Rollins, H. 2024. Psychocinema

Psychocinema
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Psychocinema
Helen Rollins
Polity

Copyright © Helen Rollins 2024
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Contents
Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse page 1

Psychocinema23
Conclusion: Fail Again, Fail Better 140
Notes147

Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse
From Opposition to Contradiction

What I aim to reveal in this book is the emancipa-
tory potential housed in the cinematic artform. This
potential is structurally analogous to the cure within
psychoanalysis; namely, it can provide a space in
which the viewer is able to traverse their fantasy
and confront their fundamental –o ntological –
Lack. It is in this disturbing confrontation that
individuals might be able to orient themselves dif-
ferently in relation to their enjoyment, discovering
a mode of desire that short-circuits our libidinal
investment in capitalist Bad Infinity.
In order to excavate this potential, we must
begin by seeing how cinema has been neutered

psychocinema
by a trend within the mainstream culture of both

film theory and filmmaking that has necessarily
misunderstood and misused psychoanalytic ideas
and that has come to serve neoliberal politics and
the philosophies of identity, difference and clo-
sure, rather than the most scandalous revelation
of psychoanalysis – t hat subjectivity is universally
ambivalent and structured by Lack.
Whilst psychoanalytic theory and practice
elevate, expose and explore subjective Lack as a
residue of the contradictory nature of our world
(as Hegel explains, Thought is the move from
the abstract to the concrete) and gradually open
the subject to the material reality of their life,
identitarian rereadings of psychoanalysis fold
existential contradiction back into oppositional
ideas and abstract the subject from their material
reality, a logic that accords with capitalist libido
and is widely identifiable in the turn away from
emancipatory politics on the Right.
Whilst it may be clear that conservative identi-
tarianism pertains to the Master’s Discourse (itself
structurally comparable to that of the Capitalist),
particularist theories within art and culture, reify-
ing essence and difference, may operate according
to the University Discourse. Apparently radical,

introduction: the analyst’s discourse
this discourse obfuscates the logic of the Master

within its very structure.
This book claims it is vital we return our
psychoanalytic film practice and theory to the
dynamic of the Analyst’s Discourse. In doing so,
film may come to help us challenge the ever-
intensifying bad faith of our libidinal economy,
which continues not only to create and justify
immense precarity and subjugation but also to
capture the subject at the precise moment when
a dialectical, contradictory approach is perhaps
most necessary.
A Poetic Logic, or A Metonymic One

Although books in film theory tend to focus
on the material nature and technical quality of
the film form, this text explores film’s operation
upon subjectivity and does so most especially
via a work’s narrative structure or philosophical
impetus – the former itself possessing a poten-
tially psychoanalytic, technological function.
Given the book’s length, film’s image is not
given primacy here; nor are aesthetic features
examined poetically, according to the logic of
metaphor (“carrying across” – the replicating of a

psychocinema
word’s signification in another context). Rather,

the text takes as a foundational premise the logic
of metonymy – that a signifier’s junction with
another presents an explosion of infinite possibil-
ity. A film’s meaning is therefore taken literally
at the manifest level. It is found in the chain of
signifiers presented to the viewer symbolically via
the film’s narrative, or in the Real of its logical
contradictions. This book is therefore a philo-
sophical one, though it claims that a Lacanian
approach may have practical, material, poetic and
aesthetic consequences.
The Four Discourses

Lacan developed his theory of The Four
Discourses in 1969 in part as a response to what
he saw as the philosophical failures of the stu-
dent protests the previous year. In doing so, he
may have taken inspiration from Freud’s earlier
insight that conscious knowledge alone cannot
resolve the symptom.1 Anticipating the rise of
neoliberalism, Lacan claimed that the conscious,
cultural approach taken by the students would
not challenge the edifice of capitalist libido
and would instead lead to a deepening and a

greater obfuscation of its workings through ide-

ology and the liberatory promises of consumer
capitalism.
Whilst the Analyst’s Discourse works accord-
ing to the unconscious, affective and libidinal
dynamics of the practice of psychoanalysis, the
University Discourse makes its critiques at the
level of consciousness and the cerebral. Whilst
much university study does not operate accord-
ing to the University Discourse – and, in fact,
one of the originary premises of the university
was to protect study from the undermining pro-
cess of market forces – it is increasingly difficult
for writers and theorists to put forward dialectical
and universalist ideas within a neoliberal structure
that sells research and teaching as a commod-
ity and that accords with an oppositional, rather
than a contradictory, logic.
Further, because film culture itself has become
dominated not only by neoliberal market forces,
but by those of a potentially new formation of
capitalist economy, emerging from the collapsed
contradictions of neoliberalism itself – a form of
state-sponsored monopoly ‘socialism’ that pro-
tects corporations from the near-zero global rate
of p
rofit – t here has been, in this sphere, an even

psychocinema
greater prevalence of oppositional theories that

mystify what is going on.
Film itself, however, because it operates on
affect and the visceral and – more importantly
– on libido and desire, may still be able – like
psychoanalysis as p ractice – to raise the uncon-
sciousness of the viewer and expose them to the
universal structure of their subjectivity in ways
that are potentially politically significant.
Contradictory Film Theory

Cinematic practice and theory are faced with
increasing limitations, both conscious and
unconscious, engendered by worsening mate-
rial conditions. The creation of challenging,
dialectical and non-oppositional work is nearly
impossible within the contours of our current
economy. Whilst filmmaking in these condi-
tions has its challenges, it may still be possible to
readdress the analysis of films with insight and
productivity.
Instead of consciously striving to excavate
the “hidden” meaning of a film, for example,
we can elevate – through the Analyst’s Discourse
– the dynamics of the Real at play within the

functioning of the machine of cinema, digesting

them into the shared language of the Symbolic
Order to understand how these dynamics direct
our subjectivity and desire. We can treat the visual
representation of film not as confirmation of the
cultural biases we already hold to be true, but
rather as the higher-order expression of a wider
nexus of phenomena that underpin our world,
an attunement to which can constantly challenge
our assumptions and leave us open to the gen-
erative dialectic of our universe, which itself may
lead to a reformulation of material conditions.
This book argues for a return to an openness
toward contradiction in the understanding of
film, w
hich – it claims – is the impulse of the
psychoanalytic method. It argues that cinema is
a tool that can help us in this reorientation, both
as an artform that operates upon us and as object
of study. It posits that popularized film theory
has misunderstood the radical import of univer-
sal contradiction in the practice and theory of
psychoanalysis and has focused on particularisms
which pose no challenge to capitalist ideology,
but are in fact determinative of its persistence.

psychocinema
Immanent Transcendence
Film as a technology was created at the end of
the nineteenth century. Early viewers of cinema
wondered at its apparent magic. The true “magic”
of cinema is perhaps found not in its mechanistic
capacity to convincingly replicate reality but in
its ability to generate an affective excess within
the viewer – a residue, like prayer, that is more
than the sum of its constitutive parts.
The relationship between film and the viewer
can function like the relationship of the analyst
and the analysand in the practice of psychoanaly-
sis, with a libidinal energy oscillating between
each party according to the dynamics of trans-
ference, exposing a Lack in subjectivity that is
experienced, by the subject, as something sub-
stantive. In Kristeva’s words, this dynamic is
experienced as something like “an immanent
transcendence here on earth.”2
This book will lay out and explain the ways
in which the structure of the machine of film
has endowed it with this fortuitous capacity. It
claims that, whilst this capacity is concealed in
all kinds of films, a sensitive approach by film-
makers may allow for a higher-order activation of

this dynamic, animating the viewer’s subjectivity

to produce an unconscious insight as to the con-
tradictory nature of their subjective constitution.
Universalist Film
Film and psychoanalysis point to a dynamic
within human subjectivity that is universal, an
essential (k)not that exists across every form of
identity and desire. The universal quality of film
has been commented upon by many theorists,
including Badiou, who says that “[c]inema opens
all the arts, it weakens their aristocratic, complex
and composite quality. It delivers this simplified
opening to images of unanimous existence. As
painting without painting, music without music,
novel without subjects, theater reduced to the
charm of actors, cinema ensures the populariza-
tion of all the arts. This is why its vocation is
universal.”3
There is a collectivity that marks film, from
the way it is produced to the way it is watched,
even within the constraints of the particularist
pressures of contemporary capitalism. However,
it is perhaps the capacity that film has to expose
the viewer to the Real of their desire – that they

psychocinema
are constituted by a fundamental Lack, that they

are, in the words of Žižek, universally “less than
nothing”4 – that is its most radical, universalist
dynamic.
A recognition of this universal constitution-
by- Lack may have political consequences. It
undermines the logic of the market system,
which relies on the false promise of possible ful-
fillment via the achievement of a commodity.
When the subject transforms this truth from the
register of the Real to that of the Symbolic, they
understand that there is no beyond of Lack for
themself or any other subject, that the economic
reality that entraps them relies on a false promise
that can never be fulfilled. Through this insight,
a philosophical opening may occur within the
nexus of our collective libidinal economy, and
the reconstitution of the material reality of our
world becomes a possibility – a material reality
that seems to sharply resist, and even adapt to,
conscious attempts to overcome it.
Capitalist Utopianism
Capitalism is a mode of production that relies on
a denial of the universal, fundamental, generative
10

force that is Lack, whilst exploiting it. Because

capitalist logic can only tolerate the contradiction
of Lack when it is repressed and denied, it must
retreat from the conscious acknowledgment of
Lack as a phenomenon and turn toward a logic
of opposition.
Opposition is a logic that acts as a parasite on
Lack, while denying its existence.
Capitalist logic is a utopianism that promises
existential purity, the inevitable completion of
desire and the absolution of Lack, even w hen
– as Marx points o ut – it is constantly under
threat from its own internal contradictions.5 In
fact, capitalism derives its power precisely from
its failure to deliver on these impossible promises.
It casts the fundamental Lack that constitutes
human subjectivity as a contingent, corrigible loss
that can be defeated. Within capitalism, aliena-
tion is not something constitutive, but rather a
contingent event that can be overcome.
Capitalism cannot make good on the purify-
ing promise of the commodities it offers because
it relies on the purchasing of more products by
unfulfilled subjects who imagine these products
will eventually assuage them. Instead of expos-
ing this fundamental contradiction within the
11

psychocinema
economy, capitalism must repress it, forcing the

capitalist subject to enter into an oppositional,
enemy-oriented logic to excuse the system’s own
failings.
The repression of this contradiction leads to
existential disquiet, emotional suffering and
extreme violence. The poor suffer through the
inadequate distribution of resources to achieve
a reasonable standard of living, through the
“meritocratic” and “philanthropic” cover stories
of corporate capitalism that cast blame upon
them for their material position, and through
the physical violence with which any challenge
to these contradictions is repressed. The rich
suffer existentially. Whilst able to appropriate
the monetary benefits of surplus value, they are
constantly confronted by the blunt impotence of
material things to assuage their existential Lack,
often experiencing a melancholic disengagement
from the reality of their life or, very often, a
consequential – though contradictory – d rive to
accrue more.
This suffering, a result of the repressed illogic
of our economic system, emerges as cultural
phenomena that psychoanalysis terms “symp-
toms.” In Seminar XXIII, Lacan explores the
12

implications of his neologism “sinthome” or

“saintly man” (a play on the French word for
symptom – “symptôme”) in reference to psycho-
sis.6 Whilst “sinthome” more specifically expresses
the contradiction that cannot be undone without
the undoing of the very edifices of subjectivity,
by drawing out the linguistic similarity between
“sinthome” and “symptôme,” Lacan suggests that
symptoms c an – if interpreted c orrectly – e xpose
us productively to the truths of our economic
system that we are at such pains to deny, like a
prophet.
Film, by exposing our reality back to us, can
reveal – intentionally or n
ot – the symptoms of
our collective disquiet and help us to confront
them, digest and resolve them in generative and
enjoyable ways.
Film as Philosophy
Capitalism operates according to a binary, oppo-
sitional logic which attempts to nullify existential
Lack and contingently absolve it with commod-
itized solutions. Art is a phenomenon that houses
contradiction within it, without any attempt to
eradicate it. It is this phenomenal ambivalence
13

psychocinema
that makes art art and distinguishes it from the

conscious call-to-action of propaganda.
Although capitalism must rationalize contra-
diction and mute the most powerful dynamics
within art, favoring and foregrounding “art” that
can be folded into the constraints of the Master’s
Discourse, there is a force to film that seems to
transcend the market forces that are driven to
quell it. It is a current that collides against the
Master’s Discourse and can productively position
the viewer toward their Gaze of Lack, mobiliz-
ing them toward a dialectical encounter with the
contours of their very desire.
The “grand narratives” of the structurally riven
filmic form have been criticized throughout the
history of film theory for supporting the totalitar-
ian logic of capitalism. However, it is perhaps this
very structure of film that allows for a productive
confrontation with Lack through transference.
Here, a libidinal investment by the viewer occurs
through the misguided belief in the promise of
closure and, as in psychoanalysis, the film may
employ and exploit this “mistake” in order to
expose the viewer to the contradictory nature of
their desire. Further, the narratively taut film –
consciously unaware of its logical c ontradictions
14

– may expose to us, in relief, the symptoms of our

own society. If philosophy is the tarrying with the
contradictions at the heart of the universe, film
may act as a powerful philosophical technology.
The Analyst’s Discourse Makes

Hysterics of Us All
Žižek posits in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema that “cinema is
the ultimate pervert art.”7 It could be worth sug-
gesting an alternative idea – that cinema has the
capacity to make hysterics of us all.
Whilst biological sex is a factor in the subject’s
first birth into matter, sexuation is a result of
their second birth into language. It refers to the
development of one’s subjective relationship to
sexuality and to Lack, which engenders it. Lacan
posited two primary forms of sexuation, which
some have called Imposture and Masquerade
(more commonly termed the Not-All). Whilst
the first is gendered as “masculine” and the
second “feminine,” these are symbolic forms of
identification and do not reflect biological reality
or subjective structure as a matter of course.8 In
Imposture, the subject identifies with the phallus,
15

psychocinema
an imagined symbol of power and c ompleteness –

there exists an imagined ideal beyond castration.
In Masquerade, the subject identifies with the
absence of the phallus and experiences an existen-
tial sense of incompleteness (though may come to
embody the phallus for the Impostor). This is why
Hysteria (the “female”-gendered neurosis, noth-
ing to do with the maligned image of a “hysteric”
in common cultural parlance) is understood,
by Lacan, to be more proximate with a political
potential in that a hysteric recognizes her Lack
more readily. Masculinity may be experienced as
real; femininity feels the truth of its contradiction.
The hysteric is sensitive to the contradictions
that mark their subjectivity and the world. These
contradictions point to a fundamental break in
reality itself, a break that makes reality possible
in the first place. This sensitivity endows the hys-
teric with an impulse to question the authority of
the Master, which may have political and eman-
cipatory results, as long as the critical process
is not itself captured by the unitary promise of
capitalism – a hallmark of the “progress” narra-
tives of neoliberalism, which has come to create
a universe of apparently “castrated” bosses and
movie stars.
16

For Lacan, despite the distinct modes of sexua-

tion and infinite categories of identity and desire
that can shape and form the subject, there is a
“dimension of hysteria latent in every kind of
human being in the world.”9 This latent dimen-
sion is what makes possible an opening toward
the emancipatory confrontation with Lack in
all subjects, which cinema may be able to make
manifest via its very structure. This latent dimen-
sion is that which is political in its collision with
film, that which McGowan refers to when he says
that “the greatest films aesthetically are the great-
est films politically.”10
When Žižek suggests that cinema is a pervert’s
art, he is referring to the way in which film can
teach us how and what to desire. This is the same
logic that marks advertisements under consumer
capitalism, the rise of which is so magically cap-
tured in Matthew Weiner’s television series Mad
Men. It is a perverse logic that makes perverts of
those on whom it operates by making them feel
they are c ertain – temporarily at least – of how
and what they desire.
The Analyst’s Discourse sensitizes the subject
to a universal Lack at the heart of our existence,
a generative disquiet that haunts the human
17

psychocinema
subject from their first breath to their last. It cuts

across class and identity, speaking to the possi-
bility of radically altering our political economy
and challenging the ideological edifice that neces-
sitates and endorses the subjugation, exclusion
and exploitation of given groups. In other words,
the Analyst’s Discourse hystericizes the subject,
leading them to question the orthodoxy of the
day and generate knowledge, like the scientist
approaching her experiment from a place of
doubt, letting go of all suppositions, in order to
be challenged by the possibility of the new.
Watching a film – a nd reading a film in a truly
analytic way – c onfronts us with the ambivalent
truth of our desire in all its inconsistencies, as
well as the universal Lack that sustains it and
around which we, as capitalist subjects, may col-
lectively reorient ourselves in order to transform
the material structure of our society.
To confront the Real of our subjectivity is
traumatic, but it is productive. It may offer us
the philosophical approach necessary to stand
outside of the libidinal dynamic that entraps us.
Ideology protects us from the radical insight of
psychoanalysis as to the impossible structure of
our desire. Our addiction to ideology leads us to
18

live in unreasonable, unproductive and unequal

ways that do not meet the dialectical nature of
our reality.
Political Revolution, Philosophical Revolution

