Freedom

PROBLEMI and Alienation;

INTERNATIONAL, T EOr,
A vol. ZHumanism
5,I 2022; of thevol.
E MPROBLEMI, Non-All
60, no. 11-12, 2022
© Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis

Freedom and Alienation;

Or, Humanism of the Non-All
Matthew Flisfeder

Today, the popular concept of the Anthropocene, used to de-

note the human geological age, puts to question the centrality
of human subjectivity. Critical posthumanism—particularly in
its neo-Spinozan and Deleuzian ontological realist versions, tied
to immediacy and pure immanence—demands the de-centering
of the human subject, which, in its hubristic and Promethean
disregard for the non-human, appears to have set the world on
fire, causing irreparable environmental damage. But is an active
de-centering of the human subject truly possible? What if the
only way for us to properly assess the situation is by doing the
opposite—that is, of occupying an anthropocentric position,
not in the sense of human domination of the non-human world,
but one of making human subjectivity the methodological and
ethical center of our investigation into this conundrum? What if
the age of the Anthropocene demands, not the de-centering of
the human subject, but the reverse: what if it is because of the
Anthropocene that we must now aim to rethink a dialectical and
universalist humanism? What if it is the case, in other words, that
the human subject is the proletariat of, not the Anthropocene, but
the Capitalocene (Moore 2015)? For instance, as Fredric Jameson
(2019) puts it, the fact of the Anthropocene proves that human-
ity can truly change the world, but now it would be wise, as he
writes, to terraform it.

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In precisely the same way that the proletariat is the symptom

of the capitalist economy, the human subject is now the symptom
of the Capitalocene in the sense that the capitalist ecology is al-
ways already posthuman. By this I mean that the reifying forces
of capitalism are always in the process of undermining human
necessity, making humans merely instrumental in the generation
of profit—even and especially, that is, when we consider the fact
that the subject of bourgeois society is reified in its ownership
of private property. Objective property becomes a stand-in for
human subjectivity—which it trades on the market; or human
labor congealed in productive technology, an idea that autonomist
Marxists develop in their reading of Marx’s “general intellect” in
the Grundrisse (Virno 1996). This way of perceiving a posthuman
capitalism is no less the case for the working class, conceived as
owners of their own private property in the form of commodified
labor power. The key difference between capitalism and slavery
(although capitalism certainly has relied upon racialized and co-
lonialist slavery) is the fact that the worker is the owner of their
own labor power, which they sell, rather than having themselves
sold as productive property. Yet, we might concede that the now
popular turn to posthumanist critical theory has emerged at the
precise historical moment when the middle classes, through neo-
liberal market fundamentalism and its transformation of subjects
into forms of “human capital,” find themselves increasingly reified
in the entirety of their everyday lives. That is to say that “human
capital” is the product of the dissolution of the barrier between
the subject-owner of labor power, and its own self, conceived
in terms of the commodity-object. Now, all of life is/has been
commodified and it is in this peculiar historical moment when
the proponents of posthumanism aim, not to humanize the ex-
ploited and oppressed, but to downgrade humanity the more we
are all reified by the capitalist system. How can the de-centering
of the human subject in this way be anything but a victory for
the posthuman turn in capitalism?

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When, in his discussion of commodity fetishism, Marx asserts

that capitalist society is premised on the social relation between
things, he provides for us the matrix for understanding capitalism
as a posthuman structure of the market as the blind, a-subjective
and objective, regulatory force. What we call postmodernity is that
moment when there is no part of the world that is not potentially
commodifiable. Everything becomes reified as commodity, where
previously, it was assumed that some human quality is capable of
escape (which is why, in art, for instance, modernism is a form
that evades commodification). In this situation, humanity be-
comes the symptom of the posthumanist capitalist ecology. The
human subject now occupies and overlaps with the same position
as the hysterical subject, or the feminine position of the non-all,
as in Lacan’s logics of sexuation. If it is true that the hysteric, we
might say, is Freud’s proletariat, expressive of the non-all of the
phallic social order, then perhaps we can grasp the human subject
in the same way, as the expression of the non-all of posthuman
capitalism. Human, as Ray Brassier (2022) has put it, names the
absolute negativity—an absent center—against which is posited
an affirmative limit constitutive of the metaphysical totality. This
is the sense in which I develop my own rethinking of a dialectical
humanism appropriate for the age of the Anthropocene. Anthro-
pocene discourse calls, not for the de-centering of the human
subject, but for a rethinking of dialectical humanism.
The dilemma, however, with this conception is the fact that,
from the perspectives of historical materialism and psychoanaly-
sis, the subject is constitutively, and not merely contingently, de-
centered and self-alienated. This is a point worth noting against
both the posthumanist aim to de-center the human subject and
the older tradition of Western Marxist humanism, which aimed
towards a politics of dis-alienation. Althusser (1996) has noted, in
fact, that the significance of Marx and Freud—against the common
Freudian-Marxist attempt to blend their methodologies (turning
psychoanalysis into an explanation for the libidinal investments

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into the consumer society, for instance)—lies in the different ways

each troubled the bourgeois-liberal conception of human subjec-
tivity. Marx, on the one hand, challenged the liberal conception
of the subject as a free, independent, and autonomous individual
by showing that the class struggle, as opposed to individual man,
in Althusser’s terms, is the motor of history. Freud, on the other
hand, challenged the conception of the human subject as fully self-
aware, self-present, and completely egoistic and rational. Through
the discovery of the unconscious (operated by the mechanism
of repression) Freud demonstrated that the individual subject is
driven, not necessarily by a rational ego, but by its response to
repressed, irrational and unconscious wishes, desires, and drives,
to which the subject remains unaware at an individual level, often
repeating painful experiences that seem to otherwise contradict the
goals it sets forth rationally to serve its own interests. To put the
point directly, according to Althusser, Marx and Freud both prove
that the subject is constitutively de-centered and self-alienated—
a point that poses a problem for contemporary critical theories
focused on projects of de-centering. If the subject is constitutively
de-centered then what exactly is the usefulness of a politics aimed
at radical de-centering? What is the purpose of an emancipatory
ethics aiming to de-center the subject when the subject is already
constitutively de-centered, castrated, and self-alienated?
As an emancipatory strategy, Anthropocene discourse ap-
pears to propose a reduction in human activity, and a retreat
into the small. It asks for humanity to whither back into a flat
existence, evening out in horizontal fashion with all of the other
species living on planet Earth. Anthropocene theory speaks to
what Alain Badiou has called an “animal humanism,” where hu-
manity is perceived as a “pitiable animal” and “deserves only to
disappear” (Badiou 2007, p. 175). Animal (post)humanism and
Anthropocene discourse emerge out of a politics of guilt seeking
to mend the wound that humanist and anthropocentric politics
and culture have supposedly, according to them, cut open in the

