mcgowan sustaining anxiety

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.

The Structure of Chapter 4 Sustaining Anxiety Here are my blog notes on this chapter

1. Hegel and recognition and his insight into its ultimate failure: when a subject seeks recognition “it devotes itself to becoming someone inthe eyes of social authority and the search for recognition validates this authority. 101
2. At the point where the subject does not experience social recognition, it discovers the neighbor. 101
3. Recognition gentries this experience of the enjoyment of the other, the real other.
4. Encounter with the real other is the key to subject’s ethical being.
5. Traditionally: DEMAND prohibiting enjoyment and “exhorting contribution to public good.”
6. Now authority flaunts its enjoyment and encourages the subject to do the same. 103
7. As a result, the subject does not face a choice between sticking to the explicit demand or seeking the hidden desire but rather the choice between trying to obey the imperative to enjoy or searching for the missing demand hidden somewhere in the social fabric. This is the choice between the position of the pathological narcissist and that of the fundamentalist, and it defines our era. 103
8. Authority has become too close, and its obscenity has become visible. The transformation of paternal authority — a turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to a command that the subjects enjoy themselves — fundamentally alters the subject’s relation not just to authority itself but to the other as such.
9. Prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject, — or that installs a distance within all the subject’s relationships
10. The absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other.
11. Much (physical and psychic) violence today oc curs in response to the ANXIETY of the encounter with the enjoying other. Both the violence of the fundamentalist suicide bomber and the violence of the War on Terror have their origins in the experience of anxiety.
12. Women not covered up, discos, this is not enjoyment, this might be the image of enjoyment.  McGowan insists that “Enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers.”

Anxiety as Ethics

1. No distance from other’s enjoyment 113
2. The other’s private enjoyment — its smell, its way of talking, its gestures — ceaselessly bombards the subject. This is an assault that occurs all the time in the contemporary social world.
3. One way to escape anxiety is to restore prohibition and paternal law which involves an avowal of the lost object and its ability to deliver enjoyment. to return to the reign of traditional symbolic authority. 115
4. To create distance from enjoyment through our various efforts to resurrect prohibition — these efforts take form of various fundamentalisms.
5. As fundamentalism restores prohibitions, it creates more intense sites of enjoyment. whereas the cynical subject sees no enjoyment in the revelation of tf an almost-naked body, the fundamentalist subject sees enjoyment proliferating with the baring of a small patch of skin. in a world of anxiety, even the attempt to create distance has the effect of creating more enjoyment. 115
6. When we tolerate the other’s “excessive and intrusive jouissance” and when we endure the anxiety that it produces, we acknowledge and sustain the other in its real dimension. 116
7. Tolerance: insists on tolerating the other only insofar as the other cedes its enjoyment and accepts the prevailing symbolic structure. We tolerate the other in its symbolic dimension, the other that plays by the rules of our game.
8. This type of tolerance allows the subject to feel good about itself and to sustain its symbolic identity. the problem is that … it destroys what is in the other more than the other — the particular way the other enjoys. 117

It is only the encounter with the other in its real dimension — the encounter that produces anxiety in the subject — that sustains that which defines the other as such.

Authentic tolerance tolerates the real other, not simply the other as mediated through a symbolic structure. In this sense, it involves the experience of anxiety on the part of the subject. This is difficult position to sustain, as it involves enduring the “whole opaque weight of alien enjoyment on your chest.” The obscene enjoyment of the other bombards the authentically tolerant subject, but this subject does not retreat from the anxiety that this enjoyment produces … To reject the experience of anxiety is to flee one’s own enjoyment. 117

The tolerant attitude that never allows itself to be jarred by the enjoying other becomes … further from encountering the real other than the attitude of hate and mistrust. The liberal subject who welcomes illegal immigrants as fellow citizens completely shuts down the space for th other in the real. The immigrant as fellow citizen is not the real other. The xenophobic conservative, on the other hand, constructs a fantasy that envisions the illegal immigrant awash in a linguistic and cultural enjoyment that excludes natives. This fantasy, paradoxically, permits an encounter with the real other that liberal tolerance forecloses. Of course, xenophobes retreat from this encounter and from their own enjoyment, but they do have an experience of it that liberals do not. The tolerant liberal is open to the other but eliminates the otherness while the xenophobic conservative is closed to the other but allows for the otherness. The ethical position thus involves sustaining the liberal’s tolerance within the conservative’s encounter with the real other. 119-120