Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. This concept was discovered in the analysis of a case study of a tech entrepreneur in Colombia and elaborated with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, we draw on Jacques Lacan’s conception of the discourse of the capitalist and his distinction between repression and foreclosure (Verwerfung). The practice of entrepreneurship, we argue, is the most perfect instantiation of what Lacan called the discourse of the capitalist. This is a discourse without limits characterised by denial of castration and lack, a discourse that at is most radical promises liberation through a break with the symbolic order, the relation to the other, and indeed with the world as such. In this particular case study, such a break is materialised in a literal belief in magic, a specifically modern and non-occult magic of deception and misdirection that promises great results from nothing. Such magical thinking, we argue, is at the heart of the entrepreneurial fantasy. To explain this broken relation to symbolic order that is characteristic of entrepreneurship, we draw on Lacanian theory and in particular Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of ‘ordinary psychosis’ to explain the structural homology between entrepreneurship discourse and the analytic category of psychosis. The structure of this discourse, we argue, brings with it not only magical and hallucinatory thinking, but moreover what we propose here to call ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis.

Keywords

Entrepreneurship foreclosure Jacques Lacan magic ordinary psychosis repression the capitalist discourse

‘Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power’

– Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

‘Recourse to magical thinking explains nothing. What must be explained is its efficiency’

– Jacques Lacan, Science and Truth.

This article shares the discovery of an ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis that emerged from fieldwork with tech entrepreneurs in Medellín, the capital of the Department of Antioquia, in the Northwest of Colombia. While this particular case is interesting in its own right, our analysis seeks to situate this case within central dynamics of contemporary capitalism. This case importantly arises from a colonised place, a place with stark contrasts between vast inequality and the most ‘developed’ forms of capitalist barbarism. The entrepreneur’s place in these mountains is overwhelmed by an avalanche of fantastic entrepreneurial fantasies and tortured relations to these fantasies. This is an analysis of both an entrepreneur and the capitalist world of which he is a part. It is both a single case study and at the same time a study of the bewitched and magical world of contemporary capitalism.

This article seeks to contribute to the critique of entrepreneurship and to the thriving area of critical entrepreneurship studies (Berglund and Verdujn, 2018; Dey and Stayaert, 2018; Essers et al., 2017; Goldman and Tselepis, 2021; Hjorth and Stayaert, 2009; Hjorth et al., 2008; Jones and Murtola, 2012; Jones and Spicer, 2009; Örtenblad, 2020; Santisteban, 2018b, 2020; Tedmanson et al., 2012; Torres Oviedo and Misoczky, 2020). In doing so we are also responding to the reality of the rising power of entrepreneurs today, in which public attention often focuses on not only the power of entrepreneurs but on their psychological particularities. In several high profile cases we can see powerful and publicly successful entrepreneurs that are by most psychological measures partially or completely unhinged, yet permitted to continue in their business practice. This reflects a deep crisis in a neoliberal capitalism in which we have been informed that from now on we will be ruled by entrepreneurs. Such practices, no matter how seemingly chaotic and unpredictable, even if they are manifest in extreme cases that seem to be individual, are modelled and framed in a discourse that seeks to legitimate and justify them. This is the contemporary discourse of entrepreneurship.

The reading of entrepreneurship proposed here is only possible because of our individual and shared readings of the works of Jacques Lacan, who has been crucial for us in fundamentally rethinking the place and function of entrepreneurship discourse. Concepts originally developed by Lacan have been applied with considerable success in the understanding of entrepreneurship (Dashtipour and Rumens, 2018; Driver, 2017; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Kenny et al., 2020; Santisteban, 2019) and in a surprisingly wide range of areas in management and organisation studies more generally (for commentary and critique see Arnaud, 2012; Arnaud and Vanheule, 2013; Arnaud and Vidaillet, 2018; Cederström, 2009; Cederström and Hoedemaekers, 2010; Contu, 2020; Contu et al., 2010; Kenny, 2020; Pedersen and Kristensen, 2019). We seek to establish here that critical studies of entrepreneurship in general and Lacanian studies of entrepreneurship in particular will benefit from much further and deeper engagement with the realities of capitalism. While some important recent work had dealt critically with the relation between entrepreneurship and capitalism (see e.g. Böhm and Batta, 2010; Goldman and Tselepis, 2021; Jones and Murtola, 2012; Torres Oviedo and Misoczky, 2020; Walsh, 2021), one of the strange things about the critical study of entrepreneurship is that so often the critique of entrepreneurship can take place without even mentioning the realities of capitalism.

While Lacanian approaches to management, organisation and entrepreneurship have developed remarkably over the past two decades, this same period has also seen significant developments in Lacanian scholarship. Prior to 2006, readers had access to only six of Lacan’s seminars in English (Lacan, 1977b, 1988a, 1988b, 1992, 1993, 1998) along with several scattered papers and an incomplete and poorly translated version of the Écrits (Lacan, 1977a). Since the arrival of the complete English translation of the Écrits (Lacan, 2006a) and the translation of seminar XVII (Lacan, 2007), the past decade has seen the publication in English of seven further seminars (Lacan, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2018, 2019, 2020) and several volumes of his scattered presentations (Lacan, 2008, 2013a, 2013b, 2017b). The editing and publication of his work in French still continues. Implied in everything that we will say here is an invitation to engage more closely and carefully with these texts, and also to explore creative new connections between Lacan’s thought and the critical tradition.

At the heart of this paper is a reading of Lacan’s understanding of the discourse of the capitalist and Miller’s conception of ordinary psychosis. We support these at critical points by introducing ideas from several other theorists. We develop the analytic category of ‘ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis’ to explain the break that entrepreneurs experience with the symbolic order, the relation to the other and the world. Further we argue that entrepreneurs implicitly or explicitly believe in magic, a magic of deception and misdirection in which value, the work and time of others – indeed, the very existence of others – disappears. This entrepreneur who makes money selling high-tech medical devices for wellbeing has a remarkable lack of interest in the actual health of the people of Colombia and in the work of those who produce the products he sells. In different ways this reflects the process of foreclosure that we analyse here, and which we seek to show rests at the heart of entrepreneurship.

The article is divided into two parts, with the first being principally conceptual and the second sketching our case study. Part one engages with Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist and the relation between magic and entrepreneurship, before introducing the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. Part two outlines our case study of an entrepreneur, perhaps the most salient feature of which is his literal interest in the practice of magic. While clearly not being ‘generalisable’ in any easy way to other entrepreneurs, this case draws to attention not only the startling fact of entrepreneurial belief in magic, but moreover points to the role of magic as a semblant that can point to the break of the entrepreneur from the symbolic order. Some readers may prefer to read our case presentation first and then return to the concepts we elaborate to interpret the case, while others may prefer to orient themselves to the concepts first. Whichever way, we must never forget the demand for the strictest formal precision possible, while also remembering that ‘analysis as a science is always science of the particular’ (Lacan, 1988a: 21).

Capitalism, magic and ordinary psychosis

One of the recurring puzzles in the uptake of Lacan in organisation studies has been the reluctance of Lacanian scholars to engage with what Lacan said about capitalism. With some notable exceptions, of which the important work of Vanheule (2016) stands out, a whole generation of Lacanian scholars has succumbed to the widespread but improbable idea that it is possible to analyse entrepreneurs and capitalist organisation without even a minimal account of the specificity of capitalism. This has not always been the case, and in foundational figures in the field such as Joseph Schumpeter there is rarely any question that when we are talking about entrepreneurship we are talking about an aspect of capitalism. We propose here to engage more fully with what Lacan has to say about capitalism and mastery, which has produced important secondary literature (Holland, 2015; Pauwels, 2019; Stavrakakis, 2007, 2010; Tomšič, 2015; Žižek, 1989) and then to see what we can say from that about entrepreneurship.

