After guiltiness:

Freud, Weber, Lacan and the psychic economy of the new spirit of capitalism

Vladimir Safatle
University of São Paulo

Conference presented at Radbound University (Department of Philosophy), november

2008

Freud, Weber and the blocked modernization

One of the main concepts Freud created to analyze social facts was that of the
superego. When he tries to explain the genesis of moral conscience, of the feeling of guilt,
the social ideals of the self and the internalization of the symbolic law, Freud came across a
process in which socialization and repression converged. The pages of Civilization and Its
Discontents that bring up this imbrication are today very well known. “Every culture must
necessarily be built on repression and drive rejection” is a sentence that has apperead as the
core of the critical program presented at the twentieth century, animating an utopian
promise of reconciliation between drive demands and social formations that brought , for
example, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization into being.
Roughly speaking, Freud’s sentence revealed the social results of an ambivalent
relation firstly given inside the bourgeois family. A relation that superposes rivalry and
identification that is more evident in the conflict between the son and the one who sustains
the Law of the father. In order to be recognized as a subject and as an object of love within
the family realm, the subject must identify himself with the very one who sustains a
repressive law. The result is the psychic internalization of a “moral instance of
observation”, that is, the superego that derives from this identification with the parents.
Thereon, every enjoyment statement connected to drive satisfaction necessarily will leads
to a guilt feeling that follows the sadistic pressure of the superego against the self. A guilt
feeling that, as a secondary benefit, leads to a neurotic enjoyment mode.
There is a known fact that Freudian psychoanalysis usually works with a univocal
perspective when comprehending the multiplicity of the symbolic orders. For instance,
Freud believes that exist something like a structural similarity between family authority and
the authority that sustains other social bonds, such as religious or political ones. Such a
similarity between apparently independent domains of values (family, religion, State)
allows Freud to insist on the supporter of the father function not only as representative of
the family law, but also as representative of a law that settles the general principle that
structure the symbolic universe. The question here is not about deriving the symbolic orders
from the family core; it is about insisting on the fact that problems of desire socialization in

1
the subject’s first field of experiences will always occasion tensions in larger realms of
socialization. That allows Freud to claim that the guilt feeling “is the most important
problem in civilization development”1, and not only in the bourgeois family development.
As a matter of fact, today this is all practically a commonplace. But there were some
substantial changes in certain socialization processes, and now those changes throw a new
light on the superego problem. This point should not surprise us. If the superego’s genesis
lies exactly from the socialization processes, if this is “an individual manifestation
connected to the social conditions of Oedipal manifestations”2, then it will necessarily
change as those processes reconfigure. As we will see, Jacques Lacan (and also Frankfurt
School) have clearly realized it when thinking the clinical incidences of a larger historical
change well defined by conservative critics of modernity: the appearance of something like
a “non-repressive society” allied with the universalization of the consumerist practices and
the so-called decay of the father imago. So as to understand the meaning and the reach of
those elaborations, it is worthy to take a step behind.
There is still a lot to be said about certain possible links between Freud and Max
Weber as theorists of modernization, of rationalization processes and its consequences.
There is tempting to remember that this superego able to articulate a moral conscience
based on the repression of the drive impulses had, for example, a precious social function in
the development of capitalism as a society of production. Thereby, the libidinal economy of
the production society fed a psychic instance such as the repressive superego, which might
explain certain engines of its lingering.
When he insists that the economical rationality utter dependence on the subject’s
willingness to adopt certain conducts, Weber remembered that capitalism would never have
existed if there wasn’t the psychic internalization of a Protestant ethics of work and
conviction, an ethics unknown to utilitarianism and whose genesis ought to be searched in
Calvinism. Weber found this ethics in the Protestant ethos of capital accumulation and of
distance from every spontaneous enjoyment of life. The work typical of capitalism as a
production society is a work that does not aim specifically at the enjoyment of sérvice des
biens, but at the obsessive accumulation of those who “do not take anything out of their
wealth to themselves, unless the irrational feeling of having appropriately ‘done’ their
task”. Weber even mentions a “psychological sanction” produced by the ethical pressure
and satisfied by the accomplishment of a work as an end; ascetical and marked by the
resignation to enjoyment – what guides him to assert that “the summum bonum of this
‘ethics’, which is obtaining more and more money, together with the strict distance from
every spontaneous enjoyment of life is above all totally devoid of any eudaemonist or even
hedonist character”. At least from the perspective of an eudaemonist or hedonist logic, the
irrationality of this process of work rationalization might point the aspect pertinent to
superego.
Weber clearly points several traits of this Law of the Protestant ethics of work
pertinent to superego: the transformation of the Heavenly Father who sustained the Law in
The New Testament into a Severe Father in that which concerns superego: “being
transcendental, beyond the reach of human knowledge”, a work regarded as a vocation,
which is the answer to the voice of the Other (in this case, the calling of God), the blaming
of every sensible pleasure (the lowering of the sensible that Freud understood as a major

