypothesis about the origin of life in order to discover the source of terrestrial life, and he hopes that this will unlock the secret to extending his own life. But the happy result is that the discovery only hastens his death.

31. As Heidegger puts it, “Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962), 284.

32. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18.

33. Despite his clear debt to Heidegger, one might convincingly make the argument that Jean-Paul Sartre in the greater philosopher because he turns away from death as the ultimate existential problem and focuses instead on significance. Our real challenge, as Sartre sees it, involves creating a significance for our existence that would enable us to act. Authentic being toward death, Heidegger’s ideal, fails to accomplish this.

34. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 358.

35. Ibid., 358–59.

36. The focus on the natural world as a limit stems from its intractable status. The limits that labor and capital represent to production are fungible, but the natural world is not. This is what John Stuart Mill correctly grasps in his theorization of political economy. Mill writes, “The limitation to production, not consisting in any necessary limit to the increase of the other two elements, labor and capital, must turn upon the properties of the only element which is inherently, and in itself, limited in quantity.” John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1872), 1:228.

37. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress, 1976), 53. This vision of the communist future provides the unacknowledged basis for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s anticapitalist thought in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Their diatribe against fixed identity and encomium to deterritorialization is an elaboration of the future proclaimed here by Marx and Engels.

1. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010), 119.

2. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism and On Liberty (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 182.

3. Just as utilitarian ethics is isomorphic with the capitalist structure, Kantian ethics is implicitly anticapitalist. In the second formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant rejects treating others as a “mere means” rather than as ends in themselves. For the capitalist, everything and everyone are means to the end of more productivity and more accumulation.

4. The introduction of a newer and better model is not the only way that dissatisfaction subtends consumption. It also manifests itself in the declining price of the product. One waits to buy the product at the best price, but then the price inevitably drops after one has purchased the commodity. Though simply a structural effect of the capitalist system, the dynamic of the dropping price has the effect of bonding the subject to the process of consumption through the dissatisfaction that it creates.

5. It is not difficult to imagine pushing workers to the extreme as an ethical duty. The capitalist does this on behalf of social productivity, which counts more than the discomfort of a few workers and may ultimately redeem this discomfort. One might even imagine a capitalist version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, which functioned as an apology for Stalinism on the basis of the future it would make possible.

6. Modern Times echoes the critique of industry’s indifference to the worker formulated in René Clair’s À Nous la liberté (1931). It echoes the earlier film to such an extent that the producers responsible for À Nous la liberté sued Chaplin for plagiarism. It was only the intervention of Clair, out of affection for Chaplin and appreciation for his art, that brought the lawsuit to an end.

7. Capitalists have historically resorted to extreme methods—Pinkerton detectives, legal machinations, and even open displays of violence—to put an end to strikes because they recognize implicitly that the strike represents a challenge to the ideal of productivity that guides the capitalist system. The strike is an existential threat to capitalism.

8. Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardi and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:333.

9. The connection between the idea of the good and the valuation of the final cause is decisive in Aristotle’s thought. If one begins with the belief that subjects pursue some good and that this is the motivating factor in all their actions, one necessarily arrives at a conception of the final cause. In every case, some specific good is the final cause on behalf of which subjects act. It is only by abandoning the idea of the good, which capitalism doesn’t do, that we can free ourselves definitively from thinking in terms of final causes.

10. Modern science’s complete dismissal of the final cause reveals the incompatibility of science and traditional religious belief. The only way to sustain belief and remain a follower of modern science is to adopt Kierkegaard’s approach and accept that God manifests itself in the world only in counterintuitive ways and disruptions rather than in the form of final causes. That is, science leaves us with the choice of nonbelief or fideism.

11. When Thomas Nagel tries to revive teleology in modern philosophy, he does so with the express intent of counteracting scientific materialism, even though his teleology attempts to dispense with the divine. For this creative but ultimately failed effort to revive the final cause, see Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

12. Insofar as we are capitalist subjects invested in productivity, Bruno Latour is correct to claim, as the title of his famous book says, We Have Never Been Modern. Of course, this is not Latour’s point at all. He wants instead to confound modernity’s clean divisions, such as that between subject and object, culture and nature. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1993).

13. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 489.

