McGowan, Todd Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, 2013
Traditional authority figures ruled through prohibition: they demanded that subjects sacrifice their enjoyment for admittance into the social order. This type of paternal authority governs through the establishing of distance — distance between the authority figure and the subject, as well as distance between the subject and enjoyment.
The new authority, however, abandons distance for the sake of proximity. Rather than confronting us with an impenetrable demand that remains out of our comprehension, he assaults us with displays of his enjoyment. 103-104
Whereas prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject — or that installs distance within all of the subject’s relationships – the absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other. 🙂 And this is a good thing! Get close to the real other.
The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity. Without this terrain (which is the contemporary situation), one encounters the other beyond its symbolic identity, the enjoying other. It is others listening to music with their headphones, talking loudly on a cell phone, eating excessive amounts of food, communicating in an unknown language, or emitting an unusual odor. Public displays of enjoyment occur with increasing frequency today because the dominant form of authority does not function through prohibition. Rather than violating the ruling social imperative, the public display of enjoyment heeds it. The result is rampant anxiety. Without the distance from the other requisite for desire, one experiences the anxiety produced by its presence.
104
The ethical position, for psychoanalysis, necessarily involves the embrace of this anxiety — and this is at once the path to enjoyment 105
🙂 embrace the anxiety, embrace this brush with the real other. Screw the symbolic! It only produces a desiring subject. No?