Structural Segregation

One of Lacan’s most important insights is that capitalism—concurrent to its globalizing and homogenizing tendencies—foments relations of segregation. Lacan warned that segregation will appear more and more at the very moment that market capitalism envelops the world in a seemingly total manner. In its spread to envelop the world through open markets, capitalism as a system gives rise to a reactive opposite movement, consisting of new unpredictable particularism’s and barriers that will reestablish separations even more segregative than before.

With this core insight in mind, I recently presented remarks with the Lacan Salon on a panel that included Lacanian thinkers from around the western hemisphere, from Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil to the USA. The prompt of this panel was to analyze the Trump moment, what it represents and what we are witnessing in terms of the profound destruction currently unleashed by DOGE, the trade wars and the fallout from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

I chose to direct my remarks to the theme of segregation as Lacan links segregation to capitalism, and I will elaborate on this connection below, but also chose to address segregation because Elon Musk’s ideological push for neo-segregation is a cornerstone to the new Trump agenda. Locating segregation describes the indifference to the destruction currently underway with the steady dismantling of the American bureaucracy, from the laying off hundreds of scientists at the National Institute of Health, to destroying the US Agency for International Development USAID, the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, etc.

I offer a Marxist class analysis of the Trump coalition as forged on a ‘contradictory class alliance’ between the finance aristocracy with class elements dejected from the system of productive labor, namely petty bourgeois small business owners, and lumpen elements of the working class. The destruction of the American bureaucracy is an act of symbolic violence designed to satiate the deeper economic suffering of the working class. It is forged in a hatred of the system of capitalism in its present state. And this is where the psychoanalytic insights of Lacan come into the picture, specifically the notion that segregation describes the logic of obscure destruction such as we are currently witnessing, but it also gives rise to unresolved resentments, and these resentments are borne from the neglect of the working class and the utter ignorance to their condition.

Lacan on Capitalism: Surplus Value & Surplus Enjoyment

Lacan calls capitalism ...