By Bernard E. Harcourt

When Marx’s Paris manuscripts on political economy and Hegelian philosophy were posthumously published in 1932, in German, under the title Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the publication produced shock waves in the intellectual world and in Marxist circles.[1]

Their publication rejuvenated the reception of Marx’s writings. It opened new interpretations of his work. It gave birth to an entire field of the philosophical investigation of alienation. And it gave rise to contentious debates over the value of the youthful philosophical writings of Marx as opposed to the more mature, scientific, economic writings.

These debates are well known. They climaxed, perhaps, with Louis Althusser’s denunciation of the youthful Marx writings as purely ideological. They led Althusser to develop his theory of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thought—a break between the early philosophical writings and the mature political economy. Althusser placed the epistemological break at 1845, and the Paris manuscripts anchored the earlier period.

Those controversies are somewhat behind us. Most political theorists today, trained in recent years, are more familiar with the early Marx of alienation than they are with the later scientific Marx. Many readers of Marx have become comfortable with the evolution of his thought. The novelty of the youthful philosophical writings has worn off.

Today, the Paris manuscripts of 1844 tend to be read as a key stepping stone to the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s theory of history. The manuscripts are best known for three elements.

1. Human self-alienation

First, Marx develops in the Paris manuscripts a theory of human self-alienation.

Marx had referred previously to the concept of alienation, mentioning it for instance in his article “On the Jewish Question,” published a few months earlier in February 1844, in the context of the Feuerbachian critique of religion. “What prevails in the so-called Christian state is not man but alienation,” he wrote there.[2] In those earlier writings, the concept of human self-alienation was intimately tied to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, which was based on the idea that humans alienate their human essence by projecting themselves into the idea of God and the heavens.

You will recall that Marx proposed to perform in the human realm what Feuerbach had achieved with religion—namely, to expose the struggles, but this time within society. As Marx wrote in the “Introduction” to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “the critique of heavens is transformed into the critique of the earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law, the critique of theology into the critique of politics.”[3]

Marx argued in the “Introduction” that the fundamental task of philosophy was “to unmask human self-alienation in its secular forms.”[4] It is to that fundamental task that Marx turns to in the Paris manuscripts.

In the Paris manuscripts, Marx brings that concept of alienation back to earth and transforms it into a theory of earthly or human self-alienation—more specifically, a theory of the worker’s alienation from their work product and from their work, a theory of alienation that would have an immense influence on later thinkers.

2. The advent of communism

Second, Marx develops in the Paris manuscripts a first sketch of his signature historical account. It is an early draft that focuses mostly on the transition from capitalism to communism with the abolition of private property. The more extensive meta-history that extends from ancient times through feudalism and then to capitalism will have to wait another year for his work with Frederick Engels on the German Ideology.

In the Paris manuscripts, what Marx develops most is a preliminary sketch of the revolutionary role of the proletariat, amplifying the work he had done in the 1844 articles in the German-French Annals. Here, Marx foreshadows his theory of communism as the last stage of history and suggests a certain teleology of the historical process.

Marx’s theory of history is anchored in his concept of alienation. It is the problem of alienation related to private property that drives the proletariat class to communism. It is the overcoming of human self-alienation that propels the movement of history.

Marx writes of “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement [alienation], and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man,” or “as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human being—a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development.”[5]

As these passages make clear, Marx considers Communism to be the dialectical overcoming, through the abolition of private property, of the central conflict in society, namely human self-alienation. It represents, in his words, “the genuineresolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.”[6] And he then famously pronounces, all here in the Paris manuscripts, that “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”[7]

The dialectical overcoming is what gives movement to history, according to Marx, at least in these manuscripts of 1844. It motivates human action and drives history. Marx writes, “The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and knownprocess of its coming-to-be.”[8]

These passages from the Paris manuscript are arresting and have a clarity and power that are striking. Marx concludes the section the discussion, which is in the section “Private Property and Communism,” with this pronouncement: “Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future […]”[9]

3. The critique of Hegel

Third, in the Paris manuscripts, Marx offers insights from his work on the critique of Hegel, specifically focused on the dialectical method and on political economy. This time, though, Marx focuses predominantly on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit rather than his Philosophy of Right. This is in the section of the manuscript titled “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” placed at the end of the English translation.