1
FREUD, Sigmund; Gesammelte Werke, vol. XIV, Frankfurt; Fischer, 1999, p. 97
2
LACAN, Jacques; Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 136

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aspect of the drive rejection) and the obsessing with a “serene self-control” as an ideal of
behavior.
In such case, if the moral law that maintains an inclination of the subjects to adopt
certain types of economical behavior could be descriptive of the superego, then the libidinal
economy of capitalism as a production society could never be possible without the
development of a neurotic civilization, that could only think its own socialization processes
through a repressive operation that produces the guilt feeling. Freud is inapprehensive when
talking about this as a case of “pathologies of cultural communities” (Pathologie der
kulturellen Gemeinschaften). It does not mean that every subject in a certain society will be
neurotic; it means that the social and cultural ideals responsible for socialization processes
based on identifications tend to cause neurotic libidinal structures.
Such considerations demonstrate the function of resorting to psychoanalysis from
the inside of a theory of the modernization and rationalization processes. Usually it is
tacitly accepted that acting and judging rationally means, among other things, to determine
the behavior upon practices and institutions that aim at universal legitimacy. The rational
action presupposes the possibility of institutionalizing justification criteria authorized by a
non-coercive agreement, even if only as a regulating perspective. However, such possibility
should be already at work, even if imperfectly (or ambivalently), through institutions and
practices that socializes subjects whose actions and judgments aspire rationality.
One of Freud’s greatest contributions in this case were to insist that socialization
processes happen at first inside the family, and for that reason are marked by the imaginary
representations and conflicts typical of the family sphere, in which the demand for love and
demands of submission are absolutely overlapped. For that reason, they are at the same
time the consummation of rational aspirations and the production of repressive instances
that act individually on the subjects through the blaming of drive demands. Every
socialization is normative, is norm self-imposed on life with its demands of drive
satisfaction. There was no other thing Max Weber has shown when maintaining that the
genesis of the Protestant ethics of work in the constitution of capitalism rationality was in
agreement with asceticism and enjoyment restrictions.
Nevertheless, the plausibility of this “repressive hypothesis” has attracted
widespread criticism, one of the main ones made by Michel Foucault. In History of
Sexuality, Foucault criticizes this connection between asceticism and consolidation of the
capitalist production society. He insists that the technologies of the self typical of the
modern bourgeois world cannot be understood as sheer repressive apparatus shaped against
a libidinal body metaphysically presupposed, a natural substratum that would appear as a
base for power operations. On the contrary, we should: “abandon the spread energism that
maintains the theme of a sexuality repressed by economical reasons” 3. Modernity need to
be understood as a long process of sexuality constitution (not repression). An
implementation of a disciplinary power that constituted both stimulation mechanisms to
manners of libidinal investments socially recognized and resistance modes – since real
power does not rest only in operations through the coercive management of normative
patterns, but produces also its own modes of resistance against “domination”. Foucault
wants to set the theorizing of power free from themes connected with oppression, so as to
allow a better understanding of the creative quality of a power that causes, a bio-power that
stimulates forms of libidinal investment, as well as forms of conflict.

