A-sexual Violence and Systemic Enjoyment

Alenka Zupančič

There is a proverb, attributed to Oscar Wilde, which is increasingly relevant

lately: “Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Perhaps
this shouldn’t be taken as an eternal wisdom, but more as a very poignant
description of the present historical—and political—moment.
That sex is about power can of course mean several different things.
It can mean – and this is a more traditional understanding – that sex and
sexuality are all about power games; for example, about women seducing
men and making them do whatever they want, or vice versa. We can change
“men” and “women” to different sexual partners, but the point remains that
sexuality, as also implied in desire, enjoyment, love, gives you certain power
over the other person, and that this is actually what it is all about. In other
words, in this understanding sex is used for, and as, power, by means of using
and turning something in the other (say, their desire) against them. In this
constellation, power (position of power) is not so much the starting point as
it is a result, even an “honestly earned” outcome. “Honestly earned” in the
sense that the game—which is basically the game of seduction—obeys
certain rules, the fundamental one being that one can obtain this power only
by inciting the other to hand it to us. One only uses against the other what
one has succeeded provoking in them. It is by responding to my seduction
that the other hands me the weapon, the power.
In classical literature one of the most prominent and interesting
examples of the exploration of sexuality and desire as power-relation is of
course Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons).1

1
This famous eighteenth-century epistolary novel has also seen many screen adaptations, the
most well-known of which is probably Stephen Frears’s film Dangerous Liaisons from 1988,

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People’s lives, and particularly the lives of women, can be ruined by their
desire, since the social setting of the eighteenth century did not allow for a
woman’s desire not to be fully covered by wedlock. But in the novel these
two levels of power are distinguished: as a result of Valmont’s manipulating
seduction and subsequent abandonment, Tourvel dies not of social shame
and exclusion, but of the injury inflicted, via her love, to her being. We can
say of course that this casting of women as beings who can “die from love”
is itself deeply ideological, and it could be read this way, but this is not what
is primarily at stake in the novel.
What is at stake is, first, a more general proposition that lies at the
origin of Valmont’s and Marquise’s (de Merteuil) pact, and which
constitutes an important theme in eighteen-century literature, namely that
even the most authentic feelings, such as love, can be “mechanically
produced” by appropriate machinations.2 Valmont decides to make Madame
de Tourvel fall in love with him, so he forms a strategy and systematically
carries it out step by step, leaving nothing to chance. And Madame de
Tourvel does in fact fall in love with him. We’ll return to this mechanical
aspect later.
The other crucial aspect of Valmont’s seduction is the
(over)emphasis on Tourvel’s surrendering willingly. Not only willingly, but
in full and sober awareness of the drastic consequences of her actions: he
does not want her to give in to his seduction in a moment of passion and
confusion.
Valmont thus makes his project doubly complicated. Firstly because
of the state of mind of Tourvel when he meets her. Not only is she known
for her genuine (rather than moralizing) virtue, but also for her being
genuinely happy in her marriage. And secondly because, as he keeps
repeating, her surrender must be a result of reflection and sober decision,

with Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer in the leading roles. The novel is
constructed as an exchange of letters from which we can reconstruct the story. The two main
characters, Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, have broken up their carnal
relationship in order to better stay true to the pact which binds them at the level of their
principles and ideas. This pact and the “duty” following from it basically consist in seducing
and manipulating other people (as many as possible) into doing whatever they want them to
do. The main storyline involves Valmont’s seduction of a particularly difficult target, Madame
de Tourvel. I discuss Laclos’ novel in much more detail in Ethics of the Real (London: Verso,
2012).
2
Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s famous work L'homme machine (1747) constitutes the obvious
background of this plot.

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not based on her giving in to his seductive efforts in a moment of confused
passion. He emphasizes this again and again, and this also constitutes the
reason for which he twice refuses to take advantage of the opportunities (to
score a quick “victory”) offered to him. Each time with the explanation that
this would be too easy, and not worthy of a true and capable hunter that he
is. “Leave the humble poacher to kill the stag where he has surprised it in its
hiding place; the true hunter will bring it to bay.”3 He also explains:

My plan is (…) to make her perfectly aware of the value and extent
of each one of the sacrifices she makes me; not to proceed so fast
with her that the remorse is unable to catch up; it is to show her
virtue breathing its last breath in long-protracted agonies; to keep
that somber spectacle ceaselessly before her eyes.4

At stake here is clearly his own fantasy and the way in which the latter
frames his enjoyment for him—a classic example of what Lacanian
psychoanalysis puts under the clinical heading of perversion: forcing the
other to subjectivize herself. Perversion, and particularly its sadistic version,
is not about treating the other as an object, but about treating her in such a
way that would trigger, demand, “extract” a subjectivation; it is about
forcing the other to become fully subject (to “decide,” consciously accept,
etc.).5 A sadist pervert wants the other to subjectivize (split) herself in
response to the surplus object he makes appear for her, and to supplement
her lack (division) by that same object. The pervert wants the Other to
become a complete Other, a “complet(ed)” subject. Ultimately, he posits
himself as the instrument of the impossible enjoyment of the Other.
In the case of Valmont it is very clear that none of his seductive
machinations with Tourvel are simply about sex — the whole thing is indeed
about power (making her do what he wants, and proving his point). But of
course power itself gets sexualized in this process of its “purification”: the
very proving of his point is for him the ultimate source of enjoyment. (There

