Author: logocentric

mcgowan death drive loss tragedy

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

The death drive, despite the implications of the term itself and Freud’s own suggestions in this direction, is not a drive to die and thereby return to an inorganic state. Rather than the death that occurs at the end of life, the death drive comes out of a death that occurs within life.

It is a drive to repeat the experience of the loss of the privileged object that gives birth to the desiring subject.

This experience is death in life insofar as it marks the moment at which death installs itself in the subject and rips the subject out of the cycle of life. The loss of the privileged object derails the subject and distorts the subject’s relationship to life itself. 35

From this moment on, rather than simply trying to survive or to increase its vitality, the subject will continually return to the loss that defines the structure of its desire.

This disruption of life that founds the subject as such renders insufficient any recourse to an organicist or biological explanation of subjectivity. The subject of desire is never just a living subject; it is a subject that holds within it a form of death, a loss that shapes every relation that it subsequently adopts to the world. In fact, this loss pulls the subject out of the world and leaves it completely alienated from its environment or lifeworld. 35

By privileging the foundational experience of traumatic loss, Freud attempts to apprehend the birth of this relationship between the subject and its world rather than taking it for granted. He implies that one can’t simply assume that a world in which one can distinguish objects as distinct from oneself is given a priori.

Rather than always experiencing a world, the subject as Freud conceives it begins in the unworldly state of autoeroticism, where distinctions do not exist.

Without some act of negation – the initial sacrifice of nothing – objects cannot emerge out of this undifferentiated existence.

But even after this primordial sacrifice, the subject does not attain the worldliness that Heidegger identifies with Dasein’s experience. Because it is born through the act of loss, the subject never has – and never can have – a world. It remains alienated and out of touch from the world, relating to the world and the objects in the world through the mediation of the lost object.

The subject, in other words, experiences the presence of the world through the absence of the privileged object. The empirical objects in the world cannot but dissatisfy the subject insofar as they fail to be the object. The lost object structures every relation that the subject takes up with the world. 36-37

mcgowan loss

p.33 No subsequent acquisition or reward can redeem the loss of the privileged object that founds subjectivity; it is a loss without the possibility of recompense.

And yet, ideology proclaims that every loss has a productive dimension to it. In this sense, ideology is singular: all ideologies are but forms of ideology as such. According to Christian ideology, our suffering on earth finds its reward in heavenly bliss. According to capitalist ideology, our labor today has its reward in tomorrow’s riches. According to Islamic fundamentalist logic, our suicidal sacrifice results in an eternity in paradise.

No ideology can avow a completely unproductive loss, a loss that doesn’t lead to the possibility of some future pleasure, and yet an unproductive loss is precisely what defines us.

One challenges ideology not by proclaiming that loss or sacrifice is unnecessary that might live lives of plenitude but by insisting on the unproductivity of loss.

Once a subject grasps that no future gain can redeem the initial loss, ideology loses its ability to control that subject. In this sense, one of the great anti-ideological works of philosophy is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 33

When one reaches absolute knowledge, one recognizes that loss is constitutive of whatever position one holds. This recognition allows one to embrace loss for its own sake and to enjoy it rather than retreating from it or trying to overcome it. … Hegel leads philosophy to the position at which it can resist ideology’s effort to recuperate loss and convince subjects that the status of loss is empirical rather than constitutive. 35

Locating the source of one’s suffering in an external threat functions precisely like imagining a future recompense for that suffering. In both cases loss becomes a contingent fact that one might overcome rather than the foundation of one’s subjectivity.

To avow the structural necessity of loss would deprive ideology of its most powerful incentive, which is why no ideology takes up this relation to loss. Or to put it in other terms, what no ideology can acknowledge is the death drive. 35

mcgowan final chapter death drive

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. … It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive.

… we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. 283

By positing the future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come.

There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying.

The enjoyment that the death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does in Hegel’s .

The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself.

The enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement.

The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive’s finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. 284

A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitation as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment.

