Artikel

Wat goed genoeg is in de ontologie is daarom nog niet goed genoeg in de geschiedenis

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Samenvatting

Todd McGowan’s work attempts to construct a psychoanalytic critique of capitalism that moves beyond the limits of marxism. He analyses capitalism in terms of its mobilization of our psyche. Our psyche, he argues, is ontologically constituted around a lost object. Capitalism manages to continually mobilize this experience of loss as a desire for the accumulation of consumer goods or capital. This way however, the psyche remains trapped in the psychic impasses of desire. Marxism, in McGowan’s reading, fails to emancipate us from capitalism, as it remains stuck in the same impasses, only for them to be realized in a different future communist society. In this article I aim to show two things. On the one hand to show how McGowan’s recourse to an ontological framework leads to a historically impoverished critical framework and on the other to show how new interpretations of Marx do not suffer from these psychic impasses as McGowan maintains. I end with a suggestion of how psychoanalysis and marxism could be combined more fruitfully.

Hoe citeren:

Van Volcem, E., (2024) “Wat goed genoeg is in de ontologie is daarom nog niet goed genoeg in de geschiedenis”, Ethiek en Maatschappij 26(1), 9–36. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/em.94660