The critique is hard hitting. Marx accuses Hegel of having wrongly posited self-consciousness as the essence of human beings, and thus having misconstrued the motion of history. As he writes, “For Hegel the essence of man—man—equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human essence is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness.”[10]

As evidenced by this passage and the discussion more broadly, the critique of Hegel emanates from the same nucleus of issues, namely estrangement, alienation. Estrangement is misdiagnosed by Hegel and must be set back straight by locating the true essence of man in what Marx calls, and as we have discussed earlier, “species being.”[11]

Ernst Bloch, whom we read in Marx 1/13, provides a helpful interpretation of these passages in the preface to his commentary on the Theses on Feuerbach in his book, The Principle of Hope. Bloch explains:

The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, 1844, contain another significant celebration of Feuerbach, admittedly as a contrast to the woolgathering of Bruno Bauer; they praise above all among Feuerbach’s achievements the ‘foundation of true materialism and of real science, in that Feuerbach likewise makes the relationship between ‘ “man and man” into the fundamental principle of his theory’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 152). But the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ are already a lot further beyond Feuerbach than they declare. The relationship between ‘man and man’ in them does not remain an abstract anthropological one at all, as it does in Feuerbach, instead the critique of human self-alienation (transferred from religion to the state) already penetrates to the economic heart of the alienation process. This not least in the splendid passages on Hegelian phenomenology, in which the historically formative role of work is identified, and Hegel’s work interpreted in the light of it. At the same time, however, the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ criticize this work because it interprets human work-activity only as mental, not as material. The breakthrough to political economy, i.e. away from Feuerbach’s general idea of man, is accomplished in the first work undertaken in collaboration with Engels, in ‘The Holy Family’, likewise in 1844. The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ already contained the sentence: ‘Workers themselves are capital, a commodity (1.c., p. 103), whereby nothing more of Feuerbachian humanness remains here than its negation in capitalism; ‘The Holy Family’ noted capitalism itself as the source of this strongest and final alienation.[12]

As evidenced by Ernst Bloch’s commentary, the Paris manuscripts have generated a large body of remarkable scholarship on all three dimensions that I have discussed—the concept of human self-alienation, the sketch of his historical theory of communism, and his critique of Hegel. Because the second and third are grounded on the foundations of the first, it is of course the theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts that has received the most attention.

Marx’s writings on alienation have led to many important commentaries including those of Rahel Jaeggi in her book Alienation, in which Jaeggi reconceives of alienation through the lens of more current questions of the relationship to self and others, and feelings of helplessness in contemporary society[13]; and Hartmut Rosa, in his book Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-modern Temporality, in which Rosa argues that the generalized feeling that things are speeding up and time is accelerating is making people feel alienated from self and others.[14]

Marx 4/13

At Marx 4/13, we return to the question of human self-alienation to actualize the problematic in conversation with Renata Salecl, a brilliant philosopher in the psychoanalytic tradition. Renata Salecl will discuss forms of social and political alienation that are currently being experienced and are spreading widely across right-wing movements in the United States today, including Christian evangelicals. She will also reflect on apathy in today’s times and how it differs from alienation.

Renata Salecl proposes that we reread Marx’s theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings, more specifically, paired with Lacan’s lecture “The Dream by the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife,” from a seminar he delivered on April 9, 1958, at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. As Salecl will show, Lacan’s text will help us understand the logic of desire and anxiety in contemporary contexts. In the seminar, we will look at the role anxiety, desire, and jouissance play in people’s fascination with populist authoritarian leaders—and how those emotions are experienced as well on the other side of the political spectrum.

A quick word of introduction. Renata Salecl is a brilliant critical thinker, whom we have had the great privilege to think with previously at the 13/13 seminars. Renata Salecl is a Slovenian philosopher and sociologist who approaches her work from a psychoanalytic perspective. She is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia and a Professor at the School of Law at Birkbeck College in London. She is the author of numerous books, including A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why (Princeton University Press, 2020); The Tyranny of Choice (2011); On Anxiety (Routledge 2004); and (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso, 2000). Her work is very interdisciplinary and focuses on bringing together law, criminology, the study of political ideologies, and psychoanalysis.

Renata Salecl will open our seminar with a presentation. In this written introduction, I will provide some background on Marx’s Paris manuscripts. Being conscious of my limits, I will allow Renata Salecl to elaborate on the context of Jacques Lacan’s writings and his 1958 seminar in her presentation at Marx 4/13.

In this introduction, I will touch upon some implications and benefits of turning to Lacan as an interlocutor of Marx. Lacan’s seminar, in the context of Marx 4/13, enriches any possible investigation of the sense of alienation that a worker might have in relation to their work product or their labor in a capitalist regime. It adds multiple layers of complexity to the analysis of the worker’s alienation. It allows us to explore, in greater depth, the contemporary landscape of alienation and anxiety in Western societies today.

Let me begin, though, with some background.

The Paris Manuscripts of 1844

After the publication in February 1844 of the two articles in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, which we discussed at Marx 3/13—namely, the “Introduction” to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “On the Jewish Question”—Marx settles in for several months to study the leading texts in political economy.