Lacan’s (2006b) sixteenth seminar, commencing in November 1968, clearly bears the marks of the revolutionary events of May ‘68 and reflects his closest engagement with capitalism, Marx and revolutionary politics. After introducing concepts such as ‘surplus-jouissance’, the ‘truth strike’ and the disjunction between price, knowledge and work (p. 200), in his next seminar of 1969–1970 Lacan situates the discourse of the master on the ‘other side’ and in opposition to the discourse of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 2007: 87; cf. Lacan, 2006c: 9). Doing so he formalises his ‘theory of the four discourses’, which articulates the different possible relations between the subject and the object in light of the intersection of the signifying chain and the way that one signifier can take the function of being a ‘master signifier’.

Lacan’s account of mastery and the discourse of the master shares Freud’s uncompromising ‘realism’ about society. He is clear about the realities of power, domination and mastery and warns, importantly, of the persistence of the discourse of the master in even the most progressive movements, including May ‘68 (Lacan, 2007: 207). Further, far from equating knowledge and power or even seeing these, as Foucault did, as being in a positive relationship, Lacan stresses the fundamental disjunction between mastery and knowledge. While the discourse of the university concerns itself with knowledge and therefore produces an endless chain of signifiers, the discourse of the master stitches itself onto a single master signifier. This can be a single name or a symbol stamped onto a coin. For the master, everything and everyone must answer to that signifier, and knowledge is lucky if it can make it into second place. As he makes brutally clear: ‘A real master, as in general we used to see until a recent era, and this is seen less and less, doesn’t desire to know anything at all – the master desires that things work’ (Lacan, 2007: 24, translation modified).

Lacan stresses a well-known historical transformation in modes of mastery which reflects a transition between ‘the ancient master’s discourse and that of the modern master, whom we call capitalist’ (Lacan, 2007: 31, translation modified). In his earlier teaching he dates the decline of the traditional master’s discourse to the beginning of the 19th century and the moment of a ‘utilitarian conversion or reversion’ which involves ‘a radical decline in the function of the master’ (Lacan, 1992: 11). This dating is in many ways surprisingly orthodox, registering as it does the rise of industrial capitalism, the French Revolution and the utilitarianism of Bentham (1967), while echoing Weber’s (1978) account of the eclipse of charisma by rational-legal domination. Lacan emphasises that this is not only a social and historical transformation but was also reflected in philosophical discourse. This featured the decline of what he calls the ‘Aristotelean master’ which, as he stresses, had been so influential for many centuries. Against this ancient discourse of the master, ‘It is in Hegel that we find expressed an extreme devalorization of the master, since Hegel turns him into the great dupe, the magnificent cuckold of historical development, given that the virtue of progress passes by way of the vanquished, which is to say, the slave, and his work’ (Lacan, 1992: 11).

This difference between the discourse of the master and the discourse of the capitalist becomes particularly clear in two key statements from 1972. The first of these appears in his lecture in Milan on 12 May 1972, in which Lacan adds the discourse of the capitalist as a ‘fifth discourse’ that modifies in subtle ways the discourse of the master, specifically in the distinct ways that these two discourses relate to what was traditionally known in psychoanalysis as ‘castration’ (Lacan, 1978: 32). Here Lacan distinguishes between the discourse of the master and the discourse of the capitalist on the basis that the latter is marked by a lack of castration. The capitalist discourse, as Bruno (2020) puts it, is a ‘discourse without loss’ (p. 133). In the second key moment in his teaching of 1972, Lacan offers, in a typically elliptical circumlocution, this profound conclusion: ‘What differentiates the capitalist discourse is this – the Verwerfung [foreclosure], the rejection [rejet] outside of all fields of the symbolic, with the consequences of which I have already spoken. The rejection of what? Of castration’ (Lacan, 2017b: 90–91, translation modified).

That capitalism is a discourse that forecloses, or seeks to foreclose, castration, opens itself to some of Lacan’s most important insights, such as the idea that appears later in 1972 with the maxim ‘The superego is the imperative of jouissance – Enjoy!’ (Lacan, 1998: 3). This lack of restraint under capital is certainly not a new idea. In capitalism, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘there is no day that is not a feast day’ (Benjamin, 1996: 288). This lack of restraint is certainly central to capitalism, and many have productively followed Lacan in stressing these dynamics of enjoyment, apparently free from any limitation, on the part of the consumer (Böhm and Batta, 2010; McGowan, 2003). Of course, this apparent lack of limitation on the side of the consumer is quickly compensated by the necessary unity, for most, of consumption and work, remembering that work for almost all under capitalism is characterised by a fierce restriction of the multiplicity of human desire. Likewise, within actual capitalism, those who take on responsibility for the administration of capital accumulation are marked by a massive repression due to the nature of their submission to their proper master – capital – and so must hold back and play the part not of a miser but a ‘rational miser’ (Marx, 1990: 254). While in capitalism most experience severe restriction of their possibilities, at the same time the figure of the entrepreneur offers the imaginary foreclosure of limitation. Here we find a figure whose very profession is to break limits, to follow their own innermost desires and to transform the world with wave after wave of innovations in the mode of capital accumulation (Walsh, 2021).

While Lacan himself does not foreground the entrepreneur, our argument is that the entrepreneur most closely approximates what he describes in terms of the discourse of the capitalist. In his critique of consumerism, Lacan astutely observes the contradictions of the idea of an escape from castration on the part of the consumer, in the ‘movement that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably possible’ (Lacan, 1992: 303).

The discourse of the capitalist is contradictory if nothing else. While in the discourse of the master it may well be possible to name the master and the master signifier, in the discourse of the capitalist, the master signifier remains in a secondary position, placed ‘under the bar’. This is because in capital the master is never fully present in the abstract movement of capital accumulation (on this matter see Postone, 1993). The place of the entrepreneur is constantly fraught precisely because the entrepreneur seeks to take the place of the master while the reality of mastery means that the entrepreneur ultimately has to answer to the master that is capital. The entrepreneur therefore plays the role of a split subject, first of all free from capital then at the next moment victim of its whims (Horkheimer, 1972; Jones and Murtola, 2012).

In this sense, entrepreneurship is a discourse of mastery and is also, as should be clear, only thinkable in relation to capital. We will see how this discourse functions further below when we introduce our case study. For now, we have simply sought to open up the question of the different relations to the castrating effects of the symbolic order that can be seen in the discourse of the entrepreneur through what Lacan calls the discourse of the capitalist. It is in the discourse of the entrepreneur that we find the most exemplary manifestation of the capitalist discourse, and all of the contradictions that this entails.

Magic and entrepreneurship

This break with the symbolic order that marks the entrepreneur can appear in a number of different ways. It can appear in wild or radical thinking and practice, in extreme, excessive or seemingly strange practices that are rationalised as being part of what it takes to be an entrepreneur (Jones and Spicer, 2006; Sköld, 2009). This can manifest itself in the otherworldly fantasies of literally escaping our planet, investing in artificial or virtual worlds, or in Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to create a ‘metaverse’ that escapes all of the constraints of this world. In the most modest form this involves the regular practice of ‘magical thinking’ in entrepreneurship (Ganzin et al., 2020). In some ways this is perfectly continuous with the longstanding interest in magic and magic effects that has characterised entrepreneurs, business leaders, corporate gurus and other capitalist tricksters (Letiche et al., 2020). In some cases, which we argue here illuminate the structure of entrepreneurship discourse as such, we find entrepreneurs who literally practice and/or believe in magic.

Here again psychoanalysis is particularly helpful in understanding the social function of magic. As is well known, Freud had a life-long interest in magic (Brottman, 2009). But beyond his specific interest in magic, he demonstrated the efficiency of the operation of language, which can create powerful effects with what seems to be very little effort, and explicitly connected this with magic.

A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by “mere” words. They will feel that they are being asked to believe in magic. And they will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. We shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power (Freud, 1953: 283).

