Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci.

(2017) 10:485–508
DOI 10.1007/s40647-017-0196-5

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class

Consciousness
An Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Class Consciousness
(…and Some Extracts from the Dialectics Money/Death Drive)

Alessia J. Magliacane1

Received: 4 August 2017 / Accepted: 10 September 2017 / Published online: 13 October 2017
 Fudan University 2017

Abstract For the purpose of the investigations, we propose in the present paper that
we have been carrying out for some years into new perspectives for a Marxist
Psychoanalysis; we try the consistence of Marxist psychoanalysis with the pre-
Leninist idea of Class consciousness as developed in Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 and in the unpublished books of Das Kapital (notably the law
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). The roots of Freudian Marxists (Reich
and Fenichel above all, but Sabina Spielrein too) are put into a comparative analysis
with Marxian psychiatry arising from the de-colonization process (Fanon) and with
the teaching of Jacques Lacan about Marxist concepts such as plus value and
reification, and eventually with the proposal on the political Unconscious developed
by Fredric Jameson. Finally, it comes the hypothesis that Psychoanalysis could
correspond to Class consciousness.

Keywords Class consciousness
Psychoanalysis
Political Unconscious
Fantasy

of destruction
Drive to amass wealth
Surplus-enjoyment
Revolution
Marx
and Lacan

It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its
participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the
prospect of a lasting existence.
FREUD, The future of an illusion (1927)
True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have
obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) from political
economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private
property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its

& Alessia J. Magliacane

alessiamagliacane1@gmail.com
1
Centre Georg Simmel, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris, Paris, France

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486 A. J. Magliacane

consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of
man’s intellectual confusion.
Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.
MARX, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

1 Part One Tendencies

1.1 Introduction: Surplus and Lack—and the ‘‘plus-enjoyment’’—at

the Beginning of a Revolutionary Process

Thus we see that right is the might of a single individual. It is still violence,
ready to be directed against any individual who resists it; it works by the same
methods and the same purposes.
FREUD, Why war? (1932)
The ghost of the Revolution (that is the revolutionary fantasies) is the product of
the ‘‘bourgeois attraction’’ suffered by the class that produces and spreads it over an
infinity plan, forever and ever (is it a dialectic fugue?).
When Revolution becomes a ghost, a desire, a lack to be fulfilled, a lull to be
covered, an Imago,1 what does it rest of the revolutionary project?
Such a question is what Marx has unceasingly collocated, since the redaction of
his Manuscripts and that he purposely left opened in the Grundrisse. Times get
mature and in Capital the question is finally solved by Marx, in a way that seems to
be so radical that even today it is generally ‘‘repressed’’ by the community of the
Marxists.
In sum: Revolution presents itself as a waste (a presence that is not functional to/
within the process of production) better than as a project. (Is it the reason why Reich
pointed it out that Revolution is not enough, meaning that it is not sufficient as a real
Revolution, in itself, if it is not accompanied by the necessity of a sexual
Revolution?).
Here comes then Marx’s vastest project both for science and politics: the
structural part of a man who self-understands himself has indeed various forms and
dimensions—the democratic domains, as well as the constitutional standards, and

1
Imago is the one of the most ambiguous and powerful word all along the history of psychoanalysis and
psychoanalyst movement, all over the world. Imago was the title chosen for an American version of the
original Freudian review. And Imago was a tool of revolution for Freudian Marxists and left-wing
psychologists all over the world.
Finally, for the purpose of this contribution, Imago is the key to understand the Revolutionary aim of
Lacanian struggle among the Real (that is symptômal), the Symbolic (that is repression and castration)
and the Imaginary (that is emancipation) within the domain of the ‘‘political unconsciousness’’.
Read Lacan [(1966, 1999), 2007: 69]: ‘‘I will simultaneously show the felicitous use Freud was able to
make of the notion of the image… and, if with the term imago he did not fully extract it from the confused
state of everyday intuition, he nevertheless masterfully exploited its concrete importance, preserving the
entirety of its informational function in intuition, memory and development’’.

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 487

the institutional levels. Revolution is the structural part, it is what is missing, and
Marx provides a set of respondings to that loss.
If History has spread its domain over democracies and governments, over
constitutions and institutions, political parties and social movements, which were
unceasingly succeeding the ones to the others, why does it oddly happen that
Revolution is not a part of History? How comes that Revolution only ‘‘discharged’’
its historical force into some constitutional settings and new rules for governments,
while providing a refreshed fitness for the institutions to come?
What kind of a real Revolution is that very one which retreats and flinches for the
benefit of a pre- or, even worse, an anti-revolutionary agreement?
Marx seems to seek the revolutionary issue that Constitutions (even as a fact, a
constitutional fact closing the Revolution: see Negri and, before him, Bobbio) miss
and lack of.
Up to the first book of the Capital, the path deployed by Marx corresponds to the
line followed throughout the Grundrisse. What does it change in books second and
third?
He finds out and discovers that in labour, that is in the subjection, meaning also:
along the process of the real sub-sumption, a sort of antibody is generated too, that
is not dialectical, neither mechanical nor ‘‘hydraulic’’: all throughout that process of
production a waste is produced too, that has an oppositional nature and that cannot
be absorbed. What is at stake here is the surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir,
according with the definition given by its ‘‘discoverer’’, Jacques Lacan; overjoy if
we wanted to evoke a political dimension too, what we are actually aiming at).
In sum, there is a workers’ technique producing the surplus for the Capitalist
(that is also a surplus in/for the capitalist’s own pleasure, as far as his overjoy is
concerned, becoming a surplus of lust into the working process).2
This surplus becomes the basis for a revolutionary process.
Marx explained it in an excellent way—a brilliant way, but perhaps not so clear
and linear, given the many disputes that originated within the community of Marxist
readers—for the purpose of the explanation of the celebre law of the falling rate in
profit, contained in the fourth book of Capital, which is rightly and openly
consecrated to the ‘‘theories’’ on the plus value.

1.2 What is Real in Labour and How It… Works (Six Remarks)

Both Psychoanalysis and Marxism are unmasking sciences, which means that
they are distrustful of what appears on the surface and view it as the result of
hidden forces. Both are convinced that what is offered as the motive for an

2
It is worth to be noted that in the same years of this Lacanian discovery, 1962–1966, Mario Tronti, the
founder of ‘‘Potere Operaio’’, collected (in Italy) his essays composing Workers and Capital.
About the importance of the year 1966, I allow myself to signal my research: 1966–1969, le tournant
‘‘imaginaire’’ de la guerre froide. Avant-garde, culture populaire et Massenkulturindustrie en conflit.

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488 A. J. Magliacane

occurrence is a pretext designed to hide the actual connections and the true
cause.
FENICHEL, Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a
Future Dialectical-Materialism psychology (1934)
What does the law state? Why does a fall in the rate of profit happen? What makes it
happen, in the end?
There is another series of Marxian inquiries arousing from this analysis of the
Capital as a mastering way of production and living. What is human—and what
does rest as it—within and throughout the production of the capital? Does this
human rest of Marxist revolution correspond—and to what extent—to the
unconscious of the psychoanalytical revolution? Does the freedom from need
imply—and to what extent, and under what conditions—the concept of desire?
Desire of Revolution, perhaps?
This is the problem which Marx opens (and implicitly provides) a solution for.
Firstly, the evidence of the injustice and the needs, the theory of value and
transformation of nature, and the emerging struggle of the classes. Let’s start from
Economics, then, which was a sort of applied Ethics (either at that time or in
Postmodernism, as David Harvey pointed out).3
More specifically, for the purpose of this essay, it is the dynamics of the variable
capital into the organic composition of the Capital, that is to say: labour (among the
many, see Joan Robinson 1966).4
Labour, it is producing the crisis of the plus value just the same way it eventually
produces a crisis into the surplus of enjoyment and into the structure of desire.
Our focus is not onto the correctness of the law, neither as a law in the tendency
nor as a political key for Revolutions.5 We are aiming at a re-visitation of the core
of the law: the organic composition. We are doing it by superposing plus value
(Marx) and plus-de-jouir (Lacan), and by understanding that Capital is essentially
Labour.
Here come six assertions.