14. The great filmic manifestation of this logic of the final cause in capitalism occurs in Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992). This film recounts the travails of four salespeople tasked with peddling worthless real estate as if it were an attractive investment. Early in the film, a representative from the main office, Blake (Alec Baldwin), arrives to gives the floundering sales agents a pep talk, in which he upbraids them with great viciousness and with a pure appeal to the final cause that disregards everything else. He says, “I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here—close!”

15. It is not accidental that Spinoza functions as the philosophical point of departure for many of the most vehement critics of contemporary capitalism. But the key to Spinoza’s value does not lie in his refusal of all negativity, as Marxists like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt believe, but in his absolute rejection of the final cause, which is a pillar of capitalism’s appeal.

16. Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 182.

17. Agamben’s emphasis on impotentiality reveals his proximity to psychoanalysis, despite his refusal to avow this proximity. Perhaps we could risk the thesis that Agamben is too close to psychoanalysis to recognize the resemblance.

18. For Arendt’s critique, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The link between Agamben’s critique of capitalism and Arendt’s is evident, though Agamben mentions Arendt’s critique only in his discussion of the modern reduction of politics to bare life in Homo Sacer, not in his description of potentiality and impotentiality.

19. Contemporary theorists of biopower tend to repeat Arendt’s error when they reduce existence to the perpetuation of life. Power over the body is always at the same time a provocation for the desiring subject. No social authority cares about the body. It is desire that counts.

20. Those who first started to wear baggy pants weren’t trying to begin a fashion trend, which is why they were able to do so. It is emblematic of a paranoid outlook to believe that someone can consciously begin a fashion trend. The trend commences not with an individual decision but with the embrace of a particular style by the anonymous social authority that has no concrete existence.

21. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and Lectures of 1822–23, eds. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2011), 418. Just to be clear, if he had to vote, Hegel would certainly have voted to exculpate Socrates, but only because he is a modern, a devotee of the freedom of the subject.

22. Alain Badiou, for instance, considers May 1968 the most recent candidate for the status of a political event. Though its status remains up in the air, the responsibility for constituting it as an event falls to those who would be faithful to it. Through fidelity to the rupture of May 1968, subjects will retroactively give it the status of a political event in Badiou’s way of thinking.

23. This is, of course, the slogan of LSD proponent Timothy Leary.

24. The use of the limp body is also a common strategy of young children who want to resist the regime of productivity—going to grandma’s house, for instance—that parents impose on them. My twins utilized this technique of nonproductivity so often that we began to label it, “Going Savio.” This label did not lessen the frustration that the technique created, a frustration that bespeaks its effectiveness.

25. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005), 168.

26. Simon Critchley advocates an active refusal to take up the question of ruling and to flee from state power. This distancing lies at the heart of his definition of politics. In his most significant book (which includes “Politics of Resistance” in the subtitle), he claims, “politics is the praxis of taking up distance with regard to the state, working independently of the state, working in a situation.” Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 112. Critchey’s insistence on resistance deliberates avoids the question of what type of state one will resist. No matter how just the state, resistance will always be in order for Critchley, which conveniently allows him to rely on someone else to make the decision that founds the state.

27. In The Century, Badiou notes, “what fascinated the militants of the twentieth century was the real. In this century there is a veritable exaltation of the real, even in its horror.” Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 19.

28. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–22.

1. The ubiquity of mirrors at the gym does not speak simply to the narcissistic status of bodily fitness but to the transformation of the participant into a commodity. While working out and after doing so, one looks at oneself in the mirror from the perspective of the admiring other, as potentially lovable.

2. Even fast food restaurants like McDonalds use the prospect of love as a way to advertise a product as unromantic as Chicken McNuggets. There is no commodity that cannot overlap with the fantasy of love.

3. It is possible, of course, to imagine capitalism without the continued existence of romantic love in its present form, but not without some form of it. Romantic love is the sine qua non of the capitalist universe because it provides for us an idealized version of the commodity through which we learn how to evaluate every other commodity.

4. One should not somehow feel exempt from the capitalist ideology of love if one has managed to avoid the use of dating services. The dating service simply lays bare the logic that undergirds romantic relations as such in the capitalist universe, and its political value consists in fully exposing the logic that would otherwise remain partially obscured. It is not the users of dating services who should feel guilty, but those of us who have avoided them in order to guard the illusion of purity in romance. We are the ones with the real blood on our hands.

5. Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 79.

6. The fact that Plato gives a compelling speech about love to Aristophanes also complicates any interpretation of the dialogue since Aristophanes publicly mocked Socrates in his comedy The Clouds, One might expect Plato to avenge himself on Aristophanes by attributing a ridiculous theory to him, but Plato refuses to do so. Even if Plato doesn’t identify himself with the conception of love that Aristophanes proffers, and even if it has a fanciful quality to it, no one can miss its metaphorical resonance with the experience of love.

7. The purity of Socrates famously manifests itself in his relationship to alcohol. As Alcibiades points out, “though he didn’t much want to drink, when he had to, he could drink the best of us under the table. Still, and most amazingly, no one ever saw him drunk.” Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 501. Socrates’ inability to get drunk parallels his inability to love insofar as both involve giving oneself up to the other.

9. Of course, no subject can attain purity, but Socrates is a character created by Plato, not an actual subject.

10. Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Métaphores de l ‘amour (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 57.

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 490.

12. Though Sartre is one of the great anticapitalist thinkers in modernity, his refusal of the unconscious constantly undermines his capacity to think outside capitalism’s own terrain. Love represents an exemplary case of this, which Sartre’s own life bore out. He treated lovers as commodities to be acquired, and when they no longer provided satisfaction, he moved on to the next one. His failed theory of necessary and contingent love marks an attempt to separate these acts from the commodity logic that underwrites them.

13. The apparent exception here occurs in the film Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007), in which Lars (Ryan Gosling) does seem to fall in love with a blow-up doll. Though other characters in the film play along with Lars and treat the blow-up doll as a real love object, in the end Lars himself must abandon this object because of its evident inadequacy. The blow-up doll is too perfect to be loved.

14. Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 45. Perhaps the most important insight in Rougemont’s work is his understanding that love clearly predates capitalism. Though he never mentions capitalism in so many words, Rougement begins the history of love well before its advent, even as he does show how capitalist modernity alters it.

15. The pathos of this attitude becomes painfully evident at the conclusion of Patricia Highsmith’s masterpiece The Cry of the Owl. The novel ends with the character Greg guilty of murder and perhaps facing the death penalty, but as he explains himself to the police, he insists to them that he had sex on two occasions with the married Nickie, even though this does nothing to exculpate him. Greg wears his sexual conquests of Nickie like a badge of honor. They indicate to him that he has really accumulated a satisfying object, though the disinterest of the police exposes the folly of this line of thought.

16. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: d’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 232.

17. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII: le transfert, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 216.

18. In his Seminar XII, Lacan provides the most refined version of what would become his classic definition of authentic love (which appears in a slightly different form in Seminar IV). He says, “Love is giving what one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, unpublished seminar, session of March 17, 1965.

19. The first clue that one is falling out of love is that the negative quality of the beloved regains its negative valence. This occurred to me when I began to find a distinctive mark on my romantic partner’s face repulsive, whereas before I had always viewed it as a sign of her singularity. Unfortunately, it required two years for this repulsion to manifest itself in the end of the relationship.

20. Alain Badiou (with Nicolas Traug), Éloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 15–16. See also Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005).

21. I once received a poem from a paramour on Valentine’s Day that captures this idea perfectly. It read, “It may be a capitalist plot / But I really like you a lot / So I’m sending you this Valentine’s Day card / Whether you like it or not.” The poem did not change my belief in the ideological nature of the holiday, but it did serve as a reminder that a capitalist plot is never just a capitalist plot. Every such plot must have a kernel of authenticity in order to be effective.

22. In his Seminar V, Lacan describes the process of substitution of a personal authority for a social one. He says, “Since everything depends on the Other, the solution is to have an Other all to oneself. This is what one calls love. In the dialectic of desire, it is a question of having an Other to oneself.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre V: les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–1958, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 133.

23. One of the weaknesses of George Orwell’s 1984 lies in Orwell’s inability to imagine love functioning as an ideology (or as romance). But this is also a strength of the novel because it leads Orwell to emphasize the disruptiveness of love for a seemingly omnipotent power structure. The love between Winston and Julia represents a genuine threat. In order to become a proper subject of the power structure again, Winston must renounce Julia and his love for her.

