S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 96-124

J o h n  H o l l a n d

T H e  C a p I T a L I s T  U n C a n n y

I
n May 1972, during a lecture entitled “Du discours psychanalytique [On the psy-
choanalytic Discourse],” delivered at the University of Milan, Jacques Lacan 
announced to his listeners that “the crisis, not of the discourse of the master, 
but of the capitalist discourse, which is its substitute, has begun.”1 The capi-

talist discourse is a “modern” modification of the discourse of the master, and in 
making this statement, Lacan was marking out certain limits of a particular tra-
jectory of his teaching, one that had enabled him to develop his theory of the four 
discourses: a theory of the ways in which jouissance and the unconscious inhere 
within particular social practices.

This article seeks to provide a broad sketch of the workings of the fith, capitalist 
discourse, lightly etching in certain arguments that would deserve to be developed 
more fully elsewhere. I shall argue that this discourse is a particular mode of the 
compulsion to repeat, and gives rise, at its heart, to an experience that could be 
called a capitalist uncanny. Let desperate by such a compulsion, the “capitalist” 
will make an attempt to impose stability upon this movement by recreating the 
Weltanschauung of his/her predecessor, the master. such efforts, however, will be 
rendered vain by the confrontation with the force of a new superego. 

1. Discourse and Ideology

The fith of Lacan’s discourses immediately raises the question of how a discourse 
can be called “capitalist.” a discourse is a particular social formation in which the 
existence of speech establishes places from which one can act; to define capitalism 
as a discourse is to relate it to the internal logic of this structure. The precondition 
for answering this question is an understanding of what discourse itself is. The par-
ticularity of Lacan’s discourse-theory can be approached by examining how it dif-
fers from its closest theoretical “relation”: the Lacanian-inspired ideology-analysis 
initiated by slavoj Žižek and others. Their treatment of ideology diverges somewhat 
from Lacan’s discourse-theory, most notably in their account of the relation be-
tween fantasy and reality.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 97

In his relatively early work, Žižek set out certain premises of a valuable and subtle 
theory of ideology; his essay, “Che Vuoi?,” which appeared in The Sublime Object of 
Ideology, the first book that he published in english, can, for the present purposes, 
be taken as the founding act of this theory.2 By drawing on Lacan’s graph of desire 
and emphasizing the role of fantasy, he produced a theory of the way in which jou-
issance and the unconscious insinuate themselves into configurations of signifiers, 
configurations that involve conceptions of society, economics, politics or sexuality. 
One of the starting-points of Žižek’s analysis is his treatment of the limits of the 
work of Louis althusser, for whom ideology “represents the imaginary relation-
ship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” a relationship that is es-
tablished when agents of the Ideological state apparatuses “hai[l] or interpellat[e] 
individuals as subjects.”3 Žižek states that 

…the crucial weakness of hitherto (post-)structuralist essays in the theory of 
ideology descending from the althusserian theory of interpellation was to 
limit themselves to the lower level, to the lower square of Lacan’s graph of 
desire—to aim at grasping the efficiency of an ideology exclusively through 
the mechanism of imaginary and symbolic identification.4 

althusser’s formulations involved only the first two of the four levels of the graph 
of desire, the ones dominated by the symbolic and imaginary. Žižek’s innovation 
is therefore to show how the third and fourth levels, which bring in jouissance and 
the unconscious, affect ideology. 

according to Žižek, the person who interpellates us opens up, without knowing 
that s/he is doing so, a dimension that has nothing to do with consciousness; con-
tained within this call is the Che vuoi?—What do you want—addressed to us by the 
s(), the point of impasse, of silence, of “inconsistency” in the Other (123). Because 
of this unknown and uncalculated dimension of the call, an ideology finds the 
source of its power in the unconscious and jouissance; “the last support of the 
ideological effect (of the way an ideological network of signifiers ‘holds’ us) is the 
non-sensical, pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment,” which is “structured in fantasy” 
(124).

Fantasy thus becomes one of the principal elements of ideology. It stages a relation 
between two terms ( ◊ a), a relation that provides an answer to the Che vuoi? This 
response tells me what the Other wants of me, and therefore what I myself want. 
as conceived in this way, fantasy becomes linked inextricably with another cat-
egory: reality. Žižek follows Lacan in presenting fantasy as the frame by which we 
perceive reality; the “fantasy framework” provides the coordinates by which we 
choose the particular elements of our “reality” that become important to us, the el-
ements that we include in our account of what occurs around us (47).This strict con-
nection between fantasy and reality is one of the most fruitful aspects of Žižek’s 
theory of ideology; it marks a radical departure from any conception of ideology as 
a “false consciousness” that can be dissipated by a fuller understanding of reality. 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 98

Their linkage becomes a powerful tool for explaining the stasis of ideology, the per-
sistence of highly problematic ideologies, in which we claim no longer to believe.

This connection also provides ideology-analysis with a reliable way of locating the 
coordinates of fantasy within any particular ideology. although both  and a are 
fundamentally ungraspable, their position can be found by paying close attention 
to the ways in which people describe their experiences of reality. In “Che Vuoi? ” 
the most important example of the ideological functioning of the object a is the 
figure of “the” “Jew” in anti-semitic corporatist ideologies, which contend that all 
elements of society should function in harmony, in the way that the organs in a 
healthy body supposedly do. “The Jew” becomes the scapegoat for the inevitable 
failure of such a conception, the explanation of why society is actually “split by 
antagonistic struggles”; for anti-semites, this figure becomes a sort of “fetish,” a 
foreign body that “marks the eruption of enjoyment in the social field,” and there-
fore serves as a perfect example of the object a (126). “Reality” becomes the principle 
that enables analysts of ideology to locate the constituents of the fantasy. 

Like the theory of ideology, Lacan’s work on discourse also seeks to specify the 
unexpected implication of the subject and jouissance within our everyday lives; in 
this case, it looks for them less in the various networks of “ideas” than in a series of 
social practices. This change of focus will sometimes involve radical reformulations 
of the roles played by fantasy and reality. 

The elaboration of the four discourses, and later of the capitalist discourse, marks 
something of a change in Lacan’s teaching: until that moment, he had devoted 
himself to theorizing a specific practice—that of psychoanalysis—in its autonomy; 
whenever he referred to historical or social questions, he had done so only to il-
luminate analytic practice. His theory of discourse, on the other hand, is based on 
a sort of wager: that the letters that he had elaborated in order to think through 
psychoanalysis can also throw light upon other practices, which may differ radi-
cally from it. as he argues, “Through the instrument of language, a certain num-
ber of stable relations are established, inside which something that is much larger 
and goes much further than actual utterances (énonciations) can, of course, be in-
scribed.”5 Lacan’s wager, in developing a theory of these positions, involves an hy-
pothesis that concerns history: that the letters by which he formalized analytic 
experience can also illuminate social relations that existed long before Freud in-
vented analytic practice. 

In comparison with the complexity of terms that he had employed with the graph 
of desire, his approach to discourse is radically simplified, and even minimalist, 
for he uses only four terms: , a force that exists outside the symbolic, and about 
which we can only learn retroactively, through the signifiers that it underlies; s

1
, 

the signifier that represents the subject; s
2
, the network of signifiers upon which 

s
1
 intervenes; a, the surplus-jouissance that cannot be lodged within the s

2
. not 

only do all the letters—i(a), m—that had designated the imaginary in the graph of 
desire disappear, but also the very term that marks the point of impasse within 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 99

the unconscious— s(), the signifier of the lack in the Other—is not written as 
such. Its absent presence can only be inferred by means of the changing relations 
within the four terms used in writing the discourses. These letters can occupy four 
places, which neither disappear nor change their order in the movement from one 
discourse to another:6

In the discourse of the master, which was, in historical terms, the first to emerge, 
one encounters a series of relations in which the signifier represents the subject for 
another signifier, to which surplus-jouissance is added. He writes it in the follow-
ing way in “Du discours psychanalytique” (40):

Here, the s
1
 occupies the place of the agent, the s

2
 of the other, the a of the produc-

tion and  of truth. The three other discourses are then made to appear through 
what Lacan, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, calls a quasi-mathematical opera-
tion of “circular permutation,” by means of a series of counter-clockwise rotations: 
when s

2
 becomes the agent, the discourse becomes that of the university; the ana-

lytic discourse emerges when the a serves as the agent; the discourse of the hysteric 
occurs when  acts as agent (39). each discourse is marked by a series of vectors, 
which indicates the ways in which one term acts upon and establishes a “relation” 
with another; each is also, however, characterized by incapacities and impossi-
bilities, where these relations fail, either completely or in part. Here will be found 
one of the most important differences between Lacan’s discourse-theory and the 
ideology-critique inspired by his teaching: the discourses show the way in which 
specific social practices render particular functions of the psyche unavailable for 
us when we find ourselves caught up in them.