3
Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1961), 63 (Letter
23).
4
Ibid, 150 (Letter 70).
5
Another example would be William Styron’s novel Sophie's Choice, and the Alan J. Pakula
film (with Meryl Streep) based on it. I refer of course to the story’s traumatic kernel: Meryl
Streep arriving at Auschwitz with her two kids, a boy and a girl, and the sadistic German
officer forcing her to choose one that will survive (or else both would be killed).

3 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
is also a suggestion in the novel that at some point he has genuinely fallen in
love with Tourvel, but this is another matter, and another layer of the story,
which we will not pursue here.)
Independently of this specific setting (of perversion), and looked at
from Madame de Tourvel’s perspective, it is clear that a certain
subjectivation and exposure – (via) desire – can always be at stake in “sexual
relations”; there is a possible dimension of power (and its abuse) that always
surrounds the very event of our desire. The fact is that we risk to be, and
sometimes are, hanged by the ropes of our own desire.
It seems that this dimension has been strongly repressed or erased
in today’s predominant debates concerning power and sexual violence,
because any hint at a possible subjective participation (by the victim) in the
configuration of abuse is perceived as an outrageous insult. This is because
it appears to lend itself directly to claims such as: she was raped because she
(more or less secretly) desired it. But this outraged dismissal of the question
of desire misses the point, and it does little service to the victims.
Desire is in itself a complex, dialectical thing; it is not one-
dimensional and it cannot be reduced to its supposed last instance. Nor are
we as subjects simply reducible to our desire (or enjoyment), but are split
by it. This is to say that if I don’t want something, and I say so, this “no”
cannot be dismissed by pointing to the desire that (perhaps) nevertheless
exists. And this holds even more true in the case of enjoyment: I can be
forced to enjoy what I don’t want to enjoy. As Slavoj Žižek emphasized some
time ago, this configuration does not constitute any kind of vector or revealer
of truth (of what I really want); on the contrary, it makes the forcing even
worse, it makes it more and not less inexcusable.6 Also: women (and men as
well) have rape fantasies, but this does not mean that deep down they
secretly want to be raped, violated. This is not how fantasy works. Fantasy,
in the strong psychoanalytic meaning of the word, is not some subjective
scenario waiting and wanting to get realized. It participates in reality exactly
as fantasy. In terms of psychoanalysis fantasies are not the opposite of
reality, but its support.
What prevents fantasy from being fulfilled is not simply our fear
(“lack of nerve” or other considerations), but above all the fact that fantasy
fully fulfils its role such as it is, as fantasy. It is as fantasy that it provides the
framework which guarantees (for us) the consistency of a certain segment

6
Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company 2007),
55.

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of our reality. This is precisely why, as Žižek also insists, a “realization of
fantasy” can be, and usually is, utterly devastating for the subject. Because
in being “realized” as empirical content, it disappears, disintegrates as the
frame that has so far held our reality together. This is also why
psychoanalytic work with fantasies does not consist in making subjects
finally “realize” them, carry them out, but in gradually making them useless
in their role of framing some reality for us and providing its consistency. We
can henceforth relate to, or be part of this reality in a different way.
To take another example: if I fantasize about suddenly dying and
my unfaithful lover being devastated by it, this does not mean that deep
down I want to die or kill myself. What I want is to see (through the
“window” of this fantasy, that is, through the otherwise impossible perspective
that this fantasy opens on my reality) the other suffer because of losing me,
I want to see him realize via this loss how important I have actually been to
him. It is a fantasy that helps me sustain the reality of my actual love life,
and not something that would constitute its future accomplishment (if
fulfilled). The difference between the two is crucial, and not addressing it de
facto leads to what this avoidance of addressing it wants to prevent: it makes
those who fantasize indeed (feel) guilty/responsible for what happens to
them in an utterly independent and brutal way. You can repeat to the victim
as much as you want that it was not her fault, but if you don’t provide her
with means of coping and tackling with the issues of desire and enjoyment
you’ve done her very little service.
As to another possible configuration, involving what we commonly
describe as seduction, I may in fact quite consciously allow myself to be
seduced, say yes, and stick with this subjectivation even if I end up
abandoned or betrayed. To say that it has all been a manipulation and I
didn’t have any choice, that is, to utterly deny one’s subjectivity, is a strange
way of “affirming” oneself. The fact that I participated in a given situation
as a subject (for example that I have fallen in love and willingly accepted,
even encouraged certain actions of the other), does not exculpate the other
with respect to their sometimes intentionally manipulative and harmful
actions. Yet holding the other responsible for their actions should not have
as its condition that I fully give up on my subjectivity (desire).
And, by the way, this problematical yet deeply ingrained conviction
that a victim cannot be a subject exists also in other situations and
circumstances. During the war in Yugoslavia many refugees from Bosnia
came to Slovenia, and people – differently from what is going on in the

