McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis.
Successful normal subjectivity, as Freud defines it, stands in contrast. The normal subject does not exist completely outside the domain of social authority, but this subject is able to enjoy in a way that neurotics, psychotics, and perverts cannot. Rather than keeping the subversion of social authority a private matter (in the manner of the neurotic), the normal subject publicly avows its fantasy. By insisting on its fantasies at the expense of social recognition, such a subject embraces its mode of enjoying. This is the fundamental aim of the psychoanalytic process, and the subject who does this necessarily exposes its fantasy and enjoys in a public way.
By enjoying in a public way, the subject becomes what we might call a fool. The fool is a subject who ceases to court the social authority’s approbation and becomes immune to the seduction of social recognition or rewards. Recognition has a value for the subject only insofar as the subject believes in the substantial status of social authority – that is, insofar as the subject believes that the identities that society confers have a solid foundation. The fool grasps that no such foundation exists and that no identity has any basis whatsoever. The only possible foundation for the subject lies in the subject itself – in the fantasy that organizes the subject’s enjoyment. Such a subject becomes a fool because it constantly acts in ways that make no sense to the social authority. It acts out of the nonsense of its own enjoyment.
This does not mean that the fool acts at random. Nonsensical enjoyment is not arbitrary enjoyment but enjoyment irreducible to the symbolic world of signification. In fact, the fool, having embraced its own mode of enjoying, acts with considerable regularity. This type of subject clearly acts against its own self-interest and in defiance of any good at all. The paradigmatic instance of the fool is the subject pursuing the lost cause or the subject continuing to act when all hope has already been lost. The pursuit of the lost cause reveals that what motivates the subject is not a potential reward but purely the enjoyment of the pursuit itself. The authentic fool doesn’t peruse the lost cause with resignation but with the knowledge that there is no other cause but the lost one. Rather than paralyzing the subject, this recognition emboldens it, as the example of Hamlet demonstrates.
Hamlet
father’s ghost and determines must kill Claudius in order to revenge his father’s murder, he believes in possibility of justice. For Hamlet at the beginning of S’s play, there is an order in the world that his act might restore …
Hamlet [believes] in distributive justice, which tacitly presupposes a social authority with a solid foundation that could distribute justice. This attitude undergoes a radical transformation, however, when he sees Ophelia’s grave. At this point in the play, Hamlet recognizes the groundlessness of all authority and the hopelessness of his own cause. 137
[…] Once his cause has become a lost cause, Hamlet can act.
As long as Hamlet hopes that his act might accomplish something substantial, the moment will never be right for it. Once he ceases to believe in the possibility of restoring justice and understands the act only in terms of his own fantasmatic enjoyment, he frees himself from the search for the proper moment. Subjects who hope to make an impact on social authority never act because they cannot calculate how the authority will respond to the act. Such subjects, like Hamlet at the beginning of the play, spend their time probing the authority.