Eros and Economy

Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference

Barbara Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138929838
• eBook ISBN: 9781317398585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Eros and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference explores the possibility that social relations between things, partially inscribed in their aesthetics, offer important insights into collective political-economic relations of domination and desire. Drawing on the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this book focuses on the idea that desire or libido, overlaid by sexual difference, is a driving force behind the material manifestations of cultural production in practices as diverse as art or economy. Re-reading the history of capitalism and aesthetics with an awareness of the forces of sexual difference reveals not just their integral role in the development of capitalist markets, but a new understanding of our political-economic relations as humans.

The appearance of the energies of sexual difference is highlighted in a number of different historical periods and political economies, from the Rococo period of pre-revolutionary France, to the aesthetics and economics of Keynesian Bloomsbury, to our contemporary Postmodern sensibility. With these examples, Jenkins demonstrates that the very constitution of capitalist markets is affected by the interaction of these forces; and she argues that a conscious appreciation and negotiation of them is integral to an immanent, democratic understanding of power.

With its unique application of Jungian theory, this book provides important new insights into debates surrounding art, aesthetics, and identity politics, as well as into the quest for autonomous, democratic institutions of politics and economics. As such, this book will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Jung, psychoanalysis, political economy, cultural studies and gender studies, as well as those interested in the field of cultural economy.

Part I Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315680910-1

Chapter 1 Toward a political economy of the unconscious

DOI: 10.4324/9781315680910-2

According to Zizek, it was Marx who identified the first social ‘symptom’. His concept of commodity fetishism, or the displacement of social relations between people onto social relations between things, constituted the first hysterical symptom of capitalism. The commodity, Marx claimed, is actually ‘a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Marx 1949, p. 41). When someone makes something for her or his own use, the labour involved in its manufacture is clear. But when it becomes integrated into a system of mass production and consumption, the link to the labourer who made the commodity is severed, along with the knowledge of the social relationships inherent to it. The (exploited) labour that manufactured the commodity becomes obscured, and what is really a relation of trade between people becomes ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (p. 43). Unlike feudal subjects, where relations between people are mystified by concepts such as the divine right of kings and religious belief, the supposedly emancipated citizens of capitalism let things or commodities ‘believe’ for them. ‘[I]t is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications… are embodied in the “social relations between things”’ (Zizek 1989, p. 31).

The central premise of this book is that social relations between things, partially inscribed in their aesthetics, offer important insights into collective political-economic relations of domination and desire. This point, of course, is not new. The political and economic relevance of aesthetics has been emphasized in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), Baudrillard (2004), Benjamin (2007), Bourdieu (1984), Harvey (1990), Jameson (1995), and Rancière (2004) among others. The novelty of my claim is that these aesthetics reveal not just the mystifications inherent to class relations, but also the ‘hysterical’ repression of relations of sexual difference. Re-reading the history of capitalism and aesthetics with an awareness of the forces of sexual difference reveals not just their integral role in the development of capitalist markets, but a new understanding of our political-economic relations as humans.

Understanding this relation requires an act of imagination, a willingness to see things differently. For unlike the exploitive relations between capital and labour Marx describes, the forces of sexual difference I will be discussing are unconscious. To be sure, these forces have material consequences and are intimately involved with the touchable matter of bodies and manufactured goods. By and large, however, they are unseen forces of the psyche that travel across and through not just bodies but material objects. My hope and contention is that once revealed, these previously mystified relations of sexual difference will help us understand some of the dis-ease or discontent we citizens of global capitalism currently endure. For if we can go so far as to imagine this possibility, then perhaps we can move onto the question they imply: what happens if we become conscious of them? Because in practice, this repression is rather one sided, with the feminine aspects of sexual difference far more blocked or occluded than masculine ones. For this reason, my focus here will be on evoking what these feminine energies might reveal.

One of the first of many steps necessary to a more democratic future is the recognition of the immanent power of the subject (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 & 1987; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005 & 2009; Purcell 2013). But when the very notion of what it feels like to be a politically included subject is denied to a majority of the population (de Beauvoir 1974; Irigaray 1985), her ability to speak or be recognized in the realm of the ‘sensible’ diminished (Rancière 2004), the democratic process is radically imperfect. Psychoanalytic theory has done little to address this situation, effectively defining woman in terms of the status quo – either as ‘lack’ relative to the regulatory signifier of the Phallus (à la Lacan), or reducing her subjectivity to the phenomenon of penis envy (as in Freud).