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recent refugee crises – mostly welcomed them and were willing to help. But
there was also some hostility which, as a rule, popped up when the refugees
started appearing as subjects, and not just as devastated victims, deprived of
everything. Some people were outraged, for example, when Bosnian women
would go out nicely dressed, and even wear some (cheap) jewelry. In order
for us to love (our) victims and help them, we need them to stay victims, and
helpless.
To point this out is not to deny the real structural (as well as
psychological) difficulty involved in seeing in the same frame the other as
the subject and the other as the victim, yet this is precisely the “parallax
view” that the truth demands.
In any case, this is slippery ground, and it seems to be all the more
intolerable because it is slippery. And it is here that another aspect of the
theme of “sexuality and power” comes in, or another way of understanding
the saying that “sex is all about power.” It presents us not so much with the
power of sexuality (power of desire, of seduction), as with the power that
comes from being in the position to seduce, or in the position to more or less
subtly blackmail the other into gratifying our sexual desires. The key word
here is of course position—power is all about position (of power), and sex
enters the game on a secondary level.
This second configuration (conception) itself comprises two
relatively different structures. As indicated, one emphasizes that there are
certain (power-) positions which facilitate seduction and even automatically
engender it, and the other exposes the abuse of power in forcing,
blackmailing people to cooperate with our sexual desires. Both are real, but
they are not exactly the same. The first brings us back to the other briefly
mentioned theme of Dangerous Liaisons, the theme of the “mechanical,”
inexorable causality by which even such subjective sentiment as love can be
produced.7 There are situations, configurations and “positions” which seem
to engender almost automatically something like love. This phenomenon is
also not foreign to psychoanalysis and its practical setting, with the
transference (also called transference love) almost inevitably appearing
during the treatment. To reciprocate this love is of course not what is
expected from the analyst, and it would inevitably end the analysis and
transform the nature of the relationship. But if, as Freud humorously
describes this possible alternative path of transference, the analyst decides

7
For more on this, see Mladen Dolar, “La femme-machine,” New Formations 23 (1994).

6 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
to stop the analysis and marry the patient, this is not exactly the same as
abuse.
The other structure is much more perfidious, it is a matter of – often
systemic and structural—blackmail. (For example: you risk your job, or
miss a promotion, or have other kinds of trouble if you do not comply with
sexual desires of those in the position of power.) In this case “sex is all about
power” refers to something else than power-games involved in seduction:
you are in the position of power, and you use this position to solicit sexual
favors, or simply exercise, impose your sexuality on persons who are in no
position to say no (or who, if they say no, can face severe consequences). In
this conceptual configuration power exists outside of sexuality, and is used
to get sex. In other words, in the first configuration it is sex (desire) that is
used for power, it gives you power over the other person, whereas in the
second configuration it is power that is used for sex.
A large majority of the public discussions about sex and violence
that we see today in the West belong to the second category. One could even
say that the interrogation of the first (of the dialectics of desire, and love)
has all but completely ceded its place to the interrogation of power positions
and power relations, and of sexuality as their hostage.
I would like to suggest that there exists a possible other, very tricky
side to this move in which one first entirely separates sex and power, and
then reunites them in a new “sex-power” compound, defined by abuse. This
rather overwhelmingly present link between sex and power, where sexual
violence appears as a result of the abuse of power, has important
consequences for both how we think about power and how we think about
sex. Its particularly problematic side concerns the way in which it affects
our thinking about power, how it efficiently narrows our critical scope when
it comes to thinking about power.
In the conclusion to his recent text “Reflections on the MeToo
Movement and Its Philosophy,” Jean-Claude Milner briefly points out the
danger that the movement faces if it simply embraces this direction: it risks
lending itself to a rather sinister ideological operation.
What operation? The predominant talk about sexual violence as
abuse of power (supported and exploited by the media) has its other side: it
implicitly suggests that power is problematic only where it involves sexuality.
Or more precisely: it suggests that it is problematic because someone enjoys
it—with enjoyment constituting the link to sexuality. As Milner succinctly
describes the consequences of this kind of stance: brutality of power is not

