McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
Psychoanalysis suggests that enjoyment will almost always triumph over knowledge, even – or especially – when this enjoyment occurs at the expense of our self-interest. 190
[Psychoanalysis] represents an effort to mobilize our knowledge about enjoyment and its priority in order to make evident the identification of emancipation with enjoyment. … psychoanalysis reveals that enjoyment derives from emancipation from the power of authority. 191
As the existence of conservative populism shows, there is a conservative form of enjoyment, but this form borrows its structure from emancipatory politics. To be effective, conservative populists must convince their adherents that they are challenging social authority even at the moment when they cede themselves to it.
Enjoyment stems from an excess, from going beyond what social authority permits. … enjoyment is proper to the forces of emancipation who work to free us from social constraints imposed by authority figures. In this sense, democracy is the social arrangement organized around enjoyment and its excess.
But democracy has always been a signifier replete with enjoyment, an indication of an excess that no social structure can adequately contain. Democracy is excessive because it strips away all legitimacy justifying social authority.
Capitalism without democracy … Capitalism delivers the goods – and the good – just as efficiently, if not more so, without democracy as with it. … rather than being a good that we strive to attain without ever fully attaining it (an impossible justice to come), [:) DERRIDA ALERT] democracy becomes the lost object animating our desire, an object that impels us to act against our interest.
Democracy today does not help us to accumulate goods (or arrive at the good) but instead functions as a barrier on this path. Time spent insisting on freedom and equality, or even time spent engaged in democratic deliberation, is time that one cannot spend in the act of accumulation of goods. From the perspective of the service of goods, it is wasted time.
In fact, democracy requires that we sacrifice our interest on behalf of it: we must put at risk and even abandon the goods that global capitalism offers us in order to achieve it. This demand for sacrifice, far from lessening the appeal of democracy, actually constitutes it as desirable. 194