ABSTRACT
If psychoanalysis ever starts out with an individual, it soon becomes clear that each individual human being is filled with swarms of others. Psychoanalytic political theory has therefore developed a theory of the subject with which it is possible to comprehend the often-unrealized capacities for agency and politics that arise from participation in collective subjects, such as groups, crowds, organizations, and assemblies. This chapter explains the place and importance of collective subjects in psychoanalytic political theory, focusing in particular on the theory of the subject in the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou. Beyond this, the chapter seeks to clarify the reality and politics of collective subjects in capitalism. Capitalism destroys previous forms of sociality and produces new forms of collective action. By dint of the productivity of collective action, capital creates collective subjects, while through law and ideology, it produces individuals as owners who parasite on the productivity of collective subjects. The theory of the subject advanced here stresses, however, that subjects are always multiple. Capital is not the only subject or locus of change, and neither do the others of capital automatically have the capacity for social transformation. Social change only ever arises out of the conflict between multiple subjects, and subjects must always be actively constructed and formed, out of but always in excess of the concrete situations with which they are confronted.