From about April to August 1844, Marx studies, reproduces passages from, and comments on the key writings of the field of political economy. In the process, he produces a set of manuscripts that he would never publish during his lifetime, and that Engels also did not publish. The manuscripts were first published in full in German in 1932 under the title “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The work is often referred to more colloquially as “the Paris manuscripts” because they were written while Marx was still living in Paris.

The manuscripts consist of four separate manuscripts, of very uneven lengths—the second manuscript is just a few pages long. When they were first published, they were broken down into the following sections and, for sections without titles, given the following titles by the editors (in brackets):

Preface

[First Manuscript]

Wages of Labour

Profit of Capital

Rent of Land

[Estranged Labour] {Marx develops the theory of alienation here}

[Second Manuscript]

[Antithesis of Capital and Labour. Landed Property and Capital]

[Third Manuscript]

[Private Property and Labour. Political Economy as a Product of the Movement of Private Property]

[Private Property and Communism] {Marx develops the historical account of communism here}

[Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property]

[The Power of Money]

[Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole] {Marx refines his critique of Hegel here}

In the existing Preface, Marx presents the Paris manuscripts as somewhat orthogonal to his lengthy, unpublished manuscript “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” He explains his unwillingness to publish the latter work because of its unwieldiness—too broad in scope, yet aphoristic in style—and his plan instead to publish pieces of it as pamphlets, which he never did explicitly. But he includes elaborations on that work here, in the section titled “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole” of the Paris manuscripts, and in the manuscript of the German Ideology, which he drafted with Frederick Engels in Brussels in 1845.

In the Paris manuscripts, Marx emphasizes he would only return to the earlier Critique of Hegel with regards specifically to questions of political economy.[15]

A few months after completing the Paris manuscripts, in February 1845, Marx is expelled from France and goes into exile in Brussels, where he will write, with Frederick Engels, the German Ideology, a text that, building on the historical account of communism in the Paris manuscripts, develops the bases of a material theory of history.

Alienation

In the build-up to the section on “Estranged Labour,” where Marx presents his theory of human alienation, Marx sets down four foundational arguments, which he summarizes at the beginning of that section as follows:

Competition, the division of labor, and commodity exchange leads to the exploitation and debasement of the worker, who becomes a mere commodity.
The condition of the worker gets worse in proportion to the magnitude of the wealth he produces.
Competition leads to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few.
All of society falls into a struggle between two classes, the privileged class (industrialists and landowners) and the propertyless workers.[16]

Marx draws these conclusions from the classical works of political economy, which he is reading, annotating, and studying in Paris—as evidenced by the copious notes he takes in the Paris manuscripts.

But he remains deeply unsatisfied by the method of the political economists. He rejects their approach of starting with some state of nature.[17] He also protests that they do not explain private property or the division between labor and capital, but instead start from those as presuppositions.[18]

So instead, Marx forges his own path. He begins by exploring the relationship of the worker to his work product. What he identifies is a form of self-alienation that characterizes the worker’s relationship to the object he works on. Marx develops multiple formulations:

The work product becomes an exterior object,
The worker becomes a slave to that object,
The worker is deformed as they form the object,
The worker is disempowered, reduced to an animal.

Marx elaborates these ideas into remarkable expressions:

The more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more becomes nature’s bondsman.[19]

From the work product, Marx then turns to the work itself, and finds that the worker is equally alienated from their work: work becomes the sacrifice of self, the mortification of the self. It is here that Marx articulates the famous lines about the worker becoming an animal: “As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”[20]

This leads Marx to the third dimension or aspect, having to do with species-being—a central concept that Marx had developed from Feuerbach’s work already in “On the Jewish Question.”[21] Marx argues that the worker estranges himself from his human essence, from his own essential self, as he serves only his individual interests, his private existence.

And this leads, fourthly, to an alienation from other human beings. He is reduced to an isolated atom, no longer in community with others, no longer able to experience social relations. Or, as Marx writes, “the proposition that man’s species nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.”[22]

These four steps allow Marx to propose that private property is the consequence or product of these forms of alienation. Marx engages in another of his classic inversions: private property does not produce alienation, it is the other way round:

Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour engenders the relation to it of the capitalist, or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour. Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour—i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that secondly it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.[23]

And from there, naturally, it follows that the only way that society can emancipate itself of private property is for the workers to emancipate themselves from their alienation. The only way to achieve the human emancipation that Marx called for in “On the Jewish Question” is to abolish in one fell swoop both the alienation of the worker and private property. This is what grounds, then, Marx’s historical account of communism in the Paris manuscripts.

Lacan: Enriching the Analysis of Alienation

Renata Salecl proposes that we read Marx’s work on alienation in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s lectures and writings on alienation and desire. Renata Salecl will present on Lacan’s work in detail at the seminar. Let me here propose some preliminary thoughts.

