McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Interview with Tutt October 2013
Once we accept that the good is antithetical to our enjoyment, is a barrier to our enjoyment, it becomes possible to think politics beyond the good. The politics of enjoyment can eschew the good altogether, I think. But we can’t fall into the trap of saying that the world will be better if we adopt a different organization of our enjoyment. No, in some sense it will become worse because we would lose the justifications that accompany our failures to enjoy fully. What we would gain, however, is what I would call an authentic relation to our enjoyment. I think we have to insist absolutely on the concept of authenticity in order to conceive of politics, just as resolutely as we have to abandon the good. In this way, I would replace the good with authenticity. That’s what we can’t do without in fact, even if it has been discredited by the association with Heidegger.
What is important about psychoanalysis to me is its theoretical intervention, its discovery of the death drive and the role that fantasy plays in our psyche. This is the great advance. And political struggle can integrate these theoretical insights without any help from actual psychoanalysis.
What allows one to disinvest in the capitalist mode of subjectivity is not, in my view, the psychoanalytic session. Instead it is the confrontation with a mode of enjoyment that ceases to provide the satisfaction that it promises. This prompts one to think about alternatives.
It’s impossible to understand how contemporary authority functions without psychoanalysis. Lacan is very clear in his explanation of the superego as an agency not of prohibition but of enjoyment, and nothing is more evident in today’s authorities. We are constantly bombarded with commands that we enjoy ourselves, and we feel guilty not for our sins but for our failures to enjoy as much as our neighbors. Psychoanalysis shows us that this command to enjoy is integral to how authority operates and that obedience can feel transgressive. This is the key to the power of contemporary authority. We obey but never experience ourselves as obedient. … We don’t know how obedient we are, and we require psychoanalysis to show us.
I was completely in support of Occupy Wall Street and even had several students who took part with my full encouragement. That said, there is a theoretical problem, and it is located exactly at the point you bring up. Occupy didn’t identify with the missing binary signifier but involves an identification with the excluded. I have a real problem with the slogan that identifies the movement with the 99%. What happens? Instantly, a new Other is produced that is the 1%, and if we can just eliminate this 1%, then we will achieve the good. That’s the logic at work. In this sense, Occupy, despite its successes (including, I would claim, the re-election of Barack Obama), remained within a very traditional political paradigm.
Identification with the missing binary signifier would insist, in contrast, would involve an identification with the inherent failure of the Other or the system itself. It would have to say something like “No One Belongs” rather than the two alternatives — either we are really the ones who belong or we are those who don’t belong. Not we are all citizens but no one is a citizen.
We shouldn’t give the 1% credit with really enjoying themselves or knowing what they’re doing. Badiou calls these finance capitalists legitimate gangsters. I don’t disagree, but this creates the sense that they are on the inside while the rest of us are on the outside.
Isn’t the lesson of Michael Mann’s masterpiece The Insider with Russell Crowe that the insider is always an outsider and that enjoyment, despite what we believe, is located on the outside?