3
For a very large and updated survey, see the chapters ‘‘Commodities, values and Class relations’’, ‘‘The
dynamics of accumulation’’, ‘‘Overaccumulation, devaluation and the first-cut theory of crisis’’, ‘‘The
production of spatial configurations: the geographical mobilities of Capital and Labour’’ in Harvey
(2006).
4
‘‘Marx was conscious of his purpose. The economists were in general unconscious’’ [Robinson (1942),
1966: 1].
Anyway, the condemnation of the system does not only depend ‘‘upon its moral repugnance’’, as
Robinson remarks, and the inevitability of its final overthrow does not depend ‘‘only on the determination
of the workers to secure their rightful share in the product of their labour’’. The system contains
contradictions within itself that must lead to its disruption. Marx sees the periodic crises of the trade cycle
‘‘as symptoms of a deep-seated and progressive malady in the vitals of the system’’ (1966: 3).
‘‘What is important is to say that owning capital is not a productive activity (…). Only labour is
productive’’ (1966: 18).
5
See this quotation by an Italian marxist, among the first reader of the law in the Seventies, Antonio
Carlo (1975: 20): ‘‘La tesi marxiana secondo cui C aumenta in rapporto a V può fondare una teoria delle
crisi di tipo sottoconsumistico, nel senso cioè che gli investimenti e la produzione crescono più della
capacità del consumo operaio’’.

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 489

a. The real structure of the Capital is both hidden to the common sense and
encoded into a dialectical structure where two forms of capital work (C and V).6
b. This structure works over three possible combinations: C changes, V changes,
both C and V change (or rest).
c. This complex structure works as a labour, i.e. over and throughout a
production-productive process.
d. The mathematical ratio of the structure is an imaginary number corresponding
to the necessary labour (the subject as a worker) that overwhelms the sufficient
labour (the subject as a desire/machine of-to-for desires).7
e. Labour contains in itself an imaginary element (the sufficient labour as
liberating an unnecessary labour, to the sake of workers’ life and well-being)
which is, as it, in a dialectical relation to a symbolic element (the quantification
of the abstract labour into-throughout-over a monetary exchange).
f. Labour produces then both Capital and Desire (the latter being the residual part
of the production, organized as the opposite of the capitalist’s lust).

These remarks imply also a terrifying consequence! It could be easily deduced from
the above mentioned assertions their very contrary: that is to say that every-any
appropriation of the plus value by the worker—if it does not coincide with the
appropriation of the plus-de-jouir—is a mystifying reality.8

1.3 Imagination and Symbolic Life at the Core Both of the Sub-sumption
and the Revolution: Questioning Mao

We say the end of mankind is something which will produce something more
advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy.
MAO, Talk on questions of philosophy (1964)

6
Real stands here for the real nature of the symptom that the Capitalistic process assume. In
Psychoanalysis, the symptom derives from the superposition of the Symbolic and the Imaginary domains,
upon the field of the Real.
Real and symptomal is the Oedipal complex according to the fact that the three instances of the Letter
(RSI) are eventually superposed. If there was no superposition (ex. in matriarchal societies, assumed as
those investigated by Marx and Engels analysing Morgan, as well as those reconstructed by Reich as a
reader of Malinowski’s) maybe the complex would not exist.
Oedipal position and the patriarchal family are purposely analysed in Marxist-materialistic terms also
by Fenichel.
7
The philosophical discussion of the ethical implications of this mathematical ratio was excellently
carried out by Hans Jonas as a discussant to Ernst Bloch.
In a more implicit way—better: implicitly assumed but explained in a very powerful tone—this ratio is
at the core of the concept of desire-machine (firstly: the child/neurotic as a desire-machine) proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari.
8
In the field of Oeconomica—what Paul Ricœur called the philosophy of Economics—this very idea that
shows up as ‘‘naturally’’ astonishing both for the social-liberal views and for the social-democratic views,
was recently investigated by Amartya Sen as the core idea of any politics of justice. See the third part of
Sen (2009: 225, ‘‘The Materials of Justice’’). See also, for the ‘‘capability approach’’ and the
‘‘empowerment of desires’’, Nussbaum—Sen (eds. 1993), and the ‘‘foundational’’ Sen (1987).

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490 A. J. Magliacane

The core of the structural dialectics of the law of the falling rate in profit as a
subject-constitution dialectics was reviewed by Slavoj Žižek in 1993, for Rethinking
Marxism.9
His analysis retraces the constitution of the alienated man into the process of
capitalistic production. Every pretended fall in the rate of profit is then a conceptual
mistake, almost as far as the revolutionary perspectives are concerned, as the falling
rate cannot reduce the ‘‘rate’’ in the alienation that is ‘‘normally’’ produced. The
core of the law is, in sum, the dialectical constitution of the alienation.10
We can follow the very same argument and therefore the corresponding
conceptual mistake in Žižek presentation of Mao’s writings (Žižek 2007: 21), since
for him
the central weakness of Mao’s thought and politics is in the lack of the
‘negation of negation’, the failure of the attempts to transpose revolutionary
negativity into a truly new positive Order: all temporary stabilizations of the
revolution amounted to so many restorations of the old Order, so that the only
way to keep the revolution alive was the ‘spurious infinity’ of endlessly
repeated negation which reached its apex in the Great Cultural Revolution.11
Let us follow the reasoning for a little while. ‘‘There is thus, beyond all cheap jibes and
superficial analogies—Žižek believes (2007: 26)—a profound structural homology
between Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the
ossification of state structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism’’.12
9
A philosophical correspondence to this review of the ‘‘falling rate’’ is in the re-imagination of the
dialectics friend/enemy developed by Jacques Derrida, whose vision of the Cold-War (upon the denial/
development of Schmitt’s counter-position, as being both traditional and postmodern) reflects the
alienation process in action. See Derrida (1993).
It is worth to be noted here that this article was published by a journal of psychoanalysis (American
Imago), among other articles devoted to the question of Love, in a volume having Thomas Keenan (see:
the vanishing of the Other) as special editor.
10
Žižek’s analysis—all over the last 25 years—is rich and stimulating, as it is always putting Marxism
and Marxist debates into a different perspective: from alienation to subjection, to a bridge over Hegel,
Marx and Lacan, and eventually Hitchcock and the Imaginary dimension, movie classics and popular
culture… What is really missing in these instigating studies is the revolutionary disclosure. Speaking of
Revolution Žižek’s analysis stands still about the topics of political revolution, meaning: not involving
psychoanalysis, the dialectics of the alienation, the core of the Imaginary structure, etc. Political
revolution should drive and lead the other revolutions (in culture, in science, in psychology, etc.), but it is
not explained why and how: is it a historical necessity, better than a political assumption, more than a
radical project, following a theoretical reflexion?
As an example, it should be clear by now that what we cannot absolutely accept in Žižek’s analysis of
Capitalism are, for instance, the following theoretical conclusions: ‘‘So in a way there is a kind of poetic
justice in the fact that the final result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution is today’s unprecedented explosion of
capitalist dynamism in China. That is to say, with the full deployment of capitalism, especially today’s
‘late capitalism’, it is ‘normal’ life itself which, in a way, gets ‘carnivalized’, with its constant self-
revolutionizing, with its reversals, crises, reinventions’’ (Žižek 2007: 22).
11
What is truly bizarre in the Slovenian philosopher is that he applies to Mao the same critique that
Louis Althusser (whose Slovenian editor and translator was Žižek himself) applied to Marx in Pour
Marx!
12
What is the role of any which form of Class consciousness, then? We can find here a clearly expressed
idea of the ‘‘self-revolutionizing’’ as a drive, an instinct, a pulsion… shortly: an ideal. Therefore, as a
Revolution is the fruit of this unconscious revolution-drive, no Class consciousness seems to be required!

