The economic stages a comeback

I have had a bit of a change of heart since my last post. I think that I have moved too far away from my original project. I started out with a psychoanalytic critique on the possibilities of achieving anti-capitalist change. I have now ended up stuck in an ally with psychoanalytic ethics and the pure politics of radical democracy. This is not to say that these issues are not important, indeed they are vital to my thesis. However, I do not believe that they form the core of my thought. Rather, I would like to refocus the thesis towards the economy, rather than politics. Ultimately, the two are unavoidably linked, but I think we must acknowledge that the economy should be the fundamental site of struggle for the left.

This position is much more Zizekian than I had previously been writing from. In fact, my redirection in thought was driven by re-reading Conversations with Zizek, an excellent book. This is not to say that I have abandoned Laclau, but rather that at this stage I believe that Zizek will provide the core insights into my main argument. As I see it now, my thesis would take the following shape;

Introduction
- Fundamentals of psychoanalysis/ Discourse theory
- Capitalism from a psychoanalytic point of view

Critiques of capitalism
- Radical democracy/pure politics; Laclau, Mouffe and Stavrakakis
- Islam
- Ecologism
- Zizekian: Internal problems of capitalism. Traversing the fantasy, the act and the singular

What is to be done?
- Problems/Solutions/Alternatives
- Ethics?

Conclusion

I forsee the main difficulty will be running in psychoanalytic theory with political critique. There are two major theories at work, discourse theory and Zizek’s Lacanian. Both are ontological theories as well as normative political programs/critiques, although they are intimately linked. Therefore I may end up using Islam and ecologism as examples, rather than sections in their own right. It will largely depend on the outcome of my work on psychoanalytic theory.

At the moment what grips me the most is Zizek’s notion of universality produced through the interplay of the abstract universal, particular and singular. Laclau’s conception of universality is remarkably similar to Zizek’s as well. What interests me most with this form of universality is that it focuses on the constitutive exclusion that produces the universal. I believe that it is this exclusion in capitalism – in the form of the third world- that could provide the most traction for an anti-capitalist move.

However, with all this I have ignored the question of ethics that held me back previously. It is not that I do not think that ethics are important any more or that I have resolved the issue, but rather that I have come to peace with contingency. To me now contingency does not mean a lack in the ethical, but rather a need to be responsible for ethical decisions. Because there is no big Other to guarantee ethics, but ethical decisions cannot be avoided, we are responsible for the consequences of our ethical acts. We can try to be the best that we can be, and we have to be open to alternatives, but we still have to make decisions within a symbolic field that have both symbolic and real consequences.