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contested per se, if nobody enjoys it. What is impermissible is for any
individual to use their professional position to satisfy their own personal
fantasies.8
This is a very important observation. Of course we can immediately
cry out: Well, it should be impermissible! Yes, but we should nevertheless
not move too quickly when reading and discussing this, and rather try to see
what exactly is being said.
Power, or its abuse, can be used to “get” many things that we like to
talk about, and do talk about a lot, like sex or personal gain. But, let us not
forget, it can also be used to influence and decide some major systemic,
fundamental social issues, such as, for example, distribution of social wealth,
general healthcare, military interventions, prosecution (and character
assassination) of people who expose serious systemic malpractices and
crimes. If all that can be wrong about power is its non-professional abuse,
then we have no means to even begin to address these issues.
The point would be the following: massive and systematic
presentation of the link between power and sex (or personal gain/enjoyment
in general) conveniently whitewashes situations where power is exercised in
ways that affect our lives, all our lives, in a most fundamental and often
extremely brutal ways.
The example of Julian Assange is paramount here: the (mere)
allegations of sexual abuse (the prosecution of which has been recently
dropped altogether) were, and still are, enough to block out in public eyes
the enormous systemic and systematic crimes and abuses revealed by
Assange and WikiLeaks.
Or consider this supposedly “natural” situation (“natural”
particularly in the US): a professor having sex with a student is a serious
and utterly inadmissible abuse of power, whereas the fact that this same
student had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a decent
education is simply business as usual. This example is emphatically not
meant to be about comparing the two, because they cannot be compared,
nor about one evil being possibly excused on the grounds that the other is
even bigger; it is about what we consider “evil” (or not at all) in the first
place. The point is not that sexual abuse is not seriously evil, but that it itself
often functions today in a much broader power game as a welcome decoy: it

8
Jean-Claude Milner, “Reflections on the MeToo Movement and Its Philosophy”, Problemi
International, No.3 (2019): 85. (Accessible on-line at http://problemi.si)

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functions as the stain the elimination of which whitewashes other ways in
which power operates, making these look simply normal (“professional”).
In other words, I’d like to suggest that the mainstream focus on
sexuality and sexual scandals is also a symptom, and not only a welcome
indicator that sexuality and sexual abuse are finally being taken seriously
(which is unambiguously a good thing). There are some extremely
significant dimensions of power that we simply don’t talk about, and don’t
have the means to talk about. But we are offered to talk about sex as much
as we want.
Again, to make this absolutely clear: the point is not that we talk too
much about sexual abuse and neglect other forms of violence; no, the point
is that we talk about it mostly in a wrong way, that is in a way that allows
for the concealment of systemic causes of violence in general, including
systemic causes of sexual violence. Paradoxically, for all the talk about sex and
sexuality, nobody really cares about, or talks about, it. The talk is indeed all
about power, and—as the obverse side of this—about whitewashing of
power (by ways of eliminating the allegedly “subjective stain” of sexuality).
In this situation the issue of sex is not overemphasized, but rather
(over)exploited, yet not taken seriously in itself.
An important issue at stake here is of course also the old issue of the
difference between subjective and objective, or between subjective and
systemic violence.
To quote Žižek on this question:

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be

perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is
experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero
level. It is seen as perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of
things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence
inherent to this “‘normal”’ state of things. Objective violence is
invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which
we perceive something subjectively violent. (…) It may be invisible,
but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what
otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.9

9
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador 2008), 2.

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The implicit context of this this quote is political, referring to the difference
between the “smooth” everyday functioning of power (with the amount of
invisible repression/violence necessary for this smooth operation), and the
visible outbursts of violence with people protesting on the streets, setting
fire to cars and shops, attacking the police.
In relation to this one could see the ideological
operation/configuration that I am trying to describe as something that casts
or deploys this difference between subjective and objective violence entirely
on the side of the systemic forces of power themselves, establishing this
divide there. Systemic violence is perceived, as it usually is, as business as
usual. However, the moment a serious and growing dissatisfaction and
revolt appears on the side of the people, a revolt that threatens the stability
of power and cannot be easily ignored, the “issue” is recognized and its
causes quickly attributed to the subjectively corrupt usurpation of the
systemic dimension of power, that is to its abuse. Somebody abused their
power, which makes the problem appear as a result of purely subjective
violence. What follows from there is this axiom: Power can only be wrong
when it is abused. Or perhaps even more precisely; power can never be
wrong it can only be abused.
So, if objective violence is invisible, subjective violence is visible,
often very visible – also when figures and representatives of power engage
in it. And I’d like to suggest that sexuality functions today not only as one of
the prominent cases of visible, subjective violence, but also and perhaps in
the first place as embodiment of the very visibility/subjectivity of violence. It
seems that nowhere more than in sexual violence the subjective factor is in
the foreground, and that “sexual violence” has the capacity (or
characteristic) of absorbing, or subjectivizing all layers of violence. If it is
sexual, it cannot be but personal—not in the sense of necessarily involving
deep feelings, emotions or passions, but in the sense of someone enjoying it,
and hence being personally/subjectively corrupt.
And here we come back to the already briefly mentioned notion of
professionalism. You can do all kinds of violent things to people if you do it
professionally, that is without (visible) personal satisfaction or gain. It seems
obvious that the notion of “professionalism” also underwent an important
change in this contemporary ideological operation. The more classical (and
in some ways laudable) notion of professionalism has been hijacked and
taken in the direction of perversion, as I briefly described it earlier. The
classical notion was mostly about not getting your personal preoccupations

