Abstract

During the first revolts of 1905, the soldiers, as Lenin noted with a certain perplexity, surrendered and the revolution thus failed fail, although there was nothing which stood as an obstacle to them anymore. The situation calls for a reexamination of the question of power and exploitation in relation to sexuality, and of the conventional reading which argues that the sailors are urged by an uncontrollable unconscious guilt to desire a punishment through the superego. The present article seeks to invert Lenin’s question, from an analytic point of view: what is this force which brutally causes burglary and forces the sailors to rebel? How are we to analyse this desire for revolt, which causes them to break out of their dominated condition, till they become, for a while, “revolutionary subjects”? A psychoanalysis of “Battleship Potemkin” permits us to re-examine the question of alienation and the problematic relation between unconscious desire, revolution and subjection. Far removed from the ideological influence which has dominated mainstream psychoanalysis, the investigation which Reich initiated, and which Deleuze and Guattari continued, enables us to interrogate the unconscious and its articulation to politics, up to the final period of Lacan.