psychocinema.txt

Psychocinema
Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Published Titles
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Gerald Raunig, Making Multiplicity
Helen Rollins, Psychocinema
Avital Ronell, America
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal
Psychocinema
Helen Rollins
Polity
Copyright © Helen Rollins 2024
The right of Helen Rollins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in 
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6113-1
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Contents
Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse page 1
Psychocinema 23
Conclusion: Fail Again, Fail Better 140
Notes 147
Introduction: The Analyst’s Discourse
From Opposition to Contradiction
What I aim to reveal in this book is the emancipatory potential housed in the cinematic artform. This 
potential is structurally analogous to the cure within 
psychoanalysis; namely, it can provide a space in 
which the viewer is able to traverse their fantasy 
and confront their fundamental – ontological – 
Lack. It is in this disturbing confrontation that 
individuals might be able to orient themselves differently in relation to their enjoyment, discovering 
a mode of desire that short-circuits our libidinal 
investment in capitalist Bad Infinity.
In order to excavate this potential, we must 
begin by seeing how cinema has been neutered 
by a trend within the mainstream culture of both 
film theory and filmmaking that has necessarily 
misunderstood and misused psychoanalytic ideas 
and that has come to serve neoliberal politics and 
the philosophies of identity, difference and closure, rather than the most scandalous revelation 
of psychoanalysis – that subjectivity is universally 
ambivalent and structured by Lack. 
Whilst psychoanalytic theory and practice 
elevate, expose and explore subjective Lack as a 
residue of the contradictory nature of our world 
(as Hegel explains, Thought is the move from 
the abstract to the concrete) and gradually open 
the subject to the material reality of their life, 
identitarian rereadings of psychoanalysis fold 
existential contradiction back into oppositional 
ideas and abstract the subject from their material 
reality, a logic that accords with capitalist libido 
and is widely identifiable in the turn away from 
emancipatory politics on the Right. 
Whilst it may be clear that conservative identitarianism pertains to the Master’s Discourse (itself 
structurally comparable to that of the Capitalist), 
particularist theories within art and culture, reifying essence and difference, may operate according 
to the University Discourse. Apparently radical, 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
this discourse obfuscates the logic of the Master 
within its very structure.
This book claims it is vital we return our 
psychoanalytic film practice and theory to the 
dynamic of the Analyst’s Discourse. In doing so, 
film may come to help us challenge the everintensifying bad faith of our libidinal economy, 
which continues not only to create and justify 
immense precarity and subjugation but also to 
capture the subject at the precise moment when 
a dialectical, contradictory approach is perhaps 
most necessary. 
A Poetic Logic, or A Metonymic One
Although books in film theory tend to focus 
on the material nature and technical quality of 
the film form, this text explores film’s operation 
upon subjectivity and does so most especially 
via a work’s narrative structure or philosophical 
impetus – the former itself possessing a potentially psychoanalytic, technological function. 
Given the book’s length, film’s image is not 
given primacy here; nor are aesthetic features 
examined poetically, according to the logic of 
metaphor (“carrying across” – the replicating of a 
word’s signification in another context). Rather, 
the text takes as a foundational premise the logic 
of metonymy – that a signifier’s junction with 
another presents an explosion of infinite possibility. A film’s meaning is therefore taken literally 
at the manifest level. It is found in the chain of 
signifiers presented to the viewer symbolically via 
the film’s narrative, or in the Real of its logical 
contradictions. This book is therefore a philosophical one, though it claims that a Lacanian 
approach may have practical, material, poetic and 
aesthetic consequences. 
The Four Discourses
Lacan developed his theory of The Four 
Discourses in 1969 in part as a response to what 
he saw as the philosophical failures of the student protests the previous year. In doing so, he 
may have taken inspiration from Freud’s earlier 
insight that conscious knowledge alone cannot 
resolve the symptom.1
 Anticipating the rise of 
neoliberalism, Lacan claimed that the conscious, 
cultural approach taken by the students would 
not challenge the edifice of capitalist libido 
and would instead lead to a deepening and a 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
greater obfuscation of its workings through ideology and the liberatory promises of consumer 
capitalism.
Whilst the Analyst’s Discourse works according to the unconscious, affective and libidinal 
dynamics of the practice of psychoanalysis, the 
University Discourse makes its critiques at the 
level of consciousness and the cerebral. Whilst 
much university study does not operate according to the University Discourse – and, in fact, 
one of the originary premises of the university 
was to protect study from the undermining process of market forces – it is increasingly difficult 
for writers and theorists to put forward dialectical 
and universalist ideas within a neoliberal structure 
that sells research and teaching as a commodity and that accords with an oppositional, rather 
than a contradictory, logic.
Further, because film culture itself has become 
dominated not only by neoliberal market forces, 
but by those of a potentially new formation of 
capitalist economy, emerging from the collapsed 
contradictions of neoliberalism itself – a form of 
state-sponsored monopoly ‘socialism’ that protects corporations from the near-zero global rate 
of profit – there has been, in this sphere, an even 
greater prevalence of oppositional theories that 
mystify what is going on. 
Film itself, however, because it operates on 
affect and the visceral and – more importantly 
– on libido and desire, may still be able – like 
psychoanalysis as practice – to raise the unconsciousness of the viewer and expose them to the 
universal structure of their subjectivity in ways 
that are potentially politically significant. 
Contradictory Film Theory
Cinematic practice and theory are faced with 
increasing limitations, both conscious and 
unconscious, engendered by worsening material conditions. The creation of challenging, 
dialectical and non-oppositional work is nearly 
impossible within the contours of our current 
economy. Whilst filmmaking in these conditions has its challenges, it may still be possible to 
readdress the analysis of films with insight and 
productivity.
Instead of consciously striving to excavate 
the “hidden” meaning of a film, for example, 
we can elevate – through the Analyst’s Discourse 
– the dynamics of the Real at play within the 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
functioning of the machine of cinema, digesting 
them into the shared language of the Symbolic 
Order to understand how these dynamics direct 
our subjectivity and desire. We can treat the visual 
representation of film not as confirmation of the 
cultural biases we already hold to be true, but 
rather as the higher-order expression of a wider 
nexus of phenomena that underpin our world, 
an attunement to which can constantly challenge 
our assumptions and leave us open to the generative dialectic of our universe, which itself may 
lead to a reformulation of material conditions. 
This book argues for a return to an openness 
toward contradiction in the understanding of 
film, which – it claims – is the impulse of the 
psychoanalytic method. It argues that cinema is 
a tool that can help us in this reorientation, both 
as an artform that operates upon us and as object 
of study. It posits that popularized film theory 
has misunderstood the radical import of universal contradiction in the practice and theory of 
psychoanalysis and has focused on particularisms 
which pose no challenge to capitalist ideology, 
but are in fact determinative of its persistence. 
Immanent Transcendence
Film as a technology was created at the end of 
the nineteenth century. Early viewers of cinema 
wondered at its apparent magic. The true “magic” 
of cinema is perhaps found not in its mechanistic 
capacity to convincingly replicate reality but in 
its ability to generate an affective excess within 
the viewer – a residue, like prayer, that is more 
than the sum of its constitutive parts. 
The relationship between film and the viewer 
can function like the relationship of the analyst 
and the analysand in the practice of psychoanalysis, with a libidinal energy oscillating between 
each party according to the dynamics of transference, exposing a Lack in subjectivity that is 
experienced, by the subject, as something substantive. In Kristeva’s words, this dynamic is 
experienced as something like “an immanent 
transcendence here on earth.”2
This book will lay out and explain the ways 
in which the structure of the machine of film 
has endowed it with this fortuitous capacity. It 
claims that, whilst this capacity is concealed in 
all kinds of films, a sensitive approach by filmmakers may allow for a higher-order activation of 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
this dynamic, animating the viewer’s subjectivity 
to produce an unconscious insight as to the contradictory nature of their subjective constitution. 
Universalist Film
Film and psychoanalysis point to a dynamic 
within human subjectivity that is universal, an 
essential (k)not that exists across every form of 
identity and desire. The universal quality of film 
has been commented upon by many theorists, 
including Badiou, who says that “[c]inema opens 
all the arts, it weakens their aristocratic, complex 
and composite quality. It delivers this simplified 
opening to images of unanimous existence. As 
painting without painting, music without music, 
novel without subjects, theater reduced to the 
charm of actors, cinema ensures the popularization of all the arts. This is why its vocation is 
universal.”3
There is a collectivity that marks film, from 
the way it is produced to the way it is watched, 
even within the constraints of the particularist 
pressures of contemporary capitalism. However, 
it is perhaps the capacity that film has to expose 
the viewer to the Real of their desire – that they 
are constituted by a fundamental Lack, that they 
are, in the words of Žižek, universally “less than 
nothing”4
 – that is its most radical, universalist 
dynamic. 
A recognition of this universal constitutionby-Lack may have political consequences. It 
undermines the logic of the market system, 
which relies on the false promise of possible fulfillment via the achievement of a commodity. 
When the subject transforms this truth from the 
register of the Real to that of the Symbolic, they 
understand that there is no beyond of Lack for 
themself or any other subject, that the economic 
reality that entraps them relies on a false promise 
that can never be fulfilled. Through this insight, 
a philosophical opening may occur within the 
nexus of our collective libidinal economy, and 
the reconstitution of the material reality of our 
world becomes a possibility – a material reality 
that seems to sharply resist, and even adapt to, 
conscious attempts to overcome it. 
Capitalist Utopianism
Capitalism is a mode of production that relies on 
a denial of the universal, fundamental, generative 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
force that is Lack, whilst exploiting it. Because 
capitalist logic can only tolerate the contradiction 
of Lack when it is repressed and denied, it must 
retreat from the conscious acknowledgment of 
Lack as a phenomenon and turn toward a logic 
of opposition.
Opposition is a logic that acts as a parasite on 
Lack, while denying its existence.
Capitalist logic is a utopianism that promises 
existential purity, the inevitable completion of 
desire and the absolution of Lack, even when 
– as Marx points out – it is constantly under 
threat from its own internal contradictions.5
 In 
fact, capitalism derives its power precisely from 
its failure to deliver on these impossible promises. 
It casts the fundamental Lack that constitutes 
human subjectivity as a contingent, corrigible loss 
that can be defeated. Within capitalism, alienation is not something constitutive, but rather a 
contingent event that can be overcome. 
Capitalism cannot make good on the purifying promise of the commodities it offers because 
it relies on the purchasing of more products by 
unfulfilled subjects who imagine these products 
will eventually assuage them. Instead of exposing this fundamental contradiction within the 
economy, capitalism must repress it, forcing the 
capitalist subject to enter into an oppositional, 
enemy-oriented logic to excuse the system’s own 
failings. 
The repression of this contradiction leads to 
existential disquiet, emotional suffering and 
extreme violence. The poor suffer through the 
inadequate distribution of resources to achieve 
a reasonable standard of living, through the 
“meritocratic” and “philanthropic” cover stories 
of corporate capitalism that cast blame upon 
them for their material position, and through 
the physical violence with which any challenge 
to these contradictions is repressed. The rich 
suffer existentially. Whilst able to appropriate 
the monetary benefits of surplus value, they are 
constantly confronted by the blunt impotence of 
material things to assuage their existential Lack, 
often experiencing a melancholic disengagement 
from the reality of their life or, very often, a 
consequential – though contradictory – drive to 
accrue more. 
This suffering, a result of the repressed illogic 
of our economic system, emerges as cultural 
phenomena that psychoanalysis terms “symptoms.” In Seminar XXIII, Lacan explores the 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
implications of his neologism “sinthome” or 
“saintly man” (a play on the French word for 
symptom – “symptôme”) in reference to psychosis.6
 Whilst “sinthome” more specifically expresses 
the contradiction that cannot be undone without 
the undoing of the very edifices of subjectivity, 
by drawing out the linguistic similarity between 
“sinthome” and “symptôme,” Lacan suggests that 
symptoms can – if interpreted correctly – expose 
us productively to the truths of our economic 
system that we are at such pains to deny, like a 
prophet. 
Film, by exposing our reality back to us, can 
reveal – intentionally or not – the symptoms of 
our collective disquiet and help us to confront 
them, digest and resolve them in generative and 
enjoyable ways.
Film as Philosophy
Capitalism operates according to a binary, oppositional logic which attempts to nullify existential 
Lack and contingently absolve it with commoditized solutions. Art is a phenomenon that houses 
contradiction within it, without any attempt to 
eradicate it. It is this phenomenal ambivalence 
that makes art art and distinguishes it from the 
conscious call-to-action of propaganda.
Although capitalism must rationalize contradiction and mute the most powerful dynamics 
within art, favoring and foregrounding “art” that 
can be folded into the constraints of the Master’s 
Discourse, there is a force to film that seems to 
transcend the market forces that are driven to 
quell it. It is a current that collides against the 
Master’s Discourse and can productively position 
the viewer toward their Gaze of Lack, mobilizing them toward a dialectical encounter with the 
contours of their very desire. 
The “grand narratives” of the structurally riven 
filmic form have been criticized throughout the 
history of film theory for supporting the totalitarian logic of capitalism. However, it is perhaps this 
very structure of film that allows for a productive 
confrontation with Lack through transference. 
Here, a libidinal investment by the viewer occurs 
through the misguided belief in the promise of 
closure and, as in psychoanalysis, the film may 
employ and exploit this “mistake” in order to 
expose the viewer to the contradictory nature of 
their desire. Further, the narratively taut film – 
consciously unaware of its logical contradictions 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
– may expose to us, in relief, the symptoms of our 
own society. If philosophy is the tarrying with the 
contradictions at the heart of the universe, film 
may act as a powerful philosophical technology.
The Analyst’s Discourse Makes 
Hysterics of Us All
Žižek posits in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and 
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema that “cinema is 
the ultimate pervert art.”7
 It could be worth suggesting an alternative idea – that cinema has the 
capacity to make hysterics of us all.
Whilst biological sex is a factor in the subject’s 
first birth into matter, sexuation is a result of 
their second birth into language. It refers to the 
development of one’s subjective relationship to 
sexuality and to Lack, which engenders it. Lacan 
posited two primary forms of sexuation, which 
some have called Imposture and Masquerade 
(more commonly termed the Not-All). Whilst 
the first is gendered as “masculine” and the 
second “feminine,” these are symbolic forms of 
identification and do not reflect biological reality 
or subjective structure as a matter of course.8
 In 
Imposture, the subject identifies with the phallus, 
an imagined symbol of power and completeness – 
there exists an imagined ideal beyond castration. 
In Masquerade, the subject identifies with the 
absence of the phallus and experiences an existential sense of incompleteness (though may come to 
embody the phallus for the Impostor). This is why 
Hysteria (the “female”-gendered neurosis, nothing to do with the maligned image of a “hysteric” 
in common cultural parlance) is understood, 
by Lacan, to be more proximate with a political 
potential in that a hysteric recognizes her Lack 
more readily. Masculinity may be experienced as 
real; femininity feels the truth of its contradiction.
The hysteric is sensitive to the contradictions 
that mark their subjectivity and the world. These 
contradictions point to a fundamental break in 
reality itself, a break that makes reality possible 
in the first place. This sensitivity endows the hysteric with an impulse to question the authority of 
the Master, which may have political and emancipatory results, as long as the critical process 
is not itself captured by the unitary promise of 
capitalism – a hallmark of the “progress” narratives of neoliberalism, which has come to create 
a universe of apparently “castrated” bosses and 
movie stars. 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
For Lacan, despite the distinct modes of sexuation and infinite categories of identity and desire 
that can shape and form the subject, there is a 
“dimension of hysteria latent in every kind of 
human being in the world.”9
 This latent dimension is what makes possible an opening toward 
the emancipatory confrontation with Lack in 
all subjects, which cinema may be able to make 
manifest via its very structure. This latent dimension is that which is political in its collision with 
film, that which McGowan refers to when he says 
that “the greatest films aesthetically are the greatest films politically.”10
When Žižek suggests that cinema is a pervert’s 
art, he is referring to the way in which film can 
teach us how and what to desire. This is the same 
logic that marks advertisements under consumer 
capitalism, the rise of which is so magically captured in Matthew Weiner’s television series Mad 
Men. It is a perverse logic that makes perverts of 
those on whom it operates by making them feel 
they are certain – temporarily at least – of how 
and what they desire. 
The Analyst’s Discourse sensitizes the subject 
to a universal Lack at the heart of our existence, 
a generative disquiet that haunts the human 
subject from their first breath to their last. It cuts 
across class and identity, speaking to the possibility of radically altering our political economy 
and challenging the ideological edifice that necessitates and endorses the subjugation, exclusion 
and exploitation of given groups. In other words, 
the Analyst’s Discourse hystericizes the subject, 
leading them to question the orthodoxy of the 
day and generate knowledge, like the scientist 
approaching her experiment from a place of 
doubt, letting go of all suppositions, in order to 
be challenged by the possibility of the new. 
Watching a film – and reading a film in a truly 
analytic way – confronts us with the ambivalent 
truth of our desire in all its inconsistencies, as 
well as the universal Lack that sustains it and 
around which we, as capitalist subjects, may collectively reorient ourselves in order to transform 
the material structure of our society. 
To confront the Real of our subjectivity is 
traumatic, but it is productive. It may offer us 
the philosophical approach necessary to stand 
outside of the libidinal dynamic that entraps us. 
Ideology protects us from the radical insight of 
psychoanalysis as to the impossible structure of 
our desire. Our addiction to ideology leads us to 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
live in unreasonable, unproductive and unequal 
ways that do not meet the dialectical nature of 
our reality. 
Political Revolution, Philosophical Revolution
Crises in the material conditions of society are 
easily taken up by reactionary forces and weaponized in the service of oppositional agendas; 
however, they also house the potential to unleash 
an emancipatory event. Such emancipatory 
events, however, will themselves become ossified 
over time, becoming part of new economic systems that themselves must be enveloped in the 
dance of affirmation, negation and negation of 
negation. 
