ABSTRACT
The final chapter of this short work focuses on the fundamental Marxian division: class antagonism. In its return to Marx, it excavates this through discussion of the oft-relied-upon base–superstructure distinction and reads this against the primary and secondary processes in Freud’s outline of psychoanalysis in his early works, and as taken up by Reich. However, for a more nuanced look at class, it then turns to Lacan and arrays the antagonism against the three orders, of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. By doing so, means of distribution—economic-productive, social-political, and affectual-ideological—are interrogated in relation to the system of capitalism that produces them. Through (re)marrying these sociopolitical phenomena to psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutics, the work ends in an attempt to chart revolutionary paths in both individual and social subjectivity, in psychoanalytic and world-historical trajectories, and advocates for a horizon in which stale investments can be given up, and new rewards taken up, without encountering too-painful surpluses.
