drive – Page 4 – objet (a)

mcgowan death in life

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

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 236

Viewed from the perspective of the death drive, the uniqueness of a subject does not derive from the divine. As the earlier chapters have contended, 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 hat 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 in to being through the subject’s act of ceding it.

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. 236

The signifier writes itself on top of life and reifies life’s supposed vitality in its death-laden paths. Every signifier is at bottom a stereotype, a rigid category for apprehending and freezing the movement of life. … the general suspicion of the signifier and its link to death is widespread among the forces of emancipation.

No matter how productive the signifier becomes, it will never access the flow of life itself and will always remain an interruption of that flow. … The very act of theorizing an embrace of pure life violates the theory in the process of constructing it. 237 -238

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 conceive of the signifier as an evil that might be overcome.

The muteness of pat of the subject’s body is the form that resistance to symbolization necessarily takes. One affirms one’s subjectivity not through 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 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.

Like the conservative project, a psychoanalytic political project rejects the mechanical flow of pure life and instead privileges the disruption of that flow. But like leftist politics, it refuses to adhere itself to that which transcends life and limits it from the outside — such as God or death. This does not mean that psychoanalytic politics represents a compromise between the Right and the Left, some sort of median position. Instead, it operates outside the confines of the established opposition and presents a political choice that transcends the philosophical limits inherent in both the Right and the Left. 239

zupančič drive

The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA

When, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan returns to the question of the drive, he reformulates the difference between the object and the Thing in terms of the difference between aim and goal.

Let us suggest an example of this difference, as well as of the difference between instinct and drive: the child’s instinct to suck the nipple in order to be fed becomes the drive when the aim (or the object) of sucking is no longer milk, but the very satisfaction that it finds in sucking.

Thus, a child sucking its finger already has some experience of the drive.

The “change of object” that characterizes the drive, as well as sublimation, is the shift from the object that gives us satisfaction (i.e. the “natural” object, the object that can satisfy a certain need) to the satisfaction itself as an object.

We are not dealing with substitution, but rather with a “deviation” or “detour.” 57

So, contrary to the common belief, sublimation does not proceed from some “unnatural,” “depraved,” or “unacceptable” desire to something more “natural” (in the sense of being more acceptable), but rather from something perfectly natural (sucking a nipple in order to be fed) to something “unnatural” (sucking a woman’s breast or a penis for the sake of sucking, for the very pleasure of sucking).

zupancic UMBRA pt 2 extimité drive Thing

The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA

Previously we took the example of “purposiveness without purpose,” which might be slightly misleading since we encounter the same term (purpose) on both sides. A better example is that of “pleasure without interest,” or, in another translation, “liking devoid of all interest,” which will help us to clarify in detail how this “interior exclusion” actually works and what its consequences are.

The notion of “pleasure devoid of all interest” also has the advantage of becoming, since Nietzsche’s critique, the emblem of the Kantian conception of the beautiful and the topos of contemporary philosophical debate concerning the notion of the beautiful (and of art in general). […]

But what exactly does the formula “pleasure devoid of all interest” aim at?

Kant calls the pleasure that is still linked with interest (or need) “agreeableness.” If I declare an object to be agreeable, this judgment “arouses a desire for objects of that kind.” This does not mean that with the next stage, the stage of the beautiful, or “devoid of all interest,” this desire disappears — the point is that it becomes irrelevant.

Let us clarify this with one of Kant’s own examples, the “green meadows.”

The first stage is the objective stage: the green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation. “Meadows are green” is an objective judgment.

The second stage is the subjective stage: the color’s agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, to feeling: “I like green meadows” is a subjective judgment, which also means, “I would like to see green meadows as often as possible.” This is a “yes” to the object (green meadows) which is supposed to gratify us (Kant’s term).

The third stage is a “yes,” not to the color, but to the feeling of the agreeable itself, a “yes” not to the object that gratifies us but to the gratification itself, i.e. a “yes” to the previous “yes.”

Here it is the feeling itself, the sensation that becomes the object (of judgment). “Green meadows are beautiful” is a judgment of taste, an aesthetic judgment, which is neither “objective” nor “subjective.” This judgment could be called “acephalous” or “headless,” since the “I,” the “head” of the judgment is replaced, not with some impersonal objective neutrality as in statements of the type “the meadows are green,” but with the most intimate part of the subject (how the subject feels itself affected by a given representation as object).

