Hysteria and the Commodity Form

“The hysteric is, indeed, Freud’s proletarian.”

— The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan by Samo Tomsic
https://a.co/56uXW33

Hysteria is enveloped in the same mystery as the proletariat because it might erupt at any moment. But just as the young Marx mistook this possibility as emancipatory, so Freud mistook hysteria as a psychological symptom of a social pathology. In a paper I presented to the Social Theory Workshop at Chicago, I invited the workshop to explore both the formal and analytical similarities Max Weber found between the charismatic religious warrior and religious hysteria, which Weber believed was amplified by women priests (G u G, 6). Weber projected onto ancient warrior religion the two-fold form of the commodity not only in India, the principle object of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Kapital 6, but also in ancient Judea, Greece, and China. In each case, the sublime was felt to threaten the rigid structures by which Weber felt it was bound. Explicitly Weber settled upon this analytical form following his discovery of Heinrich Rickert’s Grenzen in 1903. But, since it is so pervasive among scholars (see for example Edmund Burke’s Beautiful and Sublime written well before Kant’s Analytik) from the mid-18th century forward, a purely intellectual genealogy misses its broader and deeper social grounding in the two-fold commodity form itself. Hysteria is, from this vantage point (like the charismatic religious warrior) an expression of the abstract value form of the commodity, which both Freud and Weber transhistoricized and universalized as a quasi-medical ontologically fundamental condition. Unlike Freud and Weber, however, by 1867 Marx had come to recognize the social and historical specificity of the proletariat. So, yes, the hysteric is Freud’s proletariat. But Freud had not yet, and would never come to recognize the hysteric’s production and productive role composing the commodity.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *