Lacan’s Marx From the Materialism of the Signifier to Libidinal Political Economy

Acknowledgements

Series Editor’s Preface by Ian Parker

Introduction

Chapter 1. The theoretical field: Marx and Marxism, Freud and psychoanalysis 

Chapter 2. The signifier: value and structure      

Chapter 3. The subject: fetish, desire and history

Chapter 4. The symptom: knowledge and truth  

Chapter 5. Sexuality: society and economy

Conclusion

Biography

David Pavón-Cuéllar is a Mexican Marxist philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst and critical psychologist. He is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico. His recent books include Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology? published by Routledge in 2017.

“What if we have been reading both Marx and Lacan too safely—and therefore not reading them at all? This book breaks with the reassuring habits of interpretation and stages a far more unsettling encounter. Marx is no longer the familiar critic of capitalism, nor Lacan the guardian of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Instead, each is forced through the other: Marx becomes a thinker of the signifier, the symptom, and enjoyment; Lacan is drawn into the material and political real of exploitation and accumulation. The result is not a synthesis, but a disturbance. In this bold reconfiguration, Marx and Lacan cease to be stable points of reference and become instruments of critique once again.” - Alenka Zupančič, The European Graduate School, author of Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan

 

“Lacan’s Marx is a remarkable and timely achievement. David Pavón-Cuéllar delivers a rigorously systematic and wide-ranging account of Lacan’s engagements with Marx and capitalism, situating them within their broader theoretical and socio-historical context. More decisively, he demonstrates with great clarity and force why the alliance between psychoanalysis and historical materialism remains indispensable for contemporary struggles. This is not only a formidable work of scholarship but also a political act.” - Samo Tomšič, University of Fine Arts Dresden, author of The capitalist unconscious: Marx and Lacan

 

“Since his earliest studies of the connections between Marx and Lacan, David Pavón-Cuéllar has maintained - like perhaps no other thinker - his commitment to two fundamental theses: that marxism and psychoanalysis don't have to be brought into some artificial relation, because they already share a fundamental core, and that this common dimension can only be properly assessed from the standpoint of revolutionary politics. And I am sure anyone who engages with his new work will be moved to uphold this same conviction.” - Gabriel Tupinambá, psychoanalyst based in Rio de Janeiro, author of The desire of psychoanalysis: exercises in Lacanian thinking