筑波学院大学紀要第19集

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2024年‘Capitalist Realism’ and the Psychoanalytic Critique
A. Tyler Jorn ＊Abstract
The term ‘capitalist realism’ refers to the way in which capitalism has come to assume thestatus of the ‘end of history’ and thus to constitute a kind of ultimate horizon of all possible thought
and action. Critics of capitalist realism tend to focus on undermining its purported inevitability byexposing its historical contingency and utility, a genealogical strategy which, in its appeal toknowledge and education, is grounded in an old Enlightenment faith in the suzerainty of
consciousness and the power of reason. Such an emphasis on consciousness, however, is precisely
what psychoanalysis rejects in and as its founding gesture. Insofar as psychoanalysis takes up the
problem of capitalist realism, then, it is with the much different aim of accounting for capitalism’s
staying power in virtue of its deep resonance with the basic structure and dynamics of unconscious
mental life. More specifically, a psychoanalytic critique of capitalist realism reveals how the logic ofdesire finds its most perfect outward expression in a politico-economic system premised on theparadox of an ever-expanding but always and contingently unavailable or withheld abundance. Thisimplies, in turn, and provocatively, that the transition to a post-capitalist world may be far morearduous and uncertain than the critics of capitalist realism have yet grasped.
Keywords: c apitalist realism, desire, symbolic castration, big Other, lost object, the Thing,communism, death-drive

1. The need for a psychoanalytic critique of capitalist realism
The concept of ‘capitalist realism’ (CR)—as coined by Mark Fisher in his 2009 book of the same
name—takes aim at the problem of the apparent finality of capitalism. Summed up both in Francis
Fukuyama’s infamous ‘end of history’ thesis and in the well-known dictum (attributed, at minimum,
to Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson) that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism’, CR draws attention not merely to the fact that capitalism has grown ‘too big to fail’ insome strictly empirical sense, but to the much deeper and more insidious ways in which capitalism
has come to colonise the most far-flung corners of the mind, such that it now ‘seamlessly occupies
the horizons of the thinkable’.1 In the years since the book was written, humanity, so far fromgetting a grip on its addiction to endless profits and growth, has seemingly fallen off the wagon
altogether, making the topic of CR more urgent than ever before. That said, it is possible to point toa tension within Fisher’s text that severely blunts the force of its critique, if not undermines it
1Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 8.

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筑波学院大学 経営情報学部、Tsukuba Gakuin University

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entirely. To say this is not to claim that CR, or Fisher’s warnings about it, should not be taken
seriously. Precisely to the contrary, it is to suggest that working through this tension reveals thatthe critique in fact does not go far enough, and thus that the ‘reality’ of capitalism is perhaps much
more deeply entrenched than the theorists of CR have yet fully grasped.
To state this tension outright, theorists like Fisher cannot seem to decide whether CR is ultimately
a critique of capitalist ideology à la Žižek (following Lacan) or of capitalist ideological interpellation or
subjectivisation à la Althusser or Foucault. On the one hand, Fisher favourably cites Žižek’s
characterisation of ideology as a kind of soft, disingenuous cynicism, a fetishistic disavowal of the ‘big
Other’, the anonymous socio-symbolic authority, in thought and language which belies and conceals
its unconscious avowal at the level of behaviour and action, as in Žižek’s well-known joke about themadman who, despite insisting that he knows he is not a grain of corn himself, is neverthelessterrified that the chicken doesn’t know it. This is a critique which is best understood when we take it
to be levelled, in the main, at the progressive left—not so much at the ‘milquetoast liberals’ who thinkthat shopping at Whole Foods, driving a Prius, and voting for Joe Biden are the answer to the world’s
problems as at the open critics of capital who know full well that such actions are frivolous and futile
and yet keep doing them anyway, superstitiously, as it were, as though the consequences of carrying
on with business as usual, despite being perfectly well known, might nevertheless somehow
miraculously fail to materialise. As Fisher puts it, as long as ‘we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism
is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange’ with our wallets and our votes.2

There is, however, another, harder form of cynicism that Fisher addresses in his discussions ofboth accelerationism à la Nick Land and the (in his experience) political jadedness and inertia
endemic to Gen Z culture. If progressive pseudo-cynicism can be summed up in the comic absurdityof the subject’s knowing that the big Other doesn’t exist while continuing to act as though the big
Other itself didn’t know this, then this latter, more conservative form of cynicism entails a wholesale
refusal to be duped by the fiction of the big Other. There is nothing remotely funny about suchconservative cynicism, which manifests itself either, in the case of Land, in a secular faith in a ‘pure’

capitalism without contradictions3 or, in the case of Fisher’s students, in a self-reinforcing deathspiral of passive nihilism and ‘depressive hedonia’, that is, an inability to unplug from ‘thecommunicative sensation-stimulus matrix’ and thus ‘to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow ofsugary gratification on demand’.4 If the truth of ideology is epitomised in Octave Mannoni’s ‘Je saisbien, mais quand même…’ (‘I know very well that…, and yet…’), the truth of cynicism proper isfound in a circulus vitiosus of apathy and defeatism that Fisher dubs ‘reflexive impotence’: those inits grip ‘know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it’ (‘I know
very well that…, so why bother?’, as it were).5

Despite drawing on many of the conceptual resources of Žižekian/Lacanian ideology critique, it
2Ibid., 13.

