Simon Gros

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Mladen Dolar’s lecture, The Master is Undead, stakes a precise claim about modern authority: psychoanalysis belongs to political modernity because it was born at the moment when traditional sovereignty lost the capacity to guarantee itself, and when “masters” therefore reappear in counterfeit forms that draw their efficacy from the very rationalities that promised to supersede mastery. The distinctive contribution of the talk lies in its tightly engineered conceptual relay between an origin-parable (Freud’s subterranean encounter with a populist demagogue), Lacan’s formal theory of discourses (mastery’s structural afterlife under knowledge), and a contemporary symptomatology (fatigue and rage) that connects neoliberal governance, media ecology, and the present crisis of psychoanalysis. Authority, here, survives by dying into its doubles.

The lecture is composed as a sequence of displacements that are themselves treated as the content of the argument. It begins from an anecdote whose surface seems historiographical and contingent, and it gradually proves itself to be methodological: a parable of how a single line of travel narrative can function as an inaugural diagram. Dolar’s opening movement performs a controlled descent, both literal and conceptual. Freud’s 1898 visit to the Škocjan caves is staged through Freud’s own letter as a passage from tourism into metaphysical imagery: “Tartarus itself,” Dante’s Inferno, Virgil’s motto, and the thought that a descent into a subterranean river may coincide with the gestation of The Interpretation of Dreams. The lecture’s first gesture thus binds together three registers that will remain coupled throughout: a topology (downward passage and return into light), a rhetoric of the infernal (the underworld as site of truth), and a problem of inauguration (a motto that presides). Even Freud’s abandoned alternative motto from Milton—hope extracting resolution from despair—functions as a second seed, because it introduces, alongside the Virgilian provocation to move “infernal regions,” a logic of psychic endurance under conditions where the highest powers no longer bend. The lecture thereby begins by giving psychoanalysis a founding scene that already bears the signature of ambivalence: the infernal is simultaneously a threat, a resource, and a principle of method.

This initial descent then yields what Dolar calls the drama “at the bottom of the abyss,” contained in Freud’s seemingly innocuous note that “the ruler of Vienna” was with them in the cave. The rhetorical economy matters: the claim is that a master is met precisely where ordinary social space is suspended—outside Vienna, outside the city’s political stage, in an underworld that can host what the daylight order cannot. The coincidence becomes emblematic because it locates psychoanalysis’ inception adjacent to a new political type: Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna, whom Hitler later praises as a teacher in mass propaganda and in the mobilization of ressentiment. Dolar’s care with the imperial refusal to appoint Lueger (repeatedly, until capitulation under democratic pressure and papal intercession) performs a further conceptual tightening. The emperor appears as a figure of the “old authority,” a paternal stability whose legitimacy is tied to decorum, unwritten law, and social fabric; Lueger appears as the prototype of a populist mastery that thrives by breaking the very codes that previously defined political legitimacy. In that constellation, authority’s transformation is not narrated as a mere exchange of rulers. It is presented as a mutation of the conditions of acceptability: a politics that abandons decency as a resource, turns contravention into a program, and makes the violation of “unwritten laws” into a technique of adhesion.

The lecture’s argumentative rhythm depends on insisting that this mutation is neither accidental nor external to psychoanalysis. The parable is constructed so that psychoanalysis’ founding scene includes, as its subterranean companion, a demagogue who embodies a mode of authority that will later culminate catastrophically. Dolar reinforces the parable through an ominous temporal symmetry: Freud flees Vienna in 1938; the Anschluss occurs almost exactly forty years after the cave encounter. The point is not historiographical ornament. It is a claim about psychoanalysis as a discipline compelled, by its inception, to confront authority after the “downfall of all authorities,” and to confront the emergence of masters who arise precisely when the fatherly figure of sovereignty has lost its ability to stabilize the symbolic space. The lecture thus treats the political as internal to psychoanalysis’ conceptual mission; the psychoanalytic question of authority is already a question of the social bond, because authority’s crisis is not merely an external theme that psychoanalysis later analyzes, but a constitutive pressure that shaped its original problem-field.

