Subjects of Exchange: Between Lacan and the Neue Marx-Lektüre

Abstract

This essay explores the homology between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the critique of political economy through an engagement with the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the related tradition of the neue Marx-Lekture (New Reading of Marx, or NML). Without claiming an easy compatibility between the Marxian and Lacanian fields, the article establishes a dialogue founded on difference and oversight. While the unconscious figures centrally in Sohn-Rethel's account of the non-knowledge or “practical solipsism” of the subject under capitalism, critics have yet to bring a Lacanian perspective to bear on the unconscious dimension of commodity exchange. Likewise, although Lacan's early formalization of the knotting of the Imaginary and the Symbolic offers a nuanced account of the structural impersonality of the social order, its relevance for the NML theorization of the autonomization of value relations has hitherto been overlooked. Reading Lacan “with” the NML, this essay redresses these oversights through a discussion of Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of the problem of form and method in Marx and Freud, and of Michael Heinrich's exegesis of the exchange process as developed in the first volume of Capital.