To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its enjoyment. … the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews.

… recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. The recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term.

A self-limiting society would still have real battles to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe … nuclear weapons to defend itself against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the planet.

But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. 285

With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle … “… the state or political community … aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”

If we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear.

One must arrive an enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost. 286

mcgowan politics requires the enemy or outsider

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

In the last instance, Beauvoir’s own political project involves working to eliminate the association of woman with the missing signifier and thus to constitute an egalitarian society in which no one bears the mark of exclusion. But as long as one remains attached to the task of the including everything that is missing – even if one views this as an impossible ideal never to be realized, as Derrida and Robert Langdon do – one transforms the absent signifier into an actual one when in fact it is nothing but a certain necessary distortion within signification itself.

Beauvoir recognizes the internal limit that the missing signifier marks and then attempts to overcome this limit through advocating for inclusion. Inclusion at once goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. 279

One can neither elevate everyone to the status of the empowered (male) subject nor eliminate entirely the idea of the subject. But one can combat the idea of the subject as an integral whole. It is on this ground that one might struggle against the repressiveness of patriarchal society. When one opposes male and female in order to exclude the latter, one presupposes the wholeness of the male subject and fails to recognize the way in which the incompleteness of the signifying structure actually serves to constitute this subjectivity.

The point is not simply the banal one that the concept of the male depends on the existence of its opposite but that the missing signifier is part of the concept: the barrier to “male” functioning as a complete identity is an internal one. The task of a psychoanalytic politics involves bringing conceptual location of the feminine – or the missing signifier – to light. 279

The missing signifier indicates the failure of any set to close itself as a whole. By emphasizing this failure through one’s political activity, one works to effect a fundamental change in the relationship between inclusion and exclusion.

As long as the logic of wholeness or success predominates, inclusion within a set will provide a certain symbolic identity for those who are included, and those who are excluded will experience the absence of this identity. The logic of the whole secures a stable barrier that creates vastly different experiences on each of its sides, but this stable barrier is always an illusory one.

The logic of the failure of any closure does not eliminate the barrier between inside and outside or deconstruct the difference between inclusion and exclusion. Instead, it reveals the speculative identity of inclusion and exclusion. The two position become visible as the same through their very difference.

Politics requires the enemy or the outsider. It requires a gap within the signifying structure where there can be no understanding. But psychoanalytic thought allows us to relate to this gap – and to the enemy – in a new way.

We cannot understand the gap, but we can identify with it as that which defines us, as that which produces our enjoyment rather than destroying it.

This is, as Juan-David Nasio has it, the goal of the psychoanalytic process. He claims: “Before the analysis, the loss had been a badly healed scar, while at the end of analysis there is also a loss, but a loss carried out in the manner of a cut with creative effects.” The gap in signification becomes a fecund limit, a limit that we enjoy. This type of recognition is not confined … to the psychoanalytic clinic. It is possible wherever we bring psychoanalytic thinking to bear on our situation. We can take the logic of the clinic and unleash it in our political practice. In fact, this logic is inseparable from any authentic politics. 280

When male subjects identify themselves with the feminine and begin to think of themselves in these terms, they do not, of course, immediately transform the material conditions that inform this identity. Actual women continue to live as second-class citizens. Many would object to such an identification for just this reason. But it does have the effect of reinventing subjectivity as such and, in this way, leading to the transformation of the material conditions of women. If men began to take up the identification with the feminine, we would not live in a world without divisions; instead, we would live in a world with an internal rather than an external division. The divide between male and female subjectivity would become what it already is: a division within the subject itself.

The recognition that the missing signifier operates within the signifying structure rather than outside deprives politics of the long-cherished ideal of total inclusion, an ideal that often animates concrete struggles, but it provides political action with a new form.

Instead of working directly to expand the umbrella of rights to include more of those excluded, the political act would involve the refusal, on the part of those on the inside, to accept the benefits that insider status provides.