Dolar’s method, at this stage, is diagnostic rather than explanatory in the conventional sense: he uses the anecdote as a compressed symptom whose overdetermined connections can be unfolded. That unfolding includes a detour through the afterlife of Lueger in Vienna’s geography—names of streets, statues, belated contextual plaques, recurrent graffiti, petitions for removal. The insistence on “what’s in the name” is not antiquarian. It continues the lecture’s concern with how social space retains dead authority as a remainder that continues to act. The statue’s persistence, the ambivalence of historians who regard Lueger as a modernizer, and the argument that his antisemitism functioned as pose or vote-getting rhetoric—all of this is mobilized to articulate a logic of extenuation. Dolar treats “benign” antisemitism as a structural moment in the production of the acceptable: lenience toward rhetorical hatred gradually renders imaginable what had previously been unimaginable. The talk thereby introduces a model of historical drift in which the catastrophe is prepared through the social habituation to “poses” that normalize the discourse enabling later fanaticism. What matters is not whether the “pose” was sincere; what matters is the public stabilization of an injurious form that reconfigures the horizon of the sayable.

This drift is then folded into a polemic about psychoanalysis’ alleged patriarchalism. Dolar’s first explicit “point” responds to a contemporary critique—associated, in his telling, with strands of feminism—that psychoanalysis reinstates the father as the key to authority (even in the diluted form of the “Name-of-the-Father,” a signifier of symbolic law) and reduces desire to an Oedipal family drama. The response does not defend the father as normative ground. It shifts the temporal and structural location of the father-function. Freud, Dolar argues, discerns the father’s function precisely when traditional sovereignty has historically lost its sway; psychoanalysis registers the father as an afterlife of authority, a residue that persists after the demise of paternal legitimacy. The function is grasped at the moment it is already in decay, thereby making psychoanalysis less a preservation of patriarchal order than a science of what authority becomes once its paternal form has lost its guaranteed effectiveness.

Here Dolar introduces, with deliberate compactness, Freud’s myth of the primal horde and the dead father who becomes more powerful than the living one. The dead father is the symbolic authority that underpins the symbolic order. Yet the lecture inserts a further, decisive mutation: the dead father himself died. This sentence functions as an operator that transforms the entire field. It proposes a second death of the paternal guarantee: modernity does not merely kill the father; it erodes the symbolic efficacy that the dead father used to exert. Authority’s “afterlife” thereby becomes an afterlife without stable spectral anchoring. The result is a vacancy that is quickly filled, yet filled in a manner that intensifies the problem rather than resolving it. Dolar cites Lacan’s compact formula “father or worse,” and he keeps its valence as an admonition: abolishing paternal authority does not automatically yield emancipation; it can yield a worse configuration, because the paternal figure’s decline does not abolish mastery as such. It reorganizes mastery under new conditions.

That reorganization is the lecture’s central enigma: the master returns, yet the return cannot be described as regression to a premodern sovereignty. The new masters perform a “charade” of sovereignty; they are travesties whose efficacy derives from modernity. The lecture’s second movement is thus an attempt to locate the production of fake mastery within the very structure that modernity names as its emancipatory engine: the discourse of knowledge, reason, expertise, universality. The transition to Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is executed as a shift from parable to formalization. Dolar frames Lacan’s schema historically: developed in the immediate aftermath of May 1968, at a moment of opening and perceived possibility, and now reread half a century later under conditions of closure and exhaustion. The lecture thereby adds an external frame to the internal content: the theory was articulated under a historical horizon that differs sharply from the one in which it is being mobilized. Dolar’s interpretive wager is that the theory still “obliges,” yet requires supplementation by phenomena that have intensified since, especially the proliferation of doubles.

Within Lacan’s framework, the discourse of the master is treated as the minimal structure of premodern social ties: the master-signifier (S1) occupies the position of agent, organizing a chain of knowledge (S2) and producing a remainder. Modernity, in Lacan’s account, introduces the discourse of the university: knowledge (S2) is placed as agent, legitimating governance through competence, expertise, rational administration, public reason. Dolar refuses heavy technicalities, yet he maintains the structural point: modernity’s promise of universality is inseparable from a specific displacement of mastery. The master does not disappear. It is “pushed under the bar,” concealed as the truth of the discourse of knowledge, conditioning knowledge’s universality while remaining disavowed. The master’s concealment is thus constitutive: the university discourse depends on repression of its own master-signifier.

Dolar’s example of “university discourse” in contemporary form—Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now—is introduced as a symptomatic condensation of the modern ideal: reason, science, humanism, progress. The function of the example is not to debate Pinker, but to dramatize the seductive clarity of the university discourse, which offers a political and moral self-image of governance by knowledge. The lecture’s critical pivot is that this self-image necessarily produces, as its underside, the concealed master that can reemerge in counterfeit form. The return is not the past resurfacing. It is the future-prospect of what repression breeds. Dolar’s emphasis on the master as “waiting to make a coming out” renders mastery as temporality: authority’s disavowal becomes its incubation.