3

Ibid., 46.

4

Ibid., 24.

5

Ibid., 21. The fact that Fisher explicitly distinguishes reflexive impotence from cynicism means only that it is not the sort ofsoft cynicism characteristic of ideology. The genuinely cynical subject’s actions are perfectly consistent with what it knows.

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A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critiqueseems clear that what Fisher is really taking aim at with the idea of CR is something more like thereflexive impotence of disillusioned, hedonically depressed university students than the fetishistic
disavowal of their ‘enlightened’, hyper-critical professors. And there is a perfectly good reason for
this, namely, that it allows CR to be construed as a consequence of our interpellation as capitalist
subjects—the political upshot of this being that it opens up a relatively straightforward ‘discursivetranscendentalist’ praxis that ties the possibility and meaning of social activism to the orchestrationof a genealogical scandal. That is to say, for the discursive transcendentalist, laying bare the‘historical a priori’—the matrix of truth games and power relations—underpinning any social
configuration of ‘reality’ is itself a politically subversive act. ‘As any number of radical theorists fromBrecht to Foucault and Badiou have maintained’, Fisher writes, ‘emancipatory politics must always
destroy the appearance of a “natural order”, must reveal what is presented as what is necessary andinevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be
impossible seem attainable’.6 Such a scandalous unmasking of reality is precisely the point ofeducation: the goal is to expose the so-called ‘knowledge’ of the futility of action in the face of therelentless onslaught of global capitalism to be in bad faith, a mere ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’
perpetrated by capital itself.7

The critique of ideology qua fetishistic disavowal, on the other hand, calls into question thiswhole Enlightenment-based appeal to consciousness, one which assumes a fundamentally rational
subject for whom the piercing of illusions and the resulting clarity of mind are themselves sufficientmotives for transformative action. If ideology operates rather at the level of the unconscious, it is forthe most part impervious to genealogical exposure. As Freud discovered early on (and as we see
confirmed ever ywhere today), simply informing patients about the underlying causes of theirneuroses is about as effective as, to paraphrase Freud, handing out menus to famine victims.8 In thefirst instance, then, what is needed is a supplemental psychoanalytic critique of CR which does not
simply uncover its historical a priori but, beyond that, maps out what we might call its ‘psychical apriori’, the ways in which our inability to see beyond the horizon of capitalism is conditioned by thevery structure and inner dynamics, the ‘libidinal economy’, of subjectivity as such. It goes without
saying that such an approach—the best recent example being Todd McGowan’s Capitalism andDesire 9 —is doomed to marginality almost from the outset. For one thing, it challenges thelongstanding dominance of discursive transcendentalism itself as the still-reigning intellectual
vogue. So far from exposing the necessary as contingent, psychoanalysis does exactly the opposite,namely, interrogates whether, where, and to what extent, in the never-ending flux and flow ofcontingent cultural-historical production, some kind and measure of naturalness and universality,
some form and degree of inevitability, might be said to be at work (in this respect, ironically,
psychoanalysis is more, not less, Kantian than discursive transcendentalism insofar as the natural or
6

Ibid., 16–17.

7

Ibid., 21.

8

See, e.g., Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (tr.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Vol. XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works (London: Vintage Classics, 2001), 225.

9

Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

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筑波学院大学紀要192024‘pathological’ is not the death-blow to freedom so much as the very occasion and highest test of
freedom). But what is even worse, such an itinerary seriously complicates any breezy attempt tolink the theory of CR to a politics of mass resistance—not because psychoanalysis is naively or
inherently pro-capitalist, but because the questions it raises in the course of its critique haveambiguous, even troublesome, political implications. Indeed, against all theorists who would argue
that any analysis that subordinates social repression to psychical repression is automaticallysusceptible to the charge that it merely shores up the status quo, psychoanalysis can respond thatthe whole discursive-transcendentalist approach itself might be construed as a kind of fetishistic
disavowal: ‘Of course I know ver y well that simply pointing out the historical contingency of
capitalist realism is pointless—and yet…’

