Description:
Lacan's Marx presents the most comprehensive study to date of Jacques Lacan's original engagement with Karl Marx.
Review Quotes:
"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 Tomsič, 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