At this juncture, the lecture introduces the figure of the double as the key to why counterfeit mastery is worse than the old. In psychoanalysis, the double is never a mere copy; it carries a surplus that exceeds the original, an eerie excess that intensifies the effect. Dolar alludes to a “long history of doubles” proliferating at modernity’s break; he also signals a “lengthy digression” he will set aside, thereby marking the lecture’s own constraint as part of its composition. This restraint is not incidental. It signals that the double is both a concept and a formal pressure: it threatens to proliferate beyond manageable exposition, mirroring its own content. The talk thus begins to perform what it describes: the conceptual apparatus produces its own redoublings.

The subsequent digression to Marx is precisely framed as a confrontation with the same structural problem. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire supplies the canonical formula that history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce. Dolar treats Bonapartism as a symptom rather than an accident: a farcical mastery that expresses the conditions under which bourgeois modernity consolidates itself while political forms degrade into caricature. Bonapartism’s alliance with the lumpenproletariat, and its function as the enabling “extension” of liberalism, is offered as an early model of how modern rationalities and modern economies can coexist with grotesque political figures. Dolar stresses that the structural problem persists, though the figure has evolved under media and social media; capital has globalized; repression has transformed. The lecture’s conceptual contribution here is its account of contemporary repression as paradoxical: transgression is manifest, laws are violated in public view, yet repression intensifies; the repression is itself repressed. The exposure of indecency does not weaken authority; it can stabilize it by shifting the coordinates of shame, decency, and legitimacy.

The lecture then executes a second major displacement: from Marx’s political satire to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and from there to Foucault’s notion of “grotesque sovereignty.” This movement appears, on the surface, as a cultural-theoretical excursus, yet it functions as an essential bridge between structural discourse theory and the phenomenology of contemporary masters. Ubu is described as the spectacle of sovereignty’s lack of subtlety: arrogant stupidity, shamelessness, vulgarity, cruelty. Dolar’s aside about “Trump” and the onomatopoetic quality of the name functions in the lecture as an index of how signifiers themselves can operate as political specters: the name imitates a sound, yet the sound seems to imitate the evocative force of the signifier rather than any natural noise. The political master becomes a phonetic object, a brand-like condensation that works by the sonic economy of repetition and affect.

Foucault’s definition of grotesque sovereignty is then quoted at length and given interpretive weight: power can function “in its full rigor” even in the hands of someone “effectively discredited.” The grotesque is not a magical dethroning; it is a mode of expressing power’s inevitability. Dolar extracts from this a paradox that will govern his later account of media and sociality: nudity can become the ultimate disguise; exposure can increase deception; lifting inhibitions can intensify repression. The grotesque sovereign, displayed as buffoon, does not dissolve authority. It can reinforce it by making the theatrical groundlessness of power into a resource. Sovereignty becomes a performance that continues to work even when its performative conditions are openly visible.

Yet Dolar also introduces a critical reservation about Foucault. Foucault presents the grotesque as a transhistorical possibility of sovereignty, ranging from Nero to Mussolini, a category that floats across historical breaks. Dolar insists on a more precise problem: the grotesque sovereign as an offspring of the university discourse, a symptom of knowledge’s internal impasse. Here the lecture returns to Lacan’s structural algebra and uses it as a diagnostic for why the grotesque is modern. When S2—knowledge, expertise, administrative rationality—cannot measure up to the position of agent, the grotesque appears as a compensatory formation. Counterfeit sovereignty is thus connected to the failures of governance by knowledge, and to the disavowed mastery that knowledge requires as its hidden truth.

A further displacement deepens this claim: grotesquerie does not belong only to the sovereign; it can belong to bureaucracy. Knowledge itself has a double: a monstrous expansion of S2, knowledge “run amok,” the administrative machine driven by mediocre, useless functionaries. Dolar delights, with visible relish, in Foucault’s portrait of bureaucratic grotesque as a “real possibility” rather than a mere literary vision. This is a crucial extension of the lecture’s argument. It refuses the comfortable view that the problem lies merely in charismatic demagogues. The apparatus that should embody rational administration can itself become grotesque, because the removal of the master does not automatically yield rationality; it can yield an unbounded proliferation of procedures, incompetences, and arbitrary power-effects. The modern state’s rational form therefore contains, as its functional component, the possibility that reason’s machinery can produce irrational domination.