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 491

One is tempted to paraphrase Brecht here – ‘What is the robbing of a bank

compared to the founding of a new bank?’ – yet again: what are the violent
and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution
compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-
forms necessitated by capitalist reproduction?
Therefore, the question arisen is captiously the following: ‘‘How, then, are we to
revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing?’’
Otherwise, we can easily agree with Žižek quoting Jameson,13 when he writes
that ‘‘in a radical revolution, people not only ‘realize their old (emancipatory, etc.)
dreams’; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming; therein resides
the necessity of the Cultural Revolution clearly grasped by Mao (…) Therein also
resides the interest of reading the reports about daily life in the Soviet Union in the
early 1920s, with the enthusiastic urge to invent new rules for quotidian existence’’,
namely in the psychoanalytical field of investigation (Žižek 2007: 24–25).
And we can at least accept the fact that Alain Badiou (2006: 543–544) locates the
historical significance of the Maoist Cultural Revolution precisely in the negative
gesture of signalling ‘‘the end of the party-state as the central production of
revolutionary political activity’’. It is here that Badiou, in Žižek’s words (2007: 25),
should have been ‘‘consistent’’ and should then have denied the eventual status of
Cultural Revolution: ‘‘far from being an Event, it was rather a supreme display of
what Badiou likes to refer to as the ‘morbid death drive’’’.14

1.4 Wealth and Death Drive: The Imaginary, the Popular Culture,
and the Unconscious

The crux of the diatribe is, let us say, found in the maxim that proposes a rule
for jouissance, which is odd in that it defers to Kant’s mode in being laid down
as a universal rule. Let us enunciate the maxim: ‘‘I have the right to enjoy your
body’’, anyone can say to me, ‘‘and I will exercise this right without any limit
to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body’’.
LACAN, Kant with Sade (1966)
What Badiou and Žižek really miss here is the fundamental observation that the
Imaginary system and the popular culture are not coextensive.
13
See Jameson (1994: 84). ŽIŽEK’s idealism—pursuing the path Hegel-Heidegger-Lacan (a Butler’s and
Derrida’s view of Lacan, indeed), and getting to… Mao—does not consider that Fredric Jameson
proposed a very different version of Hegel in Valences of the Dialectic [Jameson 2009b: see the
chapters ‘‘Hegel and Reification’’ (p. 75), ‘‘Hegel’s Contemporary Critics’’ (p. 102)], and in the
extraordinary article Marx’s Purloined Letter (Jameson 1995) on Derrida and Lacan.
14
We can encounter other inner contradictions—both between the line Lacan–Badiou–Žižek’s, and in
Badiou’s own arguments for communism as a project—in Badiou (2008, 2014).
Finally, we should also face other important contradictions and missed opportunities—such as the
missing link between alienation in action and ‘‘the absent centre of political ontology’’—in Žižek [(1999)
2008: 145, ‘‘The Politics of Truth. Or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul’’], whose subtitle is rightly
‘‘The Absent Centre of…’’.
For a different view, see Jameson (2010).

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492 A. J. Magliacane

This is the very core of any dialectics concerning the alienating processes in the
mass culture and popular culture: the unconscious system registers (i.e. it records, it
marks, it emphasizes, it stocks) this gap in the images and the reflexive thought that
we call Alienation.
In Badiou’s and in Žižek’s views, on the contrary, psychoanalysis and the
imaginary of the unconscious are coextensive with popular culture and mass-
collective imaginary. By doing this, they even get to the conclusion that a
revolution-revolutionary project can ‘‘naturally’’ lie onto this imaginary stratus that
they call (by simplifying Lacan, unacceptably) the Desire.15
In other terms, not only any form of Class consciousness is not dialectical to
Psychoanalysis (regarded as the liberation of the symbolic-symptomal uncon-
scious), but, as popular and mass culture are coextensive to/with the Imaginary,
Imaginary tends to become the Class consciousness!
Thus, popular and mass culture tends to become the collective imaginary, and
this Imaginary (that is, in fact, a Symbolic, as it involves repressive and
authoritarian instances of the discourse of the Power) tends to become the Class
consciousness today.
This is a very dangerous inversion, going at one time against both the proper
foundations of the Psychoanalytical movement as an emancipation (if not a
revolution) instance, and the Marxian dialectics.
Back to Marx, we should then enshrine that the producer of the alienation is the
worker himself, not the Capital. The latter ‘‘simply’’ appropriates this content of
alienation (Lacan emphasizing the general dismissal from the plus-de-jouir as an
effect of the discourse of the Capitalist), leaving up the manque.
And yet: what is this content of alienation? Is it the revolution as a mere image
(once it is as depurated of any transformational element)? Is it the desire of
Revolution, i.e. the revolutionary process as a ‘‘simple’’ desire of changing? This
view (that we are trying to undermine here) implies a clear vision of the subject and
the subjectivity: a collective and people (’s) subject.
Or, better (that is what we suppose here) this desire is something we should
achieve, more than conceive. And its very subject should be the cause of a
Revolution, more than the idealistic-humanistic object of the change. Is this the
Imaginary of Revolution as a Cultural revolution? Is this the revolution where no
symbolic constraint is allowed?
In this last sense, our view of the psychoanalytical movement has a clear purpose:
that to restore the revolutionary foundations of psychoanalysis—either in the sexual
liberation or in the self-consciousness of the capitalistic slavery, or in the drive to
15
One just needs to recall here the thematic structure of Žižek (2011)—where the author crosses ‘‘The
Spiritual Wickedness in the Heavens’’ (p. vii) and ‘‘The actuality of the Theologico-Political’’ (p. 80),
‘‘The Return of the Critique of Political Economy’’ (p. 181) and ‘‘The Report from an Ideological
Battlefield in Hollywood Today’’ (p. 54), ‘‘The Architectural Parallax of Postmodernism and Class
Struggle’’ (p. 244) and ‘‘The Neuronal Trauma as the Rise of the Proletarian Cogito’’ (p. 279)—in order to
observe how this identity Imaginary/popular culture of the masses absorbs in itself that other dialectics
between the Imaginary (i.e. the emancipation of the Self, the perspective of the individual liberation, the
psychological growth, the comprehension of the neurotic structure of modern personality, the splitting of
post-modern reflexive thought, the moral perfectionism as an anti-authoritarian process, etc.) and the
Symbolic (the fatherhood, the order, the normative thought, the domain of repression, etc.).

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 493

amass wealth as a death drive (that is what will exactly animate, some years later,
for instance, the further debates Cultural studies vs. Postmodernism studies, Social
Liberalism vs. Marxian Emancipationism and Capability Approach, Freudo-
Marxism vs. Feminism and Lacan studies, French Theory vs. Radical Psychology,
Post-Structuralism vs. Complexity Approach, etc.)—moving from the debate
occurring after the exile both of the ‘‘Freudian Political Psychoanalysts’’ and the
‘‘Social Researchers’’ from Frankfurt, and their migration towards the home of
modern capitalism, in the middle-late Thirties.

