McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
The figure of the enemy offers subjects within society an explanation for the loss that they experience as members of society and as subjects. Trotsky provides a reason for the failure of the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union, and Israeli hegemony produces the misery that the Palestinians experience. Of course, in some cases, the enemy really does contribute to the loss that occurs within a society, but no enemy bears responsibility for loss as such, which comes first with subjectivity and then with the social order itself.
The enemy transforms an ontological phenomenon — loss within the social order — into an empirical one — instances of loss.
Through the obstacle that it places in the way, the enemy facilitates the belief that the collective identity within the social order or an authentic social bond is something that we might have. The barrier transforms an absence of collective identity into the illusory possibility of having this identity, and the possibility of having is integral to the male logic of exception.
Whereas male subjectivity is preoccupied with what it believes it has or should have, female subjectivity, as a structural position, involves an embrace of what one doesn’t have. To adopt the feminine position is ipso facto to recognize that all having involves having nothing.
Female subjectivity does not orient itself around an ideal of noncastration. There is no figure of the primal mother who appears to have the ultimate enjoyment and to hoard this enjoyment for herself. Though various ideals of female subjectivity certainly exist had have an impact on female identity, there is not simply one ideal. Instead, there is a plethora of them, and they often contradict each other. This is why Lacan insists that “there’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal.” 157
The result is that female subjectivity rests on a more tenuous ground: without the exception as a reference point that the male has, the female subject has no unified category within which to place herself. Because an exception is necessary to constitute the rule (or an outside is necessary to constitute an inside), there is no coherent category of female subjectivity. What results instead is a series of singularities without a clear rule defining them. As Kenneth Reinhard notes, “Unlike the case of men, for whom there is a unified category, “all men,’ that they are identified as being members of, women are RADICALLY SINGULAR, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but EACH ONE AN EXCEPTION.” The absence of an exceptional defining the category of female subjectivity renders female subjectivity as such exceptional. 157 – 158
Male subjectivity always strives for the ultimate enjoyment that it posits in the unattainable position of exceptionality. Its enjoyment is always futural, and it depends on the act of obtaining or having its object. Female subjectivity provides enjoyment through what it doesn’t have; one enjoys one’s loss as a female subject. This type of enjoyment is not exclusionary in the way that the male form of enjoyment is. It is not confined to a few exceptions, because there is nothing but exceptions, according to the logic of female sexuation. 158
The foundation of the social bond is a loss held in common, a collective sacrifice of nothing for the sake of the social order. This experience of collective sacrifice or loss provides enjoyment in the form linked to female sexuation. It is the enjoyment of a shared not-having, and it is the form that the social bond necessarily takes at first. Each subject sacrifices something in order to live together collectively, and through the shared sacrifice, subjects constitute the social bond. This bond is traumatic and shameful because its avowal places subjects in a position where their lack is completely exposed. When subjects experience the essence of the social bond — the moment of collective self-sacrifice — they simultaneously experience the humiliation of rendering their loss visible. The enjoyment of this bond comes with a steep price, and no society is willing to pay it for very long. 158
Consequently, every social order obscures the traumatic nature of the social bond, which operates according to the female logic of not having, through recourse to a male logic of exception, manifested most directly in the friend/enemy distinction. This male logic is a logic of the all — a totality forged through the position of the exception — and it continually leaves subjects in a state of dissatisfaction, seeking a completeness that they will never attain.
The female logic of not-having or universalized exceptionality is not a separate logic of the social order, a logic describing an alternative form of society. It is, rather, the hidden bond lying beneath the phallic order founded on exception. Every society has both logics simultaneously at work, but the underlying logic of the not-all is the one that societies find themselves unable to avow. 158-159
… the logic of the not-all posits that there are only enemies, only outsiders, and only exceptions. The point is not that everyone is a friend but that everyone is an enemy, including oneself. According to this idea of the universalized exception, we can’t erect a firm distinction between inside and outside because those inside — friends — are defined solely in terms of what they don’t have, and this renders them indistinct from those outside — enemies. 159
Our enjoyment of the social bond operates according to the logic of not-having: we enjoy the shared experience of loss. But the pleasure that we take in the social bond follows from the male logic of the all and the exception. We find pleasure in the possibility of having a collective identity that sets us apart from outsiders. This pleasure works in one sense to facilitate our enjoyment by hiding it from us. While most members of a society can accept the pleasure that derives from a sense of having a collective identity — almost no one objects to the affirmation of national unity embodied by a flag, for instance — few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss become visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159