Many commentators posit a stark conflict between Marx and Lacan—or, more generally, between Marx and post-structuralist thinkers. In part, this traces to some explicit statements by post-structuralist thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, about Marx’s work.

In interviews and lectures, Foucault criticized Marx’s theory of alienation for reifying the place of the individual—commonly referred to as “the subject”—in Western philosophy. Foucault accused Marx of a form of subjectivism and proposed instead his own preference for “decentering the subject,” famously through the idea of the “death of man.” Foucault’s critique was motivated by a form of structuralism that, despite rejecting the term, Foucault believed he shared with Lacan and Althusser. In more ordinary terms, we could say that Foucault was challenging Marx’s philosophical focus on the individual worker’s experience of alienation—in a similar manner to the way in which we might challenge methodological individualism today.

Jacques Lacan furthered this tendency by placing Freud’s work within the structures of language and discourse. His seminars on The Formations of the Unconscious, in 1957-1958, did this by exploring the structures of the unconscious, which, as he explained, was as structured as language. Language and discourse serve to propel the subject outside of their subjectivity and into a relational world with others—starting with their parents. Returning to Lacan, then, is helpful to articulate a more interpersonal conception of alienation.

As I indicated in my introduction to Marx 1/13, while I am deeply sympathetic to Foucault’s critique of individualism and eager to push our analyses toward more collective subjects, I am not convinced by Foucault’s gestures toward the death of man. They serve more to dramatize the point than to lead us forward toward a new conception. Moreover, Foucault’s theories of de-subjectivation and practices of the self—which I find extremely compelling—retain rather than displace a focus on the self, on the subject.

It is here that Lacan’s discussion of desire and alienation, within the framework, ambiguities, and slippages of a shared language, might be useful for a reading of Marx. It also may advance the ambition of developing a more concrete idea of what comes after the supposed death of man, insofar as language is inherently interpersonal and pushes us beyond the boundaries of the self.

I would argue that Lacan’s writings serve to enrich the questions of desire and alienation that infuse Marx’s discussion in the Paris Manuscripts, rather than undermine them. This will require additional work to develop—first on the critique of Marx, and second on the contribution of Lacan.

The Post-Structuralist Critique of Marx

Let me start then by what I might call the post-structuralist critique of Marx. I will turn here to what I consider to be its clearest expression, from the writings of Michel Foucault. (As I have mentioned before and written about previously, in the course context for The Punitive Society for instance, the relation between Foucault and Marx is complicated, fraught, and multifold; here, I am only focusing on one element).

In several lectures and interviews, Foucault critiques forms of thinking that essentialize human beings. He attacks the idea of a human essence. He privileges the transformation of subjectivity. Transformation is key, which is why he studied the history of the varying ways that human beings understand themselves and their essence over time in domains that are so central to self-identity—the mind (madness), the body (sexuality), behavior (crime and punishment), and life itself (bios, death). What preoccupied Foucault, in his words, what “fascinates me,” are, in his words again, “the limit-experiences,” such as “madness, death, sexuality, crime: these are the things that attract my attention most.”[24]

For Foucault, the task he set himself, for his philosophy, was to have experiences that would transform his being, change his subjectivity, in his words, “de-subjectify.”[25] These experiences were all aimed at transforming the self. Drawing on Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille, Foucault set himself “the task of ‘tearing’ the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely ‘other’ than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.”[26]

Foucault was especially intent on our having experiences of the present, through first-hand historical and archival submersion, that jar our senses and understandings, in order to transform the self. “I aim at having an experience myself—by passing through a determinate historical content—an experience of what we are today, of what is not only our past but also our present. […] That is, an experience of our modernity that might permit us to emerge from it transformed.”[27] It is “an experience that changes us, that prevents us from always being the same, or from having the same kind of relationship with things and with others that we had before […].”[28]

All of this translates into two separate critiques of Marx, as I read it: first, a critique of essentialization; second, a critique of subjectivism.

On the essence of man

First, Foucault criticizes the concept of species-being that was at the very heart of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s theories of human self-alienation. He does not believe that human beings have an essence, or something that is core to them. He rejects Marx’s suggestion that work or labor is in any way essential to humans—proposing that fun, laughter, partying are equally important to people.