2 Part Two Countertendencies

When one describes changes made in a musical arrangement as being directed

to bringing the arrangement of parts nearer to an ideal, the ideal is not before
us like a straight line which is set before us when we try to draw it.
WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophy (1932)
As Fredric Jameson observed, as regarding Postmodernism, mode of production
includes
a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of ‘residual’ as
well as ‘emergent’ forces, which it must attempt to manage or control
(Gramsci’s conception of hegemony): were those heterogeneous forces not
endowed with an effectivity of their own, the hegemonic project would be
unnecessary [(1989) 1998, 2009a: 43–44].
We are now trying a comparative synopsis concerning ‘‘countertendencies’’ and the
law of the falling rate in profit, both at the hegemony level and the unconscious
dialectics, at the very core of that precious analysis in Marxism as a revolutionary
movement, where Gramsci (as far as the national cultural critique in engaged)
encountered Reich (as far as sex as a revolution comes into analysis) and Fenichel
(as far as Capitalism as a maker of disease clearly enters the historical debate), more
or less in the same years.
As you all know, Capital set some important countertendencies having the aim of
limiting or relenting the fall of profit, in tendency. Our hypothesis is that even into
the pulsional organization of the Libido countertendencies are set, having they
either the specific (neurosis) or the general (conformism) function of limiting the
‘‘scarcity’’ of/into libidinal objects. We are going to propose a short list of such
objects here below, each of them accompanied by some brief commentaries or
explanations.

2.1 Money

First it comes the countertendency regarding the monetarization process, often

defined also as ‘‘in-materialization’’ or ‘‘de-materialization’’, what implies the
specific countertendency of shifting from material to de-materialized objects. We
have to recall here that Freud himself connected this tendency to the de-

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materialization with any death instinct16: more precisely, the specific sadistic-anal
regression implied a deep tendency of the Unconscious to the de-materialization of
the objects, making a bizarre ‘‘monetary accountability’’ of them. Money, in some
ways, is sexualised. Read Fenichel on this purpose:
the fact that in the family circle money matters (like sexual matters) are
reserved for the father, who maintains his domination over wife and child
through their practical economic dependence upon him, creates just the
nimbus of the ‘mysterious’ which at the present time appertains to the
financial field as frequently as to the sexual. This fact is most apparent in those
layers of society where the ideological influence of the family is still strong,
thanks to the economic anchorage of the institution of the family – that is
among peasants and petty bourgeois more than among proletarian.17
As Otto Fenichel amazingly focused in his important investigation on The drive to amass
wealth keeping more than a debt with the Marxian Midas in the Grundrisse (first
published in Moscow in the same years, 1936–1939), it seems to be there in action a
special form of the instinct of possession, made possible by the social function of money:
the need to become wealthy develops out of the multiplicity of needs from the biological
side only when money has validity; only the presence and the function of money in the
social system furnish these unspecific instinctual drives with the specific object.18
What is more, the function that money actually performs in reality breeds (itself)
in us (as) a reinforcement of the anal-erotically conditioned instinct (‘‘drive’’) of
accumulation, and not the reverse, that is to say, according with Fenichel’s analysis,
that a reinforcement of the instinct (‘‘drive’’, but it could be, sociologically, a desire)
of accumulation has not produced the reality function of money.
The varieties of irrational attitudes towards money, arising from unsolved anal-
erotic conflicts, have been so well portrayed by Freud (1908, 1916), Jones (923, and
then 1936–1939), Abraham (1927) in their classical descriptions of the anal
16
It is worth to recall here that Todestrieb is often translated into ‘‘death drive’’ (maybe the best solution,
even if more connected to the socialization and repression processes, and then employed mostly by
Freudo-Marxist reader in the Twenties-Thirties: Fenichel, for all), ‘‘death pulsion’’ (implying a sort of
neurotic cycle, or recurrence, lore than a background push, what is surely less correct in Freudian terms),
‘‘death desire’’ (evocating death as an object, what is theoretically more Lacanian than Freudian, related
to the Moi and the Imaginary more than to the Real and the Symptom), or even ‘‘death wish’’ (transferring
the object-death to the person to die, even the Self, to the ‘‘subject’’, so that the original term of Trieb
becomes something really different and ‘‘alienated’’).
Lacan himself, after 1966 (e.g. Kant avec Sade), aware of the impasse of such a strict sense of the
concept of Désir (as a death desire, as well as a sadistic-Sadean desire) sets a very interesting
countertendency at work in the unconscious life: Beauty, a sort of real (and not a material) intermediary
between Truth and Death, the subject (supposed to know) and its objects (supposed to be desired). See
Lacan (2007).
17
Fenichel (1938: 75). You could perceive here both an echo of Frida Lawrence’s ideas about money
and sex among the proletarian layers, and a polemic accent towards Reichian vision of monetary and
financial drives as linked to sexual perversions like Sadism or others, what means for Fenichel a deviation
Reich makes into a sort biology-based determinism.
18
Fenichel (1938: 87). You can perceive here echoes of Anna Freud’s first studies in London, about
money and psychoanalysis, on the basis of a social vision of the Self and the very concept of ‘‘defense’’:
see, for a brief recognition, Identification with the Aggressor [Freud A. (1936) 1998: 13] and A form of
Altruism [Freud A. (1936) 1998: 24].

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 495

character, to which nothing can be added, except, Fenichel noted (1938: 82), a
reminder that not only the unconscious attitude towards faeces but also the attitude
towards introjections of every kind can be projected on to money.
In the unconscious mental life money can represent not only possessions but
everything that one can take or give (the equation money = everything which can be
taken or given: milk, food, mother’s breast, intestinal contents, faeces, penis, sperm,
child, potency, love, protection, care, passivity, obstinacy, vanity, pride, egoism,
indifference towards objects, autoeroticism, gift, offering, renunciation, hate, weapon,
humiliation, deprivation of potency, degradation, sexual aggression, anal penis);
therefore it can represent relations to objects in general and everything through which
the bodily ego feeling and with it self-regard can be increased or diminished.19
But, according to Fenichel (1938: 82),
nothing justifies the assertion that the symbolic significance of money is more
important than its real significance or that its symbolic meaning is the cause of
the origin of money.20
Indeed a tendency towards any of these can express itself with money, can express
itself also in a sort of ambition to become wealthy.
Instincts represent the generally tendency, while matters of money and the desire
to become wealthy represent a specific form which the general tendency can assume
only in the presence of certain definite social conditions.
This is why the problem of the drive to become wealthy is a particularly good
subject for the investigation of the reciprocal action between a relatively primary
instinctual structure and the social influences modifying it (Fenichel 1938: 84).
This reciprocal action is extremely complicated. Not only do social influences alter
the instinctual structure, but the thus modified instinctual structure reacts again upon
social reality through the actions of individuals.21

19
Lacan expressly takes this theory into account in his Seminars from IV to X (the Anxiety as related to a
system of objects).
20
For a discussion, see Jacoby (Jacoby 1983: e.g. 35, 79, 114).
21
This is how ideology, once a response to material force, becomes a material force itself. Reich, as we
all know, fighting against economic determinism, formulates the theory of ideology becoming a material
force: ‘‘We, however, decline to accept the error of idealist philosophy, namely that this human structure
is immutable to all eternity. After social conditions and changes have transmuted man’s original
biological demands and made them a part of his character structure, the latter reproduces the social
structure of society in the form of ideology’’ [Reich (1933) 1980: 27].
‘‘There are no class distinctions when it comes to character’’ [Ibidem].
Sexuality, as the basic life energy, is repressed, this repression being the most effective means of
control by the authoritarian patriarchy.
Male supremacy is a major repressive factor in civilization to date: ‘‘The psychic structures lag behind
the rapid changes of the social conditions from which they derive, and later come into conflict with new
forms of life’’.
Irrationality becomes a key concept in this Reichian critique of the mass sublimation and idealist
approach to it: it plays the role of blocking out logical thought process with which people could see
beyond the given belief system. ‘‘The state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family: it
becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded’’.
‘‘Sexual inhibition prevents the average adolescent from thinking and feeling in a rational way’’.