24. Advancing telephone technology makes it increasingly difficult to hide multiple calls because most phones now register incoming calls. This means that one will know how many times a lover has tried to call within a given time. Once a beloved finds out that a lover has called fifty times in the last hour, the lover will most likely fall from grace or receive a visit from the police. The result is that this form of trauma associated with love—the call without any response—will likely become less frequent.

25. Because of its straightforward celebration of complementarity, one of the great ideological moments in the history of cinema occurs at the end of Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), when Jerry (Tom Cruise) tells Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger), “You complete me.”

26. Romantic comedies almost always focus on characters with an adequate amount of wealth, so that even when they find themselves unemployed, like Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998), they never despair about how they will pay the rent.

27. The other genre that often resorts to the montage sequence, the sports film, does so for a similar reason. The montage in the sports film is almost inevitably a training montage—depicting but compressing the labor required for the final victory. The specific function of this montage is to hide labor itself in order to create the impression that we can have the commodity (a victory) without the labor necessary to produce it. One of the virtues of the apparently wholly ideological Miracle (Gavin O’Connor, 2004), a film celebrating the Olympic triumph of the 1980 United States hockey team, is its commitment to displaying as fully as possible the labor that makes the triumph possible.

28. When discussing the romantic comedy as a genre in a film class, a student claimed that the films compress the time of falling in love because this is the most boring time in a relationship. This response itself—and its obvious falsity—testifies to the effectiveness of capitalism’s replacement of love with romance.

29. Capitalist society not only transforms romantic love (or eros) into romance, but it always does the same with Christian love (or agape). Christ welcomes the love of followers, but his love, like that of a beloved, turns back to the follower in a traumatizing way. Christ’s response to love never allows the subject to remain in the safety of a social identity but demands that the subject abandon this identity for the sake of Christ. For the faithful, Christ must occupy the place of the Other and become the reference point for the organization of the subject’s being. Christians cannot just have their Christian love be a part of their identity. It must encompass that identity entirely, a fact illustrated powerfully throughout the Gospels. To be in Christian love, as Christ shows in his response to the rich man who wants to know what he must do to win eternal life, is to abandon all our former pleasures in the world. To want love without this devastation is not to want love at all, but to prefer romance. Though we might chuckle at the prospect of a romance with Christ, this is what the capitalist version of Christianity offers. Christian love devastates the beloved and takes from her or him what is most valuable. It is not a commodity that one can acquire. But under capitalism, Christianity becomes a romance comedy that ends with the discovery of one’s soul mate in Christ.

1. Nicholas Xenos contends that “the hunters have very few needs, and those that they have are satisfied with relative ease.” Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2–3. Xenos contends that scarcity is an invention of the capitalist world, which employs it as an ideological justification for capitalist relations of production.

2. One of the great social achievements of capitalism is its elimination of direct physical violence as ubiquitous in the social order. Though capitalism perpetuates horrible violence in the general form of the oppression of labor and the specific form of, say, mining disasters, it largely eliminates direct expropriation by one person of what another has. The system itself does the dirty work, for the most part.

3. Even though he is an evolutionary psychologist rather than a capitalist economist, Steven Pinker revealed his status as an implicit defender of the capitalist system during a talk at the University of Vermont entitled “War and Peace: A History of Violence” (October 10, 2013). During the question and answer period, Pinker claimed, in response to a question about capitalism creating an increasing amount of poverty, that poverty was simply the natural state of the world. The assumption of a basic scarcity is the fundamental capitalist assumption, and it has no empirical, let alone ontological, justification. When one makes this assumption, one lays one’s cards on the table, and the audible gasps from the audience testified implicitly to the revelation that occurred.

4. David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 75.

5. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault theorizes scarcity not as a necessary presupposition of capitalism itself but the result of the development of economics in the nineteenth century. As he says, “What makes economics possible, and necessary, then, is a perpetual and fundamental situation of scarcity.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1971), 256–57. Even in Foucault’s analysis, however, scarcity has a place within thought from the moment of capitalism’s emergence, which it didn’t actually have. It falls to Ricardo to give it the priority that it comes to have in what Foucault calls the modern episteme.