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natural world. It’s in this sense that the posthumanist ethics of

proponents of the Anthropocene discourse aim to de-center the
human subject; but as Althusser has argued, the subject is always
already de-centered. If this is truly the case, then even Althusser’s
own critique of socialist humanism as ideological remains, in my
view, somewhat misguided as a strategy of emancipatory think-
ing as well as for an emancipatory science. While it may, perhaps,
be true that history is a process without a subject or a goal, it is
very difficult to imagine an emancipatory strategy (or even a sci-
ence) that does not develop out of (at least) some conception of
an historically relative and contingent premise—relative, that is,
to the particularity of the material and historical conjuncture,
and examined, evaluated, and enacted by a collective subject (the
masses) in the class struggle.
Althusser’s position is puzzling insofar as it is difficult to
understand the emergence of scientific socialism without having
it grounded in an engaged subjective position within the class
struggle. It is not by way of objective-neutral knowledge that sci-
entific socialism examines its object—history—but from a singular
position occupied within the class struggle; not the spontaneous
worldview of the working class (as early Lukács contends), but
that of a particular political and philosophical position relative to
the material conditions of existence. Historical materialism and
psychoanalysis, we must recall, are unlike other sciences in that
they are forms of praxis—the combination of theory and prac-
tice—in which the knowledge produced on the part of its subject
has the implicit effect of simultaneously changing its object.
The subject cannot, it is true, perceive itself on its own in this
way, and it requires arresting, grasping, and mediation from the
position of some external, negative, vantage point (the party or
the analyst, for instance, maybe even from the position of one’s
spouse or life partner—the small a (petit autre) as opposed to the
big A (grand Autre) in Lacanese). Nevertheless, any emancipa-
tory ethics requires building, not towards the de-centering of an

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already de-centered and self-alienated (castrated) subject. Neither

can it be built on a politics of dis-alienation and the fantasy of
an uncastrated enjoyment. Fantasies of substantialization (of
nature, of the other) merely disavow the negativity that stands
at the heart of existence, and by doing so, have the potential to
fall into forms of oppression. There is nothing more violent than
forcing the other to substantialize in the way that it is fantasized.
Instead, emancipatory politics requires political, methodological,
and ethical centering. We see this kind of centering, for instance,
in the political form of the party, or in psychoanalysis, where the
transference moves the subject towards reasoning. However, it
is never the individual subject alone or on its own that takes this
step—belief in the emancipatory freedom of the individual is, after
all, the mistake of the bourgeois humanist conception of the sub-
ject. Analysis centers the unconscious, or even the class struggle,
as the negative constitutive of the structure, as an absent center.
Can we, then, defend a form of political centrism in this way? I
believe this to be the case and I do so here with the aim of renew-
ing a universalist and dialectical humanism that contrasts with the
theoretically fraught project of Western Marxist humanisms of
the twentieth century, which aimed at an ethics of dis-alienation.
In a response to my position (Flisfeder 2021), Žižek (2022,
pp. 225–228) has argued that my humanism preserves the human
while rejecting the subject. He is incorrect. What I defend is not
the human against the subject, but rather a conception of the sub-
ject that is drawn from a dialectical defence of anthropocentrism.
This, however, is not an attempt to pit philosophical anthropol-
ogy against ontology. My position emerges out of contemporary
posthumanist critiques of anthropocentrism in the context of the
Anthropocene discourse. To refer to Žižek’s own terms, I claim
that what we require today is not the de-centering of the human,
but a “super-anthropocentrism.” As he puts it, “What is required
from us in this moment is, paradoxically, a kind of super-anthro-
pocentrism: we should control nature, control our environment;

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we should allow for a reciprocal relationship to exist between the

countryside and cities; we should use technology to stop desertifi-
cation or the polluting of the seas. We are, once again, responsible
for what is happening, and so we are also the solution” (Caffo and
Žižek 2021). As he explains elsewhere, too, “If we have to care
also about the life of water and air, it means precisely that we are
what Marx called ‘universal beings’, as it were, able to step outside
ourselves, stand on our own shoulders, and perceive ourselves as
a minor moment of the natural totality. To escape into the com-
fortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is not an option;
it is a false exit to a catastrophe” (Žižek 2021). This is a position
that I, too, defend. But unlike the projects of both the Western
Marxist humanists and today’s posthumanists, our theoretical
and political core cannot be a politics of dis-alienation, but rather
must grasp the fact that alienation is a constitutive dimension of
subjectivity—a position we can only grasp by setting out from a
conception of social humanity, split by antagonism. As Žižek puts
it in Disparities, human subjectivity is grounded in its own failure
to become what it is (Žižek 2016, p. 28). The subject is, precisely,
the failure of its own signifying representation. The subject of hu-
man subjectivity is to be located in the reasoning developed out
of this failure—this betrayal to be what it effectively is; and this
betrayal, I claim, is the subject of humanism.

Towards a Social Humanity

My initial point of reference for conceiving what I refer to as a

universalist and dialectical humanism is Freud. As he puts it in
Civilization and Its Discontents, the “replacement of the power
of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the
decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that
the members of the community restrict themselves in their pos-
sibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such

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restrictions” (Freud 1961, p. 49). Freud’s conception of civiliza-

tion, here, constitutes one of the clearest definitions for what I
describe as a universalist humanism, as opposed to naturalist phi-
losophies—such as the Feuerbachian conception—misconstrued
as humanisms, as in the work of many of the Marxist humanists,
or even the liberal humanists who base their support of market
society on some notion of brute and competitive human natural-
ism and individualism. It is noteworthy, of course, that Freud’s
conception identifies restriction/repression as a marker of inclu-
sion into the human community since it indicates a foundational
limit against which the reasoning of the human subject takes
place. Freud’s description of civilization articulates the form of the
structure to which individuals submit, restricting their individual
pursuits of immediate satisfaction to join together in the human
community—human civilization, as opposed to the mere species
being of humanity—as a way to collectively stave off and protect
against the violence of a potentially threatening external nature.
The final outcome of human civilizational development should
be, as Freud describes, “a rule of law to which all—except those
who are not capable of entering a community—have contributed
by a sacrifice of their instincts, and which leaves no one—again
with the same exception—at the mercy of brute force” (ibid.). It
is the sacrifice of basic instincts which is significant here, since it
demonstrates that inclusion is premised on a foundational nega-
tion. This, therefore, is only one side of things since the underside
of every law is pulsation of the drive that persists in the space of
the negation. Authentic freedom, in this sense, is not the freedom
to surpass or resist the law, but that of giving it to ourselves—to
assert our own self-limitations, or the inherent affirmation pro-
duced out of the fundamental negation. This is a point, too, that
cannot but recall the Hegelian doctrine of the state insofar as it
is distinguished from civil (or bourgeois) society.
The problem of civil society, as Hegel describes it, is that it
can be confused with the operation of the state. Yet, if the state