Dialectical Materialism is a commitment to 
the ongoing effort to expose the contradiction 
as it manifests in the present epoch, not so as to 
overcome it, but rather to transform it. Not in 
some postmodern Bad Infinity in which we are 
always open to a future that never arrives, but 
ultimately to reach the point where we realize 
that the Real is not a messiah that is to come, 
but one that has already arrived. In other words, 
that contradiction is never finally overcome, 
but recognized as an ontological reality always 
already among us.
Desire and fantasy are structured by material 
conditions and by collective libido. They are ways 
by which the human subject manages their Lack 
and psychically deals with the material conditions of their life, which themselves can be too 
difficult to consciously bear. Because film brings 
the contours of human desire into relief, because 
the desire of the viewer speaks through the film 
that they watch, a philosophical – analytic – study 
of these dynamics can expose us to the material 
structure of our economy that capitalism is so at 
pains to mystify. 
If confessional religion was the opium of the 
subject in past orders of societal organization, 
the capitalist orientation of desire toward closure 
can be understood as contemporary religiosity, 
even in its most “atheistic” manifestation. God, 
for Lacan, today resides in the unconscious drive 
toward the solution of absolutes. And the confidence of critique mystifies the persistence of this 
dynamic. 
For Nietszche, god died and his shadow was 
cast on cave walls for 1,000 years.11 Perhaps film 
can be conceived of as this shadowed projection, 
introduction: the analyst’s discourse
playing with and exposing our fantasies, which 
are religious insofar as they protect us from the 
Lack at the core of our existence. A theological illumination and analysis of this shadowed 
projection and of the subjective fantasies it 
exploits may yield political and philosophical 
insights. 
By confronting the subject with the fundamental, productive Lack in desire, film can reveal the 
illogic of ideology, its religiosity and the ways in 
which it enslaves and entraps us. In this way, film 
accords with the logic of Marx’s analogy of the 
living flower,12 sensitizing the subject to the ersatz 
flowers that decorate their chains and encouraging them to pluck the living flower, which grows 
in the grit and grime of the R/real world.
The soils that grow the living flower are born 
of the same antagonisms that generate subjectivity. The living flower is one that we must 
cultivate according to the conscious workings of 
reality – collectively, collaboratively, politically. 
Thus, though film might appear loftily detached 
from the baseness of the practical world via its 
commitment to movie stars, its focus on fantasy and the make-believe of plot, it may lead 
us back, via the transferential process, to the 
ordinary unhappiness of normality, to a socialist 
libidinal economy, or even perhaps a communist 
one – not despite these things, but because of 
them.
Psychocinema
“Ne pas céder sur son désir” – The Devils
The architecture of film actively positions the 
viewer toward a confrontation with the Lack in 
desire. Likewise, the practice of psychoanalysis 
gradually confronts the analysand with the contradictory nature of their desire, mobilizing their 
libido away from a totalitarian capitalist logic 
that promises a fulfillment that is logically impossible, and toward an enjoyment of the productive 
impossibility of their desire as such.
Lacan illustrates the contradictory nature of 
desire in his famous passage from Seminar VII 
– “la seule chose dont on [peut] être coupable, 
au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est 
d’avoir cédé sur son désir.”1
 The latter part of 
this phrase is deliberately obscure and has been 
rendered various ways in English, sometimes 
missing its syntactical ambivalence. Dennis 
Porter translates this passage as – “the only thing 
of which one can be guilty . . . is of having given 
ground relative to one’s desire,”2
 which captures 
Lacan’s paradoxical phrasing. The use of the 
preposition “sur” by Lacan after the verb “céder” 
(to yield) is unusual; it generally takes the preposition “à” – to give oneself over to something. 
The verb can also take an object, followed by the 
indirect pronoun, for example “céder le passage 
à quelqu’un” (to give [right of] way to someone 
else). 
Porter’s “giving ground” echoes the ambivalence of the verb “céder”; his “relative to” captures 
the obscurity of Lacan’s use of the preposition 
“sur.”
The statement can be interpreted as an indication that one should not give oneself over to 
one’s desire – one should not “yield” to it or “give 
ground,” allow its encroachment, in one’s life. 
On the other hand, the statement can be read 
as a command to not let one’s desire pass one 
by – like a vehicle at a stop or “yield” sign, giving 
way to passing traffic, putting distance between 
oneself and one’s desire. 
For Lacan, there is no fulfillment in the completion of desire, but there is no fulfillment in 
abstinence either. Lacan is therefore neither a 
utopian capitalist, promising transcendence in 
the achievement of a goal or the attainment of 
a commodity, nor a reactionary conservative, 
promising an inverse transcendence in the purity 
of non-desire. 
For the subject, the truth of the ambivalence of their desire is not an easy one to digest. 
Confronting it can be traumatic as it points to 
the lacking nature of the universe and the subject’s existence within it as nothing more than a 
symptom of that Lack. In psychoanalytic terms, 
a raw, unmediated confrontation with this truth 
is an encounter with the Real. 
To chip away at the Real in small doses through 
the process of Symbolization, to come to terms 
with it, is productive in terms of both the psychic health of the individual and the political 
well-being of the collective. Film has the capacity to confront the viewer with the Real of their 
desire. It does so, like psychoanalysis, in manageable doses. And it does so as a medium that is 
enjoyable and – at times – comforting for the 
subject.
Psychoanalysis owes much to Hegel in its 
understanding that desire is not unique in its 
contradictory status, but rather contradictory 
precisely because it emerges from matter, which 
is itself divided. Hegel anticipated the hypothesis 
of the Big Bang by over a century. According 
to the theory of some cosmologists – proximate 
to the ethos of Hegel’s work in its postulation 
of a fundamental asymmetry at its heart – a 
single point in the universe became so blisteringly hot and dark and infinitely dense that the 
forces inside it became mathematically indiscernible from their opposite. In a sudden moment of 
contradiction, all energies at this infinitely small 
point were redirected outward, backfiring with 
such an intensity that matter was generated from 
nothing and countless galaxies were cast outward 
onto the vast, black canvas of the sky.
Although there is no mind to recollect this 
moment, every rock, cell, every form of consciousness and self-consciousness in our world 
carries a meticulous account of it, something that 
was referred to by Hegel through his insight that 
“substance [is] as subject.”3
Matter is contradictory, as are the workings 
of the mind. The difference is that, whilst the 
contradiction of matter is not self-conscious, 
the contradiction of mind emerges from the 
contradiction of matter and is the experience of 
the universe witnessing its own contradictions. 
Quantum theory identifies the contradiction that 
marks matter; psychoanalysis explicates the generation of self-consciousness through the division 
of matter and is concerned with the sufferings of 
the subject, unable to confront and digest their 
own contradictory nature.
The Devils (dir. Ken Russell, 1971) depicts this 
impossible nature of desire. Whilst the capitalist 
promise that there can be a fulfillment of desire is 
a fallacy, The Devils shows what can happen when 
the subject chooses, or is forced, to turn away 
from their desire altogether. 
Repression is not to do with not getting 
what one wants, but rather to do with defending oneself against the knowledge of how – and 
potentially what – one desires. To acknowledge 
one’s own desire and not give ground relative 
to it, to make consciously Symbolized – rather 
than purely unconscious – sacrifices in terms of 
that desire when living in a community of people 
with diverse desires of their own, by using one’s 
discernment and negotiating with the dialectical 
reality of the world relative to one’s desire, one 
becomes a political subject. This is impossible 
under a repressive regime like the one depicted 
in The Devils.
The film is set during Cardinal Richelieu’s 
France, as the nation emerged from the Middle 
Ages and was plagued by a mysterious pestilence, 
understood to be satanic – a terrifying eruption 
of the Real. Social anxiety was managed through 
sexual purity, acting as an individualist standin for a failed societal repression of the darkest 
matters of the universe – in this case, a lack of 
scientific understanding. As a returned repressed, 
sexual purity became reactionary – emerging with 
a consequential, redoubled force. 
Sex is underpinned by a fantasy structure that 
emerges in childhood as a response to the mystery 
of the other’s desire. This mystery is the undefinable Lack in the subjectivity of the Other and 
is traumatic because it points to the unmanageable contradiction of the universe as such. Sex is 
therefore experienced as impure for the reactionary, who tries to manage the ambivalence of the 
universe and their subjectivity by casting out the 
necessary, generative contradiction within themselves onto a scapegoated Other. The reactionary 
subject may repress their own sexuality in an 
attempt to deny their own subjective impurity, 
under the Gaze of an unkind god, for example, 
who must be bargained with and appeased lest 
Satan penetrate the world of the living.
When repression occurs at the level of the 
unconscious, the affect related to the repressed 
phenomenon returns, attached to other phenomena, creating chaos and dissatisfaction that are 
unmeasured and out of control. The Devils was 
made at the peak of sexual openness, shortly after 
the sexual revolution of ’68. It is filmed in a carnival of psychedelic lighting, extravagant costume 
and camp production design, which – at first 
blush – seem antithetical to the subject matter 
at hand, but in fact underscore the power of the 
returned repressed, erupting as it does in displays 
of great sexual intensity, at least as excessive as the 
force with which the complexity and Lack in sex 
are held down. 
The puritanical nuns of the film are utopians who imagine the world can be purified of 
complexity and contradiction. Their ideological 
approach necessitates a scapegoat whom they can 
imagine is uncastrated, overflowing with sexual 
excess, and who can hold within their image all 
the sexual uncleanliness of the society of which 
they aim to be absolved. 
Urbain Grandier is their chosen scapegoat. The 
crime of being extremely handsome is the catalyst for the contingent petrification of devilhood 
within him. The nuns are, in reality, experiencing an intolerable division within themselves – a 
complexity of sexual desire that cannot be borne. 
Grandier becomes the accidental emblem of his 
society’s unrest, capturing the floating, repressed 
energy within the community of nuns. He is the 
contingent gristle of the Real.
Like the stereotypical nun within cultural 
history who imagines they have a libidinal relationship with the crucified Christ, the nuns 
identify with the sexual desire they project onto 
Grandier. The delusion that they have had forced 
sexual relations with him allows them to deal 
with their own unrecognized desires and justifies 
the Inquisition’s arrest, torture and ritual purging of Grandier from the collective. Through 
this dynamic, the nuns are regressing to a stage 
of psychic development that takes place in early 
infancy. It is a moment that Hegel refers to as the 
Beautiful Soul4
 and that Klein labels the paranoid 
schizoid position.5
During its early years, the child must go 
through a primary repression in order to generate an ego that helps them navigate the world. 
With language, the child’s ego is built and with 
it comes contradiction at the level of their subjectivity. Within the paranoid schizoid position, 
the subject attempts to manage these contradictions by projecting them outward. Though Klein 
posits the position is adopted in the second half 
of the first year, young children continue to integrate and manage these subjective contradictions 
throughout their infancy – the little boy obsessed 
with dinosaurs, toys that could annihilate everything if only they were real. The little girl playing 
the innocent princess, scared at night because of 
the big, hairy monster under her bed. This is 
a logic of absolutes – good and bad, black and 
white. It is a war of all against all.
For Klein, the depressive is able to tolerate 
ambiguity. In the film, it is Grandier who embodies this depressive position. His community at 
Loudon tolerates both Protestant and Catholic. 
He doesn’t hold to interpretations of the Bible 
that the authoritarian regime demands of him. 
He lives with shades of gray. The nuns, however, 
seem to inhabit a paranoid schizoid position. 
Grandier becomes the unwitting receiver of their 
projective identification.
Whilst primary repression is a necessary stage 
of early childhood and whilst we need barriers to that which we desire in order to conjure 
that very desire, excessive repressions that nullify 
the productive contradictions of life can create 
greater torment than the ambivalence they seek 
to resolve. The Devils exploits the affective power 
of the horror form, and even pornography, to 
express – viscerally – the complexity and ambivalence of desire, subjectivity and sex, perhaps most 
especially the unconscious force with which the 
subject protects themself against the contradictions that generate them. 
The Devils shows that film is able to tolerate 
and house contradiction, playing form against 
content, revealing the dialectic of a character’s 
split subjectivity, reflecting back to the audience 
the contradictions that are the foundations of 
their own reality.
The Alienation of Alienation – The Green Ray
A common, and important, critique leveled at 
capitalism is that it alienates the subject from 
their true desires when forced to undertake paid 
work to sustain their survival. Whilst this critique 
is valid, it misses the multiplicity and uncertainty 
of the subject’s desire in the first instance – the 
question of what they would desire to do with 
their time if they were totally free to make the 
most of it. 
The market system does indeed alienate the 
subject, but it does so most fundamentally by 
alienating them from the contradictory nature 
of their desire – the fact the human subject is 
alienated at the outset from themselves. Marx is 
a philosopher who explores the secondary alienation instigated by the capitalist system. Hegel 
and Lacan are philosophers who explore the ways 
in which subjects are not at one with themselves. 
The instability of human desire, and the impotence of objects and phenomena in the fulfillment 
of it, are disturbing for the human subject since 
they point to the lacking nature of the universe 
and the fact that the subject emerges from less 
than nothing. To recognize the truth of these 
factors, however, is ultimately liberatory because 
it allows the subject to have a greater understanding of the complex nature of the world in which 
they live and it allows them to live more productively in relation to its contradictions. 
The practice of psychoanalysis gradually helps 
the subject to confront these truths and to accept 
them – what Bion refers to as “alphabetization,”6
other analysts as a process of “digestion,”7
 and 
Lacan as the act of putting the Real into the 
Symbolic. The acceptance of these truths works 
against the grain of market logic, which relies 
on the libidinal investment of the subject in the 
transcendental power of a singular commodity to 
meet and fulfill a clearly defined desire.
The Green Ray (1986) is a film by Éric Rohmer 
that confronts the viewer with the alienation its 
protagonist, Delphine, experiences in relation to 
her own desire. After a break-up, Delphine is 
left alone in Paris whilst the city empties for the 
month of August. Multiple friends and family 
members offer Delphine different options. She is 
paralyzed by the multiplicity of the offers and – 
free to choose – is confused by what she wants.
Delphine goes from one holiday to the next, in 
Cherbourg, the Alps and Biarritz, finding herself 
constantly dissatisfied by contingent factors that 
do not seem to hold up against an unarticulated 
perfect holiday she imagines she might enjoy.
In the final part of the film, Delphine overhears an elderly man discussing a meteorological 
phenomenon – a rare flash of green that occurs 
on the horizon at sunset. According to the Jules 
Verne novel of the same name, if one catches the 
green light and gazes into it, one understands 
one’s desires and sees the thoughts of those 
close by.
Captured by the mystery and promise of the 
green ray, Delphine takes a man she has just 
met to wait for the green ray at sunset. Together 
they witness it. She experiences a brief moment 
of excitement. But the question as to whether 
she will receive the answer to her desire remains 
unresolved.
The viewer, having identified with Delphine’s 
desire throughout the film, is let down in their 
expectation of closure along with her – a process 
that is analogous, in the longer term, to the cure 
in psychoanalysis.
The Trauma of Jouissance – Citizen Kane
In his early writings, Freud indicates that the 
subject is driven by two oppositional forces: 
the reality principle and the pleasure principle. 
Whilst the subject might logically seek gratification in pleasure, avoiding pain, they must temper 
their pleasure-seeking desires with the demands 
of material reality and the constraints of living in 
community with others. This is an insight that he 
later complexifies in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 
recognizing that there is a supremacy of drive 
within the subject, a propensity to often seek out 
pain rather than pleasure.
Before Freud, Schopenhauer tells us that “life 
swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards 
between pain and boredom.”8
 For Schopenhauer, 
the subject is caught in a quagmire of, on the 
one hand, experiencing depression if their desires 
are not fulfilled and, on the other, experiencing 
melancholy when they are confronted with the 
impotence of the object of their desire in overcoming existential Lack when they are. 
Whilst both thinkers describe the difficulty of 
human desire in a reality that can never seem to 
meet it, psychoanalysis in particular is a theory 
and practice that attempts to address the paradoxical phenomenon that is generated for the human 
subject in their perpetual oscillation between the 
two positions that Schopenhauer describes.
In their movement between their depression in 
being deprived of the object of desire and their 
melancholy in getting it, the subject experiences 
a strange enjoyment that psychoanalysts term 
“jouissance.” The difficulties that the subject has 
in recognizing this paradoxical pleasure is what 
often leads them to psychoanalysis via symptoms 
that have emerged as a return of the repression 
they have enacted upon the contradiction in their 
desire.
“Repression” is often overused within the culture as a descriptor solely for the suppression of 
sexual desires. In psychoanalytic terms, the word 
is more polyvalent and can refer to the ways in 
which the subject represses the contradiction at 
the level of any of their desires. 
Sex and sexuality have a privileged position 
in psychoanalysis, however, because the fantasy 
and the act expose quite clearly the structure of 
the human subject’s contradictory subjectivity. 
The given mode of desiring that each subject 
has – unique in its own way according to the 
infinite potentiality of Lack – exemplifies a 
fundamental fantasy that grounds the subject’s 
phenomenological experience and understanding 
of the world. Rather than being the specific driving force of culture – something that is elevated 
because it is undivided, unlike everything else – 
sex itself is a response to Lack, an attempt by the 
semi-linguistic child to understand the contradiction they encounter in desire and the traumatic 
encounter with the subjectivity and sexuality of 
their primary caregivers.
All sexualities are marked by a universal contradiction. Sexual desire is traumatic in that it 
directly foregrounds the Lack in the universe. 
Sexual repression can be both an attempt to escape 
the complexity of desire in monk-like abstinence 
and also a belief in the transcendent power of sex 
to unify the subject in oneness. In this way, some 
of the most apparently sexually “liberated” subjects may in fact be the most sexually repressed. 