6. It would be nice if its association with the assumption of natural scarcity led to economics being known as the “dismal science.” But the pejorative appellation, invented by Thomas Carlyle, actually stems from Carlyle’s disappointment that economics—what Carlyle calls the logic of supply and demand, since the label “economics” didn’t exist yet—eliminated the justification for the forced labor of slavery. Thus, considering its origins, economists should wear the name “dismal science” like a badge of honor.

7. Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 3d ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 15. Robbins goes on to offer a succinct definition of economics as the science that deals with how humans cope with the scarcity of means. He claims that it addresses “the forms assumed by human behaviour in disposing of scarce means.” Ibid.

8. Léon Walras points out the link between value in the capitalist system and scarcity. He notes, “any value in exchange, once established, partakes of the character of a natural phenomenon, natural in its origins, natural in its manifestations and natural in essence. If wheat and silver have any value at all, it is because they are scarce, that is, useful and limited in quantity—both of these conditions being natural.” Léon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, or the Theory of Social Wealth, trans. William Jaffé (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), 69.

9. Marx, of course, also imagines a future free of scarcity, but it is not a future far away, as it is for the defenders of capitalism. For Marx, capitalism is at once the condition of possibility for the elimination of scarcity and the barrier to that elimination. We needed capitalism at a certain historical moment, but at another it constrains our capacity for abundance. Marx overcomes the contradiction by temporalizing it.

10. Dierdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 125.

13. It is possible that early humans left the abundance of hunting and gathering for the scarcity of agriculture (which would ultimately lead to the development of capitalism) because they wanted to introduce scarcity into their existence. Historians of this period see no clear evolutionary advantage in the agricultural lifestyle and hence question why humans opted for it. But its advantage may have been its absence of abundance.

14. Freud accepted the seduction theory because he remained too attached to the idea of the living being as the basis of subjectivity rather than the psyche. The living being requires others to encounter excessive stimulation, whereas the psyche finds this excess already within itself.

15. This is not just capitalist ideology, but what is ideological is the idea that society couldn’t exist at all without the societal glue of scarcity. In a society without scarcity, the social bond would undergo a profound transformation, but it wouldn’t disappear altogether.

16. The vagueness of the fantasy of abundance is not confined to the Qur’an. The same vagueness occurs in Judaism, Christianity, and Marxism. In each case, the vision of the future world of abundance never includes more than a sentence or two of description, just like romantic comedies that only briefly hint at life after marriage. Buddhism seems to be the exceptional religion in this regard. It avoids the promise of abundance and offers a pure scarcity or nothingness instead. But this is a sleight of hand: Buddhist scarcity is just the form of appearance of pure abundance and thus also cannot be adequately described.

17. Juan-David Nasio, Le Fantasme: le plasir de lire Lacan (Paris: Payot, 2005), 13.

18. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, 2009), 214.

20. Like Marx, Lenin spends almost none of his theoretical time on the abundant future but trains his eye completely on the prevailing scarcity. Through this emphasis, Lenin shows that he understands where our satisfaction actually lies—not in the abundance of the future but in today’s struggle against scarcity, even when that struggle aims at an abundant future.

21. A powerful critique of a society based of the ideal of pure abundance occurs in an episode from the original Star Trek series entitled “This Side of Paradise.” In the episode, the Enterprise arrives at a colony where everyone is healthy and happy, and the colony produces enough to meet its needs without any disharmony among its members. The catch is that this paradise is the result of spores that have invaded the bodies of the colonists and completely eliminated their desire. In order to find pure utopia satisfying, the series implies, one must cease to be a desiring subject. Or happiness comes at the expense of enjoyment.

22. The definitive account of the internal failure of the nineteenth-century utopian project is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, a novel that far outstrips in importance his much more well-known The Scarlet Letter. The Blithedale Romance shows how the utopian commune modeled on the actually existing Brook Farm led directly to the self-destructive production of lack even among the most enlightened subjects.

23. Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: Norton, 1994), 26. The exception, for Krugman, is John Maynard Keynes, who was the first economist to propose a theory of the business cycle that both made sense of it and offered a path toward mitigating its damage.

24. Marxist David Harvey largely avoids this error. See, for instance, David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capital (London: Profile, 2014).

