TRUMP AS A READER OF LACAN

NOW FREE: It is not simply meaningless; its meaning is to be meaningless.

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Jacques Lacan’s line of thought is difficult to follow, especially when he creates neologisms to render the paradoxical link between language and enjoyment, like jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-meaning). Another neologism targets the same link: le sinthome, “sinthom” as opposed to symptom. Sinthoms are a kind of “atoms of enjoyment,” the minimal synthesis of language and enjoyment, units of signs permeated with enjoyment (like a tic we compulsively repeat).

Are sinthoms not quanta of enjoyment, its smallest, most elementary packages? A sinthom can also serve to establish a social link as an empty form of a ritual, a meaningless meme. From 2024, such a meme that exploded was “six-seven”: no secret meaning, no cipher of some hidden content, just two numbers uttered one after another. The phrase “six-seven”, in its modern sense, appears to originate with the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s 2024 track Doot Doot (6 7), in which it is either a reference to police radio code, or 67th Street, or something else; it then featured in a South Park episode, and after that it exploded in all directions.

“It’s a bit of meme slang that refers only to itself, advertising nothing beyond the average 13-year-old’s capacity for being annoying and a corresponding willingness to flog a dead horse. Somewhere along the line the phrase acquired an accompanying hand gesture: two upturned palms alternately rising and falling, like weighing scales.”¹

It is not simply meaningless; its meaning is to be meaningless. Such memes last a certain time, usually not longer than a year, and “six-seven” is now already overshadowed by others.

During his first term, Trump produced a perfect case of such a sinthom that serves as a social link. In a now viral tweet, he wrote: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”² Trump never acknowledged that the tweet contained a mistyping; after deleting the original tweet, he tweeted again: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy!”³ He was right: “covfefe” is what Lacan called a sinthom, not a symptom that contains a coded meaning to be brought out by interpretation but a particular meaningless form that condenses enjoyment. While a symptom can be dissolved through its interpretation, sinthoms are something a subject should learn to fully identify with: they provide the basis of the subject’s identity, and if they disappear, the subject itself disintegrates.

Trump is also right to refer to enjoyment as an injunction: “Enjoy!” When you stupidly enjoy “covfefe,” you move beyond (or, rather, beneath) language as a means of communication, of exchanging signified content, to signifiers as condensations, fixed forms, of jouis-sense. No wonder, then, that Trump’s “Enjoy!” functions as a superego injunction at its purest. We usually perceive the Freudian superego as the cruel and sadistic ethical agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. Lacan, however, posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty. Enjoyment itself is something that parasitizes upon human pleasures, perverting them so that a subject can draw a surplus-enjoyment from displeasure itself.

To understand this paradox, we have to introduce two further distinctions elaborated by Lacan: the one between the Name-of-the-Father (father as the bearer of symbolic authority, as the agent of the dignity of the Law) and the obscene father-enjoyment, the superego agent of enjoyment; and the one between enjoyment (or, rather, pleasure) and surplus-enjoyment which is, to quote Freud, beyond the pleasure principle. We are thereby raising the old Freudian question: why do we enjoy oppression itself? That is to say, power asserts its hold over us not simply by oppression (and repression) which are sustained by a fear of punishment, but by bribing us for our obedience and enforced renunciations – what we get in exchange for our obedience and renunciations is a perverted pleasure in renunciation itself, a gain in loss itself. Lacan called this perverted pleasure surplus-enjoyment. Surplus-enjoyment implies the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself: in its “normal” state, it is nothing. This brings us to Lacan’s notion of objet a as the surplus-enjoyment: there is no “basic enjoyment” to which one adds the surplus-enjoyment, enjoyment is always a surplus, in excess.

Objet a has a long history in Lacan’s teaching; it precedes for decades Lacan’s systematic references to the analysis of commodities in Marx’s Capital. But it is undoubtedly this reference to Marx, especially to Marx’s notion of surplus-value (Mehrwert), that enabled Lacan to deploy his “mature” notion of objet a as surplus-enjoyment (plus-de-jouir, Mehrlust): the predominant motif which permeates all Lacan’s references to Marx’s analysis of commodities is the structural homology between Marx’s surplus-value and what Lacan baptized surplus-enjoyment, the phenomenon called by Freud Lustgewinn, a “gain of pleasure,” which does not designate a simple stepping up of pleasure but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject’s effort to attain pleasure. Another figure of Lustgewinn is the reversal that characterizes hysteria: renunciation of pleasure reverts into pleasure of/in renunciation, repression of desire reverts into desire of repression, etc. Such a reversal lies at the very heart of capitalist logic: as Lacan pointed out, modern capitalism began with counting the pleasure (of gaining profit), and this counting of pleasure immediately reverts into the pleasure of counting (profit).⁴