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is confused with civil society, and if its ends are primarily based
in the protection of private property, the product is thus the
disavowal of the universal grounds upon which market society
may facilitate the satisfaction of mutual needs and instead secures
primarily individual interests. This, of course, is the claim that
Marx develops further in his critique of political economy, which
must be read first and foremost as a dialectical, immanent, and
materialist critique of the bourgeois ideology.
As Marx puts in his tenth thesis on Feuerbach, the stand-
point of bourgeois materialism is civil society; whereas, for the
materialism developed by Marx and Engels, the standpoint is
social humanity. We see this developed most clearly, of course, in
Capital, where Marx sets out to challenge the bourgeois presup-
position of the individual caught in nature. Marx responds to
the Robinsonades—the reference to Robinson Crusoe in Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, for instance—in their assumption of
the human individual originating in nature, and instead posits
the presupposition of the socially determined individual acting
in bourgeois society. As Marx puts it at the beginning of the
Grundrisse, “Individuals producing in society—hence socially
determined individual production—is, of course, the point of
departure” (Marx 1993, p. 83). Marx’s point, of course, is that po-
litical economy begins from the presupposition of the individual
human subject in nature—an abstraction that coincides with the
avoidance of class struggle in actually existing society—whereas
it would be preferable to begin with the presupposition of the
individual as it is structured by social humanity, along with the
actually existing political antagonisms giving structure to human
society (i.e., class struggle as the motor of history).
Marx does not set out in Capital to produce a new political
economy. His approach is, rather, that of a critique of political
economy read as the bourgeois ideology of market society be-
ginning with the individual as owner of private property. The
materialism of Capital should be grasped as one of immanent

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critique of the bourgeois ideology. Marx’s methodology, and his

accomplishment, is to show how, if we take the bourgeois ideology
at its word—particularly its apparently humanist claims centering
on equality and freedom in the market and in civil society—and
apply it to a materialist unfolding of the movements of capital-
ist development, then we encounter, instead, the undermining
of bourgeois assumptions evinced most clearly in the existence
of the proletariat. As Sartre puts at the end of the first volume
of Critique of Dialectical Reason, “bourgeois humanism lays its
contradictions at the door of the proletariat” (Sartre 2004, p. 753).
Marx’s accomplishment, in other words, is to show that ex-
ploitation is obscured by the form of commodity fetishism, which,
amongst other things, creates the illusion that the wage laborer is
an equal owner of property, on par with the capitalist. The dif-
ficulty for the bourgeois liberal conception of humanism rests
on the fact that, although liberalism strives towards equality and
freedom—that is to say, liberalism espouses racial equality, gender
and sexual equality, and so forth; it even espouses an environmen-
talist and equitable relationship with the natural world—although
it avows these desires, it fails to explain the reproduction of its
social symptom, the proletariat, and instead downloads its exis-
tence onto the inefficiencies of particular individuals. Not unlike
the Kantian expulsion of the Thing—needed to create the illusion
of consistency in reasoning—bourgeois humanism excludes its
symptom to create the appearance of its own reified system as
equitable. It fails to see that the real presence of inequality lies
in exploitation concealed by commodity fetishism. This is a fact
that is obscured for both the worker and the capitalist insofar as
commodity fetishism and the wage form create the illusion that
workers are, themselves, individual property owners—owners
of their own labor power as commodity-property—which is
the condition granting them their relative position of freedom
and equality in the market society of individualist competition.
Again, as Sartre puts it, “The freedom of the worker-commodity

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therefore conflicts with the human freedom of the worker before

and during the signing of the contract;” the worker, then, “is the
being who lays claim to humanity only to destroy the human in
himself; he is anti-human: no one but himself has excluded him
from bourgeois humanism” (ibid.). Such a formal conception
of freedom, equality, and humanity, of course, forces us to ask
about the fate of those who are or have been, historically, legally
restricted in their rights to own property—women, the disabled,
the lumpenproletariat, etc.—or even those who are themselves
considered as property—as means of production—as is the case
in slavery.
The wage form, thus, obscures exploitation to the extent that
it creates the appearance of market reciprocity. Workers sell their
labor for a wage and, thus, in the commodification of their labor
power, appear as owners of property just like any other capital-
ist. As owners of their own property, privately produced—i.e.,
in social reproduction, in the time allotted in the working day
to the reproduction of labor power—workers are, in this way,
interpellated as subjects of market exchange, conforming to the
presupposed assumptions of political economy, of individual pro-
ducers, engaged in relations of trade and exchange in the market,
whose subjectivity, as Sohn-Rethel demonstrates, is produced as
one of private individualism: “In exchange, the action is social,
the mind is private” (Sohn-Rethel 2021, p. 24). It’s important that
we see, though, that this form of subjectivity is but the result of
interpellation by the market form, and by way of bourgeois civil
society, and that bourgeois humanism is a reflection of specifically
bourgeois social relations.
The apparent humanist investment in equality and freedom
in bourgeois society is undermined by its very own system of
reification. As such, bourgeois humanism betrays and negates
the very universality it nevertheless relies upon, as Hegel shows
when he asserts that in the market society, individuals enter into
arrangements of social relations in which the private production

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of the particular needs of each is the condition for the collective

production of the needs of all:

In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends—an attainment

conditioned in this way by universality—there is formed a system
of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, welfare, and
rightful existence of one individual are interwoven with the liveli-
hood, welfare, and rights of all. (Hegel 2008, p. 181 [§183])

It is a mistake, however, according to Hegel, to confuse civil

society of the market relation with the form of the state:

If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is
laid down as the security and protection of property and personal
freedom, the interest of individuals as such becomes the ultimate
end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state
is something optional. (Ibid., p. 228 [§258])

Universality, for Hegel, in other words, inheres to a certain

extent in the market society, which is, however, undermined in its
avowed particularisms and privileging of an individualist subjec-
tivity geared primarily towards the protection of private property.
This, however, undoes and damages the very social humanity and
universality upon which the mutual satisfaction of needs is based
in bourgeois society.
It is, thus, the mature Marx, I claim, who, through an im-
manent critique of bourgeois ideology in Capital, rather than
the young Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manu-
scripts, demonstrates that bourgeois humanism is not, in fact,
the universal humanism it claims to be. Bourgeois universality is
nothing of the sort since it appears as merely the accumulation of
particular individual differences, and emerges as anti-dialectical
and irrational or conservative. The reasoning initially developed
in bourgeois society turns back on itself and, rather than building
towards the further emancipation of human subjectivity, halts

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as a real species-being, i.e., as a human being, is only possible if he

really employs all his species-powers—which again is only possible
through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of history—and
treats them as objects, which is at first only possible in the form of
estrangement. (Marx 1992a, pp. 385–386)

Marx adds, however, that

Because Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, the estranged

object, the estranged essential reality of man is nothing but con-
sciousness, nothing but the thought of estrangement, its abstract
and hence hollow and unreal expression, negation. The supersession
of alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, hollow
supersession of that hollow abstraction, the negation of the nega-
tion. (Ibid., p. 396)

Hegel’s conception of alienation is, according to Marx, tied

up with his idealism. It is a conception in which the subject is
alienated in thought, which brings the subject down to Earth.
On Marx’s view, Hegel’s conception of alienation coincides with
materialism in the way the subject’s labor mixes with nature in the
movement of a primary negation from thought, only. However,
as Marx sees it, the subsequent movement in Hegel is one of the
negation of the negation, in which the subject returns from the
material world of nature back up into spirit. Hegel’s idealism,
according to Marx, is shown in its initial movement away from
thought only to return to it in the end. Dis-alienation appears in
the negation of the negation, according to Marx, as the restora-
tion of thought to itself. We can imagine this, for instance, as an
inverted triangle in which, initially, the subject is alienated from
thought (or spirit), moving from above down to the ground, only
to be then, in the negation of the negation, returned back to the
heavens of thought, congealed in the idea. For Marx, however,
we should think the terms of alienation beginning not from the
heavens of thought but from the bottom up, from the material

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reason only by placing a restriction on its capacity to apprehend

contradiction in its totality. To make further sense of a universal
and dialectical humanism, then, we should begin, as the Marx of
the theses on Feuerbach does, and as Freud and Hegel do, with a
humanism based principally upon a conception of social human-
ity. Not, that is, to conceive a wholly unified humanity—not to
imagine an end to the class struggle—but in order to understand
the class struggle in its social totality. Today, class struggle has
to be reimagined as the antagonism between humanity and the
reifying posthumanism of capitalism.

The Contingency of Alienation in Marx

My point in the preceding has been, in part, to argue that we find

a more coherent dialectical humanism in the later Marx than what
we find in the early Marx, which formed so much of the basis of
the Western Marxist humanisms. Marx’s early theory of alienation
is taken up, most commonly, through a reading of his section on
estranged or alienated labor in his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, where he describes humanity’s alienation from its
foundational nature, or from its species-being. Marx’s early devel-
opment of the category of alienation, as well as the naturalism of
his Feuerbach-inspired conception of species-being emerges out
of his critique of Hegel’s apparent idealism in Phenomenology of
Spirit. Marx writes:

The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final result—the

dialectic of negativity as the moving and producing principle—lies
in the fact that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process,
objectification as loss of object [Entgegenständlichung], as aliena-
tion and as supersession of this alienation; that he therefore grasps
the nature of labour and conceives objective man—true, because
real man—as the result of his own labour. The real, active relation
of man to himself as a species-being, or the realization of himself

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grounds of nature—that is from the concrete, to abstraction, and

then back down into the concrete. The trajectory is reversed, in
which the triangular figure goes from the Earth up into the heav-
ens of thought, at which point, in Marx’s paradigm, the subject is
alienated from its species-being, only then, subsequently, to be
returned back down to Earth in “an objective movement which
re-absorbs alienation into itself” (ibid., p. 395).
As Jon Stewart explains, Marx’s “critical point is that alien-
ation is conceived as the second step—that is, negation—but then
the third step, the negation of the negation does not meaningfully
do away with alienation since this third step [in Hegel] is simply
an abstract thought” (Stewart 2021, p. 156). Hegel, according to
Marx, begins with the Idea as universal and only then moves into
concrete particulars. Marx’s materialism, in contrast, begins with
“the empirically perceived particulars” as “what is truly real,”
and thus, for him, “this second step should be the real focus”
(ibid.). Instead, for Hegel, the third step of the negation of the
negation appears to reconcile the second step with the third, of a
movement back into the universality of the Idea. This common
misconception of the Hegelian dialectical process—from the
positing reflection, to external and then determinate reflection;
or, in the logic of judgement, from the positive to the negative, to
the infinite judgement—that we find in Marx regarding the final
reconciliation with the idea is one that has plagued dialectical
scholarship for over a century. It’s on these points, too, that we
see the continued rejection of the category of the negation of the
negation in Stalin, Mao, and even in Althusser.
We can see here, too, the sense in which Marx’s early attention
to humanism coincides with a naturalism that he gets from Feuer-
bach, and it is clear why even some posthumanist scholarship has
sought to return to the naturalism of the early Marx (Nail 2020;
Butler 2019). Taking humanity primarily as a natural being—an
active natural being, that is—Marx equates communism in his
early writing with humanism in the sense of returning humanity

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back to its species origins and, in this way, resembles the idealism
of posthumanist monism and what Badiou, as noted above, refers
to as animal humanism, insofar as the latter aspires towards the
recombination and reconciliation of humanity towards its basic
nature. This is not to say that nature shouldn’t be a factor for us,
but it is not, as some have argued (Johnston 2019, pp. 149-152;
Heron 2021, p. 504) an ontological priority. Nature is a biological
necessity, of course, but there is no basic natural state to which
we can return. Alienation, to repeat, is constitutive.
Posthumanism, then, especially in its monist, new materialist,
and vitalist varieties, may be grasped, as Žižek sometimes puts
it, as the desire to move from subject back into substance (Žižek
2016, p. 55). This is oddly, too, a useful description of some of
the earliest versions of Western Marxism humanism. As Maurice
Merleau-Ponty writes in Adventures of the Dialectic, historical
materialism “states a kinship between the person and the exterior,
between the subject and the object, which is at the bottom of the
alienation of the subject in the object and, if the movement is
reversed, will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with
man” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 33). For Merleau-Ponty, seeking
“reintegration” is fundamental to the historical materialist outlook
on history—that is, that the movement of history heads in the
direction of a recombination of subject and object into a totality of
the being of the species. The unity of the subject with the natural
world, with the homogeneity of society, as well as with the unity
of itself, is one way to grasp what was fundamental in Western
Marxist incarnations of humanism, particularly in its conception
of the problem of alienation, seen in this way as contingent. Insofar
as both Posthumanist new materialism and Marxist humanisms
perceive alienation as contingent both are based on a political
ontology of dis-alienation and full transparency.
A Politics of Dis-Alienation? Both posthumanism and variet-
ies of Marxist humanism aim at a complete recombination of hu-
manity and the natural world, imagining that a certain ­equilibrium

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exists that has been destroyed by the modern order of liberal,

Western, capitalist society. Both perspectives, in other words,
imagine a moment in the past where the universe was whole and
complete, and at some point humanity and nature separated from
each other, caused mainly due to the hubris of (the concept of)
humanity. This perspective, however, forces an essential ques-
tion: if the universe was in fact substantially whole prior to this
separation and alienation between humanity and nature, what, in
fact, was the cause of this separation in the first place? Let’s tackle
this question second. First, we should consider the terminal point
of humanist and posthumanist political goals since it is mainly, I
claim, according to a kind of retroactive speculation that we are
able to come to understand “origin stories” themselves.
So much flows from how we grasp things in the present,
but the present is always overdetermined by the way that we
perceive our goals or aims—the question of what we want or
what we desire in the end—which retroactively forces us to posit
our set of presuppositions that give rise to our understanding of
the causes of our crises. Erich Fromm, for instance, has claimed
that “Marx’s aim was that of a spiritual emancipation of man,
of his liberation from the chains of economic determination,
of resituating him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to
find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature”
(Fromm 2011, p. 3). As a corollary, for Fromm, prior to the
emergence of human consciousness or self-consciousness—that
is, of humanity’s own self-awareness—humanity lived in perfect
unity with nature. For Fromm, the evolution of humanity “is
characterized by man’s struggle with nature” (ibid., p. 19). The
first act of freedom, therefore, according to him, is humanity’s
“capacity to say ‘no,’” in which case the human individual “sees
himself as a stranger in the world, beset by conflicts with nature,
between man and man, between man and woman” (ibid., p. 64).
Socialism, then, according to Fromm, will be “the abolition of
human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being”

