By TODD ​​MCGOWAN*

Both Donald Trump and Kane built financial empires in the media industry and from there sought political office while conducting themselves with grandiloquence and arrogance.

What Kane lacks

There was at least one time when Donald Trump showed himself to be more capable than any other American president. When asked about his favorite movie, Donald Trump gave an answer worthy of a film scholar. He named Citizen Kane (1941), by Orson Welles, not only as the best film ever made, but as his personal favorite.

This is surely the best answer any American president has given to this question. But when you consider it at face value, it seems like an unconscious slip-up. Donald Trump identifies as his favorite the one film that chronicles the emptiness of a rich and powerful man who bears a striking resemblance to himself.

In fact, it is tempting to associate Donald Trump with Citizen Kane because of the similarities between Donald Trump and Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles). Even though we know that this was not the case, one might imagine that Orson Welles had Donald Trump in mind, rather than William Randolph Hearst, as the model for the character Kane. This suggests that Donald Trump is part of a long line of American figures, rather than being a single person. sui generis (as it has often been interpreted).

Both Donald Trump and Kane built financial empires in the media industry and from there sought political office while conducting themselves with grandiloquence and arrogance. It is impossible not to see the parallels between them. But the importance of Citizen Kane for Donald Trump’s rise lies not in the similarities between their lives, but in the fact that the film provides a diagnosis of his politics and his popular appeal.

In this sense, his love for the film requires that the film be misinterpreted, because only then would it be possible to reconcile this love with his style of politics. For the film presents the fundamental flaw in the kind of promise that Donald Trump makes – that it consists of replacing an object lost through incessant accumulation.

Citizen Kane is a portrait of a figure of excess. The film depicts how an abuse—specifically, the excessive accumulation of goods—emerges through the attempt to overcome a lack. But this attempt goes terribly wrong. Kane accumulates an ever-increasing quantity of objects that have the paradoxical effect of increasing his dissatisfaction rather than alleviating it. The more he tries to eliminate the lack by seeking excess, the more needy he becomes.

That is, the more excess he produces, the more lack he feels, because the escape from this [transfinite] lack through the pursuit of excess always fails. The object that connotes his status as a needy subject, the sled called “Rosebud,” remains forgotten and disappears amidst the excess of commodities. Since it is an object identified with lack, it embodies not the possible fulfillment of desire but the inherent incompleteness of the subject, a lack that no object can eliminate.

The sled, unlike all the goods that Kane accumulates, shows its own insufficiency, precisely that lack that Donald Trump, but also every capitalist subjectivity, has to tolerate. By contrasting the sled, as a reification of lack, with the excess of objects accumulated by the protagonist, the film Citizen Kane presents an image of enjoyment that challenges the capitalist system.

The film begins with Kane's dying word, "Rosebud"; it then attempts to link an object to this signifier through a series of unsuccessful interviews conducted by reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland). Even if Thompson never finds the solution to the mystery throughout the film, at the end, Orson Wells gives the viewer the answer that no one in the diegesis can learn.[I]

But the key to the answer turns out to be completely disappointing. In the scene where a servant at Kane's mansion throws various items into a furnace, a child's sled is seen being burned with the name "Rosebud" written on it. The audience connects this to an early scene in the film: Kane plays with this sled, but Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) arrives and takes him away from his parents' home to give him the best possible education.

Although young Kane has a good relationship with his mother, his father is abusive. This leads his mother to send him away, using the fortune she inherited to give him what she assumes is a better life. Given the treatment Kane endured from his father, the sled cannot represent a period of life marked by innocence and pure contentment. The sled is not a forgotten ideal that Kane has lost or betrayed. It is not something pleasurable that Kane has lost. Rather, it represents loss itself. Kane relates to the sled as a lost object—not as something that can still be obtained.

When he loses the sled, he loses the loss itself as such. Although “Rosebud” is a dying word, Kane spends his entire life trying to escape its loss by accumulating things excessively. Now, Citizen Kane presents the consequences of the compulsive and fetishistic denial of this characteristic lack of capitalist subjectivity. The missing sled represents this lack; the excessive accumulation of commodities, in turn, obscures the persistence of this lack. The sled commodity functions as a fetish that offers and promises completion to the subject; it is, however, a promise that he perpetually violates and reconstitutes.