2. Outline of the psychoanalytic critique
The psychoanalytic critique of capitalism deals with essentially the same problem. Althoughframed as a debate with an older generation of psychoanalytic thinkers (Wilhelm Reich, Otto Gross,and Herbert Marcuse, among others) who denounced capitalism as repressive, the counterargument put forward by psychoanalysis—in brief, that capitalism catalyses and sustains rather
than crimps and stems the flow of desire—is, in the end, an argument about capitalism’s staying
power, its psychical seductiveness. An argument, in other words, about capitalist realism. The firstorder of business, then, is to set out this argument as clearly and schematically as possible. In doing
so, I will take McGowan’s text as a roadmap, although it should always be kept in mind that the goalis the explication and evaluation not of a single work but of a general approach and line of thought.
Let us begin, then, simply by sketching a rough outline of the argument in order to make themore detailed analysis below somewhat easier to follow. We can summarise it in five main points:
1. There is a deep homology between the logic of capitalism and the logic of desire, such that
capitalism almost seems ‘custom fitted’, as it were, to the inner structure and dynamics ofdesiring-subjectivity.
2. Subjectivity is not a thing or an object but rather a ‘wound’ in the sense of an opening which isequiprimordially the movement of its own self-closing or healing. More precisely, subjectivity
entails the loss of the love and recognition of the ‘big Other’ (le grand Autre), the socio-symbolic
authority—or conversely, the appearance of the Other as necessarily withdrawn in its
withholding of its love and recognition. At the most originary level, then, subjectivity is desire,that is, an insatiable yearning to recapture and master the fickle, wandering desire of theconstitutively absent Other—or what is sometimes called, after Lacan, ‘the Thing’ (das Ding).
This ‘Thing’ is what lies at the root of every phantasy; it signifies a plenitude to which thesubject can never accede insofar as its loss is the a priori condition of its very existence as awound, namely, the Other as fully realised and attentive, or as fully realised in its undivided
attentiveness.
3. Objects of desire are those objects that appear to hold, in whole or in part, the secret to the─ 20 ─

A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critique

riddle of the Other’s desire. Such objects are distinct from objects of mere pleasure insofar as
they always seem to enfold within themselves a ‘promise’ to pin down the Other’s errant desire
and thus facilitate the recovery of the Thing. Simply put, objects of desire are whatever the
Other itself desires—or better, whatever the subject imagines that the Other desires that it
desire, and thus whatever would make the Other desire the subject if it had them.
4. As everyone knows, however, despite our being buried beneath a veritable avalanche of objectsof every conceivable sort, the Thing somehow never arrives. Once again, whereas acquiring
objects of pleasure can and often does leave us genuinely satisfied, at least temporarily,acquiring objects of desire never fails to disappoint us; our initial conscious satisfaction
notwithstanding, unconsciously we remain empty, frustrated, and restless. As long as the object
we desire remains out of reach, it lures us with the promise that it might be ‘It’…, but from themoment the object is in our possession, we realise we were wrong and are forced to admit:‘that’s not “It”’. The reason for this is simple enough: the Other whose missing desire we fretand fantasise about is a structure of subjectivity and therefore does not exist in any actual or
substantial sense. Thus we will never know what the Other desires because the Other itself
does not know what it desires—insofar as there is no ‘Other itself’ in the first place that could
know what it desires.
5. From this it follows that getting what we want—what we imagine to be ‘It’—is always somewhat
traumatic insofar as it exposes the truth of the Other’s non-existence and thus of the necessityof loss and the ineliminability of desire. Capitalism’s apparently insuperable staying power is afunction of the way in which its ceaseless production of the new and different makes it possible
to defer such a confrontation indefinitely. In other words, capitalism seduces us by making ourfr ustration bearable; by seemingly tying the possibility of satisfaction to the endlessdissemination of novelty, capitalism allows us, despite all evidence to the contrary, to continue
believing in the promise that ‘It’ lies ever just around the corner—the suffocating insipidness ofthe object du jour constantly giving way to the buzz surrounding the next ‘big new thing’ à venir.

3. Symbolic castration: language, the Other, and desire
Let us now proceed to unpack this story in more detail. If subjectivity is understood as a ‘wound’
in the sense of an originary estrangement vis-à-vis a retroactively constituted and constitutively lost
Other, as psychoanalysis teaches, then the ‘cut’ that slices open this wound is language. Broadly
speaking, this is what Lacan intends with the term ‘symbolic castration’, namely, that language isthe root cause of the desire that conjures and sustains the subject and the Other in theirequiprimordial unity and reciprocity. The first order of business, then, is to get clear on this a priori
relation between the subject, the Other, language, and desire, such that it can be shown how there
can be no such thing as a ‘speaking being’ that is not also a desiring being, and vice versa.
There are three such relations—three main interpretations of the concept of symbolic
castration—we might consider here, all intimately related and mutually reinforcing, but eachnevertheless bearing a particular valence or inflection. In the first place, it is possible to understand─ 21 ─

