This talk analyses Marx's political theory via both Dante and Lacan. I draw on William Claire Robert's Marx's Inferno with a focus on the social hell of original accumulation and place it in relation to Lacan's theory of discourse. Lacan's theory of discourse is based on the original sin of identifying with the narcissism of God, doubled in the subject of the unconscious. I propose a theory of social hell in relation to the impotence of discourse and ask: Is original narcissism, which is located in the Imaginary and canalized by capital, the cause of the repetition of aggressivity and violence? I argue that when discourse disavows its inherent impossibilities and resists the negative it unleashes an exterminatory death drive. Psychoanalysis promises only a weak retort to this problem: the subjectification of death in analysis cannot overcome the resistance of discourse, whose impotence stifles. Marx offers a strong critique of this problem by refusing to give discourse the remit of mediation: discourse does not mediate, social forms do. How do we burn the effigies of social forms in our social hell? The cost is high, but increasingly inescapable. 

Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and Director of the Civilization Studies Program at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She is the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She is co-editor (with Rohit Goel) of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2018) and of Extimacies: Encounters Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (co-edited with Surti Singh), forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. She is also editing the first English translation of Mehdi Amel’s Theoretical Prolegomenon on the Impact of Socialist Thought in the National Liberation Movement: On Contradiction and The Colonial Mode of Production for Brill’s Historical Materialism Book Series. Nadia is a practicing analyst and member of The Lacan School, Bay Area, San Francisco.