ABSTRACT
In capitalism, the power of labor's self-actualization is for the first time commodified, as a result of which surplus-value is, again, for the first time in history, accumulated. Marx shows that this phenomenon is necessarily accompanied by commodity fetishism. In a consummating gesture of psychoanalysis as the realization of a materialist epistemontology as postulated by Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, Lacan designated this category "surplus-enjoyment". This chapter explores (surplus-)enjoyment by bringing together certain common elements in Lacan's exposition of this concept in Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII – The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX – Encore. The shift to the era of commodity fetishism and capitalist biopower occurs when "power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live" or "to improve life". The chapter looks at jouissance is the psychoanalytic term for Spinoza's substance or the power of self-actualization.