3
FOUCAULT, Histoire de la sexualité I, Paris, Gallimard, 176, p. 151.

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 Keeping that in mind, Foucault might say, for instance, that the validation of
asceticism and the disqualification of the flesh that Max Weber analyzed actually were, at
first, techniques of “body intensification, of rendering health and its functioning conditions
problematic”4. Manner of assuring longevity and a good line of descendents. It would not
be the case to solidify criticisms against those disciplinary practices that constitute
sexuality. The real critique would consist, in one way of another, in “undoing” the sexuality
apparatus, cutting the tacitly accepted tie between sex and the place of truth, interrupting
the libidinal economy fed by disciplinary processes.
However, there are two possible considerations about Foucault’s perspective. First
of all, a psychoanalytically oriented analysis would not have many difficulties in accepting
the set of themes of a bio-power that starts sexuality apparatus. Here one would remember
that the larger problem raised by Freud concerning the modes of law internalization
through the superego consists exactly in showing how repression dynamics are transformed
into a neurotic way of satisfaction, showing how that which makes one sick is a source of
enjoyment. Thus the repressive hypothesis is nothing but the description of a mode of
internalization of disciplinary practices.
But it is a fact that the “repression” themes lead to the presupposition of a libidinal
body “naturalized”. A body not completely reducible to the condition of the effect of the
order of discourse. There is no reason to deny it, as well as there is no reason to deny its
importance in themes, such as the Adorno’s, of inversion of reason in proceedings of
domination of “internal nature”. It would be better to demonstrate how Foucault himself is
often obliged to retrieve a bodily substratum beyond the sphere of the order of discourse, in
order to maintain his criticism of power. That is, it would be better to show how it is not
easy to get rid of the “repressive hypotheses”.

From production to consume, passing through flexibility

Nevertheless, Freud readers slowly reviewed this social diagnosis of a block to the
modernization processes due to a socialization built on drive repression by superego. A lot
has been said about the rate of the decay of the father imago in the reconfiguration of
socialization processes and their following consequence in the arrangement of repressive
social ideals. But here I would like to insist on something else. If it is a fact that the social
occurrence of the superego is connected (although not necessarily in a cause relation) to a
certain “libidinal dynamics” of the production society through the functioning of the work
ethics, then one should think the consequences that came from the decay of society of
production, at least as it would seem to Freud and Weber at the beginning of the century.
Here one could follow those who insist on the set of themes of work society decay and
production paradigm obsolescence. Instead of production then we should comprehend
contemporaneity and its features through the theme of the consumer society. That is,
problems entailed to consumerism end up adjusting every way of subjective social
interaction and development, just as the call to consume appears as a central economical
problem.
One shall consider that, due to the exponential technological development and the
raise of productivity, subjects need less and less to be directly involved in the production
processes. Even in the working sphere, there were structural changes. “Ever since the

4
idem, p. 162.