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the wound with respect to the way in which the subject is always already ‘thrown’ (‘geworfen’ in theidiom of existential phenomenology) into a socio-symbolic order that precedes it and thus shapes
and determines it long before it is born. From this perspective, that which the subject is ‘cut off’—or to use a less dramatic Lacanian term, ‘barred’—from is itself. For it is not as though there werefirst a subject that, later on, at a given point in its ontogenetic history, began to deploy the resourcesof language as a tool of self-expression (of its ownmost inner thoughts, desires, etc.); it is rather thatthe possibilities of the subject’s being are pre-programmed by this socio-symbolic order itself.
However, if this explains why the subject always desires what the Other desires, it does little toaccount for the origin and logic of desire itself, namely, as the desire of or for the Other.
Second, we might interpret the wound as the corollary of the logic of signification, i.e., of theway in which language, as a complex nexus of interrelated differential relations as opposed to asystem of one-to-one correspondences between words and things, introduces a layer of mediation
into the world which ser ves to cut the subject off from the object. For a ‘speaking being’, themanifold objects of the world appear, never as they are ‘in themselves’, in the purity of theirundivided being, but only ever as ensembles of relations behind which this ‘pure being’ ispermanently sequestered, ‘lost’. At first glance, this understanding of the subject vis-à-vis the ‘lost
object’ appears to bring us closer to an adequate account of the logic of desire, but in truth it merely
suffers from the inverse defect of the first account. For if we now have a clearer picture of how
desire is elicited by loss or lack, we have, by the same token, also lost any sense of what it is thatsets the entire circuitr y of desire in motion in the first place. What we are left with is a quasiphenomenological account that simply posits the movement of desire ex decreto, i.e., as a function of
the mere distance between the subject and the object, and moreover in such a way as to broaden thepractico-empirical scope of desire to the point where it is rendered useless as a tool for diagnosing
the problems of modern life (as in this case there would be no object that is not an object of desire).
Third and finally, we might take the wound in terms of an originar y severance from thelinguistic community as a whole, i.e., from the ‘Other’ or ‘big Other’, and it is here that the importantdistinction between the lost object and the Lacanian ‘Thing’ comes into play. But here we must be
precise. The Other is not merely an abstraction on the order of ‘society’, ‘community’, or ‘thepeople’. However imprecise, the latter are all ontic entities, i.e., all objects which are necessarily
punctuated by loss in virtue of their subjection to the logic of the signifier. The Other, in contrast,
belongs to a different order altogether; it is not ontic but ontological—not something that appears
but an a priori condition of appearance (more akin to Heidegger’s ‘das Man’, the anonymous ‘They’or ‘Public’). In one sense, of course, the Other is a function of the presence of actual others in theworld, but as a structure of subjectivity it infinitely transcends any and every particular other(s).
In truth, we will never understand desire—and thus the seemingly natural fit between thesubject and capitalism—so long as we regard the Other as just another object in the world on theorder of ‘society’, for in that case, as with every lost object, it remains an open question as to how
the inert ‘not’ of a mere distance gives rise to the dynamic negativity of desire. This is why
psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, does not derive desire from prior conditions at all, but rather
defines subjectivity in such a way that it implicates the movement of desire a priori. More precisely,─ 22 ─

A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critiquepsychoanalysis begins from the axiom that subjectivity just is a kind of avulsion or dehiscence, arenting or ripping open that takes the form of a lack, and indeed a lack of a very particular andspecial sort, namely, of love. From this standpoint, ‘the Other’ is simply the logical corollary of thislack; it is the anonymous ‘That’, retroactively constituted in and through the avulsion itself, fromwhich this absent attention is always sought but never forthcoming. The Other, then, is also lost,
but not in the manner of an object. It is not as though the Other’s essence remains withdrawn
behind its manifold differential relations, but rather that the Other is, from the beginning andfundamentally, an enigma. If the Other isn’t paying attention, this is because it already knows what it
wants, and what it wants is something other than the subject; the Other is privy to a secretenjoyment that renders the subject superfluous. Symbolic castration in this sense refers not to aneutral distance from which a movement would have to be drawn out, but instead to an originary
alienation, a kind of abandonment, which in its very concept implicates the ‘ur-movement’, so to
speak, of a being-drawn-toward whatever would annul or repair it. And it is precisely this movementthat psychoanalysis calls desire.
Along with the thesis that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, the thesis that ‘man’s

desire is the desire of the Other’10—the desire for desire itself—is perhaps the most elementary
axiom of (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory. To say that the subject is a subject of desire is to say thatthe subject is, in its essence, the ur-movement of a yearning to solve the riddle of the Other’s own
unruly and wandering desire, or of what Lacan calls ‘the Thing’ (‘das Ding’). It is only and precisely
as such a ‘being-toward-the-Thing’ (if we may) that the subject is a wound and not a passive
distance. The logic of the signifier ensures that all objects are lost objects, but the wound runs far
deeper: it is the yearning for restoration immanent to a whole which does not exist prior to its initial
severing. There is no question as to why it heals, insofar as there is no ‘it’ to begin with prior to theinauguration of the ur-movement of healing itself.