The discourse of the master is particularly important in the present context, both 
because it will mutate into the capitalist discourse, and because its manner of op-
erating will place it in stark contrast with some of the theoretical assumptions of 
ideology-analysis. The master who dominates this discourse is a figure who oper-
ates not only in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but also, and more importantly, in 
classical philosophy and especially in aristotle’s thought. although Lacan only 
formulated this discourse and its operation in 1969, he was preoccupied with the 
master throughout his teaching, and in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he refers spe-
cifically to the Nicomachean Ethics, a work that tells us much about the master’s 
metaphysical, epistemological, and libidinal stance; the master, as Lacan argues, 
derives his authority to command by “enter[ing]…and submit[ting] to an estab-
lished and eternal ‘order’ which has been set in motion by the ‘unmoved mover.’”7



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 100

Within the theory of discourse, this master intervenes upon the slave, establishing 
a relation of command and obedience, hierarchy, and domination. If, in D’un Autre 
à l’autre [From an Other to the other], Lacan had referred to the master as a “dumb 
ass [con],” he progressively delineates a more complex status for him, first in The 
Other Side of Psychoanalysis and then in Encore, showing that if this figure is sepa-
rate from knowledge, he nevertheless embodies a somewhat sinister epistemologi-
cal position.8 In sketching out the master’s role in the seventeenth seminar, Lacan 
emphasizes that his power derives from his definition of himself as being “identical 
with his own signifier” (90). This very simplicity enables him to intervene switly 
upon the slower-moving slave, who is encumbered by the complex relations of sig-
nifiers that constitute knowledge. animated by a desire for “things [to] work,” the 
master commands the slave to do his bidding. He would like, in particular, to take 
possession of this knowledge and to have it used for his own purposes. as Lacan 
says, this knowledge is to be “transmitted from the slave’s pocket to the master’s—
assuming that they had pockets in those days”; in this way, the slave is gradually 
dispossessed of “this knowledge in order for it to become the master’s knowledge,” 
an operation that would pave the way for the establishment, first, of classical phi-
losophy and then of the discourse of the university, in which the s

2
 takes the place 

of the agent (22).

at the center of the discourse of the master is a cluster of psychic and libidinal posi-
tions: the slave’s transference towards the master, and the latter’s exclusion of his 
own jouissance in favor of his ability to control the slave. In intervening upon the 
slave’s knowledge, the master unfortunately acquires a position of great psychic 
significance for the slave. With the master’s advent, the slave loses a more or less di-
rect relation to his own body, which becomes the master’s property (89). as a result, 
from the slave’s perspective, the master’s action comes to stand in for the primal 
loss of an unmediated relation to his body, a loss that we all experience, and which 
Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, had called “alienation.” 
alienation designates, first, the operation of primal repression and then of second-
ary repressions, in which the living being has to make a “forced choice” between 
its own being and “meaning,” which Lacan would later write as s

2
. This being, in 

consenting to being represented by these signifiers, loses not only a direct access 
to its body, but also a specific signifier with which it had identified and which can 
be written as s

1
, and which is no longer accessible to consciousness. This operation 

can be represented as follows:9





Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 101

The master, in making the slave submit to him, brings the s
1
 to bear upon an “al-

ready constituted” field of knowledge, a set of signifiers that are “already articu-
lated with one another” (Other Side, 15). Through its operation, the master signifier 
will come to stand in for the signifier that has already been eclipsed by primal 
repression, the term that “Freud defined by placing it between the enigmatic paren-
thesis of the Urverdrängt” (90). In this way, each signifier that is part of the slave’s 
“headless knowledge” acquires a new resonance, precisely because it has come to 
refer to the signifier that had been “split off” from the others. This resonance exacts 
a heavy price upon the slave, for it binds him in a transferential relation to the mas-
ter. In conjunction with this new relation, the , “the subject as divided, emerges” in 
the place of the “truth of the master” (15, 90). This  becomes the subject-supposed-
to-know for the slave and the master acquires a power over him because something 
in this master is presumed to know about his unconscious. This transference, just as 
much as the master’s ability to punish the slave, seals the latter’s submission to him.

Despite the subjective roots of the slave’s subservience, the master is not all-power-
ful; not only are there limits to his ability command the slave, but this very capacity 
is based upon an acceptance of severe restrictions on his own psyche. The master’s 
discourse is marked by both “impossibilities” and incapacities or even “impotences 
[impuissances]” (Encore, 16). The impossibility inheres in the relation between the 
master signifier and knowledge; although it is true that the signifier’s intervention 
has an enormous psychic effect upon the slave, from the master’s own perspective, 
its results are inevitably disappointing. although the master may want things to 
function smoothly, what his experience will show him is that this will not occur 
through his commands, either in the field of knowledge or in more practical mat-
ters. as Lacan asserts, “it is effectively impossible that there be a master who makes 
the entire world function. Getting people to work is even more tiring, if one really 
has to do it, than working oneself. The master never does it” (Other Side, 74). noth-
ing is less certain than that the slave elaborates knowledge expressly at the mas-
ter’s command, in part because the master signifier, when it first intervenes upon 
the slave, acts upon a “network” of knowledge that has already been formed (13). 
If the slave brings forth any further knowledge, it is not as a result of a successful 
command from the master, but because the structure of the discourse has instituted 
a transference that is directed to , rather than to s

1
.10

The impuissance that inheres within the discourse of the master will have an even 
more far-reaching effect, for it will render inoperative, within this discourse, the 
relations upon which Žižek’s first formulations of ideology-analysis depend. If the 
vectors in the discourses mark the existence of certain sorts of connections, which 
allow an agent, for example, to act upon an other, and for this other to produce a 
third element, there is, on the contrary, a “barrier” between surplus-jouissance, 
located in the place of the production, and the , the master’s truth. Because of this 
barrier, “the master is castrated” (97). If the slave is bound by transference to the 
master, the latter, in turn, “is only able to dominate” him “by excluding” both phal-
lic jouissance and the fantasy that serves as its precondition, from his experience; 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 102

he does so, in part because this jouissance could expose him both to the subversive 
effects of the sexual non-relation and to the contradictions inherent within his own 
particular desire (97). such an exposure would sap his ability to dominate the slave, 
for this ability depends upon his capacity to define himself as identical to himself. 
This conclusion, as Lacan notes, is unexpected, for “what people usually say” is the 
opposite: “that jouissance is the privilege of the master” (22). The master, however, 
is radically unlike the primal father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, just as he differs 
from the term that figures in Lacan’s mathemes of masculine sexuation: , the 
at-least-one element that has not submitted to castration.

If fantasy does not operate for the master, then this structural particularity raises 
a question about the role of reality in his discourse: how can reality manifest itself 
here, if it has been defined as what frames a psychic formation that no longer oper-
ates? If the master has no fantasy, then what kind of reality does he have? To my 
knowledge, Lacan never gives an explicit answer to this question, but I shall argue 
that he provides an implicit response, and leaves us the coordinates that can enable 
us to understand the character of the master’s reality.11 This reality will turn out 
to be the opposite of the one that Lacan describes in Encore as being approached 
through “apparatuses of jouissance”; instead, it can be conceived of as a particular 
variation of the reality principle, one in which the hope of refinding the halluci-
nated object of satisfaction has disappeared (55). 

Certain indices concerning the master’s relation to reality can be found in Encore, 
in the passage in which Lacan discusses what he calls a “conception of the world,” 
an expression that he employs as a way of rethinking Freud’s remarks about the 
Weltanschauung (41-43). In his essay, “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” in the 
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Freud defines a Weltanschauung as “an 
intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly 
on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly leaves no question 
unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”12 The 
expression that interests Lacan in this definition is “fixed place,” and he will take 
up Freud’s formulations by employing the term, “world,” in a way that is reminis-
cent of alexandre Koyré’s use of it: it denotes a stable aristotelian cosmology and 
metaphysic, which is based upon a bounded system of spheres, in which the master 
himself comes to be located at its “center.”13

Lacan’s interest in the “world” and the topological qualities of the sphere is of long 
standing, and an important aspect of his concern with them derives from their 
connection with a particular understanding of what reality is. He occupied himself 
with the sphere because it permits a clear and simple demarcation between inside 
and outside, one that provides the condition for what he calls “cosmological think-
ing” in his seminar, Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse [Crucial problems for 
psychoanalysis]: a form of thought that is characterized by an adequation between 
macrocosm and microcosm, in such a way that the latter comes to be seen as the 
result of the former, and will correspond to it point-by-point. This microcosm can 
be conceived of in several ways: “as subject, soul, ηούς (nous),” while the determi-



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 103

nant macrocosm can be called “reality” or the “universe.”14 The sphere thus becomes 
the basis of a theory of knowledge in which reality can be divided into a thousand 
separate atoms, each of which will exist in a more or less perfect correspondence 
with the mental presentation that we make of it.

It is this sort of epistemology that underlies the master’s position; he locates him-
self at the center of the system of spheres and bases his power upon his “clear-
sighted” access to reality, the condition of which is his acceptance of castration. as 
Lacan argues in Encore, the stability of the conception of the world as a series of 
spheres is guaranteed by “a view, gaze or imaginary hold” that remains outside the 
system: that of the unmoved mover, who has set the spheres in motion. The master 
is able to occupy the center of this system because he defines himself as the figure 
who is able to discern and submit to this external and constitutive gaze; in Lacan’s 
words, “some-one—a part of this world—is at the outset assumed to be able to take 
cognizance of” this gaze and the imaginary hold that it provides (43).

Lacan’s use of the expression “take cognizance” is significant, for it denotes an 
operation that is the condition for the master’s assumption of his status, an opera-
tion that will have a crucial effect on the ordered set of knowledge. This expression 
is not at all absent from Freud’s work, for it is a central element of his concept of 
disavowal, with the crucial difference that, with the latter, it is always marked by a 
sort of negation, a “refus[al] to take cognizance” of something. This is the case with 
fetishism, for example, which arises when a boy refuses “to take cognizance of the 
fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis.”15

By contrast, the master’s affirmation, his action of taking cognizance is much less 
familiar to us as a concept than disavowal; it had to wait until 1972 to be formu-
lated, in Encore, and it is marked by what is, for us, the radical strangeness of the 
master’s exclusion of his own jouissance, an exclusion that is unfamiliar for us and 
is difficult for us to grasp.