“Devoid of all interest” means precisely that we no longer refer to the existence of the object (green meadows), but only to the pleasure that it gives us.

Life must involve passion (engagement, zeal, enthusiasm, interest), but this passion must always be accompanied by an additional “yes”—to it, otherwise it can only lead to nihilism. This “yes” cannot be but detached from the object, since it refers to the passion itself.

The great effort of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to think and articulate the two together. “Yes” to the “yes” cannot be the final stage in the sense that it would suffice in itself. Alone, it is no longer a “yes” to a “yes,” but just plain “yes”—the “ee-ahh,” the donkey’s sound of inane, empty enjoyment.

But how exactly does this couple function? We know that any real involvement excludes simultaneous contemplation of it.

And yet they must be somehow simultaneous, they must always walk in a pair (i.e. constitute one subjective figure), otherwise we would not be dealing with the “affirmation of affirmation,” but with two different types of affirmation.

The figure that corresponds to this criterion is the figure of creation — or, in other terms, the figure of sublimation.

The creation is never a creation of one thing, but always the creation of two things that go together: the something and the void, or, in Lacan’s terms, the object and the Thing.

This is the point of Lacan’s insisting on the notion of creation ex nihilo, and of his famous example of the vase: the vase is what creates the void, the emptiness inside it.

The arch-gesture of art is to give form to the nothing.

Creation is not something that is situated in the (given) space or that occupies a certain space, it is the very creation of the space as such.

With every creation, a new space gets created.

Another way of putting this would be to say that every creation has the structure of a veil. It operates as a veil that creates a “beyond,” announces it, and makes it almost palpable in the very tissue of the veil.

dolar keeping the ball in the air persistence perseverance

Here is the interview online

Badiou’s four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.

Science, and above all the completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world, it just creates its own entities, pure entities.
Poetry and art as such.
Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. There’s an opposition between the two. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics which has to do with justice and equality, it has to do with an idea.
Love, which is the emergence of a truth event. A subjective truth event.

Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. I am not sure that this list is the best, exhaustive or conclusive. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, even trivial ones, there may be a sudden and unexpected break, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected, and actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. But it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something, everything at stake.

To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. There is the spontaneous hang to pursue your social survival within a certain slot, the script for your career is waiting for you. And this is where the question of break comes in.

The passion is what makes a break.

But the break, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.

What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is not some striving towards death, but too much of life. There’s too much life, more than you can bear.

So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage and persistence, perseverance.

I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to… ‘übereinstimmen’.

So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glory and awards. If it started with a break, then the big danger is that the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

Dolar: Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this.

They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this.

You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of a madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis, in a certain sense, if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

Dolar: Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means that it provides you with some answers as to ‘What does it all mean?’ ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the era of progress and prosperity’, etc.

I mean the words which fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology.

Art and ideology are at the opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuity of what you most feel at home with. And what you feel at home with is entrusted upon you. But this is not to say that art is immune to ideology, it can easily be made into ideology.

WgK: At that point when you feel content.

Dolar: Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You establish canonical artworks which you are taught at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include or exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to domesticate Shakespeare’s work. You glorify it instead of dealing with it.

WgK: It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.

Dolar: Yeah. You reinscribe them into a continuity of a tradition, of a cultural identity.

WgK: I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.

Dolar: For home?

WgK: Yeah. Isn’t it?

Dolar: Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating a home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. What Freud called das Unheimliche, litterally the unhomely, but with the utter ambiguity where it can be given the comic twist. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

rothenberg dimly lit garage

Imagine that you walk into your dimly lit garage and discover a mess. The place is so jumbled that you cannot even distinguish one thing from another.

Now, let’s say that, suddenly, the walls of the garage disappear, and you discover that this jumbled mass stretches in all directions.

One final gesture: remove yourself from the scene, so that you cannot serve as a reference point or means of orientation. No up nor down, no inside nor outside. No spaces between things, no background against which they stand out, no standpoint from which to assess their relationships.

