Overview

Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology-as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Zizek-there remain remarkably few systematic accounts of the role of Marx in Lacan's work. A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan's teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan's unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian 'labour theory of the unconscious'. Tracing these developments, Tomsic maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions. Finalist for the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize.

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9781784781088

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The Capitalist Unconscious is the first book-length study of Lacan's reading of Marx in English language. One cannot overestimate its significance in filling in this almost scandalous gap -- which it does splendidly. It offers many original and most compelling insights into both Marx and Lacan. It is both systematic and highly original in developing the affinities between Lacan's and Marx's theories, often pointing at rather unexpected aspects of this affinity. Tomsic engages with his topics passionately, lucidly, with erudition and in a very readable way, despite the challenging complexity of the subject. Alenka Zupancic Samo Tomsic's The Capitalist Unconscious does the simple thing that's so hard to do: taking Lacan seriously as a reader of Marx. Against all the confusions and failures that have often characterized the attempts to synthesize Freud and Marx, Tomsic argues that we must think the structure of the unconscious and the structure of capitalism together. In a series of brilliant readings of Freud, Lacan, and Marx, The Capitalist Unconscious develops a politics of negativity that can engage with the social and psychic traumas of the present moment. The result is a provocative demand to think Lacan with Marx, to work through our denials and disavowals, and to traverse the hysterical misery of capitalism. Benjamin Noys

Author Information

Samo Tomsic obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the past he has worked at the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, and is currently research assistant in the interdisciplinary cluster ""Image Knowledge Gestaltung"" at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has widely published on psychoanalysis, structuralism and contemporary French philosophy, and translated Kant, Freud, Foucault and Badiou among others into Slovenian.

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