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496 A. J. Magliacane

In the pre-pecuniary phase there is not yet a true desire to amass wealth but
only a wish to hold on to everything, to draw everything to oneself, and
psychologically it is mere chance whether these general aims are occupied
with money or with something else (Fenichel 1938: 84).
If children introduce money into instinctual conflicts concerning taking and giving
before they can have any judgment of the reality significance of money, it does only
mean that an economic system operating with money soon alters the instinctual
structure of the individuals living under it in a way unsuspected before the days of
psychoanalysis, by relatively increasing the anal eroticism.
Nevertheless, even the pre-pecuniary phase is experienced differently according
to the function of money in the particular society in which the individual is reared
(Fenichel 1938: 85).
In the tendency to trace social institutions directly back to biological instincts, we
see and record the same danger of biologizing which we face, remarkably enough, in
the psychoanalytic literature, and throughout the process bringing from the social
criticism of the structure to the ambiguous and insufficient dynamics general
biology/individual character.
To resume: anal eroticism produces the desire to collect something. What is
collected is determined by reality. Money matters must impress the child as a secret:
he encounters money as a gift, as a (fact of) possession, and finally as the epitome of
value. Not only does an interest in money arise from the primitive conflicts of anal
eroticism, but the interest in money which is and must be instilled in the child also
does increase his anal eroticism and in turn does arouse the conflicts which formerly
raged about the latter.22
We shall only draw attention to the fact the so determined impetus to become
wealthy enters into complicated psychological connections and creates and
utilizes modifications of instinct not only in the sphere of self-preservation.
We shall also impress upon the sociologists that the study of these
modifications of instinct is no way an unessential bagatelle, but is of the
greatest importance theoretically as well as practically (Fenichel 1938: 88).
The statements that the production and dissemination of the ideology of a society
must be understood from the standpoint of the actual economic conditions of this
society, the ‘‘superstructure’’ of which is the ideology; that further they are to be
understood from the material fact that this ‘‘superstructure’’, by means of the actions
of human beings, reacts back again upon the ‘‘foundation’’, the economic conditions
modifying them—these statements are for Fenichel correct, but too general and
abstract. They become more specific only when we succeed in comprehending,

22
The article about ‘‘sacred money’’ in Melanesia by Géza Róheim, quoted by Fenichel, makes the same
mistakes as the ontogenetic study carried out by Sándor Ferenczi, ‘‘but far more grossly and therefore
more clearly’’. Here Fenichel brilliantly reconnects his critique to Wilhelm Reich’s analysis of the basis
of any moral repression in sexual life (The invasion of compulsory sex-morality, compiled between 1920
and 1930), without falling in the ‘‘trap’’ of dismantling, by that (and thus against Freud, just like Reich did
in turn), the myth of Oedipus as a complex, as the foundational complex of Human history of societies
(whose ontogenesis still stands and resists according with that Freudian hypothesis of a ‘‘scientific myth’’
that was firstly presented in Totem and Taboo, and often restyled up to Moses and monotheism).

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 497

scientifically and politically, the details of the mechanisms of these transformations,

and only psychoanalysis is able to help us in that.
The needs of human being which seek satisfaction are the cause of production.
The development of production and also the principles of distribution
constitute the history of mankind. It is not my task to investigate at what point
and through which motives in the course of this development there arose a
capitalism that had to create the general ideal of amassing wealth. I can only
affirm that it cannot be the result of an ‘‘anal-erotic mutation’’ that has fallen
from heaven. Both the invention of money as well as alterations in the nature
of money could be possible only with the existence of a certain intensity of
anal-erotic instincts [a task set by reality can only be performed with the aid of
a certain instinctual structure, NOA]; conversely with money once in
existence, its very presence alters the instinctual structure and above all with
the existence of a certain amount of restraint upon the anal-erotic instincts
(Fenichel 1938: 88).
However, the restraint in turn must likewise have their previous history and their
material determining conditions, following a critique spreading over the direction
Adorno–Lacan, as in Fredric Jameson’s works on politics, art and psychoanalysis.
The conditions of possibility of psychoanalysis become visible, one would
imagine, only when you begin to appreciate the extent of psychic fragmen-
tation since the beginnings of capitalism, with its systematic quantification and
rationalization of experience, its instrumental re-organization of the subject
just as much as of the outside world [Jameson (1981) 1983: 47].
That the structure of the psyche is historical, and has a history, is, however,
as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs
but rather the results of a long process of differentiation even within human
history. Freud’s object of study is, to be sure, less sexuality as such than desire
and its dynamics as a whole.23
Thus there takes place a continual reciprocal action between external reality and
the instinctual structure modified by it. We are going a little more into this in the

23
Jameson [(1981) 1983: 51]. ‘‘But from the point of view of a political hermeneutic, measured against
the requirements of a ‘political unconscious’, we must conclude that the conception of wish-fulfillment
remains locked in a problematic of the individual subject and the individual psychobiography which is
only indirectly useful to us. The Lacanian rewriting of Freud should not be read as a mere variant on that
Freudian hermeneutic, but rather a substantial and reflexive shift from the Freudian proposition about the
nature of the dynamics of the subject (wish fulfillment) to the interrogation of that problematic itself,
foregrounding the category of the subject and studying the process whereby this psychic reality
(consciousness)—as well as its buttressing ideologies and illusions (the feeling of personal identity, the
myth of the ego or the self, and so forth)—become rigorous and self-imposed limitations on Freud’s
notion of individual wish-fulfillment’’ [Jameson (1981) 1983: 51–52].
Jameson is then a sort of anti-Žižek! [see e.g. Žižek (2002)].

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498 A. J. Magliacane

next paragraph, taking Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis (as an original intersection of

both Adorno and Lacan readings) into account.24
As for now, here you can read Fenichel’s conclusion regarding the Money issue.
A drive to accumulate wealth exists only in certain definite social epochs. It
would be a fatal error if the Marxist theory that economic reality governs the
world were interpreted to mean that an instinctual drive to become wealthy
governs it. On the contrary, reflection on the significant influence of economic
evolution upon all the condition of mankind shows us that such a drive at one
time did not exist and at some future time will exist no longer (1938: 88).

2.2 Money as a Bridge to Postmodernity: Shifts into the Political

Unconscious

According to Fredric Jameson, mode of production includes

a variety of counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of ‘residual’ as
well as ‘emergent’ forces, which it must attempt to manage or control
(Gramsci’s conception of hegemony): were those heterogeneous forces not
endowed with an effectivity of their own, the hegemonic project would be
unnecessary [(1989) 1998, 2009a: 43–44].
What is called a mode of production is not a productionist model: it involves a variety of
levels which must be reconstructed as symptom whose cause is of another order of
phenomenon from its effects. Postmodernism as an ideology, however, is better grasped
as a symptom of the deeper structural changes in our society and its culture as a
whole, or in other words, in the mode of production (Jameson 1998, 2009a: 50).
Jameson proposed a very general picture of such levels in his work Political
Unconscious to argue the perspectives of Marxism as necessary preconditions for
adequate literary comprehension. In short, political unconscious, as the political
interpretation of literary texts, maps the limits of a specific ideological conscious-
ness and marks the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go,
and between which it is condemned to oscillate, as the mapping of that particular
‘‘libidinal apparatus’’. But ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ was in reality nothing but
a code word for ‘class consciousness’: only it proposed the need for class
consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind, while it also inflected
the account of the direction of that new spatiality implicit in the postmodern
[Jameson (1989) 1998, 2009a: 49].
Marxist critical insights will therefore here be defended as something like an
ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts.
Even this argument, however, needs a certain specification: in particular we will
suggest that such semantic enrichment and enlargement of the inert givens and
24
See Late Marxism [Jameson (1990) 2007], Marxism and Postmodernism [Jameson (1989) 1998,
Jameson 2009a], The antinomies of Postmodernity [Jameson 1998, 2009a], and of course The Political
Unconscious [Jameson (1981) 1983].

