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SLAVERY AND LACK: A SUPPLEMENT TO SAMO TOMŠIČ’S MARX AND LACAN: THE CAPITALIST UNCONSCIOUS

by | Vol 42 (3) 2024

Summary: This essay was originally delivered as a presentation at Duquesne University’s Lacan: Clinic and Culture Conference, which took place October 14-16, 2022. The aim of the essay is twofold. First, it clarifies how the capitalist subject – bourgeois or proletarian – is reproduced as constitutively lacking(-in-enjoyment). Second, it elaborates on the relationship between the libidinal economy of Europe, where “no one enjoys,” and the libidinal economy of the plantation, where “everyone is supposed to enjoy.” The essay is Lacanian in style and Hegelian in form, turning in a dialectical circle, or a ‘riverrun,’ beginning and ending with reflections on the nothingness of Man.

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