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forties”, says Claus Offe, “there is a recurring general hypotheses that, from a certain
degree of industrialization, the tendency of industrial society development would change
towards expanding the services sector, and not the industrial sector any longer” 5 (OFFE,
1991: 12). Such growth of the services sector indicates, among other things, that a large
part of new jobs are highly involved in processes of increasing consumerism, of handling
the consume rhetoric (sales, publicity, marketing, design, administration), of “symbols
manipulation”6 or still of production maintenance in its social form (health, education,
security). If one thinks mostly about the first group, one sees that inside the working sphere
subjects come across conflicting imperatives, for their jobs aim making available services
that do not submit to reproducing the working ethics.
This could be better understood if keeping in mind that a number of fundamental
consequences follows from the changing of paradigm from industrial production society to
the post-industrial consumer society – to start with the fact that the alienation forms needed
to enter the working world are not in total alliance with the modes of alienation that
concerns the consumer world. Schematically, it can be asserted that the capitalist working
world is connected to the ethics of asceticism and accumulation. Consumer world, on its
turn, asks for an ethics of the right to enjoyment, since what contemporary capitalism needs
is the search for enjoyment that stimulates the infinite plasticity of choice possibilities
production in consumerism. Consumer world needs the regulation of enjoyment inside a
structured mercantile universe. Precisely, it needs the placement of that which Jacques
Lacan calls a “market of enjoyment”7, enjoyment available through the plastic infinity of
the merchandise-form.
The awareness of the Protestant ethics of ascetic work turning into an ethics of the
right to enjoyment appears for example in Daniel Bell’s conservative criticism against the
separation of the economical production imperatives and the cultural imperatives of modern
times connected to the self development and to the pleasure principle: “the new capitalism
(the use of this word dates back to the nineteenth-twenties) keeps demanding the rules of
the Protestant moral in the production field – that is, in the working field – but by the same
token it stimulates the right to pleasuring and entertaining”8. Such contradicting imperatives
mark the tension that is found in the transformation of a production society into a consumer
society. A tension that Bell himself recognizes well: “The biggest instrument of destruction
of the Protestant ethics was the invention of the credit card. Before that, in order to buy one
should save first. But with a credit card we can immediately satisfy our wishes”9.

Repressive sublimation and the superego social function

What get our attention here are certain psychical consequences of this transformation of the
production society into a consumer society. Jacques Lacan has perhaps identified the
biggest one when he has insisted that the dominant social idea of superego in modern times
was no longer linked with repressing drive impulses, but with the obligation of assuming
fantasies. Not anymore the repression of enjoyment, but the enjoyment imperative. That is

5
OFFE, Claus; Trabalho e sociedade, Tempo Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1991, p. 12
6
See REICH, Robert; , L’économie mondialisée, Paris, Dunod, 1993
7
LACAN, Jacques; Séminaire XVI, section 11/13/1968
8
BELL, Daniel, The cultural contradiction of the capitalism, New York, Basic Books, p. 85.
9
idem, p. 31

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the reason that the real superego imperative in contemporaneity would be: “Enjoy!”,
enjoyment transformed in obligation10.
It has been a long time since the hegemony of social discourses that preached
suppression of enjoyment was last felt. Nowadays, the real discourse sustaining social and
cultural bonds is more motherly, so to speak. It is said for instance that: “each and every
one has the right to their own form of enjoyment” (or yet “each and every one must find
their own form of enjoyment”) that could be found in the multicultural liberation of the
multiplicity of possible forms of sexuality. At this point one should consider the thesis
according to which the encouragement and management of enjoyment has turned into the
real impulse of drive economy in consumer society, instead of the repression of enjoyment
that marks production society.
However, it should be kept in mind that Frankfurt School already offered an
apparatus to think this situation with the concept of “repressive sublimation”, initially used
to the comprehension of certain characteristics of totalitarian societies. Among other things,
this notion of repressive sublimation appears in Frankfurt theory as the possibility of direct
social usage of the drive impulses with no repression. A notion that is product of a time
when the ego would no longer be able to impose itself as a mediation instance between the
id drive demands and the principle of reality. Adorno for example brought up an
“expropriation of the unconscious by the social control”11, which would impose itself due to
the weakness of the ego. Elsewhere, that was what Lacan had in mind when mentioning the
“social assimilation of the individual taken to an extreme” 12 – except that, to the French
psychoanalyst, the ego is not exactly a mediation instance, but it is always a reified
construction of socially ideal images. Fro him, there is no sense to try to avoid social
expropriation of the unconscious through some kind of ego “reinforcement”.
Inside this debate Marcuse shapes correctly such an expropriation of the
unconscious as a social neutralization of the conflict between pleasure principle and
principle of reality through an managed satisfaction, meaning: “a controlled liberation that
enhances the satisfaction obtained from what society offers”, for “with the integration of
sexuality sphere to the field of business and entertainment, repression itself is repressed” 13.
We could find in all of these authors the awareness of a considerable change in the
socialization processes. They comprehend a tendency of the social ideal images to no
longer be connected to representations of the “serene self-control” of drive. With the
“integration of the sexuality sphere to the field of business and entertainment” – that is, the
incitation to enjoyment as a central element in capitalist logic of mercantile reproduction –
ideal images of those who operate their fantasies and regulate their behavior by the
irreducible demand of enjoyment proliferate.

