ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the central psychoanalytic contributions to the critique of capitalism. The main psychoanalytic insight consists in the libidinal anchoring of relations of exploitation—hence its preoccupation with the role of socioeconomic imperatives and structures in the genesis of neuroses and more generally in the organization of subjective libidinal economies. The text then turns to Lacan’s structuralist take on the link between subjective and social structures, focusing notably on his theory of discourse(s), which systematizes his thesis on the homology between Freud’s theory of pleasure and Marx’s theory of surplus-value. The whole discussion is centered on the problematic of work in the psychoanalytic framework, since this issue enables one to discern the link between the production of pleasure, reproduction of relations of exploitation, and determination of thinking. The chapter concludes by recalling that for psychoanalysis, it is important to introduce a new conflict in the subject’s existence, which mobilizes his or her intellectual efforts for work against the structural resistance, which embeds him or her in the existing mode of enjoyment. It is here that psychoanalysis most decisively meets the emancipatory efforts of Marx’s critique of political economy.
