The politics of envy, so-called, are understood to be ruinous by both the right and the left. For the right, envy-driven politics is destructive because it maliciously penalizes the wealthy; as if this were not bad enough, by removing the incentive for the wealthy to “create” wealth it also ultimately penalizes the rest of society, here imagined as an inert remainder whose well-being depends on the economic satisfaction of the “creative” few. The virtual economy of the UK now largely functions as if this were in fact the case: we are apparently kept afloat by the financial eminence of the City of London, a roaring lion with the heart of a timid pussycat that will, one is assured, suffer unendurable trauma if its status as an onshore tax haven is in any way brought into question. Perhaps it is a paper tiger, after all.

For the left, envy is synonymous with Nietzschean ressentiment, the guilty moralism by means of which those subject to power deceive themselves about the true nature of that power. In the psychoanalytic variant most recently propounded by Zizek, envy is the projection onto a supposed Other of the “full enjoyment” that the subject himself lacks. What the envious thereby prevent themselves from understanding is that such “full enjoyment” is nowhere realized. The Other is not a consistent, ontologically stable reality (in terms of Badiou’s set theoretic ontology, a being, a consistent multiple) but a radically inconsistent field of conflict (being itself, as pure inconsistent multiplicity); in this sense, the Other “does not exist”. According to this psychoanalytic account, the envious imagine the powerful as strong, confident, secure in their own being; as if only the envious subject were riven by doubt, lacking all conviction while “the worst / are full of passionate intensity”.

As is often the case with psychoanalytic concepts, this framing of envy as a symptom inexorably places to one side the question of whether envy might have any just cause. To take another example recently popularized by Zizek, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis a man who persistently entertains anxious thoughts that his wife may be unfaithful to him is being oppressed by a paranoid fantasy of his own confection even if the infidelity he fears is in fact taking place. Zizek extends the example to the anti-semitic propaganda of the Nazis: thus, Nazi anti-semitism is a fantasy supporting a particular model of the political (volkisch nationalism as an imaginary solution to the inexorable problems of modernity) even if it is in fact true that a majority of eminent financiers, doctors and lawyers are Jewish, that Jews exercise a statistically disproportionate “influence” within German society, and so on. Whether the symptom is personal or political, or both, its structure is that of a fantasy supporting some consistent ideation, a world-view generated by the subject in answer to his (or its) psychic needs.

Likewise with the politics of envy, as denounced from the left: even if it is in fact the case that a wealthy minority enjoy all sorts of privileges that the majority do not, even if their Oxbridge-educated scions exercise a wildly disproportionate influence in the arts and media (to say nothing of finance, trade and parliamentary politics), even if they project a kind of impermeable social confidence apparently supported only by an unquestionable assumption of entitlement, it is nevertheless false and mystifying to correlate these supposed advantages with one’s own feelings of impoverishment and disempowerment, to suppose that the wealthy have specifically that enjoyment, that symbolic power and primary ontological security which one personally lacks – as if in fact one lacked these things precisely because others had stolen and hoarded them.

A few things need to be said about this theory before we continue. Firstly, insofar as it is a question of the economics of enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment projected onto the Other is always charged to the account of the envious subject; it is undeniably his enjoyment, even if it has gone astray in fantasy. The closing move of the psychoanalytic account of envy is thus to assert that envy is a ruse for discharging that part of the subject’s enjoyment which he finds intolerable: the fantasy of expropriation by the Other fulfils very economically the wish that one should be relieved of something that is difficult to bear. Thus, the small businessman or self-employed tradesman who complains continuously that he is being robbed blind by the government, that extortionate levels of taxation make it almost impossible for him to carry on his business, let alone enjoy the proper rewards of his toil, is identified as someone who does not know what to do with his money (those who really know what to do with their money, also know how to avoid paying tax on it). The uses to which he imagines his taxes being put by the bleeding-heart spendthrifts in charge – supporting idle and promiscuous single mothers, providing campsites for New Age travellers, subsidizing theatre groups and lesbians – tell us a lot about his hidden desires: they are images of some of the varieties of happiness that money can buy, varieties of happiness that for the sake of his own psychic integrity he must deny himself.

