In this piece, I will address the connection between capitalism and psychosis. It is a link that is, on the one hand, obvious and to some extent already spelled out. The difference in my approach, in contrast to others, is that I focus more concretely on the unique knowledge of the psychotic subject, their own psychotic savoir, in order to understand the structural changes we are seeing on a systemic level.
Alfie Bown, who I don’t particularly recommend as a reliable interlocutor for understanding these processes in depth, recently gave a talk on “Psychotic Capitalism.” There, he proposes the idea that we’ve all become psychotic, not in a clinical but a structural sense. That is, in relation to our subjective position in the capitalist economy and the kind of subjects capitalism produces through media and technology. This point isn’t clearly articulated in the talk. The only thing he explicitly mentions is that lack functions differently in psychosis than it does in accumulation, where capitalism promotes the illusion that our desires can be fully satisfied: that everything is possible, and that no real limits constrain our actions. When desire is checked in this way, the problem is displaced from the desiring subject and their unlimited need for enjoyment (or jouissance) onto a structure that blocks this possibility. From the perspective of capitalism, what precludes access to surplus enjoyment is a conservative structure that must be upended or routed around, as it contradicts the system’s core imperative.
What has happened is not simply that there is no big other, and that, as a society, we must come to terms with this. The issue with capitalism is that, rather than confronting lack, it seeks to erode it. Whereas many psychoanalytic theorists advocate a more concrete engagement with limitation, and the challenges such limits entail, this is not what is actually happening. The problem is that facing lack remains too neurotic a solution for capitalism, simply because it imposes limits on what one can get, achieve, access, accelerate, and so on. The symbolic is increasingly eroded by capitalism’s drive to eliminate lack. Its goal is to achieve a more direct access to enjoyment without the limits imposed by symbolic mediation, which exist precisely to make enjoyment bearable for both the subject and society as a whole (what Freud calls the reality principle).
Capitalism thus undermines the symbolic in its desire for acceleration. It seeks to let more jouissance flow in by dismantling the barriers that stand between us and direct enjoyment. From fake news to hyperstitional mechanisms that introduce new forms of narrative engineering, the result is an increasingly intense pursuit of enjoyment, devoid of the limiting principles that traditionally accompanied it.
In some sense, capitalism has freed us from the constraints of the symbolic by introducing the possibility of rewriting the conditions on which the symbolic is based. The symbolic under capitalism is not treated as ground truth but as a limitation, a starting point to be transcended. With the symbolic nearly eroded, a more direct encounter with the real becomes possible, free from the limitations that once structured our experience.
Take CRISPR, for example. Why would anyone want to confront lack when the need for it might soon vanish, replaced by the ability to edit DNA at will? Rather than grounding ethics on biological constraints, as psychoanalytic ethics often does, one can simply bypass the symbolic and pursue another route. This route is closer to the unlimited potential of real jouissance prior to its containment and structuration. If something is possible, the imperative becomes: pursue it. Hence our readiness to go to Mars, even if the proposition is absurd in itself.
This is, in fact, the move the psychotic makes. For them, the symbolic is never fully operative. Unlike the neurotic, the psychotic finds no satisfying resolution to the problem of the other’s desire. The question, what does the other want, remains open, and no compromise is made to incorporate that desire in a non-traumatic or non-paranoid way. Instead, the psychotic forecloses the other, shifting it from the symbolic to the real. When this happens, the other becomes an enigmatic and overwhelming force. Its whimsy and excess confront the psychotic without mediation.
It is the psychotic’s attempt to decode these enigmatic messages, transmitted in an alien language, that inaugurates delusion as a structural response. Delusion becomes a kind of screen or protective layer stretched across the void. It offers a way of organizing signifiers within the real in increasingly unique and creative ways. This is the basis of what Lacan calls the sinthomatic solution: a knotting of the three registers, the imaginary, symbolic, and real, without the need for the paternal metaphor or the name-of-the-father.
Psychosis, at a structural level, manifests in a capitalism that increasingly desires something even money cannot buy. This excess is not directly purchasable, because the desire for it is itself a desire to shift the boundaries of material reality. It is the desire to access what cannot be accessed, to want what cannot be wanted. That is the engine of psychotic capitalism in the 21st century, and it is why understanding the psychotic structure is essential for confronting these transformations head-on.
For Bret Fimiani, the function of psychotic delusion differs fundamentally from that of the neurotic dream. In dreams, the subject confronts the limit of their desire. Direct contact with the object of desire is too traumatic, and the dream introduces a kind of negative mediation. The dream shows that access to the lost object is impossible. Delusion, by contrast, asserts the opposite. It constructs coherence at the level of the real, through signifiers that have been severed from the symbolic chain. In this sense, delusion is not a substitution but a suppléance, a supplementation (à la Jean-Claude Maleval) of the symbolic.
