Love in the end times: Capital’s jouissance and subject’s anxiety
摘要
Drawing mainly on the work of Marx, Freud and Lacan, this article addresses the psychoanalytic concepts of drive, jouissance, anxiety, desire and love in the context of the destruction of nature and culture by capitalism. The starting point is the reflection of Karl Marx and his followers on the destruction of nature in capitalism and the conversion of the Anthropocene into the Capitalocene. The widespread ecocide is then elucidated through Marx’s conceptualisation of capitalist production as the transmutation of living beings into dead money and the resulting extinction of life on Earth. This concept is understood through both the Freudian idea of the death drive and the Lacanian double definition of jouissance as the satisfaction of this deadly drive and as possession and accumulation. The possessive, accumulative and fatally destructive capitalist process, which is devastating nature and threatens to annihilate humanity, is described as a jouissance of the symbolic system of culture assimilated into the economic system of capitalism. This ‘real subsumption’ of the Other into capital, as Marx would say, not only destroys nature but also civilisation by reducing the qualitative diversity of signifiers to the quantitative repetition of the universal equivalent of money. Furthermore, as Lacan has convincingly demonstrated, capitalism absolutely excludes desire and ‘things of love’, leaving in their place the anxiety of the subject before the real of capitalist cataclysm. In the End Times, love can only take refuge in spaces of resistance against the absolutisation of the capitalist market, spaces similar to those that we sometimes find in indigenous communities, in social movements and in psychoanalytic practice.