By showing the contrast between the sled as a lost object and the infinity of empirical objects accumulated by Kane, Orson Welles offers one of the clearest visions of how the dialectic of lack and excess develops within capitalist society. Citizen Kane is focused on the contrast between the singularity of the lost and impossible object, which provides satisfaction through its absence, and the excessive accumulation of empirical objects. These make the subject incapable of recognizing his own form of satisfaction.

Kane spends his life trying to fill the lack through excess, but he dies lamenting his inability to fill it. No one in the diegetic reality does so, but in contrast, the viewer experiences the lost object at the end of the film; thus, he is able to recognize this object as the source of satisfaction.[ii] It is therefore seen in Citizen Kane, that excess is a response to lack, an attempt to replace what the subject does not have with an excess that he continually strives to obtain.

Kane responds to lack exceptionally—more excessively than most people. But he still functions as an exemplary subject. The entry into language—the subjection to the signifier—produces a needy subject, a subject with desires that cannot be fulfilled.[iii] These desires provide satisfaction through their non-fulfillment rather than their fulfillment, through the repetition of failure that characterizes the desire. Whenever the subject finds a specific object that promises to satisfy his desire, he quickly moves on to another object.

No object proves to be fully satisfying because no object can be the object—the object that embodies what the subject feels he has lost. Under the guise of a search for a variety of empirical objects, the subject seeks a nonexistent lost object that would give him ultimate satisfaction.

The failure of desire results from the type of object on which it depends. It is not a present object, but an absent one. Jacques Lacan shows this through the desire to look: “What is the subject trying to see? What he is trying to see, make no mistake, is the object as absence.” Even if one cannot see an absence, one can nevertheless recognize the satisfaction that derives from what is not there. This is what psychoanalysis reveals, that is, exactly what capitalist subjectivity obscures, since such knowledge would destroy the illusion that gives the commodity its fascination.

The absence of this object does not extinguish the subject’s desire, for it has the opposite effect. Its absence produces an excess within subjectivity. Because subjects are inherently lacking, they desire excessively. People give great weight to desire because it cannot be fulfilled. This fundamental overlap between lack and excess defines subjectivity, but it also marks the subject with an inescapable trauma. The defining trauma of subjectivity is its inability to separate lack from excess.

The capacity for excessive enjoyment held by subjects is inextricably linked to the condition that places them as lacking. As a result, no amount of excess can allow an escape from lack. The more one has, the more one feels one is losing. No excess is excessive enough to completely transcend lack. Excess has its source in lack, so that the more excessive one is, the more one experiences lack. Now, this is exactly what Orson Welles narrates in Citizen Kane.

Like Kane, Donald Trump’s success is clearly tied to excess. He lives excessively: buying vast estates, surrounding himself with attractive women, building grand hotels, and accumulating massive wealth (or at least maintaining that appearance). Those who rally behind him as a presidential candidate profess the hope that he will bring the economic and social excesses of his personal life to bear on the country as a whole, that he will make America great again by creating all sorts of excesses—an excess of prosperity, of security, of national identity.

Yet the key to the popularity of his political program lies less in its supply of excess than in its inflation of demand, that is, in its replacement of the lack. Donald Trump triumphs by convincing his supporters that they are needy subjects confronted by an excessive other in the form of the immigrant, the Chinese government, or political correctness. By invoking this particular distribution of lack and excess, Donald Trump allows his followers to enjoy the excess of the other they repel, while at the same time reassuring themselves that they are not excessive. The importance of Citizen Kane for understanding Donald Trump lies in its ability to diagnose the reasons for his appeal.

Images of excess in others

Donald Trump’s instinctive perception is that the experience of excess appears as lack and therefore never seems to be sufficiently excessive. In other words, he understands that the image of excess sells much better than the experience one might have of it. Images of excess seem perfectly excessive, while the experience of it necessarily falls short in some way.

