Lacan and Marx

Pierre Bruno traces where Marx appears across Lacan's writings and seminars, then builds an argument from Lacan's claim that Marx was the one who invented the symptom. Bruno follows that reading closely before setting out where Lacan departs from Marx, and he holds Marx's surplus-value beside Lacan's surplus-enjoyment to show what each concept does and where they diverge.

From there the book works through Lacan's formalisation of the capitalist discourse and the older question of need as Marxist and psychoanalytic accounts frame it. Bruno reads Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Zizek against one another on capitalism, and turns to Stevenson and to Brecht to develop his commentary on the division of the subject.

For a Lacanian clinician, the value lies in how carefully Bruno links the economy of enjoyment to the symptom and to that division, keeping both the exit from capitalism and its exit from us in view. John Holland translated the French text for Routledge in 2019.