25. One such effort at rethinking is Ernest Mandel’s Long Waves of Capitalist Development, where Mandel translates the concept of the business cycle into that of waves of capitalist development that crest at a decreasing point, thereby leading gradually to the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. Mandel preserved the Marxist teleology while integrating capitalism’s capacity for recovery from the business cycle’s downturn.

26. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 162. Keynes likely takes the term animal spirits from David Hume, though Descartes also employs it.

27. Later in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes chalks up the temporary decline in the animal spirits to the human tendency to save instead of invest. But this is a bizarre explanation from someone who posits the existence of animal spirits, which suggest a capacity for overcoming this tendency. Keynes claims, “there has been a chronic tendency throughout human history for the propensity to save to be stronger than the inducement to invest. The weakness of the inducement to invest has been at all times the key to the economic problem.” Ibid., 348–49.

28. Psychoanalysis emerges in response to the subject’s experience of abundance, not its encounter with scarcity. This is one reason why patients tend to be well-off rather than impoverished. If one’s problem is scarcity or the absence of the object, psychoanalysis can provide no assistance, since it insists that the object is necessarily lost.

29. The entrance into signification renders the human animal a subject of excess because signification itself is excessive. Attempts to explain signification in terms of evolutionary adaptation fail to take this excessiveness of the signifier into account. Even if language initially promised a better adaptation, it breaks this promise through the excessive suffering that it produces.

30. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 2003), 251.

31. The clear decline in Hemingway’s fiction has a direct link to his relationship to ontological scarcity. In the novels after A Farewell to Arms, characters begin to acquire the capacity to endure this scarcity and even to shine in the face of it. But this endurance only becomes possible with the conversion of ontological scarcity to a mere empirical scarcity. One the Hemingway hero arrives on the scene, ontological scarcity exits, and Hemingway’s fiction pays the price.

32. Though time seems to torture Quentin throughout this section of the novel, his obsession with time is actually an attempt to produce scarcity out of abundance. A temporal world is a world where he can dream of one day escaping Caddy’s overpresence, which he does when he kills himself. The Quentin section of Faulkner’s novel reveals that temporality or scarcity is not our ultimate ontological problem. Abundance is far more vexing.

33. Molly Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 229.

34. Throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Bea Bookchin (University of Vermont) for her thoughts on a postscarcity economy.

1. In Seminar VII, Jacques Lacan offers his classic definition of sublimation. He states, “the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object…to the dignity of the Thing.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 112.

2. Althusser claims, “In 1845, Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man.” Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1969), 227. For Althusser’s student, Étienne Balibar, Marx doesn’t just break from humanism in 1845 but also from philosophy as such. In The Philosophy of Marx, he argues, “The ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ hence demand a definitive exit (Ausgang) from philosophy, as the only means of realizing what has always been its loftiest ambition: emancipation, liberation.” Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (New York: Verso, 1995), 17.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Verso, 1998), 38–39.

4. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, “There are no absolute values, since, for money, value as such is relative. There is nothing inalienable, since everything is alienable for money. There is no higher or holier, since everything appropriable by money.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 839.

5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 163. This analysis of the fetishism of commodities has had a philosophical fecundity that no other part of Marx’s thought has experienced. It led directly to Georg Lukács’s theorizing of reification and the development of the Frankfurt School that came out of this theorizing.

6. Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of the commodity and its immanent transcendence is unthinkable outside the background of Hegel’s philosophy. Though Spinoza constructs a philosophy of complete immanence, Hegel is the philosopher to grasp transcendence existing only within immanence (though Kant first suggests this possibility). With this philosophical formulation, Hegel anticipates and makes possible Marx’s theorization of commodity fetishism. According to Marx, commodification creates transcendence in a wholly immanent universe, and this is the source of sublimity.

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145.

8. Ayn Rand and her acolytes represent possible exceptions to this rule. It doesn’t require a great leap to imagine her mounting the barricades under the flag of capitalism itself.

9. It is tempted to envision the collector as a challenge to the capitalist ethos because the collector assembles what has no use. But the apotheosis of the collector fails to recognize that capitalism itself is nothing but the accumulation of the useless in the form of the commodity. We completely fail to understand the commodity if we attach utility to its value.

10. Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 53.

11. This is true for Kant’s sublime as well. If we saw the stars as they formed, they would lose their sublime status, which emerges out of our temporal and spatial distance from them.