Recognizing that the missing signifier is internal to the signifying structure, the male subject insists on taking up the relationship to the symbolic structure that the female subject bears. The question of feminism becomes a personal question for every male subject.

By personalizing the question, male subjects affirm their own failure to attain the status of real men and thereby testify to the void that undermines – and defines – every identity.

By identifying with the absent signifier, we do not insist on subverting the system but on adhering to the truth of the signifying system and forcing that truth to manifest itself. 281

mcgowan missing binary signifier = immigrant

There is no legitimate place for the immigrant within the ruling symbolic structure, and this absence leads to calls for the deportation or elimination of immigrants. In response to the conservative push around the world for tough national policies against illegal immigration, leftists have responded by calling into question the idea of illegality with the slogan, ‘No One Is Illegal.” Those who take up this position work toward a future world where illegality itself would be eliminated, where the absent binary signifier could be fully revealed, even though they remain aware that this future is impossible. The problem with this slogan and the political position informing it is in its failure to grasp precisely how the missing signifier interacts with the signifying structure.

Because the missing signifier is present as an absence, it exerts a constant pressure. The more successful leftists are in promulgating the idea that we should not consider any immigrants as illegal, the more strenuously some other group will be located in the position of the missing binary signifier. The leftist fight against the idea of illegality, despite the good intentions of those involved, will inevitably backfire. 276-277

No amount of political effort will eliminate the position of the missing binary signifier, nor will it succeed in vacating this signifier of any content.

There will always be someone in the position of the immigrant, but the question concerns how we relate to this structurally requisite position. 277

The only political solution lies in abandoning the quest for a solution.

It involves identification with this signifier rather than in the effort to integrate it successfully.

Instead of attempting to conceive of the missing signifier from the perspective of the signifying system, we must conceive of the signifying system from the perspective of the missing signifier. 277

By doing so, we would see that the missing signifier, despite appearances, does not concern those who are not properly represented. It concerns the system of signification itself, the law itself. The absence in the law is the founding moment of the law, not an otherness that the law cannot accommodate.

This means that the struggle against illegal immigration does not concern illegal immigrants outside the legal social structure, even though they are clearly affected by this struggle. It concerns, instead, the status of the upstanding citizen within the social structure.

By responding on the level of the immigrant – or by responding to patriarchy on the level of the feminine – the political battle is already lost. The missing signifier is not an opening to a mysterious otherness; it is the unacknowledged way that the symbolic structure manifests itself.

Rather than the slogan “No One Is Illegal,” a politics of identification with the missing binary signifier would involve a slightly different one, something like “No One Is Legal.” The missing signifier does not hold the key to the future full citizenship of all subjects; instead, it prevents the full citizenship of any subjects.

The structure of citizenship itself depends on the absence of the signifier for the illegal immigrant, and, as a result, the legal citizen cannot avoid this absence.

In order to be effective in the last instance, our political efforts must emphasize the missing signifier as an internal dislocation of the structure of legal citizenship … 277

Rather than working to include previously excluded subjects within the structure of signification, we must work instead to reveal how those inside are themselves already excluded: there is no inclusion that does not partake of the fundamental exclusion that defines the structure. Legal citizens must come to recognize that legality doesn’t exist. Fostering this recognition is the essence of a psychoanalytic politics … 278

mcgowan missing binary signifier

The status of the missing signifier is transcendental. Its absence serves only to shape the signifying structure in the same way that Kant conceives the regulative ideas of reason shaping the structure of our understanding. 274

The key to responding to the absence of the binary signifier lies in recognizing its presence within the signifying structure, or, to put it in Derrida’s terms, in recognizing the immanence of what resists thought within thought itself.

This signifier [binary signifier]… does not exist, even as a trace, which is what Lacan is getting at when he insists that “the Woman does not exist” or “the Other does not exist.”

Recognizing the nonexistence of this signifier changes the way we relate to the signifying structure and has clear political consequences.

Rather than respecting the gap in signification as the placeholder for the missing signifier, we should recognize that nothing exists in the gap and that nothing really is, for us, something.