At this point the lecture explicitly reorganizes its conceptual inventory around a triad of structural elements and their doubles: S1 (master-signifier) and its counterfeit; S2 (knowledge) and its bureaucratic grotesque; and jouissance—enjoyment in the sense of surplus satisfaction that exceeds pleasure—and its imitation. Dolar’s composition is careful: he announces he is moving to the “final part,” thereby framing the prior movements as preparatory. Yet the “final part” is not a closure in the simple sense; it is the conceptual site where the earlier parable of subterranean descent returns under an economic and affective register. The infernal is rediscovered as a structural economy of excess.

The entry point is Lacan’s thesis that capitalism is defined by a historical moment when surplus enjoyment became calculable. Dolar marks the statement as staggering because it condenses, in one move, Marx’s surplus value, the psychoanalytic surplus of enjoyment, and the history of capitalism’s emergence. The lecture’s central conceptual tension is then elaborated with precision: enjoyment is defined as excess, derailment, the non-economical, the traumatic repetition that cannot be contained within the pleasure principle. How, then, can it become countable? The claim appears paradoxical precisely because it asserts that capitalism performs an impossible operation: it counts the uncountable, measures the immeasurable, economizes what is structurally non-economical.

Dolar’s handling of this paradox is dialectical in the strict sense: the attempted domestication of excess has a reverse effect. Capitalism does not remain within the pleasure principle; it is driven by excess. The very act of making surplus calculable contaminates calculation with excess; it infinitizes counting, turning the rationality of accumulation into an irrational, unlimited drive. Enjoyment is homogenized through subsumption under accumulation, yet this homogenization itself becomes destabilized, because the drive does not stop at equilibrium. Crises, far from functioning as terminal obstacles, become generators of further drive; innovations, including those with revolutionary aspirations, become new fuel. The lecture thereby offers an internal critique of the expectation that capitalism will be undone by a “final crisis” or by an external radical gesture. Capital, in Dolar’s Lacanian rendering, feeds on what opposes it, because the surplus it produces belongs structurally to its own motion.

This logic is sharpened through Lacan’s statement that surplus value announces the “theft of enjoyment.” Dolar emphasizes the ambiguity: consumer society derives its meaning from making the human element homogeneous with the surplus produced by industry; an “imitation” surplus enjoyment “draws quite a crowd.” The imitation here is not a mere falsification that can be unmasked. Dolar stresses that the logic of imitation does not presuppose an authentic remainder that could simply be recovered once deception is exposed. The unmasking does not do the work, because the sale of imitation includes the sale of the very prospect of authenticity; authenticity becomes part of the commodity’s libidinal packaging. Thus the double of enjoyment is neither an external distortion of an original enjoyment nor a simple ideological veil. It is a structural modality of enjoyment under capitalist conditions, where the commodity-form offers enjoyment’s promise as a mechanism of desire.

The lecture then introduces its most contemporary thesis: the possibility that something has shifted in the last fifty years such that capitalism’s infinite capacity to integrate excess may be reaching a point of paralysis. Dolar proposes, with cautious speculation, an “excess over the excess”: a byproduct of integrating excess into profit-making that can no longer be integrated, and that threatens collapse of the social bond. The Covid crisis is invoked as a magnifying glass that crystallizes this development; the crisis intensifies rather than inaugurates the tendency. The conceptual novelty is the claim that capitalism’s transformation increasingly targets the subject less as consumer than as waste. The subject appears as discarded remainder, a residue no longer smoothly reinvested into the circuits of enjoyment-as-commodity.

Dolar then offers an empirical phenomenology of this remainder in two opposed yet connected reactions: fatigue and rage. The distinction between tiredness and exhaustion is given conceptual sharpness: tiredness still implies recoverable possibilities; exhaustion implies that the space of possibilities itself is depleted. Dolar insists that depression and burnout are socially necessary effects, not individual shortcomings. They coincide with the rise of neoliberalism over decades; their scale reaches “pandemic global proportions” independent of Covid. In parallel, rage appears as free-floating excess that cannot be recuperated and channeled back into the system; targets are interchangeable; the affect is mobile and politically exploitable.

The lecture’s conceptual compression is important here: depression and rage are treated as two sides of a single structure. Depression is rage arrested and turned inward, immobilizing and blocking. The oscillation between the two is presented as defining the present moment. This is not merely psychological description; it is a claim about the social bond’s disintegration under conditions where the subject is produced as waste. The lecture thereby returns, under a new register, to the earlier paradox of exposure and repression. A society saturated with stimuli can yield exhaustion; a society saturated with communication can yield the collapse of shared distinctions that sustain public reason. The excess does not dissolve under visibility; it accumulates as paralysis and as fury.