Humans repress the ambivalence of desire and 
its resultant jouissance because they prefer the 
soothing alternative that is the logic of ideology, religiosity and capitalism: a possible ecstasy 
in oneness. As the Lacanian writer Vakhtang 
Gomelauri puts it, the subject is so reticent to 
confront the Lack in their desire – itself an emergence of the Lack in the universe – that they have 
“a tendency to desire symbolic stability even at 
the cost of [their] life.”9
The trauma of jouissance is addressed in Orson 
Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. The film 
begins as Kane utters the word “Rosebud” on his 
deathbed, gazing into a snowglobe. This utterance instigates a retrospective investigation by a 
journalist, Thompson, to discover the meaning 
of the word. 
Thompson speaks to Kane’s butler, Raymond, 
who informs him of an event he witnessed during 
which Kane similarly uttered the mysterious 
word. 
During this episode, Kane destroyed his exwife Susan’s bedroom after she left him. In a 
fit of rage, Kane came upon the snowglobe, 
suddenly falling calm and saying the word 
“Rosebud.” Raymond tells Thompson that he 
has no idea of the word’s significance. Since none 
of Thompson’s other interviews has yielded any 
information, he concludes that “Rosebud” will 
forever remain an enigma. 
As the film closes, Kane’s belongings are gathered and destroyed. A sledge is found amongst 
the dead man’s objects and is thrown into a furnace. As it burns, the word “Rosebud” is visible 
upon it. The audience learns that this was the 
sledge Kane was playing with on the snowy day 
on which his childhood ended at eight years old, 
the day he was introduced to a banker named 
Thatcher, who would come to control his estate 
and assume his guardianship. Upon meeting 
Thatcher, the little boy Kane hit him with his 
sledge and tried to run away. 
For Kane, “Rosebud” represents the childhood 
that he lost. Like Eden for Adam and Eve or the 
mother’s breast for the child deprived of suckling, “Rosebud” takes on a tantalizing quality for 
him precisely because it can never be retrieved. 
The sledge, for Kane, embodies this magical, lost 
universe. In psychoanalytic terms, it is a “lost 
object.” Since it is impossible and irretrievable, 
Kane’s childhood can never disappoint him: he 
can never attain it so it can never let him down, 
never fail to fulfill him in his desire. 
This magical quality is an excess in reality 
generated as a surplus by the impossibility of contradiction itself. It is an example of the way in 
which the subject experiences the world as transcendent precisely because it is not. Lacan named 
this unobtainable depth dimension within the 
object of desire “objet petit a.” The subject will 
never be able to touch this impossible depth 
within reality contained in the object of their 
desire, but they organize their desire around it 
and experience jouissance in their attempt to 
reach it and their inevitable inability to do so. 
In his 2013 book Enjoying What We Don’t 
Have,
10 McGowan explores how a conscious 
understanding of jouissance can allow the subject 
to acknowledge the excess in their desire inspired 
by what they do not or cannot have, allowing 
them to experience satisfaction in an aspect of 
their life they might otherwise find painful. 
Whilst this might in the first instance appear 
to be a punitive logic since it appears to focus 
on not having rather than having, it in fact foregrounds the productive ways in which the subject 
is inspired by Lack. Kane is miserable because he 
feels a sense of loss for a moment he can never 
retrieve. An alternative may have been possible 
for him: to recognize that the magical dimension of life, that which animates it and makes 
it worth living, is only possible because of its 
material impossibility. It is not only the case, in 
life, that there is no light without dark, no good 
without bad, but also that the interplay between 
light and dark generates an excess in experience 
that cannot be obtained but can be enjoyed. 
To embrace the impossibility within the object 
of desire is to love it. Whilst the miser experiences 
the impossibility of the object as a contingent 
loss, constantly accruing more and more objects 
because these objects continue to fail to fulfill 
them, the lover embraces the unknown within 
the object or individual they desire, enjoying the 
ever greater depths that emerge through them 
because of their infinite impossibility. 
Though each form of subjectivity and desire is 
distinct, based on the contingent experience of 
the subject in their early years in relation to their 
Lack, the fundamental logic of the generation of 
subjectivity is universal. Every subject – speaking 
or physically non-verbal, though overwritten by 
the signifier – is shaped by Lack and shares a 
universal characteristic of non-belonging because 
of it. To recognize this psychoanalytic universality is to subjectivize and humanize everyone, 
undermining the logic of capitalism, which relies 
on an imagined non-division in the subjectivity 
of certain groups to justify their exclusion and 
exploitation as non-subjects. 
In this way, since film may have the capacity 
to work alongside the practice and philosophy of 
psychoanalysis to expose the viewer toward a productive acceptance of the universal Lack in their 
desire, its effects upon the subject are political. 
Bad Infinity – Another Round
The contradictory nature of desire is traumatic 
for the subject because it points to a wider truth 
about our world and our position as subjects 
within it – that we are alone in the universe, 
that there is no undivided authority and that we 
emerge from the contradiction in matter as such. 
It also undermines the economic edifice of our 
reality, which promises fulfillment, but can never 
achieve it, because it aims to meet an undivided 
Lack that does not exist. 
In this way, the relationship of the subject of 
capitalism with capitalism’s commodities is that 
of the addict with their means of achieving psychic oblivion. Like the alcoholic who soothes an 
unarticulated (“a-diction,” unspeaking) existential trauma with the promise of ecstasy in oblivion, 
the capitalist can never overcome their Lack and 
must continue to seek out stronger and more 
intense versions of their object of fulfillment until 
the attempted cure becomes poisonous. Addicted 
as we are to the promise of the commodity, the 
market system has generated historically high 
levels of inequality and has failed to steward the 
planet that it exploits as its primary resource. Our 
attempted cure to our collective Lack has become 
poisonous. 
For the alcoholic, drinking is not the sole problem, but rather – in the first place – the attempted 
solution to a problem they cannot otherwise 
confront. Becoming sober is a traumatic process 
because it means the removal of the very thing 
helping the individual to avoid confrontation 
with an immensely difficult part of their life. But 
it is only through giving up the addiction that 
they can begin to confront the trauma they bear 
and address it. 
Since the promise of the commodity mystifies 
the divided nature of desire and the universe, the 
human is at pains to forgo it because the dialectical insight revealed in its absence may be too 
traumatic to bear. 
In this way, the logic of capitalism operates 
according to Hegel’s concept of Bad Infinity, 
which mystifies a confrontation of the subject 
with the dialectical insight of Absolute Knowing. 
Here, the subject’s desperation to overcome contradiction leads them to buy into promises of 
various kinds, but these promises can never defeat 
the presence of contradiction in the subject’s life 
because it is foundational to their very existence. 
The commodity never meets the subject’s need 
and leads them to a repeated drive forward that 
never brings them to their desired destination.
A recent film that explores the logic of addiction 
is Another Round (2020) by Thomas Vinterberg. 
Here, four teachers – Tommy, Peter, Nikolaj and 
Martin – struggle with the drudgery of teaching high school students. They discuss a theory 
that when slightly drunk – with a blood alcohol 
content of 0.05 percent – one feels more relaxed, 
happy and creative and one’s capacity to function 
well in society is not undermined. The friends 
engage in an experiment to see whether they can 
sustain this perfect blood-alcohol balance and 
whether doing so will allow them to finally enjoy 
their lives.
Since, at first, the alcohol improves their 
experience of life, they are carried away by the 
promise of more. They increase the measurement to 0.1 percent and soon find themselves 
drinking to oblivion. As their lives slip into disarray, Peter, Nikolaj and Martin decide to abstain 
from alcohol, but Tommy continues to drink. 
He sails out to sea with his old dog, drunk, and 
drowns. 
One of the important aspects of this film is 
that it is not punitive in its study of alcoholism. 
Rather, it points to the human issues at play in 
addiction, as they are in all psychic symptoms. Its 
attitude to alcohol is as much celebratory as it is 
disparaging. It handles the tragedy and triumph 
of the human subject in their pursuit of soothing 
and betterment as its characters simultaneously 
make spirited attempts to animate their lives and 
drown out the complexity of their experience. 
The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe – 
The Last Supper
Hegel’s Phenomenology identifies a foundational 
contradiction across all history, charting the 
presence and deepening of contradiction from 
not-at-oneness at the level of matter of rocks and 
rain to the divided nature of animal consciousness and the lacking structure of human self 
consciousness. Within the text, he also charts the 
deepening of contradiction across human civilizational development. Each societal structure has 
attempted to manage and overcome the foundational contradiction of the universe. It is the 
failure of each formation to do so that leads to a 
newer, more modern form of civilization. Each 
civilization represses the essential contradiction 
of life at a level more unconscious than the one 
before. 
Perhaps the most famous – and most 
misunderstood – expression of civilizational 
contradiction in Hegel’s Phenomenology is the 
Master–Slave Dialectic, present in Greco-Roman 
society. Whilst in common cultural parlance 
this example is said to represent unjust power 
dynamics, Hegel’s critique is more foundational, exploring the importance of recognition 
to subjectivity. A vital phenomenon in the psychoanalytic encounter, recognition – or a lack of 
recognition – is that which underpins society’s 
ideological impetus to include, exclude or subjugate an individual or class: in other words, to 
weaponize its power and to justify its misuse. 
The phenomenon of the scapegoat emerges as 
a result of the subject’s desire to nullify existential Lack by turning toward impossible visions of 
existential purity. The scapegoat is the necessary 
obstacle that “contingently” prevents the subject 
from reaching their desired transcendence and 
preserves it, since encountering it would confront 
the subject with its inability to solve the Lack in 
their subjectivity and the universe. The scapegoat 
is rendered such via the collective’s inability to 
recognize their dialectical humanity – the universal division that exists in all subjects.
In Hegel’s example, citizens are believed to 
be subjects, capable of thought and reason, but 
slaves are not. Slaves are the outsiders who bear 
the Lack in civilization that cannot be ideologically tolerated – they are the societal scapegoat.
Though the citizen class may have conceived of 
themselves as subjects who were whole and complete and thus capable of thought and reason, 
in fact this capacity was indicative of subjective 
division. Only as divided subjects could they 
speak and thus think and therefore be capable of 
discernment. On the other hand, the slave was 
deemed “less evolved” than the citizen-subject and 
thus – according to the misguided logic – more 
lacking and less capable of thought and reason, 
even though it is universal Lack that makes possible the process of sensation, thought, speech and 
discernment. For Zupančič, the human subject is 
the contradiction of our world witnessing itself – 
the subject embodies the “tics and grimaces” of 
the universe.11
Though their position as Other provided the 
slave with a unique understanding as to the 
workings of the society from which they were 
excluded, they were assumed to be unable to offer 
a vision of it. Thus was lost a productive insight 
into the center that the society itself could not 
see. 
Therefore, Greco-Roman society was plagued 
by a solipsistic Master’s Discourse whose logic 
accorded with Bad Infinity. The Master’s logic is 
conservative. Within the logic of the conservative 
is always housed the seeds of its own destruction. 
The conservative attempts to preserve the stability 
of the center by protecting it from the generative 
power of change only possible through Lack. As 
McGowan frequently indicates,12 whilst Adorno 
claimed a principal flaw of the “totalitarian” 
society was its drive to universalize, this society 
is in fact never total enough because it cannot 
tolerate and must exclude Lack. It is therefore 
unable to universalize. In this way, the risk-averse 
society is never risk-averse enough. Without the 
external understanding of the society’s internal 
contradictions through the eyes of a dialectical 
Other, the society fails to adapt to reality and 
collapses. 
The Last Supper (dir. Stacy Title, 1995) depicts 
a group of righteous graduate students who 
invite right-wing guests for dinner. They intend 
to murder these guests, serving them poisoned 
wine from a blue decanter – rather than a clear 
one, which contains the normal drink – unless 
they come to recant their political beliefs over the 
course of the meal. 
After several successful killings, the students 
invite a famous conservative pundit to dinner. 
The pundit confuses the group with a range of 
moderate opinions that they have difficulty refuting. He even admits that the views he presents on 
television are for ratings and do not represent his 
true political positions.
Over the course of the dinner, the pundit pieces 
together clues that murders have taken place in 
this house. The students retreat to the kitchen to 
decide the pundit’s fate, agreeing that his centrist views mean he should be spared. During this 
time, the pundit has swapped the poisoned wine 
from the blue decanter to the clear one and serves 
it to the students, raising a toast. As the film ends, 
the liberal students collapse on the floor and the 
conservative pundit speculates about a possible 
populist presidential bid.
Here, though the students profess liberal 
views, they are – as in the Master–Slave dialectic 
– conservative, acting in accordance with the 
Master’s Discourse. They are unwilling to recognize the dialectical subjectivity of the Other, 
preferring to retain a frame of logic that sustains 
the status quo. This logic is unstable and contains 
within it the beginnings of their own demise. 
Not only would an embrace of the contradictory subjectivity of the Other allow for the 
possibility of change that may transform the collective in surprising and emancipatory ways, but 
also to foreground the Lack that generates this 
universal contradiction is to challenge the logic 
of capitalist closure itself, whose symptoms at the 
level of culture the students might consciously 
condemn. 
The students nullify the possibility of contingency within the Other by casting them as 
transcendentally belonging to a category of 
belief, unable to change and not marked by universal Lack. Like the contemporaneous “culture 
warrior” declaring their opponent to embody a 
“crypto-fascist” or “crypto-communist” position, 
the students engage in abstraction, claiming an 
a priori knowledge as to the destination of the 
chain of signifiers and the possible replication of 
the signifier “A” in another context. This utopian 
approach to language and logic necessitates an 
enemy whose presence explains away its impossibility. It resides within a paranoid-schizoid 
position, in Kleinian terms, demanding the 
destruction of the subjectivity of the Other and 
denying their possible conversion, undermining 
any opening toward the surprise and novelty of 
emancipatory politics altogether. It is a position 
contradicted in the film by the pundit’s vacillating position. His adoption of political ideas as a 
televisual performance demonstrates his discernment or not-at-oneness with himself, a symptom 
of his marking by Lack and something that could 
be transformed in the right material and philosophical context.
The Irish comedian Dylan Moran said that 
“war isn’t conflict; it’s the inability to do conflict.”13 If politics is the very act of engaging with 
the inevitably conflictual desires of the collective, 
then “culture war” is the end of politics. It pits 
groups who share higher-order interests against 
each other for the benefit of a capitalist class that 
resists change, even at the cost of the world’s 
inexistence. 
To be unrecognized in one’s subjectivity is to 
experience a negation of one’s humanity that is 
experienced as violent. The intransigence of the 
liberal students and their unwillingness to recognize the Other may be the very reason those 
they disparage have taken up their reactionary 
positions in the first place – in their subjective 
anxiety and material precariousness. The conservative nature of their politics affirms their 
subjective investment in the logic of capital, 
which alienates and exploits the collective and 
casts blame upon them for their suffering in 
the face of the impossible material conditions it 
creates. 
The final scene of the film, in which the pundit 
sees himself leading a populist uprising, expresses 
the way in which this kind of revolt can be motivated by a libidinal ressentiment against the liberal 
Beautiful Soul, an action that is disastrous for the 
universal politics that would undermine the cultural phenomena that – consciously at least – the 
conservative students claim so fervently to stand 
against, as well as the political economy that 
generates the material conditions that foment 
reactive anger in the first place. 
The Chain of Signifiers – Un chien andalou
Hegel’s philosophy of contradiction anticipated 
the later linguistic developments in critical theory 
identifying the slippage between signifier and signified, insights that are also fundamental to the 
logic of psychoanalysis. 
When Hegel writes in The Phenomenology that 
A does not equal A, he is describing the way in 
which the word never has a one-to-one relationship with the object it describes.
When we think of the word “apple,” a world 
is conjured for the subject beyond a single image 
of an apple they might see in their mind’s eye. 
“Apple” refers to health – “an apple a day keeps 
the doctor away”; it evokes desire – the forbidden fruit, or “the apple of one’s eye”; it conjures 
religion – the Garden of Eden; it speaks of a 
great metropolis – the Big Apple; it refers to 
technology – the famous corporation – and to 
economic decline – the monopolistic rise of this 
corporation, and its failure to pay tax.
The slippage between signifier and signified 
is a well-known sticking point for translators. 
The universe evoked by one word in one language may open into greater expansiveness in 
another and its full meaning may be impossible 
to reproduce. “Space” might immediately refer 
in French to pastoral landscapes or – in Japanese 
– to the square footage of one’s dwelling, but 
for an American or Russian, it might point to 
astronomy, innovation, conflict and national 
might. “Bread” for a French person might evoke 
revolution, culture and subsistence, but for an 
American it might evoke money (“dough”). 
The non-unification of signifiers across language is a symptom of the division of matter 
itself, splintering as it does into images of perception through subjectivity, and then through 
each subject’s personal experience across place 
and time, this experience itself shaped by the further experience of individuals around them and 
by collective culture, both contemporary and 
historic. 
The kaleidoscopic polyvalence of the junction between signifier and signified is why 
psychoanalysis takes so long – sometimes decades. Psychoanalysis works according to a chain 
of signifiers, a sense-making logic-by-juncture, 
which is potentially different for each analysand, 
just as meanings and words splinter off into 
infinite relationships across languages. This deessentializes the role of language, breaking from 
the assumption that language refers to a preexisting or essential reality outside of itself. In this 
sense, it is the opposite of the representational 
approach which looks to understand the hidden 
meaning in images because one image never ends 
with itself – it is always associated with another. 
The time-investment necessary for the practice 
of psychoanalysis is why it is often the preserve 
of the rich, but it is also why its results are so 
elusive to the forces of commoditization and why 
ersatz psychoanalytic ideas take hold within culture, promising immediate access to the “hidden” 
truths about oneself, about the world and about 
– in some instances of film theory – the concealed 
meaning of a film or the inner workings of the 
mind of a director.
The length and inaccessibility of the psychoanalytic practice is why readily available 
“unconsciousness”-raising practices such as film 
might have political worth in terms of the philosophical transformation of wider society. What 
psychoanalysis might take considerable time and 
money to achieve, film – when understood in 
terms of the Analyst’s Discourse – might offer as 
a collective “transformance”-art-istic experience, 
guiding its viewership to an emancipatory insight 
in small doses. 