Likewise, Marx showed again and again the importance of magic and magical thinking in capitalism. This is not a matter of the belief of individuals in magic but rather reflects the unique place of magic in the social forms that come with capitalism. Magic under capital is not simply about falsity or mistaken beliefs but rather registers a truth about how value, work and time are conceived in capitalism and in the discourse of entrepreneurship. In this sense magic has played an increasingly important role over the past 50 years during the course of a neoliberal capitalist class war that has successfully secured a massive upward transfer of wealth. In its cultural forms, this magic has been accompanied by the rise of new forms of repudiation of transparency and truth, and the new forms of sophistry that characterise the present (on these see Jones, 2018). At precisely this point value under capital ‘has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs’ (Marx, 1990: 255).

Again, contemporary magic is not ‘false’ in any obvious sense of the word. Rather, magic reflects the necessarily false forms of appearance that characterise capitalist social formations. This is why, in his analysis of the forms of appearance of capital and surplus value in his drafts for the third volume of Capital, Marx made clear that capitalism is a ‘bewitched, distorted and upside-down world’, a world that is ‘standing on its head’ [auf den Kopf gestellte Welt] (Marx, 1981: 969, cf. 1998: 817; 2004: 804; 2015: 897). While Marx developed a creative reading of Hegel’s (2018: 95–96) account of the rise of a socially produced ‘inverted world’, in recent years this dehiscence of appearance from reality has become increasingly palpable. This can be seen in the way that capital has a certain ‘spectral’ character (Arthur, 2002; Derrida, 1994), in the close connections between entrepreneurship and religious ideas of salvation and the creation anew of something from nothing and in the idea that the entrepreneur partakes in the register of the sublime (Jones and Spicer, 2005). This structural falsity of capitalist social forms of appearance is why magic and gimmicks are today so deeply embedded in capitalism and why magic is central to the great trickster of today, the entrepreneur.

A significant part of the trickery of the entrepreneur regards claims over value. This arises above all in the relation between magic and the work of others. Here it should be remembered that in the historical repudiation of magic, ‘magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action’ (Federici, 2004: 142, emphasis in original). Magic, like entrepreneurship, always involves a certain dissimulation of the amount of work that is involved. In this way, entrepreneurship always involves a certain refusal of work, even if a great deal of effort is put into avoiding work or in performing the appearance of activity. Working hard to avoid work is one of the perfectly consistent contradictions of capitalism. Entrepreneurship misdirects attention away from reality in order to look deep into the interior of the entrepreneur. This sleight of hand has to be practiced, polished and performed to an audience that is willing to suspend disbelief.

One of the most valuable recent contributions to the understanding of magic appears in the work of Ngai (2020) and has particular importance for those concerned with entrepreneurship, work and value. Taking up debates in aesthetics and in contemporary value form theory (see e.g. Murray, 2016), Ngai explains how the gimmick – and remembering that ‘gimmick’ is widely thought to be an anagram of magic – is not a characteristic of all social formations but is rather a specifically capitalist social form. Ngai excavates the critical social judgements that are made about gimmicks from deep within capitalism, showing how these judgements express a deep unease about the forms of appearance of work, value and time appear under capital. The gimmick troubles us not only because it is ‘wrong’ but because the gimmick ‘indexes a bigger wrongness in the way a society goes about valorization as such’ (Ngai, 2020: 45). The fact that critical judgements are made about gimmicks, Ngai argues, is because they breach expectations about work, value and time. A gimmick involves working too much, too little, or in some cases, both. Ngai (2020) argues that:

while objects of the judgement obviously vary, every subject who lives in a world shaped by capitalism experiences something as gimmicky for crucially identical reasons related to value, labor and time. More specifically, our aesthetic dissatisfaction with the gimmick points to a deficiency of economic value that the judgement spontaneously diagnoses, revealing our sense that there is something “wrong” about the ratios of labor and time that it encodes (p. 225).

Magic breaks with the ostensibly meritocratic symmetry that is imagined to hold between effort and reward, between the time one works and the value attributed to that time. Ngai rather ingeniously does not advance one or another version of a ‘labour theory of value’, nor does she maintain for example that the value of each commodity results from the socially necessary amount of labour contained in that commodity. Instead, her argument rests on a sociological observation of the social fact that gimmicks breach a set of egalitarian assumptions about work, value and reward. As she puts it ‘Against the grain of widespread academic belief in the obsolescence of labor-value theory, the gimmick reveals it as alive and kicking in the realm of aesthetics: as a judgment through which people process the qualitative, sociological effects of capitalism’s “law of value” in everyday conversations about pleasure and displeasure’ (Ngai, 2020: 228).

Ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis

It has long been argued that capitalist corporations are psychopathological. This case is made because of the ways in which they encourage irresponsibility, manipulation, grandiosity, lack of empathy and asocial tendencies, a refusal to accept responsibility and feelings of remorse (Bakan, 2004: 57). Braverman (1998) famously described F. W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, as an ‘an exaggerated example of the obsessive-compulsive personality’ and a ‘neurotic crank’, and, argued that ‘These traits fitted him perfectly for his role as the prophet of modern capitalist management, since that which is neurotic in the individual is, in capitalism, normal and socially desirable for the functioning of society’ (p. 63). As a split subject every entrepreneur has a neurotic relation to the symbolic order and in many moments in their life either shares this neurosis with the capitalist manager or needs to hire capitalist managers to deal with the neurosis of capitalist business for them. The other side of this entrepreneurial subject, however, lies in this fundamentally broken relationship with the symbolic order, and it is here that we locate the structural homology between entrepreneurship discourse and ordinary psychosis.

Repression, following Freud, does not involve entirely eradicating words but more so lightening their affective load and in doing so putting everything back in its place. The hard-nosed capitalist manager is therefore a ‘realist’ in the sense that everything must be adjusted to the capitalist symbolic order. This involves not a refusal of discourse but rather its management. In this sense capitalist management involves a massive and ongoing repression, and with this the neuroses that will accompany that. With the entrepreneur, by contrast, repression is set aside in favour of a leap outside of the symbolic order. It is precisely from outside of the symbolic order, the relation to the other, and the world as such, outside what others might or do demand of them, that the entrepreneur finds their freedom, unrestrained by others.

This break with the symbolic order, we maintain, is an essential feature of entrepreneurship discourse. Paradoxically, then, this fracture from the language and world of others is one of the most consistent things about entrepreneurship discourse. This is one of the reasons why entrepreneurship discourse is always somewhat otherworldly, coming from what often seems to be another planet. This otherworldliness can be seen in the wild theological fantasies of entrepreneurs and in ideas of creating something from nothing (Sørensen, 2008). It can be seen in the extra-planetary fantasies of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to literally leave this world in order to create another one (Murtola, 2018). It can be seen in the efforts of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to literally reach the stratosphere, first in hot air balloons and then in billion-dollar rocket trips. Clearly, it is not simply individuals who are speaking entrepreneurship discourse, and the fact that others also fantasise this escape from reality encourages others. For the entrepreneur it is no longer, as it was for the neurotic capitalist manager, a matter of grappling with, reacting to or managing existing discourse but rather escaping it and acting as if it did not exist. These entrepreneurs pretend to live in another world by obscuring the reality of capital accumulation, the existence of social conditions and suffering, and the lives and worlds of those who produce and buy their products.

To understand the peculiarities of this relation to language characteristic of the discourse of the entrepreneur, we have found it particularly helpful to consult the works of Lacan, and in particular his third seminar dedicated to the analysis of the psychoses (Lacan, 1993). Among the many innovations in this seminar, Lacan makes an important set of specifications regarding the distinction between repression and foreclosure. While the term repression has generally been used to translate Verdrängung, Freud’s distinct term Verwerfung is, following Lacan’s (1993) proposal at the end of his third seminar (p. 321) more precisely translated into English as ‘foreclosure’. This is important, recall, because of the importance of this word for Lacan’s understanding of the capitalist discourse, which involves a foreclosure (Verwerfung) of castration.