Crises in the material conditions of society are
easily taken up by reactionary forces and weap-
onized in the service of oppositional agendas;
however, they also house the potential to unleash
an emancipatory event. Such emancipatory
events, however, will themselves become ossified
over time, becoming part of new economic sys-
tems that themselves must be enveloped in the
dance of affirmation, negation and negation of
negation.
Dialectical Materialism is a commitment to
the ongoing effort to expose the contradiction
as it manifests in the present epoch, not so as to
overcome it, but rather to transform it. Not in
some postmodern Bad Infinity in which we are
always open to a future that never arrives, but
ultimately to reach the point where we realize
that the Real is not a messiah that is to come,
but one that has already arrived. In other words,
that contradiction is never finally overcome,
19

psychocinema
but recognized as an ontological reality always

already among us.
Desire and fantasy are structured by material
conditions and by collective libido. They are ways
by which the human subject manages their Lack
and psychically deals with the material condi-
tions of their life, which themselves can be too
difficult to consciously bear. Because film brings
the contours of human desire into relief, because
the desire of the viewer speaks through the film
that they watch, a p
hilosophical – analytic – study
of these dynamics can expose us to the material
structure of our economy that capitalism is so at
pains to mystify.
If confessional religion was the opium of the
subject in past orders of societal organization,
the capitalist orientation of desire toward closure
can be understood as contemporary religiosity,
even in its most “atheistic” manifestation. God,
for Lacan, today resides in the unconscious drive
toward the solution of absolutes. And the confi-
dence of critique mystifies the persistence of this
dynamic.
For Nietszche, god died and his shadow was
cast on cave walls for 1,000 years.11 Perhaps film
can be conceived of as this shadowed projection,
20

playing with and exposing our fantasies, which

are religious insofar as they protect us from the
Lack at the core of our existence. A theologi-
cal illumination and analysis of this shadowed
projection and of the subjective fantasies it
exploits may yield political and philosophical
insights.
By confronting the subject with the fundamen-
tal, productive Lack in desire, film can reveal the
illogic of ideology, its religiosity and the ways in
which it enslaves and entraps us. In this way, film
accords with the logic of Marx’s analogy of the
living flower,12 sensitizing the subject to the ersatz
flowers that decorate their chains and encourag-
ing them to pluck the living flower, which grows
in the grit and grime of the R/real world.
The soils that grow the living flower are born
of the same antagonisms that generate subjec-
tivity. The living flower is one that we must
cultivate according to the conscious workings of
reality – c ollectively, collaboratively, politically.
Thus, though film might appear loftily detached
from the baseness of the practical world via its
commitment to movie stars, its focus on fan-
tasy and the make-believe of plot, it may lead
us back, via the transferential process, to the
21

psychocinema
ordinary unhappiness of normality, to a socialist

libidinal economy, or even perhaps a communist
one – n
ot despite these things, but because of
them.
22

Psychocinema
“Ne pas céder sur son désir” – The Devils

The architecture of film actively positions the
viewer toward a confrontation with the Lack in
desire. Likewise, the practice of psychoanalysis
gradually confronts the analysand with the con-
tradictory nature of their desire, mobilizing their
libido away from a totalitarian capitalist logic
that promises a fulfillment that is logically impos-
sible, and toward an enjoyment of the productive
impossibility of their desire as such.
Lacan illustrates the contradictory nature of
desire in his famous passage from Seminar VII
– “la seule chose dont on [peut] être coupable,
au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est
23

psychocinema
d’avoir cédé sur son désir.”1 The latter part of

this phrase is deliberately obscure and has been
rendered various ways in English, sometimes
missing its syntactical ambivalence. Dennis
Porter translates this passage as – “the only thing
of which one can be guilty . . . is of having given
ground relative to one’s desire,”2 which captures
Lacan’s paradoxical phrasing. The use of the
preposition “sur” by Lacan after the verb “céder”
(to yield) is unusual; it generally takes the prepo-
sition “à” – to give oneself over to something.
The verb can also take an object, followed by the
indirect pronoun, for example “céder le passage
à quelqu’un” (to give [right of] way to someone
else).
Porter’s “giving ground” echoes the ambiva-
lence of the verb “céder”; his “relative to” captures
the obscurity of Lacan’s use of the preposition
“sur.”
The statement can be interpreted as an indi-
cation that one should not give oneself over to
one’s d esire – one should not “yield” to it or “give
ground,” allow its encroachment, in one’s life.
On the other hand, the statement can be read
as a command to not let one’s desire pass one
by – like a vehicle at a stop or “yield” sign, giving
24

psychocinema
way to passing traffic, putting distance between

oneself and one’s desire.
For Lacan, there is no fulfillment in the com-
pletion of desire, but there is no fulfillment in
abstinence either. Lacan is therefore neither a
utopian capitalist, promising transcendence in
the achievement of a goal or the attainment of
a commodity, nor a reactionary conservative,
promising an inverse transcendence in the purity
of non-desire.
For the subject, the truth of the ambiva-
lence of their desire is not an easy one to digest.
Confronting it can be traumatic as it points to
the lacking nature of the universe and the sub-
ject’s existence within it as nothing more than a
symptom of that Lack. In psychoanalytic terms,
a raw, unmediated confrontation with this truth
is an encounter with the Real.
To chip away at the Real in small doses through
the process of Symbolization, to come to terms
with it, is productive in terms of both the psy-
chic health of the individual and the political
well-being of the collective. Film has the capac-
ity to confront the viewer with the Real of their
desire. It does so, like psychoanalysis, in manage-
able doses. And it does so as a medium that is
25

psychocinema
enjoyable and – at times – comforting for the

subject.
Psychoanalysis owes much to Hegel in its
understanding that desire is not unique in its
contradictory status, but rather contradictory
precisely because it emerges from matter, which
is itself divided. Hegel anticipated the hypothesis
of the Big Bang by over a century. According
to the theory of some cosmologists – proximate
to the ethos of Hegel’s work in its postulation
of a fundamental asymmetry at its heart – a
single point in the universe became so blister-
ingly hot and dark and infinitely dense that the
forces inside it became mathematically indiscern-
ible from their opposite. In a sudden moment of
contradiction, all energies at this infinitely small
point were redirected outward, backfiring with
such an intensity that matter was generated from
nothing and countless galaxies were cast outward
onto the vast, black canvas of the sky.
Although there is no mind to recollect this
moment, every rock, cell, every form of con-
sciousness and self-consciousness in our world
carries a meticulous account of it, something that
was referred to by Hegel through his insight that
“substance [is] as subject.”3
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psychocinema
Matter is contradictory, as are the workings

of the mind. The difference is that, whilst the
contradiction of matter is not self- conscious,
the contradiction of mind emerges from the
contradiction of matter and is the experience of
the universe witnessing its own contradictions.
Quantum theory identifies the contradiction that
marks matter; psychoanalysis explicates the gen-
eration of self-consciousness through the division
of matter and is concerned with the sufferings of
the subject, unable to confront and digest their
own contradictory nature.
The Devils (dir. Ken Russell, 1971) depicts this
impossible nature of desire. Whilst the capitalist
promise that there can be a fulfillment of desire is
a fallacy, The Devils shows what can happen when
the subject chooses, or is forced, to turn away
from their desire altogether.
Repression is not to do with not getting
what one wants, but rather to do with defend-
ing oneself against the knowledge of h ow – a nd
potentially w hat – o ne desires. To acknowledge
one’s own desire and not give ground relative
to it, to make consciously Symbolized – rather
than purely unconscious – sacrifices in terms of
that desire when living in a community of people
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psychocinema
with diverse desires of their own, by using one’s

discernment and negotiating with the dialectical
reality of the world relative to one’s desire, one
becomes a political subject. This is impossible
under a repressive regime like the one depicted
in The Devils.
The film is set during Cardinal Richelieu’s
France, as the nation emerged from the Middle
Ages and was plagued by a mysterious pestilence,
understood to be satanic – a terrifying eruption
of the Real. Social anxiety was managed through
sexual purity, acting as an individualist stand-
in for a failed societal repression of the darkest
matters of the universe – in this case, a lack of
scientific understanding. As a returned repressed,
sexual purity became reactionary – emerging with
a consequential, redoubled force.
Sex is underpinned by a fantasy structure that
emerges in childhood as a response to the mystery
of the other’s desire. This mystery is the undefin-
able Lack in the subjectivity of the Other and
is traumatic because it points to the unmanage-
able contradiction of the universe as such. Sex is
therefore experienced as impure for the reaction-
ary, who tries to manage the ambivalence of the
universe and their subjectivity by casting out the
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psychocinema
necessary, generative contradiction within them-

selves onto a scapegoated Other. The reactionary
subject may repress their own sexuality in an
attempt to deny their own subjective impurity,
under the Gaze of an unkind god, for example,
who must be bargained with and appeased lest
Satan penetrate the world of the living.
When repression occurs at the level of the
unconscious, the affect related to the repressed
phenomenon returns, attached to other phenom-
ena, creating chaos and dissatisfaction that are
unmeasured and out of control. The Devils was
made at the peak of sexual openness, shortly after
the sexual revolution of ’68. It is filmed in a carni-
val of psychedelic lighting, extravagant costume
and camp production design, which – at first
blush – seem antithetical to the subject matter
at hand, but in fact underscore the power of the
returned repressed, erupting as it does in displays
of great sexual intensity, at least as excessive as the
force with which the complexity and Lack in sex
are held down.
The puritanical nuns of the film are utopi-
ans who imagine the world can be purified of
complexity and contradiction. Their ideological
approach necessitates a scapegoat whom they can
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psychocinema
imagine is uncastrated, overflowing with sexual

excess, and who can hold within their image all
the sexual uncleanliness of the society of which
they aim to be absolved.
Urbain Grandier is their chosen scapegoat. The
crime of being extremely handsome is the cata-
lyst for the contingent petrification of devilhood
within him. The nuns are, in reality, experienc-
ing an intolerable division within themselves – a
complexity of sexual desire that cannot be borne.
Grandier becomes the accidental emblem of his
society’s unrest, capturing the floating, repressed
energy within the community of nuns. He is the
contingent gristle of the Real.
Like the stereotypical nun within cultural
history who imagines they have a libidinal rela-
tionship with the crucified Christ, the nuns
identify with the sexual desire they project onto
Grandier. The delusion that they have had forced
sexual relations with him allows them to deal
with their own unrecognized desires and justifies
the Inquisition’s arrest, torture and ritual purg-
ing of Grandier from the collective. Through
this dynamic, the nuns are regressing to a stage
of psychic development that takes place in early
infancy. It is a moment that Hegel refers to as the
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psychocinema
Beautiful Soul4 and that Klein labels the paranoid

schizoid position.5
During its early years, the child must go
through a primary repression in order to gener-
ate an ego that helps them navigate the world.
With language, the child’s ego is built and with
it comes contradiction at the level of their sub-
jectivity. Within the paranoid schizoid position,
the subject attempts to manage these contradic-
tions by projecting them outward. Though Klein
posits the position is adopted in the second half
of the first year, young children continue to inte-
grate and manage these subjective contradictions
throughout their infancy – the little boy obsessed
with dinosaurs, toys that could annihilate every-
thing if only they were real. The little girl playing
the innocent princess, scared at night because of
the big, hairy monster under her bed. This is
a logic of a bsolutes – g ood and bad, black and
white. It is a war of all against all.
For Klein, the depressive is able to tolerate
ambiguity. In the film, it is Grandier who embod-
ies this depressive position. His community at
Loudon tolerates both Protestant and Catholic.
He doesn’t hold to interpretations of the Bible
that the authoritarian regime demands of him.
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psychocinema
He lives with shades of gray. The nuns, however,

seem to inhabit a paranoid schizoid position.
Grandier becomes the unwitting receiver of their
projective identification.
Whilst primary repression is a necessary stage
of early childhood and whilst we need barri-
ers to that which we desire in order to conjure
that very desire, excessive repressions that nullify
the productive contradictions of life can create
greater torment than the ambivalence they seek
to resolve. The Devils exploits the affective power
of the horror form, and even pornography, to
express – viscerally – the complexity and ambiva-
lence of desire, subjectivity and sex, perhaps most
especially the unconscious force with which the
subject protects themself against the contradic-
tions that generate them.
The Devils shows that film is able to tolerate
and house contradiction, playing form against
content, revealing the dialectic of a character’s
split subjectivity, reflecting back to the audience
the contradictions that are the foundations of
their own reality.
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psychocinema
The Alienation of Alienation – The Green Ray

A common, and important, critique leveled at
capitalism is that it alienates the subject from
their true desires when forced to undertake paid
work to sustain their survival. Whilst this critique
is valid, it misses the multiplicity and uncertainty
of the subject’s desire in the first instance – the
question of what they would desire to do with
their time if they were totally free to make the
most of it.
The market system does indeed alienate the
subject, but it does so most fundamentally by
alienating them from the contradictory nature
of their desire – the fact the human subject is
alienated at the outset from themselves. Marx is
a philosopher who explores the secondary aliena-
tion instigated by the capitalist system. Hegel
and Lacan are philosophers who explore the ways
in which subjects are not at one with themselves.
The instability of human desire, and the impo-
tence of objects and phenomena in the fulfillment
of it, are disturbing for the human subject since
they point to the lacking nature of the universe
and the fact that the subject emerges from less
than nothing. To recognize the truth of these
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psychocinema
factors, however, is ultimately liberatory because

it allows the subject to have a greater understand-
ing of the complex nature of the world in which
they live and it allows them to live more produc-
tively in relation to its contradictions.
The practice of psychoanalysis gradually helps
the subject to confront these truths and to accept
them – w hat Bion refers to as “alphabetization,”6
other analysts as a process of “digestion,”7 and
Lacan as the act of putting the Real into the
Symbolic. The acceptance of these truths works
against the grain of market logic, which relies
on the libidinal investment of the subject in the
transcendental power of a singular commodity to
meet and fulfill a clearly defined desire.
The Green Ray (1986) is a film by Éric Rohmer
that confronts the viewer with the alienation its
protagonist, Delphine, experiences in relation to
her own desire. After a break-up, Delphine is
left alone in Paris whilst the city empties for the
month of August. Multiple friends and family
members offer Delphine different options. She is
paralyzed by the multiplicity of the offers a nd –
free to c hoose – is confused by what she wants.
Delphine goes from one holiday to the next, in
Cherbourg, the Alps and Biarritz, finding herself
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psychocinema
constantly dissatisfied by contingent factors that

do not seem to hold up against an unarticulated
perfect holiday she imagines she might enjoy.
In the final part of the film, Delphine over-
hears an elderly man discussing a meteorological
phenomenon – a rare flash of green that occurs
on the horizon at sunset. According to the Jules
Verne novel of the same name, if one catches the
green light and gazes into it, one understands
one’s desires and sees the thoughts of those
close by.
Captured by the mystery and promise of the
green ray, Delphine takes a man she has just
met to wait for the green ray at sunset. Together
they witness it. She experiences a brief moment
of excitement. But the question as to whether
she will receive the answer to her desire remains
unresolved.
The viewer, having identified with Delphine’s
desire throughout the film, is let down in their
expectation of closure along with her – a process
that is analogous, in the longer term, to the cure
in psychoanalysis.
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psychocinema
The Trauma of Jouissance – Citizen Kane

In his early writings, Freud indicates that the
subject is driven by two oppositional forces:
the reality principle and the pleasure principle.
Whilst the subject might logically seek gratifica-
tion in pleasure, avoiding pain, they must temper
their pleasure-seeking desires with the demands
of material reality and the constraints of living in
community with others. This is an insight that he
later complexifies in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
recognizing that there is a supremacy of drive
within the subject, a propensity to often seek out
pain rather than pleasure.
Before Freud, Schopenhauer tells us that “life
swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards
between pain and boredom.”8 For Schopenhauer,
the subject is caught in a quagmire of, on the
one hand, experiencing depression if their desires
are not fulfilled and, on the other, experiencing
melancholy when they are confronted with the
impotence of the object of their desire in over-
coming existential Lack when they are.
Whilst both thinkers describe the difficulty of
human desire in a reality that can never seem to
meet it, psychoanalysis in particular is a theory
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psychocinema
and practice that attempts to address the paradox-

ical phenomenon that is generated for the human
subject in their perpetual oscillation between the
two positions that Schopenhauer describes.
In their movement between their depression in
being deprived of the object of desire and their
melancholy in getting it, the subject experiences
a strange enjoyment that psychoanalysts term
“jouissance.” The difficulties that the subject has
in recognizing this paradoxical pleasure is what
often leads them to psychoanalysis via symptoms
that have emerged as a return of the repression
they have enacted upon the contradiction in their
desire.
“Repression” is often overused within the cul-
ture as a descriptor solely for the suppression of
sexual desires. In psychoanalytic terms, the word
is more polyvalent and can refer to the ways in
which the subject represses the contradiction at
the level of any of their desires.
Sex and sexuality have a privileged position
in psychoanalysis, however, because the fantasy
and the act expose quite clearly the structure of
the human subject’s contradictory subjectivity.
The given mode of desiring that each subject
has – unique in its own way according to the
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psychocinema
infinite potentiality of L ack – exemplifies a

fundamental fantasy that grounds the subject’s
phenomenological experience and understanding
of the world. Rather than being the specific driv-
ing force of culture – something that is elevated
because it is undivided, unlike everything e lse –
sex itself is a response to Lack, an attempt by the
semi-linguistic child to understand the contradic-
tion they encounter in desire and the traumatic
encounter with the subjectivity and sexuality of
their primary caregivers.
All sexualities are marked by a universal con-
tradiction. Sexual desire is traumatic in that it
directly foregrounds the Lack in the universe.
Sexual repression can be both an attempt to escape
the complexity of desire in monk-like abstinence
and also a belief in the transcendent power of sex
to unify the subject in oneness. In this way, some
of the most apparently sexually “liberated” sub-
jects may in fact be the most sexually repressed.
Humans repress the ambivalence of desire and
its resultant jouissance because they prefer the
soothing alternative that is the logic of ideol-
ogy, religiosity and capitalism: a possible ecstasy
in oneness. As the Lacanian writer Vakhtang
Gomelauri puts it, the subject is so reticent to
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psychocinema
confront the Lack in their d esire – itself an emer-

gence of the Lack in the u niverse – t hat they have
“a tendency to desire symbolic stability even at
the cost of [their] life.”9
The trauma of jouissance is addressed in Orson
Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. The film
begins as Kane utters the word “Rosebud” on his
deathbed, gazing into a snowglobe. This utter-
ance instigates a retrospective investigation by a
journalist, Thompson, to discover the meaning
of the word.
Thompson speaks to Kane’s butler, Raymond,
who informs him of an event he witnessed during
which Kane similarly uttered the mysterious
word.
During this episode, Kane destroyed his ex-
wife Susan’s bedroom after she left him. In a
fit of rage, Kane came upon the snowglobe,
suddenly falling calm and saying the word
“Rosebud.” Raymond tells Thompson that he
has no idea of the word’s significance. Since none
of Thompson’s other interviews has yielded any
information, he concludes that “Rosebud” will
forever remain an enigma.
As the film closes, Kane’s belongings are gath-
ered and destroyed. A sledge is found amongst
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psychocinema
the dead man’s objects and is thrown into a fur-