Un chien andalou is a 1929 film by Luis Buñuel, 
written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It is a 
classic example of Buñuel’s surrealism in that 
it breaks from linear plot and works with the 
fragmented chains of images that make his films 
so recognizable. In one sense, this would make 
it the antithesis of those films discussed in this 
book that achieve psychoanalytic impact on the 
viewer through well-constructed plot and guiding them to a point of revelation – potentially 
the Gaze of Lack – via affect and transference. 
However, when seen less as a celebration of anarchic fragmentation and more as an exploration of 
the metonymic approach of psychoanalysis, this 
kind of film can be seen as a version of putting 
the viewer through an episode of free association, like a dream. In this sense, it might radically 
make visible the infinite search for meaning in 
answer to perennial Lack.
Hiding in Plain Sight – Storytelling
In the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
Hegel states, “‘A cannot at the same time be 
A and not A.’ – This maxim, instead of being 
a true law of thought, is nothing but a law of 
abstract understanding.”14 What he means here 
is that by denying that the signifier “A” can be 
at the same time “A” and “not A,” the thinker 
is not adhering to the dialectical understanding 
of matter and signs (“Absolute Knowing”), but 
rather neutering the radical opening of contradiction in reality, in favor of binary, oppositional, 
ideological reasoning.
Though many industries are now using AI to 
produce initial drafts, later to be “brushed up” 
by humans, the inadequacy of programs such as 
Google Translate speaks to the dialectical knowledge required to work with the contradictions of 
language in its various forms in a way that the 
binary logic of machines cannot handle. When I 
was a French teacher, one of the most common 
tells that a student had used the “help” of Google 
Translate in their homework were phrases such 
as playing in an “allumette de foot” (a football 
match [that you might use to light a candle]) 
or the fact that there were “vingt-cinq maisons 
d’embarquement” at the school (boarding houses 
[as in boarding a plane]). These examples show 
the computer’s necessary and inevitable impetus 
to force the signifier A to replicate as A in another 
context. 
Computers cannot think because they are born 
only once, created as-they-are at the hands of 
human subjects. They are not born twice and are 
therefore not self-conscious. Computers process 
literally, not poetically or metonymically. They 
are divided insofar as matter is divided at the level 
of quantum oscillation, but they are not divided 
at the level of consciousness.
Against the digital attempt to reproduce A as 
A, language – born of Lack – cannot ever hit 
the nail of meaning on the head. Like a wet bar 
of soap that constantly slips from the grasp of 
those who attempt to handle it, language productively fails at direct communication, always 
pointing in a novel direction according to a 
connective logic. Like ions that form chains 
with more ions according to their lacking electrons, words latch onto more words according 
to the nonfulfillment of their role to signify a 
signified. 
The failure of communication generates a surplus in language. Its failure generates poetry and 
art, just as subjectivity’s universal formationby-failure points toward a possible universalist, 
emancipatory politics. 
Art’s power over subjectivity resides in its ability to house contradiction within its structure 
and to operate on unconsciousness. What is 
perhaps unique about the artform of film is its 
ambition to totalize. Whilst structured storylines 
corral Lack within film toward a potentially 
productive point of revelation as to the true 
nature of desire, films that attempt to repress 
contradiction altogether are propagandistic. 
However, the very attempt to repress contradiction within the artform is exposed by it. The 
attempts sit ill with the viewer and are obvious. They may incite productive discussion since 
they reveal in relief the binary logic of ideology 
against the truly contradictory nature of life that 
art may more readily capture than oppositional 
abstraction. 
Comedy, like art, is made possible by the contradictions present in language and logic and 
productively exposes them. Humor often relies 
on the presence of two conflictual truths within 
a signifier at the same time (for example, a child 
speaking like a wizened adult). Lacan comments15
on humans’ ability to manipulate contradiction via comedy and word play in reference to a 
famous joke from Freud about a couple of men 
who meet on a road in Poland. One man asks the 
other, “If you say you’re going to Cracow, you 
want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But 
I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So 
why are you lying to me?”16
Here, Lacan shows that humans are able to 
hide truth not only in fiction, but also in nonfiction. This, he says, is one of the principal 
differences between animal consciousness and 
human subjectivity. He continues his analysis 
using the example of hunting. Animals, pursued 
by a hunter, leave tracks. Slier animals are able 
to conceal their tracks or leave decoys. It is up 
to the wily hunter to decipher these illusions. 
There is only one kind of “animal” that can leave 
true tracks that are intended to be read as false: 
human beings. Only humans are able to hide the 
truth in the truth. As Groucho Marx’s joke goes 
– one that Žižek often recounts: “He might look 
like an idiot, sound like an idiot, but don’t be 
fooled, he really is an idiot.”17
Storytelling (dir. Todd Solondz, 2001) is a film 
divided into two halves: Fiction and Nonfiction. 
In Fiction, MFA student Vi writes the short story 
of an abusive sexual encounter with her Pulitzer 
Prize-winning instructor for a class crit. Vi’s 
story provokes outrage amongst her fellow students. They call it outlandish, unbelievable, even 
though Vi found photographs in her professor’s 
apartment that show the opposite is true – nearly 
all her course-mates have had sex with him. The 
students are outraged, therefore, not because the 
story is unbelievable, but precisely because it is. 
And Vi has put that truth in the wrong register: 
fiction. 
Žižek recounts the story of a thief who left 
his factory every night with an empty wheelbarrow. Every night, the guards inspected the empty 
wheelbarrow and, never finding anything inside, 
waved him on, until they later came to understand 
that he had in fact been stealing wheelbarrows. 
Since ideological subjects are captured by a logic 
that truth is concealed from them, Vi would have 
done better to hide her truth in a register where 
no one would ever find it: the truth.
There is an impetus to understand psychoanalysis as a process that aligns with the satisfying 
psy­ho­inema
logic of the detective story. Like the conspiracy 
theorist, the ideological subject gains satisfaction 
in the belief that the truth of their life is concealed from them. Whilst this mistake allows the 
analysand to libidinally invest in the “powers” of 
the analyst via transference, only to be let down 
later when they are revealed to possess no special 
knowledge, the political truth of psychoanalysis 
is that material reality is the limit of the subject’s 
horizon. To think in terms of a concealed topography of subjectivity and matter is for the subject 
to hold themself hostage to a fantasy of an alternate world in which everything would be resolved 
for them, if only things were different. Instead, 
life is a calamity only made possible by a primary 
apocalypse whose contradictions are ongoing. By 
coming to terms with the contradictory nature 
of the world around them as it is, the subject can 
live more productively – less toxically – as long as 
they are alive, by working to transform a reality 
that is actually theirs, not an alternative universe 
that only exists via psychic abstraction.
Being, Becoming – Babe
Psychoanalysis is the philosophy of selfconsciousness and is therefore a universal 
practice. Psychoanalysis charts the ways in which 
subjectivity – in a possibly infinite way for each 
individual – is not at one with itself. This non-atoneness is called the unconscious. 
Psychoanalysis developed as a theory and 
practice in response to the suffering experienced 
by subjects at a certain point of human civilizational development. Whilst different societal 
orders produced different modes of suffering – 
for example, the fear of the retribution of God in 
Hell for the subject’s transgressions in feudalism 
– industrial capitalism produces a form of psychic disquiet that is so acute precisely because 
its antagonisms are so radically denied, it being 
the most modern form of societal development 
– and therefore the most adept at repressing its 
contradictions. 
The main antagonism repressed by the market 
system is surplus value, which is predicated on 
the sacrifice of workers. This contradiction is 
obfuscated with cultural concessions and a puritanical focus on the ethics of “meritocracy,” 
psy­ho­inema
which – when they fail – are further papered over 
by ideological justifications that explain away 
these failures as contingent, rather than inherent 
to the structure of the market system as such. 
Whilst capitalist ideology affirms particularity 
in terms of identity-as-commodity and the logic 
of ownership, psychoanalysis affirms universality 
(a traditionally “leftist” or emancipatory position) 
via its explication of the journey to subjectivity 
that follows the same pattern in all subjects – 
though explodes into infinity in its manifest form 
– and its revelation that no subject can overcome 
their Lack via the commodity. 
The Master Signifier of capitalism (exemplified by “free,” unfettered access to the market) 
is totalitarian in that it posits a false universality 
via the logic of exclusion (of those from whom 
surplus value is appropriated) and exception 
(for those who appropriate it). The symptoms 
of capitalism are manifested in response to its 
unbearable principal contradiction – the foundational “sinthome” of surplus value. The 
universality of psychoanalysis undercuts the false 
universal of the Master Signifier. All human subjects have something in common – nothing itself. 
The Master Signifier can never be universal and 
thus is an abstraction from the concrete “denaturedness” of universal subjectivity. 
According to psychoanalysis, subjectivity is 
premised upon the signifier. Language, and 
therefore subjectivity, is formed through the 
impossibility of communication. 
Humans are born with a potential to speak 
and think that is not yet actualized. For Hegel, at 
this point they are conscious, like other members 
of the animal kingdom – a status that may be 
likened to the Sartrean In-Itself.18 Humans are 
distinguished from other animals via their second 
birth into language and subjectivity, a status that 
is For-Itself. 
As compared to other animals, born with a 
greater physical readiness, humans are unindividuated at birth. Unlike the pony, for example, 
that can stand on its feet moments after birth and 
run, the human baby is born as a fetus, utterly 
dependent for many months on their primary 
caregiver as a result of their large skull and the 
small birth canal of the human adult, itself a 
result of the fact that we are bipedal. 
The infant cries and laughs. The caregivers are 
lacking subjects who are unable to directly discern the meaning of their baby’s communication. 
psy­ho­inema
Gradually, through frustration, the infant comes 
to speak. Speech is therefore a symptom of the 
contradiction of human biology, the Lack in the 
infant and the Lack in the parents.
Since the status of the pre-linguistic infant was 
Consciousness, the subject is forever endowed 
with a sense they have lost something substantive: an imagined oneness with their caregivers 
where their every need was met. This oneness is 
a fallacy in that the lacking parents were never 
able to faultlessly care for their child and the 
self-conscious child-as-divided-subject did not 
exist in its infant form. As for Adam and Eve 
for whom Eden became utopic only upon their 
expulsion from the garden, the prelinguistic 
“oneness” of infancy is only transcendent insofar 
as it was lost. 
This loss of an imagined oneness is subjective 
Lack. We are universally marked by it as long as 
we are alive. This Lack drives desire and makes 
life worth living. Capitalism exploits the fallacy 
that Lack is loss, offering an imagined access to 
the oneness via a commodity that could close it, 
but never can. 
The second birth into language is that which 
opens self-consciousness within us and endows us 
with drive, rather than instinct. It also alienates 
us from the apparent oneness of matter.
The imagined totality of ego is cut through 
by the unconscious, which means – though we 
must invest in the stability of ego to navigate 
the world – we are never at one with ourselves. 
We are riven with contradictions. Suffering may 
occur when we attempt to overly rationalize these 
contradictions, instead of allowing them to dwell 
within us, all at once. The ongoing process of recognition through the eyes of the divided Other 
provides us with an egoic stability that the precarity of capitalism, and the commoditization of the 
Other, constantly threatens. 
To be human is to be other to the material self; 
this otherness is the inevitable result of Lack in 
matter. 
Babe (dir. Chris Noonan, 1995) is about a pig 
who is a sheepdog. According to psychoanalysis, 
Babe has traversed the second birth into language 
and therefore is a subject. He is a creature of 
language and thus marked by both Being and 
Becoming. In Being, he is a pig. But Hoggett, 
the farmer, has identified a capacity in him to 
herd other animals and, by proving his utility, he 
will not be eaten for dinner. In Becoming, Babe 
psy­ho­inema
is a sheepdog. He learns the signifier required to 
herd sheep (Baa Ram Ewe) and transforms into 
a prize-winning dog. Language brings the subject 
beyond biological necessity and permits them to 
inhabit multiple identities at once, syllogistically. 
Radical Sex – The Piano Teacher
The term “little death” in French (“la petite 
mort”) refers to the nothingness to which the subject is exposed after orgasm. “Mort” refers to the 
death in the subject’s desire after the completion 
of the act. It can be traumatic because it points 
the subject toward the nothingness at the heart of 
something that is imagined to be transcendent, as 
well as their emergence from the contradiction in 
matter as such. Fantasy and foreplay are the necessary crutches which allow the subject to enjoy 
the sexual act as gratifying rather than traumatic. 
Rape is so violent precisely because of the psychic 
harm it entails when the subject is not involved 
in the sexual act on the level of fantasy. 
Sex is given primacy in psychoanalysis not 
because it is the underlying cause of everything 
else, but rather because it presents a critical 
moment in the subject’s structure by desire – a 
moment of pure confrontation with Lack that 
can, in the right philosophical context, point 
them toward a better understanding of their subjectivity and its place within the world, orienting 
them toward insights that might lead them to live 
in more constructive and liberatory ways, both as 
individuals and in community.
Sexual fantasy forms for the infant as a response 
to the question of what their primary caregiver 
wants of them. It is an attempt to stabilize the 
Lack in the subjectivity of the Other and, in this 
way, is a defense against Lack. Since it arises at 
such a young age, sexual fantasy is inevitably 
base, irrational and scatalogical. 
Historically, conservative societies managed 
the necessary impurity in sex in its infantile logic 
via the scapegoat mechanism. These modes of 
social organization condemned certain forms of 
desiring as impure in order to envisage heterosexual modes of desire as pure by contrast. In reality, 
because of the fundamental illogic of all sexuality 
and because of the way it is structured via the 
“impurity” in contradiction that it attempts to 
manage, all sexuality has Lack in common. This 
is what is meant by theorists who claim that all 
sexuality is queer. 
psy­ho­inema
The historical conservative punished and 
excluded the “queer” subject via a false logic of 
purity in order to manage the impurity that was 
present within their own sexuality. Whilst neoliberal politics has commoditized the promise of 
queerness by particularizing sexuality, according 
to a product-based logic of identity categories with 
which the subject is encouraged to identify via a 
logic of exception rather universality, what is radical in queer theory is the universality of disorder 
in sex, in subjectivity and in our universe. There 
is no resolution to the queerness of our universe. 
The political act of queerness is to reside in its 
universal contradiction and not to overcome it via 
Death Drive, scapegoating and commoditization. 
When wrapped up in its fantasy, when guided 
to orgasm by the act of foreplay and intercourse 
(or even browsing a dating app), the subject can 
suffer the death of their desire in small doses. 
Likewise, film – especially narrative-driven film 
– can draw the subject by their desire and place 
them in the position of the orgasm enjoyer in 
order to confront them – in a way that they can 
manage – with the nature of their desire and 
offer them a terrain of possible philosophical and 
political insight.
In the moment of their orgasm, the subject 
can be understood as the perfect capitalist consumer, moving toward what they believe to be 
their desire’s completion like a good addict in 
the throes of an imagined ecstatic hit. Then, at 
the moment of orgasm, the subject is returned 
to itself, confronting the contradictory nature of 
their desire and its impossibility, like a user who 
feels both the relief and disaster of another hit. 
The structure of film, which guides the viewer 
by desire and anticipation through a riven story 
that charts the possible fulfillment or nonfulfillment of a protagonist, which focuses the 
viewer’s attention through sumptuous color, 
sound and music, acts upon the subject like foreplay upon the subject engaged in sex. 
An ideological reading of sex and film would 
have it that the most valued moment is that of 
the final release of orgasm or the final revelation of the fate of the protagonist. This logic is 
that of the pleasure principle, focusing on the 
possible orgasmic ecstasy offered in the completion of a goal or the attainment of a product. 
Instead, it could be politically and philosophically fruitful to place import both on the death 
in the viewer’s desire following the resolution 
psy­ho­inema
of the plot – exposing the death in desire that 
cannot be assuaged via the commodity – and on 
the fantasy that is the necessary obstacle facilitating a tolerance of the death in desire, which 
can be productively enjoyed according to a logic 
of True Infinity, reducing the suffering of the 
subject and the resultant ressentiment the subject feels when they imagine pleasure has been 
contingently stolen from them, which can have 
negative, oppositional effects. 
The Piano Teacher (dir. Michael Haneke, 2001) 
expresses how traumatic the end of desire can be, 
against a process of foreplay and excitation that 
appears as the obstacle to the act, but is in fact the 
site of enjoyment. Fantasy protects the subject 
from the trauma of the death in desire; orgasm 
protects the subject from the trauma of the Lack 
in the Other’s fantasy.
In the film, sexually disturbed pianist Erika 
is engaged in an affair with her talented student 
Walter. After Erika confesses the contours of her 
fantasy in a letter to Walter, he is disgusted, the 
fantasy revealing the dark, scatological, repulsive 
desires of the piano teacher. When Walter finally 
agrees to enact Erika’s demands to be attacked 
and raped by him, Erika has achieved her sexual 
fantasy and is confronted by the horror of its hollowness. In despair, she stabs herself in the chest. 
The Universalism of Psychoanalysis – Alien
In the history of film theory, Alien (dir. Ridley 
Scott, 1979) has been misunderstood at times as 
containing a singularly feminist message, rather 
than – potentially – a Marxist one. Film’s subjectivity is manifest in the vacillation of its apparent 
philosophical impetus according to the context 
in which we view it, reflecting to us the contours of our moment and its capitalist desire. A 
feminist reading may have been most pertinent 
at the time of the film’s release when women had 
been long excluded from aspects of public life; 
at a time when gender-based progress narratives 
have been weaponized to mystify the workings 
of capital (for example, “girl boss feminism”), 
a materialist critique may be most fruitful and 
may expose how particularisms can stymie, in the 
longer term, the psychoanalytic contribution to 
emancipatory politics. 
An influential contemporaneous interpretation of Alien used psychoanalytic language to 
show that the film illustrated the prevalence of 
psy­ho­inema
misogyny within culture by revealing how the 
female reproductive system is associated with 
monstrosity (“the monstrous feminine”).19 Here, 
the facehugger that attaches itself to a crew member’s face exemplifies the horror of the vagina. 