Freud drew the distinction between repression and foreclosure in his early analysis of the neuro-psychoses of defence. With repression, ‘defence against the incompatible idea was effected by separating it from its affect; the idea itself remained in consciousness, even though weakened and isolated’ (Freud, 1962: 58). By contrast, ‘There is, however, a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all’ (Freud, 1962: 58). Having made this distinction, Freud immediately adds that the defence involved in foreclosure is not so much neurosis as it is psychosis. Thus he continues, ‘But from the moment at which this has been successfully done the subject is in a psychosis’ (Freud, 1962: 58, emphasis in original). We must tread carefully here. Psychosis, it must also be recalled, is not a condition but rather a state that a subject may enter and exit. Likewise, repression and foreclosure do not simply refer to mental types but rather index the complex and tortured relation, as noted above, of the subject to language. With repression the symbolic order is interpreted such that the objects of discourse are worked over to make their affective charge more palatable. With foreclosure the subject breaks with the symbolic order and the affective states of others are treated as if they do not exist. With foreclosure the psychotic bears the cost but also the advantages of not being caught within what others recognise as discourse.

In his seminar on psychosis, Lacan specifies and formalises the broken relation to language that typifies the psychotic subject. While in his later reflections on psychosis Lacan develops the idea that ‘psychosis is marked by the absence of a crucial signifier’ (Vanheule, 2011: 2), the key innovation of seminar three is to specify the dynamics of language at play in psychosis. This relation to language is crucial: ‘for us to have a psychosis there must be disturbances of language’ (Lacan, 1993: 92). Of course, the seductive thing about the discourse of the entrepreneur is that it forecloses the idea of mastery, putting it to one side, although this does not make mastery disappear but rather obscures it. The obscuration of functioning makes it all the more oppressive. With regard to mastery, the entrepreneur shares at least this with the psychotic, given that ‘the psychotic subject is ignorant of the language he speaks’ (Lacan, 1993: 12). This is a curse but is also a great relief. As Lacan (1993) puts it: ‘Well then, compared to you the psychotic has this disadvantage, but also this privilege, of finding himself a little at odds with, askew in relation to, the signifier’ (p. 322).

Such an understanding of psychosis bears important connections with what Lacan calls the discourse of the capitalist which, we argued above, finds its best instantiation in the discourse of the entrepreneur. As we argued above, the discourse of the capitalist rests on a particular relation to castration, in which the capitalist subject is taken to not be lacking anything. All of this is of course an imaginary relation, a product of fantasy. This is not to say it is less effective, but rather that it is in the imaginary.

Lacan’s discussion of psychosis has been importantly extended by his student Jacques-Alain Miller’s account of what he calls ‘ordinary psychosis’. Miller argues that the distinction between neurosis and psychosis has hardened and thickened, and against this proposes ordinary psychosis as an ‘excluded third’ (Miller, 2013: 36), even if it sits on the side of psychosis. The ordinary psychotic might well be able to function for much of their life within the boundaries of particular discourses. Miller argues that psychosis is much more ‘ordinary’ than people think, and many forms of ordinary psychosis might not become fully blown by being ‘triggered’. Our argument here is that the concept of ordinary psychosis developed by Miller and his colleagues (Brousse, 2013; Laurent, 2013) has crucially important things to say about the ordinary psychosis of the entrepreneur. To be clear, we are not saying that entrepreneurs are psychotics but rather seeking to draw attention to the homology in the operation of the discourse of the entrepreneur and what has been identified in clinical practice as an ordinary psychosis. We see this with remarkable clarity, we believe, in the case study from which this connection was initially drawn to our attention.

Magic and entrepreneurship in the mountains of Antioquia

There is a long tradition of the use of case studies of individual figures in psychoanalysis. Several of Freud’s cases now have an iconic status, in figures such as Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man and Judge Schreber. At the same time, he often treated himself as a case study. Likewise, psychoanalytic and in particular Lacanian studies of organisation have produced rich insights out of the analysis of particular case examples and in studies of particular signifiers, such as ‘care’ (Driver, 2021), ‘employability’ (Cremin, 2010), ‘evaluation’ (Vidaillet, 2013) and ‘performance’ (Hoedemaekers and Keegan, 2010). It must be stressed that the purpose of such case studies is not to produce general explanations but more often is to expose holes in existing explanations. The purpose is to put psychoanalytic theory into conversation with specific case examples in order both to illuminate those cases and to make theoretical advances by testing ideas.

The case presented here was discovered in the course of a series of in-depth interviews conducted with entrepreneurs in Medellín between May and July 2019. These interviews were conducted in Spanish by Sebastian Santisteban and were subsequently transcribed and coded for thematic analysis. This sequence of research follows from previous research that included interviews of 144 entrepreneurs in Bogotá (Santisteban, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). As with that earlier research, the study reported here was informed by Lacanian theory and therefore paid particular attention to the dynamics of the signifier. In the transcription and translation of the interview material we followed the strict protocols of the analysis of the signifier ‘to the letter’ (Fink, 2004). We have therefore retained all of the pauses, breaks, changes in tense, movements between the first and second person, and so forth, as they appeared in the interviews. If there is to be a science of the signifier then this requires considerable effort at the level of the signifier, before rushing to the ‘meaning’ of any particular instance of speech. In this task both authors engaged deeply with the data. During a 12-month research visit with Campbell Jones, both authors debated the data in detail and translated the interviews from Spanish to English, while continuing to read and discuss Lacan, organising a Lacanian cartel and running a seminar on Marx’s Grundrisse and contemporary value theory.

We refer here to the subject of our case as ‘S’. We give him this signifier to preserve his anonymity, even if it is the first letter of his proper name. Further, the capital letter S, which Lacan used as shorthand for ‘the signifier’ (see e.g. Lacan, 2006a: 428), might also remind us that S is a signifier as much as a subject. When he was interviewed, S was a 34-year-old non-indigenous Colombian identifying as male, living and working in Medellín. Sebastian Santisteban conducted three in-depth interviews with S in 2019. He was born in a small town in the mountains of Antioquia, a reality that he symbolises in vivid ways, as we shall see. He is the co-founder of an Internet of Things start-up that produces and sells tech devices connected to the cloud mainly for health and pharmaceutical industries, including vaccine container thermometers and online patient data tracking.

The specific details of any case are always marked a singularity that plays out between the particular quirks of each individual and the social order in which these take on meaning. Whether such lessons are learned from the hard grind of empirical fieldwork or from book three of the Science of Logic (Hegel, 2010), singularity expresses this constant interplay between the particular and the universal. To reduce this to the automatism of a discourse, a discourse that operates ‘without a subject’ runs the risk of making discourse itself into the subject and in doing so effacing the particularities of that case. At the same time, to not see the patterned nature of the signifying chain risks reinstating a freely choosing subject who merely ‘chooses’ how they use language. In some ways the discourse of S, as with many other entrepreneurs we have studied, is quite typical, with its hyperbolic overstatements, braggadocio, gloating and self-promotion. At first glance, our entrepreneur is fully within the world of the mountains of Antioquia, although at the same time his every effort is to escape this world.

Mountains

In his speech S skilfully weaves together his sense of himself, his pathway to success and his place and background, in a set of fantasies which provide him with an orientation to his vision of entrepreneurship, which contains its own specific structure of foreclosure. Entrepreneurship and his high moral vision of himself intersect in important ways with how he conceives his arrival in the world:

I come from a small town – this doesn’t imply anything bad, nor do I feel inferior for that – it’s cool because it’s natural. I shouldn’t even be mentioning this but I believe that the fundamental values [. . .] about families, the rural, like hard work, respect, honour. Because how did our parents and grandparents do business? They shook hands and fuck, you gave your word.

Being born in a small town in the mountains of Antioquia is central to S’s sense of himself as a subject and features across his speech. For him the mountains of his homeland are the stage for formulating an origin myth of entrepreneurialism, even if it is less nuanced than other histories (Applebaum, 2003; Twinam, 1982). He evokes the imaginary idea that strength, drive and virility characterise the area of Antioquia and the Paisa people of this region. He sees this in the city of Medellín, the capital of Antioquia and the second largest city in Colombia.