It is as though everything is glued to everything else in what Copjec calls the “realtight.”

I will follow Alain Badiou in calling this state of affairs “being,” where things have no particular identity or relationship to one another, where there is no subject, and where orientation is impossible. In this state, no thing is determined because no thing has any relation to anything else.

[…] The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation – like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other – they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. The “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties, and relationships – as objects.33

McGowan 2004 on traversing fantasy

I have just read a 2004 article by Todd McGowan “Fighting Our Fantasies: Dark City and the Politics of Psychoanalysis” from his edited book on Lacan and Cinema. Now that I’ve read McGowan in 2013, I see that he’s moved a bit from this position on fantasy. Not a lot mind you, but instead of fantasy as concealing a truer reality, or a real, I think McGowan now would subscribe to the theory that fantasy is necessary, that it provides us with an opportunity to transcend the symbolic, and in expounding on this he cites the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t think McGowan is so big on the “traversing the fantasy” stuff anymore.

Psychoanalytic interpretation allows individuals to recognize functioning of ideology and role private fantasies play does nothing to help individuals act “politically as part of a larger group.” Žižek here stakes his position on the identity of psychoanalysis and politics by claiming that psychoanalysis demands the political Act – the traversal of fantasy because for Žižek fantasy “keeps the subjects within the hold of ideology.” But for McGowan this answer is very individualistic.

“Traversing the fantasy—the end of analysis—seems to be something that occurs only on the level of the individual. It may provide freedom for the individual, but this freedom exists, according to Marxism, within the larger unfreedom of capitalist society. Historically, this has been the problem with psychoanalysis for Marxism: it works for the satisfaction of the individual, not the whole.”

The strength of what I get from McGowans 2004 article is his discussion of objet a as something that even authority, Big Daddy in this case, desires, over and above their demands. For example he cites the play/movie Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and the patriarchal father desires his son that fucks up and rebels and is homosexual, over the one that becomes a lawyer, has a family, gives him grandchildren etc. McGowan’s explanation is as follows:

“The more Brick acts against Big Daddy’s demand, the more Big Daddy desires him. Brick’s resistance to Big Daddy’s authority attracts Big Daddy’s desire because it indicates the presence of the objet petit a — something that absolutely resists assimilation to the demands of authority. Big Daddy, like the Strangers, seeks out this object that seems to hold the secret of jouissance that always remains just outside the reach of those in power. Symbolic authority’s lack constitutes a political opening for the subject, which is why the subject must constantly remain aware of it.”

But it’s McGowan’s last sentence that doesn’t convince me. Yes there is lack in the Other, but how does the subject remain constantly aware of it? In what sense? How does the lack in the Other manifest itself politically?

“Often, the strongest barrier to overcome in the political act is the belief that symbolic authority is without fissure, that there is no opening in which the act can occur. By showing the Strangers’ desperate search for the jouissance of the subject, the film shatters this belief. Rather than embodying an invariable mastery that thwarts all challenges to it, the Strangers betray the inconsistency of mastery, its lack. And because even symbolic authority lacks, we need not succumb to its demands. Symbolic authority’s lack creates the space at which we can oppose it, and taking up this opposition is what it means to act politically. But the primary barrier to such an act is our investment in the fantasy that fills in symbolic authority’s lack.

Because symbolic authority is lacking or split, ideological control is not absolute. This means that it needs a fantasmatic support in order to entice subjects to buy into it. If ideology simply demands submission, subjects will be reluctant to buy into it. But fantasy fills in this lacuna, offering a reward (an image of the ultimate jouissance) that ideology offers in exchange for submission.