I elaborated on this in detail last year in connection with Axel Honneth’s book, The Working Sovereign, and his seminar at Coöperism 12/13. As I discussed there, Foucault developed this critique of Marx in his lectures on The Punitive Society in March 1973, where he pronounced:

It is false to say, with certain famous post-Hegelians, that labor is man’s concrete existence. The time and life of man are not labor by nature; they are pleasure, discontinuity, festivity (fête), rest, need, moments, chance, violence, and so on. Now, it is all this explosive energy that needs to be transformed into a continuous labor-power continually offered on the market. Life must be synthesized into labor-power, the clever ploy [he had written “stroke of genius”] of industrial society was to take up the old technique of the confinement of the poor, which, in the classical age, was a way of fixing and, at the same time, suppressing those who through idleness, vagabondage, or revolt had escaped all the geographical fixations in which the exercise of sovereignty was carried out.[29]

Foucault returns to this in his lectures on “Truth and Juridical Form” in Rio a few months later. In discussing the theory of alienated labor and the idea of man’s concrete essence, Foucault deconstructs the concept. It is as if he is specifically targeting the passage in the Paris manuscripts where Marx defines what is quintessentially human—the passages where Marx writes of the quintessential “animal functions,” consisting of “eating, drinking, procreating,” by contrast to the “human functions,” which consist of laboring freely and productively. Labor, Marx writes, is “life-activity, productive life itself … the life of the species … life-engendering life”; or, as Marx writes, “free conscious activity is man’s species character.”[30] The alienation of the worker’s product becomes problematic on these grounds, because it turns life as labor into a mere means for existence: “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”[31]

Foucault protests here, criticizing Marx’s thesis, and arguing that “labor is absolutely not man’s concrete essence or man’s existence in its concrete form,” as he declares.[32] “In order for men to be brought into labor, tied to labor, an operation is necessary, or a complex series of operations, by which men are effectively—not analytically but synthetically—bound to the production apparatus for which they labor. It takes this operation, or this synthesis effected by a political power, for man’s essence to appear as being labor.”[33]

Foucault essentially argues that we only come to believe in man’s essence by means of certain practices that are intimately connected to capitalist relations of production themselves. These are the practices, Foucault argues, that shape the body, that render bodies docile. Foucault develops this insight in Discipline and Punish. There, specifically citing Marx’s Capital (Vol. I, Chap. XIII), Foucault proposes that the industrial revolutions that made possible the accumulation of capital cannot be separated from the production of docile bodies—what he refers to as “the methods for administering the accumulation of men.”[34] These are the disciplinary techniques at the heart of Discipline and Punish.[35] As he states in Psychiatric Power: “necessary for the accumulation of capital, there was an accumulation of men, or, if you like, a distribution of the labor force with all its somatic singularities.”[36]

On Subjectivism

Second, Foucault criticizes the idea of a fixed self, an essence that might not change, a core identity. Foucault studies histories of the self, how self-understanding changes over time—self-understanding in our core behaviors involving sexuality, reasoning, deviance, and life itself. He emphasizes the contingency of those transformations. In this work, he takes as his target thinkers like Sartre who he associates with the fixity of the subject and the idea that human being assign meaning to the world, and can restore meaning.[37] His main point is the following:

In the course of their history, men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is, to shift continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of / something that would be “man.” Man is an animal of experience, he is involved ad infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as a subject.”[38]

Foucault believed that he shared this critique with Althusser, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss, as he explained in an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978. Even though he rejected the label of “structuralist” and argued it was inaccurate, Foucault acknowledged a commonality of his work with theirs, namely, that they all challenged the primacy of the subject. They all put in question the classical philosophical touchstone of the I, the ego, the cogito.[39] Althusser did this in his work on Marxism. As Foucault explained:

Following another route, Althusser performed a similar task when he elaborated his criticism of French Marxism, which was imbued with phenomenology and humanism and which made the theory of alienation, in a subjectivist key, into the theoretical basis for translating Marx’s economic and political analyses into philosophical terms. Althusser reversed this point of view. Returning to Marx’s analyses, he asked himself if they themselves manifested / that conception of human nature, of the subject, of alienated man, etc. […] We know that his answer was radically negative.[40]

Lacan did this work in relation to Freud. As Foucault explained: “Setting out with psychoanalysis, Lacan discovered, or brought out into the open, the fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with a theory of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as the phenomenological one).”[41] He adds: “Lacan concluded that it was precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned on account of this incompatibility, and that the point of departure should be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious.”[42]

As Foucault explains, it was important for thinkers like Althusser, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss—and himself—to oppose the philosophy of the subject by returning and rereading the work of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. With regard to Marx specifically—or starting from the Marx of the Paris manuscripts, Foucault explained: “One went from the kind of Marxism that agonizes over the concept of alienation, to phenomenological existentialism centered on lived experience, to those tendencies of psychology that in the name of experience and of making it adequate to man—let’s say the ‘experience of the self’—rejected the theme of the unconscious. It’s true that the ‘structuralists’ needed to oppose all that.”[43]

How then did Lacan further that critique? And how did he render more rich the possible analysis of alienation?