Lacan’s superego inversion

The long Lacanian superego elaboration defined “Enjoy!” as the real superego imperative.
It is noteworthy that this elaboration is the opposite of what one would usually find.
10
LACAN, Jacques; Séminaire XX, Paris: Seuil, 1975, p. 10
11
ADORNO, Theodor; “Freudian theory and the patterns of fascist propaganda”, In: Soziologische Schriften I
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990, p. 431
12
LACAN, Jacques; Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 146
13
MARCUSE, Hebert; Cultura e sociedade II, são Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1996, p. 106

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According to Freud superego is the result of a process in which socialization and repression
converge due to the increasingly inconsistent demand for drive restraint. As it is seen in
Freudian considerations on obsessional neurosis, the blaming of enjoyment appears as a
result of superego action.
Lacan however is well aware of the change in the socialization processes nowadays
and its impact on the superego configuration. In a diagnosis symmetrical to that provided
by Horkheimer in 1936, Lacan insists on “the large number of psychological effects derived
from the father imago social decline. A decline conditioned by the return of extreme effects
of social progress on the individual”, effects such as the “economical concentration and the
political catastrophes”14. One could think Lacan has in mind, among other things, the
Horkheimerian problem of the weakening of father authority due to the impact of
impersonal development of the great bureaucratic corporation inside the family, what
makes the father figure (not the father function – a distinction that was exhaustively used
by Lacan) more and more “absent, humiliated, deprived or false”15.
Nevertheless, the decay of the ideal father figure does not mean at all decrease from
the pressure of superego and its consequences. Lacan worked for 30 years until he came up
with the explanation: the father imago decay gave room to the appearance of fantasy
authority figures that were similar to the primeval father of the Freudian myth in Totem and
Taboo, that is, to the father master of enjoyment who adjusts his actions according to the
ceaseless search for immediate satisfaction. As Lacan used to say, a perverse figure, wild
and obscene, which has little in common with the traditional figure of a father that
converges repression and sublimation imperatives. This has made Lacan say, for example,
that the truth version of the father is a père-version. About that, elsewhere, Christopher
Lasch correctly asserts that the decay of the father figure is a fundamental fact: “not only
because it deprives the child of a role model to represent, but mainly because it allows
primitive fantasies with the father to rule the further development of the superego”16.
Hence Lacan’s question becomes: what does it mean to think socialization
processes based on “ideal types” that guide their action by the ceaseless search for
immediate satisfaction? It fundamentally means that subject identification with such types
is introjected with the help of a superego no longer connected with repression, but with the
enjoyment imperative. Which is why Lacan can state that “the superego originates in this
more than mythical original father, in this appeal to pure enjoyment, that is, appeal also to
the non-castration: Enjoy!”.
However, it could be asked: what is the problem with such a superego? At first,
nothing would be better than a psychic instance able to impel enjoyment gratification
demands and that gives every repressive discourse the mark of obsolescence. It would be
the perfect accomplishment of the ethics of the right to enjoyment, of this libidinal morality
required by the plastic multiplicity of consumer society. But, “such an order [enjoy] is
impossible to satisfy”17. We should asked where does this structural impossibility comes
from.
Lacan has always insisted that superego law is an “unreasonable law”, a law that
works as a significant with no meaning. Freud also reiterated this. This unreasonable
quality indicates the superego lack of normative character, among other things. The
14
LACAN, Jacques; Autres écrits, Paris: seuil, 2001, p. 60
15
Idem, p. 61
16
LASCH, Christopher; A cultura do narcisismo, São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984, p. 215
17
LACAN, Jacques; Séminaire XIX, section of 06/16/1971