For me Medellín is the anchor, understood as the centre of operations. There is something very nice that I feel. I have a phrase that we put on the electronic devices that we make here: “Engineered in the mountains of Antioquia”. This relates to the fact that we are a knowledge company and that manufacturing does not add value; manufacturing is done in China and we design our own products. I highly value the myth of the Antioquian founders and Paisa strength, that whatever Paisas set themselves to accomplish, they will do it. I think that the culture of the Paisas allows us to have no borders. I haven’t been to San Francisco, but I know everything that happens there. I have a company that serves 48,000 users worldwide. Today we have clients in 80 countries.

By all measures of polite society, S is a nice and even a good person. He has a vision of moral fortitude with which he defends himself from the realities of the capitalist world. This vision of his own internal moral probity certainly helps him to navigate the conflicts between his vision of himself and the massive violence and systematically organised exploitation that surround him on a daily basis. This foreclosure operates in several ways. One of the most interesting things regarding his place in the mountains of Antioquia is the fact that the horrifying violence which has and continues to wrack his country simply does not appear in his discourse. Poverty appears, but always somewhere else, and when it appears is contrasted with his own entrepreneurial practice. Equally, he is completely silent about the state of physical and mental health of the Colombian people, even though the lack of funding for public healthcare infrastructure is the underlying basis of his business model. There is a similar structural absence in the way in which he maintains that, even while noting that the gadgets he sells are produced in China, ‘manufacturing does not add value’. This is not a relative value claim concerning the respective contribution of Chinese and Colombian labour, but rather a claim that his work alone, or maybe his work and those who work immediately alongside him, is the source of value, while the labour of thousands producing and distributing the products he sells produces no value whatsoever. In short, while one might think that such things would appear in his discourse and be offered an explanation, what is interesting is that they are set entirely outside of consideration and treated as if they did not exist.

The value claim that manufacturing in China ‘does not add value’ involves a foreclosure of the idea that those involved in manufacturing the gadgets he sells add any value at all. This value claim clearly makes the magical entrepreneur the source of value at the expense of others, a claim which refuses to acknowledge the realities of global value extraction and transfer (Cope, 2019; Smith, 2016; Suwandi, 2019). But it is not simply the falsity of S’s vision that is interesting but rather the truth that this falsity brings to light. This is not a mistake on his part but rather a reflection of capitalist value and its magical character. As Marx argued, when the other of capital becomes capital, and in this case, when the activity of the entrepreneur’s other is taken to be the activity of the entrepreneur, it can then appear quite logical that the value produced by the other is in fact produced by the entrepreneur.

In his speech S elevates himself above the mountains, such that the mountains of Antioquia are given meaning by and through signifiers that arrive from elsewhere. The mountains of his home are overrun by fantasies about entrepreneurialism, and even though he has never been to San Francisco, he fantastically claims to know ‘everything that happens there’. Just as the mountains of Antioquia are overloaded by a series of fantasies about of entrepreneurship, likewise ‘San Francisco’ appears not as a place or a material reality but a screen onto which he projects his fantasies and desires. These fantasies and desires do not come from nowhere, of course, but from the other, from deep within the ideology of Silicon Valley, itself a specific version of the ideology of capital (Daub, 2020; Jimenez, 2020). Although in important ways S is fundamentally connected to the mountains of Antioquia, the lessons that he draws from these mountains could just as well be learned from almost any place on earth. For him the mountains signify hardship and long journeys, the hard road of import/export. In this way the mountains function for him through their flexibility, through claiming something imagined to be unique about one specific place, when in fact overcoming hardships reflects the nature of the human condition.

The mountains also serve as the basis, for S, of not only the Antioquian culture of hard work, pride and creativity. They also produce a culture of deception, trickery and crime. As he explains: ‘In Colombia I believe we still have a very big Mafia culture, drug-trafficking. A person wants to become a millionaire very fast, and wants to do it as an end in itself, to start to show it off, and be more visible’. Here there arises a profound ambiguity between this reality of a culture of deception, trickery and violence, and the normal narrative about the emancipatory promise of entrepreneurship. Considering that Colombia has one of the highest rates of violence in the OECD and the greatest number of social leaders and human rights defenders killed in Latin America in recent years (BBC, 2021), this ambiguity is important in its own right. S translates deception and trickery, however, into a characterisation of the Antioquian people as storytellers who are prone to ‘overstatement’. He provides this example of apparently harmless deception, which he couches not as deceit but in terms of entrepreneurial ‘maximisation’ of opportunities:

When you find a little kitten on the road then you go to tell a story and say, like “Dude, I found a tiger, as big as fuck, it almost ate me, but I’m a tough guy, brother, and I got away”. People from Antioquia are pretty much of that style. They’re storytellers. I believe it is also associated with being wanderers and walkers through the mountains, and being liars, talkers. But I mean liars in the sense of maximising something. It is not lying as such but maximising something. Not in the sense of doing harm but of creating a story. Storytellers and stories arise from invention, they are creative. Inventors, like, creative. So, I believe that Antioquian culture has that particularity and that, mixed with Paisa strength [verraquera], which is very much like: if you are capable of raising cattle in those mountains, you are capable of whatever. If you are capable of crossing from there to there, you are a tough one [verraco]. People from Antioquia, I believe due to their geography, haven’t had any advantages, they don’t have any comparative advantage, as they cannot have a port. So then they have to be very creative.

S makes clear that he is addicted to work and to his entrepreneurial ventures. As he explains, projecting his own addiction onto an imagined other that is clearly himself: ‘You [vos] become addicted to the business, entrepreneurship; you think 90 per cent about this’. For S this has become a challenge because of the time that this takes away from other pursuits, hobbies and relationships. Thus he speaks about the cost of entrepreneurship in relation to ‘Things like sharing time with your girlfriend, your family, doing other activities such as hobbies, sports, in my case magic’.

Magic

S’s interest in magic is one of his most long-standing passions and features repeatedly in his discourse. This is not a minor diversion or plaything. He explains: ‘I started studying magic when I was eight years old and when I started, my dream was always to do automatic things, such as, I don’t know, moving things. It’s like I’m too lazy to go there, poof, I want to bring it, I want to have it here, or you’ve got to tidy up the kitchen and then, with a snap of the fingers, the thing fixes itself’. S’s knowledge of magic and magical technique is very advanced and he comfortably extemporises in detail about the history and theory of magic:

There’s magic since Egypt. One finds the origins of magic in Egypt 2,500 years ago, up to the first European writings in France, Spain and England 200, 300 years ago. If you look at the English writing then you say: Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, well he is a researcher and how does he discover thoughts? How is he restless to tell these stories? But what about obscurantism, because magic is a trick, a technique. That is very nice, science, there have been a lot of extremes which are in fact some complicated stuff that has been created: obscurantism, witchcraft. But that has nothing to do with magic.

This kind of ‘magic without magic’ is precisely the kind of demystified conception of creativity and genius that characterises the advice of contemporary business consultants. Here the magic of creativity arises from pure technique and hard work, from which there is no escape. In the words of best-selling business guru Seth Godin the advice is simple: ‘The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic’ (Godin, 2020: v, 257). What must be carefully worked through here is why there is also no ‘magic’ in modern magic. For the founders of modern performance magic such as Robert-Houdin (1859) magic is technique. In the advice of business guru Godin, the reason that there is no magic to creativity is that creative work is a ‘practice’ rather than an inspired event of genius. On this vision magic is pure technique and is the result of relentless preparatory labour. Only the fool would believe in the magic that they are selling. Indeed, for Godin, ‘we certainly don’t have to believe in magic to create magic’ (Godin, 2020: 15). In this world there are no acts of intellectual or creative genius that will bring riches and happiness. Rather, creative work is above all work, and on the vision of Godin there is no escape from work.

