Psychoanalysis and Social Change

Abstract

This paper focuses on the psychoanalytic claim that jouissance, or excessive enjoyment, is different from the pleasure guaranteed by the pleasure principle – which serves homeostasis in the subject – and is achievable only at the cost of transgressing some prohibition enshrined, if not in the moral Law, then in some conventional symbolic order. It further argues that capitalism is characterised by a certain kind of negation – of commodities by commodities, and of subjects' capacity for jouissance – and it examines the question, whether jouissance is possible on capitalism's terms, given that capitalism promises jouissance through commodity consumption. Upon investigation, the promise turns out to be illusory because, although it is the case that the neoliberal capitalist order is the present conventional symbolic order, it is not characterised, like the moral Law, by prohibition as much as by the exhortation to “enjoy.” Hence it is nonsensical to speak of transgression of a capitalist prohibition which would yield jouissance for transgressive subjects. Psychoanalysis is therefore in the position to prepare subjects for social transformation or revolution by creating the space where questioning subjects may “assume their desire” by refusing the pseudo‐jouissance that capitalism offers through commodity consumption.