Donald Trump, therefore, does not simply show images of the world of excess that he hopes to create – America made totally great again. Instead, he points to images of excess in the figure of the other. Excess really seems excessive only when it is seen in the image of the other and not in itself. The image of the excessive other is the pure form of excess and that is why populists like Donald Trump constantly resort to it.

Donald Trump’s political strategy involves bombarding potential supporters with images of excess in others, while contrasting these images with the lack of it in those he is addressing. The figures of excess presented by Donald Trump are Mexican criminals, Chinese political leaders, Muslim refugees, and politically correct college students. While these figures supposedly enjoy their excesses, ordinary Americans suffer from their lack of them.

Americans are supposedly suffering from unfair trade deals, religious persecution, and drug overdose epidemics. In this sense, it is the absence of greatness in America and the greatness in the other—American lack and foreign excess—that is ironically essential to Donald Trump’s appeal. He does not require America to be great in order for his supporters to experience the pure excess he promises them, since pure excess is impossible to experience. His appeal depends on his supporters’ failure to recognize how they are already beings of excess; that they cannot confront the mixture of lack and excess that constitutes them as subjects of the system.

It is always easier to recognize excess in another or in the future than in oneself. This is because one never experiences excess completely divorced from lack. Lack intrudes even into the most extreme moments of excess, creating a situation in which everyday moments of excess do not seem so excessive. If one is absorbed in watching a football game or is absorbed in the task of eating a piece of chocolate cake, there are times when one regrets how soon it will end.

And they appear when one thinks about going to work the next day, or when children or other people interrupt during the crucial play or the moment of the most delicious bite. As desiring subjects, one cannot experience excess in its pure state. Although one might imagine that such disturbances are only contingent, they have the status of a necessary event. There is no unadulterated excess (although there is, with Donald Trump, an adulterating excess).

Yet it is possible to see what appears to be pure excess in the other: images of the jihadist, the Arab celebrating September 11 on the roof of his house, the participant in an orgy, or the politically correct university professor. One’s own excesses never seem to be as excessive as the excesses of others. Faced with the image of the excessive other, one’s own experience seems marked by lack, and this is what the experience of such images reinforces. This deception about the satisfaction of the other has deleterious political consequences.

This is precisely what Orson Welles diagnoses in Citizen Kane. Kane finds himself constantly seduced by the image of the other enjoying a way to which he himself does not have full access. All his attempts to purchase the perfect commodity or to attain the proper status fail because he can never completely escape his own position as a needy subject. Welles highlights the spectator's own lack in a way that coincides with Kane's. The spectators miss the significance of "Rosebud" as a perfect object; therefore they seek it in the same way that Kane does.

But the film allows the viewer to become aware of the satisfaction that this position of lack offers in a way that Kane himself never does. Kane continues to seek excess free from lack while the film encourages the viewer to embrace the excess that is found through the structure of lack. It is this fundamental tension between the viewer's position and that of Kane (and the other characters within the diegesis) that defines the film.

The position that Citizen Kane creates for the viewer also allows one to interpret the phenomenon of Donald Trump. Trump’s appeal lies in the constant search for an unhindered excess that he attributes to the other and that he promises to regain for the needy American subject. By attributing it to the other and by depriving “real Americans” of this excess, Donald Trump preserves his supposed immaculate quality.

The ability to see an excess in the other that one cannot experience in oneself provides the basis for political conservatism. If one asks why conservatism always seems to face an easier political task than that of the struggling left, the answer lies in the form of appearance that lack and excess have. Lack is obscure and difficult to see in the other, but easy to experience in oneself. Excess, in contrast, is easily visible in the other, but never fully apparent to oneself. As a result of this distribution, one has an inherent suspicion of the other combined with a belief in oneself as a victim of the structural situation.

The dynamic of recognizing lack in oneself and excess in others is the fundamental form of fantasy.[iv] Fantasy provides the framework within which subjects organize their satisfaction. It targets the excess of the other—the other’s capacity to enjoy in a way that the subject himself cannot—and offers the subject a scenario through which he can access the pleasure of the other that would otherwise remain unattainable to the subject. In this way, fantasy allows the subject to accomplish the impossible in order to bridge the gap that separates him from the pleasure of the other.