S explains the origins of modern stage magic and the professionalisation of magic as it moved from street art to performance art and evokes the nineteenth figure of Robert-Houdin who, along with John Henry Anderson and others, created performance or stage magic which practices magic without any obvious belief in the paranormal or the occult. While ancient magic accompanied by supernatural belief certainly continues to this day, this is often, following Aleister Crowley, spelt ‘magick’ to distinguish supernatural magick from magic resting on technique and effects that knowingly appear to be ‘supernatural’ (Davies, 2017; Gosden, 2020). These seemingly non-occult forms of magic are based on direct deception through technique rather than deception through appeals to the supernatural, and as historians of this modern form of magic make clear, this practices of ‘staging the impossible’ rests on the practiced arts of deception and misdirection (Kuhn, 2020; Lamont and Steinmeyer, 2018). For S, the absence of supernatural powers is a way of staving off any idea that modern magic involves deception. On his framing:

The father of modern magic is Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. He was the first, he was French, in the 1800s, he is deemed to be the father of modern magic, he put on a suit and said “this is science, this is a technique, there are no supernatural powers, there is nothing about the devil here, none of those things”. Before him there were a lot of magicians, using magic techniques but in order to fool people. They used to say that they had powers coming from the devil and that they were mediums. So then from there a stream was created, but us in the world of magic say that is people fooling other people.

S has a complex relationship with the idea of fooling people and the fact that he raises this issue so often is an important aspect of his discourse. In his speech deception is always done by others to others, never by him or to him. He protects himself from any association with trickery by casting aspersions on the ethics of those who would deceive. He is particularly critical of others who seek to fool people and in doing so to conquer others. For example:

So what’s with the English? Lots of bandits! Well, it’s history, one hears about a lot of pirates. One sees an Englishman and he’s a super sophisticated person, elegant, with good posture. But go and look at his ancestors. There are a lot of people with stumps instead of hands, with eye patches; they are pirates. The thing is, when you say, what do they have, from an anthropological point of view, what do these people have? What makes them so strong as people? They have been able to conquer the world.

Against such visions of banditry and dishonesty, S is clear about the complexities of his own negotiations with capital. For him this is no simple matter. He has been involved in entrepreneurship and startups for many years, and he revels in the repetition that this involves. He even speaks about creating ‘an entrepreneurship factory’ that would roll out repeated ventures. Working in this world has led him to reflect deeply on his work and life and their meaning. In terms of the purpose of his entrepreneurial life, he explains, ‘A large part of it is purely economic, capitalist, in that technology is sold and that’s money. It is largely an economic component. But that component, when one looks at it from another perspective, one realises that this is a means for higher ends [cosas]’.

Ethics

S contrasts these higher ends with questions of pleasure, distinguishing the immediate pleasures of life against what he describes as a more holistic point of view:

It is the same with pleasures. It is very true that there are certain pleasures that permit you to be in balance as a strengthened human being to attain levels, superior quotas. Then they are totally justified if they are used as means and not ends, because I feel that startups and entrepreneurs today, they are not spoken about from a holistic, philosophical, scientific point of view, regarding what human beings are and where we are going; but they simply see the economic and technological spectrum. They only see one very specific thing about humanity and they believe that this is an end in itself. I believe that this is an error.

To express what this holistic view based on moral purpose looks like, he often refers directly to the ideas of major philosophers. In one interview he evokes Spinoza’s Ethics as the ground for his moral vision of himself. Because so many who operate in the business world, of which he is a part, fall short of this holistic moral vision, he constantly questions himself and dreams of an escape to another world. On the hamster wheel that is capitalist business, he asks himself what the meaning of everything is, and offers this answer to his question, now complaining about the repetition that he elsewhere revels in:

Everyone wants to make seed capital, everyone wants to go looking for capital and fuck, “I’m going to be the biggest millionaire [el más millonario]” and the pleasures [. . .] but when one does an analysis one realises that this is a wheel, because in fact it is an endless race. You join and you realise that every 18 months, every 12 months, you have to get out something new. This is growing at such a rate, and it’s burning money: the burn rate. Then one begins to say: obviously you have to be profitable but the important thing is to raise and raise and raise. Then you start to say like fuck! What is the meaning of all of this?

Speaking of San Francisco, he contrasts the high standards of those with impressive incomes with those who live in brutal poverty. Foreclosing any idea that he might be implicated in such inequality and the production of poverty, he asks of this social arrangement ‘What is this then? Does this really have a purpose? Does it bring well-being to people?’. In doing so S defines his position against other entrepreneurs, representing himself in terms of honour and integrity in the face of a broken world. He speaks about other entrepreneurs who trick governmental and capitalist agencies into supporting new ventures which do not return any profits nor pay any taxes. His own deceptions and his taking advantage of others are foreclosed in relation to himself. In this way, they become unthinkable and are cast out onto the other:

I have very close friends who have lived two or three years based on that [government funding]. And I say to them “No dude, that is sheer fraud. Like, you don’t have a real company. You are just living off selling PowerPoint presentations. Do a PowerPoint and off you go – a billion dollar business!”.

Conclusion

In the first part of this paper we examined the discourse of the capitalist, the relation between magic and entrepreneurship, and in light of the dynamics of foreclosure that characterise entrepreneurship discourse, we introduced the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. As can now be seen, our conception of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis arises from the case and from what can be seen in entrepreneurship discourse. In turn, these concepts help to explain these realities. This particular entrepreneur exemplifies what Lacan calls the discourse of the capitalist and in particular the denial of castration on which it rests. As such, this case sheds light on entrepreneurship discourse more generally. S’s explicit practice of magic also makes clear its relation to entrepreneurship in general. Above all, this case study crystallises the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis that we have forged here in order to explain the break of the entrepreneur from the symbolic order, from the relation to the other and from the world as such. While clearly there are a number of different positions that specific individual entrepreneurs can take, we have presented this case as an instance that exemplifies the knotting together in this entrepreneur of the capitalist discourse, magic and ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis.

We should be clear here about what we are claiming and what we are not. First, we are not engaged here in clinical analysis of the case, nor in some sort of treatment of S. We are deploying structural categories derived from clinical practice, above all the concept of ordinary psychosis, to critically analyse entrepreneurship discourse. Second, we are not claiming that all entrepreneurs are psychotic. Rather, we are seeking to establish that the category of psychosis, and more specifically the concept of ordinary psychosis, can explain fundamental aspects of the practice of particular entrepreneurs and the discourse of entrepreneurship as such. Third, we are not making moral claims about psychosis and we are not saying that psychosis is evil. Breaking with the symbolic order in itself is not necessarily a negative thing and so we have tried to draw attention to the specifically capitalist nature of the break of the entrepreneur with the social order. Fourth, we are not making epidemiological claims about the rates of occurrence of psychosis, nor are we claiming that psychosis is becoming more common today. Rather, we are pointing to specific contemporary discourses that allow psychotic structures to ‘pass’ as normal. At the limit, if there was a normalisation of neurosis under Fordism, we are pointing here to a normalisation of psychosis under entrepreneurial capitalism. More specifically, we are concerned with the how entrepreneurship promises the escape from the neuroses of capitalist management. In short, entrepreneurship dictates neurosis for the many and psychosis for the few.

If we are critical of the idea and the practice of entrepreneurship, this is not so much a critique of specific individual entrepreneurs so much as it is a critique of the world of entrepreneurship as it is currently configured. With Lacan we have been able to excavate some important elements of the symbolic structure of entrepreneurship, and with this to show how a certain psychosis can be tempting and seductive. In entrepreneurship this break with the symbolic order promises intense liberation for the individual entrepreneur, while the cost of this is a break with the world inhabited by others. We cannot, however, understand the operation of this break if we do not take the step of connecting the structure of discourse to the imperatives of capital accumulation. Entrepreneurship discourse has a specific mode of operation and in it words can do magical things, objects can appear, disappear or reappear elsewhere, while the subject can find liberation, at least in the imaginary, in the escape from the world of others.