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and views interfere with your job, while taking full subjective responsibility for
the objective outcome of your actions, which is what the notion of “objective
responsibility” is about in this case. The new notion and ideal of
professionalism simply pretends to cut off any subjective dimension, and
casts the professional as a mere executor (of higher forces and orders); the
subjective dimension is reduced entirely to just a possible source of troubles.
(If the execution of these orders has devastating results, it has to be because
a subjective factor got in the way of their pure execution. And this is very
different from taking subjective responsibility for the objective state of
things that you helped to bring about. It is, more often than not, about
offering a subjective explanation for what is objectively wrong.)
The problem is that this professionalization of power (via
elimination of enjoyment) doesn’t really work: as psychoanalysis keeps
pointing out, you don’t get rid of enjoyment so easily. Moreover, there is
such a thing as impersonal enjoyment, and perversion is the key figure of it.
Contrary to how it is often depicted in movies, the true image of perversion
is not that of an old horny man observing a young girl with saliva dripping
from his mouth; on the contrary, it’s true image is that of a cold and
composed “professional” making others ashamed of themselves and their
enjoyment.
Important to emphasize here is that I am not trying to denounce the
perverse position on the grounds that behind its “professional” posture its
practitioners nevertheless enjoy, and are hence bad. This would be repeating
the same argument that I am trying to dismantle here. The figure of
perversion is important because it challenges the idea that all enjoyment is
simply and directly subjective, personal. It testifies to the existence and
dimension of impersonal enjoyment. It testifies to the existence of what we
could call “systemic enjoyment.” Perverts know that it exists, and they
certainly know how to put it to personal use, but that doesn’t make the
enjoyment simply subjective in its origin.
Why is this important? Because today the key question seems to be
the following: Is it even possible to conceive of power without some
enjoyment sticking to it? Can there be power without this libidinal stain
blemishing it purity? If we accept the question in this form and let it
orientate us, we end up with two possible attitudes.

1) One that claims that this should at least be our ideal (even if
unattainable), and that the progress lies in the potentially

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 infinite purification of power, invention of more and more
complicated rules and prescriptions that regulate it and prevent
its abuse.

2) One that cynically gives up on these attempts, embraces

enjoyment, invites us to realistically accept that there is no
power without the libidinal compound, and suggests that we
better get used to it, and even use it fully.

But, as we can see almost every day now, this is a deadlock, it

confronts us with a wrong, and politically rather disastrous alternative. For
isn’t this precisely how our political space is structured today between “left
progressive liberals” and the rise of the alt-right?
As Angela Nagle has pointed out,10 we have been witnessing lately
a curious turn in which the new populist right is taking the side of
transgression and rebellion, traditionally associated with the left: they talk
about breaking the taboos (of speech, but also of conduct), they dare to
speak up, say and do the forbidden things, challenge the established
structures (including the media) and denounce the “elites.” Even when in
power, they continue with this “dissident” rhetoric of opposition and of
courageous transgression (for example against European institutions and
their bureaucracy, or else against the “deep State”). Transgression seems to
be “sexy,” even if it simply means no longer greeting your neighbor, because,
“Who invented these stupid rules and why should I obey them?” In this
constellation, and after giving up on the more radical ideas of social and
economic justice, and on exposing the systemic causes of injustice, the left
has paradoxically ended up on the conservative side: defending the rule of
law, conserving what we have, and responding to contradictions, excesses
and plain catastrophes generated by the present socio-economic system by
means of introducing more and more new rules, regulations and adjustments
that are supposed to keep the “anomalies” at bay and to prevent/punish any
abuse. This growing and often impenetrable corpus of rules and sub-rules,
which are usually easily disregarded by the big players, but tend to
drastically complicate the lives of smaller players and individuals, includes
“cultural” rules and injunctions which have become, in the past decades, the
main battlefield between the “left” and the “right,” particularly in the US.