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(ibid., p. 68). We can easily see here the way that, for Fromm, the
project of socialism as one of dis-alienation coincides with his
presupposition that humanity exists as alienated from its essence.
Henri Lefebvre, likewise, characterized the project of historical
materialism as one of dis-alienation.
Total man, as Lefebvre describes, “is ‘dis-alienated’ man”
(Lefebvre 2009, p. 150). According to him, “human alienation
will end with ‘the return of man to himself’, that is to say in the
unity of all of the elements of the human.” As he puts it, “this
‘perfect naturalism’ coincides with humanism” (ibid., p. 15).
There is, of course, precedent to this point in the early Marx of
the 1844 philosophical manuscripts, who writes comparatively
of naturalism and humanism, noting the way that “naturalism or
humanism differs both from idealism and materialism and is at
the same time their unifying truth.” The human after all, as Marx
notes, is an active and natural being (Marx 1992a, p. 389). Thus,
for Marx, communism as the superseding of private property is
a humanism insofar as it is the re-absorption of alienation into
itself (ibid., p. 395). As Lefebvre writes, defined in this way, “hu-
manism has a quantitative aspect: it is based on the development
of forces of production. It also has a qualitative aspect. Every
human community has a quality or style… total humanism does
not aim to destroy [national; cultural] communities but, on the
contrary, to free them from their restrictions…” (Lefebvre 2009,
p. 151). Humanism, for Lefebvre, based on Marx’s conception
in his early writing, can thus be understood as “the supreme in-
stance” of “total man” as a “free individual in a free community.”
Total man, according to Lefebvre, is “an individuality which has
blossomed into the limitless variety of possible individualities”
(ibid., pp. 151–152).
The most notable instance of the Western Marxist and human-
ist insistence on a politics of dis-alienation comes from the young
Lukács, who, without having even read Marx’s early writing,
developed a conception of emancipation based on a reading of

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the later Marx’s writing on commodity fetishism. In the devel-

opment of his conception of reification, Lukács shows how the
proletariat in capitalist conditions of exploitation, self-objectifies
as commodified labor power. Lukács’ turn to Hegel stands out
in particular. As Žižek (2020, pp. 41–56) notes, beginning with
Lukács and Karl Korsch, Western Marxism turned to a particular
kind of Hegelianism that described the social context as the ulti-
mate horizon for grasping objective phenomena. Both returned
to Hegel in opposition to the neo-Kantianism of the second
international and its insistence upon the gap between objective
reality and the normative dimension of ethical practice. Lukács
and Korsch aimed at the combination of theory and practice,
making its knowledge of history into a practical dimension for
changing and transforming its object.
For Lukács, in his early phase, alienation coincides with rei-
fication, and the consciousness of the proletariat is one of grasp-
ing as subject its objectification as commodity. Whereas Western
Marxism, as Žižek puts it, grasps “human praxis as the ultimate
transcendental horizon of our philosophical understanding,”
Soviet Marxism clung to a “naïve realist ontology” (ibid., p. 43),
claiming direct access to the whole form of reality and history.
Instead of merely subjective social knowledge, it claimed direct
and objective knowledge of the whole of reality, not unlike the
realist ontology of contemporary posthumanist theory that seeks
to bypass human epistemology, going straight to ontology. For the
later Lukács, however, the evasion of the transcendentalist horizon
ultimately returns to a realist ontology in an attempt to human-
ize Soviet ideology by distinguishing between the objectivizing
aspects of labor, as such, and the alienating-reifying dimensions
of labor under capitalism.
The theme that nevertheless persists in the various versions
of humanist Marxism (as a kind of transcendentalism), as well as
in that of the realist ontologies, is the prospect of a transparent
coincidence between human social reality and nature. This ­vision,

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however, fails to account for the way human social reality separates
itself from nature. At what point does humanity alienate itself from
nature? Is it the product of capitalism? Was there an alienation
in the feudal order? Fromm (2011) argues that, despite a certain
lack of freedom, the human community still provided a sense of
wholeness in pre-capitalist societies, provided for by the comfort
and security of the social reality. Was it, then, the development
of technology that first forced the alienation of humanity? But
by what cause was the development of technique set in motion?
The solution to this problem, according to Žižek, is “to
abandon the starting point [that is, of a contingent alienation]
and to admit that there is no reality as a self-regulated whole, that
reality is itself cracked, incomplete, non-all, traversed by radical
antagonism” (Žižek 2020, p. 52). Much of the problem in humanist
Western Marxism, not unlike the problems we encounter in post-
humanism, turns on the way it grasped the Hegelian conceptions
of sublation and reconciliation—often associated with the poorly
defined notion of synthesis. But this is, in fact, not the point of the
Hegelian reconciliation, which is actually a reconciliation with
the inevitability of alienation—that is with the fact of negativity.
Human subjectivity, we might say, coincides with the negativity
constitutive of reality. It is not, as some argue (Johnston 2019, pp.
149-152), through the production of a “de-naturalizing nature”—
again, nature is still a biological necessity of human subjectivity, if
not necessarily an ontological one—but of the occupation of the
position of negativity within reality. We can locate human sub-
jectivity, that is, in the form of a primordial negation—through a
constitutive alienation—that is arrived at in its rejection, as Freud
argues, of basic instincts. Every act of (free) choice involves, at the
same time, a negation of those choices not chosen. This alienation
in every free act of negation is where we locate the human subject.
What we should do, then, according to Žižek, is return to
Hegel, as the Marxist humanists did, but to read the Hegelian
reconciliation in a different way—not in terms of the contingency

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of alienation, but as a constitutive aspect of both subjectivity and

reality—that is, as informed by a constitutive lack. Subjectivity
is the product of emergence of the negative in a reality that is
constitutively non-all.