nace. As it burns, the word “Rosebud” is visible
upon it. The audience learns that this was the
sledge Kane was playing with on the snowy day
on which his childhood ended at eight years old,
the day he was introduced to a banker named
Thatcher, who would come to control his estate
and assume his guardianship. Upon meeting
Thatcher, the little boy Kane hit him with his
sledge and tried to run away.
For Kane, “Rosebud” represents the childhood
that he lost. Like Eden for Adam and Eve or the
mother’s breast for the child deprived of suck-
ling, “Rosebud” takes on a tantalizing quality for
him precisely because it can never be retrieved.
The sledge, for Kane, embodies this magical, lost
universe. In psychoanalytic terms, it is a “lost
object.” Since it is impossible and irretrievable,
Kane’s childhood can never disappoint him: he
can never attain it so it can never let him down,
never fail to fulfill him in his desire.
This magical quality is an excess in reality
generated as a surplus by the impossibility of con-
tradiction itself. It is an example of the way in
which the subject experiences the world as trans-
cendent precisely because it is not. Lacan named
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psychocinema
this unobtainable depth dimension within the

object of desire “objet petit a.” The subject will
never be able to touch this impossible depth
within reality contained in the object of their
desire, but they organize their desire around it
and experience jouissance in their attempt to
reach it and their inevitable inability to do so.
In his 2013 book Enjoying What We Don’t
Have,10 McGowan explores how a conscious
understanding of jouissance can allow the subject
to acknowledge the excess in their desire inspired
by what they do not or cannot have, allowing
them to experience satisfaction in an aspect of
their life they might otherwise find painful.
Whilst this might in the first instance appear
to be a punitive logic since it appears to focus
on not having rather than having, it in fact fore-
grounds the productive ways in which the subject
is inspired by Lack. Kane is miserable because he
feels a sense of loss for a moment he can never
retrieve. An alternative may have been possible
for him: to recognize that the magical dimen-
sion of life, that which animates it and makes
it worth living, is only possible because of its
material impossibility. It is not only the case, in
life, that there is no light without dark, no good
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psychocinema
without bad, but also that the interplay between

light and dark generates an excess in experience
that cannot be obtained but can be enjoyed.
To embrace the impossibility within the object
of desire is to love it. Whilst the miser experiences
the impossibility of the object as a contingent
loss, constantly accruing more and more objects
because these objects continue to fail to fulfill
them, the lover embraces the unknown within
the object or individual they desire, enjoying the
ever greater depths that emerge through them
because of their infinite impossibility.
Though each form of subjectivity and desire is
distinct, based on the contingent experience of
the subject in their early years in relation to their
Lack, the fundamental logic of the generation of
subjectivity is universal. Every s ubject – speaking
or physically non-verbal, though overwritten by
the signifier – is shaped by Lack and shares a
universal characteristic of non-belonging because
of it. To recognize this psychoanalytic univer-
sality is to subjectivize and humanize everyone,
undermining the logic of capitalism, which relies
on an imagined non-division in the subjectivity
of certain groups to justify their exclusion and
exploitation as non-subjects.
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psychocinema
In this way, since film may have the capacity

to work alongside the practice and philosophy of
psychoanalysis to expose the viewer toward a pro-
ductive acceptance of the universal Lack in their
desire, its effects upon the subject are political.
Bad Infinity – Another Round

The contradictory nature of desire is traumatic
for the subject because it points to a wider truth
about our world and our position as subjects
within it – that we are alone in the universe,
that there is no undivided authority and that we
emerge from the contradiction in matter as such.
It also undermines the economic edifice of our
reality, which promises fulfillment, but can never
achieve it, because it aims to meet an undivided
Lack that does not exist.
In this way, the relationship of the subject of
capitalism with capitalism’s commodities is that
of the addict with their means of achieving psy-
chic oblivion. Like the alcoholic who soothes an
unarticulated (“a-diction,” unspeaking) existen-
tial trauma with the promise of ecstasy in oblivion,
the capitalist can never overcome their Lack and
must continue to seek out stronger and more
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psychocinema
intense versions of their object of fulfillment until

the attempted cure becomes poisonous. Addicted
as we are to the promise of the commodity, the
market system has generated historically high
levels of inequality and has failed to steward the
planet that it exploits as its primary resource. Our
attempted cure to our collective Lack has become
poisonous.
For the alcoholic, drinking is not the sole prob-
lem, but r ather – in the first place – the attempted
solution to a problem they cannot otherwise
confront. Becoming sober is a traumatic process
because it means the removal of the very thing
helping the individual to avoid confrontation
with an immensely difficult part of their life. But
it is only through giving up the addiction that
they can begin to confront the trauma they bear
and address it.
Since the promise of the commodity mystifies
the divided nature of desire and the universe, the
human is at pains to forgo it because the dialec-
tical insight revealed in its absence may be too
traumatic to bear.
In this way, the logic of capitalism operates
according to Hegel’s concept of Bad Infinity,
which mystifies a confrontation of the subject
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psychocinema
with the dialectical insight of Absolute Knowing.

Here, the subject’s desperation to overcome con-
tradiction leads them to buy into promises of
various kinds, but these promises can never defeat
the presence of contradiction in the subject’s life
because it is foundational to their very existence.
The commodity never meets the subject’s need
and leads them to a repeated drive forward that
never brings them to their desired destination.
A recent film that explores the logic of addiction
is Another Round (2020) by Thomas Vinterberg.
Here, four t eachers – T ommy, Peter, Nikolaj and
Martin – struggle with the drudgery of teach-
ing high school students. They discuss a theory
that when slightly d runk – w ith a blood alcohol
content of 0.05 p ercent – o ne feels more relaxed,
happy and creative and one’s capacity to function
well in society is not undermined. The friends
engage in an experiment to see whether they can
sustain this perfect blood- alcohol balance and
whether doing so will allow them to finally enjoy
their lives.
Since, at first, the alcohol improves their
experience of life, they are carried away by the
promise of more. They increase the measure-
ment to 0.1 percent and soon find themselves
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psychocinema
drinking to oblivion. As their lives slip into disar-

ray, Peter, Nikolaj and Martin decide to abstain
from alcohol, but Tommy continues to drink.
He sails out to sea with his old dog, drunk, and
drowns.
One of the important aspects of this film is
that it is not punitive in its study of alcoholism.
Rather, it points to the human issues at play in
addiction, as they are in all psychic symptoms. Its
attitude to alcohol is as much celebratory as it is
disparaging. It handles the tragedy and triumph
of the human subject in their pursuit of soothing
and betterment as its characters simultaneously
make spirited attempts to animate their lives and
drown out the complexity of their experience.
The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe –

The Last Supper
Hegel’s Phenomenology identifies a foundational
contradiction across all history, charting the
presence and deepening of contradiction from
not-at-oneness at the level of matter of rocks and
rain to the divided nature of animal conscious-
ness and the lacking structure of human self
consciousness. Within the text, he also charts the
46

psychocinema
deepening of contradiction across human civili-

zational development. Each societal structure has
attempted to manage and overcome the foun-
dational contradiction of the universe. It is the
failure of each formation to do so that leads to a
newer, more modern form of civilization. Each
civilization represses the essential contradiction
of life at a level more unconscious than the one
before.
Perhaps the most f amous – and most
misunderstood – expression of civilizational

contradiction in Hegel’s Phenomenology is the
Master–Slave Dialectic, present in Greco-Roman
society. Whilst in common cultural parlance
this example is said to represent unjust power
dynamics, Hegel’s critique is more founda-
tional, exploring the importance of recognition
to subjectivity. A vital phenomenon in the psy-
choanalytic encounter, recognition – or a lack of
recognition – is that which underpins society’s
ideological impetus to include, exclude or sub-
jugate an individual or class: in other words, to
weaponize its power and to justify its misuse.
The phenomenon of the scapegoat emerges as
a result of the subject’s desire to nullify existen-
tial Lack by turning toward impossible visions of
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psychocinema
existential purity. The scapegoat is the necessary

obstacle that “contingently” prevents the subject
from reaching their desired transcendence and
preserves it, since encountering it would confront
the subject with its inability to solve the Lack in
their subjectivity and the universe. The scapegoat
is rendered such via the collective’s inability to
recognize their dialectical h umanity – t he univer-
sal division that exists in all subjects.
In Hegel’s example, citizens are believed to
be subjects, capable of thought and reason, but
slaves are not. Slaves are the outsiders who bear
the Lack in civilization that cannot be ideologi-
cally tolerated – t hey are the societal scapegoat.
Though the citizen class may have conceived of
themselves as subjects who were whole and com-
plete and thus capable of thought and reason,
in fact this capacity was indicative of subjective
division. Only as divided subjects could they
speak and thus think and therefore be capable of
discernment. On the other hand, the slave was
deemed “less evolved” than the citizen-subject and
thus – according to the misguided logic – more
lacking and less capable of thought and reason,
even though it is universal Lack that makes possi-
ble the process of sensation, thought, speech and
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psychocinema
discernment. For Zupančič, the human subject is

the contradiction of our world witnessing itself –
the subject embodies the “tics and grimaces” of
the universe.11
Though their position as Other provided the
slave with a unique understanding as to the
workings of the society from which they were
excluded, they were assumed to be unable to offer
a vision of it. Thus was lost a productive insight
into the center that the society itself could not
see.
Therefore, Greco-Roman society was plagued
by a solipsistic Master’s Discourse whose logic
accorded with Bad Infinity. The Master’s logic is
conservative. Within the logic of the conservative
is always housed the seeds of its own destruction.
The conservative attempts to preserve the stability
of the center by protecting it from the generative
power of change only possible through Lack. As
McGowan frequently indicates,12 whilst Adorno
claimed a principal flaw of the “totalitarian”
society was its drive to universalize, this society
is in fact never total enough because it cannot
tolerate and must exclude Lack. It is therefore
unable to universalize. In this way, the risk-averse
society is never risk-averse enough. Without the
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psychocinema
external understanding of the society’s internal

contradictions through the eyes of a dialectical
Other, the society fails to adapt to reality and
collapses.
The Last Supper (dir. Stacy Title, 1995) depicts
a group of righteous graduate students who
invite right-wing guests for dinner. They intend
to murder these guests, serving them poisoned
wine from a blue d ecanter – rather than a clear
one, which contains the normal drink – unless
they come to recant their political beliefs over the
course of the meal.
After several successful killings, the students
invite a famous conservative pundit to dinner.
The pundit confuses the group with a range of
moderate opinions that they have difficulty refut-
ing. He even admits that the views he presents on
television are for ratings and do not represent his
true political positions.
Over the course of the dinner, the pundit pieces
together clues that murders have taken place in
this house. The students retreat to the kitchen to
decide the pundit’s fate, agreeing that his cen-
trist views mean he should be spared. During this
time, the pundit has swapped the poisoned wine
from the blue decanter to the clear one and serves
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psychocinema
it to the students, raising a toast. As the film ends,

the liberal students collapse on the floor and the
conservative pundit speculates about a possible
populist presidential bid.
Here, though the students profess liberal
views, they are – as in the Master–Slave dialectic
– conservative, acting in accordance with the
Master’s Discourse. They are unwilling to rec-
ognize the dialectical subjectivity of the Other,
preferring to retain a frame of logic that sustains
the status quo. This logic is unstable and contains
within it the beginnings of their own demise.
Not only would an embrace of the contra-
dictory subjectivity of the Other allow for the
possibility of change that may transform the col-
lective in surprising and emancipatory ways, but
also to foreground the Lack that generates this
universal contradiction is to challenge the logic
of capitalist closure itself, whose symptoms at the
level of culture the students might consciously
condemn.
The students nullify the possibility of con-
tingency within the Other by casting them as
transcendentally belonging to a category of
belief, unable to change and not marked by uni-
versal Lack. Like the contemporaneous “culture
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psychocinema
warrior” declaring their opponent to embody a

“crypto-fascist” or “crypto-communist” position,
the students engage in abstraction, claiming an
a priori knowledge as to the destination of the
chain of signifiers and the possible replication of
the signifier “A” in another context. This utopian
approach to language and logic necessitates an
enemy whose presence explains away its impos-
sibility. It resides within a paranoid- schizoid
position, in Kleinian terms, demanding the
destruction of the subjectivity of the Other and
denying their possible conversion, undermining
any opening toward the surprise and novelty of
emancipatory politics altogether. It is a position
contradicted in the film by the pundit’s vacillat-
ing position. His adoption of political ideas as a
televisual performance demonstrates his discern-
ment or not-at-oneness with himself, a symptom
of his marking by Lack and something that could
be transformed in the right material and philo-
sophical context.
The Irish comedian Dylan Moran said that
“war isn’t conflict; it’s the inability to do con-
flict.”13 If politics is the very act of engaging with
the inevitably conflictual desires of the collective,
then “culture war” is the end of politics. It pits
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psychocinema
groups who share higher-order interests against

each other for the benefit of a capitalist class that
resists change, even at the cost of the world’s
inexistence.
To be unrecognized in one’s subjectivity is to
experience a negation of one’s humanity that is
experienced as violent. The intransigence of the
liberal students and their unwillingness to rec-
ognize the Other may be the very reason those
they disparage have taken up their reactionary
positions in the first place – in their subjective
anxiety and material precariousness. The con-
servative nature of their politics affirms their
subjective investment in the logic of capital,
which alienates and exploits the collective and
casts blame upon them for their suffering in
the face of the impossible material conditions it
creates.
The final scene of the film, in which the pundit
sees himself leading a populist uprising, expresses
the way in which this kind of revolt can be moti-
vated by a libidinal ressentiment against the liberal
Beautiful Soul, an action that is disastrous for the
universal politics that would undermine the cul-
tural phenomena t hat – consciously at least – the
conservative students claim so fervently to stand
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against, as well as the political economy that

generates the material conditions that foment
reactive anger in the first place.
The Chain of Signifiers – Un chien andalou

Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction anticipated
the later linguistic developments in critical theory
identifying the slippage between signifier and sig-
nified, insights that are also fundamental to the
logic of psychoanalysis.
When Hegel writes in The Phenomenology that
A does not equal A, he is describing the way in
which the word never has a one-to-one relation-
ship with the object it describes.
When we think of the word “apple,” a world
is conjured for the subject beyond a single image
of an apple they might see in their mind’s eye.
“Apple” refers to health – “an apple a day keeps
the doctor away”; it evokes d esire – the forbid-
den fruit, or “the apple of one’s eye”; it conjures
religion – the Garden of Eden; it speaks of a
great metropolis – the Big Apple; it refers to
technology – the famous corporation – and to
economic d ecline – the monopolistic rise of this
corporation, and its failure to pay tax.
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psychocinema
The slippage between signifier and signified

is a well-known sticking point for translators.
The universe evoked by one word in one lan-
guage may open into greater expansiveness in
another and its full meaning may be impossible
to reproduce. “Space” might immediately refer
in French to pastoral landscapes o r – in Japanese
– to the square footage of one’s dwelling, but
for an American or Russian, it might point to
astronomy, innovation, conflict and national
might. “Bread” for a French person might evoke
revolution, culture and subsistence, but for an
American it might evoke money (“dough”).
The non-unification of signifiers across lan-
guage is a symptom of the division of matter
itself, splintering as it does into images of per-
ception through subjectivity, and then through
each subject’s personal experience across place
and time, this experience itself shaped by the fur-
ther experience of individuals around them and
by collective culture, both contemporary and
historic.
The kaleidoscopic polyvalence of the junc-
tion between signifier and signified is why
psychoanalysis takes so long – sometimes dec-
ades. Psychoanalysis works according to a chain
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of signifiers, a sense-making logic-by-juncture,

which is potentially different for each analysand,
just as meanings and words splinter off into
infinite relationships across languages. This de-
essentializes the role of language, breaking from
the assumption that language refers to a pre-
existing or essential reality outside of itself. In this
sense, it is the opposite of the representational
approach which looks to understand the hidden
meaning in images because one image never ends
with itself – it is always associated with another.
The time-investment necessary for the practice
of psychoanalysis is why it is often the preserve
of the rich, but it is also why its results are so
elusive to the forces of commoditization and why
ersatz psychoanalytic ideas take hold within cul-
ture, promising immediate access to the “hidden”
truths about oneself, about the world and about
– in some instances of film theory – the concealed
meaning of a film or the inner workings of the
mind of a director.
The length and inaccessibility of the psy-
choanalytic practice is why readily available
“unconsciousness”-raising practices such as film
might have political worth in terms of the philo-
sophical transformation of wider society. What
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psychocinema
psychoanalysis might take considerable time and

money to achieve, fi lm – w hen understood in
terms of the Analyst’s Discourse – might offer as
a collective “transformance”-art-istic experience,
guiding its viewership to an emancipatory insight
in small doses.
Un chien andalou is a 1929 film by Luis Buñuel,
written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It is a
classic example of Buñuel’s surrealism in that
it breaks from linear plot and works with the
fragmented chains of images that make his films
so recognizable. In one sense, this would make
it the antithesis of those films discussed in this
book that achieve psychoanalytic impact on the
viewer through well-constructed plot and guid-
ing them to a point of revelation – potentially
the Gaze of L ack – v ia affect and transference.
However, when seen less as a celebration of anar-
chic fragmentation and more as an exploration of
the metonymic approach of psychoanalysis, this
kind of film can be seen as a version of putting
the viewer through an episode of free associa-
tion, like a dream. In this sense, it might radically
make visible the infinite search for meaning in
answer to perennial Lack.
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Hiding in Plain Sight – Storytelling