Lacan on Alienation

What Lacan suggests, drawing on Freud’s work, is that there are often conflicting and ambiguous relations between desires, wants, wishes, and demands. Lacan analyzes desire and alienation primarily through the categories of what he calls the dialectic between “demand” and “desire.” Demand, a technical term for Lacan, can be understood as what someone is asking for and feels that they need, expressed through language that effectively distorts or alters those very needs; desire, for Lacan, can be understood as what someone yearns for emotionally or libidinally above and beyond the distortions of demand.

We can understand this better if we turn to the seminar of Lacan that Renata Salecl asked us to read: a seminar dated April 30, 1958, that goes by the title of “The Dream by the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife,” which was the third dream that Freud analyzed in his book The Interpretation of Dreams.

Very succinctly, the dream is by a woman whose husband, whom she loves dearly, is a butcher. In her dream, she wants to have a dinner party but realizes that she only has a small amount of smoked salmon at home. She is unable to go to the market or to find caterers for the dinner, so she abandons the idea of holding the dinner party. That’s it. It is a simple dream. The exact language matters to Lacan, I will not read it out, but you have the text available online:

I wanted to give a supper-party, but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon. I thought I would go out and buy something, but remembered then that it was Sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut. Next I tried to ring up some caterers, but the telephone was out of order. So I had to abandon my wish to give a supper-party. [SE 4: 147][44]

Freud understands that the patient is proposing this dream as a challenge to counter his argument that dreams are always a form of wish fulfillment. The patient challenges Freud by saying that this dream is precisely the non-fulfillment of her wish to have a dinner party.

But what the analysis reveals is a far more complex set of desires and demands. Freud shows, through further analysis and conversation with the patient, that the dream in fact satisfies a desire, or more than one: a desire to love her husband, to defeat a potential rival, and to keep her own desires unsatisfied. On an even simpler reading, I would argue, it may also have satisfied her desire to please her husband—and to see him lose weight.

During the analysis, the patient expresses jealousy and anxiety about a close female friend of hers, another woman whom her husband often refers to in favorable terms and with whom she was speaking recently. Her female friend is very thin, and the patient knows that her husband prefers more full-bodied women. Her friend, however, has asked her to be invited to dinner, in part because one eats so well at the patient’s home, but also because she wants to gain some weight.

The dream of not being able to give a dinner party can be interpreted then as the desire not to have her friend over for dinner, so as not to fatten her up and become more attractive to her husband.

On this interpretation, there are many references—or what are called, in the more technical terms of Lacan, signifiers. These include the smoked salmon, which actually indexes the patient’s woman friend, because smoked salmon is her favorite dish. Gaining weight also indexes both the female friend, who voiced that desire, and the patient’s husband, who had spoken about being too heavy and wanting to go on a diet. Her husband had specifically spoken about wanting to avoid dinner engagements in order to lose weight. So the very idea that a dinner party represents something that would make one gain weight is associated with the conversation between the patient and her husband. There is also the fact that her husband, who has a striking face, had been asked to sit for a portrait by a painter, and had refused, telling the painter that he surely would prefer painting a young woman and insinuating a sexual relationship—an element that the patient told Freud and that sits unexplained in the dream sequence, but that would suggest, at the very least, that the husband butcher has his thoughts on young women.

One additional element, or piece of the puzzle, is that the patient loves the taste of caviar and would have liked to have caviar every morning. She spoke to her husband the butcher about it, and he naturally would have satisfied that desire by providing her with caviar every morning, had the patient not asked her him to not do so in order to allow her to tease him about it.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggests that the dream, then, is in fact about wish fulfillment, although it is a wish, as Lacan suggests, to keep a desire unsatisfied desire.^[45] Lacan develops Freud’s analysis to argue that Freud’s interpretation of the dream is a perfect illustration of what Lacan calls “the dialectic of desire and demand.”^[46] Lacan places this dialectic within the context of language and discourse—language being key to understanding the relations between people and the way in which desires are expressed and articulated through and in discourse.^[47]

We can get a sense of the multiplicity of desires and demands, and the dialectical relationship between them, in Lacan’s reading of Freud. There are many. First, the patient is asking for love, the love of her husband, with whom she is indeed very much in love. In fact, the overall project of the dream itself, one might say, on Lacan’s interpretation, is to seek out the love of her husband by avoiding the competition by her female friend and by continuing the game of the unsatisfied desire for caviar. There is, second, the desire for caviar itself, which is then combined with another desire, here a demand, which is to not be given the caviar precisely in order to continue teasing her husband about it in an affectionate way.