The master’s taking of cognizance is not the symmetrical opposite of the budding 
fetishist’s refusal to do so. The latter refuses to recognize what is empirically avail-
able to him in sense perceptions; the master, however, acknowledges something 
that is never present to the senses as such: something of which the gaze as ob-
ject a—which Lacan defines as “unapprehensible”—is itself the index (Four Funda-
mental Concepts, 83). The master recognizes not a sense-perception, but a logical 
position that is located beyond the object a: this position is that of the unmoved 
mover, which stands outside, and thus constitutes an exception to the system of 
spheres. For the master, this figure has the status of the at-least-one element out-
side castration——and his acknowledgement of it becomes something like the 
primordial Bejahung, the “judgment of attribution” that marks him as radically 
castrated and constitutes his position as master.16

The master can then claim that he has the “right” to command others because he 
believes that his affirmation—his Bejahung—is a sign of his strength. as a conse-
quence, he claims to be unlike the fetishist; he supposedly does not allow psychic 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 104

and libidinal concerns to prevent him from affirming the correctness of his percep-
tions. He presents his own subjective and libidinal impasses as virtues, by using his 
“clear-sighted” perception of reality as the source of his power. such a choice gives 
the master a very particular relation to the Freudian “reality principle.” Lacan had 
always argued that, as he says in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, “the world of percep-
tion is represented by Freud as dependent on the fundamental hallucination with-
out which there would be no attention available”; reality would not interest us if we 
did not believe that we could locate in it an hallucinated representation of what has 
once satisfied us (53). The master, however, seeks to approach the reality principle 
more directly, in a way that is not oriented by the search for an hallucinated satis-
faction; in Freud’s words, his goal is to “form a conception of the real circumstances 
in the external world and…make a real alteration in them,” without needing this 
world to be “distorted” by his own jouissance.17

If this construction of the master’s fundamental epistemological position is correct, 
then it will affect our understanding of his connection with the slave’s knowledge. 
His conception of the world provides him with a relation to reality that underlies 
his domination of the slave and determines his relation to knowledge. He himself 
knows “nothing,” for he does not occupy the place where knowledge is to be found; 
his position as bearer of the master signifier does, however, enable him to intervene 
upon and judge this knowledge: to prescribe the characteristics that the signifiers 
in this set should possess. The master becomes a sort of “policeman” of reality: he 
patrols the border between reality and our presentations of it, acting to ensure 
that each signifier corresponds to its atom of reality. He thereby upholds the pre-
eminence of reality over the knowledge that presents it. This species of surveillance 
becomes an integral part of the process by which the master takes possession of the 
slave’s knowledge, and will thereby gradually enable the discourse of the universi-
ty to emerge, in a form that Lacan characterizes, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 
as a “pure knowledge of the master, ruled by his command” (104). 

The discourse of the master thus presents us with a social practice that has con-
straining effects upon the unconscious and libidinal positions of its participants. 
The position of the master does not correspond directly with the graph of desire, 
which presents relations of speech in which fantasy plays an almost necessary role; 
the master’s exclusion of fantasy and his very different relation to reality are not 
parts of a theory of ideology based upon the graph. 

This significant difference will bring us back to the question with which I began 
this discussion: what is the capitalist discourse and what does it mean to qualify a 
discourse as “capitalist”? For the moment, an answer to this question remains im-
possible, but several preliminary observations can be made. First, with the capital-
ist discourse, it is not at all clear that the two mainsprings of the Lacanian theory 
of ideology, fantasy and the reality that it frames, will be able to operate at all. If 
the capitalist discourse is the modern “substitute” for the discourse of the master, 
then in spite of the radical differences between the two, it is uncertain that it re-



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 105

stores the operation of the fantasy. The capitalist mode of production would then 
be obliged to gain and keep its hold on us by some other means.

second, it is also uncertain that the “capitalism” in question in this discourse is 
even fundamentally a mode of production. as we shall see, when Lacan defines 
the structural particularity of the capitalist discourse, he does so by emphasizing 
the very specific character of the jouissance and the unconscious relations of those 
who are entrapped within it; he claims that it is marked by a foreclosure of castra-
tion. any direct or indirect connection between this “capitalist” characteristic and 
the capitalist mode of production will therefore not be apparent from the start. It 
would itself have to become the object of an investigation.

2. The Capitalist Discourse

Lacan, indeed, himself required a fairly long time to define the particularity of 
both the capitalist discourse and the specificity of the jouissance that is to be found 
within it. In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, he sometimes locates capitalism with-
in the discourse of the master, positing that Marx’s worker is a direct descendant of 
Hegel’s slave; just as “the slave will, over time, demonstrate [the master’s truth] to 
him,” so the worker will spend his/her time in “fomenting [the capitalist master’s] 
surplus-jouissance” (107). Lacan’s writing of the capitalist discourse as such, and 
the rather spare comments that he made about it, would have to wait another two 
years, until 1972. They will enable us to take the measure of both the similarity 
and the difference between this discourse and that of the master. What these two 
discourses have in common, as the seventeenth seminar suggests, is the way in 
which surplus-jouissance is produced. Unlike the discourse of the master, however, 
“capitalism,” for Lacan, institutes a series of relations in which this force of the 
plus-de-jouir makes the unconscious—to the extent that the latter can be grasped in 
terms of signifiers—cease to operate. This radical change has several consequences: 
a compulsion to repeat that may never cease and new forms of the superego and 
the trauma.

The two discourses share a common account of the production of the plus-de-jouir, 
one that Lacan had begun to formulate as early as november 1968, before he had 
even presented his theory of discourse. He gave his first exposition of this concept 
in the opening sections of his seminar, D’un Autre à l’autre, by means of a reference 
to Marx’s account of surplus-value. For Marx, the production of a surplus-value is 
synonymous with the creation of capital. In the second part of Volume I of Capi-
tal, Marx sets himself the task of tracing “[t]he [t]ransformation of [m]oney into 
[c]apital” and thus of showing how money, which had been exchanged in both the 
ancient and the medieval worlds, had mutated into something that would become 
the basis of a new mode of production.18 In this new mode, the capitalist uses the 
money that is at his disposal in order to buy both the means of production and 
labor-power. The latter is purchased at its current exchange-value, but its use-value 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 106

oten proves to be much greater; in the course of a day, workers may produce a 
value that is, for example, “double what the capitalist” has paid them (301). The 
capitalist appropriates this “increment or excess” and the appearance of this new 
“surplus-value” is crucial: Marx locates in it the point at which money is changed 
into capital and the element upon which capitalism is founded (251). The capitalist 
appropriates this new value that has been produced, and uses a part of it to repeat 
and expand the process. He buys more material and hires more workers in order to 
obtain an even greater surplus-value, thus instituting a process that could, in the-
ory, continue forever. Within this system, the production of surplus-value “takes 
place only within [a] constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is…
limitless” (253).

Lacan’s claim that Marx was the inventor of the symptom is well-known.19 It could 
just as well be argued that he was also the inventor of the concept of the com-
pulsion to repeat; the capitalist mode of production’s continual pursuit of profit 
becomes the endless movement of an infernal machine. Within the domain not of 
the psyche but of economics, Marx delineated a process by which the production 
of something new would institute a sort of automatism, a structural necessity in 
which this new value “forms of itself the starting-point for a new cycle” (253).

In D’un Autre à l’autre, Lacan’s recognition of this structural necessity becomes the 
basis of a new definition of the genesis of the objet petit a. In this seminar, he no 
longer―as he had done earlier, in seminars such as Anxiety and The Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Psycho-analysis―uses the mathematical term, “remainder,” as a way 
of theorizing this object (Four Fundamental Concepts, 154). He ceases to treat it as 
an element of the real that has been let over from the process of transforming the 
latter into signifiers, and instead, referring explicitly to Marx, defines it as a real 
object that is gradually produced by the repeated elaboration of signifiers. playing 
upon the French translation of Mehrwert, surplus-value, as “plus-value,” he dubs the 
object a as the plus-de-jouir, a “surplus-jouisance,” and argues that the production 
of the object a is “homologous” to that of surplus-value (D’un Autre, 29, 45–46).20 Just 
as labor produces surplus-value, so the gradual establishment of knowledge― the 
elaboration of a set of traits, each of which fixes a part of our jouissance and sat-
isfaction―produces something else: a certain kind of precipitate or sediment (180). 
The latter would not exist if there were no process of creating signifiers, but it is 
not itself a signifier: it cannot give rise to meaning by being enchained with other 
signifiers. This generation of knowledge is a process that is repeated many times, 
and with each repetition, more of the precipitate is generated, with the result that 
ater a certain point, it coagulates into a consistent object, which stands in relation 
to knowledge as a surplus-jouissance.

This object, as some of Lacan’s formulations make clear, does not comfort us and 
palliate our lack; instead, he links it explicitly to Freud’s concept of the death drive. 
It is produced by the “renunciation of jouissance,” a renunciation that is presented 
less as a deliberate choice than as a consequence of a structural impossibility: that 
of translating jouissance into signifiers. The attempt to do so inevitably results in 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 107

the loss of a part of it, a loss that gradually solidifies into the plus-de-jouir. The result 
of this renunciation is that the surplus-jouissance assumes the status of a cause 
of the “discontents of civilization” (40). This direct reference to Civilization and Its 
Discontents indicates the profound connection between this jouissance and what 
Freud formulated concerning the superego. In this work, Freud had argued that the 
effect of what the Standard Edition translates as the “renunciation of instinct” is the 
“erection of an internal authority”―the superego―that watches over and torments 
the ego.21 The repetition that characterizes the production of surplus-value in Marx 
thus provides Lacan, in the opening sessions of D’un Autre à l’autre with a way of 
beginning to rethink the death drive.

although this conception of the object a was presented shortly ater the events of 
May 1968, an understanding of some of its mortal effects would only come during 
the winter and spring of 1972, in the course of several presentations that were made 
outside the framework of his regular seminar. Here, he began to speak of a fith, 
“capitalist” discourse, a paradoxical one, for its very existence disrupts the logic of 
discourse. This discourse is marked by precisely the action that is unavailable to 
the master in his own discourse: the appropriation of surplus-jouissance. 