4. Desire and capitalism
Having established this much, the psychoanalytic critique of capitalism falls neatly into place.
As a symbolically castrated or desiring being, the subject is originarily and irremediably oriented,
not toward the necessarily absent kernel of full meaning, being, etc. of the object (which would
make ever y object desirable qua ‘lost’), but rather toward the ever-missing Thing qua theconstitutively inaccessible and fundamentally mysterious desire of the Other. To repeat: it is not as
though there is first a subject which then, after conducting a thorough examination of the world andits place within it, comes to the conclusion that it has lost the Other’s attention and thus resolves to
win it back; rather the subject just is the rupturing of an originary alienation vis-à-vis an Other thatwas never there to begin with.11 To call the subject a ‘wound’ is thus no empty rhetorical flourish
10Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), Alan Sheridan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 235.

11

This is why McGowan can write that the subject is an originary ‘failure to belong’ and ‘lack of place and identity’. See
Capitalism and Desire, 20–1.

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but serves to distinguish it from the abstract ‘not’ of every mere distance. Ever tending toward its
own self-healing closure, the subject is always on the lookout for the objects that would solve theriddle of the Other’s wandering desire—objects that would be ‘It’—and thereby fulfil the phantasy
of a restoration of ‘authentic belonging’. No object, however, could ever be ‘It’, and for the obvious
reason that neither the subject nor the Other can exist except under the condition of their mutual
estrangement. A fully attentive Other is a contradictio in terminis, a ‘negation of the negation’ thatwould destroy both the subject and the Other by compressing them into a smothering One-All.
Thus objects loom up and tempt us with the promise that they might be ‘It’—only and inevitably
to let us down the moment we finally manage to get our hands on them: the magic dissipates, thepromise dissolves, whatever it was about them in which the ‘It-ness’ was supposed to have resided
slips away. To distinguish between the absent Thing and the lost object in this way is to distinguishbetween, first, that which slices open the dehiscence of subjectivity as a ‘being-toward-the-Thing’,and second, that which ‘catalyses’ desire by facilitating a ‘metonymical’ sliding from one object ofdesire to another. An object becomes an object of desire just to the extent that it promises to satisfy
the riddle of the Other’s desire, but it is the dual revealing-concealing nature of the object as suchthat, when the object fails (as it must) to fulfil this promise, drives the subject onward to the next…,
and the next…, and the next…, ad infinitum (the failure can always be accounted for and excusedby this lostness or ontological non-coincidence). The psychical staying power of capitalism thus
resides in the way in which its ‘concept’, its defining logic of production, precisely mirrors the inner
structure and dynamics of the subject’s libidinal economy. Capitalism’s ceaseless production ofnovelty and difference yields an ever-expanding realm of objects that the ‘floating’ promise can latch
onto and ride out. At this level, ‘accumulation’ has no meaning, at least in the sense of hoarding as
many objects as possible. People may hoard, of course, but this is not what is at issue; the point isthat capital’s seductiveness stems from the way in which it creates a symbolico-material body as themedium in which the promise is able to keep itself in constant circulation.

5. Capitalist realism and communism
At first glance, the psychoanalytic account sketched above seems to provide an adequate
theoretical explanation of the problem of capitalist realism. Why can’t we envision a life beyond
capitalism? Why does capitalism seem like the final horizon of all thought and action and the ‘end of
history’? Answer: because capitalism plugs into psychical subjectivity in the most profound way, atthe level of the very being of the subject itself as a subject of desire. In place of a world of things,
capitalism substitutes a world of currents and pathways, an infinitely complex and tangled circuitry
to house the promise, with things being little more than fungible nodes whose sole function is tocharge desire by giving it something to surge through on its way to something else. No sooner has
one candidate for ‘It’ failed to deliver on the promise than another rises up to take its place.
Psychoanalysis therefore posits not that capitalism is merely something we are ontologicallysusceptible to—something we stumbled into by historical accident and thus might have avoided
under different circumstances—but instead, and more problematically, that capitalism is something─ 24 ─