In the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
Hegel states, “‘A cannot at the same time be
A and not A.’ – This maxim, instead of being
a true law of thought, is nothing but a law of
abstract understanding.”14 What he means here
is that by denying that the signifier “A” can be
at the same time “A” and “not A,” the thinker
is not adhering to the dialectical understanding
of matter and signs (“Absolute Knowing”), but
rather neutering the radical opening of contradic-
tion in reality, in favor of binary, oppositional,
ideological reasoning.
Though many industries are now using AI to
produce initial drafts, later to be “brushed up”
by humans, the inadequacy of programs such as
Google Translate speaks to the dialectical knowl-
edge required to work with the contradictions of
language in its various forms in a way that the
binary logic of machines cannot handle. When I
was a French teacher, one of the most common
tells that a student had used the “help” of Google
Translate in their homework were phrases such
as playing in an “allumette de foot” (a football
match [that you might use to light a candle])
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or the fact that there were “vingt-cinq maisons

d’embarquement” at the school (boarding houses
[as in boarding a plane]). These examples show
the computer’s necessary and inevitable impetus
to force the signifier A to replicate as A in another
context.
Computers cannot think because they are born
only once, created as-they-are at the hands of
human subjects. They are not born twice and are
therefore not self-conscious. Computers process
literally, not poetically or metonymically. They
are divided insofar as matter is divided at the level
of quantum oscillation, but they are not divided
at the level of consciousness.
Against the digital attempt to reproduce A as
A, language – born of Lack – cannot ever hit
the nail of meaning on the head. Like a wet bar
of soap that constantly slips from the grasp of
those who attempt to handle it, language pro-
ductively fails at direct communication, always
pointing in a novel direction according to a
connective logic. Like ions that form chains
with more ions according to their lacking elec-
trons, words latch onto more words according
to the nonfulfillment of their role to signify a
signified.
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The failure of communication generates a sur-

plus in language. Its failure generates poetry and
art, just as subjectivity’s universal formation-
by-failure points toward a possible universalist,
emancipatory politics.
Art’s power over subjectivity resides in its abil-
ity to house contradiction within its structure
and to operate on unconsciousness. What is
perhaps unique about the artform of film is its
ambition to totalize. Whilst structured storylines
corral Lack within film toward a potentially
productive point of revelation as to the true
nature of desire, films that attempt to repress
contradiction altogether are propagandistic.
However, the very attempt to repress contradic-
tion within the artform is exposed by it. The
attempts sit ill with the viewer and are obvi-
ous. They may incite productive discussion since
they reveal in relief the binary logic of ideology
against the truly contradictory nature of life that
art may more readily capture than oppositional
abstraction.
Comedy, like art, is made possible by the con-
tradictions present in language and logic and
productively exposes them. Humor often relies
on the presence of two conflictual truths within
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a signifier at the same time (for example, a child

speaking like a wizened adult). Lacan comments15
on humans’ ability to manipulate contradic-
tion via comedy and word play in reference to a
famous joke from Freud about a couple of men
who meet on a road in Poland. One man asks the
other, “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you
want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But
I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So
why are you lying to me?”16
Here, Lacan shows that humans are able to
hide truth not only in fiction, but also in non-
fiction. This, he says, is one of the principal
differences between animal consciousness and
human subjectivity. He continues his analysis
using the example of hunting. Animals, pursued
by a hunter, leave tracks. Slier animals are able
to conceal their tracks or leave decoys. It is up
to the wily hunter to decipher these illusions.
There is only one kind of “animal” that can leave
true tracks that are intended to be read as false:
human beings. Only humans are able to hide the
truth in the truth. As Groucho Marx’s joke goes
– one that Žižek often recounts: “He might look
like an idiot, sound like an idiot, but don’t be
fooled, he really is an idiot.”17
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Storytelling (dir. Todd Solondz, 2001) is a film

divided into two halves: Fiction and Nonfiction.
In Fiction, MFA student Vi writes the short story
of an abusive sexual encounter with her Pulitzer
Prize-winning instructor for a class crit. Vi’s
story provokes outrage amongst her fellow stu-
dents. They call it outlandish, unbelievable, even
though Vi found photographs in her professor’s
apartment that show the opposite is true – nearly
all her course-mates have had sex with him. The
students are outraged, therefore, not because the
story is unbelievable, but precisely because it is.
And Vi has put that truth in the wrong register:
fiction.
Žižek recounts the story of a thief who left
his factory every night with an empty wheelbar-
row. Every night, the guards inspected the empty
wheelbarrow and, never finding anything inside,
waved him on, until they later came to understand
that he had in fact been stealing wheelbarrows.
Since ideological subjects are captured by a logic
that truth is concealed from them, Vi would have
done better to hide her truth in a register where
no one would ever find it: the truth.
There is an impetus to understand psycho
analysis as a process that aligns with the satisfying
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logic of the detective story. Like the conspiracy

theorist, the ideological subject gains satisfaction
in the belief that the truth of their life is con-
cealed from them. Whilst this mistake allows the
analysand to libidinally invest in the “powers” of
the analyst via transference, only to be let down
later when they are revealed to possess no special
knowledge, the political truth of psychoanalysis
is that material reality is the limit of the subject’s
horizon. To think in terms of a concealed topog-
raphy of subjectivity and matter is for the subject
to hold themself hostage to a fantasy of an alter-
nate world in which everything would be resolved
for them, if only things were different. Instead,
life is a calamity only made possible by a primary
apocalypse whose contradictions are ongoing. By
coming to terms with the contradictory nature
of the world around them as it is, the subject can
live more productively – less toxically – as long as
they are alive, by working to transform a reality
that is actually theirs, not an alternative universe
that only exists via psychic abstraction.
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Being, Becoming – Babe

Psychoanalysis is the philosophy of self-
consciousness and is therefore a universal
practice. Psychoanalysis charts the ways in which
subjectivity – in a possibly infinite way for each
individual – is not at one with itself. This non-at-
oneness is called the unconscious.
Psychoanalysis developed as a theory and
practice in response to the suffering experienced
by subjects at a certain point of human civili-
zational development. Whilst different societal
orders produced different modes of suffering –
for example, the fear of the retribution of God in
Hell for the subject’s transgressions in f eudalism
– industrial capitalism produces a form of psy-
chic disquiet that is so acute precisely because
its antagonisms are so radically denied, it being
the most modern form of societal d evelopment
– and therefore the most adept at repressing its
contradictions.
The main antagonism repressed by the market
system is surplus value, which is predicated on
the sacrifice of workers. This contradiction is
obfuscated with cultural concessions and a puri-
tanical focus on the ethics of “meritocracy,”
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hich – w
w hen they fail – a re further papered over
by ideological justifications that explain away
these failures as contingent, rather than inherent
to the structure of the market system as such.
Whilst capitalist ideology affirms particularity
in terms of identity-as-commodity and the logic
of ownership, psychoanalysis affirms universality
(a traditionally “leftist” or emancipatory position)
via its explication of the journey to subjectivity
that follows the same pattern in all subjects –
though explodes into infinity in its manifest form
– and its revelation that no subject can overcome
their Lack via the commodity.
The Master Signifier of capitalism (exempli-
fied by “free,” unfettered access to the market)
is totalitarian in that it posits a false universality
via the logic of exclusion (of those from whom
surplus value is appropriated) and exception
(for those who appropriate it). The symptoms
of capitalism are manifested in response to its
unbearable principal contradiction – the foun-
dational “sinthome” of surplus value. The
universality of psychoanalysis undercuts the false
universal of the Master Signifier. All human sub-
jects have something in common – nothing itself.
The Master Signifier can never be universal and
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thus is an abstraction from the concrete “dena-

turedness” of universal subjectivity.
According to psychoanalysis, subjectivity is
premised upon the signifier. Language, and
therefore subjectivity, is formed through the
impossibility of communication.
Humans are born with a potential to speak
and think that is not yet actualized. For Hegel, at
this point they are conscious, like other members
of the animal k ingdom – a status that may be
likened to the Sartrean In-Itself.18 Humans are
distinguished from other animals via their second
birth into language and subjectivity, a status that
is For-Itself.
As compared to other animals, born with a
greater physical readiness, humans are unindi-
viduated at birth. Unlike the pony, for example,
that can stand on its feet moments after birth and
run, the human baby is born as a fetus, utterly
dependent for many months on their primary
caregiver as a result of their large skull and the
small birth canal of the human adult, itself a
result of the fact that we are bipedal.
The infant cries and laughs. The caregivers are
lacking subjects who are unable to directly dis-
cern the meaning of their baby’s communication.
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psychocinema
Gradually, through frustration, the infant comes

to speak. Speech is therefore a symptom of the
contradiction of human biology, the Lack in the
infant and the Lack in the parents.
Since the status of the pre-linguistic infant was
Consciousness, the subject is forever endowed
with a sense they have lost something substan-
tive: an imagined oneness with their caregivers
where their every need was met. This oneness is
a fallacy in that the lacking parents were never
able to faultlessly care for their child and the
self-conscious child-as-divided-subject did not
exist in its infant form. As for Adam and Eve
for whom Eden became utopic only upon their
expulsion from the garden, the prelinguistic
“oneness” of infancy is only transcendent insofar
as it was lost.
This loss of an imagined oneness is subjective
Lack. We are universally marked by it as long as
we are alive. This Lack drives desire and makes
life worth living. Capitalism exploits the fallacy
that Lack is loss, offering an imagined access to
the oneness via a commodity that could close it,
but never can.
The second birth into language is that which
opens self-consciousness within us and endows us
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with drive, rather than instinct. It also alienates

us from the apparent oneness of matter.
The imagined totality of ego is cut through
by the unconscious, which means – though we
must invest in the stability of ego to navigate
the w orld – w e are never at one with ourselves.
We are riven with contradictions. Suffering may
occur when we attempt to overly rationalize these
contradictions, instead of allowing them to dwell
within us, all at once. The ongoing process of rec-
ognition through the eyes of the divided Other
provides us with an egoic stability that the precar-
ity of capitalism, and the commoditization of the
Other, constantly threatens.
To be human is to be other to the material self;
this otherness is the inevitable result of Lack in
matter.
Babe (dir. Chris Noonan, 1995) is about a pig
who is a sheepdog. According to psychoanalysis,
Babe has traversed the second birth into language
and therefore is a subject. He is a creature of
language and thus marked by both Being and
Becoming. In Being, he is a pig. But Hoggett,
the farmer, has identified a capacity in him to
herd other animals and, by proving his utility, he
will not be eaten for dinner. In Becoming, Babe
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psychocinema
is a sheepdog. He learns the signifier required to

herd sheep (Baa Ram Ewe) and transforms into
a prize-winning dog. Language brings the subject
beyond biological necessity and permits them to
inhabit multiple identities at once, syllogistically.
Radical Sex – The Piano Teacher

The term “little death” in French (“la petite
mort”) refers to the nothingness to which the sub-
ject is exposed after orgasm. “Mort” refers to the
death in the subject’s desire after the completion
of the act. It can be traumatic because it points
the subject toward the nothingness at the heart of
something that is imagined to be transcendent, as
well as their emergence from the contradiction in
matter as such. Fantasy and foreplay are the nec-
essary crutches which allow the subject to enjoy
the sexual act as gratifying rather than traumatic.
Rape is so violent precisely because of the psychic
harm it entails when the subject is not involved
in the sexual act on the level of fantasy.
Sex is given primacy in psychoanalysis not
because it is the underlying cause of everything
else, but rather because it presents a critical
moment in the subject’s structure by desire – a
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moment of pure confrontation with Lack that

can, in the right philosophical context, point
them toward a better understanding of their sub-
jectivity and its place within the world, orienting
them toward insights that might lead them to live
in more constructive and liberatory ways, both as
individuals and in community.
Sexual fantasy forms for the infant as a response
to the question of what their primary caregiver
wants of them. It is an attempt to stabilize the
Lack in the subjectivity of the Other and, in this
way, is a defense against Lack. Since it arises at
such a young age, sexual fantasy is inevitably
base, irrational and scatalogical.
Historically, conservative societies managed
the necessary impurity in sex in its infantile logic
via the scapegoat mechanism. These modes of
social organization condemned certain forms of
desiring as impure in order to envisage heterosex-
ual modes of desire as pure by contrast. In reality,
because of the fundamental illogic of all sexuality
and because of the way it is structured via the
“impurity” in contradiction that it attempts to
manage, all sexuality has Lack in common. This
is what is meant by theorists who claim that all
sexuality is queer.
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psychocinema
The historical conservative punished and

excluded the “queer” subject via a false logic of
purity in order to manage the impurity that was
present within their own sexuality. Whilst neo-
liberal politics has commoditized the promise of
queerness by particularizing sexuality, according
to a product-based logic of identity categories with
which the subject is encouraged to identify via a
logic of exception rather universality, what is radi-
cal in queer theory is the universality of disorder
in sex, in subjectivity and in our universe. There
is no resolution to the queerness of our universe.
The political act of queerness is to reside in its
universal contradiction and not to overcome it via
Death Drive, scapegoating and commoditization.
When wrapped up in its fantasy, when guided
to orgasm by the act of foreplay and intercourse
(or even browsing a dating app), the subject can
suffer the death of their desire in small doses.
Likewise, fi lm – especially narrative-driven film
– can draw the subject by their desire and place
them in the position of the orgasm enjoyer in
order to confront them – in a way that they can
manage – w ith the nature of their desire and
offer them a terrain of possible philosophical and
political insight.
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psychocinema
In the moment of their orgasm, the subject

can be understood as the perfect capitalist con-
sumer, moving toward what they believe to be
their desire’s completion like a good addict in
the throes of an imagined ecstatic hit. Then, at
the moment of orgasm, the subject is returned
to itself, confronting the contradictory nature of
their desire and its impossibility, like a user who
feels both the relief and disaster of another hit.
The structure of film, which guides the viewer
by desire and anticipation through a riven story
that charts the possible fulfillment or non-
fulfillment of a protagonist, which focuses the
viewer’s attention through sumptuous color,
sound and music, acts upon the subject like fore-
play upon the subject engaged in sex.
An ideological reading of sex and film would
have it that the most valued moment is that of
the final release of orgasm or the final revela-
tion of the fate of the protagonist. This logic is
that of the pleasure principle, focusing on the
possible orgasmic ecstasy offered in the comple-
tion of a goal or the attainment of a product.
Instead, it could be politically and philosophi-
cally fruitful to place import both on the death
in the viewer’s desire following the resolution
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of the plot – exposing the death in desire that

cannot be assuaged via the c ommodity – a nd on
the fantasy that is the necessary obstacle facili-
tating a tolerance of the death in desire, which
can be productively enjoyed according to a logic
of True Infinity, reducing the suffering of the
subject and the resultant ressentiment the sub-
ject feels when they imagine pleasure has been
contingently stolen from them, which can have
negative, oppositional effects.
The Piano Teacher (dir. Michael Haneke, 2001)
expresses how traumatic the end of desire can be,
against a process of foreplay and excitation that
appears as the obstacle to the act, but is in fact the
site of enjoyment. Fantasy protects the subject
from the trauma of the death in desire; orgasm
protects the subject from the trauma of the Lack
in the Other’s fantasy.
In the film, sexually disturbed pianist Erika
is engaged in an affair with her talented student
Walter. After Erika confesses the contours of her
fantasy in a letter to Walter, he is disgusted, the
fantasy revealing the dark, scatological, repulsive
desires of the piano teacher. When Walter finally
agrees to enact Erika’s demands to be attacked
and raped by him, Erika has achieved her sexual
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fantasy and is confronted by the horror of its hol-

lowness. In despair, she stabs herself in the chest.
The Universalism of Psychoanalysis – Alien

In the history of film theory, Alien (dir. Ridley
Scott, 1979) has been misunderstood at times as
containing a singularly feminist message, rather
than – potentially – a Marxist one. Film’s subjec-
tivity is manifest in the vacillation of its apparent
philosophical impetus according to the context
in which we view it, reflecting to us the con-
tours of our moment and its capitalist desire. A
feminist reading may have been most pertinent
at the time of the film’s release when women had
been long excluded from aspects of public life;
at a time when gender-based progress narratives
have been weaponized to mystify the workings
of capital (for example, “girl boss feminism”),
a materialist critique may be most fruitful and
may expose how particularisms can stymie, in the
longer term, the psychoanalytic contribution to
emancipatory politics.
An influential contemporaneous interpreta-
tion of Alien used psychoanalytic language to
show that the film illustrated the prevalence of
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misogyny within culture by revealing how the

female reproductive system is associated with
monstrosity (“the monstrous feminine”).19 Here,
the facehugger that attaches itself to a crew mem-
ber’s face exemplifies the horror of the vagina.
Misogyny results from an excess hatred for
femininity that emerges from the subject’s anger
at their deprivation of the imagined oneness
offered by the breast that was taken from them by
their mother and the ambivalence (joy, disgust,
resentment) they feel at the notion of ever having
been born. It relies on the “female-ness” of the
caregiver only insofar as it is ideological (that it is
an unconscious mechanism by which the subject
rationalizes their Lack as an exception). Whilst
sexuation exists according to gendered difference,
there is no transcendent essence to “female-ness”
or “male-ness” not only because a woman can so
readily be or become a man, but because there is
no transcendent essence in existence in the uni-
verse, other than that which is experienced as
such by the subject in excess, because of their
marking by Lack.
The recognition of the existence of misogyny is
vital, but it is not the end of the analytic process.
It is a cultural symptom that is a starting place for
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psychocinema
a material analysis that may gradually overcome

it. Its universal nature (stemming from the birth
process through which all subjects pass) speaks
to the political potential of an analytic reading of
the phenomenon as symptom.
Whilst psychoanalysis would expose the sub-
ject to the material foundations of the symptom
in order to create the libidinal and philosophical
conditions for a potential material transforma-
tion of the psychic economy that generates it in
the first place (by rationalizing Lack as a contin-
gent, non-universal loss that can be overcome),
some components of psychoanalytic theory have
come to maintain their analyses at the level of the
cultural. To do so is to remain within abstraction,
solidifying the Real at the level of the Imaginary
instead of elevating it to the level of the Symbolic,
which is the very d efinition – for Lacan – o f the
process of analysis.
Oppositional theory sustains the identification
of the symptom as its end point and avoids the
dialectical work of tarrying with Lack and all its
implications, explaining away the symptom as an
indication of the transcendent purity/impurity
of given groups or of poor subjective behavior
on the part of a specific group that can simply
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psychocinema
be resolved by conscious, disciplinary solutions.

