Enjoyment as an Economic Factor: Reading Marx with Lacan

Ceren Özselçuk
Yahya M. Madra

This paper takes issue with economic discourses that present excessive greed as the central cause of economic crises. We argue that this focus on greed as the catalyst (when harnessed or the enemy of social order keeps the public debate from deliberating on the particular modes of enjoyment, which both shore up and destabilize the dynamics of production, appropriation, distribution and consumption under capitalism. We produce an analysis of the latest crisis of US capitalism that steers away not only from the theoretical humanist categories like greed but also from the residual reproductionism that continues to silently inform certain Lacanian analyses.

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Özselçuk, Ceren and Y. M. Madra. 2010. "Enjoyment as an Economic Factor: Reading Marx with Lacan." Subjectivity 3 (3): 323-347