Donald Trump sells the fantasy that Kane lives in. It is a fantasy that discovers the unrestrained excess of the other, obtained through a process of incessant accumulation. For this fantasy to work, it requires the image of an excessive other. The core of Donald Trump’s political strategy involves talking about the fantasy of pure excess, convincing his followers that they are beings of pure lack, while others (immigrants, China, politically correct Hollywood elites) are having excessive fun.

This contrast between the needy and the excess subject not only speaks to a basic injustice that ordinary Americans have endured; it also speaks to an excess other, someone who, in Donald Trump’s scheme, has stolen the excess that properly belongs to those who need it. This is the logic at work in “make america great again".

The belief that the other has stolen American excess or greatness is the basic formula for paranoia, which takes the logic of fantasy one step further.[v] Paranoia is the psychic structure that develops from the logic of fantasy. While fantasy does not attribute malevolence to the excessive other, paranoia places the other as the barrier to the subject’s own excess. Jacques Lacan states that “paranoid knowledge is knowledge founded on… rivalry.”

The paranoid never escapes the specter of rivalry, so that his lack necessarily implies a corresponding excess in the other. The excess of the other becomes, for the paranoid subject, the cause of the subject's lack. What this subject fails to see is that the other can only be excessive to the extent that he suffers from the same lack as the subject himself.

On the one hand, paranoia constantly reminds the subject of his or her own deficiencies in relation to the other. The other illegitimately enjoys an excess that properly belongs to the subject while the subject toils in the lack. Immigrants come to America illegally and take jobs or benefits that properly belong to American citizens. Chinese leaders appropriate capital that legitimately belongs to America. Champions of political correctness prohibit all social transgressions that were previously permitted. This is how paranoia keeps subjects entertained in the affect of disappointment.

On the other hand, paranoia is a psychic position that proves satisfactory because it allows the subject to believe that there is someone who actually enjoys a pure excess, free from lack. By attacking the other who has stolen the excess, the subject actually enjoys this excess in a way that would otherwise be impossible. It is the attack on the other under the pretext of eliminating the other's illicit pleasure that provides the opportunity to experience genuine excess. This is how he identifies with the enemy who supposedly stole his pleasure.

In this sense, paranoid subjectivity allows us to glimpse an excess that no one can experience. By providing access to a pure excess that does not exist, paranoia has an appeal that surpasses all other psychic structures. This is why subjects are so ready to adopt a paranoid attitude, even when it directly contradicts not only the facts, but even their own moral compass.

Paranoia is difficult to dispel because whenever someone reveals to another that he or she is also lacking, just like the paranoid person, the latter can imagine a hidden excess lurking within the other's lack. This is why news stories that portray the horrible situation of refugees in concentration camps or the normality of Mexican immigrants are rarely effective.

The excess that the paranoid subject sees has nothing to do with the empirical other. This excess comes from the subject’s own relationship with himself. Thus, abandoning this basic belief consists in abandoning one’s own capacity to enjoy it. Even if the paranoid subject reflects on the illegitimate excess of the other, he obtains from it a pleasure that would otherwise be impossible. To deny the existence of this enjoyment in the other is to deprive the paranoid subject of his own enjoyment. This is why even a great deal of news about the real state of things fails to convince him.

The defining fact of Donald Trump’s political career is his successful deployment of the logic of paranoia. He takes this appeal to those who feel deprived and offers a path to enjoy a non-deprived excess. In this way, Trump offers his followers the chance to be Charles Foster Kane—that is, a citizen of excess. In doing so, he simply amplifies the same incentive structure that capitalism provides for the psyche. His political success reveals that he has learned the basic lesson of capitalism not as an economic system but as a psychic system.

Capitalism and fascism

Both Donald Trump and Charles Foster Kane are paradigmatic capitalist subjects. But Donald Trump’s political success stems from his great ability to exploit the flaw in the psyche of capitalism’s own logic. He is not simply a representative of the capitalist system, but presents himself as someone who offers the corrective to what it cannot deliver. In this sense, he is the turning point toward fascism.

