Diaphanes, Fachbücher, Egocracy (Englisch, Howard, Arribas Rouse, 2011)

The claim is often made that Marxism lacks an adequate conception of the subject and psychoanalysis an adequate conception of the social. "Egocracy: Marx, Freud and Lacan" seeks to render this contention redundant. The book's first part elaborates a new (non-Lukacsian, non-Althusserian etc.) reconstruction of the development of Marx's thought, centering around the (proto-Lacanian) problematic of the split subject. There are, we discover, three Marxes, not one (Lukacs et al.) or two (Althusser) and it is only the third Marx, the today much-maligned Marx of "Das Kapital", who definitively succeeds in the social articulation of the subject's division. Part two traces the effects of this articulation on the coherence of the work of Freud and Lacan. Freud, ironically, is revealed to have repressed his most revolutionary insight: "the nucleus of the Ego is Unconscious". Carried through, this formula is seen to explode the fundamentally asocial presuppositions of the two metapsychological topologies. Lacan, paradoxically, is shown to do justice to his master's most radical aspect only by effecting a gradual "return to Marx" which is, at the same time, a turning away from his own earlier and indefensible erection of a "transcendental" symbolic order. Lacan's famous barred subject turns out, with a whole host of repercussions, to be none other than the (proletarian!) subject centrally diagnosed in Marx's magnum opus.