McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
Marxist claim: subjects must break the hold that fantasy has over them before they can take authentic political action and act according to their own class interests. Attacking fantasy thus becomes, for Western philosophy and for Marxism, the sine qua non of political activity. 207
🙂 McGowan disagrees with Stavrakakis, as McGowan thinks his notion of of traversing the fantasy is caught up, like the Marxists that Stavrakakis himself criticizes, in trying to rid oneself of fantasy, since fantasy hides the gap, we need, according to Stavrakakis, to make this gap apparent, be cool with it.
Quoting Stavrakakis “Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.” Here, Stavrakakis sees the ideological dimension of fantasy, and psychoanalysis for him facilitates this recognition and provides a way to dissolve fantasy’s power.
This kind of psychoanalytic politics evinces the attitude toward fantasy that both modern philosophy and Marxism take up, and this attitude certainly seems faithful to psychoanalytic practice and its attempt to assist the subject in “traversing the fantasy.”
Fantasy offers the subject a transcendent experience, and this transcendence, despite its illusory quality, has a political content. It represents a moment at which the subject is no longer bound by the limitations of the symbolic structure that ordinarily constrain it. As such, this moment of fantasmatic transcendence poses for the subject a fundamental challenge to the authority of that symbolic structure. In fact, the radical import of fantasy is located in precisely the same feature that causes fantasy to further ideology: the illusions of fantasy keep subjects content with the ruling symbolic structure, but they also provide a venue for thinking beyond that structure. 209
That is to say, the politics of attacking fantasy does not allow us to transcend the limitation that the prevailing ideology places on us. Through offering us an illusory image of transcendence, fantasy takes us beyond the limitation that the symbolic order places on us, and in doing so, it opens us to possibilities that were previously foreclosed. It is through fantasy that one sees the possibility of the impossible. If psychoanalysis allows us to see the political effectiveness of fantasy, it doe so because it emphasizes how fantasy allows us to experience the impossible. 211