12. The frustration that every consumer experiences when dealing with excessive packaging is akin to the frustration that one experiences during a difficult trek to a holy site. The transcendence is inextricable from the lack of easy access.

13. Depression is not the result of failing to obtain what we want but of recognizing that even what we want will not provide the satisfaction that we can imagine. This is why depression is so widespread within capitalism, which relies on the exact structure that produces depression—an image of satisfaction that no experience can ever approximate.

14. I myself have been guilty of this series of purchases for a single film in one instance, but I never watched any of the versions because my initial theatrical experience of the film was too traumatic and memorable to repeat.

15. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2d ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66.

16. The emphasis that marginal utility theory places on the consumer’s anticipated satisfaction rather than the consumer’s actual satisfaction shows again that the defenders of capitalism expose its psychic appeal much better than its critics. Even this simple observation explains why consumers invest themselves in what actually fails to satisfy them.

17. Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, trans. James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 240–41.

18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269.

19. According to Walter Davis, this moment, not the abandonment of things in themselves in the first Critique, represents Kant’s turn toward a lamentable subjectivism. Rather than experiencing the sublimity inhering in the subject’s distance from the external world, Kant translates this distance into the subject’s internal distance from itself. See Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

20. For the first theorist who recognizes Hegel as the great critic of capitalist society, see Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1981).

21. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 377.

22. At first glance, Friedman’s analysis of capitalist morality seems completely convincing. The idea that one must pay a price for one’s prejudices is clearly in evidence when one contemplates a diner that refuses to serve black customers and thus cuts into its possible market. But the problem is that Friedman assumes a neutral starting point for the social order, a social order initially free of any prejudice. At many points throughout the history of capitalism, the refusal to serve a certain clientele did not harm a proprietor’s bottom line but rather enhanced it. If one does business in a racist society, then the system penalizes the proprietor for a lack of racism, not a surfeit of it. Friedman fails to see this because an impossible neutrality functions as his system’s one a priori category.

23. There are those who do take up the case for the lumpenproletariat and their revolutionary potential. Though much more a Marxist than Said, Frantz Fanon adopts this position. He believes that in the colonial situation capitalist has already bought off the industrial proletariat, but the lumpenproletariat sustain a revolutionary spirit. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004). The great filmic representation of the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat occurs at the conclusion of Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1975), where a group of outcasts join together and cover the naked torso of a bourgeois leader with their spit. This is their response to his betrayal of the country and the revolution to the capitalists from the colonizing power France.

24. In his subsequent Culture and Imperialism, the role of capitalism in Said’s account becomes more pronounced, though he still does not mention the relationship between the commodity structure and the exotic other. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993).

25. In this sense, orientalism represents a translation of Foucault’s thought to the relation between West and East. Western writers have assembled knowledge about the East with the ultimate aim of obtaining power over this otherness, just like the medical system gains power over bodies by cutting them up and acquiring knowledge about their functioning.

26. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 222. What separates Hegel from all orientalism, despite denigrating comments about the East, is his refusal to grant any knowledge of the mystery of otherness to the others themselves. The mystery of the Orient, in other words, confounds those in the Orient just as much as it does Westerners. For Hegel, there is no subject supposed to know, as there is for the orientalist, who believes that oriental subjects have access to a secret knowledge and thus do not suffer from the unconscious in the way that Westerners do.

27. Peter Brunette, “Sophia Coppola’s Overly Subtle Lost in Translation,” Indiewire, www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_030917lost.html.

28. For a more exhaustive (and perhaps exhausting) interpretation of Lost in Translation, see Todd McGowan, “There is Nothing Lost in Translation,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 1 (2006): 53–64.

29. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 2008), 137.

30. The position of complete secularity is that of philosophical pragmatism, and this pragmatism is fully compatible with the functioning of capitalism. It suffices to open any book by Richard Rorty to see the ease with which pragmatism accepts capitalism’s primary assumptions.

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 742.

2. The fundamental idea of psychoanalysis lies in the opposite direction from that of capitalism. For psychoanalysis, “Too much is not enough.” That is to say, every excessive accumulation results in an unavoidable confrontation with lack, and it is this confrontation that sends the capitalist subject into psychoanalysis.