A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critique

we are (to use a fashionable idiom) ontologically ‘hard-wired’ for. Capitalism, in other words, is what
Heidegger would call our destiny, not in the sense that it was sent from on high or written in thestars (destiny is not fate), but in the sense that for beings ontologically constituted such as we are—i.e., for subjects—an eventual reckoning with desire, and with the consequences of our reconfiguring
the world in accordance with desire, was inevitable from the beginning.
Against all appearances, however, this account is precisely what challenges the thesis of capitalist
realism from the ground up. Why? For the simple reason that the political ‘impossible’ which we aresupposed to be able just barely to glimpse through the cracks and fissures in the monolithic edificeof CR is invariably described as a form of communism that, in its main features, is not only formally
identical to capitalism but indeed nothing more than the phantasy of capitalism, a kind of utopic‘capitalism without contradictions’. I think McGowan is correct in his analysis here, and all one has
to do is consult texts such as Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism12 to understandwhy. The political premise of such texts is the promotion of a form of social and politico-economic
organisation which in point of fact is not really so hard to glimpse at all (as evidenced by thenumerous mainstream publications that endorsed Bastani’s central ‘FALC’ thesis), namely, a kind of
hyper-technological, ultra-efficient, and maximally sustainable AI-managed capitalism on steroids.
Put in other words, while CR takes issue with capitalism in, to use a Bataillean distinction, a‘restricted’ sense, i.e., as an historically given and contingent politico-economic system characterisedby certain concrete relations, tendencies, contradictions, dangers, etc., psychoanalysis in contrast
focuses on capitalism in a more ‘general’ sense, i.e., as a logic of productive life überhaupt which is
independent of any particular politico-economic configuration. And it is the insights of the latterapproach that seriously call into question those of the former. For if the psychoanalytic critiqueholds true at the level of the logic of production of capitalist society generally—namely, the everexpanding and self-valorising production of what we might call ‘surplus-difference’—then there isno obvious reason why we should remain trapped in one historically specific politico-economic form
in which this logic gets expressed (e.g., that of a bellum omnium contra omnes waged between
private owners of production to exploit labour, maximise profit, capture state power, etc.).
To be clear, this is not intended as a critique of ‘communism’, whatever that may be, as an ideal;
such a critique may or may not be called for, but it is not what is at stake here. The broader point is
this: that insofar as this is true—insofar as what is called ‘communism’ (as the hitherto impossible
but now glimpsable future beyond the cracked horizon of capitalism) is in essence indistinguishable
from the fulfilment of the promise of capitalism itself—the thesis of capitalist realism is immediately
thrown into doubt. For if CR in a more fundamental sense refers not merely to the way in which
certain contingent factors (such as ideology) prevent us from realising the transformation ofhistorical capitalism into a system in which the productive forces are channelled toward the more
emancipatory end of universal and unlimited abundance (via mechanisms of communal ownership,socialised profit, etc.), but rather to the way in which the ever-growing production of surplus12

See, for example, Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (London: Verso, 2020); Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A
Guide to Our Future (London: Penguin, 2016); and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism anda World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015).

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difference feeds into the most basic structural dynamics of desiring subjectivity—if this is true, thenwhat we see is not only that communism, so far from being the inversion or antithesis of capitalism,
is merely the phantasy of its fulfilment and full actualisation, but also, and for that very reason, that
there is no compelling reason for our utter failure to transition away from historical capitalism into
this purportedly more humane and sustainable form of life. In other words, if the psychoanalytic
critique makes us sceptical of the kind of Enlightenment-based, pedagogically oriented utopianismof CR (one whereby popular mobilisation is predicated on a scandalising genealogical exposure of
the base origins of our current epidemic of apathy, depressive hedonia, hard cynicism…), this is inpart because the more general account it offers of the deeper ontological resonances between
political economy and libidinal economy effectively makes CR, as a restricted thesis about the
intransigence of a given form of capitalism, incoherent. For even if CR is correct about thisintransigence, as it certainly is—i.e., we really do seem to be at the ‘end of history’ in the sense that
there are no universally shared alternatives to capitalist democracy on the horizon—it remains
incomprehensible why our deeper psychical attachment to the concept of capital does not override
our ideological interpellation as capitalist subjects in the narrower sense—why, in short, we do not
see through capital’s shenanigans and work together to start realising a world that is even more intune with the structural workings of desiring subjectivity than the present one. Simply put: if capitalism
is so seductive precisely because it keeps desire in a state of perpetual motion due to its seemingly
infinite capacity for the production of novelty and difference, and if what is called ‘communism’
merely takes this to its logico-historical conclusion (qua utopia of difference without contradiction
via a techno-politics that secures safe, limitless abundance for all), then whence capitalist realism?
Why aren’t we all chomping at the bit to realise this ‘communism’ which—we are told—would
exceed the capitalism of our wildest dreams? If the alternative is so psychically enticing, why aren’t
we already there?