Dolar then binds this symptomatology back to psychoanalysis’ institutional fate. The rise of massive pathologies—forms that appear to exceed the classical clinical triad of neurosis, psychosis, perversion, along with transformations such as narcissistic and borderline phenomena—extends beyond psychoanalysis as clinical practice. Psychoanalysis is marginalized amid the “stunning rise” of pharmacology and the therapeutic-industrial complex, which offers chemical means for mass afflictions. Classical analysis appears expensive, time-consuming, socially limited; the world is “flooded” with antidepressants and anesthetics. Dolar’s formulation of contemporary subjectivity as simultaneously anesthetized and stimulated condenses the lecture’s entire logic of the double: pacification and excitation belong together as modes of regulating surplus affects that otherwise threaten the bond.

This is the point at which populism returns explicitly as the political apparatus that has been able, so far, to canalize rage. If pharmacology pacifies, populism excites; it encourages production of rage while lacking a substantive program; it handles the affective surplus that cannot find representation. Liberal politics confronts this dynamic increasingly, because the older forms of legitimacy—expertise, public reason, parliamentary procedure—are destabilized by a political logic that thrives on the collapse of the boundary between knowledge and opinion, facts and rumors, private and public, decent and indecent. Dolar’s response, at the end of the lecture, is framed as an unresolved necessity: a politics of a new kind of S1, and a left that ceases to be merely reactive, presenting its own agenda with confidence.

The lecture’s final framing returns to Lacan’s rare predictive gesture: the rise of segregation and a “new racism” connected to common markets, universalization, science’s rearrangement of social groupings. Dolar uses this to link globalization’s promise to the intensification of segregative pressures: the more universality progresses, the more the theft-of-enjoyment rhetoric grows, the more the danger of segregation. The conference setting matters: Dolar ends on a note that is simultaneously gloomy and “luminous,” then adds a further theme he cannot develop: social media. The closing formula is stark: more communication and information than ever, yet less knowledge; universalized communication threatens the social tie’s falling apart. The structure of this conclusion recapitulates the lecture’s method. It does not present a final synthesis. It clarifies a set of tensions whose persistence is itself the thesis: knowledge as agent produces its own concealed mastery; exposure intensifies deception; integration of excess produces a remainder that cannot be integrated; communication produces disintegration; emancipation from the father yields a worse mastery; the master is undead because authority survives as a doubled remainder within the very discourses that deny it.

The question-and-answer segment functions as an outer frame that, in Dolar’s own terms, threatens a “return of the repressed” once debate is postponed. Yet the exchange is conceptually revealing because it repeats the lecture’s central logic: puns become conceptual work; objections become symptoms of the theory’s strain under present conditions. The move from “Ubu to Uber” captures, with comic compression, the lecture’s account of grotesque sovereignty intersecting with platform capitalism and labor organization that produces fatigue and rage. Dolar acknowledges the conceptual productivity of such wordplay, implicitly reaffirming that signifiers can carry structural insight, and that the grotesque is not merely theatrical display but a diagram of power’s distribution through contemporary infrastructures.

Jamila’s question presses the ambiguity of Dolar’s “excesses”: are exhaustion and rage limits to capitalism’s unlimitedness, and do they carry subversive potential, given capitalism’s capacity to manipulate rage and to metabolize crises? Dolar’s response is cautious, bordering on confessed uncertainty: he was attempting description of developments over fifty years; Lacan’s elegant system remains valid, yet something has emerged that Lacan did not see—redoubling of S1, of S2, of enjoyment. The double is worse than the original, and it “takes over.” The plausible endpoint is not revolution but tearing of the social tie, collapse of the possibility of a shared bond, a disintegration that manifests precisely through generalized communication. In this response Dolar sharpens the lecture’s darkest implication: the limit may arrive as social fragmentation rather than emancipatory rupture, and the political task would then involve inventing forms of binding that do not merely repeat the old authority’s paternal figure.

Aaron’s question targets the concept of imitation enjoyment: if everything is imitation, why retain the term “imitation” at all? Dolar answers by reconstructing Lacan’s implicit logic: consumer society sells the prospective possibility of authenticity; the very fantasy of an “authentic enjoyment” becomes part of the mechanism. The term “imitation” therefore functions less as a moral denunciation than as a structural marker: the commodity-form redoubles enjoyment by offering an enjoyment of enjoyment, a second-order promise that does not require an original to remain effective. The critique thus shifts away from exposure of falsity toward analysis of how the promise of authenticity is operationalized.