Lacan pinpointed one of the central characteristics of the capitalist discourse in 
an aside that he made in the course of a lecture given January 6, 1972 to the in-
terns at the at Hôpital de Sainte-Anne. There he claims that “What distinguishes the 
discourse of capitalism is this―the Verwerfung, the rejection, the throwing out-
side all the symbolic fields… of what? Of castration. every order, every discourse 
that has capitalism in common sets aside what we shall call simply the matters of 
love.”22 Then, four months later, in a lecture delivered in Milan entitled “Du discours 
psychanalytique,” Lacan continued these reflections by providing a writing of the 
structure of the capitalist discourse (40):

This writing shows that this discourse is a mutation of that of the master; the fore-
closure of castration is written as an inversion of the two terms that are located on 
the let side of the latter—s

1
 and —so that the place of the agent is now occupied by 

the  and that of truth by the s
1
.

One of the major effects of this inversion is the breaking through of the barrier 
between a and , which characterizes the discourse of the master. Because the  
has ceased to be located in the position of truth, and is found, instead, at that of 
the agent, the plus-de-jouir can reach it directly. The , rather than the capitalist, 
appropriates surplus-jouissance, and the gap between subject and object is thereby 
abolished. If, in the discourse of the master, the a had been rendered so radically 
unavailable that the  could obtain no sense of it, here it is too fully present. The  
is violently “completed” by its object, and through this encounter, castration ceases 
to exist.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 108

This foreclosure of castration—the inundation of the  by the a—is the opposite of 
the situation that Lacan had described in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, in his discussion of the trompe l’oeil, as the “taming” of the gaze. In that 
seminar, in telling the anecdote concerning the Hellenistic painters, Zeuxis and 
parrhasios, he was concerned with showing the result of the introduction of castra-
tion—of the -φ—into the object a. ater Zeuxis had painted a bunch of grapes that 
was so convincing that birds tried to eat it, parrhasios painted “a veil so lifelike 
that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted 
behind it” (103). The revelation of the trompe l’oeil—that there is nothing behind 
the veil—however, has a calming effect upon this impulse; it reduces the invasive 
quality of the wish to look, thereby lessening the violence of a tendency that, when 
let to itself, would have the “effect of arresting movement and…of killing life” (55). 
The trompe l’oeil thus introduces a mode of castration that is not as radical as what 
determines the master’s position; the  has access to a, while also maintaining a 
distance from it, so that it is not overwhelmed by the libidinal object.

In the capitalist discourse, on the other hand, the relation between the  and the 
a is precisely the opposite: the a is unmarked by the -φ, and the  is stricken by 
the encounter with it. since this subject is not the psychological “subject” of con-
sciousness, but is, instead, related to the unconscious and its chain of signifiers, it is 
“stricken,” however, in quite a particular sense. What is stunned and overwhelmed 
is the very status of the unconscious; the absence of castration will involve some-
thing like the disappearance of unconscious formations.

This disappearance can occur because one of the roles of castration is to enable 
jouissance to be ciphered into what we can apprehend as the signifiers of the un-
conscious. such a role is implied by Lacan’s very broad claim that every signifier ci-
phered by the unconscious refers to castration and has a phallic “signification.” The 
latter term, as he explained, is to be understood in the sense of the Fregean “Bedeu-
tung”; it concerns a word’s reference and denotation.23 each signifier can be taken 
to refer directly to castration, for that is the action that has made its production 
possible. Castration enables the unconscious to generate signifiers by introducing a 
distance with respect to the overpowering quality of jouissance; if jouissance is too 
present, there is no need—or possibility—of symbolizing it. such symbolization can 
only take place when this jouissance is lessened, and this is what castration does, 
at the cost of leaving the subject with a jouissance that can only be experienced 
as “insufficient” (Encore, 105). In other words, signifiers denote castration in part 
because the latter constitutes the condition for their possibility.

It is within this context that one of the implications of the inversion of the s
1
 and 

the  starts to become apparent. In the discourse of the master, the slave’s sinister 
subjection to the master’s supposed unconscious is based upon the formula that 
Lacan used frequently in order to describe one of the fundamental structures of 
unconscious formations: the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. In 
this formulation, the problematic term is not “signifier,” for in analysis, we can ap-



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 109

prehend very specific signifiers directly; we extract them from our dreams and our 
parapraxes, connect them with other signifiers, and thereby learn something about 
a desire whose existence we may well not have expected. The term that has a more 
difficult status is “subject,” for we can never have direct access to it. In explaining 
it, Lacan frequently uses the aristotelian term, “hypokeimenon,” for it underlies the 
signifying chain, but its nature is fundamentally different from that of any signi-
fier, and therefore its existence can only be a logical “supposition”; we can infer 
that it exists because of the effect of our encounter with the chain (Other Side, 13). 
It is a force that would seem to generate signifiers through a chiffrage, a ciphering, 
of jouissance; only by examining the chain can we form any hypothesis concern-
ing its jouissance, an enjoyment that would seem to derive a part of its satisfaction 
through the very process of ciphering. none of these signifiers, however, is identi-
cal with the subject and none can encapsulate it; each of them tells us something 
about it that seems too partial that it ends up being little more than a “lie” about 
this subject. 

In the capitalist discourse, the consequence of the inversion of the s
1
 and the  is 

that the signifier no longer represents the subject for another signifier. The capital-
ist discourse disarticulates the subject from both this signifier and knowledge. as 
a result, the  now precedes the signifier that had once represented it and ceases 
to be the subject of the unconscious; knowledge, in turn, is no longer presumed to 
be touched by such an unconscious. Within this discourse, the unconscious ceases 
to operate.

If this is the case, then we can answer in the negative the question of whether 
fantasy functions within the capitalist discourse. Fantasy exists no more here than 
it does in the discourse of the master, but for a very different reason. The master 
knows nothing about his fantasy because the point of arrest between a and  pre-
vents these two terms from communicating. What is paradoxical in the capitalist 
discourse is that it is precisely the absence of this point of arrest that renders the 
fantasy inoperative. The vector, a → , does not write the relation between the 
divided subject and the “external” object in which it locates its “being.” Instead, 
it writes a violent breach of that delicate relation of “externality.” What had been 
the subject of the unconscious encounters the jouissance of the death drive; over-
whelmed, it becomes merely an empty place.

as a consequence, not only castration, but also much of the psychic apparatus 
of which the fantasy had been part are now abolished; this abolition renders the 
operation of this discourse very different from that of the graph of desire. In the 
graph, the fantasy had provided an answer to the question, Che vuoi?, posed by our 
dim sense of the existence of the s(); when, however, the unconscious ceases to 
confront us with signifiers that disturb us because of their enigmatic quality, the 
s() disappears, along with any need to provide a response to it. The answer given 
by the fantasy provides us with a supple way of dealing with our castration, for it 
allows the -φ to be “switched from one of its terms to the other”: from  to a and 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 110

then back.24 With the foreclosure of this castration, not only the fantasy but also the 
very reason for its existence disappear. 

In a context in which the unconscious and fantasy cease to exist, one may wonder 
what would be the status of knowledge in the capitalist discourse, since it would 
no longer be linked to a supposed subject. In what follows, I will suggest that such 
knowledge can take various forms, which will have in common only the cutting of 
this link with the . as a first approach to its status—one that highlights its discon-
nection from the unconscious—let us imagine how a cognitive psychologist might 
conceive of one of the phenomena that has served as a foundation of analysis: the 
dream. This psychologist could well isolate in a dream elements that we would call 
signifiers, but s/he would not assume that they point enigmatically to an ungrasp-
able term that underlies them, and about which we can only know partially and 
imperfectly. Instead, this network of signifiers would be taken to be little more than 
the day’s residues, which are now being “processed” and laid to rest by the giant 
computer that is our mind.