6. Capitalism as death-drive
Here is where the psychoanalytic critique is at its most profound. The staying power ofhistorical capitalism—the reason why capitalist realism is likely to remain confined to historicalcapitalism and not pass over into historical communism, or better still, the reason why we areunlikely to pass over to historical communism anytime soon (even, and indeed especially, to ‘fully
automated luxury communism’), despite the fact that it might seal the deal for CR insofar as it
would be the most perfect actualisation of the ‘will to difference’ that is so neatly aligned with thestructure of desiring subjectivity—is explained less by the way in which capitalism maximises thepossibilities for success and far more by the way in which it manages failure. If we accept that theexistence of the Other as an a priori structure of subjectivity is constituted by its inscrutability,
inattentiveness, errancy, etc., and correlatively that there can never be any question of fully andfinally solving the riddle of the Other’s wandering and fickle desire, it follows that the only form ofenjoyment fully open to the subject is the enjoyment of the promise itself—that desire, as investment
in a promise that can never be kept, is its own form of enjoyment. From this we can conclude that─ 26 ─

A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critiquethe main problem around which the organisation of social life turns under capitalism is not one ofrealising the impossible so much as one of maintaining the promise as such as continually worthy oflibidinal investment. In getting what we want, in acquiring the objects of desire, we invariably fail toget ‘It’, whatever brings us in proximity to ‘the Thing’; what is called ‘communism’ is predicated on
the wager that the trauma of this failure is always more than offset by the promise embodied in thething-to-come, that the flow of desire can always be sustained by the ceaseless production of the
new tout court. In truth, however, there is no warrant for this. Constant failure is painful anddebilitating. To acquire an object only to discover that it was not what it seemed, that its allure wasconcealing a void, that whatever was sought within it had already slipped away, that the wholebusiness was a fool’s errand—to repeat this farce time and again exacts a heavy psychical toll on thesubject, one that far outstrips the power of the promise itself. To sustain the promise, then, requiresthat objects of desire be put out of reach even while they are never rendered totally and permanently
inaccessible. In other words, objects of desire must be made contingently inaccessible, in such a waythat we can fail to get them, but always for non-essential reasons. This is what McGowan is getting at
when he says that we ‘enjoy our failure’; the point is not that failure as such is enjoyable, but rather
that failure is the a priori condition of the only kind of enjoyment possible for us, namely, theanticipatory, purely virtual enjoyment of libidinally investing ourselves in a future, final enjoymentthat can never arrive.
Capitalism, of course, has any number of such obstacles or ‘contradictions’ that make our failure
to get the Thing seem at once inevitable and accidental. Capitalism does not simply give us what we
desire, what lures us on with the promise that it will be ‘It’—for then the promise would quickly be
exposed as a cruel lie and desire would have its legs cut out from under it. But neither does
capitalism simply deny, constrict, or repress desire as Marcuse et al. maintained. Instead, and in
perfect accordance with its ‘concept’, capitalism erects one barrier after another to our appropriating
the inexhaustible cornucopia of objects it dangles out in front of us and, in so doing, sustains desireby keeping the promise in constant circulation. It is not merely that there is always something new
coming around the bend, but that our inability to tap and exploit this inexhaustible wellspring ofnovelty is always somehow the fault of the system itself. We love and hate the system in equalmeasure—or more precisely, the fact that the system gives us a reason to hate it is essential to why
we love it. Nothing more per fectly dovetails with the contradictor y status of the subject as
ontologically oriented vis-à-vis something it can never have than the irrationality of capitalism as aregime of production which is doomed to withhold from the vast majority of workers the abundant
fruits of their own labour. It is precisely this irrationality that comforts us by allowing us to keep
indulging in the phantasy that ‘It’ must be out there somewhere, in that vast ocean of difference—if
only… (‘True, I don’t have “It” yet, but that’s because the system is so broken, rigged, unfair…’) So
far from being internal limits that threaten to bring the whole system crashing to the ground,capitalism’s contradictions are in fact the secret to its longevity.
The persistence of CR at the level of historical capitalism is thus a manifestation of the Freudian
death-drive. This, of course, has nothing to do with any will to perish but rather points to an
unconscious propensity to self-destruction, even when the alternative is demonstrably preferable─ 27 ─

筑波学院大学紀要192024(for no one could deny that, in terms of certain objectively measurable indicators, we would all bebetter off under FALC as compared with the mess we’re dealing with at present). By absolving us of
any need or responsibility to ‘traverse the phantasy’ and face the hard truth that there is no ‘It’ to
get in the first place, capitalism traps us in cycle of compulsive behaviour that now threatens todestroy the very conditions of civilised existence, if not life itself. The problem is that, despite thisfact, nothing would be more psychically traumatic for the subject than the phantasy-world of‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ (and for everyone) that FALC represents, because nothing else
would so violently and mercilessly destroy the world, built on the foundation of the promise, inwhich the subject is most libidinally at home.