Since these solutions are abstracted from the
dialectical Real that underpins our world, they
sustain its repression, with new symptoms return-
ing with renewed intensity.
Further, the problem-solution logic of these
interpretations is readily commoditized by
the market. In film, this can manifest in vari-
ous ways. A film might consciously display
moral rectitude and become a commodity that
promises to assuage a Lack in the viewer by dis-
ciplining them. The (im)pure identity of the
maker –
abstracted from the material reality
that generated it – m ight endow the film with
an imagined transcendence via a wisdom that
the audience can appropriate according to an
Orientalist logic. Conscious moral purity within
the film’s narrative structure can be appropri-
ated as cultural capital by the beneficiaries of
surplus value who can perform a familiarity with
the “correct” knowledge proffered by the film,
which itself acts as a veil to conceal the immoral
and illogical workings of the system that benefits
them. These factors are antithetical to the univer-
salist, political structure of the film mechanism
and work to repress it.
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psychocinema
The University Discourse uses already exist-

ing cultural and political biases to understand
the manifest content of the film and is therefore
conservative. An approach that pertains to the
Analyst’s Discourse positions the viewer in rela-
tion to a productive encounter with the infinite
potentiality of the Lack within the film itself,
which may offer a conversion experience through
the destabilization of these biases – film not just
as symptom, but as process.
In the canonical film theory essay “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”20 it is argued
that feminists should “fight the unconscious” as
it appears in films marked by the so-called “male
gaze.” In this reading, films made within the
context of patriarchal capitalism display “uncon-
scious” evidence of being so. In psychoanalytic
theory, however, there is no substantive uncon-
scious and therefore no unconscious- as-
entity
to fight. The unconscious is a fissure present in
reality at all times, a residue of the ego’s aim
for totality as a mechanism by which the self-
conscious subject, as a child, comes to navigate
the world. The symptomatology of the film does
not end with “patriarchy” itself, but rather with
the eternal contradictions of subjectivity and
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psychocinema
the universe which must be continually produc-

tively and politically tarried with, lest the subject
collapses into reactionary thinking, a historical
example of which is patriarchy itself.
Taking the insight that Alien exposes misogyny
within the culture to its psychoanalytic con-
clusion, we might come to a stronger political
interpretation. Misogyny is not just a feature of
the gender wars, but rather a toxic artifact of
subjective life, one that capitalism sustains by
denying subjectivity’s contradictions and one
that can be challenged by raising the trauma of
the Real to the universal Symbolic Order, a pro-
cess that itself undermines the logic of capitalism.
The arrival of all subjects from Lack creates a
latent anxiety in them, regardless of gender, rela-
tive to the birth process. The attraction–repulsion
toward and against the vaginal symbolism in
Alien, and the fact that viewers of every gender
can identify with the horrors on show, reveals
the universal subject’s anger at their deprivation
of the imagined oneness of Being. The hatred
here is not directed to women because they are
women, but because they gave birth. In a differ-
ent scientific order, one that some have argued
we are heading toward, whoever gives birth
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– male, female or other – may come to face the

same unconscious hatred, which itself, through
philosophy and psychoanalysis, would have to
be tarried with and the trauma of the Real of it
neutered by its digestion into the Symbolic.
Further, whilst it has been argued that the
alien creatures in the film code female in their
aesthetic proximity to human genitals, it cannot
be denied that the xenomorph has characteristics
that appear “male” (the large head, the phallus-
shaped alien fetus that bursts out of a crew mate’s
chest). Whilst there is anxiety for all subjects in
relation to the Lack from which they emanate
(the vagina), there is also anxiety related to the
phallus – both its possession and its absence,
as exemplified in Little Hans’ fear of horses in
Freud’s famous case.
The universal Lack within the viewer and the
Lack within Ripley- as-
subject allows transfer-
ence to occur between them and for subjects
of all genders to identify with her. Part of the
universal power of the film’s horror resides in
its depiction of the Lack within the monstrous
Other – the mystery of the dialectic of subjec-
tivity, necessary for recognition to occur, but
terrifying for the subject who can never anticipate
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how the Other might act or what they desire of

them.
As many theorists have pointed out, Alien
expresses drive, a feature of all human s ubjectivity
– an insatiable, eternal force that pays no atten-
tion to the “pleasure principle” (the reassuring
notion that humans are motivated by utility,
rather than their own destruction). The alien is
more like themselves as humans than the crew
members aboard Nostromo would like to admit:
zombie-like, unrelenting, it destroys all around
it in the attempt to survive, even against its own
well-being. The alien is a mirror to the capital-
ist subject who would maintain a non-dialectic
understanding of their reality, even at the cost of
their life.
Perhaps the most terrifying message of Alien,
however, is that – t wo centuries after Hegel, one
and a half after Marx, one after Freud and a half-
century after L acan – h uman society has still
not come to terms with the political import of
Absolute Knowing, the emancipatory potential
of an embrace of universal Lack. The religios-
ity of commodity fetishism is so powerful that
it remains across centuries and may never be
undone. Still slaves to surplus value, the crew
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believes at the start of the film that they have

earned their money and are on their way home.
Instead, they are forced by the corporation to risk
their lives once again or forfeit the fruit of the
sacrifice already made.
Romantic Exception – Bridget Jones’s Diary

Pride and Prejudice is sometimes read as a
proto-Marxist novel in that it foregrounds the
material conditions of the Bennett sisters in the
context of securing their future via marriage.
Whilst the novel is certainly more materialist
than most cultural products today, the ideologi-
cal closure offered by the story – that Elizabeth
is exempted from precariousness by marrying
into wealth and, at the same time, finds her
perfect match – h as meant that its story struc-
ture has been readily commoditized and has
become recognizable in perhaps the most ideo-
logical of narrative forms: the rom-com. Bridget
Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001) is one
of the most successful examples of this genre
and is a near calque of Pride and Prejudice onto
the life of a young woman in contemporary
London.
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Here, the subject imagines that the solution

to their economic constraint is not to work col-
lectively to overcome capitalism, but to invest
in exception: like the lottery winner, they could
be absolved of material constraints by a wealthy
person who not only is themselves sufficiently
Marxist to understand contemporary economics
and to conceive of the person of desire outside
of capitalist ideology (i.e., they are not desirable
because of what they offer, they are to be loved
“just the way they are”), but also is able to offer
the subject a life beyond the antagonisms of capi-
talism within it. The rom-com depoliticizes the
subject, transforming the politics of Love into
the commodity form of romance. This is perhaps
why it is a genre most enjoyed by the subject at
the precise moment they experience the market
system’s downsides (for example, after a break-
up) and need to be soothed. By offering an

ideological solution, the depressed subject is able
to mourn their losses and re-knit the chain of sig-
nifiers via a renewed fantasy. But it is a temporary
fix; by re-investing in capitalist fantasy, they will
inevitably be let down again.
The rom- com became particularly prevalent
in the nineties and noughties when economic
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conditions allowed for the cultural supremacy of

mid-budget films. It has been argued that the
contingent prevalence of the rom-com during
the childhood and adolescence of millennials has
been disastrous for their adult love lives, having
led them to ideologically invest in an exception
that can never arrive, rather than accepting the
dialectical reality of love: that it is to invest in the
Lack of the Other. Tragically, the more precari-
ous their material conditions, the more driven
they may be to invest in this fantasy.
It is not only the millennial who can invest in
the 30-something Bridget and be exploited by
the ideological currents of the film in which she
appears. A 70-year-old male viewer may identify
with Bridget and her desire to be the capitalist
exception. Whilst the potential identity charac-
teristics of the human subject are infinite because
of the prism of Lack, capitalist desire follows a
singular, unconscious logic – the assuaging of the
gap of Lack in fulfillment.
Just as the subject is endowed with desires that
are not theirs, but become theirs, during their
entrance from consciousness into language via the
play of recognition and misrecognition with the
subjectivities of their lacking parents, the lacking,
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self-conscious adult can readily adopt desires that

are not originally their own, but become them,
via mimetic desire.
The fact that even a well-intentioned environ-
mentalist or a carefully conscious anti-capitalist
may find themselves, through a narrative like
that of Bridget Jones, desiring along ideological
lines shows capitalist desire is mimetic and that it
operates unconsciously. Conversely, the fact that
the subject is so easily shaped and directed by
the process of mimetic desire speaks to an eman-
cipatory potentiality in film. The artform that
so readily captures the subject’s libido could be
consciously directed toward a productive under-
standing and relationship with the object of
desire through an investment in a narrative form
that gradually lets the subject down. Further, as
an object of study, the collective enjoyment of
ideological film informs us of the contours of our
capitalist desire, reminding us – with political
effect, if considered assiduously – how and what
we do in fact desire, despite our conscious claims
to the contrary. In this sense, our collective desire
“speaks through” the ideological film and what is
spoken – a s in the process of p
sychoanalysis – c an
be analyzed.
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Capitalist Death Drive – Brazil

The slogan of the dating app “Hinge” provides an
interesting example of the contradiction within
capitalism that ideology is constantly at pains to
deny. The app’s slogan claims that it is “designed
to be deleted.” It asserts that the app is so suc-
cessful at matching its users that its purpose is to
self-destruct.
As a profit-seeking enterprise, the opposite is
true. The profits for its shareholders rely on its
failure to match its users, not its success. In order
to sustain revenue, the app relies on daters who
continue to date, not those who succeed in find-
ing a partner. The market system foregrounds its
successes, but they are exceptions that prove the
rule. Whilst Steinbeck stated that “everyone was
a temporarily embarrassed capitalist,”21 today
we might claim that – in our epoch of platform
capitalism – everyone is a temporarily frustrated
Hinge dater, just as they may be a temporarily
frustrated SoundCloud rapper, viral YouTuber
or TikTok meme creator.
A common argument from capitalism’s sup-
porters is that it is the most logical, reasonable and
productive form of organizing society because it
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is so utilitarian. Capitalism’s detractors also often

use this argument – that it is an overall nega-
tive to human flourishing precisely because it is
too utilitarian and doesn’t match the complex
nature of human life, reducing everything in the
world to objects to be exchanged. Perhaps neither
of these logics fully captures its toxicity, which
resides not in its tendency to be utilitarian, but
rather in its necessarily destructive quality, which
always creates and offers a problem that must
consequently be “solved.”
Death Drive is the attempt by the subject to
eradicate the dialectic by returning to a oneness
that is not even possible in death (the sub-
ject returns to the earth as minerals, which are
themselves oscillating at the quantum level, and
becomes again part of a human subject via their
consumption of food). The subject protects them-
self from their contradictory status by driving
toward objects and phenomena that they believe
will quell their Lack. Since they can never reach
the oneness of fulfillment because it cannot exist
in material reality, the subject must perpetually
put distance between themself and their object
of imagined fulfillment, which will inevitably let
them down, in order to sustain its magic.
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psychocinema
Brazil (dir. Terry Gillam, 1985) depicts the

Death Drive in capitalism – h ow the system
exerts itself over the collective via its failure. Those
involved in the bureaucratic edifice depicted in
the film fail to do anything, whilst striving to
appear rushed and busy. One of the system’s out-
laws is handyman Harry Tuttle, who comes to
the aid of individuals who have broken devices
in their homes. By fixing these devices, he is the
enemy of the state whose own handypeople must
keep the machinery of the system broken in order
to justify their own existence.
The very inciting incident of the narrative
occurs when a squished insect fudges Tuttle’s
arrest warrant in a teleprinter, resulting in a mis-
understanding that the wanted criminal is Buttle.
What is important here is not that the totalitarian
hyper-bureaucracy is undermined by a mere fly,
but rather that it is sustained by it, echoed by the
structure of the narrative itself, which is incited
by the mistake.
Capitalism necessarily creates bad products that
do not meet the needs of the collective. Under the
regime of corporate oligopoly, seemingly more
like the techno-bureaucracy of Brazil every day, it
is nearly impossible to create work outside of the
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auspices of capitalist Death Drive. Today, good

work, and good films, are an exception, even a
miracle. Great films are produced, but are often
unrecognized, explained away, shielded from the
view of the public lest they expose the failures of
the center. Occasionally, though – through the
miracle of contradiction – they do appear and
they can be embraced.
Nonetheless, like Tuttle, most filmmakers
and artists must often work bandit-like, with the
scraps of an ever more totalizing system, in the
knowledge their work might never be watched.
Gaze of Mastery, Gaze of Lack – Vertigo

In Lacanian terms, Gaze is a residue that appears
in excess between interfacing subjects or subjects
and objects. It confronts the subject with the
constitutive Lack at the core of being.
Gaze challenges the ideological notion that
sight is unmediated. Of the five senses, sight is
often misunderstood as the most objective (“I saw
it with my very eyes!”; “it was in plain sight”) or
totalizing (we can be said to have “20/20 vision”
or a clarity of “hindsight” and “foresight”), as
compared to taste, for example, the very word
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conveying discernment (“I have a taste for cher-

ries, not chocolate”) or touch (“it felt wrong”).
In his Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, Lacan says of Gaze that “what is
profoundly unsatisfying, and always missing, is
that you never look at me from the place from
which I see you.”22 Since subjects are divided,
looking always involves a process of infinitely
reciprocal recognition and misrecognition and
brings with it a reminder of the “armor of an
alienating identity”23 with which the subject is
endowed during the mirror stage, in the face of
which they always feel inadequate.
The divided parent necessarily misrecognizes
their child in two principal ways. First, the child
is sufficiently frustrated by the failure of the lack-
ing parent that they must come to speak and
therefore think. Second, the lacking parent rein-
forces the child’s sense of self by lending their
look to the process of visual reinforcement that
occurs during the mirror stage. Gaze is the
resultant residue between parent and child. The
parent’s process of seeing– lacking, therefore
discerning – a ffirms their child’s vision of them-
self as a bounded being in their reflected image.
This is the armor of an alienating identity that
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allows the subject to navigate the world, but it

endows them with an uneasy sense of inadequacy
and non-totality in the face of an imagined Ideal
Ego, a Cartesian subject who appeared for them
in the mirror and whose mind and body seem to
be connected.
“Male gaze” identifies with the “mistake” of
masculine sexuation in that it expresses the male
artist’s subjectivity as a powerful entity, objecti-
fying the female subject who becomes a helpless
object beneath the command of their phallic
camera. Whilst the idea cut against the trends
of misogyny within filmmaking culture at the
time of its conception and may in fact implic-
itly critique the “mistake” of the Impostor that
the Lacanian Gaze exposes, the way the con-
cept has been u nderstood – o r m
isunderstood
– in mainstream culture arrests the radicality of
Lacan’s universalist concept and lends weight to
the notion that there is an intransigent, “hidden”
totality to male perception via the use of psy-
choanalytic language. Here, there is no male or
female essence to Gaze since Gaze concerns the
identity of the looking subject as much as that
of the Other (the subject/object who returns the
look and exposes the viewer’s necessary subjective
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division). A particularist understanding of Gaze

as one of mastery aligns with the Bad Infinity of
capitalism, which suggests both that there is a
singular subject who is undivided (uncastrated –
having stolen an amassed jouissance for themself)
and that the Other can ever not be implicated in
the processes of perception and desire.
This commoditized understanding runs con-
trary to the impetus of Lacan’s revolutionary
ideas of universal alterity and the public nature
of subjectivity and desire, including those that
marked early dynamics in queer theory, which
show that all sexuality is queer because it forms
around Lack and that there is no subjectivity
without division. The “male gaze” came to have
a near-unprecedented impact upon the language
and ethos of film studies and filmmaking, within
the institution and the cultural mainstream, per-
haps because the way it was understood made
no challenge to the underlying ideology of capi-
talism that engenders economic inequality and
instability, which intensify and maintain forms
of oppression such as misogyny, where a group or
class must be subjugated for the extraction of sur-
plus value. The progressive nature of the critique
even came to operate as an unconscious fetish
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to deny the dynamic of this underlying ideology

within film practice and the wider economy.
In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Scottie – an
ex-detective who has retired from police work
because he suffers from vertigo – is hired by an
old friend, Gavin, to follow his wife, Madeleine.
Gavin claims that Madeleine is acting strangely
and he believes she is being haunted by her great-
grandmother Carlotta, who died by suicide.
Gavin fears a similar fate will befall Madeleine.
In reality, Gavin has already murdered his wife
and has hired another woman, Judy, to portray
her. Judy lures Scottie to a tall clock tower from
which she appears to fall. Too afraid to stop her,
Scottie sees only a body on the ground, which
does not belong to Judy, but rather to the original
Madeleine. In this way, Gavin exploits Scottie’s
phobia to cover up the murder of his wife.
According to “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” Vertigo expresses a misogynistic “male
gaze” in that “the look is central to the plot,
oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fas-
cination.” Scottie, as a policeman, is “exemplary
of the symbolic order and the law.” He has “the
power to subject another person to the will sadis-
tically or the gaze voyeuristically” and turns this
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“onto the woman as object of both.”24 While it

may be the case that Scottie is a misogynistic man,
that the film was produced within a misogynistic
culture and that Hitchcock, like male directors
of his time, subjectivized men as male characters
and objectivized women as passive facilitators of
plot, this critique is not aligned with a Lacanian
approach, but rather perhaps with Foucauldian
critiques of manifest systems of power.25 In fact,
by positing that the misogyny present in the film
exists because of the totality of male subjectivity,
rather than its Lack, it falls into the oppositional,
capitalist logic that Lacan aimed to undermine
via this theory. Lacanian Gaze exposes the Lack
in all subjective structures, predicts the political
potential of hysteria in all and claims that cultural
symptoms such as misogyny are a result of the
attempt to deny the denaturedness of all human
subjectivity upon an economic terrain that must
promise oneness in alterity in order to extract
profit. For Lacan, all Gaze is Gaze-of-Lack. The
possibility of a Gaze-of-Power is an ideological
illusion.
Indeed, a Lacanian analysis of the film’s most
iconic scene would yield a universalist insight,
showing that Scottie is equally as lacking as
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Madeleine, that the patriarchal power that he has

does not offer what it promises, subjectivizing
them both and leading to the logical conclusion
that misogyny is a symptom of the attempt to
deny universal Lack, rather than embrace it, and
that a society based on its unconscious recog-
nition might facilitate the undermining of the
subjugation of one group by another – be they
male or female or of a given class or ethnic group.
In this scene, Scottie follows Madeleine/Judy
to an art gallery and finds her gazing at a portrait
that appears to be a near replica of her and that
turns out to depict Carlotta. The “male gaze”
invites us to read this moment as an example of
the image of the woman already existing in the
eye of the man, constructed by an active mascu-
line power, which disempowers the woman and
forces her to respond to this demand. Madeline/
Judy looks at the picture, but she will never live
up to the image in Scottie’s e yes – the female is
the lacking subject in an apparently patriarchal
world. Madeline/Judy is small and appears lower
in the picture, she sits meekly in a position com-
parable to that of Carlotta as she submits to the
framing of the screen, which itself mirrors the
perspective of a domineering male director.
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psychocinema
This moment, however, depicts the universal

Lack in Gaze in numerous ways. The resem-
blance/mis-resemblance of Madeline/Judy with
Carlotta exposes how the universal subject can
never live up to their Ideal Ego, a factor that
haunts subjectivity and makes it possible. Here,
Scottie is confronted – and through him, the
viewer (male, female or other) – with incom-
plete reciprocity. We see that the Other is not
their Ideal Ego and is divided. The division in the
object of sight (even when apparently passive)
returns the Gaze of Lack upon the viewer, since
this division subjectivizes the object according
to Hegel’s quantum notion of substance being
as subject.26 For example, the chignon worn by
Madeleine/Judy is terrifying, looking more like
the flared nostrils of a stallion than the one worn
by Carlotta in the painting. The roses in Carlotta’s
hands are not the symbol of romantic unity, but
of difference – “there is no sexual relationship”27
– as they sit not in Madeline/Judy’s hands, but
next to her on the bench.
What we see here is not Scottie in the position
of “master” and Madeline as “slave” but the dia-
lectical and intersubjective relationship between
them, as well as its traumatic reminder of the
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universal Lack at the core of two subjects in a

moment of misrecognition. The universal Gaze
sits between subjects and reminds them that this
Lack is what they both are, against the comforting
illusion that the male is uncastrated, a master who
has amassed all the jouissance in the world, the
reappropriation of which can be commoditized
via a logic of the promise of oneness-in-identity.
The Mysteries of the Egyptians Were Mysteries

to the Egyptians Themselves – Caché
Caché (dir. Michael Haneke, 2005) is an anti-
colonial film insofar as it challenges the Orientalist
logic of oneness in alterity. It shows that there
is no exception in subjectivity, that the ego is
master in the house of neither the Westerner nor
the colonized s ubject – all Becoming is marked by
universal Lack. A universal politics based on this
insight may generate a future where the exploi-
tation and subjugation of the Other ceases to
continue in the excessive ways that it has marked
capitalist society because there is no promise to
be commoditized in that Other.
Caché depicts a bourgeois-bohemian literary
critic in Paris (Georges) who begins to receive
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packages containing video- tapes of his house.

