McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
The main thrust of Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left involves forging the link between democracy and enjoyment. He sees that this is a link that most advocates of democracy – even radical democracy – have insufficiently emphasized because they fail to see the possibilities of an enjoyment derived from the experience of failure or of the not-all.
He says: “Far from being antithetical to jouissance, democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions. … They mobilise a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole.”
Severing democracy from the image of the social good requires emphasizing its scandalous dimension – the location of power in an entity (the people) that does not substantially exist.
Democracy emerges not through the expression of the popular will in institutionalized forms but when we experience the ultimate groundlessness of political power itself, when we experience the absence of any foundational social authority making itself felt.
The democratic impulse is tied to the absence at the heart of the social order, but the association of democracy with capitalism and the good has had the effect of filling this absence with the myth of the sovereign substantive people. The contemporary geopolitical universe has broken this association and returned the scandal to democracy, placing it in the position of the lost object. 194
But we are already seeing the enjoyment that derives from contemporary invocations of democracy. The enjoyment that surrounded Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the enjoyment that the 2011 Arab revolutions evinced are but two examples of this phenomenon, which becomes possible when the status of democracy shifts from being central to the capitalist order to being excessive.194
Identifying democracy with enjoyment can also change the way that we articulate its appeal.
We can make evident the contemporary disjunction between democracy and the good and emphasize the necessity of sacrificing the good for the sake of democracy and the enjoyment it provides.
If democracy becomes recognized as a lost object among contemporary subject and the advocates of democracy can marshal the enjoyment that it might engender, they will have a chance to triumph over the reign of the universalized service of goods that is global capitalism.
The political project of psychoanalysis is fundamentally democractic, but it envisions democracy as an excess that we can enjoy, though we cannot reconcile it with our enlightened self-interest.
It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment. 195