Secondly, we should take note of the deliberately counter-intuitive argumentative swerve at the heart of this account. It is acknowledged that the fantasy may coincide to a greater or lesser degree with reality; but it remains a fantasy even if this is so. This reverses the commonsense view of the nature of delusion, according to which a delusional fantasy is one that remains in place “even if” reality does not support it, even if the facts consistently tell against it. The delusional subject will always be able to interpret reality to make it fit his delusion, but such interpretation will require considerable ingenuity and will place the subject’s powers of symbolization under constant strain. In the Zizekian/Lacanian account of fantasy, however, what the fantasy resists is precisely its dissipation into the mundanely descriptive register in which everything it asserts is more or less true, but none of it really matters. The effort involved in maintaining the fantasy is not the effort of “denying reality”, in the sense of asserting that things are not as they appear and are truly otherwise, but rather the effort of denying mundanity. For the fantasist, things are indeed much as they appear: the fantasmatic dimension of his experience consists of the way in which earth-shatteringly significant (ultra- or infra-mundane) consequences are braided into these manifestations.

Let us now return to the right-wing criticism of the politics of envy. In its naïve form, it simply asserts that the wealthy are entitled to their wealth, that it is the deserved reward for their talents and exertions, and that the politics of envy is a moralistic disguise for the malicious dispossession of the worthy by the unworthy: a stratagem by which the idle seek to enrich themselves by plundering from the industrious. This position is seldom found to be adequately convincing by itself, however, and is generally supplemented by some variety of argument from natural law. For example, it may be argued that taxation and redistribution tends to produce anarchy and universal dispossession by undermining property rights, posited as the fundamental basis of social order. Alternatively, the motive of personal enrichment is asserted to be fundamental to all human striving, such that unearned benefits (welfare) and unrewarded effort (confiscation through taxation) must inevitably demoralize the idle and industrious alike.

It is on this point that the left and right arguments against the politics of envy converge: the wealth (enjoyment) of the wealthy (the Other) really is the wealth (enjoyment) of the envious (the subject), inasmuch as it represents something intrinsic to the subject – his inalienable property rights, his entrepreneurial motivation, his membership of a society collectively enriched by the prodigal economic creativity of an eminent minority, and so on. The real meaning of the Reaganite theory of a “trickle-down” of wealth from the elite few, such that it eventually permeates and enriches the whole of society, is that the wealthy few are already wealthy on our behalf: their wealth is already working for us, already indistinguishable from our own. On this point, then, psychoanalysis and Reaganism are in agreement: the envious are maliciously attacking their own enjoyment, sawing away at the branch on which they themselves are sitting.

The therapeutic counsel is the same in both cases, too. Just as the psychoanalytic subject is encouraged to embrace the guilty enjoyment at the heart of his fantasy, to acknowledge that the insufferable, heedless hedonism he projects onto the Other is the distorted image of his own true desire, so the envious are advised by moralists of the right that it is their own passivity and resentment that is holding them back: only by emulating what they affect to despise will they break out of the infantile dependency that they mask with impotent complaints of unfairness. The prescription is always the same: get into the game of desire!

Perhaps all that this convergence indicates is that the right are fond of borrowing psychoanalytic truisms for the purpose of slandering their opponents: the image of the leftist campaigner as an emotionally retarded whiner is certainly one that they find endlessly gratifying. Even so, there is a problem with the psychoanalytic theory itself, which is perhaps exemplified by Freud’s treatment of the question of incestuous abuse: for Freud, it is ultimately the role of the fantasy of incest that is paramount for analysis, which deals exclusively with problems of psychic organization. What cannot appear in its own right, what in any psychoanalytic account is inexorably reduced to its image within the psychic economy that receives it, is the scandalon, the stumbling-block placed in the subject’s path (the biblical term, let us recall, is “offence”).

