No Such Thing as Society? On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond

This essay revisits Margaret Thatcher’s notorious claim: “There is no such thing as society.” Not only does this remark sum up the neoliberal political programmatic but it also, and more fundamentally, exposes an entire political ontology, which organizes the antisocial tendencies of the capitalist mode of production. After reflecting on the implications of Thatcher’s implicit stance in ontological matters, the text moves on to the critique of capitalist antisociality in Freud by reflecting specifically on the affective conditions of solidarity. In the end, the encounter of psychoanalysis and emancipatory politics, as well as their own solidarity, is exemplified in the concept of the symptom.