A first step forward to addressing this ‘lack’ of feminine subjectivity is to approach the study of the unconscious in a way that provides for positive forces or energies of sexual difference, specifically, transpersonal, libidinal forces bearing the energies of sexual difference. These forces become manifest in the realm of representation in multiple practices of sexuality, identity, language, aesthetic expression, and, last but not least, political economy. My Jungian approach also insists, however, that the energies of the feminine are key to an understanding of the subjectivities of all persons, not just those who identify as women. Indeed, most of the stories I will tell involve men ‘channelling’ these feminine energies, and explicitly recognizing that they are doing so. This contra-sexual negotiation of identity will be central to the overall argument I make here.

Explaining these energies of sexual difference involves going beyond the politics of representation to focus on forces, whether we consider them ontological, pre-ontological, or a priori, that drive our desire. In this respect, my account relies heavily on the ideas of Deleuze, especially his work with Guattari, which describe forces of libidinal energy flowing across and through molecular bodies. The crux of my argument, however, lies in the contention that this libidinal energy is overlaid with the forces of sexual difference. Here the work of Jung and his concepts of the archetypal masculine as Logos/Sol and the archetypal feminine as Eros/Luna become central to my imagination of these libidinal flows. I argue that adding the perspective of Eros or love to understandings of economy and democracy strengthens and broadens classical liberal portrayals of democracy and economics as primarily rational, contractual arrangements. As Negri (2013, p. 98) notes in a remark that I will develop in Chapter 3, ‘Democracy is an act of love’.

I invoke Jung because the notion of a transpersonal, recurring energy based on sexual difference bears affinities to his notion of the archetypal masculine and feminine, but Jung’s work should also be considered in the context of other vitalist (Lash 2006) analyses. It is curious that the progenitor of the ‘collective unconscious’ has not figured prominently in the contemporary revival of a fascination with transpersonal flows of energy that appear to affect ‘both one and many’ (Blackman 2008, p. 24), but as Pint points out, the fact that almost everyone in the social sciences has forgotten about Jung can be an advantage (Pint 2011, p. 48). Unlike Freud or Lacan, the application of Jung’s ideas is relatively unmapped territory in cultural studies and political economy, providing a fresh perspective on well-worn debates over foundationalism, essentialism, and sexual difference. A nascent ‘Jungian turn’ in Deleuzean and cultural studies (Hauke 2000; Kazarian 2010; Kerslake 2007; Pint 2011) suggests it may be time for a Jungian complement to the views of those similarly concerned with transpersonal connections, usually based on the ideas of thinkers such as James, Whitehead, or Tarde (Blackman 2007 & 2008; Connolly 2011; Despret 2004; Stengers 2011). My focus will be on tracing what Zizek claims is a direct lineage from Jung to Deleuze (Zizek 2004, p. 663).

There is no denying that Jung uses his conception of the archetypal feminine and masculine in a highly sexist way at times. Like any male philosopher prior to the Postmodern period, his work bears the marks of blindness to his own patriarchal privilege. Frankly, this is the least of the things he has been accused of. As Shamdasani (2003, p. 1) notes, Jung has simultaneously been regarded as ‘Occultist, Scientist, Prophet, Charlatan, Philosopher, Racist, Guru, Anti-Semite, Liberator of Women, Misogynist, Freudian Apostate, Gnostic, Post-Modernist, Polygamist, Healer, Poet, Con-Artist, Psychiatrist and Anti-Psychiatrist’. At the risk of adding yet another label to this list, I would argue that Jung might also be considered what Connolly (2011) calls a ‘connectionist’: ‘someone who presents a world in the making in an evolving universe that is open to an uncertain degree’ (p. 35). From this perspective, I view Jung’s work less from a psychological perspective and more in terms of its contributions to philosophy. As Bergson once noted, ‘I have great respect for the work of Jung, which isn’t only interesting for the psychologist and psychopathologist, but also for the philosopher! It is here that psychoanalysis has found its philosophy’ (quoted in Shamdasani 2003, p. 107).