From Constitutive Alienation to the Positing

of the New Signifier

In contrast to the Marxist humanist conception of alienation

as contingent—in which politics is aimed in the direction of
dis-alienation—in Hegel’s ontology we find that a constitutive
alienation—and the reasoning required to grasp this via language,
representation, and discourse—provides the grounds and the
conditions upon which an ethical freedom is made possible. As
human subjects, we experience our freedom—and there cannot be
any ethics, or even politics, without freedom—not by returning
into a species being, but by grasping that reality and actuality are
open-ended, never whole on their own, never complete. There
is only politics if subjects are free to transform and recreate the
actual conditions of existence—to change, that is, the object. This
possibility is undermined if we conceive a terminal point of his-
tory, in which an alienated subject is finally reconciled with its
un-alienated nature, and which would bring about an end to the
class struggle. All we can do—if, however, with a conception of
universal freedom in mind—is develop that which is necessary
given the historical contingency of any and every situation. No
one knows the course of history—historical knowledge is only
knowable after the fact—and therefore, all we can do is create
necessary conditions in situations of pure contingency. It’s from
this perspective that we can conceive the overlapping of the lacks
in the subject and in reality.
Hegel describes this overlapping of the lacks in the subject and
the material world in the section on culture as self-alienated spirit

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in Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, Hegel describes the world that

confronts the subject as the negative of its own self-consciousness
(Hegel 1977, p. 294 [§484]). The world, however, also has an alien
reality, according to Hegel, both present and given, and has a being
of its own, but in which it does not recognize itself. In the absence
of its own self-recognition, the subject is, thus, the negative of
the material world. In its immediacy, the self appears without
substance, just as much as substance appears without subject.
It seems that by alienating itself through externalization—by
changing and transforming the real world through work—that
substance attains its existence for the subject. However, the reverse
is also true since this is the sense in which Hegel writes, in the
Preface to the Phenomenology, that “everything turns on grasp-
ing and expressing the True, not only as Substance but equally as
Subject” (ibid., p. 10 [§17]). In contrast to Spinoza’s substantive
monism, for instance, by evincing the process by which Spinoza
comes to think and reason the substantive world, Hegel shows
that the presence of the subject is there in the very thinking in-
volved in the coming to recognize the actuality of the world as
substance. Subject is, here, present where reasoning apprehends
the negativity in being.
Spirit, for Hegel, represents the self-conscious unity of self
and essence, each relating to the other in the form of their mutual
self-alienation—essence, that is, as a determinateness that has its
being and appearing for self-consciousness. However, although
it is the consciousness of the objective real world, which exists
freely and on its own account, consciousness is still confronted by
Spirit—that is, through its externalization in the real world and by
that which supersedes the actual world in what lies beyond it. “The
present actual world,” Hegel writes, “has its antithesis directly in
its beyond, which is both the thinking of it and its thought-form,
just as the beyond has in the present world its actuality, but an
actuality alienated from it” (ibid., p. 295 [§485]). Nothing—or
nothingness—which is the beyond of the actual, inheres as the

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negative of both the self-conscious Spirit and the actual world.

“The equilibrium of the whole,” then, as Hegel puts it, is not
a unity that remains unto itself, a unity, that is, which is self-
substantializing, but which “rests in the alienation of opposites”
(ibid., p. 295 [§486]; my emphasis). The whole, in other words, is
a self-alienated actuality. There is, thus, we might say a “hole” in
the whole, which the subject apprehends in its materiality through
the process of reasoning the presence of the negative in this way.
Knowledge of the beyond, of this negativity that lies beyond
the actual, according to Hegel, at first rests on Faith. Yet, just as
consciousness, divided by that which it knows and that which it
does not (its un-conscious), returns into itself as its constitutive
self-alienation, so too does self-alienated Spirit return into the
self, initially in its immediacy as a single person, but subsequently,
through its externalization, it returns in its universality insofar
as consciousness grasps or arrests itself via the reference to the
Concept or the Notion. The insight that this produces, according
to Hegel, completes the stage of culture and moves the subject
from Faith to Enlightenment, which, in the very material sense
of grasping the constitutive alienation at the heart of both the self
and the actual world, provides the basis for absolute freedom—
and, in Lacanian terms, it is the moment of subjective destitution.
By recognizing that nothing inheres—nothing, that is, as
an object—intrinsically in actuality, not only can Faith, but also
the actual world, be overthrown, giving rise to the possibility of
ethical action, which depends upon the freedom of the subject. In
this way, the subject can suspend the realm of causality and enact
its freedom in the positing of the Concept. The Concept, in this
way, provides the representational co-ordinates of self-alienated
actuality insofar as it is translated into language and discourse.
As Fredric Jameson puts it, although “language cannot
be trusted to convey any adequate or positive account of the
Notion [the Concept], or of truth and reality… it can much
more pertinently be used as an index of error or contradiction”

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(­Jameson 2010, p. 35). Language (and representation), in other

words, mediates that which cannot be said or spoken, which it
conveys by grasping lack, negativity, alienation, and contradic-
tion. This is how, for instance, we come to grasp the Real, in the
Lacanian sense, at the limits of the symbolic, a point that departs
from the Deleuzian perspective, where representation amounts,
merely, to the congealing of, and therefore the evisceration of
contradiction and difference. To the contrary, it is only by way
of the mediations of language and representation that we are
able to apprehend—or know—contradiction and difference at
the limit points of the representation itself. This is also where
the Althusserian conception of ideology as an imaginary rep-
resentation of the subject to its real conditions of existence can
appear misleading. Ideology is not simply in the representation
itself; the representation, rather, is the medium through which
the critique of ideology is made possible. Without representa-
tion—without language, discourse, and rhetoric—our hands are
tied in our attempts to locate that which remains negative at the
heart of every affirming and positing of an idea. As Zupančič
notes, posthumanist new materialists tend to distance themselves
from representational paradigms found in structuralism and
post-structuralism. However, she notes, it is the discovery of the
inconsistencies in language that locate the position of the subject:
“if language, discourse, or structure were consistent ontological
categories, there would be no subject” (Zupančič 2017, p. 119).
This is how even abstractions can be liberating.
In Hegel, then, we see that language becomes the medium
of universality, but it is only through our alienation in language
that we are made capable, through reasoning its logic to the end,
of grasping its significance. In speech, as Hegel puts it, “self-
consciousness, qua independent separate individuality, comes as
such into existence, so that it exists for others” (Hegel 1977, p.
308 [§508]). Again, as Jameson explains, here we see the paradox
of the fact that “my individuality, expressed through first person

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language, does not really come into existence until it is expressed

‘for others’” (Jameson 2010, p. 38). In Lacanian terms, we see here
how the subject attains its identity via the signifier (from $ to S1),
which represents the subject for all of the others. At the same time,
the signifier (S1) is that for which all of the others (S2) determine
the subject ($). The subject, in other words, is self-present, on
the one hand, in its representation in the form of the signifier,
while, on the other hand, finds itself emptied out as the missing
place—the gap or lack—in the battery of all the other signifiers,
or the symbolic order as such.
Language and representation thus, according to Jameson,
become, for Hegel, diagnostically necessary. The Concept be-
comes the representational device against which the negativity
that inheres in both the actual world and the subject itself can
come to be known. The absolute (ethical) freedom that we found
previously in the understanding that nothing inheres in the actual
world—and that the actual world is, too, self-alienated, fissured
by gaps, and thus incomplete—is given form in the way that the
subject finds itself capable of positing the Concept, or the new
signifier. In other words, to center its constitutively de-centered
and self-alienated presence. Does this, however, mean that the
subject can automatically become self-actualizing, on its own, in
this way, thereby completely negating the Symbolic order, the
realm of language and representation, in which its self is given
substance through its definition by others in language?