The capitalist economy depends on subjects who see themselves as lacking while identifying an excess in the other. This is what motivates the competition that drives the capitalist system. The excess of the other is what capitalist subjects aim to obtain through the process of exchange and through the accumulation of capital. The accumulation of capital is the attempt to appropriate the excess of the other for oneself in order to eliminate the lack, to have excess without any trace of lack.

Karl Marx, in his critical view of the economic sphere, describes this process as the appropriation of the surplus labor of others; however, this process is at work more broadly throughout the capitalist system. It is installed in the psyche so that capitalism can function. Thus, every action in capitalism is based on the attempt to appropriate the surplus labor of others for oneself in order to eliminate one's own lack. This is the logic of capitalism already installed in the psyche.

Without this psychic disposition to overcome lack through the accumulation of capital, capitalism simply could not function. Capitalism requires subjects for whom accumulation is an unbreakable law – Marx mentioned it when, in The capital, said the law in Manchester was “hoard, hoard! Behold Moses and the prophets.”

If one believes that one already has too much, one does not embark on the process of constantly accumulating more and more. This is why capitalist agencies must constantly remind people that they are in need and that the surplus is available only through the commodity. This is the basic function of consumer advertising, but it is also what drives the corporation to try to hire employees, the entrepreneur to consider investing in additional productive capacity, or the stockbroker to consider what to buy and sell.

Capitalist subjects accumulate with the idea of ​​accumulating enough money or commodities to enjoy without restriction. The idea of ​​doing so without measure, rather than simply enjoying, is absolutely crucial to the psychic structure of agents in capitalism. The recognition that satisfaction involves lack and that it therefore depends on some form of restriction prevents effective capitalist subjects. The image of enjoyment without lack is the only one that capitalism allows.

The problem, however, is that one never reaches the goal of having enough because that point moves away in distance the closer one gets to it, just like the green light that marks Daisy's house for Gatsby in The big Gatsby. As one approaches it, it moves further and further away. In the psychic universe of capitalism, the more one has, the more one experiences lack. Instead of filling the lack, excess highlights it more and more. This is why the most ardent hoarders in the capitalist economy are not those at the bottom, but those at the top.

Whenever one gets what one wants, it soon becomes apparent that a little more excess is required. After obtaining what one once wanted, one desires more money, a newer phone, or a bigger television. Hoarding inevitably generates the desire to accumulate even more, rather than bringing about the satiety of desire. Within the capitalist psychic economy, no one says that he has enough because what he has is never experienced as being excessive enough. This is because the experience of an excess cannot be as satisfying as its image promises it to be. Excess is excessive insofar as it can never be attained, which means that it never frees the subject from lack.

The result of this logic is that capitalist subjects find themselves constantly dissatisfied with no clear explanation for this dissatisfaction, since it stems from the capitalist system itself. Within the logic of capitalism, there is no solution to this problem. Since it cannot be solved, it has the potential to produce a revolutionary spirit that is capable of looking beyond the horizon of capitalism to a different socioeconomic system.[vi] To prevent this from happening, a paranoid fantasy always comes to the rescue of capitalism in its most difficult moments.

The psychic disposition in capitalism is always on the verge of falling into paranoia, which is why capitalist democracy constantly confronts the danger of fascism. The fantasy that the other is the barrier to the pure excess that capitalism promises is the basic fascist fantasy. And this is precisely the fantasy that Donald Trump promulgates. For Trump, it is the other who is excessive – be it the criminal immigrant, the clever Chinese government, or the politically correct university professor.

This other then emerges as the barrier that prevents America from escaping from want. America can become non-needy or great again only by eliminating this barrier. This is the paranoid twist that Donald Trump gives to the capitalist fantasy. It is a twist that makes capitalist democracy move toward fascism.

Capitalist democracy depends on the subject's fantasy about the excess of the other. It cannot do without this basic fantasy because it motivates the subject's incessant competition with others. Without this fantasy about others, no one would embark on the project of accumulation to the extent that capitalism demands. Even Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, confesses this. He points out that the rich do indeed live miserable lives, but the fantasy that wealth brings complete satisfaction is necessary. Smith argues that this fantasy “awakens and keeps in continual motion the industry of humanity.”

