Enjoyment as an economic factor: Reading Marx with Lacan

Abstract

This article takes issue with economic discourses that present excessive greed as the central cause of economic crises. Through constructing a particular genealogy of greed, we show how governing it for restoring social order has been a dominant fantasy narrative that has motivated the (theoretically humanist) problematic of political economy. We argue that this focus on greed as the catalyst (when harnessed ‘appropriately’) or the enemy of social order keeps the public debate from deliberating on the particular modes of enjoyment (jouissance) which both shore up and destabilize the dynamics of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption under capitalism. After rethinking the Marxian concept of class antagonism through Lacanian categories, we produce an analysis of the latest crisis of US capitalism that steers away not only from the theoretical humanist problematic of political economy, but also from the residual reproductionism that continues to silently inform certain Lacanian analyses.