The core theoretical task of this thesis is a consideration of the possibilities for redeveloping a form of class relationship that avoids the current suffering of the hungry. Despite the immaterial face of Western capital, the limitations of this form of political economy are the most damaging in material form – in the hunger of the poor and the breakdown of our natural environmental. These symptoms are constitutive of the continued presence and expansion of capital. For this reason, any response to capitalism which intends to alter global economic conditions must move outside of the realm of capital and turn to theory. Although such a turn can be difficult, particularly in the face of the expansion of capitalist logic and structure into ‘critical; thought it remains vital. One discipline that has remained largely immune to the demands of capital is psychoanalysis. As a mode of critique, psychoanalysis is best able to avoid the twin dangers of postmodern particularism (which offers no threat to capital) and nostalgic essentialism in producing an analysis of capitalism. In particular, Lacanian psychoanalysis adds much to a Marxist critique of political economy. In doing so, however, this critique removes the foundations of the predominant Leftist responses to political economy and shared social life and instead insists on the constitutivity of both lack and excess.
The problem of the instantiation of a communal ethic continues to plague the political production of psychoanalysis, which thus far has provided no alternative to capital and certainly no modality of the material reproduction of shared social life which might meaningful reduce the material sufferings which result from the rule of the capitalist empire. Nonetheless, by considering Zizek’s theory of universality, in conjunction with a rehabilitation of class as the fundamental condition of (im)possibility for political economy, renewed possibilities emerge for the material reproduction of globally shared social life which avoid class exploitation, thus opening up the possibilities of a global economic matrix which does not require the material depravation of the masses, nor the ecological rape of the planet to continue to instantiate itself. Ultimately, I seek to propose a renewed dialectic of class impossibility, one that offers the possibility of the emancipation of the hungry, an emancipation that is the duty of our species. In doing so I hope to develop a language for the development of a critique of capitalism and establish the nodal points of a new frontier for political economy.