The gap marks the point at which senselessness itself is included in the world of signification. Nothing or senselessness is not a specter that haunts the system but the very basis of the symbolic system.

The absence of the binary signifier constitutes the social as such, which means that this missing signifier is not simply absent but present as an absence. The missing signifier is already here, already within the signifying structure, constantly making its effects felt on this structure.

When we recognize the transcendental status of the missing signifier we can give up the impossible pursuit of it that dominates the contemporary popular intellectual landscape. … Hermeneutics embarks on an endless quest for the impossible signifier that it can never find – it is an unending process of seeking – but psychoanalytic interpretation finds without seeking. … I do not seek I find To find, in the sense that Lacan uses the term here, signifies recognizing the missing signifier as a structuring presence. 275

The endless seeking of the hermeneutic position functions as a barrier to genuine political engagement; it allows the subject to avoid the political act of identifying itself with the missing signifier.

This identification is the result of the finding that Lacan mentions. The psychoanalytic position fully takes up the advocacy of the missing signifier, and it can do so because this signifier is not external to the signifying structure but ensconced within it as that which gives the structure its form, so that there is no risk that the identification will transform it into a full presence within the structure.

The missing signifier does not reside elsewhere, on a separate plane, but rather operates within the signifying structure. Even the most banal moments of everyday life center around the missing signifier, which animates them with whatever vitality they possess. Every aspect of the signifying structure takes the missing signifier as its point of departure because this gap marks the point at which the structure opens itself to the new and different.

We affirm the missing signifier not just when we politicize ourselves through fidelity to the exceptional event that occurs in the space of the missing signifier or void but through all the variegations of our everyday lives.

Every aspect of the signifying structure is already informed by the gap. We can identify with the missing signifier in its absence, and this is the gesture that a genuine politics demands. 276

mcgowan god contingency the other

The key to fighting against the nefarious effects of belief involves promulgating the recognition that we cannot but believe.

Armed with this recognition that God is a structural necessity rather than a being in whom we might opt to believe, we transform the believer’s conception of God.

Though in one sense widespread acceptance of the necessity of belief wouldn’t change much, it would allow this transformation in the nature of what is believed. The subject who grasps belief as a necessity and God as a structural entity recognizes that even God doesn’t know – and this is the fundamental recognition inherent in every politicization.

If psychoanalysis is atheistic, it is atheistic in the sense that it insists that even though there is God qua gap in the signifying order, there is no knowledge in this gap. Or as Lacan puts it in Seminar XI “The true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” 253

To know that the other in the gap doesn’t know or that God is unconscious is to understand that nothing grounds human existence. The recognition that nothing grounds human existence founds any genuinely emancipatory political project. 254

Recognizing belief as necessary or God as unconscious requires an ability to see contingency at the point were explanations break down and where one typically posits the mysterious power of God.

The place where the binary signifier is missing represents the place where the contingent resides. 254

Rather than stressing the godless nature of the universe or the inutility of faith, his film shows the contingency operating at the point of the absent signifier, where believers would locate God.

Instead of God connecting everyone to each other, Babel shows the contingent nature of the social bond. Contingency becomes the source of the link between disparate worlds, and the contingent encounter provides a possibility for the realization of this link.

The contingent encounter forces the subject to confront a lack of knowledge concerning the other. One has no assurance about what the other desires, and no one can provide this assurance – not even the other itself. 257

As Babel shows, the contingent encounter offers the subject the opportunity to act – to thrust itself toward the other without any guarantee concerning how the other might respond.

In doing so, it brings the subject back to the moment of its entry into symbolization and the point at which belief first manifests itself. 258

mcgowan master signifier binary signifier God

Though Freud eagerly participated in this failed frontal assault on belief, psychoanalysis also points toward another strategy: rather than insisting on the irrationality or problematic nature of believing, we might instead maintain the impossibility of not believing. … psychoanalytic insights reveal that belief is not exceptional but the de facto attitude of the subject, the result of a structure in which the subject enters in order to become a subject.