It is unclear from whom these packages come
and whose perspective they depict. Georges then
receives cards depicting a childlike drawing of
a man having his throat cut and, later, another
video that depicts a working-class suburb.
In the first instance, the undefined Gaze of the
videos evokes an unease in Georges, exposing his
own Lack, so easily forgotten in his milieu as an
upper-middle-class television host – he is directly
confronted with the anxiety of Gaze (“What does
the Other want of me?”). The ambiguous signi-
fiers and the sense he is being watched stir a guilt
in him as he begins to conceive of the sender:
Majid, a boy, now man, of his own age whom his
parents adopted following the death of his par-
ents during the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians,
drowned by the police in the Seine.
Aesthetically, the film borrows motifs from
the work of Camus. Whilst in the work of the
absurdist, the Arab is barely subjectivized and
is conceived of as a threat to the pied-noirs who
know nothing of the Other’s desires, and is
haunted by the mystery of their Das Ding (the
dimension of desire that it is impossible to imag-
ine), Haneke’s work goes further by subjectivizing
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the orphan Majid, whose desires are shown to be

ambiguous even to himself. In a final interaction
with Georges, a tape recording of which is sent
to him, Majid denies any knowledge at all of the
packages and slits his own throat.
Whilst conservative identity politics sustains
the logic of colonization by consciously elevating
and unconsciously debasing the subjectivity of the
Other by casting them as “wise,” “all-knowing”
or “noble” and thus of a transcendentally alter-
nate subjective status to the Westerner, thereby
preserving the possibility of oneness in totality on
which the commodity logic of capitalism relies,
emancipatory politics posits a shared Lack that
can never be defeated in life or death. This insight
inspires a universal politics of collectivity rather
than exception and challenges the enemy-making
dialectic of utopianism upon which exclusion,
exploitation and subjugation are predicated.
Recognition and Identification –

Ingrid Goes West
The screen medium of social platforms has come
to dominate collective life. Particularly since
the pandemic, interfacing between dialectical
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subjects in the public sphere has been replaced

by commoditized interactions that take place via
a screen. This has had destabilizing effects for
the subject, who – unrecognized – will inevitably
come to invest further in an imagined absolution
offered by capitalist logic, which itself facilitates
the greater extraction of surplus value from the
subject and their greater, second-order alienation.
Whilst everything that was once sacred has
been profaned by market forces – for example,
many young people can no longer afford to have
children and neoliberal ideology has defeated the
reactionary dynamics within institutions such as
marriage and religion, but also the reassurance
they once offered – the inability for social media
to offer recognition to the subject has redoubled
the absence of the latter in a society that no longer
provides roles.
The Other of social media is a commoditized
object who is portrayed as whole and complete.
Materially, Tiktoks and Instagram posts evoke
the totality of the star- on-screen as witnessed
during the Hollywood Golden Age, but do not
– like film at its b est – expose the star’s Lack.
Tweets have the aesthetic authority of black
typeface against white, synonymous with the
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published word. This has endowed the Other of

social media with the appearance of being more
authoritative than they are. As Dolar has pointed
out,28 this is a phenomenon that has had disin-
tegrative effects on the social collective where we
witness – forever, once published – the opinions
of others, rumor and gossip (once relegated to
the private sphere) with the traumatic veneer of
officialdom, leading to a distrust of the Other, to
self-policing and to a libidinal investment in can-
cellation when it seems like the only recognition
available in the privatized public sphere.
Whilst the dialectical complexity of film allows
for the viewer to be let down in their transferential
relationship with the subject portrayed on screen,
social media provides a non- dialectical, non-
relationship with the Other. On corporatized
platforms, where even the “like” is a commod-
ity, an individual’s page is not only the locus of
their personal brand, but also the site of labor
extraction. Whilst the ethos of philanthropic cap-
italism, a derivative of corporate oligopoly, drives
subjects to simultaneously display their successes
as well as all that is stacked against them, both
phenomena – e ven the latter, “more authentic”
one – are commoditized. The Other, therefore,
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appears whole and complete even in their non-

completeness. Lack becomes loss via commodity
logic.
Recognition through the Gaze of the divided
Other – o nly possible because of the discernment
they offer because they are divided – is what gen-
erates the ego in childhood and facilitates the
navigation of public life that would otherwise be
experienced as traumatic. The process of recogni-
tion is ongoing throughout the subject’s life and
vital. Since the Other of social media appears
undivided, they cannot offer the subject the
recognition via discernment that would usually
occur in the intersubjective encounter.
The addictive nature of social media confirms
that no intersubjective recognition is taking place
there. The subject curates their brand via their
social media page and attempts to reality-test their
identity via the reception of “likes” and “com-
ments.” When no recognition occurs, the subject
comes back for more. Any attempt the user makes
to assuage their Lack through Instagram ulti-
mately feeds it. Finding no recognition on these
platforms, the subject’s mode of enjoyment in
relating to them becomes one of the ressentiment
of “annoy-ment,” the painful pleasure of envious
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voyeurism, laughter at the Other’s earnestness or

irritation at the logic of the “humblebrag” which
pervades the self-commoditization into which the
subject of social media is forced according to the
contradictory logic of philanthropic capitalism.
Ingrid Goes West (dir. Matt Spicer, 2017) is the
story of a down-and-out millennial who invests
in the Instagram posts of a successful influencer
from Venice, California (Taylor). Ingrid distracts
herself from her own material conditions by
imagining that she and Taylor could be friends.
She blows her inheritance on a short-lived trip to
Los Angeles to stalk her prospective bestie.
Over the course of the film, through the inter-
subjective productivity of the real-life encounter,
Ingrid comes to understand that Taylor is as mis-
erable as she is, that she is insecure, that Taylor’s
apparently perfect boyfriend is in fact a pathetic,
untalented leach, although it takes Ingrid failing
at an overdose to truly reach rock bottom and
confront her life.
Whilst the film offers an exception of clo-
sure in that Ingrid broadcasts this overdose via
Snapchat and receives recognition for doing so
in the form of her post going viral, she comes at
length to understand that she has repressed an
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acknowledgment of her dialectical reality and the

possibility of finding joy in ordinary unhappiness
according to her own desires, having invested so
heavily in a fantasy that was not hers. According
to the logic of the living flower, Ingrid is able to
build a new life and create new love in the world
as it is, not as she fantasizes it might be.
“Jouir à cause des entraves” – The Dreamers

The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci
expresses how film can shape desire, even on
the level of eroticism. In ’68, three students –
American Matthew, and Parisian twins Théo

and Isabelle – imitate the films they watch at the
Cinémathèque Française and play sexual games
according to the dynamics they see on screen,
conceiving of this pursuit as intrinsically politi-
cal. Evoking Genet’s The Balcony,29 the political
action of the film in fact takes place outside their
window. Whilst the notion that “the personal is
political” may be well known to them, it seems
that the students have misunderstood its prin-
cipal tenet – that the personal is political insofar
as each individual is connected to the universal
via their Lack. It is perhaps clearer, therefore, to
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say that the interpersonal, or the intersubjective,

is political; the individual sexual escapades of
bourgeois students certainly does not constitute
productive political activism in and of itself.
Whilst, in the film, certainly more activism is
taking place in the streets of Paris than between
the students’ bedsheets, it has been recognized by
many that the student protests of ’68 took a non-
emancipatory turn in their misunderstanding of
the politics of desire in which they were invested.
Rather than conceiving of desire as universal –
and therefore non-capitalistic – the promise of
transcendence in desire re-particularized the uni-
versal phenomenon, resulting in the expansion
and solidification of capitalism via the ethos of
the protests, even into realms that were previously
conceived of as outside its sphere of influence.
The sexual revolution lost its emancipatory
potential when it became invested in a utopian
(non-divided) logic, leading to the commoditiza-
tion of sex and relationships and the exploitation
of sexual desire in the advertising of products.
The utopian turn in the politics of ’68 can be
viewed in the slogan that commanded the subject
to “jouir sans entraves” (enjoy without limits).
Politically and psychoanalytically, this is a logical
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impossibility: it is precisely limitation that gener-

ates desire.
Capitalism relies on the illusion that there is
both a transcendence on offer in getting what we
want and that obstacles to the object of desire are
contingent and eradicable, rather than necessary
to sustain enjoyment. Whilst the melancholic
experiences a loss in their desire by attaining the
longed- for object and experiencing its impo-
tence, the depressive is unable to enjoy the loss
of the object that it feels spiritually connected
to, but materially separate from. Whilst utopian
logic focuses on the possibility of fulfillment,
emancipatory logic undermines the capitalist Bad
Infinite by encouraging the subject to enjoy the
creative possibility of their Lack as such.
In the film, the three students have huge
amounts of sex but remain unfulfilled. They fall
into a sexual stupor. Isabelle attempts to restimu-
late desire by enacting loss – a murder suicide,
which itself is abruptly interrupted, and the stu-
dents’ desire restimulated, by the intrusion of the
external, political world when a brick is thrown
through their window.
It is for this reason that Lacan warned the
students of ’68, “ce à quoi vous aspirez comme
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psychocinema
révolutionnaires, c’est à un maître. Vous l’aurez”30

(What you are looking for as revolutionaries is a
master. You will have one). From this perspec-
tive, the conscious revolution of the students was
not a political one, but rather one that solid-
ified capitalist desire and that m ystified – b ut
sustained – the Master Signifier of capitalism.
What the students misunderstood about desire
was that one cannot enjoy without constraint.
Enjoyment is only possible because of it. What is
political in psychoanalysis is the transformation
of desire in relation to the obstacle, the enjoy-
ment of the obstacle toward a Good Infinity
when the subject understands there can be no
end to their desire and there is therefore no need
to desperately scapegoat, subjugate and exploit to
sustain it.
Who, or Where,
Is the Emancipatory Subject? – Pig
Many of the trends in contemporary arthouse and
experimental cinema have regarded themselves
as progressive in their move to fragment grand
narrative structures and splinter the film form,
seeing form and narrative itself as restrictive and
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repressive. These movements have cast heavily

structured and plotted narratives as conserva-
tive. But the highly structured nature of narrative
film could, in fact, be seen as the apotheosis of
emancipatory cinema and precisely that which
may challenge a conservative mindset, not only
because it is popular and libidinally compelling,
but because it offers a mechanism that uncon-
sciously transforms desire.
André Bazin criticized the tendency of cinema
to seek or simulate fantasy, arguing that cinema
is political insofar as it is realistic.31 In the six-
ties, Noël Burch built on Bazin’s work,32 arguing
for a new, emancipatory “cinema of the future”
that would break from the limitations of the
kinds of narrative structures favored by main-
stream cinema – viewed, by him, as ideological
and politically d angerous – into a progressive,
fragmentary, experimental form that would be
the ally of class consciousness and liberation. But
this anarchistic approach has not yet yielded a
liberatory class consciousness it aspired to and, in
fact, has contributed to the greater mystification
of capitalism precisely because it promised lib-
eration without confronting material conditions
and was an ethos readily commoditized by the
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market, whilst simultaneously offering a cathartic

Imaginary that confidently affirmed progress and
change.
Film is not political in its representational
qualities, but in its psychoanalytic characteristics.
Unless art transforms libido, it remains within
the capitalist register, often redoubling the toxic-
ity of the system via mystification.
Audre Lourde posited that “the master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”33
Whilst it could be claimed that the “traditional”
narrative form of plotted cinema represented the
“master’s tools” during the Golden Age of early
twentieth- century Hollywood and during the
supremacy of American popular culture in later
decades, given the changes to the economic and
cultural order via the rise of the state-sustained
corporate oligopoly, today’s master’s tools may
in fact be very different and may pertain not to
the riven narrative form that characterized tra-
ditional cinema, but rather to the aesthetic (a)
politics that has come to decorate studio films
and to the anarchistic, non-materialist approach
that has come to dominate the “independent”
sphere. Across both spaces, the identity of the
maker has often been granted supremacy over
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psychocinema
the artful content of the w ork – a logic of solip-

sism and commodification that has outstripped
the political potential of a focus on the universal
viewing experience of the public. Many critics,
perhaps fearful of losing their footing in a pre-
carious landscape, read works not according to
the artistic qualities of their manifest content, but
according to the work’s ideological adherence to
culturally accepted points of view or the identity
of those who made it. Thus, much of film culture
has missed the political possibility of the encoun-
ter with the novelty of Lack in film. At a time of
immense economic precarity – a nd with the ever-
present threat of the trauma of finally accepting
the failures of the system in which we are all so
deeply, unconsciously invested – a repression of
the productive Lack in film as artform acts as a
soothing fetish to protect ourselves from the truth
of our reality, to which Lack (in film’s Gaze, in
the unexpected non-unity of artistic output and
identity, in the challenge to comforting ideolo-
gies) would orient us.
Similar to the philanthropic drive amongst
robber barons during early twentieth- century
monopoly capitalism, the immoral workings of
corporate oligopoly have demanded an appeal
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psychocinema
to moralism to both mystify its functioning and

to drive a wedge between different population
groups who would have greater sway if they col-
laborated according to the universal logic of Lack
and recognized their shared interest. Impecunious
graduates are able to sustain a fantasy relationship
to the tragedy of their impoverishment precisely
by their debt-inducing neoliberal education by
adhering to the moral logic of the University
Discourse that sets them apart, consciously
at least, from the p roletariat – to which, mon-
etarily, they in fact have become aligned. The
University Discourse may claim to know in
advance the direction of political change, but it is
in fact an aesthetic, apolitical and utopian logic,
as evidenced in its disciplinary dynamic and its
impulse to fetishize the Other according to the
conservative promise of Orientalism.
Whilst the University Discourse confidently
pre-codes the contours of a revolution that may
never come, the Analyst’s Discourse remains open
to the surprise of potentiality within the political
space. Whilst well-meaning activists may nomi-
nate a given group with transcendent promise,
absolving themselves of political responsibility
in the process, past revolutions have shown that
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transformation can occur in the most unexpected

of places.
In revolutionary Russia, for example, in
nineteenth-century France and during the Arab
Spring, certain tipping points toward the poten-
tial of change came about when the soldiers turned
their weapons away from the people and toward
those in power. It was precisely the master’s tools
that offered an opening toward political change,
so much so that political theorist Benjamin
Studebaker has argued that perhaps the most ter-
rifying and reactionary component of our political
future is the replacing of soldiers and police with
non-subjective robots.34 Whilst training desensi-
tizes soldiers and police to the repressive violence
they enact on behalf of capital, there is always a pos-
sibility of transformation in the dialectical human
subject, whose division by the unconscious leaves
them open to hysteric change, to see the human
in the Other, to question the illogic of the system
they defend and to understand the righteousness
of siding with the collective. Robotic creatures
cannot do this. Armed with weapons and pro-
grammed to kill, there is absolutely no potential
for subjective change and therefore no threat to
systems of power.
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psychocinema
Pig (dir. Michael Sarnoski, 2021) is a film that

exploits contours of the traditional film form,
resulting in a range of emancipatory insights.
It is a political film dressed up as a traditional,
Hollywood caper, exploiting both the genre
expectations of the thriller form and the cast-
ing of Nicholas Cage, who metonymically – as
a signifier – evokes a particular universe as an
action figure.
The viewer invests in the traditional narrative
form here, following a reclusive truffle hunter
whose pig is stolen by criminals, only to be sur-
prised by the contrast to their expectations offered
by the universal insight of the film’s revelation.
Structurally, the quest appears to be an opposi-
tional one: Rob, played by Cage, is motivated
to retrieve an object on which his income seems
to rely or to enact redemptive violence on those
who stole it from him. Instead, in each encounter
with the Other (in this case, his former colleagues
from the high-end restaurant business that he has
renounced in favor of an impoverished life), Rob
exposes the contradiction and insincerity of their
choices via recognition. For example, his own ex-
prep chef has given up on his dream of running
a pub in favor of a trendy haute cuisine restaurant
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psychocinema
and confronts, through Rob’s eyes, the tragedy of

his decision.
Later, instead of taking revenge on the mob
boss (Darius) who orchestrated the stealing of his
pig, Rob cooks a special meal for him, the same
as the last one Darius and his wife had enjoyed
at Rob’s restaurant before her death. In sharing
the meal, both Rob and Darius are subjectively
transformed.
In this encounter, they each witness the Lack
in the Other, recognizing the grief they have both
experienced in losing their wives and they are
able to mourn via the consolation of the experi-
ence of the other.
For Rob, who has abstracted himself from
public life after the death of his own wife and
forgone the possibility of conversion via the sub-
jectivization of the Other through his quietism,
the journey into the world has exposed the con-
tradictions and limitations of his own approach.
Having mourned her, he is able to re-subjectivize
her and finally enjoy the sound of her voice via a
recording she left of herself singing I’m on Fire by
Bruce Springsteen.
Distinctly, but just as importantly, the viewer
– who has come to invest in the transcendent
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quality of the pig according to a logic of commod-

ity satisfaction – is let down in their cinematic
investment, exposed to its Lack, when they dis-
cover that the pig has been dead throughout the
entire film, killed even before Rob embarked on
his quest by the incompetent addicts employed to
kidnap it, and already made into bacon. Whilst
using the Hollywood cinematic structure, all
parties – c haracters and v iewers – c ome, through
the film, to embrace the fundamental Lack in
life – w hich, taken to its final logic, is life’s e nd
– precisely because the film’s traditional form
inspires a libidinal investment that leads all par-
ties to Lack and exposes to them in relief, in an
analogous dynamic to psychoanalysis, where the
analysand’s “misguided” investment in the ana-
lyst’s non-division is precisely that which allows
them to be confronted with their own Lack.
Whilst we can look to history and employ
philosophical reasoning to explore the patterns
in our repressive system to imagine the future
contours of possible political change, Pig reminds
us that we may not know in advance where the
emancipatory subject will be found or what form
a revolution might concretely take. By predicting
these things, or particularizing their location, we
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psychocinema
may sustain the libidinal economy that entraps

us, conferring an individual, group or dynamic
with transcendent potential and transforming the
promise they hold into a commodity that can be
bought and sold and therefore neutered of its
radicality.
Traversing the Fantasy – Phantom Thread