The elimination of the stopping-point between the a and the  in the discourse of 
the master has another consequence: it transforms the capitalist discourse into a 
sequence that, once one enters it, will become extremely difficult to exit. In the 
other discourses, these points of arrest between the places of the production and 
of truth help make it possible for anyone who is traversing a particular discourse 
to pause, take a distance from it, and try to move into another discourse. With the 
capitalist discourse, this pause does not occur. Because of this change, one can 
move, without impediment, from starting-point back to the same point:  → s

1
 → 

s
2
 → a → ….25 This discourse thus “succeeds” in a way that the other discourses, 

marked as they are by the impasses between production and truth, do not. It repro-
duces, in the field of the psychic and the social bond, the limitless movement that 
characterizes capital; both domains are dominated by the same sort of infernal 
machine. Once the circuit has been traversed and one returns to the beginning at , 
nothing favors one’s escape from this discourse and everything leads one, instead, 
to repeat the same path that has only just been taken. Commenting on this circular 
motion in “Du discours psychanalytique,” Lacan notes that the inversion makes the 
discourse “work like a charm, like skids that have been fully greased, but that’s just 
it: it goes too fast, it consumes itself [ça se consomme], and it does this so well that 
it uses itself up [ça se consume]” (48).

a sequence that moves faster and faster until its very efficiency leads to collapse 
and destruction: what Lacan is describing can easily be understood as a specific 
mode of what Freud calls the compulsion to repeat, and thus of the death drive. 
In “The Uncanny,” Freud describes this repetition as “the constant recurrence of 
the same thing,” a recurrence that points towards “a compulsion powerful enough 
to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their 
daemonic quality.”26 Our entrapment within the capitalist discourse can take on a 
similar character; the sense of being caught within its continual movement consti-
tutes a part of its nightmarish quality.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 111

If the capitalist discourse is indeed a form of the compulsion to repeat, then it can 
only be characterized as one in which the passion for ignorance is particularly ag-
gravated, because of the destruction of the signifier’s capacity to represent the sub-
ject. Freud, in elaborating his conception of this compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure 
Principle, had been seeking to resolve a problem that had been brought to the fore 
by soldiers who had been traumatized during the First World War: they dreamed 
repeatedly about the experiences that had traumatized them. Freud theorized that 
this constant repetition in dreams was part of an attempt to “bind” the trauma: to 
symbolize it, to translate something of it into signifiers, thus depriving it of some 
of its force.27

What distinguishes the capitalist discourse from the process that Freud theorized 
is the way in which the former disables the attempt to transform trauma into signi-
fiers. If one of the hallmarks of Freud’s uncanny and the death drive is a compul-
sion to repeat, then one can speak of a capitalist uncanny in which repetition and 
jouissance take a very particular form. Repetition does not enable the real to be 
symbolized; instead, this discourse becomes the site of an uncanny repetition in 
which a traumatic jouissance keeps recurring and can never be symbolized.

In the capitalist discourse, the , rather than being the hypokeimenon, thus becomes 
the place of the trauma that is inseparable from this repetition.28 The vector, a → 
, writes this capitalist uncanny: the traumatic overwhelming of the subject by 
jouissance occurs over and over because this subject, wrenched out of its position 
as what is represented by the signifiers, is unable to lessen the force of the trauma 
by transmuting it into new signifiers. In this discourse, the endless movement of 
the machine becomes the machine’s very raison d’être and traumatic jouissance 
becomes the fuel that enables this repetition to continue. 

In treating capitalism as a discourse in which a signifier ceases to represent the 
subject for another signifier, Lacan is departing somewhat from Freud’s own for-
mulations. as samo Tomšič remarks in his analysis of the homology between 
surplus-value and surplus-jouissance, Freud frequently approached the cipher-
ing effected by the unconscious in terms of metaphors borrowed from the field 
of capitalist production; he used expressions such as “Traumarbeit, dream-work, 
Witzarbeit, jokework, etc.” This could be read as implying that the proletarian is 
precisely the “subject of the unconscious” and that the unconscious is an eminently 
capitalist enterprise (“Homology,” 99, 111). I would like to take a slightly differ-
ent tack, by suggesting that the capitalist discourse marks Lacan’s departure from 
these formulations of Freud’s. at least insofar as it delineates the conditions under 
which the unconscious ceases to operate, and is, indeed, rendered impossible, the  
can now no longer be employed in just this way.

If the  becomes the mark of a new form of trauma, the a becomes that of a new 
form of superego. at the beginning of D’un Autre à l’autre, in sketching out the way 
in which surplus-jouissance is produced, Lacan had likened it to Freud’s account of 
the genesis of the superego in Civilization and Its Discontents. The plus-de-jouir acts 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 112

as a superego, and this superego can function, for example, as the voice, which is 
linked to a call that Lacan characterizes in a famous passage in Encore: “The super-
ego is the imperative of jouissance—enjoy!” (7). This object calls upon us to pursue 
an “absolute” jouissance, an injunction that is impossible for castrated figures to 
obey. This command, as Lacan argues at the end of his seminar D’un discours qui 
ne serait pas du semblant [On a Discourse that would not be of the Semblance], is “the 
origin of everything that has been elaborated in terms of moral conscience”; the 
push towards an unreachable jouissance comes, paradoxically, to clothe itself in a 
voice that demands that one obey traditional morality (178).

In the capitalist discourse, surplus-jouissance also acts as superego, but its role 
is different, for it commands us to submit to a jouissance that has ceased to be 
impossible. Because the command, “Jouis!” or “enjoy!” is no longer a “correlate of 
castration,” it becomes imbued with a devastating power (Encore, 7). The subject, 
in encountering the a, is required to lend itself to—to become the habitation of—a 
jouissance that contains too much excitation, and is therefore more or less impos-
sible to bear. In this way, jouissance itself becomes a sort of authority, to which the 
subject is compelled to submit, and the effect of which will be traumatic.29

3. Capitalist Knowledge

at this point, it still remains unclear why this discourse is qualified as capitalist. 
a compulsion to repeat has been initiated by surplus-jouissance, a term that is ho-
mologous to surplus-value, which itself begins a different process of repetition; the 
latter occurs within the infrastructure. This homology does not, in itself, suffice to 
enable us to qualify this discourse as specifically “capitalist” in the economic sense. 
If Lacan’s discourses are attempts to theorize the fate of the unconscious and jouis-
sance within specific social practices, then does this discourse provide us with a 
way of understanding the effect of certain capitalist structures?

as a first, approximate, response to this question, one can consider  and s
2
 as two 

aspects of the proletarian. The , overwhelmed and deprived of everything—espe-
cially its status as the term that underlies a chain of signifiers connected with the 
unconscious—has no recourse other than to solicit the capitalist, s

1
. submitting to 

the latter’s orders, the proletarian becomes a “worker” in the place of knowledge, 
thus producing surplus-jouissance, which will then lead to a repetition of the cycle. 

One way of theorizing the process by which this knowledge can become related to 
capitalism as a mode of production is provided by capitalist thinkers themselves. 
They do so through their concept of the homo œconomicus, the “subject” that they 
believe would be the correlate of capitalism in its various forms: one that obtains 
satisfaction by acting on the market. Christian Laval, in L’homme économique: essai 
sur les racines du néoliberalisme [Homo Œconomicus: an Essay on the Roots of Neoliber-
alism], his intellectual history of the genesis and consequences of this concept, has 
shown how, for capitalist thinkers, a market cannot exist unless each participant 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 113

in it—each instance of homo œconomicus—has elaborated a sort of capitalist knowl-
edge: a catalogue of what provides satisfactions or causes pain.30 The basis for such 
a catalogue was given its classical expression by Jeremy Bentham, at the beginning 
of his book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “nature has 
placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. 
It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what 
we shall do.”31 Building upon this foundation, each economic actor will rank the 
degree of satisfaction that various objects provide him or her, a procedure that 
is made possible by considering them purely in quantitative, rather than qualita-
tive terms (Laval 159). according to Bentham’s notorious calculus of pleasures and 
pains, the “value” of any object is its “force,” the intensity of the satisfaction or 
sense of discomfort that it provides (Bentham 29). This value can be calculated in 
a quasi-mathematical fashion by taking into account the intensity and duration 
of the pleasure or pain that is expected, along with its “certainty or uncertainty” 
and its “propinquity or remoteness” (29). as Bentham states, whenever people have 
had “a clear view of their own interest,” they have always followed precisely this 
practice (32). 

In other words, such calculations are supposed to provide the basis for all trade and 
contracts (Laval 158). The medium of such exchanges is money, which becomes the 
means par excellence of measuring the intensities of anticipated satisfaction in a 
way that would correspond to Bentham’s calculus of pleasure. armed with such a 
conception of self-interest, individuals would be able to compete with each other 
in the market, each seeking to accumulate as much satisfaction for him/herself as 
possible.

Homo œconomicus, the figure who arranges the objects that provide such satisfac-
tions according to their “values” is, as samo Tomšič remarks, a purely “psychologi-
cal” subject.32 Calculations are conscious and satisfaction is judged on the basis of 
criteria that make no appeal to the split subject. such satisfaction, indeed, is not 
complicated by the considerations of any insuperable gaps between need and de-
mand, between demand and desire, or between desire and jouissance; in the for-
mulations of the earliest utilitarians and the classical economists, the object that 
I ask is, in effect, the one that will satisfy, in a seamless and unproblematic way, 
the goals that I have set for myself. For example, “jewelry…and fine clothing” will, 
without any great difficulty, succeed in “making us loveable or impressive” (Laval 
159). The goals of being loveable or impressive are not, in turn, considered to harbor 
discontents within themselves, discontents that would then render them less satis-
fying than had been foreseen.33 

Homo œconomicus, in cataloguing of objects in terms of the degree of satisfaction 
that they procure, shows us one of the principal forms taken by capitalist knowl-
edge; grouped together, these rankings of intensity of satisfaction can comprise 
one of the most important and widespread instances of the s

2
 in the capitalist dis-

course. as Laval has noted, however, such a catalogue can only be constructed 
under one condition: all such objects are to be considered to be commensurable 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 114

with each other (158). In order for them to be compared, they must all provide a 
satisfaction—or a pain—that differs only in degree, and not in quality; certain sat-
isfactions must not be so fundamentally different from the others that they can no 
longer even be compared with them.

 For psychoanalysis, this necessary commensurability of the satisfactions included 
within capitalist knowledge must be considered as one of the weakest elements of 
the capitalists’ formulations: it does not take into account the incompatibility be-
tween the pleasures recorded in the catalogue and surplus-jouissance. If the objects 
in this catalogue can be measured and ranked in a way that is considered to be 
fundamentally unproblematic, then they have the status of signifiers. Lacan argued 
that each signifier in the place of knowledge has something like the status of a 1; 
the more that we speak of it within an analysis, the more it has the appearance of 
a relatively clear and distinct entity and it can therefore be theorized as a positive 
integer.

