Review of Samo Tomšič, The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy, Berlin: August Verlag, 2019.

Abstract

If Samo Tomšič’s first book, The Capitalist Unconscious, depicts the marriage of Marx and Freud, his follow-up, The Labour of Enjoyment, enacts the consummation of that marriage. As such, the book provides a heretofore untraveled path through the political possibilities present in psychoanalysis that neither Freud nor Lacan nor any of their epigones ever developed to their fullest extent. Although many psychoanalytic theorists marshal psychoanalysis to aid in the critique of capitalism, few view it as providing itself an absolute alternative. The key virtue of Tomšič’s book is that it does so. Tomšič unapologetically sees Freud as a political thinker on a par with, if not surpassing, Marx.