Now we can see clearly how surplus-enjoyment is the obverse of sadism: when a capitalist switches from counting the pleasure to the pleasure of counting, he renounces (or, at least, relegates to a secondary role) direct pleasure itself (pleasure of consuming particular objects), replacing it with the “abstract” pleasure of counting possible pleasures. Surplus-enjoyment thus functions as a sadistic denigration of actual pleasures. But what has all this to do with Trump? Here comes the true surprise: in one of his latest speeches, there is a passage which quite literally, and in popular terms, reproduces the paradox of superego and surplus-enjoyment:

“Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country until you came along, we’re just always losing. But now we’re winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.”⁵

Russell Sbriglia, who drew my attention to “covfefe” and to these lines, was quite right in claiming that “this is pure sadism. The message is: ‘Americans, encore un effort!’ Don’t be ashamed of winning too much! You must enjoy the pain of winning beyond the pleasure principle! He even delivers these lines like he’s one of Lynch’s superegoic fathers.”⁶ People find the continuous “winning,” the continuous overwhelming intrusion of surplus-enjoyment, unbearable; they want just to live a comfortable life of ordinary pleasures, but Trump acts like the obscene superego father who oppresses the people, his subjects, with the constant pressure to enjoy more, to never relax and accept a comfortable, stable life. Trump quite literally formulates the oppressive, negative dimension of surplus-enjoyment: “no, no, no, you’re going to win again.” This is why the injunction to enjoy is grounded in a “no, no, no.” Trump’s quoted passage enables us to see how the superego paradox is not just a matter of refined theory: it works in our daily experience. So what if we risk a step further and paraphrase the quoted passage by way of taking the key word “winning” in its military sense?

“In preemptive strikes on Iran, our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore, stop bombing Iran! But I say, no, no, no, you’re going to win again, you’re going to win bigger than ever.”

Why? Because Trump is the greatest peacemaker in the history of humanity, or so he claims. And, as we know well, the only way to achieve eternal global peace is through one big last war that will destroy all enemies of peace. As Trump repeats again and again, the US is not at war with Iran; together with Israel it is just liberating the people of Iran (in exactly the same way as Israel liberated Gaza, and the ruins in Tehran made it look more and more like Gaza…). Trump is thereby following his true master, Netanyahu, who is arguably an even greater peacemaker: Israel is now engaged in a total war aimed at bringing peace to the entire Middle East – and peace means here that Israel simply wants to dominate the entire Middle East.

So what are we to do? I am often accused of anti-Serb bias, but I must admit that my favored folk song is a Serb one about Kraljević Marko (Prince Marko, the great hero of Serb medieval songs) meeting his warrior companion and competitor Ljutica Bogdan (the Angry Bogdan) – the prose translation is mine:

“Prince Marko and Ljutica Bogdan, so they say, met on that day. The two grim heroes observe each other for a long time – which of the two will start the fight? They wait one for another. / ‘You know what, my Marko, it would be better for both of us if each of us goes his own way – into the vineyard, onto the field. If we were to fight, the world would tremble, and who knows who would keep his head on.’ / Eagerly awaiting these words, Marko runs off on his horse across the field. Prince Marko and Ljutica Bogdan, so they say, met on that day.”

The surprising anti-climactic decision of the two heroes to forego their duel is not to be read as an indication of their cowardice lurking beneath the mask of a fearless warrior, but as a momentary insight into the meaninglessness of their pursuit of heroic honor – it is as if their underlying reasoning is: “Why the hell should we risk our lives playing this stupid role of heroes expected to fight when they stumble upon each other? Shouldn’t we simply step out of it for a moment, disengage and enjoy some peace?” Gestures like this are infinitely better than great dreams of eternal peace which just bring total war.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/20/six-seven-latest-slang-should-parents-be-worried.

2. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/05/31/sean-spicer-says-covfefe-wasnt-typo-trump-knew-exactly-what-he-meant/102355728/.

3. “Tweet from Donald Trump: “Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe” ??? Enjoy!”“. Twitter. Archived from the original on December 15, 2020. Retrieved August 1, 2020.

4. For a more detailed account of this notion, see chapter “The Varieties of Surplus” in my Incontinence of the Void, Cambridge: MIT Press 2017.

5. https://youtube.com/shorts/MJMSJM-h6b4?si=ai6y8xMfnkDGpZPL.

6. Personal communication.