On the other hand, surplus-jouissance stands radically apart from such a catalogue 
of satisfactions, for Lacan has explicitly theorized, there is a non-relation between 
the signifiers collected in s

2
 and the object a. The two are precisely incommensurable 

with each other. The object a, rather than being like a positive integer, is something 
like an irrational number; its boundaries, instead of having an integer’s distinct-
ness, can never be marked out fully, and can only be written with an endless and 
nonrepeating decimal, such as 0.618 (D’un Autre, 131).34 a number possessing this 
quality cannot be written in terms of a relatively neat proportion with other num-
bers; it thereby falls outside the utilitarian attempt to relate the numerical values of 
anticipated satisfactions to each other. For it, Bentham’s calculus of pleasures and 
the various systems of currency would be nothing more than so many procrustean 
beds, which can only misapprehend the character of its jouissance. such systems 
are unable to take into account a surplus-jouissance that overwhelms the subject. 

If the preceding account of the functioning of the capitalist discourse is more or 
less correct, then it enables us to entertain some rather dire hypotheses concerning 
the effects of the calculations made by homo œconomicus. When the unconscious 
functions, every attempt to cipher jouissance into a knowledge about our satisfac-
tion must necessarily miss a part of what is being aimed at, and the result is the 
production of the plus-de-jouir, which is linked to the death drive and the superego. 
The elaboration of capitalist knowledge made through utilitarian calculations of 
interest is necessarily cruder than the operations of the unconscious; what these 
calculations miss regarding jouissance is far more radical and therefore one may 
suppose that the production of surplus-jouissance—the violent embodiment of 
what cannot fit into knowledge—will be accomplished with an even greater rapid-
ity and efficiency. 

If surplus-jouissance must remain alien to the catalogue of satisfactions, then one 
can well wonder about the particular forms through it will manifest itself in this 
discourse. If the object a is set apart radically from our usual satisfactions, then it is 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 115

not at all clear that consumer objects come to embody it and that the fith discourse 
is fundamentally a way of theorizing a “drive of consumption.”35 In most cases, con-
sumer products would seem to be more closely related to the catalogue of capitalist 
knowledge than to surplus-jouissance; since the arrival of consumer capitalism, 
peoples’ calculations have come to be occupied more and more with the satisfac-
tion that such items are expected to bring. The object of surplus-jouissance would 
presumably, for the most part, be somewhat different: it would be located anywhere 
the four objects of the drives—the breast, feces, the gaze and the voice—have taken 
up residence. If the consumer object may sometimes harbor the object a, the latter 
may also be found in a thousand places that have nothing to do with consumption. 
The distinguishing feature of this surplus-jouissance, instead, will be that it lacks 
lack; the inversion of the positions of s

1
 and  enables the latter to encounter an 

object a that is not marked by the -φ. 

In 1968, Lacan had suggested that this surplus-jouissance provides us with a way 
of conceiving of the superego, as Freud had presented it in Civilization and Its Dis-
contents: it is produced through a structural “renunciation” of jouissance. Lacan’s 
somewhat later formulations about the capitalist discourse place Freud’s work in 
a certain perspective: they show the extent to which Freud both grasped and fell 
short of understanding various mutations in the social bond. Despite his important 
formulations about the production of the superego, he had perhaps not anticipated 
some of the effects of capitalism; the constant self-purification and radicalization 
of this mode of production may well have made certain of its features clearer to us 
now than they had been to him in 1930. Freud had argued that civilization is based 
on an “internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a closely-
knit group,” but which can be “disturb[ed]” and imperilled by the aggression that 
arises from the death drive (133, 112). such formulations do not take into account 
the way in which capitalism seeks to transform this aggressiveness into an integral 
part of the system: universal competition, in which we are all compelled to take 
part, and the effect of which can only be psychic violence. perhaps more important-
ly, Freud does not quite see the way in which this superego, created by the attempt 
to renounce the aggressive drives, not only creates a sense of malaise in us but 
also becomes the precise element that makes the repetition of the discourse pos-
sible. The object-superego ensures the death of the subject and the impossibility of 
the unconscious, thus allowing our minds to be colonized by a capitalist theory of 
knowledge and a new production of the object. For this discourse, our discontent is 
our excessive, tormenting jouissance, which enables capitalism to perpetuate itself.

4. Looking into You

If the plus-de-jouir, the superego’s push towards a jouissance that is not marked by 
castration, is not usually located in the object of consumption, this does not mean 
that it is rarely present in our everyday lives. On the contrary, it can be found 
everywhere, and can catch us at any time. One of the areas where we can learn 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 116

about this object is art and literature; these fields constantly mark out a place for it, 
soliciting its attention and charting its effects. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis36 takes as 
its theme the financial forces that now dominate the capitalist mode of production, 
but it is also a complex meditation upon the capitalist discourse itself. If Lacan had 
imagined that this discourse could end up in exploding, DeLillo’s novel presents us 
with what is perhaps a somewhat optimistic dramatization of this event (Du dis-
cours psychanalytique, 48). It also, and more importantly, shows, both in its themes 
and its form, the production of a lethal surplus-jouissance that has the potential to 
destroy the subject. This jouissance manifests itself not only in the novel’s charac-
ters, but in the very process of reading it. Finally, it also approaches the difficult 
question of the relation of continuity and discontinuity between the master and the 
capitalist. It shows the latter’s doomed attempt to lend stability to this discourse 
by continuing and extending the master’s Weltanschauung. The feverish attempt to 
ensure that language corresponds to an ever-changing reality will, however, have 
the opposite effect: it will induce a vertigo that will help precipitate the capitalist’s 
collapse. 

These processes, and the novel itself, begin with an activity that will finally become 
enmeshed within the capitalist discourse: reading. eric packer, the novel’s main 
character, is dominated by a sense of malaise. He is tormented by insomnia, finds 
“every act” to be “self-haunted,” and feels that the “palest thought carried an anx-
ious shadow”; ruling out any psychic source of this dread, since “Freud is finished,” 
he can only try to stabilize his reactions by “read[ing] his way into sleep” (6, 5). He 
thus becomes a sort of stand-in for those who read the pages of DeLillo’s own novel. 
a literary text is a very particular elaboration of knowledge, in the sense in which 
this term has been used throughout this essay: it consists of a set of signifiers which 
are articulated with each other in complex ways. Well before the appearance of the 
object a as surplus-jouissance, packer discerns some elements of jouissance in these 
literary arrangements of knowledge: less in the meanings that may be produced, 
but in their very appearance upon the page, which calls upon the reader to look at 
it. When he reads a poem, his feelings “float in the white space around the lines,” 
and he is enchanted by the appearance of “spare poems sited minutely in white 
space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper” (66, 5). What calls out to packer 
when he reads a text is a series of abstract shapes: the “eloquence of alphabets” (24). 
With these abstract letters, we are not far from Lacan’s reminder that the alphabet 
began as representations of commonplace objects; the capital, “a,” for example, was 
first the drawing of the head of a bull or cow, which was then turned upside-down, 
and gradually ceasing to be an image, became an abstract figure.37 now, as we read, 
it is as if the very abstractness of the letters grasps our attention and draws us into 
a text, soliciting us to continue reading.

such reading is an activity: it mobilizes a part of our bodies—our eyes—as well as 
something that is incorporeal—the gaze—which is connected with our jouissance 
and which may well show its first inchoate stirrings at the initial moment of our 
encounter with a text. What packer does not note, in looking at the volumes of 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 117

poetry, is that if our attention is to continue to concern itself with the text, our 
minds must work upon these letters; letters fix words, and as we move through the 
text, we subject them to a deciphering that turns them into sentences. In certain 
cases, this grammatical structure will enable us to give these sentences a relatively 
simple signification, but such words will also confront us with enigmas to which it 
will be more difficult to respond. If a text acts upon us, it will have particular effects 
that we cannot calculate from the beginning; what Cosmopolis itself will suggest is 
that the capitalist discourse can involve a specific mode of reading. 

even before this mode reveals itself, however, Cosmopolis shows us another, rather 
surprising aspect of reading; its suggests that the lover of literature’s initial fasci-
nation with a text is not as different as we might hope from a financier’s interest 
in a very different arrangement of knowledge. eric packer is a speculator, and his 
concern with poetry is dwarfed by his interest in the columns of numbers that for-
malize the fluctuations in the “value” of currency and goods on international mar-
kets. In his opinion, “it was shallow thinking to maintain that [the] numbers and 
charts” that record the fluctuations of capital “were the cold compression of unruly 
human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units 
in the financial markets” (24). Instead, for those who believe that goods provide 
satisfaction and that money measures the latter, these numbers are irradiated by 
the jouissance that they condense within themselves; “data itself was soulful and 
glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process” (24). such jouissance exerts an at-
traction both upon those who read these data and those—located in the s

2
 of the 

capitalist discourse—who work to formalize it. Money is already an abstract entity, 
and such knowledge-workers, who focus on its importance, experience a certain 
jouissance in formalizing it even further and increasing its abstractness; this is 
part of what replaces the jouissance of ciphering, the process by which something 
of our unconscious comes to be symbolized. 