So the desire for caviar is actually a desire for something else, as Lacan suggests. For the patient, “it’s necessary, first, that she desire something else, and the caviar has no other role than to be this something else, and, in the second place, that in order for this something else to fulfill the function that is its task to fulfill, precisely, one doesn’t give it to her.”^[48] As Lacan explains, “what Freud tells us in so many words is that she wants her husband not to give her caviar so that they can continue to be madly in love, that is, tease one another and make each other’s lives endlessly miserable.”^[49]

The entire dream of not being able to have the dinner party because there is only a small bit of smoked salmon left is tied to the patient not being able to satisfy her desire for caviar. The smoked salmon is a reference to her friend. The denial of the dinner party is a denial of the friend’s desire for salmon and for a good meal at her friend’s house in order to gain some weight. So the denial of her friend’s desire stands in for the denial of her own desire to have caviar in order to maintain her love with her husband. The desire to have the dinner party that is unfulfilled is like her desire to have caviar, which in its unfulfilledness, satisfies her desire for her husband. There is a transference or appropriation, or there is another dimension to the way in which desire is not so obviously related to its object. There are a multiplicity of desires at play here, all of which are the product of social relations, language, and discourse—things that people have said. It is just not so simple as to think that one desires an object and that the alienation from that object produces dissatisfaction, or that having the object would satisfy those desires. In essence, things are much more complicated.

And in addition to these demands and desires, there is the desire of the patient to avoid satisfying the desire of her woman friend by not inviting her to dinner in so that she will not become more attractive to her husband. There is also the desire of the husband in his veiled reference to young women. There are even more desires and demands that neither Freud nor Lacan discuss, like the desire of the painter to paint the Butcher because he has such an expressive face—with a potential attraction there. Or the unstated, but one can only surmise, desire of the patient regarding her husband’s recent weight gain—either way, depending on her own preferences.

Lacan uses his interpretation of this dream to unearth structural elements associated with the dialectic between demand and desire, and also language and discourse. As Lacan explains, “What is expressed is a structure which, beyond its comical side, has to represent something necessary. The hysteric is precisely a subject who finds it difficult to establish a relation—one that enables her to retain her place as a subject—with the constitution of the Other as big Other and bearer of the spoken sign. This is the very definition of what one can give of the hysteric. In a word, the hysteric, man or woman, is so open to suggestion through speech that there must be something in it.^[50]

My interpretation of what is going on here, beyond the structuration of the unconscious, or the structural dimension, is the complexity of desire and demand in the context of alienation, because alienation is central to the relationship between demand and desire. Lacan makes this clear in his discussion of Hegel and the master-slave dialectic. In fact, the whole dream sequence that he is discussing here is an attempt to supplement Hegel’s dialectic of recognition from the master-slave dialectic with the other key relationship, perhaps more primeval, which is the child’s relationship to its parents. Lacan proposes that, instead of viewing the world through the master-slave dialectic, we can view these events through the paradigm of the child’s relationship to its parents, which is not a question of struggle or conflict, but in his words, “a question of demand.”^[51] Lacan writes, “It is, in short, a question of seeing when and how the subject’s desire, alienated in demand, profoundly transformed by the fact of having to pass through demand, can and must be reintroduced.”^[52] Or, as he explains, the young child in the pre-Oedipal stage, in its impotence, he writes, “finds itself entirely dependent on demand, that is, on the Other’s speech [that is the parents], which modifies, restructures and profoundly alienates the nature of its desire.”^[53] Because the pre-Oedipal child is so dependent on the parent and on language, the relationship between demand and desire is one of alienation, where the exchange, the language exchange with the parents, leads to the transformation, alienation, alteration of the child’s desires.

The dream of the butcher’s beautiful wife is an instantiation of the way in which demand is in a dialectical relationship with desire—for instance, the way in which the patient asks her husband the butcher not to satisfy her demand in order to enrich her love of her husband.

Return to Marx

This may seem puzzling in its relationship to alienation in Marx—although the desire for caviar is such a perfect foil, such a perfect bourgeois desire. So let me try to be as clear as possible.

The point, returning to alienation in Marx, is that it may not be as straightforward to suggest that human beings want a relationship to the world in which they are able to see themselves in their work product or in their labor. There are complicating dimensions of language, interpersonal exchange, and conflicting desires. In the dream, the patient’s desire for her husband is mediated by the apparent desire of her friend. It is mediated by her relationship with her husband as well—in fact, it is mediated by the triangular relationship between the patient, the friend, and the husband, and also perhaps the painter. Certain things that are said trigger demands and desires. The social dimension and language are wrapped up in these individual desires.

Returning to Marx again, it is impossible to think of the desire of the worker in isolated terms, apart from other workers and managers—and outside of language, Lacan would add. There is always a possibility that the desire for the work product is actually a desire for something else, an unquenchable desire for being part of a community. The purported object of desire itself may not be what is really desired. And the desire for community may remain, regardless of the mode of production. Perhaps modes of production are not what would satisfy the desire for community. Perhaps other demands and desires would arise even in a communist regime. Once we engage at the level of psychological wellbeing, we may never get to a point of satisfaction. The satisfaction of desires might not be result in the end of desire and alienation. And some desires may be precisely for the unfulfillment of desires themselves.