When the subject enters into signification, it encounters the senseless injunction of the master signifier, a signifier that requires unconditional obedience. Through the form of this initial signifier, the subject receives the social authority’s demand. But this demand never acquires a sense, and the structure of justification remains incomplete because no binary signifier for the master signifier exists.

The authority’s injunction exists on its own, without any subsequent signifier that would provide completion and justification for the master signifier.

The parent tells the child to obey, but no parent can ground this demand in an ultimate reason that would allow it to make sense. This is why, at some point, the parent must respond to the child’s question “Why?” with the unsatisfying response “because I said so.” The ultimate justification for parental (and societal) authority is tautological.

In the last instance, the child must obey simply because the parent says so, and this absence of a ground for the parental injunction is typically our first experience of the missing binary signifier that would provide a sense for the senseless master signifier. 250

The absence of a binary signifier, a signifier that would explain or justify the demand of the master signifier, creates an opening within the structure of signification.

Signification begins with a master signifier, but there is no binary signifier that would close the signifying utterance definitively.

Every stopping point remains a failed stand-in for the missing ultimate stopping point. The absence of a final stopping point or binary signifier unleashes the subject’s desire, but it also molds the subject into a believer.

While enlightenment and rationality might topple our belief in God qua master signifier, it cannot touch our belief in the God of the real, the God who occupies the position of the missing binary signifier and thus does not appear in the chain of signifiers. 251

The Enlightenment assault on the God of the philosophers or the symbolic God leaves intact the other version of God – the God of the missing binary signifier. This is the God who acts in mysterious ways, who provides the answers that transcend causal explanations.

This God never shows itself but always remains in the position of impossibility. One cannot argue away this God because it occupies a position outside all rationality and argumentation: the more successfully one refutes this God’s existence, the more ardently the believer will cling to belief.

This insistence is visible not just in backwater fundamentalists but even in a thinker as sophisticated as Kierkegaard, who contends that the strength of the arguments against the existence of God provide incentive for the leap of faith rather than discouraging it.

But even Kierkegaard’s belief is not the result of an existential choice made by the believer but is rather imposed on the subject by the nature of the symbolic structure itself. 252

Each act of speaking makes us aware of a field of the unsaid that does not exist prior to or outside of the act of speaking. The field of the unsaid, the field of the real other, is irreducible. No matter how many times we attempt to say the last word and to provide an ultimate ground for what we sway, our act of speaking will open up this field of the beyond that no words can subsequently contain.

The inescapability of the real other is at once the inescapability of the God of the missing binary signifier, who is nothing but the name for that which we cannot grasp through the signifier, even though the signifier structurally creates a place for it.

Atheists Marxists appeal to History; evolutionary biologists appeal to Natural Selection; Nietzsche appeals to the fecundity of Life itself; and so on. Even though such figures reject the name of the God, they accept God as a structural position by filling in the missing space in the structure of signification with an explanatory guarantee. 253

mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

…[Why do we think that] if people simply had all the facts, they would abandon either their religious belief or their investment in the capitalist mode of production.

But religious belief and ideological commitment are not reducible to knowledge. Both represent libidinal investments that provide adherents with a reward that no amount of knowledge can replace. … the enjoyment that derives from believing 247-248

Enjoyment has an inverse relationship to utility: we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions. …

Given the odds, belief represents a poor investment and should attract very few adherents. But if the driving force behind belief is not eternal bliss but the very act of sacrifice itself – a wasteful rather than a productive act – the arguments against belief would lose all of their force.

Wasteful sacrifice appeals to us because we emerge as subject through an initial act of ceding something without gaining anything in return. The creative power of the human subject stems from its ability to sacrifice.

Through sacrificing some part of ourselves, we create a privileged object that will constitute us as desiring subjects, but this object exists only as lost or absent and has no existence prior to the sacrificial act that creates it.