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 499

materials of a particular text must take place within three concentric frameworks,
which mark a widening out of the sense of the social ground of a text through the
notions, first, of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a
chronicle-like sequence of happenings in time; then of society, in the now already
less diachronic and time-bound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between
social classes; and, ultimately, of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the
sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various
human social formations, from prehistoric life to whatever far future history has in
store for us [Jameson (1981) 1983: 60ss].
Thus, within the narrower limits of our first, narrowly political or historical,
horizon, the ‘‘text’’, the object of study, is still more or less construed as coinciding
with the individual literary work or utterance.
The difference between the perspective enforced and enabled by this horizon,
however, and that of ordinary explication de texte, or individual exegesis, is that
here the individual work is grasped essentially as a symbolic act. When we pass into
the second phase, and find that the semantic horizon within which we grasp a
cultural object has widened to include the social order, we will find that the very
object of our analysis has itself been thereby dialectically transformed, and that it is
no longer construed as an individual ‘‘text’’ or work in the narrow sense, but has
been reconstituted in the form of the great collective and class discourses of which a
text is little more than an individual parole or utterance.
Within this new horizon, then, our object of study will prove to be the
ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic
collective discourses of social classes.25
When finally, even the passions and values of a particular social formation find
themselves placed in a new and seemingly relativized perspective by the ultimate
horizon of human history as a whole, and by their respective positions in the whole
complex sequence of the modes of production,
both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and
must be read in terms of what I will call the ideology of form, that is, the
symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign
systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production
[Jameson (1981) Jameson (1989): 60ss].

2.3 Globalization, Internationalization, International Trade, New Markets,

Circulation of Goods and Persons

The tricky questions of the international trade and the opening of new markets seem to
imply, on a psychoanalytic level, the question of the reciprocal translation of the
stages. In other terms, what is at stake is the symbolic passage from one
psychoanalytical phase to another: upon this passage there lay regressions, repres-
sions, phobias and manias, and it is the very possibility of translation/reduction of the
25
Jameson [(1981) 1983: 60ss]. We can read here a sort of critical dialogue with some of Freudian
reductionist interpreter such as the ‘‘beloved’’ Ernst Jones. See Jones [(1939) 1974: 254].

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stages into each other that guarantees the continuity of the plus-de-jouir. There will
never be a crisis neither in the surplus-jouissance nor in the enjoyment beyond
pleasure thanks to the capacity of re-organizing the structure itself of this surplus.
The objects act into and upon the sphere of the enjoyment as they were goods or
commodities having the property of circulating over and beyond the boundaries of
the subject.26
Read the following celebre Grundrisse extract (233–234) where Marx focuses on
wealth, money, circulation, lack, and Midas.
Where wealth as such seems to appear in an entirely material tangible form, its
existence is only in my head, it is a pure fantasy. Midas. On the other side, as
material representative of general wealth, it is realized only by being thrown
back into circulation, to disappear in exchange for the singular, particular
modes of wealth. It remains in circulation, as medium of circulation; but for
the accumulating individual, it is lost, and this disappearance is the only
possible way to secure it as wealth.27
26
We are not implying, of course, that the Self is universal, like Jungian readers could do, but that the
different Selfs act by following laws of evolution that make them have same properties and skills. Is that a
neo-structural approach?
Well, both Erich Neumann (see The Child, more than The Mother, where the dialectics
ontogenesis/phylogenesis is more complex than elsewhere in his researches) and James Hillman (on a
different basis) seem to show such a disposition towards the structure (just think that that the archetypical
evolution follows, for Hillman, the rules of the interaction between the complexity of reality and the
individual adaptive capacities of fitness).
What is really at stake here is that Hillman and Neumann seem to lap the contours of the structure they
evocate, but they fail to introduce those new paradigms which could forecast a scientific revolution. The
archetypes—for instance, but we could say ‘‘the Self’’ or ‘‘the Child’’, and it would be the same—are
more a schema of interpretation for individual lives than a powerful breaking up with major previous
views of the subject and the unconscious life. From this point of view, Lacan’s theory of the mirror
(1936–1954), among the others, seem to have the scientific force to anticipate a change of paradigm to
come: what will happen later, when Lacan introduces the triadic structure of the subject (melting
conscious and unconscious life of the subject, just like Hillman and Neumann did too, by breaking any
former Cartesian unity, and going meanwhile far beyond Freudian topics, which constituted the change
into paradigms that precedes in turn Lacanian post-structure of Imaginary—Symbolic—Real).
The scientific concern about an implicit change of paradigm is evident in his second Seminar, where
psychoanalysis, mythology (Antigone), enigmas (Poe and the purloined letter), anthropology,
mathematics and neuroscience continuously melt: it was the year 1954!
27
We have to admit that Marx recalls here an entire tradition—going forward up to Braudel’s Wheels of
commerce (Braudel 1982)—having Midas as an object of desire (the Psychoanalysis objects as well as the
Capitalism object, both based upon loss and lack, and inflactive scarcity, providing the workers a sort of
tragic Midas touch). Among others (Lily, Payne, Vaughan), Bassanio wrote about gold as the ‘‘hard food
for Midas’’. In Bassanio’s formulation, the prospect of gold is rendered as a form of danger: ‘‘the guiled
shore/to a most dangerous sea’’, whereas the quick profit is ‘‘the seeming truth which cunning times put
on/to entrap the wisest’’.
The ‘‘hard food’’ resembles one of Theodore de Bry’s most striking images from his virulently anti-
Catholic travel anthology America (written in 1594), that of Amerindians enacting a symbolic revenge on
avaricious Spaniards by pouring molten gold down their throats.
As you can easily see, Capitalism, Imperialism (both British and Spanish), Colonialism, the function
of gold, and the wealth as ‘‘circulation’’, are strictly intertwined.
John Donne also applies the image of Midas to colonialism in his Elegy 20: ‘‘Love’s war’’ wherein he
depicts the failure of English colonization in the Americas as a ‘‘Midas touch’’ that provides wealth but
not the means for the colonies’ survival: ‘‘And Midas’ joys our Spanish journeys give/We touch all gold,
but find no food to live’’.

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 501

In another version,
Where wealth appears to exist as such in a quite material, tangible form, it has
its existence merely in my mind, is a sheer figment of the imagination.
Midas.28
The tension is therefore between the drive to embody (or ‘‘interiorize’’, just like in
the case of money) and the opposite one, that to liberate from/through the body (the
jouissance-enjoyment-pleasure is the general ‘‘reverse’’ in/of Psychoanalysis, the
Real alternative evolutionary solution to the generation of ‘‘trained gorillas’’
forecast by Gramsci in Americanism and Fordism). Sometimes Psychoanalysis
focused on the second part of the dialectics (the liberation process, the disclosure of
the ‘‘trained gorillas’’: it is Gross, Reich, and Marcuse, and in a simplified approach
Fromm and Horney). Some other times it pointed out and denounced the dialectics
in itself (Balint, Adorno, Lacan).
Here comes then a list of ‘‘heretical’’ themes in Psychoanalysis, such as the dance
as counter-interiorizing process, that present the perspectives of the different
approaches.
Dance
and Wilhelm Reich
Reich argued that—differently from the current times, in which sport and dance,
and arts in general, have a sublimation function—dance in Polynesian societies
could have a sexual importance: purposely that of helping woman inducing the
sexual satisfaction of men.
In those communities, notably matriarchal orders, dance does not take any
function of subliming the instincts and the drives to the orgasm satisfaction. No
coactive moral could repress this fundamental function.
Dance
and Franz Fanon
This is why, according to Franz Fanon (1973: 288), any study of the colonial
world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and of possession:
‘‘this disintegrating of the personality, this splitting and dissolution, all this fulfils a
primordial function in the organism of the colonial world’’.
This magical superstructure which permeates native society fulfils certain well-
defined functions in the dynamism of libido:
The native’s relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which
the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized,
transformed and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle:
it protects and permits. (…) There are no limits – for in reality your purpose in
coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity

28
One of the most interesting commentaries of this extract comes from Jonathan Beller’s investigation
about The Unconscious, the Unconscious of the Unconscious, or, the work of Consciousness in the age of
technological imagination: Beller (2006).