If one does not believe in the fantasy that accumulation leads to ultimate satisfaction, one stops accumulating. But when this basic capitalist fantasy turns into paranoia about an other—which has already become an illicit barrier to the excess desired by the subject—fascism breaks out. Fascism is the practical position of political paranoia. It identifies an other (or several others) responsible for stealing society’s excess and engages in the impossible project of eliminating this other. But fascism is ultimately a dead end. Fascism cannot succeed because its paranoid structure depends on the other it seeks to eliminate. The more fascism eliminates the other that appears to it as a barrier to the attainment of pure excess, the more it erects another barrier. Since there is no pure excess, there is no successful fascism.

Orson Welles' speech

After having appointed Citizen Kane as his favorite movie, Donald Trump gave a brief interpretation of it. He claimed that the lesson of the movie is that Kane never found the right woman, that the right woman would give him the satisfaction that neither his newspaper, nor his properties, nor his statues ever could. Kane tried to marry twice and failed both times, while Donald Trump himself – so he claims – found the solution with his third wife. In this sense, Donald Trump would have learned the fundamental lesson of Citizen Kane; he kept looking for the right woman until he found her.

As absurd as Donald Trump’s interpretation may seem, it is not completely wrong. This error is the basis of his entire political project. Donald Trump correctly sees that the film focuses on an object that provides satisfaction. The film, however, does not show a Kane who never found his Melania, because it reveals that his failure is precisely the result of his effort to achieve an excess without fail.

The right object is not empirical, not a right woman, but an absent object. Kane fails to see that satisfaction always involves another in what is lacking. Furthermore, he fails to see that lack is not only inevitable but salutary for the subject. Kane's denial of the necessity of lack condemns him to a life of endless striving that leads nowhere.

This is the position that the viewer also occupies for most of the film. As commentator James Naremore puts it: “Like Kane’s own newspapers, the filmmaker’s camera is also a ‘searcher.’ Its search also places in the audience a desire to find Kane’s private meaning, rather than his public meaning.” But by the end of the film, Orson Welles has distanced the viewer from Kane’s perpetual search for the object that would ultimately satisfy. The point at which the film distances the viewer from Kane’s perspective (and that of the other characters in the film) is one that Donald Trump fails to explain, either in his brief performance or in his political project as a whole.

At the end of the film, in the closing lines, reporter Thompson summarizes the results of his investigation. He concludes that his inability to find the object that corresponds to the signifier “Rosebud” indicates that such an object does not exist, that there is no object that can answer the problem that the film poses at its opening. Another reporter then says to him: “If you could find out the meaning of Rosebud, I bet that would explain everything.” Faced with this consideration, Thompson then responds: “No, I don’t think so, not at all. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, but then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he didn’t get, or something he lost. Either way, it wouldn’t explain anything. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I think Rosebud is just a piece in a puzzle, a missing piece.”

As Thompson speaks, Orson Welles pulls the camera back to create an extremely long shot of the interior of the Xanadu mansion, thus showing many of the objects that Kane has accumulated. This scene seems to confirm the validity of his thesis: amidst all these objects, it is impossible to choose one that holds the secret of someone's existence.

Orson Welles could have ended the film with the final speech of the reporter Thompson. As mentioned, he speaks of his ultimate inability to identify the excess that moves a person. If he had ended the film at this point, Orson Welles would have been proclaiming that it is not possible to know the excess of the other. Such an ending would have left the viewer with the illusion that there is an excess unrelated to the lack. It would have left the viewer in the position of the capitalist subject. In this sense, despite the formal inventiveness of what comes before, it is the scene of the sled in the flames that gives the film its political importance.

By showing the viewer the sled as the object corresponding to the signifier “Rosebud,” Orson Welles allows the viewer to see what Thompson and the other characters cannot. Rosebud is not a mysterious object that Kane enjoys excessively, as one imagines when watching the film. It is the loss that defines his subjectivity. Rather than being Kane’s specific form of success, this object indicates his singular failure. Orson Welles forces the viewer to see the inescapable connection between the subject’s lack and his excess, between what the subject misses and how he enjoys it, which is what Kane himself never sees.