Misogyny results from an excess hatred for 
femininity that emerges from the subject’s anger 
at their deprivation of the imagined oneness 
offered by the breast that was taken from them by 
their mother and the ambivalence (joy, disgust, 
resentment) they feel at the notion of ever having 
been born. It relies on the “female-ness” of the 
caregiver only insofar as it is ideological (that it is 
an unconscious mechanism by which the subject 
rationalizes their Lack as an exception). Whilst 
sexuation exists according to gendered difference, 
there is no transcendent essence to “female-ness” 
or “male-ness” not only because a woman can so 
readily be or become a man, but because there is 
no transcendent essence in existence in the universe, other than that which is experienced as 
such by the subject in excess, because of their 
marking by Lack. 
The recognition of the existence of misogyny is 
vital, but it is not the end of the analytic process. 
It is a cultural symptom that is a starting place for 
a material analysis that may gradually overcome 
it. Its universal nature (stemming from the birth 
process through which all subjects pass) speaks 
to the political potential of an analytic reading of 
the phenomenon as symptom. 
Whilst psychoanalysis would expose the subject to the material foundations of the symptom 
in order to create the libidinal and philosophical 
conditions for a potential material transformation of the psychic economy that generates it in 
the first place (by rationalizing Lack as a contingent, non-universal loss that can be overcome), 
some components of psychoanalytic theory have 
come to maintain their analyses at the level of the 
cultural. To do so is to remain within abstraction, 
solidifying the Real at the level of the Imaginary 
instead of elevating it to the level of the Symbolic, 
which is the very definition – for Lacan – of the 
process of analysis. 
Oppositional theory sustains the identification 
of the symptom as its end point and avoids the 
dialectical work of tarrying with Lack and all its 
implications, explaining away the symptom as an 
indication of the transcendent purity/impurity 
of given groups or of poor subjective behavior 
on the part of a specific group that can simply 
psy­ho­inema
be resolved by conscious, disciplinary solutions. 
Since these solutions are abstracted from the 
dialectical Real that underpins our world, they 
sustain its repression, with new symptoms returning with renewed intensity. 
Further, the problem-solution logic of these 
interpretations is readily commoditized by 
the market. In film, this can manifest in various ways. A film might consciously display 
moral rectitude and become a commodity that 
promises to assuage a Lack in the viewer by disciplining them. The (im)pure identity of the 
maker – abstracted from the material reality 
that generated it – might endow the film with 
an imagined transcendence via a wisdom that 
the audience can appropriate according to an 
Orientalist logic. Conscious moral purity within 
the film’s narrative structure can be appropriated as cultural capital by the beneficiaries of 
surplus value who can perform a familiarity with 
the “correct” knowledge proffered by the film, 
which itself acts as a veil to conceal the immoral 
and illogical workings of the system that benefits 
them. These factors are antithetical to the universalist, political structure of the film mechanism 
and work to repress it. 
The University Discourse uses already existing cultural and political biases to understand 
the manifest content of the film and is therefore 
conservative. An approach that pertains to the 
Analyst’s Discourse positions the viewer in relation to a productive encounter with the infinite 
potentiality of the Lack within the film itself, 
which may offer a conversion experience through 
the destabilization of these biases – film not just 
as symptom, but as process.
In the canonical film theory essay “Visual 
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”20 it is argued 
that feminists should “fight the unconscious” as 
it appears in films marked by the so-called “male 
gaze.” In this reading, films made within the 
context of patriarchal capitalism display “unconscious” evidence of being so. In psychoanalytic 
theory, however, there is no substantive unconscious and therefore no unconscious-as-entity 
to fight. The unconscious is a fissure present in 
reality at all times, a residue of the ego’s aim 
for totality as a mechanism by which the selfconscious subject, as a child, comes to navigate 
the world. The symptomatology of the film does 
not end with “patriarchy” itself, but rather with 
the eternal contradictions of subjectivity and 
psy­ho­inema
the universe which must be continually productively and politically tarried with, lest the subject 
collapses into reactionary thinking, a historical 
example of which is patriarchy itself.
Taking the insight that Alien exposes misogyny 
within the culture to its psychoanalytic conclusion, we might come to a stronger political 
interpretation. Misogyny is not just a feature of 
the gender wars, but rather a toxic artifact of 
subjective life, one that capitalism sustains by 
denying subjectivity’s contradictions and one 
that can be challenged by raising the trauma of 
the Real to the universal Symbolic Order, a process that itself undermines the logic of capitalism. 
The arrival of all subjects from Lack creates a 
latent anxiety in them, regardless of gender, relative to the birth process. The attraction–repulsion 
toward and against the vaginal symbolism in 
Alien, and the fact that viewers of every gender 
can identify with the horrors on show, reveals 
the universal subject’s anger at their deprivation 
of the imagined oneness of Being. The hatred 
here is not directed to women because they are 
women, but because they gave birth. In a different scientific order, one that some have argued 
we are heading toward, whoever gives birth 
– male, female or other – may come to face the 
same unconscious hatred, which itself, through 
philosophy and psychoanalysis, would have to 
be tarried with and the trauma of the Real of it 
neutered by its digestion into the Symbolic.
Further, whilst it has been argued that the 
alien creatures in the film code female in their 
aesthetic proximity to human genitals, it cannot 
be denied that the xenomorph has characteristics 
that appear “male” (the large head, the phallusshaped alien fetus that bursts out of a crew mate’s 
chest). Whilst there is anxiety for all subjects in 
relation to the Lack from which they emanate 
(the vagina), there is also anxiety related to the 
phallus – both its possession and its absence, 
as exemplified in Little Hans’ fear of horses in 
Freud’s famous case.
The universal Lack within the viewer and the 
Lack within Ripley-as-subject allows transference to occur between them and for subjects 
of all genders to identify with her. Part of the 
universal power of the film’s horror resides in 
its depiction of the Lack within the monstrous 
Other – the mystery of the dialectic of subjectivity, necessary for recognition to occur, but 
terrifying for the subject who can never anticipate 
psy­ho­inema
how the Other might act or what they desire of 
them. 
As many theorists have pointed out, Alien
expresses drive, a feature of all human subjectivity 
– an insatiable, eternal force that pays no attention to the “pleasure principle” (the reassuring 
notion that humans are motivated by utility, 
rather than their own destruction). The alien is 
more like themselves as humans than the crew 
members aboard Nostromo would like to admit: 
zombie-like, unrelenting, it destroys all around 
it in the attempt to survive, even against its own 
well-being. The alien is a mirror to the capitalist subject who would maintain a non-dialectic 
understanding of their reality, even at the cost of 
their life.
Perhaps the most terrifying message of Alien, 
however, is that – two centuries after Hegel, one 
and a half after Marx, one after Freud and a halfcentury after Lacan – human society has still 
not come to terms with the political import of 
Absolute Knowing, the emancipatory potential 
of an embrace of universal Lack. The religiosity of commodity fetishism is so powerful that 
it remains across centuries and may never be 
undone. Still slaves to surplus value, the crew 
believes at the start of the film that they have 
earned their money and are on their way home. 
Instead, they are forced by the corporation to risk 
their lives once again or forfeit the fruit of the 
sacrifice already made. 
Romantic Exception – Bridget Jones’s Diary
Pride and Prejudice is sometimes read as a 
proto-Marxist novel in that it foregrounds the 
material conditions of the Bennett sisters in the 
context of securing their future via marriage. 
Whilst the novel is certainly more materialist 
than most cultural products today, the ideological closure offered by the story – that Elizabeth 
is exempted from precariousness by marrying 
into wealth and, at the same time, finds her 
perfect match – has meant that its story structure has been readily commoditized and has 
become recognizable in perhaps the most ideological of narrative forms: the rom-com. Bridget 
Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001) is one 
of the most successful examples of this genre 
and is a near calque of Pride and Prejudice onto 
the life of a young woman in contemporary 
London. 
psy­ho­inema
Here, the subject imagines that the solution 
to their economic constraint is not to work collectively to overcome capitalism, but to invest 
in exception: like the lottery winner, they could 
be absolved of material constraints by a wealthy 
person who not only is themselves sufficiently 
Marxist to understand contemporary economics 
and to conceive of the person of desire outside 
of capitalist ideology (i.e., they are not desirable 
because of what they offer, they are to be loved 
“just the way they are”), but also is able to offer 
the subject a life beyond the antagonisms of capitalism within it. The rom-com depoliticizes the 
subject, transforming the politics of Love into 
the commodity form of romance. This is perhaps 
why it is a genre most enjoyed by the subject at 
the precise moment they experience the market 
system’s downsides (for example, after a breakup) and need to be soothed. By offering an 
ideological solution, the depressed subject is able 
to mourn their losses and re-knit the chain of signifiers via a renewed fantasy. But it is a temporary 
fix; by re-investing in capitalist fantasy, they will 
inevitably be let down again.
The rom-com became particularly prevalent 
in the nineties and noughties when economic 
conditions allowed for the cultural supremacy of 
mid-budget films. It has been argued that the 
contingent prevalence of the rom-com during 
the childhood and adolescence of millennials has 
been disastrous for their adult love lives, having 
led them to ideologically invest in an exception 
that can never arrive, rather than accepting the 
dialectical reality of love: that it is to invest in the 
Lack of the Other. Tragically, the more precarious their material conditions, the more driven 
they may be to invest in this fantasy.
It is not only the millennial who can invest in 
the 30-something Bridget and be exploited by 
the ideological currents of the film in which she 
appears. A 70-year-old male viewer may identify 
with Bridget and her desire to be the capitalist 
exception. Whilst the potential identity characteristics of the human subject are infinite because 
of the prism of Lack, capitalist desire follows a 
singular, unconscious logic – the assuaging of the 
gap of Lack in fulfillment. 
Just as the subject is endowed with desires that 
are not theirs, but become theirs, during their 
entrance from consciousness into language via the 
play of recognition and misrecognition with the 
subjectivities of their lacking parents, the lacking, 
psy­ho­inema
self-conscious adult can readily adopt desires that 
are not originally their own, but become them, 
via mimetic desire. 
The fact that even a well-intentioned environmentalist or a carefully conscious anti-capitalist 
may find themselves, through a narrative like 
that of Bridget Jones, desiring along ideological 
lines shows capitalist desire is mimetic and that it 
operates unconsciously. Conversely, the fact that 
the subject is so easily shaped and directed by 
the process of mimetic desire speaks to an emancipatory potentiality in film. The artform that 
so readily captures the subject’s libido could be 
consciously directed toward a productive understanding and relationship with the object of 
desire through an investment in a narrative form 
that gradually lets the subject down. Further, as 
an object of study, the collective enjoyment of 
ideological film informs us of the contours of our 
capitalist desire, reminding us – with political 
effect, if considered assiduously – how and what 
we do in fact desire, despite our conscious claims 
to the contrary. In this sense, our collective desire 
“speaks through” the ideological film and what is 
spoken – as in the process of psychoanalysis – can 
be analyzed. 
Capitalist Death Drive – Brazil
The slogan of the dating app “Hinge” provides an 
interesting example of the contradiction within 
capitalism that ideology is constantly at pains to 
deny. The app’s slogan claims that it is “designed 
to be deleted.” It asserts that the app is so successful at matching its users that its purpose is to 
self-destruct.
As a profit-seeking enterprise, the opposite is 
true. The profits for its shareholders rely on its 
failure to match its users, not its success. In order 
to sustain revenue, the app relies on daters who 
continue to date, not those who succeed in finding a partner. The market system foregrounds its 
successes, but they are exceptions that prove the 
rule. Whilst Steinbeck stated that “everyone was 
a temporarily embarrassed capitalist,”21 today 
we might claim that – in our epoch of platform 
capitalism – everyone is a temporarily frustrated 
Hinge dater, just as they may be a temporarily 
frustrated SoundCloud rapper, viral YouTuber 
or TikTok meme creator.
A common argument from capitalism’s supporters is that it is the most logical, reasonable and 
productive form of organizing society because it 
psy­ho­inema
is so utilitarian. Capitalism’s detractors also often 
use this argument – that it is an overall negative to human flourishing precisely because it is 
too utilitarian and doesn’t match the complex 
nature of human life, reducing everything in the 
world to objects to be exchanged. Perhaps neither 
of these logics fully captures its toxicity, which 
resides not in its tendency to be utilitarian, but 
rather in its necessarily destructive quality, which 
always creates and offers a problem that must 
consequently be “solved.”
Death Drive is the attempt by the subject to 
eradicate the dialectic by returning to a oneness 
that is not even possible in death (the subject returns to the earth as minerals, which are 
themselves oscillating at the quantum level, and 
becomes again part of a human subject via their 
consumption of food). The subject protects themself from their contradictory status by driving 
toward objects and phenomena that they believe 
will quell their Lack. Since they can never reach 
the oneness of fulfillment because it cannot exist 
in material reality, the subject must perpetually 
put distance between themself and their object 
of imagined fulfillment, which will inevitably let 
them down, in order to sustain its magic. 
Brazil (dir. Terry Gillam, 1985) depicts the 
Death Drive in capitalism – how the system 
exerts itself over the collective via its failure. Those 
involved in the bureaucratic edifice depicted in 
the film fail to do anything, whilst striving to 
appear rushed and busy. One of the system’s outlaws is handyman Harry Tuttle, who comes to 
the aid of individuals who have broken devices 
in their homes. By fixing these devices, he is the 
enemy of the state whose own handypeople must 
keep the machinery of the system broken in order 
to justify their own existence. 
The very inciting incident of the narrative 
occurs when a squished insect fudges Tuttle’s 
arrest warrant in a teleprinter, resulting in a misunderstanding that the wanted criminal is Buttle. 
What is important here is not that the totalitarian 
hyper-bureaucracy is undermined by a mere fly, 
but rather that it is sustained by it, echoed by the 
structure of the narrative itself, which is incited 
by the mistake. 
Capitalism necessarily creates bad products that 
do not meet the needs of the collective. Under the 
regime of corporate oligopoly, seemingly more 
like the techno-bureaucracy of Brazil every day, it 
is nearly impossible to create work outside of the 
psy­ho­inema
auspices of capitalist Death Drive. Today, good 
work, and good films, are an exception, even a 
miracle. Great films are produced, but are often 
unrecognized, explained away, shielded from the 
view of the public lest they expose the failures of 
the center. Occasionally, though – through the 
miracle of contradiction – they do appear and 
they can be embraced. 
Nonetheless, like Tuttle, most filmmakers 
and artists must often work bandit-like, with the 
scraps of an ever more totalizing system, in the 
knowledge their work might never be watched. 
Gaze of Mastery, Gaze of Lack – Vertigo
In Lacanian terms, Gaze is a residue that appears 
in excess between interfacing subjects or subjects 
and objects. It confronts the subject with the 
constitutive Lack at the core of being.
Gaze challenges the ideological notion that 
sight is unmediated. Of the five senses, sight is 
often misunderstood as the most objective (“I saw 
it with my very eyes!”; “it was in plain sight”) or 
totalizing (we can be said to have “20/20 vision” 
or a clarity of “hindsight” and “foresight”), as 
compared to taste, for example, the very word 
conveying discernment (“I have a taste for cherries, not chocolate”) or touch (“it felt wrong”). 
In his Four Fundamental Concepts of 
Psychoanalysis, Lacan says of Gaze that “what is 
profoundly unsatisfying, and always missing, is 
that you never look at me from the place from 
which I see you.”22 Since subjects are divided, 
looking always involves a process of infinitely 
reciprocal recognition and misrecognition and 
brings with it a reminder of the “armor of an 
alienating identity”23 with which the subject is 
endowed during the mirror stage, in the face of 
which they always feel inadequate.
The divided parent necessarily misrecognizes 
their child in two principal ways. First, the child 
is sufficiently frustrated by the failure of the lacking parent that they must come to speak and 
therefore think. Second, the lacking parent reinforces the child’s sense of self by lending their 
look to the process of visual reinforcement that 
occurs during the mirror stage. Gaze is the 
resultant residue between parent and child. The 
parent’s process of seeing– lacking, therefore 
discerning – affirms their child’s vision of themself as a bounded being in their reflected image. 
This is the armor of an alienating identity that 
psy­ho­inema
allows the subject to navigate the world, but it 
endows them with an uneasy sense of inadequacy 
and non-totality in the face of an imagined Ideal 
Ego, a Cartesian subject who appeared for them 
in the mirror and whose mind and body seem to 
be connected. 
“Male gaze” identifies with the “mistake” of 
masculine sexuation in that it expresses the male 
artist’s subjectivity as a powerful entity, objectifying the female subject who becomes a helpless 
object beneath the command of their phallic 
camera. Whilst the idea cut against the trends 
of misogyny within filmmaking culture at the 
time of its conception and may in fact implicitly critique the “mistake” of the Impostor that 
the Lacanian Gaze exposes, the way the concept has been understood – or misunderstood 
– in mainstream culture arrests the radicality of 
Lacan’s universalist concept and lends weight to 
the notion that there is an intransigent, “hidden” 
totality to male perception via the use of psychoanalytic language. Here, there is no male or 
female essence to Gaze since Gaze concerns the 
identity of the looking subject as much as that 
of the Other (the subject/object who returns the 
look and exposes the viewer’s necessary subjective 
division). A particularist understanding of Gaze 
as one of mastery aligns with the Bad Infinity of 
capitalism, which suggests both that there is a 
singular subject who is undivided (uncastrated – 
having stolen an amassed jouissance for themself) 
and that the Other can ever not be implicated in 
the processes of perception and desire. 