Traversing the fantasy is the process of recog-
nizing that the subject themself is the source of
the sublime quality of their fantasy and that this
sublimity is only made possible by the uncon-
scious oscillation between the hope of achieving
the object of desire and the reality of its impo-
tence. The subject enjoys the undermining of the
attainment of the object of their desire and may
unconsciously participate in its sabotage. The
subject’s desire is sustained by their perpetual
circling – a nd non-attainment – o f the lost object.
This is the universal structure of subjectivity,
but the dynamics of this structure, as well as form
the object of desire takes, differ in potentially
infinite ways, a phenomenon that makes mani-
fest both the operation of the material world on
the subject’s form of desire and the non-fixity of
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subjectivity at the point of its emergence from

Lack.
The subject’s fundamental fantasy is a decision
that they do not make; it is one that is made for
them via the contingent experiences of their early
years. Fantasy is a means by which the infant has
rationalized their place in the universe relative to
the contradictory desires of those around them
– in particular, the uncanny, destabilizing desire
of their primary caregiver, whose wants for them
the child can only guess. This structuring of the
infant’s subjectivity via fantasy condemns them
to play out their (mis)understanding of the desire
of the Other for the rest of their life.
Since this fantasy structure assists the subject
in managing their own Lack and protects them
from the trauma of witnessing their own self-
division, the objects around which the subject’s
fantasies are oriented take on a transcendent
power. This power is illusory. If the subject attains
the object of desire, they fall into melancholy,
confronted by the object’s blunt impotence. If
they find themselves too far from it, they fall
into depression, and must engage in a process of
mourning during which they stitch together the
puncture in the chain of signifiers provoked by
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psychocinema
this loss, reorienting themself toward the object

again according to a new logic.
Once the subject is able to accept and digest
the structuring of their desire by Lack, to bring
the Real of their desire to consciousness, they are
able to traverse their fantasy. Here, the problem
of desire is not resolved, but, rather, enjoyed. The
sublime of desire is understood as an “immanent
transcendence” that emerges from Lack, which
must continue to be undermined to be sustained.
Thus, in the traversing of fantasy, the nega-
tion of desire is negated. The failure of desire
is transformed into a generative possibility. The
subject is therefore now able to “fail better” since
their investment in the power of their object is
no longer transcendent but material. Since the
subject is the origin of the sublime in their own
fantasy, to traverse it is to de-otherize jouissance.
The subject acknowledges that no Other has
stolen their jouissance; it was with the subject all
along, unrecognized and enjoyed.
Whilst, ideologically, love might be rep-
resented by terms refedrring to a lover like “a
soulmate” or “twin flame,” expressing two per-
fectly matching sides of the same whole that can
be unified in oneness, love involves the imperfect
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play of Lack and fantasy. In love, for Lacan, the

subject receives something they do not want in
their p artner – t he end of a fantasy that the “one”
will utterly fulfill them – v ia something they do
not h ave – the Lack in their subjectivity and the
structure of their own fantasy. To love, then, is
to traverse the fantasy. The lovers find in each
other not a fulfillment of their fantasy but a Lack
that scuppers the perfect attainment of “object a”
and makes possible an infinite investment in that
which the other does not have.
Phantom Thread (dir. P. T. Anderson, 2017)
depicts how sado-masochism can be an embodi-
ment of love. Famed fashion designer and avowed
bachelor Reynolds Woodcock falls for waitress
Alma Elson. She becomes his model and lover,
though there is immense tension in their rela-
tionship. Reynolds is obsessive and rigid; Alma
is equally stubborn and refuses to be controlled.
The couple, each party as intransigent as the
other, cannot find equilibrium in love. Alma tries
to win over Reynolds with displays of affection;
Reynolds lambasts any disruption to his meticu-
lous routine.
Neither Alma nor Reynolds realizes that
this conflictual pattern sustains their love by
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undermining the fantasy that each other is the

perfect match. Each gains enjoyment from the
imaginary ideal that the other could perfectly
assuage their subjective Lack and fit perfectly into
their lifestyle and routine. By sabotaging their
relationship, they luxuriate in the fantasy of a
perfect fit and do not realize that it is the imper-
fection of the other – that each seeks to dominate
the other and have them yield to their own desire
– that sustains that very desire.
Alma resolves to take revenge upon Reynolds,
poisoning him with wild mushrooms. Alma
nurses him back to health. They reconcile and
marry, but, after their honeymoon, they fall back
into their conflictual patterns. A client suggests to
Reynolds that his work might be losing its edge.
Reynolds confides in her that Alma’s presence is
a distraction and that he is considering divorce.
Alma overhears this conversation and poisons
Reynolds again, this time with a wild mush-
room omelet. Reynolds now willingly eats the
dish. Alma tells him that she wants to make him
sick and dependent upon her. By bringing their
conflictual dynamic to consciousness, Reynolds
and Alma begin to enjoy the jouissance of their
inevitably impossible relationship. By corralling
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psychocinema
the conflict of domination and submission to the

play of poisoning and nursing back to health, a
dynamic they experienced as unpleasant becomes
enjoyable. They identify with their drives, with
the undermining of their own desire, and no
longer s uffer – in their wider lives – as a result of
them.
Not only is a film such as Phantom Thread an
object lesson in traversing the fantasy, but the
structure of film itself can encourage this process
by using plot to corral the desire of the protago-
nist to a point of revelation, exposing the viewer
to the inevitable Lack in their desire and the pri-
macy of the process of plot/fantasy in terms of
the subject’s enjoyment.
Only a Christian Can Be an Atheist –

The Wizard of Oz
Perversely, consumer capitalism not only directs
the subject’s libido toward commoditized objects
that they are told to desire through advertising,
but also tells the subject that they can be fulfilled
in their desire by a specific object at all.
Today, this lie is often repressed via fetishistic
disavowal. The atheistic subject of contemporary
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life may very well be aware that there is no

promise in fulfillment via the commodity, but,
as Octave Mannoni explains, the subject oper-
ates on a logic of: “I know very well, but all the
same . . .”35 The fact, for example, that studies
have shown branded medication to work better
than non-branded medication on the symptoms
of illness, despite being composed of precisely
the same chemical ingredients, speaks to the con-
tinued way in which belief in the commodity’s
mystical powers operates upon the contemporary
subject’s mind and body, despite the confident
logic of atheism having pervaded much of public
and private life.
Capitalist companies may express conscious
knowledge of the impotence of the ideology of
promise, but mere lip service in this regard does
nothing to transform the functioning of their
company’s bottom line. For example, in the
recent Mattel-funded film Barbie, many of its
characters offer critiques of the company’s own
products and practices, but Mattel continues to
rely on the premise of the ideology of promise –
that the subject can be fulfilled in the purchasing
of one of their c ommodities – t o sustain its busi-
ness model.
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psychocinema
It is as if non-belief is precisely that which

sustains belief within the contemporary capital-
ist world. As the subject approaches its trauma
in recognizing their unresolvable constitution by
Lack, they radically turn back away from it at the
last moment by avowing knowledge of the way
capitalism functions in order to disavow the trau-
matic truth of the Real of their desire.
Over the history of theology, many thinkers
– from Ernst Bloch to Heidegger, Paul Tillich,
Simone Weil, Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton,
Don Cuppitt and Žižek – have made this claim
in relation to Christianity. For Block, “The best
thing about religion is that it makes for heretics
. . . Only an atheist can be a good Christian;
only a Christian can be a good atheist.”36 It is
only in giving oneself over fully to the promise
of fulfillment in belief that one can confront the
impotence of that belief in reality and the ulti-
mate truth of the division of the nature of the
universe – t hat we are less than nothing.
Throughout the history of psychoanalysis,
misguided criticisms have been leveled at it for
functioning in a patriarchal, absolutist way,
promising a solution to the subject’s lacking
desire. For the critic, psychoanalysis presents a
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knowledgeable figure of singular authority who

holds command over their analysand, who often
lies vulnerable and exposed on the couch. The
“patriarchal” analyst is said to tell the analysand
how they desire and offer a solution to the prob-
lems of that desire.
Of course, the opposite is true. The ultimate
insight of psychoanalysis is that there is no all-
knowing Big Other offering a solution to the
conundrum of the subject’s contradictory desire,
and the job of the analyst is to work with the
analysand to gradually come to terms with this
reality and incorporate this insight within the
workings of their life.
There is an aspect of the well-worn critique,
however, that does carry weight. The critic of the
analyst’s authority misunderstands the divided
nature of the analyst themself, but their delu-
sion in their belief is one with which the analyst
would hope the analysand arrives at the start of
their analysis.
In order to enact transference upon the ana-
lyst, the analysand must believe in the analyst’s
capacity to “cure” them. This is what Lacan
refers to in his comment that “les non-dupes
errent”37 (the non-duped are mistaken). This is
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play upon “le nom du père” (the name of the

father), a function that is missing for the psy-
chotic subject who is, initially at least, unable to
enact transference upon the figure of authority.
In this case, the analyst must position them-
self differently toward the analysand in order to
emphasize the role of the “father,” rather than
undermine it.
For the non-psychotic subject, in order for the
psychoanalytic relationship to play out between
analysand and a nalyst – for the analysand to suc-
cessfully project their desire upon the analyst
– the analysand must, at first, be duped by the
analyst’s authority.
The over- investment of the analysand in
the knowledge of the analyst is like that of the
Christian believer in the power of God. It is
only because the analysand has invested in the
promise of the analyst’s knowledge that the
gradual disabusing of this illusion can take place
and that the analysand is capable of confront-
ing the Lack in their desire. The play between
two lacking subjectivities – that of the analyst
and that of the analysand via transference and
countertransference – creates a subjective experi-
ence in surplus and the conditions for subjective
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transformation. This generative experience is

not itself transcendent, beyond contradiction.
Rather, it is manifest from Lack and could not be
generated any other way.
Film has a similar power to generate something
“immanently transcendent” in the subject as a
result of the transferential relationship between
the viewer and the screen. The viewer, lacking in
their desire, invests in the desire of the protago-
nist as the analysand invests in the knowledge
of the analyst. They experience excitation at the
prospect that the protagonist will be fulfilled in
their desire, and that so – in the position of the
spectator – m
ight they.
Furthermore, like Freud’s Fort- Da game,
the plotted film plays on the expectations of
the viewer, involving them psychically in a rep-
etitious process that piques their desire. Films
in Hollywood are bought and sold by genre.
Scripts are pitched according to the ways they
play on and subvert expectation (an agent sell-
ing The Shallows might claim, “It’s Jaws meets
Castaway!”; Inception might be sold as The Matrix
meets Memento) and attract a paying audience via
offering anticipation in what they know and the
thrill of what they might not.
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psychocinema
Through the Fort-Da game, Freud recognized

the way the child derives pleasure from the repet-
itive action of making an object disappear then
reappear as a means of coping with the anxiety
caused by the absence of their primary caregiver.
The game also exposes the importance of rep-
etition in both the psychic development of the
subject and the ways they invest themself libidi-
nally in the world around them.
The effects of investing the viewer’s libido in
the point of revelation are two-fold. First, film has
the capacity to consciously disabuse the viewer of
the existential power of the promise in fulfillment
by raising their expectation and exposing the
emptiness in their desire in relief via revelation.
This is the logic of the ripping of the temple cur-
tain in the Jewish tradition. Second, the viewer is
able to cope with the trauma of the loss of fantasy
via the excitation of the plotted form as the child
who manages the loss of the breast in the Fort-Da
game. By pleasurably disabusing the subject of
their investment in ideology, film can help orient
the viewer to a political relationship with reality
and the Other.
The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939)
provides a famous example of the temple curtain
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psychocinema
ripping at its point of revelation. Dorothy and

her colleagues discover that the Wizard is not the
all-knowing deity they hope for, one who can
solve their problems in an instant, but rather a
man behind a curtain who offers them the insight
that they already possess all the knowledge they
require. The power of this insight is only made
possible by the transferential relationship the
characters have with the Wizard and the subse-
quent quest on which they embark, the active
process of which exposes them to the insights
that they latterly come to understand through
their encounter with him. They are shown by the
Wizard what they already know and would oth-
erwise not have understood unless they embarked
on their journey with the motivation to discover
knowledge they believed was concealed from
them.
Although The Wizard of Oz is a conscious exam-
ple of the exposure of the audience toward the
Lack in desire and the Lack in the Big Other via
the nature of its plot, all film structured around a
story has the capacity to offer the viewer a “small
death” in their desire. Whether the character with
whom the viewer identifies is fulfilled or not, the
orgasmic release in the answering of the primary
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question posed by the plot confronts the viewer

with the end of their desire. This release may be
dissatisfying, if it accords with the pattern of the
impossible promise so prevalent in capitalism, or
productive, if the question is answered in such a
way that it opens the subject toward the impos-
sibility of their desire as such.
Film, because of its capacity to mobilize and
undermine desire, has the capability of func-
tioning like psychoanalysis upon the subject in
this way to confront them with the Lack in their
desire and – u
ltimately – the Lack in the universe
as such.
Outopia – The Children of Men

Just as Lack generates speech, thought and subjec-
tivity, as non-completion is that which generates
and sustains desire and as sex offers pleasure in
the obstacles that lead up to the “little death” of
desire in orgasm, the chaosmos of the u niverse –
in all its depth dimensions, difficulties, d
arkness
– offers the productive grounds from which an
emancipatory political collective can emerge.
Though common cultural assumptions might
have it that psychoanalysis turns its interest
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psychocinema
inwardly toward the desire of the individual

subject, it is political insofar as it transcends
particularism and leads the subject toward their
universal status as a lacking subject. Further, it
points to the social nature of desire. Desire is
only possible within a social network. There is no
transcendent desire that exists before the emer-
gence of subjectivity, but rather subjectivity is the
vessel of desire and the subjectivity of the Other
generates the Lack within us that inspires our
own desire and teaches us, foundationally, how
to desire.
Lyotard is often associated with postmodern-
ism but is better understood as a critic of it. He
attended Lacan’s lectures in the mid-sixties and
subsequently coined the term “libidinal econ-
omy”38 to describe the material economic system
of capitalism in which we d esire – and which
is driven by desire. Because of the social nature
of desire, we cannot “opt out” of the libidinal
collective and, in fact, by consciously choosing
to act as superior, “ethical” subjects beyond the
libidinal fray, we may end up suppressing the
contradictions of capitalism all the more, lead-
ing to greater suffering in the return of this
repression.
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psychocinema
While a long history of certain well-meaning