To give but one contemporary illustration. It is possible that an American worker at a Ford assembly plant today finds satisfaction in their work because they are producing a car “made in the USA” and take pride in “putting America first.” The fact that the Mustang they are assembling in Flat Rock, Michigan, belongs to the Ford Motor Company and is their private property that they will sell off at some car dealership may pale in comparison to the patriotic fervor that a factory worker might experience. Their demands and desires may point in very different directions.

One cannot fault Marx for not anticipating Lacan’s elaborations. Marx was writing, of course, before the advent of modern psychology, psychiatry, and especially psychoanalysis. In fact, in the Paris manuscripts, Marx takes a swipe at whatever rudimentary psychological science exists at his time, writing that: “A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word – ‘need’, ‘vulgar need’?”[54]

So it does seem helpful, to me at least, to reread the Paris manuscripts in light of these developments by Lacan. They help de-essentialize human nature. They complexify desire. And, with their emphasis on language, they introduce interpersonal relations, possibly even the collectivity, in the psyche of the subject. They provide one avenue, perhaps, for the kind of collective subject that might accompany the turn from individualism to forms of cooperation.

The history of worker solidarity over the twentieth century does not obviously corroborate Marx’s theory of alienation and historical account regarding communism. So it seems important to enrich the analysis with further elaborations on needs and desires. This may also serve as an entry way into further reflections on ideology or regimes of truth, and all of the work that Antonio Gramsci opened up for us.

Armed with these paired readings—Marx and Lacan—we are in a better position to explore how forms of alienation might arise in capitalist society, but also in communist societies. We may also be better equipped to deal with the repercussions of alienation today and the many questions of anxiety and the non-fulfillment of desires, and apathy, catastrophe, and sublimation, that Renata Salecl raises in her brilliant essay for Marx 4/13.

For many of us in the United States, we have just gone through an election cycle that has generated a whole new wave of anxiety and self-alienation. What are the myriad transformations that we each, each one of us, are going through in the face of these crises? I know that, personally, I feel as if I have changed multiple times, over the past few weeks, since the re-election of Trump, with regard to how I process the election, react to it, decide how to act going forward; and that these changes are constantly happening as a result of hearing how others are reacting and what they are saying. Rereading Marx and Lacan, I do believe, can be an essential companion during these times.

To read more and watch the Marx 4/13 Seminar, please proceed here.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 3 (Marx and Engels 1843-1844) (New York: International Publishers, 1975); Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), available on-line at https://archive.org/details/economicphilosophicmanuscripts1844/page/n1/mode/2up; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, 66-125, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978).

[2] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 26-52, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), at 38.

[3] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” 129-142, in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), at 132.

[4] Marx, “Introduction,” at 132.

[5] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 84.

[6] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 84.

[7] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 84.

[8] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 84.

[9] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 85.

[10] Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 113.

[11] Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Paris Manuscripts, Tucker at 116 (“But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing.”).

[12] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 [1959]), 251.

[13] Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

[14] Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-modern Temporality (NSU Press, 2010).

[15] Marx, “Preface,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 67.

[16] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 70; Flammarion edition at 107.

[17] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 71; Flammarion edition at 108.

[18] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 71; Flammarion edition at 108.

[19] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 73; Flammarion edition at 111.

[20] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 74; Flammarion edition at 113.

[21] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 26-52, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), at 33-34 (“The perfected political state is, by its nature, the species-life of man as opposed to his material life.”)

[22] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 77; Flammarion edition at 117.

[23] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 79; Flammarion edition at 119-120.

[24] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 99-100.

[25] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 31.

[26] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 31.

[27] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 33-34.

[28] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 41.

[29] Lecture of 28 March 1973, p. 232.

[30] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 75-76.

[31] Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 74.

[32] Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 86.

[33] Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 86.

[34] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 220-221 (emphasis added).

[35] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 221.

[36] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 71.

[37] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 49.

[38] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 123-124.

[39] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 56.

[40] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 57-58.

[41] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 56.

[42] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 57.

[43] Foucault, Remarks on Marx, at 86.

[44] Lacan, “The Dream by the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife,” in Formations of the Unconscious, at 338 [360]. The page numbers in brackets are the marginal page references in the English edition.

[45] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 342 [363].

[46] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 341 [362].

[47] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 342 [363].

[48] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 343 [364].

[49] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 343 [364].

[50] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 343 [364].

[51] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 336 [358].

[52] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 336 [358].

[53] Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, at 336 [358].

[54] Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Paris manuscripts, Tucker at 90.