Hence, far from subverting ideological control, fantasy perpetuates it and follows from it. The Strangers provide the inhabitants of the city with fantasies—images of an experience beyond ideological control—and these fantasies assist in rendering the people docile. In the case of Murdoch, we see clearly how ideological control depends on a fundamental fantasy. For Murdoch, this fantasy is that of Shell Beach, a place of warmth and light in contrast to the dark, dreary city. Shell Beach occupies this important place in Murdoch’s psychic economy because it represents his point of origin—home. He believes that if he can return to this point, he will find the answers to all of his questions about his identity and gain a sense of completion.” 160

“When a subject traverses the fantasy, he or she moves from desire (continually seeking the object) to drive (circling around an objectless void). One resists this transition because it entails the loss of any hope for escape. Desire promises a transcendent future, a future beyond present constraints. But the drive makes no promises; it involves only a perpetual circling. Murdoch is not the only character in the film to pass from desire to drive. 164-165

Traversing the fantasy doesn’t allow us to escape the limits of our present situation; instead, it allows us to see that there is nothing beyond those limits, that the image of the beyond is the product of the limits themselves. That is to say, fantasy doesn’t conceal the “real world” (however bleak), but instead works to convince us that such a place exists, just beyond our reach. Traversing the fantasy involves the recognition that there is no beyond—or, rather, that the beyond exists within the present world. 167

death drive

Carel, Havi. Born to be Bad: Is Freud’s Death Drive the Source of Human Evilness? Department of Philosophy, University of Essex download here

McGowan, Todd. A Violent Ethics: Mediation and the Death Drive Février 2009

McGowan, Todd. Violence of Creation in The Prestige. 2007 International Journal of Žižek Studies. Vol 1.3 download here

In her essay Carel examines Freud’s initial debate with Einstein and pointing out that Freud made use of the death instinct to incorporate a notion of an aggressive drive that needs be pointed outwards, otherwise it directs itself against the subject in a form of repetitive masochistic self-harm. Therefore Carel ends the first part of her essay detailing how it could easily be taken that Freud falls into a more pessimistic stance, detailing the horrors of war and how this instinctual death drive is behind human aggressiveness. However the central point of Carel’s essay is the moment he questions this conclusion:

“This theory of the death drive has been conceived as the height of Freud’s pessimism, as admitting that we are indeed born evil. But is this the only ethical position that can be deduced from the death drive? This same death drive, I claim, can actually offer a solution to the problem of innate aggression.” What is Carel’s answer? Through sublimating the death drive we can control its aggressive nature, and thereby strengthen the superego. Here Carel moves to Freud’s well known treatise on the battle between Eros and Thanatos in her book: Civilization and its Discontents (1920). Carel here states that: human “aggression is innate, but nonetheless not uncontrollable.” Carel’s intention is to show how we can interpret Freud’s take on instinctive aggressiveness, not as strictly a doom and gloom scenario, but can actually turn it around.

“In this sense the ethical question is not whether aggression can be abolished from the human psyche, but rather how this aggression can be channelled to non-destructive activities and turned into a positive energy source, a will to power. We can conclude that the thesis of inherent aggression does not necessarily lead to ethical determinism. Aggression can be regarded as neutral energy, which can be used for various purposes. This idea is reinforced by abandoning the dualistic model, so the death drive is no longer a destructive force whose antidote is Eros, but rather a fundamental human force.”

Carel’s Ethics of Finitude

Psychoanalysis has an ethics, it is to reduce suffering, mitigating the self-blame and harsh talk coming from the superego, the analyst works with the analysand to reduce suffering, the increase a level of acceptance and faithfulness to oneself, regardless of whatever is Truth, the Good etc.

“Freud’s ethical imperative, as stated in the 1915 essay Thoughts for the Times on War and Death is: “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death”. This is the imperative to prepare for the possibility of loss and mourning, for disappointment and failure. For Freud the death drive is not only the final fact of finitude, our ceasing to exist, but the many forms of loss and transience experienced within life.”

“The ethical imperative inscribed in the death drive is one of tolerance, patience, and acceptance. These are not to be confused with resignation, cynicism or despair. The ethical imperative is to learn the lesson of ambivalence, that life is made out of good and bad, fulfilment and disappointment, and moreover, that the two are inseparably intertwined.”

Todd McGowan is well known as a Lacanian film theorist. But his taste for developing a comprehensive politics based on the teaching of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He starts out his article on violence and the death drive by first drawing our attention to the fact that we are born, that is, our subjectivity emerges out of a violent tearing, or negation of our base, complacent being.

“Violence, and the rupture it suggests, marks the foundation of our subjectivity, and it is necessary for the subject’s sustenance. In his commentary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève makes precisely this point. He notes, ‘Man is not a being that is: he is a Nothing that annihilates by the negation of being.’ Through the violent act, we tear ourselves out of undifferentiated being and emerge as subjects.”