7. Conclusion: the best of all possible worlds?
All of this forces us to take the problem of CR much more seriously and literally than Fisher et
al. are wont to do. Far beyond every effort that would seek to combat ideological interpellation witha politics of genealogical denaturalisation, the psychoanalytic critique raises—problematically andprovocatively—the terrifying possibility that capitalism is, after all, the best of all possible worlds fordesiring subjects. ‘Best’ here is of course meant in a strictly formal and non-normative, or at any ratenon-moral, sense. That is, it is not a matter of capitalism being the optimal system in terms of what
we owe each other and ourselves as autonomous, self-determining beings, but rather of its being
precisely the kind of system that an impar tial obser ver, armed with only the findings ofpsychoanalysis to go on, would expect such beings to create for themselves over time.
In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, capitalist modernity, now global, finds itself
at a curious crossroads. On the one hand, the waning of neoliberal ideology, the growing preference
for some form of socialism, and the rapid emergence of new technologies that seem able to bring it
within reach are all conspiring to sublate the kind of ‘winner-take-all’ capitalism that has held sway
throughout most of its history into a more humane, ‘prosperity-for-all’ capitalism which, though by
no means the same thing, is nevertheless a diffident adumbration of the kind of techno-communist
utopia envisioned by Bastani et al. On the other hand, such ‘progress’ remains perpetually stalled
due to a collective failure to confront—and often, it seems, a collective commitment to exacerbate—large-scale, epoch-defining existential crises (inequality, global warming, nuclear war…) that, being
as predictable as it is egregious, all but compels us to conclude that its causes lie far deeper than theendless machinations that play out daily on the plane of politics (or rather these machinations arethemselves part of the way in which the failure is enacted). All of this puts the capitalist subject inan equally precarious position: the obstacles that serve to sustain the promise and keep the Thing atbay now threaten to swallow up the system itself, while their removal, increasingly within reach,threatens to provoke a traumatic confrontation with the hard fact of Thing’s irremediable absence.
Given this state of affairs, one might reasonably ask whether the ongoing pandemic of depressive
hedonia (which is hardly restricted to university students) translates to apathetic resignation to thefutility of confronting the former or, on the contrary, to anxiety stemming from incipient awareness of
the latter. Do we retreat into our digital bubbles because capitalism has interpellated us as lone

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A. Tyler Jorn:‘Capitalist Realism’and the Psychoanalytic Critiqueindividuals powerless to resist the inexorable, zombie-like march into the abyss? Or is that we havealready glimpsed the abyss in these bubbles themselves, in the nauseating monotony of their endless‘creativity’—on terrifyingly stupid display in, for example, Mark Zuckerberg’s DOA ‘metaverse’13 orin the disturbing growth of billionaire-backed, Elysium-like planned cities, from ‘California Forever’14(Silicon Valley) to ‘The Line’15 (Saudi Arabia), which, despite promising everything under the sun,are about as inspiring as the ersatz heaven cooked up by Ted Danson’s demonic architect in The
Good Place? Indeed, even if one scrolled through the marketing material for ‘The Line’ and mistook it
for the quixotic brainchild of some precocious Gen-Z utopian communo-futurists, there would still belittle to alleviate the suspicion that, having bleached life of ever ything dangerous, dirty, andunpredictable, the city wouldn’t quickly drive one to despair—if not suicide.

References
Books:
1. Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism. London: Verso, 2020.
2. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
3. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XI (1910):
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works. Translated by James Strachey. London:
Vintage Classics, 2001.
4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
5. Mason, Paul. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Penguin, 2016
6. McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2016.
7. Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London:
Verso, 2015.
Articles:
8. Anguiano, Dani. ‘Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled’. The Guardian,
September 2, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep02/silicon-valley-elites-utopian-citycalifornia (accessed September 5, 2023).
9. Gat, Orit. ‘The Boring Art of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse’. ArtReview, November 12, 2021. https://artreview.
com/the-boring-art-of-zuckerberg-metaverse/ (accessed September 5, 2023).
Website:10. ‘The Line’. NEOM. https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline (accessed September 5, 2023).
13

Orit Gat, ‘The Boring Art of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse’, ArtReview (12 Nov 2021). https://artreview.com/the-boring-art-ofzuckerberg-metaverse/ (accessed 5 Sept 2023).

14

Dani Anguiano, ‘Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled’, The Guardian (2 Sept 2023). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/02/silicon-valley-elites-utopian-city-california (accessed 5 Sept 2023).

15

See https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline (accessed 5 Sept 2023).

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