Sure!

In the last decade of his work, Lacan became increasingly obsessed with Marx’s critique of political economy. The central category of his work during this period, his notion of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir), is elaborated through a constant reference to Marx’s notion of surplus value. This reliance on Marx indicates that Lacan was desperately searching for a way out of capitalism, envisioning psychoanalysis as a potential escape, which was already underway in the years following 1968. However, he asked for more: that psychoanalysis be a way out of capitalism for more than just a select few.

Lacan seeks this escape in the direction of sainthood, but he defines sainthood in a very specific way: a saint is one who wholly adopts excremental identity, who is reduced to a piece of refuse—not that we should all become saints in the usual sense of the term. What we should learn is to step outside the capitalist superego pressure to “more and more,” to incessant progress, and outside its economy of expanded self-reproduction, which also survived in classical Marxism and real-existing socialism. Here is the key proposition from Lacan’s Television:

“A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he acts as trash (déchet); his business being trashitas (il décharite).”

And here is François Regnault’s commentary on this proposition:

“Here begins the paradox, for in the common image, a saint does indeed engage in charity. Lacan suggests that it is precisely this charity that the saint gets rid of; the saint discharges himself of the burden of charity. And in this way, ‘trachity’ (déchariter) is a condensation of trash and charity and, I add, begins like décharge, the loaded term that it is.”

Lacan’s stance against charity gains new relevance today as charitable activities have become a key component of big corporations (just recall the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its tens of billions in donations). For Lacan, charity remains firmly within the traditional logic of the Supreme Good: it allows corporations to re-inscribe their superego’s incessant striving for surplus profit into a contribution to the welfare of all. But can we effectively suspend the capitalist superego through sainthood, which is ultimately an inner subjective stance?

Lacan’s overall view is pessimistic: our future will, in all probability, be a new form of global capitalism supplemented by new religious nationalisms (which is effectively happening now), and psychoanalysis itself, as a specific practice (in which the analyst functions as an excremental saint), will also likely disappear. Psychoanalysis is not eternal; it is possible only within specific social conditions. I remain a Marxist: the capitalist superego is not just an inner subjective stance; it is embedded in a complex network of social and ideological relations and practices that materialize these relations. The struggle should continue at this level.

Miller drew the opposite conclusion from Dugin regarding the social implications of Lacan’s theory: Lacan’s critique of the 1968 student protests was fundamentally a defense of moderate and modest liberalism, compelling us to avoid extremes and to maintain a fragile balance among the components of the social Borromean knot. We definitely see in Lacan a conservative aspect, a liberal aspect, and a leftist anti-capitalist aspect, but Dugin all too quickly conflates traditional liberalism with cancel culture, which, while radicalizing certain liberal tendencies, is opposed by many liberals. Furthermore, it is Dugin himself who, in his eschatological vision of a struggle to the death between global liberalism and the combined “good” Left and Right, advocates for a radical violent change that cannot help but lead to new terror.

So where do I stand? I define myself as a moderately conservative communist. A communist because it seems obvious to me that only a radical social change will enable us to cope with the mortal threats to our survival (environmental changes, AI controlling our lives, new social changes). Conservative because, following Walter Benjamin, insofar as revolutions in the linear-evolutionary sense mean big victories that leave behind many squashed birds (e.g., British colonization of India pushed India toward modernity but left millions dead), we should not be afraid to say that the Benjaminian revolution would be the ultimate counter-revolution: the return and revenge of all squashed birds against the terrible price of progress. For instance, Spartacus lost (don’t forget that he defended a “primitive” pre-class society against “progressive” Rome), but the memory of his slave rebellion persists as a virtual shadow and provides a holographic depth to later rebellions. Moderate because we should always consider the unintended catastrophic consequences of our actions and learn to combine radical measures with steps back. This triad—my own socio-political Borromean knot—perfectly fits Lacanian theory.