McGowan continues:

“This negating gesture is the positive condition for subjectivity, which remains inseparable from it. Our existence as subjects is thus a thoroughly violent existence. Obviously, the violence that Kojève theorizes is not identical to what we usually think of as violence — fighting, the use of weapons, and so on — but actual acts of violence are a manifestation of the original violence that gives birth to subjectivity. Actual acts of violence repeat and sustain this original negation.”

Here McGowan is talking about the original violence. Is it that 4 years later in his 2013 book, <em>Enjoying What We Don’t Have</em>, he slightly modifies this from violence to loss? Or is this still the same? Perhaps, since I still can not his emphasis on the emergence of subject via a traumatic, originary and constitutive loss.

For McGowan violence is foundational. For socialists, conservative and liberals and utopians alike, they see violence as the result of some other cause: poverty, lack of life chances, poor education, decline in morality etc. McGowan states, “In each case and in numerous others, there is an explanation for violence in other foundational disturbances. … There are few who try to theorize violence itself as foundational. Even one of the great thinkers who attempted to do so, Sigmund Freud, took a long time to accede to this conception.”

mcgowan enjoyment envy

According to Freud, all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society. But the identification with the leader has two sides to it: on the one hand subjects identify with the leader’s symbolic position as a noncastrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack; but on the other hand, subjects identify with the leader’s weaknesses, which exist in spite of the powerful image.

Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society, but they work in radically different ways. The identification with the leader’s power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leader’s weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community.

The identification with the leader’s strength provides pleasure that obscures the enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leader’s weaknesses. The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss, that she/he enjoys rather than being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people. The weaknesses are evidence of the leader’s enjoyment, points at which a private enjoyment stains the public image. By identifying with these points, subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with presence.

The [leader’s] strength allows subject who identify with the leader in her/his weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness. 162

The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond. 163

The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it. No matter how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness, they will inevitably believe that their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly.

As Slavoj Žižek points out in Tarrying with the Negative, “We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to this way: the smell of ‘their’ food, ‘their’ noisy songs and dances, ‘their’ strange manners, ‘their’ attitude toward work.”

This belief – the paranoia about the other’s secret enjoyment – derives from the signifier’s inability to manifest its transparency. 163-164

[…] paranoia is written into the structure of the signifier itself … The belief that the other holds a secret enjoyment that the subject has sacrificed renders the smooth functioning of collective life impossible. The force that allows human beings to come together to form a society in common — language — is at once the force that prevents any society from working out. The structure of the signifier militates against utopia. It produces societies replete with subjects paranoid about, and full of envy for, the enjoying other. 164 – 165

Though one might imagine a society in which subjects enjoyed without bothering themselves about the other’s enjoyment, such a vision fails to comprehend the nature of our enjoyment.

We find our enjoyment through that of the other rather than intrinsically within ourselves. Our envy of the other’s enjoyment persists because this is the mode through which we ourselves enjoy. It is thus far easier to give up the idea of one’s own private enjoyment for the sake of the social order than it is to give up the idea of the enjoying other. 165

The other is perhaps enjoying, but this is not an enjoyment that occurs in spite of loss. Like the subject’s own, the other’s enjoyment is the enjoyment of loss because there is no other kind. Recognizing the link between enjoyment and loss – that is, accepting the logic of female sexuation – allows subjects to emphasize enjoyment at the expense of pleasure.

Those who achieve this experience the impossibility of having the object, recognizing that one can never have the object because it is nothing, existing only insofar as it is lost, and it is only in this form that it provides enjoyment for the subject. 165

As subjects of loss, there is no barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond, one where envy does not play a key role. The antagonism between the society and the individual develops out of the envy that subjects experience when they believe other members of the society have greater access to the privileged object than they do.

For the subject who grasps that this object only exists – and can only be enjoyed – through its loss, envy is no longer inevitable.