This formalizing is eric packer’s particular interest; inhabiting the place of the cap-
italist, s

1
, he commands his workers to elaborate knowledge. such knowledge con-

cerns, in particular, the relative values of various currencies, but it also extends to 
other areas. Certain employees, for example, analyze security threats made against 
packer, putting under a microscope each movement that he may make in order to 
assess his vulnerability to an attack. packer, in turn, shows a particular interest in 
critiquing the limits of such analyses, pointing to their blind spots and pushing his 
employees to expand and deepen their analyses. In hearing his security analyst 
announce with certainty that “Our system’s secure—we’re impenetrable… there’s 
no vulnerable point of entry,” packer immediately pinpoints the weak spot in this 
expert’s knowledge: “Where was the car last night ater we ran our tests?” (12). For 
packer, knowledge and its formalization never reach a point where they can be 
complete.

What complicates his project is an inheritance from the discourse of the master, for 
he seeks to use his position as capitalist to recreate and extend the master’s “world.” 
He attempts to locate capitalist financial patterns within a system of “spheres”; he 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 118

then induces his workers to show that such patterns respond to the same sort of 
analysis that the natural world does and conform to mathematical patterns that 
can be found in nature. The most advanced techniques of formalization are put at 
the service of discovering a system of correspondences, a method that one of his 
former employees will describe:

you tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from na-
ture…. The mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs 
of galactic spirals…. The way signals from a pulsar in deepest space can 
describe the fluctuation of a given stock or currency…. How market cycles 
can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding, wheat 
harvesting (200).

One of the consequences of this newly formalized reintroduction of the master’s 
system is the very approach to language that Lacan had criticized: the assump-
tion that there is an adequation between it and reality. packer’s concern with this 
correspondence, however, will manifest itself in a particularly violent way, since 
he seeks to make the world exist in a situation that is radically different from the 
one in which the master commanded the slave. The master had inhabited a world 
that was believed to be fundamentally stable and eternal, and in which it was not 
difficult to grasp a reality that did not change. packer’s relation to reality is very 
different: his goal is to render it as unstable and mutable as possible: to intervene 
upon it, altering it with each new “advance” in technology and financial capitalism. 

such constant mutation, however, brings about a radical instability in the language 
that is supposed to exist in adequation to reality; each time that an atom of reality 
changes, the signifier that had corresponded to it is rendered more or less obsolete. 
as a consequence, packer finds himself preoccupied by the conviction that particu-
lar common nouns or compound nouns should be destroyed and then be replaced 
with words that would be more fully adequated to the most recent reality. at the 
beginning of the novel, he brings his dissatisfaction to bear upon the word, “sky-
scraper,” which disturbs him because of its anachronistic quality. In the contempo-
rary world, where such towers are the norm rather than a rarity, there is no longer 
any sky that can be “scraped” in such a manner; the word belongs only “to the 
olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was 
born” (9). similarly, the expression, “automated teller machines” seems out-of-date; 
it is “aged and burdened by its own historical memory,” suffering because it retains 
a reference to “fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts,” both of which 
belong to a past that has now become so distant that even mentioning it seems ir-
relevant (54). Indeed, in the course of the novel, the common nouns, “walkie-talkie” 
and even “computer,” among others, come in for the same criticism (102, 104). By the 
end of the book, it is apparent that this vertiginous procedure has become so gen-
eralized that no common noun can escape it; any of them can become the object of 
packer’s automatic suspicion and will to destruction. When he enters the building 
where he will die, he notices that “a man lay dead or sleeping in the vestibule, if 
this is still a word” (182). The willed impermanence of reality has a corrosive effect 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 119

upon both a language that packer would like to make into its mere reflection and 
the capitalist’s attempt to perpetuate the master’s world.

a project of such complexity must inevitably encounter stumbling blocks, and both 
the thematics and the form of the novel give body to a violence that is produced by 
failures and impasses of formalization; the attempt to revivify the master’s world 
leads to catastrophe. Cosmopolis takes place on the day when the limits of packer’s 
system of calculation become apparent and bring him to a ruin that is not merely fi-
nancial. Having been “borrowing yen at extremely low interest rates and using this 
money to speculate heavily in stocks that would yield potentially high returns,” he 
has let himself vulnerable to the eventuality that the value of the yen would rise; 
“the stronger [it] became the more money he [would] nee[d] to pay back the loan” 
(84). He has done so because every element of his complex system of formalization 
has led him to believe that “the yen could not go any higher”; nevertheless, “it did 
go higher time and again,” and in this result that he had deemed to be impossible, 
he discerns the failure of his own process (84).

Cosmopolis thematizes the results of this failure: the repetitive workings of the 
machine of calculation results in the production of a plus-de-jouir that is marked by 
a lethal violence. This object is the gaze, and it arises with a strength and violence 
that seems directly connected with the novel’s repeated concerns with formaliza-
tion and destruction; it is as if the elaborating of knowledge has been precipitating 
a kind of sediment, which now assumes consistent form, in the look of a former em-
ployee, Richard sheets. The latter describes with great lucidity the effect upon him 
of packer’s method of formalization. “you made this form of analysis horribly and 
seductively precise,” and its very complexity destabilizes workers, causing a sense 
of vertigo in them: “your system is so microtimed that I couldn’t keep up with it. I 
couldn’t find it. It’s so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the 
numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life” (200, 191). 

While falling gradually into madness, sheets became more and more fascinated 
with packer himself, becoming the steady, determined presence through which 
something of the ungraspable and “evanescent” object that is the gaze can flash 
out (Four Fundamental Concepts, 77). He becomes dominated by the impulse to seek 
packer out, and all the technology that the latter has used to show himself has 
had the effect of catching sheets’s gaze: “I used to watch you meditate, online…. I 
couldn’t stop watching…. I watched every minute. I looked into you” (DeLillo, 198). 
This look is not the tamed gaze, the intensity of which would be lessened by castra-
tion. Instead, it is marked by violence and aims at packer’s destruction; in compari-
son with it, the gun with which sheets shoots him is little more than the tool by 
which this look can meet its goal. Richard sheets’s look is the surplus-jouissance of 
the capitalist discourse.

If one effect of this method of formalization is to locate sheets as marking the place 
of the object a, another is to put packer in the position of the . The financier em-
braces his own destruction; having, at the beginning of the novel, located the ques-



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 120

tion of where the limousines are kept at night as the limit of his security experts’ 
knowledge, packer places himself on a trajectory that leads to this place, where, 
as if by chance, he falls into the hands of his murderer. sheets, himself, struck by 
this coincidence, remarks, “we want to know why you’d willingly enter a house 
where there’s someone inside who’s prepared to kill you.” packer, as his antagonist 
surmises, could only have experienced “some kind of unexpected failure. a shock 
to your self-esteem” (190). The financier’s response is that “I couldn’t figure out the 
yen” and therefore “became halfhearted,” and determined, as sheets says, to “bring 
everything down” (190). In this way, packer marks himself out as the , the place of 
the element that will be annihilated by the force of surplus-jouissance.

This encounter is an instance of the capitalist uncanny: the experience of the vio-
lent shock of the a and the , an overwhelming of the subject that carries with it 
undertones of horror. In the case of Cosmopolis, this repetition goes beyond that of 
the novel’s plot, in which packer thinks obsessively about the fall of the yen and 
recurrently bets his and other people’s funds on it. It also comes to involve the 
reader, whose look will acquire something of the violence associated with the plus-
de-jouir. If, in much of the novel, eric packer stands in for the reader, experiencing 
the way in which the attraction of black marks on a white page draws him/her into 
a text, by the end, Richard sheets becomes the figure who embodies the violence 
of reading. 

Cosmopolis is a text—and it is not the only one—that leads us to read within the 
capitalist discourse, and to do so is, finally, to become a part of the destruction that 
reigns at the end of the novel. Reading this novel is a process in which packer’s 
very preoccupations teach us what to look for as we read; if, at first, the abstract 
beauty of the novel’s letters played a part in capturing our attention, we are gradu-
ally drawn into a would-be world in which even the bizarre theory of the adequa-
tion between reality and language, which is a part of capitalist knowledge in this 
novel, can have a constraining effect upon us. Reading can become violent, in part, 
because it comes to be touched by the will to destruction that is characteristic of 
packer’s approach to language: the determination to efface the existence of an en-
tire series of words that no longer corresponds to the reality that he is struggling 
to bring into existence. His constant concern can affect the way in which we read 
this novel; his will to obliteration becomes part of our own way of approaching 
the words on the page. To read Cosmopolis is to imagine that the words that we see 
before our eyes at any particular moment can cease to exist. This process can also, 
however, be extended; to follow, page ater page, the main character’s determina-
tion to “bring everything down” is also to imagine that such destruction could be 
applied to a very particular proper name: “eric packer” itself can disappear. 

at the end of this novel, this will to destruction, as applied to packer, becomes 
divorced from any attempt to maintain the capitalist’s “world” and becomes a jouis-
sance that can be imputed to the process of reading. eric packer’s self-engineered 
death is designed to call to the gaze; my thesis is that it has the potential to at-
tract the reader’s look, the small, incorporeal element that is distinct from the eye, 



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 121

and which becomes the invisible incarnation of the reader’s jouissance. The will to 
destruction that the reader has been “trained” to apply to the “obsolete” vocabu-
lary becomes detached from the “world” and brought to bear upon parker himself. 
Within the fiction, the murderous gaze of Richard sheets comes thereby to stand in 
for that of the reader. The more the reader imagines such a destruction, the more 
fully does his/her own look come to be represented by, and even to identify itself 
with this look.38 Within the capitalist discourse, the activity of reading, like the 
most common activities of everyday life, thereby becomes marked by violence. This 
violence is the inevitable result of the annihilation of the subject that had been 
represented by one signifier for another.

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique” in Lacan in Italia/Lacan en Italie (1953-
1978), ed. by Giacomo Contri (Milan: La salamandra, 1978) 10.