10
See her book Kill All Normies (New York: Zero books, 2017).

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 So, on the one side we have people who want “power without
enjoyment”, and on the other people who openly and boastingly enjoy it,
who make it a matter of enjoyment. And the problem is that both sides are
part of the same fundamental logic, which is why they often need and
encourage each other, keep responding to each other, rather than to any
social real.
To at least conceptually break out of this alternative between a-
subjective power without enjoyment, and subjectively affirmed enjoyment
as power, we have to first recognize that this is a false alternative, and why.
The true question is simply not this: is it possible to have power without the
subjective libidinal compound or not?
The conceptual shift to accomplish would be to conceive of the very
libidinal compound of power (which we usually associate with some
subjective gain) as something that is never simply or immediately subjective,
but is rather generated out of the structure itself, and is symptomatic of its
contradictions.
As I tried to develop more extensively in What is sex?, the libidinal
compound of power (“enjoyment”), or of any symbolic/social structure, is
not simply some unavoidable human factor that comes to stain its purity, but
is the symptom of an inner contradiction of this structure, of a gap in it. It is
this contradiction that we need to deal with, and just cutting off the
enjoyment does little to help with that.
The fact that there is enjoyment always points to a “leak” or
contradiction, inconsistency of the structure. If structure were a fully
consistent entity, it wouldn’t produce, in its functioning, these layers and
shoots of (surplus) enjoyment. The latter always occur in places of structural
difficulty, interruption, discontinuity, passages from one level to the other,
from the outside to the inside, and so one. We usually respond to these
contradictions and shoots of enjoyment (that we can experience directly or
indirectly) by subjectivizing them in different ways. A subject is not the
cause of this enjoyment, but a response to it.
So the strong claim here would be that no enjoyment is simply
personal, subjective in its outset; it is not subjective, but subjectivizing
(inducing subjectivation), which is a different thing. It can be
“subjectivized” in different ways, and the figure of the boasting, self-
affirming, often authoritarian “enjoyer” doubtlessly gets a lot of thrust from
the growing discontent that people experience in the face of the also growing
amount of systemic enjoyment and its pressure, which is being methodically

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disclaimed by the purely “professional” executors of politics.
What is “systemic enjoyment”? It is the term11 with which one could
perhaps address more specifically what Freud has called das Unbehagen in der
Kultur, the discontent that grows out of different layers of our social edifice
and its contradictions. Freud’s term points to an affect: discontent,
discomfort, but to what exactly does this affect respond? To the growing
complexity of cultural, civilizational configurations and demands, yet which
cannot be reduced to symbolic regulations, prohibitions and restrictions, but
also imply and generate new forms and even injunctions of enjoyment. (The
“injunction” part was added by Lacan.) For Freud this basically meant that
in dealing with and regulating the drives, Kultur itself takes on a kind of
drive-life and logic, so that the two can no longer be simply opposed, but
work in a singular and sometimes devastating complicity.
The logical form implied in this configuration of complicity can be
easily extended to political economy, or even, and perhaps more accurately,
it can be argued that it comes from political economy; and that psychic
economy is its “extimate” prolongation.
Lacan famously claimed that “Marx invented the symptom” – that
is to say the very logic and structure of what is called “symptom” – and he
has coined the term “surplus enjoyment” upon the Marxian concept of
“surplus value.” This is more than just an analogy. The Marxian concept has
provided Lacan with a way to think of enjoyment as systemic, precisely, that
is as being generated out of a certain glitch in the “system” or social/symbolic
order. And I would suggest that Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is a
response to this idea, a further and systematic elaboration of the fact that
enjoyment is not simply a subjective category. For this theory also allows
Lacan to redefine what is implied for him in the term “discourse,” Discourse
is not simply synonymous with language and speech, or with the symbolic
order in general, it now gets to be defined as a “social link,” le lien social. And
while Lacan held that all symbolic structures and discourses involve a
contradiction, a lapse at the point where systemic enjoyment emerges, he
also suggested that they do not exactly base their entire economy on it, as is
the case with capitalist economy, which “discovered” the
productivity/exploitability of this lapse or glitch. In other words, whereas
the glitch and the systemic enjoyment emerging at its point can function as
an obstructive element of a social link, and calls for repression (or some

11
I am not the only Lacanian using this term. Samo Tomšič uses it in a similar way in his
recent book The Labor of Enjoyment (Berlin: August Verlag, 2019).

14 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
other forms its “domestification” and control), capitalist economy discovered
it as a possible source of profit. Is capitalism one of the four Lacanian
discourses or social link? The longer I keep thinking about this, the less I
think so.
Capitalism, in the sense of capitalist economy, is not a social link, yet
it affects, can affect, all social links. Perhaps some more than others. It
affects them with its two fundamental inventions, which involve the
countability of the surplus generated out of the contradiction,12 and the
systemic exploitation of this contradiction (non-relation) as the very source
of profitable productivity (source of “growth”). 13 This exploitation of the
contradiction was made possible by the new material means of production,
which involved labor force as a peculiar commodity (object) to be bought
and sold: labor appeared on the market as yet another commodity for sale.
This is a key point in what Marx analyzes as “the transformation of money
into capital.” To put it very simply: what makes the products (namely, labor-
power) also appears with them on the market as one of the products, objects
for sale. This paradoxical redoubling corresponds to the point of structural
negativity and its appropriation as the locus of the market’s “miraculous”
productivity. The money-owner finds on the market a commodity whose use
value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, and whose
actual consumption is a creation of value. Labor-power as commodity is the
point that marks the constitutive negativity, gap, of this system: the point
where one thing immediately falls into another (use value into source of
value). Labor is a product among other products, yet it is not exactly like
other products: where other products have a use value (and hence a substance
of value), this particular commodity “leaps over” or “lapses” to the source of
value. The use value of this commodity is to be the source of value of (other)
commodities. It has no “substance” of its own.
It is this peculiar commodity that gives body to the point of
contradiction, and keeps laboring the contradiction, as it were. The surplus