Kane's misunderstanding of himself as a subject consists in the light brought by Citizen Kane as a film. One can only escape the logic of envy and paranoia if one accepts that excess is inextricable from lack. Only in this way can one avoid seeing excesses in others as barriers to one's own satisfaction. Excess does not fill the lack or eliminate it, because it always recreates it anew. It is the path to confronting this lack.

the bet of Citizen Kane It is through film that one can access the fundamental link between lack and excess. One need not spend one’s life fruitlessly seeking excess only to be pushed back into lack. One need not, in other words, fall victim to Donald Trump’s promise to overcome lack once and for all. One can instead recognize that the image of excess one sees in others is nothing more than one’s own experience of lack.

 One can only escape paranoia by recognizing that one is already being excessive; this is the conclusion that Citizen Kane allows us to arrive. Donald Trump’s entire political project – and even his life project – is based on his misinterpretation of the film. His belief in the promise of pure excess is precisely what the film shows to be unrealizable. It is only by glimpsing what Trump fails to see in the film that one can avoid falling victim to the capitalist promise, which always leaves individuals and society on the brink of falling into fascism. Donald Trump’s favorite film shows how to oppose it.

* Todd McGowan is a professor at the University of Vermont. Author of, among other books, The end of dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment (State University of New York Press). [https://amzn.to/4g0Ryeq]

Translation: Eleutério Prado.

Originally published in Continental Thought & Theory: a journal of intellectual freedom, vol. 3 (1), 2024.

[I] The key point is that Thompson fails to find the object that corresponds to the signifier “Rosebud” because the excess of commodities obscures the singularity of objects in general. As HelGeudi observes in Orson Welles: The rule of falsehood, researchers “fail to see what constitutes the crucial objective of their research amidst the profusion of objects.” See Johan-Frédérik Hel-Geudi, Orson Welles: The Rule of Faux ; Paris: Éditions Michalon, 1997. Likewise, capitalist excess has the effect of making it impossible to recognize lack.

[ii] Laura Mulvey emphasizes the disjunction between the position of the spectator and that of the investigator in Citizen Kane; it follows that the spectator experiences the pleasure of desire, which is not evident to Thompson within the filmic diegesis. She writes: “while ‘Rosebud’ gives meaning to the ‘mystery of Kane’ in the story, Welles presents the spectator with a series of visual clues that literally put this mystery as images on the screen. The enigmatic text gradually materializes an appeal to an active and curious spectator who takes pleasure in identifying, deciphering the signs given for interpretation.” See Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. But the difference goes even further. For, given the advantage of the spectator's point of view to appreciate the sled as a lost object for satisfaction, he has to recognize that satisfaction lies in deciphering the lack beyond the pleasure, as Mulvey points out.

[iii] Natural need, through language, is elevated to desire, becoming infinite in principle. In pre-capitalist societies, when scarcity still seems insurmountable, the infinity of desire is satisfied imaginarily through a principle of common good, which needs to be supported by the community, state and religion. In capitalist society, where scarcity is gradually overcome over time, desire is captured by the logic of capital, which is of the order of infinite evil.

[iv] Fantasy is not just a supplement that is introduced into everyday life in order to add a little more satisfaction. It is the essential basis of everyday life. However, the fantasy that guides people’s lives in general is primarily unconscious. It becomes known only through the references that inspire people to act. This is what Juan-David Nasio says in his book on fantasy: “the subject is governed by his fantasies, but he does not see the scene or clearly distinguish the protagonists.” Juan-David Nasio, Le Fantasme: Le plasir de lire Lacan; Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2005.

[v] In his founding essay on fantasy, A child is beaten, Freud shows the relationship between different forms of fantasy and the development of paranoia. As he sees it, the structure of fantasy definitely points towards paranoia. And it does so because of the privileged status of the other (and the enjoyment of the other) in fantasy. See Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

[vi] And this new system, not yet realized in history, has to be regulated by a good infinite terrain – non-transcendental and non-transcendent.

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