There is a fundamental dissatisfaction written into the very structure of subjectivity that no one can ever escape. But at the same time, the act of sacrifice allows us to create anew our lost object. 249

Especially in the contemporary world, religious belief provides respite – an oasis of enjoyment – for the subject caught up in the capitalist drive to render everything useful and banish whatever remains unproductive. 249

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 3

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

If we locate the origin of the subject in the act where it loses nothing, this promises to revolutionize our thinking about the struggle between life and death or between Left and Right.

Privileging an originary loss allows us to see how death, rather than acting as an external limit, inheres in life itself for the subject.

There is no life for the subject that does not have its origin in death.

The subject begins its life with a death – a loss of what is most valuable to it – and no subsequent loss or death will ever be the equal of this originary one (which occurs only structurally, not empirically).

We do not have to seek out death in order to render life valuable; death is always already present within our lives and providing us value. We don’t recognize it because we resist the notion that we originate as subjects through loss and that loss is the only vehicle through which we can enjoy.

We can only give up the pursuit of death when we realize that we have already found it – or that it has found us at the moment of our emergence as subjects. 240

We embrace loss itself as the key to our freedom and our enjoyment rather than trying to flee the experience of loss through having. Recognizing the creative power of loss for us as subjects would imply a political transformation as well.

We cannot trace a through-line from the evolutionary development of animals to the emergence of subjectivity.

Subjectivity emerges through a break, through a moment in which death is injected into life and thereby throws life off its course. But in order for this disruption to be possible, a fundamental gap in the evolutionary process must have already been there. That is to say, if the evolutionary process moved forward without a hitch, there would have been no space for the emergence of language and subjectivity.

The very existence of a subject of the death drive – a being that doesn’t desire its own good – testifies to a profound lacuna within evolutionary theory. This reveals that even the movement of life in the natural world has an unnatural dimension to it, or else the death drive as such could never emerge. The natural world harbors death within it as an excess that permanently disrupts its forward movement. 241

[Subjectivity] persists only as long as it sustains the experience of loss and continues to return to this originary experience.

To recognize the excessive presence of death in life would result in a fundamental transformation of the social order. It would create neither the pure productivity of the Marxist utopia nor the strict prohibitions (and resulting ultimate enjoyment) of the fundamentalist’s dreams.

The world in which recognized death in life would contain at once more suffering and more enjoyment. We would see the trauma of loss as our only destiny, but we would also see loss as the site of our enjoyment. 242

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 2

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

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 [Deleuze, Hardt] conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome. This conception of the signifier fails to account for the inseparability of negation and production.

The signifier does in fact kill; it does mortify the body. But this mortification is itself a productive act. Prior to the mortification of the body, the body is not vital and productive; it is simply stupid.

The signifier writes itself on top of this stupid body and transofmrs it into a signifiying body. But this transformation is not complete: there are points at which the body resists its signification, where it refuses to speak. The troubled passage from the living body to the signifiying body reveals the antagonism between the subject and the social order that leads to the formation of psychoanalysis.

Hysterics originally came to Freud and Breuer because of the disjunctive relationship between the body and the world of signification. Part of the hysteric’s body refuses to speak, to accept it integration into the symbolic order, and this refusal is symptomatic.

The signifier deadens the entire body in order to make it signify, but part of the body resists the deadening process and becomes mute. This occurs literally in the case of aphasia, though every hysterical ailment follows the same pattern the muteness of part of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes.

One affirms one’s subjectivity not though 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 its 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.

The source of our enjoyment and the source of whatever value we find in existence is neither life nor death. It is a product of the collision between death and life, between the signifier and the body.

The signifier’s deadening of the body opens up the space for a part of the body that resists this deadening. It creates value not directly but through the bodily remainder that escapes its power. This remainder is not a present force but an object irretrievably lost for the subject. 239

mcgowan death drive subject of loss 1

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

… psychoanalysis in fact represents a third way. 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.

Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine … 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 that 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 into being through the subject’s act of ceding it. 236

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.