The composition of nothing is such that no one can have more of it than anyone else; there can be no hierarchy of loss, because everyone alike loses nothing. The authentic society of subjects connected through the embrace of trauma would be a society that could recognize that nothing is something after all. 165-166

mcgowan death drive

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

Rather than effectuate qualitative change in the subject by transforming dissatisfaction in satisfaction, psychoanalysis attempts to intervene – and finds the justification for its intervention – on a quantitative level. Rather than attempting to cure dissatisfied subjects, psychoanalysis confronts subject who are satisfied but who spend too much psychic effort or who take a path that is too circuitous for the satisfaction they obtain. In this sense, psychoanalysis is fundamentally an economic theory of the psyche. 54

The death drive and the repetition that it installs in the subject follow a self-satisfying course. The death drive finds a path to satisfaction or enjoyment despite – or because of – whatever obstacles the external world might erect.

The satisfaction of the subject is the one constant in psychoanalytic thought, and it leads Freud to postulate the existence of the drive as the source of that satisfaction. The satisfaction that the death drive produces stems from its circular structure: rather than trying to attain satisfaction through an external aim, the drive produces that satisfaction through the process of the repeated movement itself. 54-55

The self-satisfied quality of the drive differentiates it from physiological need: needs undergo fluctuation from a state of dissatisfaction to one of satisfaction when they achieve their aim. The drive, on the other hand, never fluctuates. Unlike biological need (which might be satisfied or not, depending on whether it discovers its object), the drive (which has an absent object) always involves satisfaction.

Thus, psychoanalysis, a practice oriented around the drive, cannot intervene by way of offering a missing satisfaction or providing a helping hand to those down on their luck. 55 [Note: This is, of course, a paradoxical situation. No one would come into analysis if she or he were not, on some level, dissatisfied, but this dissatisfaction occurs on a second level: aspiring analysands are dissatisfied with the way that they obtain their satisfaction] 55

The symptom is the disruption of the circuit that the death drive follows, but its disruptiveness constitutes the circuit. Without the symptom’s disruption of the circuit, there would be no drive at all: we would have a living organism rather than a desiring subject. 56

Quote from Joan Copjec: The death drive achieves its satisfaction by not achieving its aim. Moreover, the inhibition that prevents the drive from achieving its aim is not understood within Freudian theory to be due to an extrinsic or exterior obstacle, but rather as part of the very activity of the drive itself. (Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. 2002, 30.)

Though the failure marks the point at which the subject misses something, it becomes the point through which the subject enjoys itself. Because there is no possibility for success in relation to the object, the subject can find satisfaction only through its specific mode of failure.

Through the symptomatic failure, the subject relates to its lost object, and this failure is the only possible vehicle for doing so. It is not as if the symptom is a poor substitute for a true relation to the object. The subject’s failure is its form of success, and the trouble that the disruptiveness of the symptom gives the subject defines the subject as such. 56

Every subject has a fundamental symptomatic disruption that serves as the foundation for subjectivity itself [Lacan uses the neologism sinthome to describe the fundamental symptom that animates each subject.]

The elimination of this disruption would not produce a normal subject able to enjoy itself but would result in the annihilation of the subject itself (and its capacity for enjoyment).

By simultaneously showing the subject that the disruption of the symptom is not the barrier to enjoyment but the source of it and that there is no normal symptomless path to enjoyment, psychoanalysis frees the subject to find satisfaction through the subject’s symptomatic disruption rather than continuing to view the disruption as the obstacle to the ultimate satisfaction that the subject is constantly missing. 56-57

mcgowan death drive violence politics

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

The conceptual breakthrough involved with the abandonment of the seduction theory paved the way for the discovery of the death drive because it permitted Freud to consider violence not as primarily coming from someone else but as what the subject itself fantasizes about. After this development in his thought, it would make theoretical sense to conceive of an original violence that the subject does to itself as the genesis of subjectivity and the death drive, which is the move that Freud makes in 1920.

The seduction theory would have prevented Freud from recognizing that subjectivity has its origin in violence that the subject does to itself – the violent sacrifice of the privileged object that begins desire. The death drive, the structuring principle of the psyche, engages the subject in a perpetual repetition of this violence.