On the surface, Jung’s ideas on sexual difference constitute precisely the kind of discourse that feminists aim to deconstruct: a man telling women what the feminine is, often in ways that map the characteristics of his own projections of the ‘feminine’ onto the bodies of women. Yet Jung’s work also focuses on transformation. His insistence on the process of individuation as a ‘coming-to-be’ of the self resonates with the emphasis in Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, or Grosz on ‘becoming’, or the self as event. More importantly, Jung and Jungians have undertaken a genealogical and archaeological analysis of the symbolic feminine that is one of the most systematic and inventive archives in existence.

Jung acknowledged the deleterious effects of the repression of the symbolic feminine long before French feminism did; his work is permeated with an unrelenting appreciation of and advocacy for the integration of the divine feminine, not just in analytical psychology but in the everyday life of the spiritual, social, and political. In his view, this was not a feminist mission, but necessary for the psychic health of society as a whole. Despite his extreme ambivalence toward organized religion, he considered Pius XII’s proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on November 1, 1950 to be one of the most important religious developments for 400 years (Jung 1973a, p. 567) in its acknowledgment of a least some role for the feminine in the divine symbolic. His colleague Erich Neumann similarly decried the predominance of a one-sided patriarchal consciousness. ‘This modern consciousness’, he maintained, ‘is threatening the existence of Western mankind, for the one-sidedness of masculine development has led to a hypertrophy of consciousness at the expense of the whole man [sic]’ (Neumann 1974, p. 57).

Looking at political-economic relations in this manner involves different conceptions of ideology, philosophy, and art. Returning to Zizek (1989, p. 30), I agree with his Lacanian influenced definition of ideology not as a Marxist false consciousness or illusion, but as an unconscious fantasy that structures social reality. From this perspective, ideology and the philosophies that accompany it are, in part, ‘already staged’ by our unconscious desires. From Zizek’s Lacanian perspective, such desires must remain unknown – both philosophy and ideology are defined by their blindness to desire – the unnameable ‘kernel of enjoyment’ or jouissance whose lack or void the social symptom of ideology rotates around.

It is here that I part company with Zizek’s Lacanian approach. His argument that unconscious desires must remain unknowable is belied by the revelation of unconscious forces that become especially apparent in artistic and economic production and discourse. Persistent references to the sexualized nature of aesthetic and economic production are not just ‘symptoms’ played out in the realm of signification, but the manifestation of libidinal energies that express themselves in terms we recognize as sexual difference. Recognizing them is key not only to an understanding of individual subjectivity, but a collective consciousness of the extent to which the forces of sexual difference both inhere to, and interfere with, the immanent sources of political power.

Understanding aesthetics and economy this way means going into the unconscious and engaging with ‘unknowable’ forces, something that Lacan expressly warned against and which, Zizek (2004, p. 661) laments, both Jung and Deleuze insisted upon. This, as Jung and Deleuze and Guattari knew, is a dangerous undertaking. Psychologically, it risks the radical ‘destratification’ of identity, a potentially explosive enterprise. On a theoretical level, it means wading into the equally volatile debates surrounding essentialism, foundationalism, and social constructionism. One of the thorniest issues a contra-sexual exploration of identity raises is how a feminine energy can be applied to all persons, yet still remain politically relevant to the collectivity of singularities we call women.

My approach to this issue involves some delicate perceptual manoeuvres that in many ways defy typical practices of knowledge and understanding. I view feminine energies as being associated with, but not equivalent to, the bodies of women. Understanding the feminine this way involves thinking of it in terms that Jung and Deleuze considered to be symbolic. Jung, for example, considered the psychic energy he called the archetypal feminine to be an unknowable or unrepresentable thing that could only be understood through projection. The images he associated with his concept of anima might present themselves in the figure of a woman because that image comes closest to explaining what they mean. This does not mean that such energies are the same thing as woman. In his words, ‘When projected, the anima always has a feminine form with definite characteristics. This empirical finding does not mean that the archetype is constituted like that in itself’ (Jung 1980, pp. 69–70).

In contrast to Freud, who focused on the unconscious repression of energies, Jung viewed the images that appear in dreams, reveries, and fantasies as attempts by the unconscious to express something ‘as best it can’ (Jung 1973b, pp. 161–2). To do so, the unconscious draws from the assortment of images and signifiers frequently used to communicate in the realm of representation, including cultural...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theory
• Part II Genealogies
• Index