This commoditized understanding runs contrary to the impetus of Lacan’s revolutionary 
ideas of universal alterity and the public nature 
of subjectivity and desire, including those that 
marked early dynamics in queer theory, which 
show that all sexuality is queer because it forms 
around Lack and that there is no subjectivity 
without division. The “male gaze” came to have 
a near-unprecedented impact upon the language 
and ethos of film studies and filmmaking, within 
the institution and the cultural mainstream, perhaps because the way it was understood made 
no challenge to the underlying ideology of capitalism that engenders economic inequality and 
instability, which intensify and maintain forms 
of oppression such as misogyny, where a group or 
class must be subjugated for the extraction of surplus value. The progressive nature of the critique 
even came to operate as an unconscious fetish 
psy­ho­inema
to deny the dynamic of this underlying ideology 
within film practice and the wider economy. 
In Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Scottie – an 
ex-detective who has retired from police work 
because he suffers from vertigo – is hired by an 
old friend, Gavin, to follow his wife, Madeleine. 
Gavin claims that Madeleine is acting strangely 
and he believes she is being haunted by her greatgrandmother Carlotta, who died by suicide. 
Gavin fears a similar fate will befall Madeleine. 
In reality, Gavin has already murdered his wife 
and has hired another woman, Judy, to portray 
her. Judy lures Scottie to a tall clock tower from 
which she appears to fall. Too afraid to stop her, 
Scottie sees only a body on the ground, which 
does not belong to Judy, but rather to the original 
Madeleine. In this way, Gavin exploits Scottie’s 
phobia to cover up the murder of his wife. 
According to “Visual Pleasure and Narrative 
Cinema,” Vertigo expresses a misogynistic “male 
gaze” in that “the look is central to the plot, 
oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination.” Scottie, as a policeman, is “exemplary 
of the symbolic order and the law.” He has “the 
power to subject another person to the will sadistically or the gaze voyeuristically” and turns this 
“onto the woman as object of both.”24 While it 
may be the case that Scottie is a misogynistic man, 
that the film was produced within a misogynistic 
culture and that Hitchcock, like male directors 
of his time, subjectivized men as male characters 
and objectivized women as passive facilitators of 
plot, this critique is not aligned with a Lacanian 
approach, but rather perhaps with Foucauldian 
critiques of manifest systems of power.25 In fact, 
by positing that the misogyny present in the film 
exists because of the totality of male subjectivity, 
rather than its Lack, it falls into the oppositional, 
capitalist logic that Lacan aimed to undermine 
via this theory. Lacanian Gaze exposes the Lack 
in all subjective structures, predicts the political 
potential of hysteria in all and claims that cultural 
symptoms such as misogyny are a result of the 
attempt to deny the denaturedness of all human 
subjectivity upon an economic terrain that must 
promise oneness in alterity in order to extract 
profit. For Lacan, all Gaze is Gaze-of-Lack. The 
possibility of a Gaze-of-Power is an ideological 
illusion.
Indeed, a Lacanian analysis of the film’s most 
iconic scene would yield a universalist insight, 
showing that Scottie is equally as lacking as 
psy­ho­inema
Madeleine, that the patriarchal power that he has 
does not offer what it promises, subjectivizing 
them both and leading to the logical conclusion 
that misogyny is a symptom of the attempt to 
deny universal Lack, rather than embrace it, and 
that a society based on its unconscious recognition might facilitate the undermining of the 
subjugation of one group by another – be they 
male or female or of a given class or ethnic group.
In this scene, Scottie follows Madeleine/Judy 
to an art gallery and finds her gazing at a portrait 
that appears to be a near replica of her and that 
turns out to depict Carlotta. The “male gaze” 
invites us to read this moment as an example of 
the image of the woman already existing in the 
eye of the man, constructed by an active masculine power, which disempowers the woman and 
forces her to respond to this demand. Madeline/
Judy looks at the picture, but she will never live 
up to the image in Scottie’s eyes – the female is 
the lacking subject in an apparently patriarchal 
world. Madeline/Judy is small and appears lower 
in the picture, she sits meekly in a position comparable to that of Carlotta as she submits to the 
framing of the screen, which itself mirrors the 
perspective of a domineering male director. 
This moment, however, depicts the universal 
Lack in Gaze in numerous ways. The resemblance/mis-resemblance of Madeline/Judy with 
Carlotta exposes how the universal subject can 
never live up to their Ideal Ego, a factor that 
haunts subjectivity and makes it possible. Here, 
Scottie is confronted – and through him, the 
viewer (male, female or other) – with incomplete reciprocity. We see that the Other is not 
their Ideal Ego and is divided. The division in the 
object of sight (even when apparently passive) 
returns the Gaze of Lack upon the viewer, since 
this division subjectivizes the object according 
to Hegel’s quantum notion of substance being 
as subject.26 For example, the chignon worn by 
Madeleine/Judy is terrifying, looking more like 
the flared nostrils of a stallion than the one worn 
by Carlotta in the painting. The roses in Carlotta’s 
hands are not the symbol of romantic unity, but 
of difference – “there is no sexual relationship”27
– as they sit not in Madeline/Judy’s hands, but 
next to her on the bench. 
What we see here is not Scottie in the position 
of “master” and Madeline as “slave” but the dialectical and intersubjective relationship between 
them, as well as its traumatic reminder of the 
psy­ho­inema
universal Lack at the core of two subjects in a 
moment of misrecognition. The universal Gaze 
sits between subjects and reminds them that this 
Lack is what they both are, against the comforting 
illusion that the male is uncastrated, a master who 
has amassed all the jouissance in the world, the 
reappropriation of which can be commoditized 
via a logic of the promise of oneness-in-identity. 
The Mysteries of the Egyptians Were Mysteries 
to the Egyptians Themselves – Caché
Caché (dir. Michael Haneke, 2005) is an anticolonial film insofar as it challenges the Orientalist 
logic of oneness in alterity. It shows that there 
is no exception in subjectivity, that the ego is 
master in the house of neither the Westerner nor 
the colonized subject – all Becoming is marked by 
universal Lack. A universal politics based on this 
insight may generate a future where the exploitation and subjugation of the Other ceases to 
continue in the excessive ways that it has marked 
capitalist society because there is no promise to 
be commoditized in that Other. 
Caché depicts a bourgeois-bohemian literary 
critic in Paris (Georges) who begins to receive 
packages containing video-tapes of his house. 
It is unclear from whom these packages come 
and whose perspective they depict. Georges then 
receives cards depicting a childlike drawing of 
a man having his throat cut and, later, another 
video that depicts a working-class suburb. 
In the first instance, the undefined Gaze of the 
videos evokes an unease in Georges, exposing his 
own Lack, so easily forgotten in his milieu as an 
upper-middle-class television host – he is directly 
confronted with the anxiety of Gaze (“What does 
the Other want of me?”). The ambiguous signifiers and the sense he is being watched stir a guilt 
in him as he begins to conceive of the sender: 
Majid, a boy, now man, of his own age whom his 
parents adopted following the death of his parents during the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians, 
drowned by the police in the Seine.
Aesthetically, the film borrows motifs from 
the work of Camus. Whilst in the work of the 
absurdist, the Arab is barely subjectivized and 
is conceived of as a threat to the pied-noirs who 
know nothing of the Other’s desires, and is 
haunted by the mystery of their Das Ding (the 
dimension of desire that it is impossible to imagine), Haneke’s work goes further by subjectivizing 
psy­ho­inema
the orphan Majid, whose desires are shown to be 
ambiguous even to himself. In a final interaction 
with Georges, a tape recording of which is sent 
to him, Majid denies any knowledge at all of the 
packages and slits his own throat.
Whilst conservative identity politics sustains 
the logic of colonization by consciously elevating 
and unconsciously debasing the subjectivity of the 
Other by casting them as “wise,” “all-knowing” 
or “noble” and thus of a transcendentally alternate subjective status to the Westerner, thereby 
preserving the possibility of oneness in totality on 
which the commodity logic of capitalism relies, 
emancipatory politics posits a shared Lack that 
can never be defeated in life or death. This insight 
inspires a universal politics of collectivity rather 
than exception and challenges the enemy-making 
dialectic of utopianism upon which exclusion, 
exploitation and subjugation are predicated. 
Recognition and Identification – 
Ingrid Goes West
The screen medium of social platforms has come 
to dominate collective life. Particularly since 
the pandemic, interfacing between dialectical 
subjects in the public sphere has been replaced 
by commoditized interactions that take place via 
a screen. This has had destabilizing effects for 
the subject, who – unrecognized – will inevitably 
come to invest further in an imagined absolution 
offered by capitalist logic, which itself facilitates 
the greater extraction of surplus value from the 
subject and their greater, second-order alienation.
Whilst everything that was once sacred has 
been profaned by market forces – for example, 
many young people can no longer afford to have 
children and neoliberal ideology has defeated the 
reactionary dynamics within institutions such as 
marriage and religion, but also the reassurance 
they once offered – the inability for social media 
to offer recognition to the subject has redoubled 
the absence of the latter in a society that no longer 
provides roles. 
The Other of social media is a commoditized 
object who is portrayed as whole and complete. 
Materially, Tiktoks and Instagram posts evoke 
the totality of the star-on-screen as witnessed 
during the Hollywood Golden Age, but do not 
– like film at its best – expose the star’s Lack. 
Tweets have the aesthetic authority of black 
typeface against white, synonymous with the 
psy­ho­inema
published word. This has endowed the Other of 
social media with the appearance of being more 
authoritative than they are. As Dolar has pointed 
out,28 this is a phenomenon that has had disintegrative effects on the social collective where we 
witness – forever, once published – the opinions 
of others, rumor and gossip (once relegated to 
the private sphere) with the traumatic veneer of 
officialdom, leading to a distrust of the Other, to 
self-policing and to a libidinal investment in cancellation when it seems like the only recognition 
available in the privatized public sphere. 
Whilst the dialectical complexity of film allows 
for the viewer to be let down in their transferential 
relationship with the subject portrayed on screen, 
social media provides a non-dialectical, nonrelationship with the Other. On corporatized 
platforms, where even the “like” is a commodity, an individual’s page is not only the locus of 
their personal brand, but also the site of labor 
extraction. Whilst the ethos of philanthropic capitalism, a derivative of corporate oligopoly, drives 
subjects to simultaneously display their successes 
as well as all that is stacked against them, both 
phenomena – even the latter, “more authentic” 
one – are commoditized. The Other, therefore, 
appears whole and complete even in their noncompleteness. Lack becomes loss via commodity 
logic.
Recognition through the Gaze of the divided 
Other – only possible because of the discernment 
they offer because they are divided – is what generates the ego in childhood and facilitates the 
navigation of public life that would otherwise be 
experienced as traumatic. The process of recognition is ongoing throughout the subject’s life and 
vital. Since the Other of social media appears 
undivided, they cannot offer the subject the 
recognition via discernment that would usually 
occur in the intersubjective encounter. 
The addictive nature of social media confirms 
that no intersubjective recognition is taking place 
there. The subject curates their brand via their 
social media page and attempts to reality-test their 
identity via the reception of “likes” and “comments.” When no recognition occurs, the subject 
comes back for more. Any attempt the user makes 
to assuage their Lack through Instagram ultimately feeds it. Finding no recognition on these 
platforms, the subject’s mode of enjoyment in 
relating to them becomes one of the ressentiment
of “annoy-ment,” the painful pleasure of envious 
psy­ho­inema
voyeurism, laughter at the Other’s earnestness or 
irritation at the logic of the “humblebrag” which 
pervades the self-commoditization into which the 
subject of social media is forced according to the 
contradictory logic of philanthropic capitalism. 
Ingrid Goes West (dir. Matt Spicer, 2017) is the 
story of a down-and-out millennial who invests 
in the Instagram posts of a successful influencer 
from Venice, California (Taylor). Ingrid distracts 
herself from her own material conditions by 
imagining that she and Taylor could be friends. 
She blows her inheritance on a short-lived trip to 
Los Angeles to stalk her prospective bestie.
Over the course of the film, through the intersubjective productivity of the real-life encounter, 
Ingrid comes to understand that Taylor is as miserable as she is, that she is insecure, that Taylor’s 
apparently perfect boyfriend is in fact a pathetic, 
untalented leach, although it takes Ingrid failing 
at an overdose to truly reach rock bottom and 
confront her life. 
Whilst the film offers an exception of closure in that Ingrid broadcasts this overdose via 
Snapchat and receives recognition for doing so 
in the form of her post going viral, she comes at 
length to understand that she has repressed an 
acknowledgment of her dialectical reality and the 
possibility of finding joy in ordinary unhappiness 
according to her own desires, having invested so 
heavily in a fantasy that was not hers. According 
to the logic of the living flower, Ingrid is able to 
build a new life and create new love in the world 
as it is, not as she fantasizes it might be.
“Jouir à cause des entraves” – The Dreamers
The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci 
expresses how film can shape desire, even on 
the level of eroticism. In ’68, three students – 
American Matthew, and Parisian twins Théo 
and Isabelle – imitate the films they watch at the 
Cinémathèque Française and play sexual games 
according to the dynamics they see on screen, 
conceiving of this pursuit as intrinsically political. Evoking Genet’s The Balcony,
29 the political 
action of the film in fact takes place outside their 
window. Whilst the notion that “the personal is 
political” may be well known to them, it seems 
that the students have misunderstood its principal tenet – that the personal is political insofar 
as each individual is connected to the universal 
via their Lack. It is perhaps clearer, therefore, to 
psy­ho­inema
say that the interpersonal, or the intersubjective, 
is political; the individual sexual escapades of 
bourgeois students certainly does not constitute 
productive political activism in and of itself. 
Whilst, in the film, certainly more activism is 
taking place in the streets of Paris than between 
the students’ bedsheets, it has been recognized by 
many that the student protests of ’68 took a nonemancipatory turn in their misunderstanding of 
the politics of desire in which they were invested. 
Rather than conceiving of desire as universal – 
and therefore non-capitalistic – the promise of 
transcendence in desire re-particularized the universal phenomenon, resulting in the expansion 
and solidification of capitalism via the ethos of 
the protests, even into realms that were previously 
conceived of as outside its sphere of influence. 
The sexual revolution lost its emancipatory 
potential when it became invested in a utopian 
(non-divided) logic, leading to the commoditization of sex and relationships and the exploitation 
of sexual desire in the advertising of products. 
The utopian turn in the politics of ’68 can be 
viewed in the slogan that commanded the subject 
to “jouir sans entraves” (enjoy without limits). 
Politically and psychoanalytically, this is a logical 
impossibility: it is precisely limitation that generates desire. 
Capitalism relies on the illusion that there is 
both a transcendence on offer in getting what we 
want and that obstacles to the object of desire are 
contingent and eradicable, rather than necessary 
to sustain enjoyment. Whilst the melancholic 
experiences a loss in their desire by attaining the 
longed-for object and experiencing its impotence, the depressive is unable to enjoy the loss 
of the object that it feels spiritually connected 
to, but materially separate from. Whilst utopian 
logic focuses on the possibility of fulfillment, 
emancipatory logic undermines the capitalist Bad 
Infinite by encouraging the subject to enjoy the 
creative possibility of their Lack as such. 
In the film, the three students have huge 
amounts of sex but remain unfulfilled. They fall 
into a sexual stupor. Isabelle attempts to restimulate desire by enacting loss – a murder suicide, 
which itself is abruptly interrupted, and the students’ desire restimulated, by the intrusion of the 
external, political world when a brick is thrown 
through their window. 
It is for this reason that Lacan warned the 
students of ’68, “ce à quoi vous aspirez comme 
psy­ho­inema
révolutionnaires, c’est à un maître. Vous l’aurez”30
(What you are looking for as revolutionaries is a 
master. You will have one). From this perspective, the conscious revolution of the students was 
not a political one, but rather one that solidified capitalist desire and that mystified – but 
sustained – the Master Signifier of capitalism. 
What the students misunderstood about desire 
was that one cannot enjoy without constraint. 
Enjoyment is only possible because of it. What is 
political in psychoanalysis is the transformation 
of desire in relation to the obstacle, the enjoyment of the obstacle toward a Good Infinity 
when the subject understands there can be no 
end to their desire and there is therefore no need 
to desperately scapegoat, subjugate and exploit to 
sustain it. 
Who, or Where, 
Is the Emancipatory Subject? – Pig
Many of the trends in contemporary arthouse and 
experimental cinema have regarded themselves 
as progressive in their move to fragment grand 
narrative structures and splinter the film form, 
seeing form and narrative itself as restrictive and 
repressive. These movements have cast heavily 
structured and plotted narratives as conservative. But the highly structured nature of narrative 
film could, in fact, be seen as the apotheosis of 
emancipatory cinema and precisely that which 
may challenge a conservative mindset, not only 
because it is popular and libidinally compelling, 
but because it offers a mechanism that unconsciously transforms desire. 
André Bazin criticized the tendency of cinema 
to seek or simulate fantasy, arguing that cinema 
is political insofar as it is realistic.31 In the sixties, Noël Burch built on Bazin’s work,32 arguing 
for a new, emancipatory “cinema of the future” 
that would break from the limitations of the 
kinds of narrative structures favored by mainstream cinema – viewed, by him, as ideological 
and politically dangerous – into a progressive, 
fragmentary, experimental form that would be 
the ally of class consciousness and liberation. But 
this anarchistic approach has not yet yielded a 
liberatory class consciousness it aspired to and, in 
fact, has contributed to the greater mystification 
of capitalism precisely because it promised liberation without confronting material conditions 
and was an ethos readily commoditized by the 
psy­ho­inema
market, whilst simultaneously offering a cathartic 
Imaginary that confidently affirmed progress and 
change.
Film is not political in its representational 
qualities, but in its psychoanalytic characteristics. 
Unless art transforms libido, it remains within 
the capitalist register, often redoubling the toxicity of the system via mystification. 