The politics of envy, so-called, is not usually a response to the general unfairness of the world: it is not a revolt against the mundane, which is to be accepted as it is, but an outraged cry against the scandalous. It is important here to distinguish the scandalous from the traumatic: whereas trauma disrupts symbolization, producing an unassimilable shock that can only be registered in fantasy, the scandal is capable of direct and straightforward symbolization. It is accessible to ordinary language, capable of being grasped within the terms of what Badiou calls the “encyclopedia of the situation”. On what account, then, does it scandalize? By crystallizing and making explicit that which is everywhere implicit and taken for granted, by providing a concrete and visible instance of a general but unacknowledged reality. The scandal resonates beyond itself: it is a mundane figure placed in the position of a synechdoche, a specific wrong or injustice standing in for a class of injustices, separating them from the background of general unfairness or indifference to questions of right and wrong (“life’s unfair”, as one says to children) and identifying them as instances of a specific wrong (“it is unfair that…”). An element of the situation becomes the yardstick against which other elements of the situation are judged; the situation is reframed by the scandal.

These two operations, synechdoche and reframing, are the means by which what was previously taken for natural is denaturalized: rather than being indifferently related to everything else that “goes on”, and thus bound within the natural schema of presentation, the scandal and the class of wrongs it identifies are separated from other matters, they constitute an issue in their own right. Again: this separation is not the irruption of an unpresentable or indiscernible Otherness, a “transcendental shock” or ontological break: it is a purely formal, intra-situational operation, the election of an element of the situation to the status of the right-hand term in a predicate of resemblance (“x resembles y“) which allows other, similar, elements to be discerned and grouped together. We are not yet by any means dealing with a truth, in Badiou’s sense.

For different scandals there are different laws of resemblance. “Scandals” in the media are based on the superficial resemblance between instances, based on their emotive potential within the context of a cried-up “campaign”. Word and image association blocks are set up, and used to generate copy; the desired outcome is a consensus on the rightness of the campaign itself, and the urgent need to eliminate whatever it identifies as the source of the scandal. The choreography of such campaigns invariably follows a pattern of conjuration followed by exorcism; they serve to mystify concrete relationships, to cloak them in vaporous clouds of emotion which can then be dissipated with a few gusts of briskly-exhaled hot air. What was conjured as egregious is soon returned to the mundane, with little harm done (except to the occasional bystander, mangled by the temporary crowds).

Other scandals are more trenchantly presented, more soundly connected and more difficult to defang. The issue of exorbitant bonuses for city traders and fund managers was briefly emotive; it made for good copy, and provoked plenty of moralistic clucking without noticeably resulting in anyone’s being hung from a lamp-post by their necktie. The issue of increasingly unaffordable housing costs, which is not in fact unrelated to the speculations of some of those hard-working wealth-creators, is less immediately startling, and ever so boring to read about, but its manifestations (which may be indexed against some single shocking statistic, such as the average selling price of a one-bedroom apartment in Hoxton) are both wide-ranging and strongly connected (“the housing market” being the overarching metaphor for these connections). The shed sold for three quarters of a million in central London stands in for every wretched hovel placed far beyond the reach of even the most financially masochistic nurse or schoolteacher. Resentment and anger seem eminently reasonable responses to such circumstances.

We have said that the scandal cannot give rise to a politics of truth; and this is because it identifies a positive configuration within the situation that is ultimately accessible to reformist measures. All that is necessary is for the bonds joining the members of the class identified by the synechdoche to be loosened, so that the scandal can no longer strongly separate elements from the situation. Justice need not be done: only business as usual – a return to the general unfairness of life, which is only natural. A truth, in Badiou’s formulation, separates elements according to a faithful procedure, not a finite predicate; it has at its heart not an element belonging to the situation, but an event subtracted from it. A scandal can be renormalized; a truth cannot. The question is therefore: can the politics of envy (if we understand this to be motivated by the appearance of some scandal, rather than the ressentiment of the envious subject affected by some trauma) give rise to a politics of truth? Under what conditions might this be possible?

To be continued…

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