Both nostalgia and paranoia try to flee the subject’s original self-inflicted violence. But even the attempt to avoid violence leads back to it. Nostalgia and paranoia lead almost inevitably to violence directed toward the other who appears as a barrier to the subject’s enjoyment

[…] Violence against the other attempts to replace violence against the self; this type of violence attempts to repeat the subject’s initial moment of loss on the cheap, so to speak. It seeks repetition while sparing the subject itself the suffering implicit in this repetition.

Aggressive violence toward the other tries to separate the enjoyment of repetition (which it reserves for the subject) with the suffering of it (which it consigns to the other).

Understood in terms of the death drive, one can readily see the appeal of aggressive violence. It provides a seemingly elegant solution to the troubling link between enjoyment and suffering. 49-50

[…] Aggressive violence is nothing but a detour or prolongation of the path toward self-inflicted violence. In this sense, the other’s violent act of vengeance in response to the subject’s own violence is precisely what the subject unconsciously hopes to trigger when committing a violent act in the first place.

The other’s violent response allows us to experience the loss that we have hitherto avoided. Violence directed to the other does not satisfy the subject in the way that violence directed toward the self does. In order to accomplish the repetition that the death drive necessitates, external violence must finally lead back to violence directed at the self.

The power of repetition in the psyche leaves the subject no possibility for escaping self-inflicted violence. This is what psychoanalytic thought allows us to recognize and to bring to bear on our political activity.

The only question concerns the form that this violence will take. Will the subject use the other as a vehicle for inflicting violence on itself, or will it perform this violence directly on itself?

By recognizing the power of unconscious repetition, we can grasp the intractability of the problem of violence, but we can also see a way out of aggressive violence that doesn’t involve utopian speculation.

Rather than trying to avoid violence, we can restore to it its proper object – the self. The more the subject engages in a violent assault on its own forms of symbolic identity, its own ego, its own deepest convictions, the more the subject finds an enjoyable alternative to the satisfactions of aggression. 51

mcgowan fort/da enjoyment and loss

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

The experience of traumatic loss has such a hold on the subject – the subject continually returns to it, re-creates it – because this experience itself engenders desiring and the object of desiring.

This foundational experience provides insight into the otherwise inexplicable structure of the celebrated fort/da game that Freud discusses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. … the key philosophical moment in all of Freud’s work. Through the observation of the fort/da game, Freud recognizes the priority of loss in human activity. 37

… Freud eventually posits a drive beyond the pleasure principle. The negative therapeutic reaction, the resistance to the psychoanalytic cure, convinces Freud that repetition has a much stronger hold on subjects than the quest for pleasure. It is in this light that one must return to the fort/da game and reinterpret it (even though Freud himself does not).

Pleasure is not the final word on this game; there is something more – the pull of enjoyment, or what Freud calls the death drive.

Though it seems completely counterintuitive, the subject enjoys the disappearance of its privileged object; it enjoys not having it rather than having it because this experience returns the subject to the initial moment of loss where the subject comes closer to the privileged object than at any other time.

Since the object does not exist, one cannot recover it; one can only repeat the process through which it is lost. This fundamental link between enjoyment and loss renders enjoyment difficult to endure. The subject inevitably suffers its enjoyment. 38

Precisely because enjoyment traumatizes us with a return to a foundational experience of loss, we seek the pleasure that accompanies the presence of the object as a way of hiding this trauma from ourselves. But this pleasure is also fundamentally deceptive; it has a wholly imaginary status. That is to say, the pleasure accompanying the recovery of the lost object appears as the ultimate pleasure when we anticipate it but diminishes exponentially when we realize it. 38

Tragedy’s focus on the self-inflicted loss returns us as spectators to our own initial loss of the privileged object — the primordial self-inflicted wound. the enjoyment that tragedy produces in the spectator occurs through the repetition of sacrifice. 39

Even if tragedy as an art form doesn’t offer us much in the way of pleasure, it does provide an opportunity for us to enjoy. While watching a tragedy, we enjoy the repetition of the experience of loss. … The loss it highlights is always in some sense self-inflicted …

Tragedy’s focus on self-inflicted loss returns us as spectators to our own initial loss of the privileged object — the primordial self-inflicted wound. The enjoyment that tragedy produces in the spectator occurs through the repetition of sacrifice.

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