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502 A. J. Magliacane

to dissolve as in a volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rites,

imaginary mass murders – all must be brought out (Fanon 1973: 313).
Because of the immobility to which the native is condemned, the native’s muscles
are always tensed. (The native dreams of possession, all manner of possession: ‘‘To
sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible.’’ And:
‘‘The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re
never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the
streets of his town are cleaned and even, with no holes or stones.’’)
This is why the originality of the colonial context, Fanon says, is that economic
reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask
the human realities:
In the colonies the economic sub-structure is also a superstructure. The cause
is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because
you are rich (Fanon 1973: 292).
There is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe
that must be overthrown.
‘‘The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question
if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization—the history of
pillage—and to bring into existence the history of the nation—the history of
decolonization.’’29
In Fanon, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are immediately, although not without
problems, revolutionary forces.30
Dance
and the fantasy of destruction
There is another field in which corporeity has a specific importance, notably the
childish playing having the dance or any physical movement that is purposely
coordinated over a rhythm as an aggressive tool (Sabina Spielrein 1912).31

29
‘‘Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. (…) the ‘thing’ which has been colonized
becomes man during the same process by it frees itself, and to become its moving force, is ready for
violence at all times’’ (Fanon 1973: 288).
‘‘After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the
native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life—the force of
colonialism. And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may
well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of the ancestors, the horses
with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djinns who rush into your body while you yawn’’ (Fanon
1973: 313).
30
During the struggle for freedom: ‘‘The native discovers reality and transforms it into the patter of his
customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom. We have seen that this same violence,
though kept very much on the surface all through the colonial period, yet turns in the void. We have also
seen that it is canalised by the emotional outlets of dance and possession by spirits; we have seen how it is
exhausted in fratricidal combats. Now the problem is lo lay hold of this violence which is changing
direction. When formerly it was appeased by myths and exercised its talents in finding fresh ways of
committing mass suicide, now new conditions will make possible a completely new line of action’’
(Fanon 1973: 313).
31
See Spielrein [(1912) 1986].

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 503

There is no room to discuss here the implication of such an innovative theory as

elegant as sub-estimated (but not by Freud himself, who openly recognized that this
investigation by the soviet psychiatrist formerly loved by Jung paved the way to his
theory of death-pleasure instincts, published from two to 5 years after). We could
note by now that for Spielrein both aggressiveness and revolutionary violence are
connected to corporeal movements rhythmically performed by the child.

2.4 Monetary Scarcity and Super-Inflation: The Supposition of the Orgone

We could not end this brief investigation into Class consciousness and psycho-
analysis—from the ground supposition that any psychoanalytical function of the
imaginary of Money is a bridge to the symptomal domains of repression and
castration (either symbolic or real), that is the symptom in itself (in Lacanian
terms)32—without a short introduction to Reich’s re-interpreting of some standard
concepts in Economy and Politics, on the basis of the imaginary of a circulating
phallus that will flow and converge into the radical Lacanian theory and clinic (after
1966 and until the last Seminars).
In the complex context of the SexPol (and of the derived ‘‘sex economy’’, the
original sexualöhonomie of the well-known banned Zeitschrift of the 30s)
characterizing Reich’s investigations, the Orgone plays the role both of a specific
bargaining chip and of the general currency trading. In both sides Orgone responds
to the attempt of finding a currency that is not scarce, and which everyone could
provide of, beyond and despite the general regime of scarcity dominating the
economica.33
A general provision without scarcity means also that State has no part in it, no
redistribution being required.34
Furthermore, what is worth to be pointed out is that both Freud and Jung
developed their own ‘‘sex economies’’: the first purposely giving libido an
economy-based content as structured around the Lustprinzip, the latter introducing
the archetypal exchange as an activity regarding the trade of general sets of
knowledge and practice on the sphere of a comprehensive Self. They conceived then
those exchanges as a real market of goods (chips or currencies) found in an order of
common possession, circulating over a global surface (the libido in Freud’s theory

32
See, for a Marx to Lacan direction, the standard works: Lacan [(1966, 1999), 2007: On the Subject
Who is Finally in Question (p. 189), The function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis
(p. 197), as well as the fundamental Kant with Sade (p. 645) and The Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious (p. 671)]. See also the later Radiovision (1977) and the
tenth Seminar on Anxiety [(1962–1963) 2014].
33
For a discussion, see the volume directed by Hans Peter Gente: Gente (1970) and the excellent
Schneider (1972) opening up on the chances of some ‘‘political Resistance against a sick society’’.
34
This intuition of Reich is developed by Lacan’s theories of ‘‘the four discourses’’ and the ‘‘castrated
master’’, in three of his annual Seminars that he held around 1968: Psychoanalysis Upside Down
(1969–1970)—also published as The Other Side of Psychoanalysis [(1969–1970) 2006]—, On a
Discourse that might not be a Semblance (1970–1971),…Or Worse (1970).

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504 A. J. Magliacane

of the Unconscious; the archetype as far as the Self theory developed by Jung is
concerned).35
Finally, the implications of such theories for the Political Unconscious are of
remarkable ones.
First, any project of Revolution could not be a political project only anymore.
Revolution cannot limit itself—as far as we can say ‘‘limit’’, of course!—to the
radical change of the statu quo in economy and politics.
Second, the revolutionary project cannot be a ‘‘mere’’ political project, its
perspectives having to open widely in order to consider other fields where the
revolutionary strength should act, such as the erotic domain as a whole or any kind
of psychological repression of drives and passions. Let me recall here Wilhelm
Reich’s view of the sexual struggle of youth (1932):
We must solve the sex problem in a revolutionary way, by evolving a clear
sexual-political theory; proceeding from it to a sexual-revolutionary praxis;
and integrating both these in the proletarian movement as a whole.
Third, ‘‘superstructures’’ (let’s take this only term into a general account, for now)
turn to have e structural eminence and consistence, once known that passions and
drives are repressed and that the multiple-complex reality of the Unconscious faces
the totalitarian reality of the facts and of the opinions. Either the capacity to
symbolize beyond the normative borders and boundaries, or the provision of setting
some imaginary ‘‘fugues’’ to the dimension of a ‘‘better future’’ should be taken into
the right account.