2. The following discussion of Žižek’s work is necessarily very partial. For example, it does 
not take into account later developments of this theory of ideology, including his increas-
ingly complex engagement with Marxism. It also does not enter into his discussions of 
the symptom, his important treatments of the act, or his own considerations on discourse. 
For more extensive examinations of his ideology-analysis, see Ronan de Calan and Raoul 
Moati, Žižek, marxisme et psychanalyse (paris: presses universitaires de France, 2012) 
47–100; Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, Žižek: Beyond Foucault (Basingstoke; new york: 
palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 29–40.

3. Louis althusser, “Ideology and Ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an Inves-
tigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (new york: 
Monthly Review press, 1972) 162, 173.

4. slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 124.

5. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis [Seminar XVII], ed. by Jacques-alain 
Miller, trans. by Russell Grigg (new york: norton, 2007) 13. When Lacan speaks here of 
“relations,” he is referring to the ability of a particular term to act upon the next term in 
the series: a master, for example, commands the slave, who then produces the plus-de-jouir. 
such relations, if they occur, are indicated by vectors. The term, “relation,” is thus used in 
a somewhat different sense than it is in Lacan’s later discussions of the sexual relation, 
or rather, lack of it. In the latter sense, the term refers, instead, to questions of the logical 
commensurability or incommensurability of certain terms. This is not to say, however, 
that the discourses are untouched by problems of commensurability; knowledge and sur-
plus jouissance are incommensurable with each other.

6. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. by Jacques-
alain Miller, trans. by Bruce Fink (new york: norton, 1998) 17.

7. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 [Seminar VII], ed. by Jacques-alain 
Miller, trans. by Dennis porter (new york: norton, 1986) 22.

8. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre 1968-1969, ed. Jacques-alain 
Miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 385. since the master and the slave are, first of all, historical roles 
held by men, I have used the masculine pronoun for both throughout this discussion.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 122

9. see Colette soler, “The subject and the Other (II),” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four 
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Including the First English Translation of “Position of 
the Unconscious” by Jacques Lacan, ed. by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus 
(albany: sUny press, 1995). This Venn diagram marks a further formalization of the 
diagram that appears in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, 
ed. by Jacques-alain Miller, trans. by alan sheridan (new york: norton, 1978). also see 
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, (princeton: princeton 
University press, 1995).  There is an especially useful discussion of primal repression in 
Fink’s article “alienation and separation: Logical Moments for Lacan’s Dialectic of Drive,” 
Newsletter of the Freudian Field. 4.1 & 2 (1990).

10. It is here that one can locate the imposture that lies behind the best-known depiction of 
the master’s relation to the slave’s knowledge: plato’s portrayal of socrates’ dialogue with 
the slave in The Meno. Claiming that the slave already possesses a knowledge of incom-
mensurable numbers, but has simply forgotten it, socrates asks him a series of questions 
that are supposed to lead him to remember it. However, as Lacan remarks, the slave is 
simply answering what “the questions already dictate as their response,” and perhaps 
more importantly, a true master could not ask these questions, since he is defined precisely 
as lacking the knowledge that they presuppose (Other Side, 22).

11. For a discussion of the master’s relation to reality, see John Holland, “La fin du monde,” 
Psychanalyse. 28 (2013): 62–66.

12. sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund 
Freud (London: Hogarth press, 1953-1974), XXII (1964): “The Question of a Weltanschauung,” 
158–84.

13. alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins, 1957) 41–2.

14. Jacques Lacan, “séminaire XII : problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964-1965,” 
n.d., staferla, 75. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s12/s12%20pROBLeMes.pdf>.

15. sigmund Freud, XXI (1961): “Fetishism,” 153.

16. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question prior to any possible Treatment of psychosis,” in Écrits: 
The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg 
(new york: norton, 2006) 465. In this écrit, the Bejahung concerns the judgment that the 
signifier of the name-of-the-Father exists, and is thus directly opposed to the psychotic’s 
Verwerfung, foreclosure of this signifier. although the master has no access to fantasy, he 
can affirm the existence of a gaze through the vector that goes directly from a to s

1
 in the 

writing of this discourse in “Du discours psychanalytique.”

17. sigmund Freud, XII (1958): “Formulations on the Two principles of Mental Functioning,” 
219.

18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: pen-
guin Books in association with new Let Review, 1981) 245.

19. For example, see Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVIII, D’un discours 
qui ne serait pas du semblant 1970-1971, ed. by Jacques-alain Miller (paris: seuil, 2006) 164 
and pierre Bruno, Lacan, passeur de Marx: l’invention du symptôme (Toulouse: Érès, 2010) 
227–254.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 123

20. For fuller discussions of this homology, see samo Tomšič, “Homology: Marx and 
Lacan,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 5 (2012): 98–113. also see 
alenka Zupančič, “When surplus enjoyment Meets surplus Value,” 155–178, and Juliet 
Flower MacCannell, “More Thoughts for the Times on War and Death: The Discourse of 
Capitalism in Seminar XVII,” 195–215, both of which can be found in Jacques Lacan and the 
Other Side of psychoanalysis: reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. by Justin Clemens and Russell 
Grigg  (Durham: Duke University press, 2006). 

21. sigmund Freud, XXI (1961): “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 40.

22. Jacques Lacan, Je parle aux murs: entretiens de la chapelle de Sainte-Anne, ed. by Jacques-
alain Miller (paris: seuil, 2011) 96. see also pierre Bruno, “The Capitalist exemption,” in S: 
Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 63-79.

23. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XIX: ...ou pire, 1971-1972, ed. by Jacques-alain Miller 
(paris: seuil, 2011) 55. For Frege, the “Bedeutung” of a name is its reference, as distinguished 
from its sense. Because the planet Venus was referred to as both the “Morning star” and 
the “evening star,” Frege argues that “The Bedeutung of ‘evening star’ would be the same 
as that of ‘Morning star,’ but not the sense.” Gottlob Frege, “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” in The 
Frege Reader, ed. by Michael Beaney, trans. by Michael Beany (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) 152.

24. Jacques Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freud-
ian Unconscious,” in Ecrits: The First Complete Translation in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, 
Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (new york: norton, 2006) 699.

25. see Marie-Jean sauret, “psychopathology and Fractures of  the social Bond,” S: Journal 
of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 38-62.

26. sigmund Freud, XVII (1955): “The Uncanny,” 238.

27. sigmund Freud, XVIII (1955): “Beyond the pleasure principle,” 62.

28. For a different view of the relation between capitalism and trauma, which highlights 
the increasing fragility of the psyche and the difficulty of surmounting trauma in the 
contemporary world, see Colette soler, L’époque des traumatismes/The era of traumatism, ed. 
by Diego Mautino, trans. by Berti Glaubach and susy Roizin (Rome: Biblink, 2005) 68–73.

29. another consequence of the capitalist discourse is its radical incompatibility with the 
Other jouissance, which is related to the pas-tout and femininity (Encore, 71-74). The par-
ticularity of the feminine is that it offers a way to go beyond the phallus and castration. 
The capitalist discourse would seem to lay a trap on this path; in preventing the advent of 
castration, it also eliminates the possibility of surpassing the latter.

30. Christian Laval, L’homme économique: essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (paris: Gal-
limard, 2007) 159. For a  Žižekian treatment of homo œconomicus, see Heiko Feldner and 
Fabio Vighi, Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism (new york: Blooms-
bury, 2015) 42–60.

31. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: 
Clarendon press, 1907) 1. available at <https://ia700406.us.archive.org/0/items/princmor-
alsleg00bentuot/princmoralsleg00bentuot.pdf>

32. samo Tomšič, “Laughter and Capitalism,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology 
Critique 8 (2015): 22-37.



Holland: The Capitalist Uncanny S8 (2015): 124

33. as a result of the ever-increasing radicalization of capitalist practices over the course 
of the last two centuries, Bentham’s successors have, of course, found themselves obliged 
to explain why the implementation of their suggested policies has not let us all awash 
in joy. such attempts have not stopped with marginal utility theory, and have, in recent 
years, involved the creation of more and more complex epicycles in an attempt to save 
the appearances of capitalist utilitarianism. My article “La fin du monde,” 68-74, discusses 
recent work by Gary Becker and Luis Rayo, who have used evolutionary biology and psy-
chology to explain the stubborn persistence of unhappiness.

34. For more on irrational numbers in Lacan, see Guy Le Gaufey, Hiatus sexualis: du non-
rapport sexuel selon Lacan (paris: epeL, 2013) 13–32 and Guy Le Gaufey, “Towards a Critical 
Reading of the Formulae of sexuation,” trans. by Cormac Gallagher (2008), available at 
<http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Le-Gaufey.pdf>.

35. pietro Bianchi, “From Representation to Class struggle: Reply to samo Tomšič,” S: Jour-
nal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 5 (2012): 120.

36. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis: A Novel, (new york; London; Toronto: scribner, 2003).

37. Jacques Lacan, “séminaire IX: L’identification, 1961-1962,” n.d. session of December 20, 
1961. available at <http://staferla.free.fr/s9/s9%20L%27IDenTIFICaTIOn.pdf>.

38. This account of the violence of reading within the capitalist discourse emphasizes its 
origin and growth in terms of a problematic of reading that is internal to Cosmopolis: the 
relation between, on the one hand, the attraction exerted by the letter, and, on the other, 
a meaning that is concerned with, and encourages thoughts about the destruction of ele-
ments of language. One can also mention a simpler and more commonsensical aspect of 
the reader’s destructiveness: I suspect that many readers find packer to be a reprehensible 
character and are rather pleased when sheets murders him.