Audre Lourde posited that “the master’s 
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”33
Whilst it could be claimed that the “traditional” 
narrative form of plotted cinema represented the 
“master’s tools” during the Golden Age of early 
twentieth-century Hollywood and during the 
supremacy of American popular culture in later 
decades, given the changes to the economic and 
cultural order via the rise of the state-sustained 
corporate oligopoly, today’s master’s tools may 
in fact be very different and may pertain not to 
the riven narrative form that characterized traditional cinema, but rather to the aesthetic (a)
politics that has come to decorate studio films 
and to the anarchistic, non-materialist approach 
that has come to dominate the “independent” 
sphere. Across both spaces, the identity of the 
maker has often been granted supremacy over 
the artful content of the work – a logic of solipsism and commodification that has outstripped 
the political potential of a focus on the universal 
viewing experience of the public. Many critics, 
perhaps fearful of losing their footing in a precarious landscape, read works not according to 
the artistic qualities of their manifest content, but 
according to the work’s ideological adherence to 
culturally accepted points of view or the identity 
of those who made it. Thus, much of film culture 
has missed the political possibility of the encounter with the novelty of Lack in film. At a time of 
immense economic precarity – and with the everpresent threat of the trauma of finally accepting 
the failures of the system in which we are all so 
deeply, unconsciously invested – a repression of 
the productive Lack in film as artform acts as a 
soothing fetish to protect ourselves from the truth 
of our reality, to which Lack (in film’s Gaze, in 
the unexpected non-unity of artistic output and 
identity, in the challenge to comforting ideologies) would orient us. 
Similar to the philanthropic drive amongst 
robber barons during early twentieth-century 
monopoly capitalism, the immoral workings of 
corporate oligopoly have demanded an appeal 
psy­ho­inema
to moralism to both mystify its functioning and 
to drive a wedge between different population 
groups who would have greater sway if they collaborated according to the universal logic of Lack 
and recognized their shared interest. Impecunious 
graduates are able to sustain a fantasy relationship 
to the tragedy of their impoverishment precisely 
by their debt-inducing neoliberal education by 
adhering to the moral logic of the University 
Discourse that sets them apart, consciously 
at least, from the proletariat – to which, monetarily, they in fact have become aligned. The 
University Discourse may claim to know in 
advance the direction of political change, but it is 
in fact an aesthetic, apolitical and utopian logic, 
as evidenced in its disciplinary dynamic and its 
impulse to fetishize the Other according to the 
conservative promise of Orientalism.
Whilst the University Discourse confidently 
pre-codes the contours of a revolution that may 
never come, the Analyst’s Discourse remains open 
to the surprise of potentiality within the political 
space. Whilst well-meaning activists may nominate a given group with transcendent promise, 
absolving themselves of political responsibility 
in the process, past revolutions have shown that 
transformation can occur in the most unexpected 
of places. 
In revolutionary Russia, for example, in 
nineteenth-century France and during the Arab 
Spring, certain tipping points toward the potential of change came about when the soldiers turned 
their weapons away from the people and toward 
those in power. It was precisely the master’s tools 
that offered an opening toward political change, 
so much so that political theorist Benjamin 
Studebaker has argued that perhaps the most terrifying and reactionary component of our political 
future is the replacing of soldiers and police with 
non-subjective robots.34 Whilst training desensitizes soldiers and police to the repressive violence 
they enact on behalf of capital, there is always a possibility of transformation in the dialectical human 
subject, whose division by the unconscious leaves 
them open to hysteric change, to see the human 
in the Other, to question the illogic of the system 
they defend and to understand the righteousness 
of siding with the collective. Robotic creatures 
cannot do this. Armed with weapons and programmed to kill, there is absolutely no potential 
for subjective change and therefore no threat to 
systems of power.
psy­ho­inema
Pig (dir. Michael Sarnoski, 2021) is a film that 
exploits contours of the traditional film form, 
resulting in a range of emancipatory insights. 
It is a political film dressed up as a traditional, 
Hollywood caper, exploiting both the genre 
expectations of the thriller form and the casting of Nicholas Cage, who metonymically – as 
a signifier – evokes a particular universe as an 
action figure. 
The viewer invests in the traditional narrative 
form here, following a reclusive truffle hunter 
whose pig is stolen by criminals, only to be surprised by the contrast to their expectations offered 
by the universal insight of the film’s revelation. 
Structurally, the quest appears to be an oppositional one: Rob, played by Cage, is motivated 
to retrieve an object on which his income seems 
to rely or to enact redemptive violence on those 
who stole it from him. Instead, in each encounter 
with the Other (in this case, his former colleagues 
from the high-end restaurant business that he has 
renounced in favor of an impoverished life), Rob 
exposes the contradiction and insincerity of their 
choices via recognition. For example, his own exprep chef has given up on his dream of running 
a pub in favor of a trendy haute cuisine restaurant 
and confronts, through Rob’s eyes, the tragedy of 
his decision. 
Later, instead of taking revenge on the mob 
boss (Darius) who orchestrated the stealing of his 
pig, Rob cooks a special meal for him, the same 
as the last one Darius and his wife had enjoyed 
at Rob’s restaurant before her death. In sharing 
the meal, both Rob and Darius are subjectively 
transformed.
In this encounter, they each witness the Lack 
in the Other, recognizing the grief they have both 
experienced in losing their wives and they are 
able to mourn via the consolation of the experience of the other. 
For Rob, who has abstracted himself from 
public life after the death of his own wife and 
forgone the possibility of conversion via the subjectivization of the Other through his quietism, 
the journey into the world has exposed the contradictions and limitations of his own approach. 
Having mourned her, he is able to re-subjectivize 
her and finally enjoy the sound of her voice via a 
recording she left of herself singing I’m on Fire by 
Bruce Springsteen. 
Distinctly, but just as importantly, the viewer 
– who has come to invest in the transcendent 
psy­ho­inema
quality of the pig according to a logic of commodity satisfaction – is let down in their cinematic 
investment, exposed to its Lack, when they discover that the pig has been dead throughout the 
entire film, killed even before Rob embarked on 
his quest by the incompetent addicts employed to 
kidnap it, and already made into bacon. Whilst 
using the Hollywood cinematic structure, all 
parties – characters and viewers – come, through 
the film, to embrace the fundamental Lack in 
life – which, taken to its final logic, is life’s end 
– precisely because the film’s traditional form 
inspires a libidinal investment that leads all parties to Lack and exposes to them in relief, in an 
analogous dynamic to psychoanalysis, where the 
analysand’s “misguided” investment in the analyst’s non-division is precisely that which allows 
them to be confronted with their own Lack. 
Whilst we can look to history and employ 
philosophical reasoning to explore the patterns 
in our repressive system to imagine the future 
contours of possible political change, Pig reminds 
us that we may not know in advance where the 
emancipatory subject will be found or what form 
a revolution might concretely take. By predicting 
these things, or particularizing their location, we 
may sustain the libidinal economy that entraps 
us, conferring an individual, group or dynamic 
with transcendent potential and transforming the 
promise they hold into a commodity that can be 
bought and sold and therefore neutered of its 
radicality. 
Traversing the Fantasy – Phantom Thread
Traversing the fantasy is the process of recognizing that the subject themself is the source of 
the sublime quality of their fantasy and that this 
sublimity is only made possible by the unconscious oscillation between the hope of achieving 
the object of desire and the reality of its impotence. The subject enjoys the undermining of the 
attainment of the object of their desire and may 
unconsciously participate in its sabotage. The 
subject’s desire is sustained by their perpetual 
circling – and non-attainment – of the lost object. 
This is the universal structure of subjectivity, 
but the dynamics of this structure, as well as form 
the object of desire takes, differ in potentially 
infinite ways, a phenomenon that makes manifest both the operation of the material world on 
the subject’s form of desire and the non-fixity of 
psy­ho­inema
subjectivity at the point of its emergence from 
Lack. 
The subject’s fundamental fantasy is a decision 
that they do not make; it is one that is made for 
them via the contingent experiences of their early 
years. Fantasy is a means by which the infant has 
rationalized their place in the universe relative to 
the contradictory desires of those around them 
– in particular, the uncanny, destabilizing desire 
of their primary caregiver, whose wants for them 
the child can only guess. This structuring of the 
infant’s subjectivity via fantasy condemns them 
to play out their (mis)understanding of the desire 
of the Other for the rest of their life. 
Since this fantasy structure assists the subject 
in managing their own Lack and protects them 
from the trauma of witnessing their own selfdivision, the objects around which the subject’s 
fantasies are oriented take on a transcendent 
power. This power is illusory. If the subject attains 
the object of desire, they fall into melancholy, 
confronted by the object’s blunt impotence. If 
they find themselves too far from it, they fall 
into depression, and must engage in a process of 
mourning during which they stitch together the 
puncture in the chain of signifiers provoked by 
this loss, reorienting themself toward the object 
again according to a new logic. 
Once the subject is able to accept and digest 
the structuring of their desire by Lack, to bring 
the Real of their desire to consciousness, they are 
able to traverse their fantasy. Here, the problem 
of desire is not resolved, but, rather, enjoyed. The 
sublime of desire is understood as an “immanent 
transcendence” that emerges from Lack, which 
must continue to be undermined to be sustained. 
Thus, in the traversing of fantasy, the negation of desire is negated. The failure of desire 
is transformed into a generative possibility. The 
subject is therefore now able to “fail better” since 
their investment in the power of their object is 
no longer transcendent but material. Since the 
subject is the origin of the sublime in their own 
fantasy, to traverse it is to de-otherize jouissance. 
The subject acknowledges that no Other has 
stolen their jouissance; it was with the subject all 
along, unrecognized and enjoyed. 
Whilst, ideologically, love might be represented by terms refedrring to a lover like “a 
soulmate” or “twin flame,” expressing two perfectly matching sides of the same whole that can 
be unified in oneness, love involves the imperfect 
psy­ho­inema
play of Lack and fantasy. In love, for Lacan, the 
subject receives something they do not want in 
their partner – the end of a fantasy that the “one” 
will utterly fulfill them – via something they do 
not have – the Lack in their subjectivity and the 
structure of their own fantasy. To love, then, is 
to traverse the fantasy. The lovers find in each 
other not a fulfillment of their fantasy but a Lack 
that scuppers the perfect attainment of “object a” 
and makes possible an infinite investment in that 
which the other does not have. 
Phantom Thread (dir. P. T. Anderson, 2017) 
depicts how sado-masochism can be an embodiment of love. Famed fashion designer and avowed 
bachelor Reynolds Woodcock falls for waitress 
Alma Elson. She becomes his model and lover, 
though there is immense tension in their relationship. Reynolds is obsessive and rigid; Alma 
is equally stubborn and refuses to be controlled. 
The couple, each party as intransigent as the 
other, cannot find equilibrium in love. Alma tries 
to win over Reynolds with displays of affection; 
Reynolds lambasts any disruption to his meticulous routine.
Neither Alma nor Reynolds realizes that 
this conflictual pattern sustains their love by 
undermining the fantasy that each other is the 
perfect match. Each gains enjoyment from the 
imaginary ideal that the other could perfectly 
assuage their subjective Lack and fit perfectly into 
their lifestyle and routine. By sabotaging their 
relationship, they luxuriate in the fantasy of a 
perfect fit and do not realize that it is the imperfection of the other – that each seeks to dominate 
the other and have them yield to their own desire 
– that sustains that very desire.
Alma resolves to take revenge upon Reynolds, 
poisoning him with wild mushrooms. Alma 
nurses him back to health. They reconcile and 
marry, but, after their honeymoon, they fall back 
into their conflictual patterns. A client suggests to 
Reynolds that his work might be losing its edge. 
Reynolds confides in her that Alma’s presence is 
a distraction and that he is considering divorce. 
Alma overhears this conversation and poisons 
Reynolds again, this time with a wild mushroom omelet. Reynolds now willingly eats the 
dish. Alma tells him that she wants to make him 
sick and dependent upon her. By bringing their 
conflictual dynamic to consciousness, Reynolds 
and Alma begin to enjoy the jouissance of their 
inevitably impossible relationship. By corralling 
psy­ho­inema
the conflict of domination and submission to the 
play of poisoning and nursing back to health, a 
dynamic they experienced as unpleasant becomes 
enjoyable. They identify with their drives, with 
the undermining of their own desire, and no 
longer suffer – in their wider lives – as a result of 
them. 
Not only is a film such as Phantom Thread an 
object lesson in traversing the fantasy, but the 
structure of film itself can encourage this process 
by using plot to corral the desire of the protagonist to a point of revelation, exposing the viewer 
to the inevitable Lack in their desire and the primacy of the process of plot/fantasy in terms of 
the subject’s enjoyment.
Only a Christian Can Be an Atheist – 
The Wizard of Oz
Perversely, consumer capitalism not only directs 
the subject’s libido toward commoditized objects 
that they are told to desire through advertising, 
but also tells the subject that they can be fulfilled 
in their desire by a specific object at all. 
Today, this lie is often repressed via fetishistic 
disavowal. The atheistic subject of contemporary 
life may very well be aware that there is no 
promise in fulfillment via the commodity, but, 
as Octave Mannoni explains, the subject operates on a logic of: “I know very well, but all the 
same . . .”35 The fact, for example, that studies 
have shown branded medication to work better 
than non-branded medication on the symptoms 
of illness, despite being composed of precisely 
the same chemical ingredients, speaks to the continued way in which belief in the commodity’s 
mystical powers operates upon the contemporary 
subject’s mind and body, despite the confident 
logic of atheism having pervaded much of public 
and private life. 
Capitalist companies may express conscious 
knowledge of the impotence of the ideology of 
promise, but mere lip service in this regard does 
nothing to transform the functioning of their 
company’s bottom line. For example, in the 
recent Mattel-funded film Barbie, many of its 
characters offer critiques of the company’s own 
products and practices, but Mattel continues to 
rely on the premise of the ideology of promise – 
that the subject can be fulfilled in the purchasing 
of one of their commodities – to sustain its business model.
psy­ho­inema
It is as if non-belief is precisely that which 
sustains belief within the contemporary capitalist world. As the subject approaches its trauma 
in recognizing their unresolvable constitution by 
Lack, they radically turn back away from it at the 
last moment by avowing knowledge of the way 
capitalism functions in order to disavow the traumatic truth of the Real of their desire. 
Over the history of theology, many thinkers 
– from Ernst Bloch to Heidegger, Paul Tillich, 
Simone Weil, Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, 
Don Cuppitt and Žižek – have made this claim 
in relation to Christianity. For Block, “The best 
thing about religion is that it makes for heretics 
. . . Only an atheist can be a good Christian; 
only a Christian can be a good atheist.”36 It is 
only in giving oneself over fully to the promise 
of fulfillment in belief that one can confront the 
impotence of that belief in reality and the ultimate truth of the division of the nature of the 
universe – that we are less than nothing.
Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, 
misguided criticisms have been leveled at it for 
functioning in a patriarchal, absolutist way, 
promising a solution to the subject’s lacking 
desire. For the critic, psychoanalysis presents a 
knowledgeable figure of singular authority who 
holds command over their analysand, who often 
lies vulnerable and exposed on the couch. The 
“patriarchal” analyst is said to tell the analysand 
how they desire and offer a solution to the problems of that desire. 
Of course, the opposite is true. The ultimate 
insight of psychoanalysis is that there is no allknowing Big Other offering a solution to the 
conundrum of the subject’s contradictory desire, 
and the job of the analyst is to work with the 
analysand to gradually come to terms with this 
reality and incorporate this insight within the 
workings of their life.
There is an aspect of the well-worn critique, 
however, that does carry weight. The critic of the 
analyst’s authority misunderstands the divided 
nature of the analyst themself, but their delusion in their belief is one with which the analyst 
would hope the analysand arrives at the start of 
their analysis. 
In order to enact transference upon the analyst, the analysand must believe in the analyst’s 
capacity to “cure” them. This is what Lacan 
refers to in his comment that “les non-dupes 
errent”37 (the non-duped are mistaken). This is 
psy­ho­inema
play upon “le nom du père” (the name of the 
father), a function that is missing for the psychotic subject who is, initially at least, unable to 
enact transference upon the figure of authority. 
In this case, the analyst must position themself differently toward the analysand in order to 
emphasize the role of the “father,” rather than 
undermine it.
For the non-psychotic subject, in order for the 
psychoanalytic relationship to play out between 
analysand and analyst – for the analysand to successfully project their desire upon the analyst 
– the analysand must, at first, be duped by the 
analyst’s authority. 
The over-investment of the analysand in 
the knowledge of the analyst is like that of the 
Christian believer in the power of God. It is 
only because the analysand has invested in the 
promise of the analyst’s knowledge that the 
gradual disabusing of this illusion can take place 
and that the analysand is capable of confronting the Lack in their desire. The play between 
two lacking subjectivities – that of the analyst 
and that of the analysand via transference and 
countertransference – creates a subjective experience in surplus and the conditions for subjective 
transformation. This generative experience is 
not itself transcendent, beyond contradiction. 
Rather, it is manifest from Lack and could not be 
generated any other way. 
Film has a similar power to generate something 
“immanently transcendent” in the subject as a 
result of the transferential relationship between 
the viewer and the screen. The viewer, lacking in 
their desire, invests in the desire of the protagonist as the analysand invests in the knowledge 
of the analyst. They experience excitation at the 
prospect that the protagonist will be fulfilled in 
their desire, and that so – in the position of the 
spectator – might they. 
Furthermore, like Freud’s Fort-Da game, 
the plotted film plays on the expectations of 
the viewer, involving them psychically in a repetitious process that piques their desire. Films 
in Hollywood are bought and sold by genre. 
Scripts are pitched according to the ways they 
play on and subvert expectation (an agent selling The Shallows might claim, “It’s Jaws meets 
Castaway!”; Inception might be sold as The Matrix 
meets Memento) and attract a paying audience via 
offering anticipation in what they know and the 
thrill of what they might not.
psy­ho­inema
Through the Fort-Da game, Freud recognized 
the way the child derives pleasure from the repetitive action of making an object disappear then 
reappear as a means of coping with the anxiety 
caused by the absence of their primary caregiver. 
The game also exposes the importance of repetition in both the psychic development of the 
subject and the ways they invest themself libidinally in the world around them.