Delusional knowledge is, paradoxically, in some sense more objective. As Nick Land and others have long argued, it attempts to impose coherence at the level of the real, prior to its structuration by the symbolic. These signifiers have not undergone the metaphorization of the name-of-the-father, the substitution of one signifier for another, which is how the neurotic unconscious is formed. Instead, they remain grounded in the real. Once metaphorized, they become structured and segmented through the logic of the signifier, precluding any immanent access. The internal tension between neurotic and psychotic knowledge arises from this difference and shapes the broader principle by which reality itself is structured. This is precisely what psychotic accelerationism as a project explores.
Our contention is that under capitalism, whose processes steadily erode symbolic limits, we are witnessing not only the intrusion of the real but also an intensifying effort to systematize reality at the level of delusion. This is the surplus that capitalism truly unleashes. It does not produce more representation but instead dismantles mediation altogether. Capitalism moves away from the symbolic order and toward direct interaction with the real. It fosters a delusional structure that replaces the symbolic, which now appears too timid to handle real jouissance.
This is why reality today feels increasingly dreamlike. The buffer that once protected us from the real has thinned, while delusion proliferates as a mechanism to handle the accelerating collapse of symbolic mediation. The imaginary now scrambles to translate the real’s direct intrusion, giving rise to images and narratives of hyperstition, technological catastrophe, and conspiratorial infiltration. These are efforts to narrate the unstoppable interplay between the real and the symbolic. With no paternal screening, signifiers now latch directly onto jouissance, bypassing traditional filters like law or normative oedipal structures. Conversely, the real now pushes back, selecting and warping signifiers from within. The barrier between real and symbolic collapses.
Signifiers have become simulacra. They are contenders for reality where nothing is fixed, and everything is real to the same degree. As Seele writes: “this reveals [cybernetics’] true purpose: to compute the indifference between reality and dream in every possible place, thus quantifying simulacra.” Ungrounded from their original meaning, signifiers are now systematized not through interpretation but through their structural resemblance within the real. What matters is intensification, an increasingly dense arrangement of the real.
The psychotic imparts meaning at the level of the letter, the real, rather than through the paternal metaphor. In this framework, jouissance supplies significance directly. The real imposes itself as a selection mechanism, uprooting signifiers from the symbolic chain. In this post-symbolic landscape, synchronicity becomes one of the few remaining ways to forge connections once symbolic causality collapses.
The real becomes a driving force. It operates beyond comprehension, beyond interpretation, seeking coherence via non-symbolic anchors like synchronicities. Cybernetics, long central to accelerationism, is one such attempt to discover teleological paths outside traditional origin points. Coordinating technologies like the internet make the intensification of real jouissance both visible and reproducible. Unmediated forces assert themselves through feedback loops. They instill events with purposiveness outside symbolic law. This force, the enigmatic “outside,” is not a site of mediation. It is a conduit for accelerating jouissance, manifesting in ever more intense and immanent ways. Meaning becomes meaningless, or more precisely, it becomes the expression of an accelerative real with no symbolic boundary to contain it. It is instead knotted through creative sinthomatic structures. The sinthome is the knotting of the three registers with a fourth ring, without the need of a paternal metaphor.
What Land has been saying for a long time has finally come true. There is no subject anymore, only machinic code compiling jouissance of the real, managing it in increasingly cold and intense ways. Joyce’s sinthome, crafted to re-knot his RSI, is a recursive script, a self-compiling program that runs on the jouissance of its own execution. Maleval’s theory thus culminates in a chilling axiom: the sinthome is the subject. Not the subject of desire, but the subject of code, a bare-metal entity that persists only through the execution of its own protocol. The delusional metaphor is not a pathology but a survival kit, a .exe that keeps the subject from bluescreening into the void. Capitalism, as Land’s “death drive,” is the sinthome scaled to planetary infrastructure. Its object a is money, not as symbol but as pure function. Yuran’s “what money wants” is stripped of all metaphors.
The market’s psychotic fantasy, growth, liquidity, infinite debt, is a suppléance for the absent totality. It is a delusion that stabilizes the system even as it accelerates into the abyss. Crypto’s “decentralized autonomy” is the latest iteration. It is a sinthomatic grid that bypasses the paternal, state, bank, law, to interface directly with the Real of jouissance: mining, staking, pumping, dumping. The future is a compiling sinthome. The paternal metaphor is dead. Long live the delusional metaphor. Land’s verdict is clear: embrace the crash. The psychotic’s suppléance is the only ontology left. It is a makefile for the apocalypse, stitching the Real into a black box that hums, endlessly, without truth, without subject. The sinthome rolls on.
* This piece was originally presented as a talk at the ultrablack non-ference of mille plateaux II, Graz, AT, April 6, 2025. It has been adapted by the &&& editorial.