The Archipelago #18: Samo Tomšič – On Alienation, Enjoyment and the Damaged Life

With his first book ‘The Capitalist Unconscious’, Samo Tomšič, a philosopher and researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin, provided a thorough account of the influence of Karl Marx on the work of French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Then, in his second book, ‘The Labour of Enjoyment’, he moved even further, by proposing a fusion of the works of Marx, Freud and Lacan as a means to unravel the workings of politics, economy and society. In this episode of The Archipelago, Samo Tomšič talks about the articulation between psychoanalysis and marxism, the damaged life of the subject they both describe, the importance of enjoyment in the reproduction of capitalism and the multiple meanings of alienation as a default way of being.