The Alienated (Non-All) Subject of the Signifier

Alienation, for Lacan, like Hegel, is also consubstantial with

subjectivization. The subject is not alienated from the symbolic
order; it is, rather, alienated into the symbolic order. The subject
is alienated in the sense that, in the formation of subjectivity, the
moment of positive subjectivization coincides with a certain loss,

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which depends on the subject’s relation to the signifier. As Lacan

puts it, the signifier “is that which represents a subject for another
signifier” (Lacan 1981, p. 207). The subject, according to Lacan,
is, therefore, “born in so far as the signifier emerges in the field
of the Other” (ibid., p. 199). The choice of signifier into which
we invest our identity and our sense of self represents the way
that the subject perceives itself from the perspective of the gaze
of the symbolic order, or the big Other, and in this way helps to
produce the subject as an ego-ideal. Again, as Lacan explains, the
signifier “producing itself in the field of the Other, makes mani-
fest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier
only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a
signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it
calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject” (ibid., p. 207).
This petrification of the subject, this loss central to subjectivity,
coincides with its emergence in the field of the Other and is the
flipside of its alienation—in order to exist socially and in the field
of the Other, the subject is required to give up something, which
is why Lacan (2007, p. 124) refers to the subject’s entry into the
field of the Other as “symbolic castration.” As Mladen Dolar puts
it, “alienation was for Lacan always essentially connected with the
idea of a forced choice… The subject is subject to a choice—this
is what makes it a subject in the first place” (Dolar 1998, p. 17).
Dolar is quick to note, however, that this choice is “the opposite of
a free and autonomous choice one is accustomed to associate with
the subject” (ibid.), as we see, for instance, in Sartre’s existential
ethics of responsibility. This is due to the fact that the emergence
of subjectivity is formed, initially, in the field of the Other.
The alienation of the subject, in other words, involves a kind
of emptying out, which is the other side of its positivization in
the field of the Other, in its subjectivization. While the subject
submits to its alienation in the Symbolic order of the big Other
(grand Autre), it loses what Lacan calls the object small a: the
small other (petit autre)—the objectification of lack. It’s how-

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ever, necessary, to grasp the fact that the small other only ever
emerges as existing through the loss itself. Its positive existence is
that of being lost. Prior to its loss, the small other never existed
and, therefore, no actual object can ever satisfy the loss central to
subjectivity. The subject is always structured around this lacking.
The production of the subject of the signifier coincides with the
emergence of the small other in the same way that every act of
choice overlaps an operation of an affirmation and a negation.
Every affirmative choice we make is, at the same time, the nega-
tion of all of the other possible choices. The truth is that we can
never be or have everything all at once and, thus, in every act of
decision—in every act of choice—we lose something at the same
time that we gain something else.
Lacan develops this point by splitting the Cartesian cogito
ergo sum into two separate moments of the “I think” and the “I
am”—that is, the split between thought and being. It is notewor-
thy that this division between thought and being corresponds to
the traditional distinction between idealism and materialism that
we find described in Marx as early as his theses on Feuerbach, and
later expanded by Engels. This division is also, in its later develop-
ment in “official” Soviet Marxism, adapted by the various anti-
Hegelian materialisms of Mao and French Structuralism, central
to vulgar materialist, ultraleftist, anti-humanist and posthumanist
critiques of subjectivity. But specifically, for Lacan, the choice of
thinking or being is one in which the affirmation of one, and the
negation of the other, doesn’t necessarily mean that the negative
choice is completely lost. Its presence persists in fantasmatic form,
in the same way that for Hegel being and nothingness consist in
assuming each other. This, for instance, is where Lacan improves
on the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, where Sartre famously
rejects the thesis of the Freudian unconscious.
As Žižek notes, in Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Con-
cepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan proposes that, by alienating itself
into the field of the Other, the subject is forced to choose thought

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over being. For Lacan, the “eclipse of being” is “induced by the

very function of the signifier” (Lacan 1981, p. 211). However,
Žižek also notes that Lacan later on, in Seminar XIV on the logic
of fantasy, reverses course and instead claims that the subject, by
alienating itself into the field of the Other, chooses being, instead,
with thought therefore relegated to the position of the uncon-
scious. According to Žižek (1993), we shouldn’t read this change
in Lacan’s teaching as a later adjustment to a prior formulation.
Rather, the two formulations should be read as two different ways
of relating to the forced choice of being along the lines of Lacan’s
later logics of sexuation.
For Žižek, the choice of being must be understood according
to the masculine logic of universality—that is, where a universal
exception, a finite limit informs the (closed) field of significa-
tion. It is in this sense that the phallic signifier creates a point of
suture to the signifying field. The choice of thought, however, is,
thus, one of the unlimited—as Joan Copjec (1994) puts it—thus
coinciding with the feminine logic, where a particular negation
implies that there is no exception and that the Symbolic order
is not-all, incomplete and marked by gaps and negativity. The
masculine subject, we might say, is here—in the choice of be-
ing over thought; the affirmation of a finite limit—the Kantian
transcendental subject of the Verstand, of mere understanding;
whereas the feminine subject is that of the Vernunft, or of think-
ing and reasoning.
The feminine (hysterical) subject is the one who is constantly
engaged in bombarding the Other with questions: what am I?
What am I to you? Am I a man or woman? Why am I what you
(the Other) are saying that I am? The hysterical questioning here,
is, of course, as expressed in Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric
(Lacan 2007; Lacan 2006), also key to the production of psycho-
analytic knowledge and analytical discourse; and, to avoid any
misunderstanding, it is important to note that we call this subject
the feminine or the hysteric, not because of anything attached to

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the body or the biology of the subject, but precisely because of

the material anxiety of being a woman in patriarchal society. As
Juliet Mitchell once put it: psychoanalysis is the interpretation
of a patriarchal society, not the prescription for one. Thus, again,
we might say that the hysteric is Freud’s proletariat. The hysteri-
cal subject is, therefore, the subject as such. Hysteria, as Žižek
(2002, p. 101) puts it, means failed interpellation; and, it is in this
failed interpellation that we find the emergence of the subject.
As Žižek (ibid., p. 62) has also noted, elsewhere, hysteria is the
“‘human’ way of installing a point of impossibility in the guise
of absolute jouissance.” This is why, as I have put it elsewhere,
the contemporary fear of the human subject coincides with what
I have referred to as the hysterical sublime (Flisfeder 2021). Put
differently, it is the feminine position of the non-all that allows
the subject to grasp itself in the failure of its own signifying
representation. It is from this position, the hysterical position of
coming to reconcile with the constitutive alienation of human
subjectivity, that I now advocate reading a renewed conception
of humanism via the Lacanian discourse of the analyst alongside
the Hegelian conception of love.