35
Marx emphasized in his Critique of the Gotha Program that the principle of equivalent exchange must
survive in a socialist society for a considerable period as a guide to the efficient allocation and utilization
of human and material resources. By the same token, however, the evolution of socialism into
communism requires an unremitting struggle against the principle, with a view to its ultimate replacement
by the ideal ‘‘From each according to his ability, to each according his needs’’.
In a fully developed communist society in which scarcity would be largely overcome, equivalent
exchange would no more serve as the organizing principle of economic activity. This is obviously not to
imply that the communist society of the future can dispense with rational calculation; what it does
indicate is that the nature of the rationality involved in economic calculation undergoes a profound
change. And this change in turn is but one manifestation of a thoroughgoing transformation of human
needs and of the relations among men in society.
What we want to outline, furthermore, is that even during the life span of capitalism itself, on the
contrary, with commodities being priced not according to their costs of production but to yield the
maximum possible profit, the principle of equivalent exchange turns into the opposite of a promoter of
rational economic organization and instead becomes a formula for maintaining scarcity in the midst of
potential plenty.
As Baran and Sweezy pointed in their study on the monopoly capital, ‘‘human and material resources
remain idle because there is in the market no quid to exchange against the quo of their potential output’’.
See Baran and Sweezy (1966: 337–338).
So, ‘‘the obsolescence of such central categories of bourgeois thought is but one symptom of the
profoundly contradictory nature of monopoly capitalism, of the ever sharpening conflict between the
rapidly advancing rationalization of the actual processes of production and the undiminished elementality
of the system as a whole’’ (Baran and Sweezy 1966: 338). The authors use the words elemental and
elementality to characterize a society which is governed as though by great natural forces, to which men
may seek to adjust but over which they have no control.

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 505

Moreover, even the mechanism of the sublimation (through the arts or any other
of the ‘‘superstructures’’) should be fought and banned, or, anyway, submitted to a
radical critique.
Fourth, what above briefly introduced refers itself directly to the dialectics Class-
in-itself/Class-for-itself: in other terms, as a question, are we about to imply that
somehow and to some extent Class consciousness could turn to be coincident with
Psychoanalysis?
Here, of course, it not matter of the party of a Leninist type anymore, but of
Young Marx’s dialectics among citizenship, humanity, and personhood, as well as
the subjectivity under the law, the individuality, and the process of subjection.

3 Conclusions

But it is clear that the most influential and elaborate interpretive system of
recent times is that of psychoanalysis.
JAMESON, The Political Unconscious (1981)
Here come some temporary conclusions. Firstly, after the Soviet Revolution and,
mostly, during the Great Cultural Revolution, evidence was empowered that the
‘‘Political Unconscious’’ could tend to coincide with the Collective Desire of
Revolution.
Secondly, countertendencies of Capitalism (read here: Monopoly Capital) had
exploited the individual level of the unconscious drives and instincts, since the first
great crisis of the late Twenties.
It is during this complex historical phase—including both the Fascism and the
Soviet Revolution, having the Capitalism failure as a problematic and controversial
background—that the falling rate of profit takes then the place of Revolution as
insurrection (as it is subsequent that the tendency of the falling rate, i.e. the recurrent
crisis and, eventually, the Monopoly Capital failure, do not need any Revolution).
Thirdly, strong and unexpected oppositions to those countertendencies arose
from the American re-enhancement of the elder Psychoanalytical Revolution (from
Europe)—and the debates converging onto the Eros and civilization topics (let us
simplify for the benefit of the synthesis, for once!)—accompanying the dramatic
migration of the ‘‘Political Freudians’’ and the ‘‘Social Researchers’’ escaping from
Nazi repression.
Their analysis focused mostly alienation (Horkheimer) and death drive
(Fromm)—while Eros was the alias of the proletarian struggle (Marcuse). Fenichel
and Adorno focused instead the core problems of capitalistic imaginary: meaning
wealth and mass production, two of the greatest issues of all time for both Marxists
and Freudians, which Adorno and Fenichel tried to provide a solution for in the field
of psychoanalysis as renewed. The drive to amass wealth and the drive to amass
commodities (i.e. ‘‘the dialectics of seeing’’, as Susan Buck-Morss brilliantly
interpreted Benjamin’s Passagenwerke and Work of Art) produce a drive to an
imaginary revolution in the lifestyle, where the well-being takes the place of any
emancipation process.

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506 A. J. Magliacane

Fourthly, new paths in psychoanalysis tend to become, then—at the turning point
of the Fourties, shortly before the war—the best performing path on the critique of
the society of Western Monopoly Capital and its imaginary standards produced by
the mass (popular) culture.
Not by chance, the preys of the recurring US Government hunting for witches
were exactly the characters of popular culture and imaginary lifestyle (assumed to
be, in turn, the genuine expressions of the Political Unconscious).
From now on, any Western ‘‘socialist-communist-Marxist’’ revolution should be
in the first place a cultural revolution—assuming here the general schema of
Leninist revolution, as articulated into the organization of the avant-garde party, the
development Class consciousness and the general insurrection.
And yet: what else is any which form of Class consciousness if it is not the
Psychoanalysis itself?
Meaning that the rationale in Marx (and, to a certain extent, in Lenin too, and
Cultural Revolution as a passage à l’acte) is rightly the dimension of Class
consciousness, that is to say: Psychoanalysis. This allows us to link the analysis
carried out in the unpublished versions of the second to fourth book of Capital to the
previous 1844 Manuscripts.
Consciousness constitutes itself into the Class.
Yet this ‘‘creation’’ process does not fit into the subjectivization/subjectiva-
tion/subjectification (even beyond the specific meaning Judith Butler meant to give
to her ‘‘Foucaultian-Althusserian’’ dialectics into the psychic life of power) but into
the subjection, as a waste (meaning either a rest or a part which is not utilisable
anymore as a part of the process) that properly is what is commonly called
‘‘Desire’’.36
Desire is a part of the production, but it cannot be utilisable as such: it is not
functional as a desire but as a commodity.
This proceeding—wholly discovered by Jacques Lacan throughout the tenth
Seminar (on Anxiety) and in his works following the years 1965–1966, from Kant
avec Sade to the Seminar XVI, and that was updated in the three following
‘‘Marxist’’ Seminars of Lacan, until the clear dialectical identification State/
Fascism/Libido of Death, developed in the ‘‘RSI’’ unpublished Seminar—takes off
upon a debate which remains in perspective occurring among the Freudian-Marxist
psychoanalysts. These had to face both the ‘‘classical’’ Freudian socialists and an
inner tendency opposing soviet supporters to skeptical analysts. The focus of the
debate wrapped around the importance of the ‘‘social factors’’ as for the production
of the contemporary subjectivity.

36
‘‘In this sense the first appearance of the Law, and the opening up of unconscious desire, occur at the
same moment: it is only when the child acknowledges the taboo or prohibition which the father
symbolizes that it represses its guilty desire, and that desire just is what is called the unconscious’’
(Eagleton 1996: 143).
The father signifies what Lacan calls the Law, which is in the first place the social taboo on incest:
‘‘Lacan’s originality is to rewrite this process, which we have already seen in Freud’s account of the
Oedipus complex, in terms of language’’ (Eagleton 1996: 144).
‘‘With the entry of the father, the child is plunged into post-structuralist anxiety’’ (Eagleton 1996:
144).

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The Imago of Revolution Psychoanalysis and Class… 507

If social factors are general and performing, subjectivity is conformist and

neurotic. What is authentically of Psychoanalysis is the modality in which neurosis
tend to shift to a personal level. Psychoanalysis should not tend to a plain denounce
against the social constrictions and limitations ‘‘pathologizing’’ the individual (i.e. a
description of the social causes of neurosis). It should aim at the emancipation of the
subject and, in tendency, at the constitution of a revolutionary position.

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Alessia J. Magliacane (Naples, 1979) lives in Paris where she is senior researcher at the Centre Georg
Simmel and PhD at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and EHESS. She is visiting professor in
Porto Alegre and Santa Maria (Brazil). Her researches activities focused on philosophical aspects of
Revolution throughout the époques and struggles of European Resistances in the contemporary ages and
today. Her publications, translated in different idioms, include: Zéro. Révolution et critique de la Raison.
De Sade et Kierkegaard à Adorno et Cavell (2017); To Blue (2016), on Black music and Black struggle;
Un monde parfait. Géographies de l’Amérique imaginaire (2013); Monstres, fantasmes, dieux, souverains
(2012).

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