but also in its theoretical 'topography', since it requires the articulation of the class struggle to concepts that have a different materiality (such as the unconscious). ³⁷

Can psychoanalysis effectively play this key role of providing the missing support of the Marxist theory of ideology (or, more precisely, of accounting for the very lack in the Marxist theory that becomes visible apropos of the deadlocks in the theory of ideology)? The standard reproach to psychoanalysis is that in so far as it intervenes in the domain of the social and/or political, it ultimately always ends up in some version of the theory of the 'horde' with the feared--beloved Leader at its head, who dominates the subjects via the 'organic' libidinal link of transference, of a community constituted by some primordial crime and thus held together by shared guilt. ³⁸

The first answer to this reproach seems obvious: was not precisely this theoretical complex -- the relationship between the mass and its Leader -- the blind spot in the history of Marxism, what Marxist thought was unable to conceptualize, to 'symbolize', its 'foreclosed' that subsequently returned in the real, in the guise of the so-called Stalinist 'cult of personality'? The theoretical, as well as practical, solution to the problem of authoritarian populism--organicism that again and again thwarts progressive political projects is conceivable today only via psychoanalytic theory. This, however, in no way entails that psychoanalysis is somehow limited in its scope to the negative gesture of delineating the libidinal economy of 'regressive' proto-totalitarian communities: in the necessary obverse of this gesture, psychoanalysis also delineates the symbolic economy of how -- from time to time, at least -- we are able to break the vicious circle that breeds 'totalitarian' closure. When, for example, Claude Lefort articulated the notion of 'democratic invention', he did it through a reference to the Lacanian categories of the Symbolic and the Real: 'democratic invention' consists in the assertion of the purely symbolic, empty place of Power that no 'real' subject can ever fill out. ³⁹ One should always bear in mind that the subject of psychoanalysis is not some primordial subject of drives, but -as Lacan pointed out again and again -- the modern, Cartesian subject of science. There is a crucial difference between le Bon's and Freud's I crowd': for Freud, 'crowd' is not a primordial, archaic entity, the starting point of evolution, but an 'artificial' pathological formation whose genesis is to be displayed -- the 'archaic' character of the 'crowd' is precisely the illusion to be dispelled via theoretical analysis.

Perhaps a comparison with Freud's theory of dreams could be of some help here. Freud points out that within a dream we encounter the hard kernel of the Real precisely in the guise of a 'dream within the

-29-