The effects of investing the viewer’s libido in 
the point of revelation are two-fold. First, film has 
the capacity to consciously disabuse the viewer of 
the existential power of the promise in fulfillment 
by raising their expectation and exposing the 
emptiness in their desire in relief via revelation. 
This is the logic of the ripping of the temple curtain in the Jewish tradition. Second, the viewer is 
able to cope with the trauma of the loss of fantasy 
via the excitation of the plotted form as the child 
who manages the loss of the breast in the Fort-Da 
game. By pleasurably disabusing the subject of 
their investment in ideology, film can help orient 
the viewer to a political relationship with reality 
and the Other. 
The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) 
provides a famous example of the temple curtain 
ripping at its point of revelation. Dorothy and 
her colleagues discover that the Wizard is not the 
all-knowing deity they hope for, one who can 
solve their problems in an instant, but rather a 
man behind a curtain who offers them the insight 
that they already possess all the knowledge they 
require. The power of this insight is only made 
possible by the transferential relationship the 
characters have with the Wizard and the subsequent quest on which they embark, the active 
process of which exposes them to the insights 
that they latterly come to understand through 
their encounter with him. They are shown by the 
Wizard what they already know and would otherwise not have understood unless they embarked 
on their journey with the motivation to discover 
knowledge they believed was concealed from 
them.
Although The Wizard of Oz is a conscious example of the exposure of the audience toward the 
Lack in desire and the Lack in the Big Other via 
the nature of its plot, all film structured around a 
story has the capacity to offer the viewer a “small 
death” in their desire. Whether the character with 
whom the viewer identifies is fulfilled or not, the 
orgasmic release in the answering of the primary 
psy­ho­inema
question posed by the plot confronts the viewer 
with the end of their desire. This release may be 
dissatisfying, if it accords with the pattern of the 
impossible promise so prevalent in capitalism, or 
productive, if the question is answered in such a 
way that it opens the subject toward the impossibility of their desire as such.
Film, because of its capacity to mobilize and 
undermine desire, has the capability of functioning like psychoanalysis upon the subject in 
this way to confront them with the Lack in their 
desire and – ultimately – the Lack in the universe 
as such. 
Outopia – The Children of Men
Just as Lack generates speech, thought and subjectivity, as non-completion is that which generates 
and sustains desire and as sex offers pleasure in 
the obstacles that lead up to the “little death” of 
desire in orgasm, the chaosmos of the universe – 
in all its depth dimensions, difficulties, darkness 
– offers the productive grounds from which an 
emancipatory political collective can emerge. 
Though common cultural assumptions might 
have it that psychoanalysis turns its interest 
inwardly toward the desire of the individual 
subject, it is political insofar as it transcends 
particularism and leads the subject toward their 
universal status as a lacking subject. Further, it 
points to the social nature of desire. Desire is 
only possible within a social network. There is no 
transcendent desire that exists before the emergence of subjectivity, but rather subjectivity is the 
vessel of desire and the subjectivity of the Other 
generates the Lack within us that inspires our 
own desire and teaches us, foundationally, how 
to desire.
Lyotard is often associated with postmodernism but is better understood as a critic of it. He 
attended Lacan’s lectures in the mid-sixties and 
subsequently coined the term “libidinal economy”38 to describe the material economic system 
of capitalism in which we desire – and which 
is driven by desire. Because of the social nature 
of desire, we cannot “opt out” of the libidinal 
collective and, in fact, by consciously choosing 
to act as superior, “ethical” subjects beyond the 
libidinal fray, we may end up suppressing the 
contradictions of capitalism all the more, leading to greater suffering in the return of this 
repression. 
psy­ho­inema
While a long history of certain well-meaning 
“political” projects that accord with the logic 
of the Beautiful Soul shows an aspiration to 
be removed from the problem of existence, 
dreaming of utopian alternatives or cleansing 
oneself of complicity in a corrupt system and 
projecting moral insufficiency onto the Other, 
for psychoanalysis – as for Lyotard – the only 
way out is to recognize the libidinal structure of 
the system, comprised as it is of every subject’s 
interpersonally evolved desire, and transform it. 
Just as there is no possibility of the consciously 
pure ethical consumer extinguishing their capitalist libido without politico-social transformation, 
the philosophical insight into the structure of the 
subject’s capitalist desire does not extinguish their 
ability to desire and to enjoy. In other words, 
by subscribing to an anti-capitalist agenda, we 
do not prevent ourselves from desiring within 
the parameters of capitalist desire. Likewise, critiquing or making visible the structure of desire 
– as is being delineated here – does little to 
change it. It does, however, offer the subject the 
chance to think about creating practices – for 
instance in art or perhaps, in particular, in film – 
which might be oriented toward a change in our 
relationship not to our own individual desires, as 
so much discussion is oriented, but to our social 
and collective interpersonal role as desiring subjects, even – or perhaps most especially – on an 
unconscious level.
One key feature of a practice oriented toward 
changing the desire of the subject would be its 
immediacy: it would not be rooted in utopian 
promises for the future. 
Utopian visions of society are always dystopian 
in practice. Psychoanalytically speaking, the toxicity of the fascist’s vision of utopian purity is that 
it is never total enough because it cannot embrace 
Lack. The totalitarian transforms the Lack that is 
foundational to the universe and human life into 
contingent loss. 
The formation of an enemy, necessary to cast 
as a possibility a world without loss, creates and 
maintains the conditions for oppression and 
alienation of the collective and of the oppressed 
class in particular, in order to sustain income 
for the few, generated – under capitalism – by 
surplus value. On a societal level, the transformation of capitalist desire through the logic of 
psychoanalysis is not to reduce the utopia to its 
dystopian opposite for dystopia is precisely what 
psy­ho­inema
is present within the logic of utopia as its returned 
repressed – as Ian Parker has posited,39 Stalinist 
realism accords with the Bad Infinity of capitalist realism and is just as right-wing. Instead, the 
analyzed desire acts according to an alternative 
logic – one that might be termed “outopian.” 
The circular infinity of an outopian society 
might accord with Hegel’s logic of the True 
Infinite, as an alternative to the Bad Infinity of 
capitalism. Here, the toxic excitation of drive 
is assuaged, but not extinguished. The subject 
is able to enjoy the productive consequences of 
their Lack in sustainable ways, not by being presented with a promise of a future, but by being 
allowed to embrace the contradictions of desire in 
the present moment. In this sense, Hegel, Marx 
and Freud all opposed utopianism. Utopianism, 
like capitalism, believes in the possibility of an 
undivided subject to come, whereas the only 
possible route to change comes from rejecting 
this ideological myth, embracing the emancipatory present where action toward change can 
materially take place. This logic not only holds 
philosophically, but practically: the urgency of 
our present moment demands a transformation 
that takes place within it.
Žižek borrows the term “possible worlds”40
from analytic philosophy to describe the ways in 
which subjects can be caught up in alternate universes where a utopia could exist, even when they 
have accepted the death of perfection in their 
own life. Though these worlds are not possible, 
they can hold sway over the subject, distracting 
them from the emancipatory power of the enjoyment they might experience in their life within 
the contradictory present. 
The Christian apocalypticist may embody this 
libidinal dynamic. Unable to digest the complex, 
and imperfect, nature of the world as it is, they 
imagine their experience is contingently difficult 
– not because of the material conditions their 
politics may or may not sustain, but because they 
happen to be living within the end times. Instead 
of transforming their society through collective 
political action, the apocalypticist turns their 
attention to a possible world where life could 
be better at the hands of a superior being whose 
whims they can appease, or if others believed in 
the way that they did. 
Progressivism is at its most progressive when 
it rejects an ideological retroactivity that explicates history as a gradual, if stilted, process of 
psy­ho­inema
improvement toward the present. This fetishistic 
approach can often compensate for poor contemporary economic conditions by focusing on 
the moral perfectionism of developing cultural 
attitudes. It is at its best when it turns away from 
a reality to come in favor of the direct moment, 
in all its contradictory possibility, embracing a 
universal politics that does not employ the nonprogressive as a contingent obstacle who casts the 
fantasy of a perfect society in relief, but works 
with them in the understanding that the site of 
anti-capitalist politics is within the contradiction of the present and that the embrace of that 
contradiction may be the only means by which 
society can transform its collective libido from 
the reactionary logic of Bad Infinity toward an 
emancipatory one in True Infinity. 
Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) 
depicts a post-apocalyptic Britain where humans 
have ceased to reproduce due to the unlivable 
conditions that capitalism has produced. The 
government uses military force to defend its borders from immigrants who continue to travel to 
the country as one of the remaining states with 
a semblance of functioning government. In this 
context, a group of underground activists travel 
with a young immigrant woman, the first person 
to be pregnant in a decade, to a boat off the south 
coast called Tomorrow. 
The dystopian society depicted in the film has 
been made so by capitalist utopianism. The promise of future profit has killed both the present and 
the future – as exemplified in the death of birth. 
There is literally no future for this totalitarian 
state, save for the pregnant immigrant. As the 
activists flee the country, Tomorrow only exists 
in the uncertain waters of the open ocean. 
Political Film – Two Days, One Night
In Two Days, One Night (2014, dir. Dardenne 
brothers), a young woman overcomes depression via an encounter with the collective that 
allows her to digest and symbolize the Real of 
her despair. By witnessing the Lack in the Other 
and experiencing the recognition it can provide 
her, she is able, gradually, to confront reality as 
it is, not as she hoped it would be, and is able to 
embrace the Lack she psychically attempted to 
keep at a distance, manifested in her depression. 
The film’s structure is political and accords with 
the logic of Marx’s living flower. This structure 
psy­ho­inema
may offer a metaphor for the universal potential 
of film as such. 
Sandra works in a Belgian solar-panel factory 
and has taken time off because of her mental 
illness. Her boss has proposed that her workmates share her salary since they have been able 
to manage her workload in her absence and it 
makes no difference to productivity if she is 
dismissed. There will be a vote on Monday to 
finalize the decision. Over the course of the 
weekend, Sandra approaches each of these workmates in a final attempt to convince them to vote 
for her return.
She has been bed-bound, but news of the 
decision is so painful that it is a catalyst for an 
existential shift in her reality. An Event, it offers 
the possibility of conversion in relation to the 
conditions of her life, but it is only through a 
confrontation with the collective that she is able 
to bear the weight of her loss and carry it.
In depression, the subject experiences a toomuch-ness. A loss is felt as so great that the 
meaning of the subject’s life has been broken. 
There is a rupture in the chain of signifiers and 
there is an invasion of the Real upon the subject. 
There is no space to desire anything else but the 
object that has been lost – in this case, Sandra’s 
social role and her livelihood. 
The process of encountering her colleagues 
allows Sandra to begin to knit together the 
broken chain. She is able to exit the horror of her 
subjective experience into a reality that indeed 
generated the horror, but that is more bearable 
once it has been symbolized and that must be tarried with in order to be transformed.
Although the vote does not pass in her favor, 
the intersubjective encounter with each of her 
colleagues allows for a process of recognition to 
occur. The very fact each colleague has the ability to choose one way or the other shows them 
also to be a dialectical subject, constituted by 
Lack. The stories they share of their own difficulties affirm not only that each subject is marked 
by Lack, but that they dwell together within an 
unproductive, inhuman economic order, the 
bringing to consciousness of which may lead to 
political transformation. 
Sandra’s contingent crisis allows her to confront and embrace this universal Lack. Not only 
is she buoyed by her own strength of will to confront her former employer, she is refolded into 
the collective by transforming her desire from 
psy­ho­inema
a logic of exception (that a material event can 
assuage her suffering, which is constitutive) to 
an embrace of reality in all its grit, grime and 
tragedy. In this way, Sandra has been politicized.
Whilst utopian logic keeps the subject fixated 
on a future that will never come, the politicized 
subject is able to take action in the present, knowing that life exists here and now and that change 
can only occur in the infinite potential of this 
ever-unfolding moment. 
Film can guide the subject, like Sandra, to a 
confrontation with the Lack in their desire, the 
Lack in the collective of subjectivity and the 
inadequacy of the economy we invest in to satisfy 
and sustain us. 
Conclusion: Fail Again, Fail Better
Language Never Hits the Nail on the Head
In contrast to communication, which – when 
functioning properly – always means what it 
says, language involves an inherent misunderstanding. The reason for this lies in the way that 
language refers to a Master Signifier. This is a signifier that generates meaning, but which cannot 
itself be captured by meaning. Words, such as 
God, Freedom, Justice and Love can act in this 
way: words that generate unending discourse, yet 
cannot be adequately captured by that discourse.
Anselm defined the word “God” as that which 
names something beyond naming.1
 Unlike 
­on­lusion: fail again, fail better
communication, language is always “missing” 
something, which means that it can never be a 
closed system. In Derridean terms, we can say 
that language operates with an “undeconstructable” core that is a type of eternal absence that 
generates the very discourse that it evades. 
Thus, the words of this book are doomed to fail 
in their attempt to capture that elusive quality in 
film that makes it so compelling and therefore so 
productive. The greatest aspiration I can have for 
them is that they generate more words and more 
discussion or that they inspire film work that 
may engage with psychoanalytic ideas in all their 
openness, mystery and contradiction, beyond the 
ways in which they have been conceived within 
the neoliberal ideology of identity, difference and 
closure. 
Film as Theology
Human subjects are spoken into existence. We 
are overwritten by language that always fails 
and by desire that can never be fulfilled. In our 
impossible relationship with meaning and with 
fulfillment, drives are created, which – whilst 
endowing life with the depth-dimension that 
makes it livable – can cause us to act against 
our best interest in the religious hope that we 
can transcend our condition. Psychoanalysis and 
the Analyst’s Discourse are therefore our much 
needed allies. But even aspects of psychoanalysis can be perverted by promises of fulfillment, 
of essence in the chaos of identity and in the 
nullification of Lack in the self and the Other, 
which undermine its very emancipatory power. 
This is particularly true when material conditions 
become so unbearable that we are drawn to ideological solutions that soothe us from the reality 
of our moment, precisely when it would be most 
fruitful to confront it.
Film, with psychoanalysis, may offer a cultural 
and political practice that operates on the collective unconscious and reorients us toward the 
infinite possibility of Lack, in place of the collective theological practices that existed under 
different forms of societal organization and 
which – when stripped of their repressive or utopian promises – allowed for the subject to live 
more practically, less toxically, dwelling within 
the mystery of the world. 
­on­lusion: fail again, fail better
A Privileged Artform
Film is the unique medium where Lack can 
alight. Whilst capitalism harnesses the specific 
ways humans attempt to overcome Lack, film 
can expose the viewer to it. In this way, it may act 
upon the analysand as the analyst in the process 
of psychoanalysis, which – at its best – confronts 
the subject with, and allows them to digest, the 
Lack in their subjectivity and the Lack in the 
world that generates them. 
Film’s capacity to perform this function is the 
result of many of its material factors. In addition 
to the unconscious operation of the film over the 
subject, a consideration of these factors via an 
analytic approach, as well as the manifest content 
of a given film, may also yield a philosophical and 
political potentiality for the collective. 
The Re-emancipation of Public Life
Philosophy is tarrying with the contradictions of the universe. Politics is tarrying with 
the contradictory desires of distinct members 
within a group. Art is art insofar as it houses and 
exposes contradiction. Contradiction cannot be 
commoditized insofar as it cannot offer absolution from Lack, which is the precise reason 
we are most shielded from contradiction within 
capitalism – a tragedy given that an orientation 
toward it could transform the way we live in 
the world. Capitalism is an exploitation of the 
religious tendency in subjectivity – the drive to 
seek oneness in oblivion – and it offers none 
of the critique of this impulse that the best of 
confessional religion provides. It has encroached 
into nearly every crevice of modern life, perhaps most especially into the intersubjective 
relationship, to the extent that it has undermined itself and appears to be disintegrating and 
reformulating. 
Capitalism may be collapsing into its new 
manifestation. The morbid symptoms of its crisis 
could confront us with the nature of our world 
and subjectivity and lead us, via collective politics, to a novel future. The greater repression of 
its contradictions could lead us away from the 
possibility of a future altogether. As in the society 
depicted in The Children of Men, the Death Drive 
of capital could sacrifice our tomorrow in eking 
out the last possible element of profit from us 
today. 
­on­lusion: fail again, fail better
Under the pervasive constraints of oppositional 
capitalist ideology, even philosophy, politics and 
art have become disfigured as commodities. 
“Politics” has become an oppositional war of all 
against all that sustains the promise of utopia 
behind the contingent enemy of the Other whose 
vision of the world does not accord with our 
own. Much philosophy has come to accord with 
the University Discourse under the regime of the 
neoliberal institution where, instead of speaking and thinking freely, one must neuter one’s 
insights in favor of a set of oppositional ideas that 
aesthetically accord with the history of thought, 
but in fact sustain the extraction of surplus value 
and the generation of scapegoats around whom 
the non-dialectical society rationalizes its own 
purity as it collapses. 
Whilst film and art have long been commoditized to their detriment, the very structure of 
film, the way it operates on the subject’s desire 
and unconscious, the way it houses contradiction and exposes its own repression of it, may 
offer the collective a mechanism by which to reemancipate public life. 
Whilst decades of theory and critique have 
exposed the toxicity of capitalism to the capitalist 
subject, it persists. Film, like psychoanalysis, may 
offer an alternative approach in its capacity to 
work against capitalist ideology via its work on 
unconsciousness. 
Film is a technology that was first created only 
a few generations ago. Its power – mechanistic, 
in terms of affect and, most importantly, in terms 
of fantasy – has been glimpsed by makers and 
audiences, but often eclipsed by the oppositional 
logic of capitalist Bad Infinity. A collectivist 
medium, one that is widespread and popular, it 
speaks to our desire, our desire speaks through 
it and our desire is revealed to us by it. It is an 
artform that works with human unconsciousness and reflects it back to us. With the right 
approach, we may transform our relationship to 
the artform, libidinally and therefore politically 
and philosophically, which may yield for the collective an emancipatory present and future that 
we so desperately need.