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From LQ 210

From Civilisation to Globalisation I 

 Agnès Aflalo 

Since the end of the Second World War, the world has changed. And this change can be put into order

starting from the concept of discourse as Lacan formalised it1. The progress made by the discourses of

capitalism and science allows us to grasp the effects of it. 

The Capitalist Discourse and its Subject 

As for every discourse, the discourse of capitalism account for a loss of jouissance that is impossible to

recover. This loss of jouissance is always perceived as a theft, and its return is always located on the side of

the Other, the Master.  Freud describes the same libidinal displacements within the circuit of the drive. But

Marx was the first to knot these two unknown displacements of the libido, which made Lacan say that he is the

inventor of the symptom. This symptom as it was discovered by psychoanalysis in its beginning is still valid

today. Scientific obscurantism in the 21st century may very well decide to ignore it, which does not prevent it

from existing.

This capitalist discourse rejects the first loss of jouissance and suspends its return. The symptom ceaselessly

reiterates this double movement of refusal of the loss and its return so as to totalise it, which it does not

miss.  This is the fundamental stereotypy of the symptom. This discourse thus accomplishes a foreclosure of

castration. In Freud’s era, civilisation and its discontents centred itself essentially on loss, whilst today,

globalisation centres itself especially on the second time of the return of jouissance without limits. For

Lacan, the discourse of the unconscious must be clarified with this capitalist discourse.

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Capitalism has allowed a new subject to emerge. He is very much an effect of language, but is no longer

subjected to the master signifier which is repressed. That is to say that the signifiers of the social Other no

longer identify him.  We particularly observe this with regards to homosexuality or autism, current

symptomatic stakes for the DSM. These subjects refuse the segregation induced by the dominant discourse

which classes them respectively within perversions or psychoses. These worn-out master-words no longer index

the real that is at stake and are rejected.

More generally, the capitalist subject refuses the authority of the Master. And “the authority crisis” names

this phenomenon of the decline of the Master at every level of democratic societies.  However, the function

of the master-words is also the mortification of jouissance. When the master-word is repressed, the

mortification of jouissance – castration – no longer operates. The consequence of this at the level of the body is

decisive. There are no longer any limits upon the production of the object (a) surplus-enjoyment. This is

exploitation to death. The reason for this is that it is not only having that is concerned, but also being. The

subject is even more abandoned to the authority of the absolute master in so far as he is not identified to any

particular master. Death is the only limiting principle for jouissance when castration no longer operates.

Capitalism has known two major modifications during the last thirty years. Firstly, it has become globalised.

Effectively, since the fall of the Berlin wall, communist nations have come together under the market economy.

It is then legitimate to say that there is no longer civilisation, but globalisation in which subjects are suffering

particularly from addictions without any limits founded upon the unlimited return of the surplus-enjoyment.

Next, capitalism has become “scientific” –  financial capitalism should be called scientific capitalism. Its

subject is the generalised proletarian, because nothing allows him to uphold a discourse, as the phenomenon

of the ‘Indignados’ shows us.  It is no longer necessary to place the proletarian in factories in order to extract

the surplus-enjoyment from him. The financial crisis of 2008 showed this, it suffices to lure him by means of

investments which have the appeal of casino winnings, reduced to a few opaque mathematical equations

(securitization) in order to transform him into a homeless person at the first crisis of confidence. The

phenomenon of solitude and its autistic satisfaction gives an idea of the worldwide expansion of this

phenomenon.

The Scientific Discourse and its Subject 

With science, the master-signifier no longer functions either. What is more, science reduces the effect of a

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series of functions of discourse: The signifier is reduced to its effect of letter  –mathematics only uses letters – 

and the object (a) surplus-enjoyment is rejected; there, the dialectical work of truth is no longer possible

because the subject’s division is neutralised. Castration then no longer operates. Truth and the singular real of

libido are disconnected. The only real at stake in this discourse obeys universal laws, and not a singular cause:

It is the real of the organism which is to be distinguished from that of the body. The analytic discourse has

shown, in effect, since its beginnings in the 20th

  century, that the body is always a speaking body, which

evidently is not the case of the organism which is a matter of science.

The subject of science dates from the cogito and is nothing other than a void. It is a pure subject. It is decisive

to see this, because science no longer needs to turn to the intuition of the body.   It does without the body.

Now science operates solely on the organism and its real. This pure subject of science does not exist

anywhere, but it is necessary to grasp that science veils the part of the subject that expresses itself in the

fantasy and which is correlated to the object (a).  The subject thus neutralised in his division becomes

universalising.  He increasingly lends himself to the logic of classes. But the liberation from the body provokes

a disjunction between the body and the object (a), between the universality of the body and the particularity of

the object (a). The object (a) is an empty set, it is therefore incorporeal. When it is rejected, it gallops off all by

itself, separated from the body. But it is also ready to recapture the bodies again at the first opportunity. This is

the case of every natural  or industrial object (a). This object (a) is not inert. It is a bit like a black hole, it is an

object “that wants”. Let us take the example of the object (a) gaze and its relation to the body.  The gaze

increasingly captures the bodies in our societies under surveillance, whether outside on the street by way of

increasingly numerous cameras, but also in the home by way of television or computer screens without

counting mobile telephones and other mobile tablets transportable everywhere, all the time. In other words,

this object (a) has on the body the effect of a push-to-enjoying, from which it cannot be separated for long.

When it returns towards the organism, it then manifests itself in all sorts of addictions which make up

contemporary symptoms. It is the same insatiable gaze object that scrutinises the private life of everyday

people through shows of the so-called reality TV; it is also this object that feeds upon the vicissitudes of the

private lives of our modern masters whose mediatisation is demanded without delay. But when the media

mirror no longer provides a veil, the awaited ideal does not appear, and disappointment is then assured. The

ideal of the normal man is without doubt in the spirit of our times. However, this fiction which gathers

together also contains within itself the germ of ulterior dispersion. Effaced for only a short time, it does not

miss re-appearing and manifesting itself in particular as the small difference to which each one holds on, as

though to his most precious possession. Let us add that the subject of science, liberated from the body, is also

a subject without shame. Following the same principle, the emancipation of the oral object provokes

worldwide epidemics of obesity or anorexia, from the earliest age.

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Science and capitalism are united for better and for worse. They have engendered the most important

progress of humanity. However, the deep modifications that they impose on discourse also generate new

forms of discontent. Evaluation has come to reinforce this globalised discontent. Contemporary discontent

knows no traditional frontiers and this is why it is justifiable today to speak of globalisation and no longer of

civilisations.