12
This is how Lacan puts it: “Something changed in the master's discourse at a certain point
in history. We are not going to break our backs finding out if it was because of Luther, or
Calvin, or some unknown traffic of ships around Genoa, or in the Mediterranean Sea, or
anywhere else, for the important point is that on a certain day surplus jouissance became
calculable, could be counted, totalized. This is where what is called the accumulation of
capital begins.” The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 177.
13
I develop this point concerning the discovery and the exploitation of the contradiction (non-
relation) as a source of profit more extensively in What is sex?, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2017).

15 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
produced here gets integrated in the symbolic structure by means of being
counted, by means of counting (as surplus value), which in turn implies a
supposedly miraculous expansion of the given symbolic structure, implied
in the perspective of “unceasing growth.”
To develop this further and in more detail would largely exceed the
scope of this paper, so let me return to the starting point. What Freud has
detected and called “discomfort in civilization” could be seen as him
recognizing some effects of a newly established short-circuit between
symbolic structures and (libidinal) economy of the drives, their becoming
strangely homologized in their very heterogeneity and incompatibility. (The
concept of the Superego clearly belongs to this register.) His concept of the
unconscious was born not simply out of the configuration in which symbolic
prohibitions and restrictions demanded repression of certain drives (and
their representations), but out of a more dialectical configuration which
revealed an unexpected complicity between drives and repression, between
(purely) symbolic and the libidinal.
This complicity or short-circuit could be seen as a historical
occurrence, yet one needs to be very precise here: the co-existence, in their
very heterogeneity, of the symbolic structure and enjoyment is not historical,
but belongs to the very “leaking” ontology of symbolic order. Enjoyment is
generated at the points of these contradictions. On the other hand, their
“homologization” (in the form of a new way of counting), and the
consequent massive complicity between the libidinal and symbolic, is a
historic occurrence or “invention.”
As Freud has pointed out, there can be huge amounts of repression
that we simply know nothing about, because they are “successful” in the
sense of not inducing any neurotic behavior, or simply not producing any
symptoms, not leaving any further traces. The symptom has two sides, or
levels. On the one hand it points to a contradiction, a problem. But it points
to it by means of providing a solution to it – an often strange or cumbersome
solution, yet a solution nevertheless. The symptom is this solution. The
symptom alerts us to the fact that repression has been engaged in a further
economy, and has a consequential afterlife. Neurotic behavior always
involves an economy, it involves an economy that feeds on its own negativity,
and this has far reaching consequences and implications.
If this kind of economy of surplus (enjoyment) which has until then
remained mostly uncounted is the invention of capitalism, does this mean
that the symptoms that led to the birth of psychoanalysis were also related,

16 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
connected to this historical occurrence, dependent on it? Even more brutally
formulated: does this mean that people in pre-capitalist times were never
neurotic, or were so in a significantly lesser degree? In a way, yes, this would
be the radical implication. Which of course does not amount to saying that
they were “happier.” And even less that no repression had been at work
there, on the contrary. It rather means that its repressive use had by far
exceeded its economic use, its exploitation as a possible source of profit or
gain, on the individual as well as social scale.
A considerable amount of Foucault’s work revolves around
describing and thinking this shift, which could be formulated as shift from
repression to the economy of repression (for example: from brutal
punishment and torture to imprisonment and surveillance). And economy
of repression does not only mean “cashing in” on repression, but also
involves what Freud has discovered as the vicious spiral of repression and
its “gain” or profit, a spiral in which they mutually reinforce, amplify each
other. Yet even from the purely economic point of view, this complicity is
not a fairy tale, as Foucault tends to suggest. For Foucault, and to put it very
simply, this economy is so vicious because it is utterly unassailable; it turns
everything to its profit, it capitalizes on its own contradictions, rather than
being threatened and endangered by them. And of course, Foucault’s
criticism of Freud and psychoanalysis in general is related to this point:
psychoanalysis participates fully in this economy, and encourages it with its
own means. This is what it’s supposed “invention of sexuality,” as Foucault
phrases it, means: with sexuality and its repression psychoanalysis
discovered something that could be infinitely exploited and put to use in this
modern economy.14
But there is another possible, and far more critical perspective on
this: Freud discovered sexuality as the privileged territory of symptoms, that
is precisely of everything which, in this allegedly “perfect” economy, does not
work. More precisely, he discovered it as the symptom of everything which,
in this perfect economy, produces an additional, further, second degree
“surplus” which cannot be put back to profitable use, but constitutes
disruption, a break-down, a serious crisis. In other words, what Freud saw
so well in relation to the “libidinal economy,” and what he has named das
Unbehagen in der Kultur, was not only how this economy feeds on the profits
of repression, but also that it comes with accumulating costs, and that the

14
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume one: An Introduction (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978).