Is it Possible to Love One’s Analyst?

Humanism as Separation

By referring to love in this way, I do not mean it in the sense of

loving all of humanity or the love of nature, and so on. Rather,
love here denotes the choice of a singular other—a small other
(petit a) that holds me to account. An other in whom I choose
and can trust, into whom I invest my own negativity. As Lacan
puts it, “love is giving what you don’t have” (Lacan 2015, p.
129). Embracing the small other as a limit of my own choosing
is the embracing, at the same time, of the formalization of a new
structuration giving the subject its freedom—as Anna Kornbluh

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puts it, this involves the embracing of a limit “as the condition
of freedom” (Kornbluh 2019, p. 154; my emphasis). It is not by
escaping structure, but by building and producing it, that we cre-
ate the conditions of our freedom—that is, by giving to ourselves
the conditions of our freedom. It is not the case, however, as in
an older humanist model of the fully self-present and self-aware
subject who freely makes choices on their own. Rather, it is the
position of the small other as limit who helps to bring about the
negativity within us, and that holds us to account for it. We can see
this relationship in the link between the hysteric and the analyst.
The hysteric, at the outset, produces the knowledge needed
for the analytical discourse. Through its symptom, through its
bombardment of questioning, the hysterical subject helps to pro-
duce the analytical discourse, as is represented by the matheme of
the hysteric’s discourse, where it is knowledge that gets produced.

$ → S1
a S2

This same knowledge is then applied by the analyst in the

treatment of the subject.

a → $
S2    S1

And, conversely, what gets produced via the discourse of the

analyst is the construction of a new signifier instituting a new sig-
nifying structure. What changes in the analytical discourse is the
fundamental structuring principle of the subject with regards to
its enjoyment—the lack and alienation constitutive of subjectivity.
Similarly, with regards to the social field, the production of the
new signifier is, likewise, fundamental to changing the structural
principle of society (Žižek 2000, p. 93).

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 Freedom and Alienation; Or, Humanism of the Non-All

According to Lacan, love is what gets produced in the course

of the analytical treatment. It interests us, according to Lacan, “in-
sofar as it allows us to understand what happens in transference—
and, to a certain extent, because of transference” (Lacan 2015, p.
49). As Dolar notes, love is one of the effects of the transference
and, therefore, part of its aim is to cure a symptom produced
by the analytical treatment itself (Dolar 1993, pp. 84–85). Love,
in this way, according to Dolar, involves a dimension beyond
interpellation (ibid., p. 87). This, too, is how we can come to see
the overlap between the Lacanian analytical discourse, and the
Hegelian conception of love. For Hegel:

Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with

another, so that I am not in isolation by myself but win my self-
consciousness only through the renunciation of my independence
[Fürsichsein] and through knowing myself as the unity of myself
with another and of the other with me. (Hegel 2008, p. 162, [§158]
Addition)

We can see, here, too, how love relates differently than the
standard reference to the struggle between the Lord and Bonds-
man, and the striving towards the liberal conception of “mutual
recognition.” In the latter, self-consciousness is won in a conflict
whereby recognition becomes a source for the production of
the big Other, and we can see this clearly, too, in the way that
Kojève describes the creation of desire out of the struggle for self-
recognition in the master-slave dialectic. But as Lacan writes in
Seminar XX, his teaching aims to dissociate or separate the small
other from the big Other (Lacan 1998, p. 83). The movement of
the subject in the analytical discourse is one of moving from the
Symbolic Other to the Real other, and this is something we see,
again, in Hegelian love. Hegel writes:

The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-sub-

sistent and independent person and that, if I were, then I would

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 Matthew Flisfeder

feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find

myself in another person, that I count for something in the other,
while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love,
therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the understand-
ing cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than
this point [Punktualität] of self-consciousness which is negated
and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is
at once the producing and the resolving of this contradiction. As
the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type. (Hegel 2008, p.
162, [§158] Addition)

Love, as we see in Hegel, allows for the recognition, the grasp-

ing of the subject’s own alienation—its own lack or gap or nega-
tivity—through its reflection in the other. The self-consciousness
attained in love is not one of completion and wholeness, or of
becoming fully self-aware; rather, it is one of reconciling with
the fact of the subject’s own constitutive alienation, the negative
at the heart of subjectivity. In love, the subject renounces its own
independence, its own affirmative self-presence, and accepts its
constitutive alienation. But in doing so, attains the knowledge
of the freedom that allows it to produce the structure of its own
further freedom. There is also in love something of an irrational
kernel—the level of feeling produced in the form of the trans-
ference—allowing the subject to, later, join with the rational,
objective, and universal form of the state, a rationalism that can
be known to us.
The structuralist revolution, as Dolar notes, was “a break
away from the humanist tradition centered on the subject […] and
particularly as a radical rupture with the philosophical tradition
based on cogito” (Dolar 1998, p. 13). However, if we are to think
emancipatory politics and ethics via reason and the presence of the
subject, we can see now in what way the constitutive alienation
of the subject is a condition of dialectical reasoning. The kind of
reasoning produced in the transference—in love—involves the
reconciling of the subject with its own constitutive alienation.

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 Freedom and Alienation; Or, Humanism of the Non-All

This, to conclude, is how the subject comes to center itself in the

moment of an ethical act that produces the new as a signifying
structure, the fundamental principle of the society, founded upon
a necessary transformation that is nonetheless historically contin-
gent. It is how the subject passes, not towards dis-alienation, or
de-centering, but towards separation—the movement from the
big Other to the small other. The new signifier, produced, then,
in the analytical discourse, as the new center—an absent center,
correlative with the subject as the gap in the structure—and the
structuring principle is, as Zupančič puts it, “the event proper, and
it triggers a new subjectivization” (Zupančič 2017, p. 127). This
is how, again, as Dolar puts it, for Lacan “there is no process, and
no structure, without a subject” (Dolar 1998, p. 13).
These are the terms in which the renewal of a dialectical hu-
manism that apprehends subjectivity in its constitutive alienation
must be grounded: not by way of the false humility of bourgeois
and posthumanist concern with a substantialized otherness,
where, as Žižek puts it “the subject pretends to speak on behalf
of the Global Cosmic Order, posing as its humble instrument”
(Žižek 1999, pp. 132–133)—a strategy to combat anthropocentric
hubris—but as acknowledgement of the fact that no subject but us
can take responsibility for doing what is necessary in historically
contingent conditions. In a nod to Sartre, we have to agree that
humanity is nothing other than what it makes of itself. We, alone,
are responsible for what we do. Our struggle today, then—the
struggle of the Anthropocene against the Capitalocene—is pre-
cisely the struggle of (dialectical) humanism against posthuman
capitalism. Dialectical humanism must be grasped as the choice
of preserving the conditions for human universality—a choice
that, nonetheless, is centered on a constitutive loss.

167
 Matthew Flisfeder

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