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superego says nothing about how to enjoy or what is the appropriate object to enjoy.
Nothing but “Enjoy” with no preaching, purely “when it comes to your desires, do not
yield”. The unreasonable quality of this pure enjoyment becomes clear when one considers
that every empirical choice of object is inappropriate to an enjoyment that is trying to
assure itself of its purity of determinations, of its independence concerning every single
privileged object fixation. This pure enjoyment may only fulfill itself in the “bad infinite”
of consume and never-ending object destruction, that does nothing but to cause an
enjoyment surplus. Which means we are standing before a superego that is perfect for a
society marked exactly with the programmed obsolescence of merchandise. A society that
must feed the continuum flow of equivalences in increasingly larger social fields.
This Lacanian superego thus represents a step beyond ideas such as those that liven
up Michel Foucault’s understanding of the change in the disciplinary processes tactics,
especially from the sixties. A change that was described in statements like: “As an answer
to the revolt of the body, we find a new investment that is not shaped like a suppression-
control anymore, but like a stimulation-control: ‘Be naked... but be thin, beautiful,
tanned!’”18. That is, show your sexuality ... but in a socially given manner, and socially
codified by the market. And yet, what Lacan’s superego concept points out is the general
disengage of enjoyment imperative from privileged normative contents. I insist once more:
the superego law is empty, with no privileged determinations. This way, it may help us
comprehend why, in contemporary consumer society, “Thin, beautiful and tanned” could be
easily replaced by “sick, anorexic and deathful”, with no harm done to their momentary
capacity to mobilize desires.

Guiltiness and cynicism

Since every determination will turn out to be provisional and inadequate in the presence of
a superego imperative that demands pure enjoyment, it is necessary for the merchandise
system to offer determinations in a increasingly disposable and fast manner, less and less
concerned with the alleged content of those determinations. Furthermore, it turns a society
of managed satisfaction into a society of managed dissatisfaction, in which no-one really
believes the enjoyment promises made by the merchandise system (as they are set to be
disposable) – not even the system itself, that introduces them in an ever more self-ironic
and “critical” form. This self-irony is seen, for example, in advertisings that ridicule the
very advertising discourse (Diesel, Calvin Klein). We stand before a society in which the
bonds to the objects are fragile, but simultaneously is still able to feed from this fragility,
because there is no question of offering determined contents of social representations
through the market, but about offering the empty form of ceaseless reconfiguration that
passes through and cancels every determined content.
The secret of this society, which has fragile bonds to the objects and still is able to
feed from this very fragility, lies in what one could call the “absolute irony of life modes”.
In a society of managed dissatisfaction, subjects are no longer summoned to identify with
ideal types built after fixed and determined identities, which would demand engagement
and a certain ethics of conviction. Actually, they are ever more summoned to sustain
ironical identifications, that is, identifications in which the subject is constantly reassuring
their distance from what they are playing, or from their own actions.