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latter were about to burst. They did burst eventually, although in a rather
unexpected, global “political” way: in the form of a world war, no less. The
latter was the catastrophe that had, among other things, the effect of
stabilizing the economy for a while.
Everything can be put to use, or made to count, yes. The problem –
a possible crisis of capitalist order—does not come from the fact that some
things, however, cannot be put to use, and resist this use; the threatening,
critical point is not resistance, but the fact that another kind of useless
surplus gets produced/constituted while everything is put to use; it is being
produced as the other side of this expanding inclusion. The more inclusive
capitalist economy becomes, the more exclusion it generates. This is
paradoxical only if we don’t recognize the difference between the two levels
on which this operates. Absolute uselessness is not something that resists
being put to use, it is what remains or is generated out of things being put to
use. This accumulating, unbound, useless surplus – what I refer to as
“systemic enjoyment”—is not what offers resistance to the capitalist
economy; rather, it is something that threatens to make it explode.15 But it
can be put to use on another level, at least temporarily; more precisely, it can
be bound by means of politics and ideas, rather than directly by economy
(although some economic use or benefit can also result from this bounding).
This, for example, is what we call today populism. What is wrong with
populism is not that it engages the masses, not even that it advances by gross
simplifications, but that while leaving the economy of repression intact (and
growing), it bounds the real and growing dissatisfaction of people in all
kinds of imaginary ways, which nevertheless can have very palpable
material consequences.

15
We can recognize the same logic in the case of the climate crisis, global warming and its
core cause: the emissions. The latter are essentially by-products of capitalist economy and its
use of resources. The climate has not been changed simply by our direct efforts, by what we
created and built, but mostly because of what has accumulated in this process: pure waste.
The ecological crisis is not simply a problem of the word’s finitude, a problem regarding the
fact that natural resources will run out. This obviously can (and will) cause shortage, wars,
etc., but the problem of climate change comes from elsewhere: namely from what comes into
existence when we burn these resources. If we were able to just use up these resources with
no remains or surplus, we wouldn’t be talking today of climate change. We talk about it
because of the emissions, which are a kind of useless “surplus” of industrial exploitation of
natural resources. In other words, the problem is not only natural resources are running out
(which obviously is a problem), but that while running out they seem to be returning,
reentering our space from another side, from a “beyond,” from the real – in the form of
another kind of surplus, a menacing disaster.

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 The rise of populism that we talk about a lot these days is emphatically
not simply about the personal style of populist leaders: their bet on
enjoyment as political factor may be a good match for their personal
affinities, but the libidinal compound that they so aptly and amply use is not
generated there, by them and their personalities. It is generated by the
contradictions and impasses of the social space in which these leaders
manage to prevail and thrill.
Let me conclude with a brief remark, very much related to this,
concerning the terminological shift that has taken place in the last decades
in academic debates, the shift from the possibly controversial notion of
politics to the (also academically) more glamorous notion power. This
terminological shift is quite significant, because the two notions allow for
very different sets of distinctions, implying very different levels of reflection,
critique and action.
“Politics” can be (judged) good or bad, right or wrong, and it can be
judged bad or wrong even if there is no direct personal gain or abuse
involved. A morally good person can lead very bad politics (and vice versa).
Politics allows for discussion, controversy, rebellion, militancy,
(counter)organization.
“Power”, as the term is mostly used today, is something else. As
suggested earlier, power can never be wrong, it can only be abused. Of
course we can say that it is always bad (or wrong), but then we haven’t said
much. Yet the moment we introduce some distinctions and criticism, we
usually end up somewhere along the following two divides:
professionalism/abuse (corruption), or else benevolence/wickedness. And
these are all subjective, not social categories. Of course people can organize
and protest against wicked leaders publicly, but the structuring of this
protest is very different. Abuse/corruption (if manifest or proved) is directly
accused (and subjected to outrage) and demands elimination. Which is fine.
But we should not forget that this has a clear limit: the bottom line is that if
we eliminate the abuser, or cut out the corruption, everything will be well
and sound (again).
Just think about the situation that surrounded Trump’s presidency.
Very few people questioned the fundamental political and economic
contradictions, and their endless prolongation in the form of a status quo,
that have produced the incredible amount of systemic surplus enjoyment,
which people felt so strongly about as to elect someone like Trump in the
first place. Of course he was despicable as president, but many of his critics

19 Penumbr(a) 1/2021
all too eagerly succumbed, and still succumb, to one of his favorite slogans.
They seem to believe that because Trump has been eliminated as president,
or eliminated from the political space, America will become great again.

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works as

research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of
the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European
Graduate School in Switzerland, and is invited as guest lecturer to numerous
universities worldwide. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy
and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and many books,
including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's
Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On
Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?

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