Lacan’s association of desire with interdiction. He overstates the difference between them insofar as he and Lacan both conceive desire as the desire of the Other, enjoyment as indirectly accessible, and the object of desire as separate from the object-cause of desire. Žižek’s version of Lacan, moreover, suggests an even greater compatibility with Borch-Jacobsen in that he, too, emphasizes that desire has no object prior to an intervention that establishes desireability, as in, for example, Žižek’s discussions of ideology as a matrix of desire, of enjoyment as originally stolen, and of the ego ideal. Although a thorough exploration of the possible convergences is beyond the scope of my analysis, a potential benefit in Borch-Jacobsen’s emphasis on desire as imaginary is that it opens up a thinking of desire in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency, allowing for an understanding of the rivalry, hatred, and violence that Žižek associates with the alliance ofthe imaginary with the Real.
69 Ibid., 47.
70 Borch-Jacobsen writes, “The so-called subject of desire has no identity of its own prior to the identification that brings it, blindly, to occupy the point of otherness, the place of the other (who is thus not an other): an original alienation (which is thus not an alienation); and an original lure (which is thus not a lure, either).” Ibid., 48.
71 Ibid., 133.
72 Ibid., 139.
73 Le Bon, The Crowd, 30–31.
74 Freud, Group Psychology, 13.
75 Dolar, “Freud and the Political.”
76 Le Bon, The Crowd, 13.
77 Freud, Group Psychology, 7.
78 “How is it that these new characteristics are created?” Le Bon, 17; Freud, Group Psychology, 9. Borch-Jacobsen misreads Le Bon and Freud here. He treats as descriptive characteristics ofthe crowd what Freud and Le Bon present as explanations why new characteristics appear, 139. McClelland makes the same mistake, misreading the causes ofnew characteristics as the new characteristics themselves, 203.
79 Freud, Group Psychology, 9.
80 Ibid., 10.
81 Ibid., 11.
82 Ibid., 12.
83 Ibid., 15.
84 Ibid., 13.
85 Ibid., 15.
86 Le Bon. The Crowd, 90.
87 Freud, Group Psychology, 29.
88 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 157.
89 Freud, Group Psychology, 27; paragraph 40 in the original German.
90 Ibid., 33.
91 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 166–7.
92 Freud, Group Psychology, 62.
93 Ibid., 63.
94 Ibid., 68.
95 Ibid., 70.
96 Ibid., 70.
97 Ibid., 71.
98 Ibid., 72.
99 Le Bon, The Crowd, 71, 68.
100 Freud, Group Psychology, 73.
101 Ibid., 20.
102 Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 119.
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