In the real world every individual entrepreneur is a split subject. They are split between the discourse of entrepreneurship, to which they must always submit at least to a certain extent. But every entrepreneur is also caught between this and other discourses. We saw the way that S appealed to the highest visions of truth, justice and ethics, even if these visions were foreclosed in his own practice. Each of us is always caught between more than one discourse, which is why Lacan insists that ‘The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving and realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image’ (Lacan, 1988b: 54). In the descent into entrepreneurship, traces of other discourses will always remain.

We have focussed here on the discourse of entrepreneurship in order to grasp its reality. We have paid less attention to the symbolic structures that move in other directions, that go elsewhere, or challenge this discourse. Here in the mountains, however, those other discourses have not yet been completely forgotten. Entrepreneurship discourse is not all. From the many instances of modes of speech that are outside or that refuse the discourse of entrepreneurship, we will therefore close with the words of the José Manuel Arango, the great poet and late Professor of Symbolic Logic and the Philosophy of Language at the University of Antioquia in Medellín. In one of his poems dedicated to the mountains of Antioquia, we find something that departs radically from the discourses of both the master and the capitalist, in words bound tightly to each other and to the land.

With a glass in hand, looking at the mountains,

I caress the back of my dog.

These mountains of ours

in the interior,

so familiar they are almost forgotten,

seen so much they are almost invisible,

it is not even certain that they are not

the furniture of a dream.

These sullen mountains

that narrow,

that absorb themselves in us.

Now perhaps only a manner

of the voice,

of the step,

of the gesture.

I like to caress them with my eyes

slowly following

their rugged lines,

while on their backs light

imperceptibly

shifts from green to blue

to violet.

I like to caress them with my eyes,

as I caress

the back of my dog with my free

hand.

(Arango, 1995: 81–82, our translation)

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Campbell Jones

Author biographies

Sebastian C. Santisteban is a researcher, writer and lecturer on tech start-ups, creativity and entrepreneurship. His work is based in cultural studies, critical theory, critical entrepreneurship studies and Lacanian theory. He has a PhD in Social Studies from the Universidad Externado de Colombia and has undertaken postdoctoral research in critical theory at the University of Auckland.

Campbell Jones has a longstanding interest in the consequences of the thought of Jacques Lacan for the critical analysis of economy, organization and entrepreneurship. His publications include ‘The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship’ (2005, in this journal), Unmasking the Entrepreneur (2009, Edward Elgar) and ‘Entrepreneurship and Expropriation’ (2012, in this journal).

References

Applebaum

(2003) Muddied Waters: Race, Region and Local History in Colombia, 1846-1948. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Arango

(1995) ‘Montañas 3’ in Montañas, pp. 81–2. Santa Fe de Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma.

Arnaud

(2012) ‘The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Organization Studies and Management: An Overview’, Organization Studies 33(9): 1121–35.

Arnaud

Vanheule

(2013) ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Management Research: On the Possibilities and Limits of Convergence’, Management Decision 51(8): 1664–77.

Arnaud

Vidaillet

(2018) ‘Clinical and Critical: The Lacanian Contribution to Management and Organization Studies’, Organization 25(1): 69–97.

Arthur

C. J.

(2002) ‘The Spectre of Capital’ in the New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden: Brill.

Bakan

(2004) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. London: Constable.

BBC (2021) ‘Colombia Protests: UN “Deeply Alarmed” by Bloodshed in Cali’. Retrieved May 18, 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56983865

Benjamin

(1996) ‘Capitalism as religion’, in Bullock

Jennings

M. W.

(eds) Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10.

Bentham

(1967) ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’, in Harrison

(ed.) A Fragment on Government and an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, pp. 113–435. Oxford: Blackwell.

11.

Berglund

Verdujn

(eds) (2018) Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education: Adopting a Critical Approach in the Classroom. Oxford: Routledge.

12.

Böhm

Batta

(2010) ‘Just Doing It: Enjoying Commodity Fetishism With Lacan’, Organization 17(3): 345–61.

13.

Braverman

(1998) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 25th anniversary ed. New York, NY: Monthly Review.

14.

Brottman

(2009) ‘Psychoanalysis and Magic: Then and Now’, American Imago 66(4): 471–89.

15.

Brousse

M.-H.

(2013) ‘Ordinary Psychosis in the Light of Lacan’s Theory of Discourse’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 26: 23–31.

16.

Bruno

(2020) Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom (trans. Holland

). London: Routledge.

17.

Cederström

(2009) ‘Lacan Goes Business’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology 7: 16–32.

18.

Cederström

Hoedemaekers

(eds) (2010) Lacan and Organization. London: Mayfly Books.

19.

Contu

(2020) ‘Critical Management Studies’, in Stavrakakis

(ed.) Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory, pp. 122–35. New York, NY: Routledge.

20.

Contu

Driver

Jones

(eds) (2010) ‘Jacques Lacan With Organization Studies’, Organization 17(3): 307–15.

21.

Cope

(2019) The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer. London: Pluto.

22.

Cremin

(2010) ‘Never Employable Enough: The (Im)possibility of Satisfying the Boss’s Desire’, Organization 17(2): 131–49.

23.

Dashtipour

Rumens

(2018) ‘Entrepreneurship, Incongruence and Affect: Drawing Insights From a Swedish Anti-Racist Organisation’, Organization 25(2): 223–41.

24.

Daub

(2020) What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry Into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

25.

Davies

(2017) ‘The Rise of Modern Magic’, in Davies

(ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, pp. 195–224. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

26.

Derrida

(1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (trans. Kamuf

). New York, NY: Routledge.

27.

Dey

Stayaert

(eds) (2018) Social Entrepreneurship: An Affirmative Critique. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

28.

Driver

(2017) ‘Never Social and Entrepreneurial Enough? Exploring the Identity Work of Social Entrepreneurs From a Psychoanalytic Perspective’, Organization 24(6): 715–36.

29.

Driver

(2021) ‘Caring for the Divided Self: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Care and Identity in Organizations’, Organization. Published online before print February 22, doi: 10.1177/1350508421995747.

30.

Essers

Dey

Tedmanson

, et al. (eds) (2017) Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship: Challenging Dominant Discourses. Oxford: Routledge.

31.

Federici

(2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York, NY: Autonomedia.

32.

Fink

(2004) Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

33.

Freud

(1953) ‘Psychical (or Mental) Treatment’, in Strachey

(ed.) Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II, pp. 281–302. London: Hogarth.

34.

Freud

(1962) ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, in Strachey

(ed.) Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III, pp. 45–61. London: Hogarth.

35.

Ganzin

Islam

Suddaby

(2020) ‘Spirituality and Entrepreneurship: The Role of Magical Thinking in Future-Oriented Sensemaking’, Organization Studies 41(1): 77–102.

36.

Godin

(2020) The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. London: Penguin Business.

37.

Goldman

G. A.

Tselepis

(2021) ‘“What’s Puzzling You is the Nature of My Game”: What the Grand Narrative of Entrepreneurship Doesn’t Say’, International Entrepreneurship Review 7(1): 7–19.

38.

Gosden

(2020) The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to Present. London: Penguin.

39.

Hegel

G. W. F.

(2010) The Science of Logic (trans. di Giovanni

). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

40.

Hegel

G. W. F.

(2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. T. Pinkard). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

41.

Hjorth

Jones

Gartner

W. B.

(2008) ‘Introduction for “Recreating/Recontextualising Entrepreneurship”’, Scandinavian Journal of Management 24(2): 81–4.

42.

Hjorth

Stayaert

(eds) (2009) The Politics and Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

43.

Hoedemaekers

Keegan

(2010) ‘Performance Pinned Down: Studying Subjectivity and the Language of Performance’, Organization Studies 31(8): 1021–44.

44.

Holland

(2015) ‘The Capitalist Uncanny’, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8: 96–124.

45.

Horkheimer

(1972) Critical Theory: Selected Essays (trans. O’Connell

M. J.

). New York: Continuum.

46.

Jimenez

(2020) ‘The Silicon Doctrine’, Triple C 18(1): 322–36.

47.

