With respect to Marxism, it means tackling the recuperation of the theory, the neutralisation and absorption of it by the very ideological forces it pits itself against, notably the ruling ideas that are the ideas of the ruling class.² The banalisation includes turning Marxism into a form of ideology, which is also exactly what it became as warrant for the bureaucracies in the temporarily ‘post-capitalist’ Stalinist workers’ states. That ideologisation, then, has profoundly practical effects, giving rise to forms of ‘Marxism’ that are antithetical to what I would understand by it, antithetical to anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism.

I mark my position on this now so we can avoid some tendentious Lacanian readings of Marx later on. David will have a different political slant on this, but we Trotskyists and Maoists can bury our differences when need be, if not in the way that Stalin and Mao buried Trotskyists. The point is that misappropriation of Marx is materially effective; the ideological reformatting of Marxism becomes part of the conditions of possibility, and impossibility, Marxists encounter for political action. We could say that this ideologisation can be countered by critique and by ‘praxis’ – the dialectical interweaving of theory and practice – but that is easier said than done.³

This problem of banalisation makes things even more difficult for Lacanians. For psychoanalysis, as a theoretical framework that has been thoroughly recuperated by popular culture, banalisation is the name of the game, something we confront in our clinical practice when it takes form as a series of defences against the work. Lacan knew this. He had faced it as a material force incarnated in the International Psychoanalytical Association from which he had to break, and this is precisely why he is, as they say, so ‘difficult’ to read. That ‘difficulty’ does not solve the underlying problem, which is that we hold to this specific theoretical framework for psychoanalysis in the context of globalised processes of ‘psychologisation’ in which psychoanalytic culture plays a potent role, feeding specifications for subjectivity that are then lived out, experienced as interpersonal and intrapersonal reality. It is not surprising that these conditions of possibility and impossibility for psychoanalysis, an impossible profession, should work their way into the way practitioners as well as clients, analysts as well as analysands, understand and then attempt to theoretically elaborate what they are doing in the clinic, in their clinical practice.⁴

There is also a tension, which takes the form of an experiential paradox, between what can be spoken and what can be written, formalised in some way. It is an experiential paradox precisely because the truth that is spoken in psychoanalysis as a talking cure, truth of the subject that is both fleeting and liberating, can take shape as if it thereby operates as a metalanguage. On the side of the analysand, there is a particular temptation: the turning of what has been said by themselves in the transference or, worse, by their analyst, into a revelatory guide for life and an evangelical attachment to psychoanalysis. On the side of the analyst, there is a corresponding temptation; the idea that it is their interpretation that has made a difference and then they enjoy the sedimentation of that in reports of the case to colleagues. Then it is as if a metalanguage has been spoken.⁶

But if no metalanguage can be spoken, as Lacan claims, and I think he is correct here, is it also the case that no metalanguage can be written? This, I think, is a moot point, and it would seem, from both the privilege that Lacan accords writing as a domain of representation of psychoanalytic theory that is ‘tighter’ than speech and the activity of psychoanalysts’ own writing, even before the attempted reduction of meaning effects in the ‘mathematisation’ of Lacanian psychoanalysis, that it can. That is perhaps why I needed to write this, even though it is possible for a written text to mimic speech and it is equally possible, and usually is the case for obsessional neurotic speech in analysis to be like writing, for there to be what Jacques-Alain Miller calls ‘the written in speech’.⁷ In some contexts, when the analyst suspects that there is psychotic clinical structure present in the clinic, one of the markers of which is the cursed ability of the analysand to witness the mechanics of the language they speak, there will be encouragement to write. Science itself, Jacques-Alain Miller, suggests in an early paper, is effectively psychotic.⁸

In other words, writing is the domain in which we find metalanguage, which is also one of the defining characteristics of most theoretical work, including about the psychoanalytic clinic. This is very different from speech in the clinic, which is where we will hear the truth of the subject, which is not, of course, empirical observable fact, not verifiable through the written analytical procedures of science. Perhaps that is why Lacan tries, according to Bruce Fink, to track a path somewhere between speech and writing, knowing well the importance of each domain of representation.⁹ If writing is privileged in one domain, psychoanalytic theory, then speech is privileged in the other, the psychoanalytic clinic.

Writing that builds and sustains the architecture of our tradition of work does, of course, have a history. There are quite specific conditions of possibility for writing to appear on the world stage and quite specific subjective effects. Psychoanalytic writing ‘mirrors’, as it were, the emergence of what has been called ‘print capitalism’, a form of writing that configures what Benedict Anderson terms ‘imagined communities’ within nation states that developed in the couple of centuries following the fifteenth-century invention of the Gutenberg press.¹⁰ A transformation of the Symbolic thus hosts the formation of specific forms of the Imaginary and specifications for and fantasies about what is Real. A range of other mediations of the Symbolic, including the ‘Discourse Networks’ account by Friedrich Kittler also has consequences for the way psychoanalysis has taken shape and been reshaped in the popular imagination.¹¹

Here we begin to edge onto the domain of social-theoretical analysis of what makes psychoanalysis possible as a practice, and so onto the unnecessary but potent turf war between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Historical sensitivity to every form of practice, including its own, is one aspect of Marxism that attracted Lacan, and the battleground between Lacan and Marx has often revolved around the precise points where Lacan adapts Marxist theory and reformats it in line with his own attempt to analyse the cultural-historical conditions in which psychoanalysis functions; this most notably appears in the rewriting of Marx’s category of ‘surplus value’ as ‘surplus jouissance’ and in his description of the ‘four discourses’ as structures that do indeed, Lacan insisted, march in the streets, that is, have a materially effective political existence.¹²

The problem is that these translations of concepts from the context of one frame into another then twists the relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism from admiration and utility to rivalry and colonisation. Into the gap that opens up between the two then flood false oppositions that obscure both similarities and differences, and accusations that need to be carefully disentangled if we are to go any way towards closing the gap again. Marxist Lacanian psychoanalysis could then really still be Lacanian. Let us turn, first, to the similarities between the two traditions to be clear about the grounds of the debate between them.