Bourgeois Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and Proletarian Revolution as Genres in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Abstract

The famous aesthetic and temporal metaphors in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte can be conceptualised if they are formalised using the discourse theory developed in Lacan’s Other Side of Psychoanalysis. If we read Marx’s most “psychoanalytic” analysis with Lacan’s most “political” seminar, Brumaire’s bourgeois revolution, the counter-revolution, and the proletarian revolution appear to be respective instances of the discourse of the master, the hysteric, and the analyst. Far from being reductionist, such a synoptic reading of Marx’s discoursivisation of politics and Lacan’s politicisation of discourse can prevent Derridean and similar reductionist interpretations of Marx’s metaphors such as “spirit”/“spectre”, “tragedy”/“farce”, “phrase”/“content”, “drape”/“parody”, and “new”/“native language”. And vice versa, it can render Lacan’s matrix of discourses pertinent for Marxian analyses of contemporary capitalism, in which the discursive lien social itself is being commodified.