Changes

In the history of Marxism, the reference to psychoanalysis played a precise strategic role: psychoanalysis was expected to "close the gap" by explaining why, despite the presence of "objective" conditions for the revolutionary transformation, individuals willingly persisted in their enslavement to the ruling ideology (i.e., why they desired their subordination and even found a perverse satisfaction in it). Why did the masses prefer the Fascist temptation to the Communist revolution in the 1930s? Why did they let themselves be lured into dull satisfaction by the Sirens of the late-capitalist "society of consumption" in the 1960s? In short, psychoanalysis functioned as an ambiguous (necessary but dangerous) pharmakon invoked in order to supplement the inherent insufficiency of the Marxist theoretic edifice.

17 The first and still unsurpassed description of this paradox was perhaps Fichte's notion of Anstoss, the "obstacle/impetus" which sets in motion the subject's productive effort to "posit" objective reality; no longer the Kantian Thing-in-itself-an external stimulus affecting the subject from outside-the Anstoss is a kernel of contingency which is extimate: a foreign body in the very heart of the subject. Subjectivity is thus defined not by a struggle against the inertia of the opposing substantial order but by an absolutely inherent tension.

[[Category:Works]]

[[Category:Essays]]