18
FOUCAULT, Michel; Microfísica do poder, Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1996, p. 147

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 An unrestricted demand for enjoyment that searches for accomplishment through
the annulment of every “restrictive” determination finds its perfect form in the absolute
irony that sends every bond with determination back to the field of the ineffective.
Accordingly, this absolute ironizing of life modes is nothing but a subjective position that
has internalized the general disengagement of enjoyment imperative from privileged
normative contents, typical of this new superego social figure. It gains importance in a
historical situation, such as today’s, in which capitalism ideology may get rid of each and
every privileged bond with substantial contents. For “In the same way the ironic subject can
adopt any discourse or persona, capitalism can put in the market any discourse or value (...)
Irony represents, simultaneously, both a tendency and a problem of capitalism. It always
has some point beyond any content or particular value. Thereby, it anticipated capitalism
tendency to cross contexts and produce a universal point from which every value may be
interchanged”19. Such an ironic logic can be accomplished, for instance, as the “flexibility”
of a plastic subjectivity that includes social identities purely given as appearances, and
hence it can reassure itself as a pure game of masks.
Such a social and cultural configuration might help one understand why the great
symptoms in contemporaneity are no longer the obsessive guilt feeling nor the hysterical
“conversion” that presuppose, each in its own way, the belief in desires repressed in its
very enunciation by repressive instances. Desires that would inhabit another scene and that
would be freed through hermeneutical procedures of interpretation of resistances. If some
of the most common symptoms nowadays are anxiety and depression, they might point to
results of the pressure of this superego linked to the sheer enjoyment imperative, for both
anxiety and depression presuppose the unspoken awareness of the incapacity to sustain
object choices. While anxiety is desire demand to pass through object choices increasingly
faster, depression is exactly the impossibility to bond to an object relation. In the case of
depression, one could recall Pierre Fedida’s central idea: “depression is a form disease –
considering the psychic that which shapes the living being. ‘I feel undone in my human
appearance’, says a woman the moment she starts describing herself” (Fedida, 2002: 12).
Where an object choice cannot be structured, the very self-image is undone.
Thus, anxiety and depression may be regarded as symptoms directly resultant from
the introjection of a superego that demands an enjoyment injunction so strong and
unconditional that every attempt of effective accomplishment will necessarily fail. Hence,
if the guilt feeling used to be the direct result of a repressive superego that blocks
enjoyment, anxiety and depression may result of this new superego configuration that
demands unconditional enjoyment.
However, it should be added here another symptom of contemporary socialization
processes based on a superego that stimulates enjoyment. Together with anxiety and
depression, one should consider mainly cynicism as the symptom of a “guiltless world”.
For “cynicism” is the correct name for this subjective position able to sustain socially given
identifications, while it ironises each and every determination absolutely. It reflexively
denies that which to it bonds, thus creating a “carnivalesque” social universe of reflexive
appearances, that is, purely given as appearances. This given contradiction is able to be
arranged as a contradiction resolved in no other than a perfectly adequate definition of
cynicism logic – a logic Žižek clearly apprehended: “the cynical live off of the
disagreement between declared principles and practice – all of their wisdom consists in

19
COLEBROOK, Claire; Irony, Londres; Routledge, 2004, p. 150

9
legitimating the distance that separates them”. Legitimatization that means: to transform
contradiction into some kind of synthesis.
More importantly, cynicism could be understood as the possible subjective position
for a subject that internalized the Law beneath a superego that demands conducts are
oriented by the sheer enjoyment logic. Such a position may solve the contradiction: what to
do when enjoyment particularity runs into the universalizing aspirations of normative
criteria? During repressive superego era, the answer was clear: to abdicate enjoyment by
recurring to guiltiness, or, as Max Weber used to say, “to take cold showers and work on
one’s vocation”. Nevertheless, in a historical moment when superego is grounded on the
enjoyment imperative, one is stimulated to perform a “very peculiar conflicts suspension
mode of being”, once in order to suspend the conflict it is enough for norms to be made
flexible in its indexing regime of effectiveness. In other words, it is enough for the norms to
be followed cynically, thus making them justify quite the opposite of what they seemed to
index. Such a cynical relation to normative criteria is a phenomenon worth of attention. It
tends to become hegemonic in historical situations in which imperatives of unrestricted
satisfaction must live with normative expectations that aspire universal legitimacy.
Therefore, bringing to date the articulation between clinic and culture is something to
remind us that, just like Freudian psychoanalysis was able to provide a harsh criticism of a
social modernization process based on the imbrication between socializing and suppressing,
today it is expected from psychoanalysis that it measures up to its new task: to provide a
criticism, just as harsh, of a process of cynical rationalization of our enjoyment promises.

Translated by Luísa Torrano

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