Jones

(2018) ‘Where Thought is Not’, in Bartlett

A. J.

Clemens

(eds) Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses, pp. 177–260. London: Bloomsbury.

48.

Jones

Murtola

A. M.

(2012) ‘Entrepreneurship and Expropriation’, Organization 19(5): 635–55.

49.

Jones

Spicer

(2005) ‘The Sublime Object of Entrepreneurship’, Organization 12(2): 223–46.

50.

Jones

Spicer

(2006) ‘Entrepreneurial Excess’, in Joanna

Linstead

David

, et al (eds) The Passion of Organizing, pp. 187–202. Copenhagen: Abstrakt.

51.

Jones

Spicer

(2009) Unmasking the Entrepreneur. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

52.

Kenny

(2020) ‘Lacan, Identities and Organizations: Potentialities and Impossibilities’, in Andrew

(ed.) Oxford Handbook of Identities and Organizations, pp. 185–99. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

53.

Kenny

Haugh

Fotaki

(2020) ‘Organizational Form and Pro-social Fantasy in Social Enterprise Creation’, Human Relations 73(1): 94–123.

54.

Kuhn

(2020) Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. Harvard, MA: MIT Press.

55.

Lacan

(1977a) Ecrits: A Selection (trans. Sheridan

). London: Norton.

56.

Lacan

(1977b) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964 (trans. Sheridan

). London: Norton.

57.

Lacan

(1978) ‘Du discourse psychanalytique’ in Lacan in Italia, 1953-1978, En Italie Lacan. Milan: Salamandra.

58.

Lacan

(1988a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954 (trans. Forrester

). London: Norton.

59.

Lacan

(1988b) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 (trans. Tomaselli

). London: Norton.

60.

Lacan

(1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 (trans. Grigg

). London: Routledge.

61.

Lacan

(1993) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956 (trans. Grigg

). London: Routledge.

62.

Lacan

(1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973 (trans. Fink

). London: Norton.

63.

Lacan

(2006a) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (trans. Fink

). New York, NY: Norton.

64.

Lacan

(2006b) Le séminaire, livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre. Paris: Seuil.

65.

Lacan

(2006c) Le séminaire, livre XVIII. D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. Paris: Seuil.

66.

Lacan

(2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969-1970 (trans. Grigg

). London: Norton.

67.

Lacan

(2008) My Teaching (trans. Macey

). London: Verso.

68.

Lacan

(2013a) On the Names of the Father (trans. Fink

). Oxford: Polity.

69.

Lacan

(2013b) The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics (trans. Fink

). Oxford: Polity.

70.

Lacan

(2014) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962-1963 (trans. Price

A. R.

). Oxford: Polity.

71.

Lacan

(2015) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 1960-1961 (trans. Fink

). Oxford: Polity.

72.

Lacan

(2016) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975-1976 (trans. Price

A. R.

). Oxford: Polity.

73.

Lacan

(2017a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious, 1957-1958 (trans. Grigg

). Oxford: Polity.

74.

Lacan

(2017b) Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations at the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital (trans. Price

A. R.

). Oxford: Polity.

75.

Lacan

(2018) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX: . . . or Worse, 1971-1972 (trans. Price

A. R.

). Oxford: Polity.

76.

Lacan

(2019) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, 1958-1959 (trans. Fink

). Oxford: Polity.

77.

Lacan

(2020) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object Relation, 1956-1957 (trans. Price

A. R.

). Oxford: Polity.

78.

Lamont

Steinmeyer

(2018) The Secret History of Magic: The True Story of the Deceptive Art. London: Penguin Putnam.

79.

Laurent

. (2013) ‘Ordinary psychosis’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 26: 11–22.

80.

Letiche

Linstead

Moriceau

J.-L.

(eds) (2020) The Magic of Organization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

81.

McGowan

(2003) The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

82.

Marx

(1981) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three (trans. Fernbach

). London: Penguin.

83.

Marx

(1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (trans. Fowkes

). London: Penguin.

84.

Marx

(1998) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 37. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

85.

Marx

(2004) Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Dritter Band. In Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol. II, p. 15. Berlin: Academie Verlag.

86.

Marx

(2015) Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1964-1865 (trans. Fowkes

). Chicago, IL: Haymarket.

87.

Miller

J.-A.

(2013) ‘Ordinary Psychosis Revisited’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 26: 33–48.

88.

Murray

(2016) The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form. Chicago, IL: Haymarket.

89.

Murtola

A.-M.

(2018) ‘How the Global Tech Elite Imagine the Future’, Economic and Social Research Aotearoa 11: 1–12.

90.

Ngai

(2020) Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap/Harvard University Press.

91.

Örtenblad

(ed.) (2020) Against Entrepreneurship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

92.

Pauwels

(2019) ‘The Most Hysterical of Masters: Lacan’s Capitalist Discourse and Contemporary Styles of Interpellation’, Psychoanalysis Culture & Society 24: 53–71.

93.

Pedersen

Kristensen

A. R.

(2019) ‘“Blowing up the Pylon”: The Limitations to Lacanism in Organization Studies, Seen From the Perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’, Culture and Organization 25(3): 189–201.

94.

Postone

(1993) Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

95.

Robert-Houdin

J.-E.

(1859) Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author and Conjuror, vol. 2. London: Chapman and Hall.

96.

Santisteban

S. C.

(2018a) Las Startups en Bogotá: Un Estudio Crítico sobre los Imaginarios de la Creatividad y el Emprendimiento en la Hipermodernidad. Medellín: Serie investigaciones CEIPA.

97.

Santisteban

S. C.

(2018b) ‘Las startups tecnológicas en Bogotá: un estudio teórico desde la hipermodernidad y el psicoanálisis lacaniano’, Revista Espacios 39(14): 31.

98.

Santisteban

S. C.

(2019) ‘The Tech Entrepreneur in Colombia: A Discussion of Actor-Network-Theory, Lacanian Theory and Social Imaginaries’, Digithum 23: 1–13.

99.

Santisteban

S. C.

(ed.) (2020) Emprendimiento En el Valle de Aburrá: Miradas Críticas. Sabaneta: Fondo Editorial CEIPA.

100.

Sköld

(2009) ‘An Evil King “thing”, Rising, Falling and Multiplying in Trucker Culture’, Organization 16(2): 249–66.

101.

Smith

(2016) Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. New York, NY: Monthly Review.

102.

Sørensen

B. M.

(2008) ‘“Behold, I Am Making All Things New”: The Entrepreneur as Savior in the Age of Creativity’, Scandinavian Journal of Management 24: 85–93.

103.

Stavrakakis

(ed.) (2007) The Lacanian Left: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

104.

Stavrakakis

(2010) ‘Symbolic Authority, Fantasmatic Enjoyment and the Spirits of Capitalism: Genealogies of Mutual Engagement’, in Cederström

Hoedemaekers

(eds) Lacan and Organization, pp. 59–100. London: MayFlyBooks.

105.

Suwandi

(2019) Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism. New York, NY: Monthly Review.

106.

Tedmanson

Verduyn

Essers

, et al. (eds) (2012) ‘Critical Perspectives in Entrepreneurship Research’, Organization 19(5): 531–41.

107.

Tomšič

(2015) The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan. London: Verso.

108.

Torres Oviedo

C. F.

Misoczky

M. C.

(2020) ‘Por una crítica ontológica de la ideologíaendimiento’, Innova 30(78): 61–73.

109.

Twinam

(1982) Miners, Merchants and Farmers in Colonial Colombia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

110.

Vanheule

(2011) The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

111.

Vanheule

(2016) ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1948.

112.

Vidaillet

(2013) Evaluez-moi! Évaluation au travail: les ressorts d’une fascination. Paris: Seuil.

113.

Walsh

(2021) ‘Marx, Subsumption and the Critique of Innovation’, Organization. Published online before print May 21, doi: 10.1177/13505084211015377.

114.

Weber

(1978) ‘The Types of Legitimate Domination’, in Guenther

Wittich

(eds) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, pp. 212–300. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

115.

Žižek

(1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.