“political” projects that accord with the logic
of the Beautiful Soul shows an aspiration to
be removed from the problem of existence,
dreaming of utopian alternatives or cleansing
oneself of complicity in a corrupt system and
projecting moral insufficiency onto the Other,
for psychoanalysis – as for Lyotard – the only
way out is to recognize the libidinal structure of
the system, comprised as it is of every subject’s
interpersonally evolved desire, and transform it.
Just as there is no possibility of the consciously
pure ethical consumer extinguishing their capital-
ist libido without politico-social transformation,
the philosophical insight into the structure of the
subject’s capitalist desire does not extinguish their
ability to desire and to enjoy. In other words,
by subscribing to an anti-capitalist agenda, we
do not prevent ourselves from desiring within
the parameters of capitalist desire. Likewise, cri-
tiquing or making visible the structure of desire
– as is being delineated here – does little to
change it. It does, however, offer the subject the
chance to think about creating p ractices – for
instance in art or perhaps, in particular, in film –
which might be oriented toward a change in our
131

psychocinema
relationship not to our own individual desires, as

so much discussion is oriented, but to our social
and collective interpersonal role as desiring sub-
jects, even – or perhaps most especially – on an
unconscious level.
One key feature of a practice oriented toward
changing the desire of the subject would be its
immediacy: it would not be rooted in utopian
promises for the future.
Utopian visions of society are always dystopian
in practice. Psychoanalytically speaking, the tox-
icity of the fascist’s vision of utopian purity is that
it is never total enough because it cannot embrace
Lack. The totalitarian transforms the Lack that is
foundational to the universe and human life into
contingent loss.
The formation of an enemy, necessary to cast
as a possibility a world without loss, creates and
maintains the conditions for oppression and
alienation of the collective and of the oppressed
class in particular, in order to sustain income
for the few, generated – under capitalism – by
surplus value. On a societal level, the transfor-
mation of capitalist desire through the logic of
psychoanalysis is not to reduce the utopia to its
dystopian opposite for dystopia is precisely what
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psychocinema
is present within the logic of utopia as its returned

repressed – as Ian Parker has posited,39 Stalinist
realism accords with the Bad Infinity of capital-
ist realism and is just as right-wing. Instead, the
analyzed desire acts according to an alternative
logic – o ne that might be termed “outopian.”
The circular infinity of an outopian society
might accord with Hegel’s logic of the True
Infinite, as an alternative to the Bad Infinity of
capitalism. Here, the toxic excitation of drive
is assuaged, but not extinguished. The subject
is able to enjoy the productive consequences of
their Lack in sustainable ways, not by being pre-
sented with a promise of a future, but by being
allowed to embrace the contradictions of desire in
the present moment. In this sense, Hegel, Marx
and Freud all opposed utopianism. Utopianism,
like capitalism, believes in the possibility of an
undivided subject to come, whereas the only
possible route to change comes from rejecting
this ideological myth, embracing the emancipa-
tory present where action toward change can
materially take place. This logic not only holds
philosophically, but practically: the urgency of
our present moment demands a transformation
that takes place within it.
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psychocinema
Žižek borrows the term “possible worlds”40

from analytic philosophy to describe the ways in
which subjects can be caught up in alternate uni-
verses where a utopia could exist, even when they
have accepted the death of perfection in their
own life. Though these worlds are not possible,
they can hold sway over the subject, distracting
them from the emancipatory power of the enjoy-
ment they might experience in their life within
the contradictory present.
The Christian apocalypticist may embody this
libidinal dynamic. Unable to digest the complex,
and imperfect, nature of the world as it is, they
imagine their experience is contingently difficult
– n ot because of the material conditions their
politics may or may not sustain, but because they
happen to be living within the end times. Instead
of transforming their society through collective
political action, the apocalypticist turns their
attention to a possible world where life could
be better at the hands of a superior being whose
whims they can appease, or if others believed in
the way that they did.
Progressivism is at its most progressive when
it rejects an ideological retroactivity that expli-
cates history as a gradual, if stilted, process of
134

psychocinema
improvement toward the present. This fetishistic

approach can often compensate for poor con-
temporary economic conditions by focusing on
the moral perfectionism of developing cultural
attitudes. It is at its best when it turns away from
a reality to come in favor of the direct moment,
in all its contradictory possibility, embracing a
universal politics that does not employ the non-
progressive as a contingent obstacle who casts the
fantasy of a perfect society in relief, but works
with them in the understanding that the site of
anti-
capitalist politics is within the contradic-
tion of the present and that the embrace of that
contradiction may be the only means by which
society can transform its collective libido from
the reactionary logic of Bad Infinity toward an
emancipatory one in True Infinity.
Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
depicts a post-apocalyptic Britain where humans
have ceased to reproduce due to the unlivable
conditions that capitalism has produced. The
government uses military force to defend its bor-
ders from immigrants who continue to travel to
the country as one of the remaining states with
a semblance of functioning government. In this
context, a group of underground activists travel
135

psychocinema
with a young immigrant woman, the first person

to be pregnant in a decade, to a boat off the south
coast called Tomorrow.
The dystopian society depicted in the film has
been made so by capitalist utopianism. The prom-
ise of future profit has killed both the present and
the future – a s exemplified in the death of birth.
There is literally no future for this totalitarian
state, save for the pregnant immigrant. As the
activists flee the country, Tomorrow only exists
in the uncertain waters of the open ocean.
Political Film – Two Days, One Night

In Two Days, One Night (2014, dir. Dardenne
brothers), a young woman overcomes depres-
sion via an encounter with the collective that
allows her to digest and symbolize the Real of
her despair. By witnessing the Lack in the Other
and experiencing the recognition it can provide
her, she is able, gradually, to confront reality as
it is, not as she hoped it would be, and is able to
embrace the Lack she psychically attempted to
keep at a distance, manifested in her depression.
The film’s structure is political and accords with
the logic of Marx’s living flower. This structure
136

psychocinema
may offer a metaphor for the universal potential

of film as such.
Sandra works in a Belgian solar-panel factory
and has taken time off because of her mental
illness. Her boss has proposed that her work-
mates share her salary since they have been able
to manage her workload in her absence and it
makes no difference to productivity if she is
dismissed. There will be a vote on Monday to
finalize the decision. Over the course of the
weekend, Sandra approaches each of these work-
mates in a final attempt to convince them to vote
for her return.
She has been bed- bound, but news of the
decision is so painful that it is a catalyst for an
existential shift in her reality. An Event, it offers
the possibility of conversion in relation to the
conditions of her life, but it is only through a
confrontation with the collective that she is able
to bear the weight of her loss and carry it.
In depression, the subject experiences a too-
much-ness. A loss is felt as so great that the
meaning of the subject’s life has been broken.
There is a rupture in the chain of signifiers and
there is an invasion of the Real upon the subject.
There is no space to desire anything else but the
137

psychocinema
object that has been lost – in this case, Sandra’s

social role and her livelihood.
The process of encountering her colleagues
allows Sandra to begin to knit together the
broken chain. She is able to exit the horror of her
subjective experience into a reality that indeed
generated the horror, but that is more bearable
once it has been symbolized and that must be tar-
ried with in order to be transformed.
Although the vote does not pass in her favor,
the intersubjective encounter with each of her
colleagues allows for a process of recognition to
occur. The very fact each colleague has the abil-
ity to choose one way or the other shows them
also to be a dialectical subject, constituted by
Lack. The stories they share of their own difficul-
ties affirm not only that each subject is marked
by Lack, but that they dwell together within an
unproductive, inhuman economic order, the
bringing to consciousness of which may lead to
political transformation.
Sandra’s contingent crisis allows her to con-
front and embrace this universal Lack. Not only
is she buoyed by her own strength of will to con-
front her former employer, she is refolded into
the collective by transforming her desire from
138

psychocinema
a logic of exception (that a material event can

assuage her suffering, which is constitutive) to
an embrace of reality in all its grit, grime and
tragedy. In this way, Sandra has been politicized.
Whilst utopian logic keeps the subject fixated
on a future that will never come, the politicized
subject is able to take action in the present, know-
ing that life exists here and now and that change
can only occur in the infinite potential of this
ever-unfolding moment.
Film can guide the subject, like Sandra, to a
confrontation with the Lack in their desire, the
Lack in the collective of subjectivity and the
inadequacy of the economy we invest in to satisfy
and sustain us.
139

Conclusion: Fail Again, Fail Better
Language Never Hits the Nail on the Head

In contrast to communication, which – when
functioning properly – always means what it
says, language involves an inherent misunder-
standing. The reason for this lies in the way that
language refers to a Master Signifier. This is a sig-
nifier that generates meaning, but which cannot
itself be captured by meaning. Words, such as
God, Freedom, Justice and Love can act in this
way: words that generate unending discourse, yet
cannot be adequately captured by that discourse.
Anselm defined the word “God” as that which
names something beyond naming.1 Unlike
140

conclusion: fail again, fail better
communication, language is always “missing”

something, which means that it can never be a
closed system. In Derridean terms, we can say
that language operates with an “undeconstructa-
ble” core that is a type of eternal absence that
generates the very discourse that it evades.
Thus, the words of this book are doomed to fail
in their attempt to capture that elusive quality in
film that makes it so compelling and therefore so
productive. The greatest aspiration I can have for
them is that they generate more words and more
discussion or that they inspire film work that
may engage with psychoanalytic ideas in all their
openness, mystery and contradiction, beyond the
ways in which they have been conceived within
the neoliberal ideology of identity, difference and
closure.
Film as Theology
Human subjects are spoken into existence. We
are overwritten by language that always fails
and by desire that can never be fulfilled. In our
impossible relationship with meaning and with
fulfillment, drives are created, w
hich – w hilst
endowing life with the depth- dimension that
141

psychocinema
makes it livable – can cause us to act against

our best interest in the religious hope that we
can transcend our condition. Psychoanalysis and
the Analyst’s Discourse are therefore our much
needed allies. But even aspects of psychoanaly-
sis can be perverted by promises of fulfillment,
of essence in the chaos of identity and in the
nullification of Lack in the self and the Other,
which undermine its very emancipatory power.
This is particularly true when material conditions
become so unbearable that we are drawn to ideo-
logical solutions that soothe us from the reality
of our moment, precisely when it would be most
fruitful to confront it.
Film, with psychoanalysis, may offer a cultural
and political practice that operates on the col-
lective unconscious and reorients us toward the
infinite possibility of Lack, in place of the col-
lective theological practices that existed under
different forms of societal organization and
which – w hen stripped of their repressive or uto-
pian p
romises – allowed for the subject to live
more practically, less toxically, dwelling within
the mystery of the world.
142

A Privileged Artform
Film is the unique medium where Lack can
alight. Whilst capitalism harnesses the specific
ways humans attempt to overcome Lack, film
can expose the viewer to it. In this way, it may act
upon the analysand as the analyst in the process
of psychoanalysis, w hich – a t its b est – c onfronts
the subject with, and allows them to digest, the
Lack in their subjectivity and the Lack in the
world that generates them.
Film’s capacity to perform this function is the
result of many of its material factors. In addition
to the unconscious operation of the film over the
subject, a consideration of these factors via an
analytic approach, as well as the manifest content
of a given film, may also yield a philosophical and
political potentiality for the collective.
The Re-emancipation of Public Life

Philosophy is tarrying with the contradic-
tions of the universe. Politics is tarrying with
the contradictory desires of distinct members
within a group. Art is art insofar as it houses and
exposes contradiction. Contradiction cannot be
143

psychocinema
commoditized insofar as it cannot offer abso-

lution from Lack, which is the precise reason
we are most shielded from contradiction within
capitalism – a tragedy given that an orientation
toward it could transform the way we live in
the world. Capitalism is an exploitation of the
religious tendency in subjectivity – the drive to
seek oneness in oblivion – and it offers none
of the critique of this impulse that the best of
confessional religion provides. It has encroached
into nearly every crevice of modern life, per-
haps most especially into the intersubjective
relationship, to the extent that it has under-
mined itself and appears to be disintegrating and
reformulating.
Capitalism may be collapsing into its new
manifestation. The morbid symptoms of its crisis
could confront us with the nature of our world
and subjectivity and lead us, via collective poli-
tics, to a novel future. The greater repression of
its contradictions could lead us away from the
possibility of a future altogether. As in the society
depicted in The Children of Men, the Death Drive
of capital could sacrifice our tomorrow in eking
out the last possible element of profit from us
today.
144

Under the pervasive constraints of oppositional

capitalist ideology, even philosophy, politics and
art have become disfigured as commodities.
“Politics” has become an oppositional war of all
against all that sustains the promise of utopia
behind the contingent enemy of the Other whose
vision of the world does not accord with our
own. Much philosophy has come to accord with
the University Discourse under the regime of the
neoliberal institution where, instead of speak-
ing and thinking freely, one must neuter one’s
insights in favor of a set of oppositional ideas that
aesthetically accord with the history of thought,
but in fact sustain the extraction of surplus value
and the generation of scapegoats around whom
the non-dialectical society rationalizes its own
purity as it collapses.
Whilst film and art have long been commod-
itized to their detriment, the very structure of
film, the way it operates on the subject’s desire
and unconscious, the way it houses contradic-
tion and exposes its own repression of it, may
offer the collective a mechanism by which to re-
emancipate public life.
Whilst decades of theory and critique have
exposed the toxicity of capitalism to the capitalist
145

psychocinema
subject, it persists. Film, like psychoanalysis, may

offer an alternative approach in its capacity to
work against capitalist ideology via its work on
unconsciousness.
Film is a technology that was first created only
a few generations ago. Its p ower – m
echanistic,
in terms of affect and, most importantly, in terms
of fantasy – has been glimpsed by makers and
audiences, but often eclipsed by the oppositional
logic of capitalist Bad Infinity. A collectivist
medium, one that is widespread and popular, it
speaks to our desire, our desire speaks through
it and our desire is revealed to us by it. It is an
artform that works with human unconscious-
ness and reflects it back to us. With the right
approach, we may transform our relationship to
the artform, libidinally and therefore politically
and philosophically, which may yield for the col-
lective an emancipatory present and future that
we so desperately need.
146

Notes
Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse

1 Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ Analysis,” The Revised
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI, trans. James Strachey
(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2024), p. 217.
2 Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine
Herman (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), p. 194.
3 Alain Badiou, “Cinema as a Democratic Emblem,”
trans. Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon, Parrhesia 6
(2009), p. 4.
4 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow
of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2013).
5 Karl Marx, “Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique
of Political Economy,” www.marxists.org/archive/ma
rx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch15.htm.
6 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome, ed.
147

notes to pages 15–26
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge:

Polity, 2016).
7 Sophie Fiennes, dir., The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
(2006).
8 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton,
2000).
9 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre V: Les formations de
l’inconscient (1957–58), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
Seuil, 1998) pp. 466–7.
10 Todd McGowan, “The Gaze in Cinema,” Youtube,
uploaded by Todd McGowan, March 28, 2020,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ukJTaTgyQ4
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aphorism 108, Book III, The
Gay Science,” available at http://nietzsche.holtof.com
/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/the-gay-science/aphorism
-108-quote_6e7c2d49f.html.
12 Karl Marx, “Introduction, Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right,” available at www.marxists.org
/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.
Psychocinema
1 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre VII: L’éthique de la
psychanalyse (1959–60) (Paris: Seuil, 1986) p 61.
2 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Denis Porter (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 319.
3 G. W. F. Hegel, “The Phenomenology of Mind,”
available at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel
/works/ph/phprefac.htm.
148

4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.

A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 383.
5 Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,”
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (1946),
pp. 99–110.
6 Wilfred Bion, “A Theory of Thinking,” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 42 (July–August 1961),
pp. 306–10.
7 Wilfred Bion, Learning from Experience (London:
Tavistock, 1962), p. 7.
8 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, Volume I, trans. Judith Norman,
Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 338.
9 Vakhtang Gomelauri (2018) “Can You Die of Shame?”
Vackhtang Gomelauri LCSW [blog], available at
https://vakhtanggomelaurilcsw.wordpress.com.
10 Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The
Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2013).
11 Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex? (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2017), p. 97.
12 Todd McGowan, “The Universality of Non-
Belonging,” The Philosopher 108, 4 (Autumn 2020),
pp. 54–60.
13 Dylan Moran, “Dylan Moran (BBC America Comedy
Live Presents) Part 4 (Last),” Youtube, uploaded by
John Hio, July 19, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Rgm4kwMs-Mc.
14 G. W. F. Hegel, “Part One of the Encyclopaedia
of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic,” available at
149

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/
slessenc.htm#:~:text.
15 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI:
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co., 1998), p. 139.
16 Sigmund Freud [1905], Jokes and their Relation to
the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1960), pp. 137–8.
17 Groucho Marx, dir., Duck Soup (1933).
18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes
(London: Methuen, 1958), p. 60.
19 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film,
Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2007),
pp. 16–30.
20 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” Screen 16, 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18.
21 John Steinbeck, “A Primer on the ’30s,” Esquire (June
1960), pp. 85–93.
22 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 103.
23 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Écrits:
A Selection, trans. Allan Sheridan (London: Routledge,
2005) p. 3.
24 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
pp. 6–18.
25 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans.
A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 89.
26 Hegel, “The Phenomenology of Mind.”
27 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of
150

Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York:

W. W. Norton & Co., 2008) p. 116.
28 Mladen Dolar, “On Rumours, Gossip and
Related Matters,” in Objective Fictions: Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, Marxism, ed. Adrian Johnston
(Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 144–64.
29 Jean Genet, The Balcony (London: Faber Finds, 2015).
30 Jacques Lacan, Annexes au Séminaire, Livre XVII:
L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 239.
31 André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinema? (Paris: Cerf,
1976).
32 Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R.
Lane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981),
p. 15.
33 Andre Lourde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle
the Master’s House (London: Penguin, 2018).
34 Benjamin Studebaker, “Requiem for a Soldier,” in Four
Essays on the Revolutionary Subject (London: Everyday
Analysis, 2024), p. 62.
35 Octave Mannoni, “I Know Very Well, but All the
Same . . .”, in Perversion and the Social Relation, ed.
Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj
Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
pp. 68–92.
36 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of
the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann (New
York: Verso, 2009), p. viii.
37 Jacques Lacan, “Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent,”
available at https://nosubject.com/index.php?title=
Seminar_XXI&oldid=48747.
38 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans.
151

Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum Impacts,

2004).
39 Ian Parker, Stalinist Realism and Identity (London:
Everyday Analysis, 2024).
40 Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease without Cure (London:
Bloomsbury, 2023), p. 108.
Conclusion
1 Saint Anselm, Proslogion, trans. M. J. Charlesworth
(University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 54.
152

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Psychocinema

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First published in 2024 by Polity Press

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For further information on Polity, visit our website:

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Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse page 1

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From Opposition to Contradiction

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by a trend within the mainstream culture of both

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this discourse obfuscates the logic of the Master

A Poetic Logic, or A Metonymic One

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word’s signification in another context). Rather,

The Four Discourses

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greater obfuscation of its workings through ide-

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greater prevalence of oppositional theories that

Contradictory Film Theory

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functioning of the machine of cinema, digesting

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this dynamic, animating the viewer’s subjectivity

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are constituted by a fundamental Lack, that they

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force that is Lack, whilst exploiting it. Because

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economy, capitalism must repress it, forcing the

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implications of his neologism “sinthome” or

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that makes art art and distinguishes it from the

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– ­may expose to us, in relief, the symptoms of our

The Analyst’s Discourse Makes

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an imagined symbol of power and c­ ompleteness –

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For Lacan, despite the distinct modes of sexua-

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subject from their first breath to their last. It cuts

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live in unreasonable, unproductive and unequal

Political Revolution, Philosophical Revolution

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but recognized as an ontological reality always

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playing with and exposing our fantasies, which

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ordinary unhappiness of normality, to a socialist

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“Ne pas céder sur son désir” – The Devils

Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse page 1

– may expose to us, in relief, the symptoms of our

an imagined symbol of power and c ompleteness –

enjoyable and – at times – comforting for the

infinite potentiality of L ack – exemplifies a

confront the Lack in their d esire – itself an emer-

groups who share higher-order interests against

of signifiers, a sense-making logic-by-juncture,