Never Employable Enough: The (Im)possibility of Satisfying the Boss’s Desire

Abstract

Lacan refers to an excessive or mad desire of the subject to overcome its alienation in the world, to be at one with it, as the drive conditioning its existence. The mad desire for surplus profit is the drive of the capitalist as the condition for its existence. In this article, it is argued that subjective desire and capitalist desire enter into a dialectical synthesis, an enjoyment derived from improving employability. This is the conceptual framework for an analysis of employability as a condition that can never be fulfilled. The argument is developed through Slavoj Žižek’s notion of false disidentification. This concept is utilized to show how subordination to capital (the material fact of labour) is defused by the sense we have of our independence from the employer (an identification that is not associated with the act of labour). Employability is augmented through the use values we derive from the ‘life outside of the job’ (spatial disidentification) that we willingly commit to the employer in order to improve prospects for employment (temporal disidentification). The critical purchase of the concepts of surplus value, surplus enjoyment and false disidentification are demonstrated against the background of Boltanski and Chiapello’s leading analysis on the ideology of employability.