A further question raises territoriality: masters, populism, bureaucracy appear territorial, while production and excess circulate globally. Dolar’s response insists that even territorial slogans (he cites “Make America Great Again”) can have global repercussions by reshaping discursive space—what can be publicly said, how boundaries between knowledge and opinion collapse, how decency and indecency are remeasured. The master, in this sense, is territorial in its staging, global in its effects. The question’s invocation of “placeholder” resonates with Dolar’s own account of S1: a signifier that anchors a space of meaning and legitimacy, even when its content is vacated or reduced to slogan. Dolar’s response suggests that contemporary politics increasingly lacks stable oppositions that once organized public space; maintaining such oppositions becomes itself a condition of politics, and their collapse is part of the master’s undead efficacy.

Another question asks for the logic linking surplus enjoyment and segregation. Dolar does not answer it directly in the compressed time; the omission is itself telling. The lecture has established the connection through Lacan’s prediction, and through the claim that universality intensifies tensions around enjoyment and theft. Yet the precise mediations—how enjoyment becomes racialized, how segregation offers an imaginary solution to the anxiety of stolen enjoyment, how universality breeds counter-universal partitions—remain to be articulated. The unanswered question thus marks a productive gap: the lecture gestures toward an account of segregation as an affective-political management of surplus, yet leaves its mechanism as a task for further work.

Finally, the question that “literalizes” excess over excess via the 2008 financial crash shows the conceptual elasticity of Dolar’s term. Dolar does not elaborate a financial theory; he acknowledges, instead, that the questions exceed what can be responsibly claimed beyond the text of Lacan and his own proposal. Yet his earlier account makes the connection intelligible: financialization exemplifies surplus becoming calculable and then becoming excessive, producing crises that threaten systemic collapse and require intervention. The questioner’s fear—more crashes rather than revolution—aligns with Dolar’s own cautious pessimism about how limits may manifest: as breakdowns managed by emergency measures, rather than as transformations that reconstitute the bond.

Taken as a whole, the lecture’s scholarly value lies in how it uses psychoanalytic formalism as a diagnostic of political modernity without reducing politics to psychology or psychology to family romance. Its core wager is that authority’s crisis is structurally inscribed into the very discourses that promised to rationalize power: the university discourse, governance by knowledge, and the public use of reason. The undead master is the name for this structural remainder: a disavowed mastery that returns as counterfeit, and whose counterfeit form can be more dangerous because it thrives on exposure, on theatrical abjection, on the conversion of disqualification into efficacy. Dolar’s conceptual economy is deliberately built around remainders: the dead father’s second death; the concealed truth under the bar; the grotesque as power’s inevitability; knowledge’s bureaucratic monstrosity; enjoyment’s imitation; the subject as waste; fatigue and rage as socially necessary effects; communication’s conversion into disintegration.

The lecture’s internal coherence depends on treating “doubles” as the principle that unifies these heterogeneous domains. The double is not an aesthetic flourish. It is a claim about how modern systems generate surplus formations that exceed their intended functions while remaining structurally produced by them. The master’s double emerges from knowledge’s disavowed truth; the bureaucratic grotesque emerges from the removal of the master; enjoyment’s imitation emerges from capitalism’s economy of calculable surplus; depression and rage emerge as affective doubles of a system that produces subjects as waste; social media intensifies the informational double of knowledge, generating more information and less knowledge. The lecture thereby offers a single formal motif that can travel across political history, psychoanalytic theory, cultural staging, economic critique, and contemporary symptomatology.

Clarification at the end is therefore less a summary than a delimitation. Dolar does not claim to have provided a complete political program, nor a completed theory of social media, nor a fully articulated causal model of segregation. He offers, instead, a rigorous description of a structural predicament: modernity’s rationalizing discourses generate their own counterfeit masters and their own surplus pathologies, and the contemporary moment appears marked by a redoubling that strains the older elegance of Lacan’s schema. The lecture closes by naming the necessity of inventing a new political S1—an anchoring signifier capable of sustaining a bond—while refusing any comforting assurance that such invention follows automatically from critique. The undead master is thus neither a simple enemy to be exorcised nor a mere nostalgia for lost authority; it is the name for a persistence that demands a new politics precisely because the old supports of legitimacy have lost their capacity to hold.