McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Rather than championing life against death or insisting on death as the necessary limit on life, it focuses on the death that remains internal to life. This death within life is what Freud calls the death drive 236
Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine. As the earlier chapters have contended, that uniqueness is the product of a primordial act of loss through which the subject comes into being.
The subject emerges through the sacrifice of a privileged object hat the act of sacrifice itself creates.
This act is correlative to the acquisition of a name which allows the subject to enter into a world of meaning and signification — a world that brings with it an indirect relation with the world of objects and with its privileged object. With the acquisition of a name, the subject becomes a subject of loss.
The entire existence of the subject becomes oriented around its lost object, even though this object only comes in to being through the subject’s act of ceding it.
This death that founds the subject creates in it a drive to return to the moment of loss itself because the originary loss creates both the subject and the subject’s privileged object.
The only enjoyment that the subject experiences derives not from life nor from death but from the death-in-life that is the death drive. 236
The signifier writes itself on top of life and reifies life’s supposed vitality in its death-laden paths. Every signifier is at bottom a stereotype, a rigid category for apprehending and freezing the movement of life. … the general suspicion of the signifier and its link to death is widespread among the forces of emancipation.
No matter how productive the signifier becomes, it will never access the flow of life itself and will always remain an interruption of that flow. … The very act of theorizing an embrace of pure life violates the theory in the process of constructing it. 237 -238
There is no system of pure life. In order to advocate a turn to life, one must take a detour through death. The philosophers of life conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome.
The muteness of pat of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes. One affirms one’s subjectivity not through proclaiming it but through a certain mode of keeping silent. 239
The psychoanalytic project involves helping the subject to recognize its symptom — the part of the body that resists full integration into the symbolic order — as the source of its enjoyment and freedom. The part of the body that gives us trouble, that refuses integration, is the expression of our subjectivity, the kernel that negates or refuses what has been imposed on it. By identifying ourselves with our mute body part, we take up the death drive and affirm a value that transcends pure life.
Like the conservative project, a psychoanalytic political project rejects the mechanical flow of pure life and instead privileges the disruption of that flow. But like leftist politics, it refuses to adhere itself to that which transcends life and limits it from the outside — such as God or death. This does not mean that psychoanalytic politics represents a compromise between the Right and the Left, some sort of median position. Instead, it operates outside the confines of the established opposition and presents a political choice that transcends the philosophical limits inherent in both the Right and the Left. 239