Category: jouissance

mcgowan subjectivation

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

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice (pt 2)

The sacrifice that subjects make in order to enter society repeats the earlier sacrifice, but what occurs is repetition with a difference. While the initial sacrifice of the privileged object installs the death drive in the subject and thereby constitutes the individual as a subject, the repetition of this sacrifice marks an attempt to domesticate the death drive at the same time as it follows the death drive’s logic. That is, the death drive leads us to this repetition, but the repetition attempts to solve the impossible bind that the death drive creates for us. Society is an attempt to solve the problem of subjectivity itself. 146

Of course, the idea that subjectivity in the psychoanalytic sense exists prior to society is absurd, since subjectivity only becomes possible through the imposition of a societal demand on an animal being. But within society the process of subjectivization occurs in two steps: an initial loss occurs that constitutes the subject, and subsequently the subject makes an additional sacrifice in order to commemorate the first loss and to join the social order.

It is only through the repetition of loss that the social order really gets a hold on the subject because the second loss involves an investment through sacrifice in the good of the social order as a whole. In this sense, subjects do exist prior to their entrance into the social order, and properly socialized subjects are only those who have sacrificed for the sake of the social good. The subject who would refuse to make this sacrifice for the sake of society would not participate in the social bond and would exist as an outsider within the social order. This is the position that the psychotic occupies. 146

mcgowan sacrifice

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

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice

Neither subject nor social order exists independently but emerge out of the other’s incompleteness. The subject exists at the point of the social orders failure to become a closed structure, and subject enters into social arrangements as result of its own failure to achieve self-identity.  The internal contradictions within every social order create the space for the subject, just as the internal contradictions of the subject produce an opening to externality that links the subject to the social order. Failure on each side provides the connective apparatus and constitutes the bond between the subject and the social order. 145

To put it another way, the subject’s entrance into a group or society depends on the originary loss that gives birth to its subjectivity. Without this loss and the desire that it produces in the subject, no one would agree to enter into a social bond, a bond that places a fundamental restriction on the subject’s ability to enjoy.

The psychoanalytic name for this foundational loss is the human animal’s “premature birth” a condition that creates an undue dependence not present in other animals. But whether or not one wants to defend the idea of humanity’s premature birth, the idea of a foundational loss is nonetheless essential for theorizing the emergence of subjectivity. Without loss, there could be no desire and no subjectivity. This loss leads the subject to society as the site where loss might be redeemed. 145

Once deceived by the lure of an imaginary complete enjoyment and disappointed with all the enjoyment it experiences, the subject is ready to agree to the entrance requirements of a society. The frustrated subject accedes to societal restrictions on enjoyment as she/he sees that others have also accepted these restrictions. a society circumnavigates the antagonisms between its member by promoting equality or justice among them all. … The subject’s individual frustration with the inadequacy of every actual enjoyment measured against he anticipated enjoyment finds an outlet in the societal demand for equality, a demand that proscribes [forbids] this enjoyment for all. The subject sacrifices a complete enjoyment that it never attains for the equality that derives from membership in society. 145-146

mcgowan hegel master slave

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

McGowan argues that what Hegel fails to see “how recognition functions as a barrier to enjoyment. In the struggle for recognition,the master wagers her or his enjoyment precisely because it has no value for the master. Unlike the slave, the master finds no satisfaction in her or his own enjoyment, which is why she or he can risk it – with life itself – for the sake of prestige [recognition].

As a result, the master may eat, wear, or hold what the the slave produces, but she or he cannot enjoy it. In assuming the position of mastery and acquiring the recognition that accompanies it, the master makes a fundamental sacrifice of enjoyment that obtaining an object from the slave cannot redeem. The slave, on the other hand, remains free to enjoy, which is what, as Jacques Lacan points out, Hegel fails to see. 93

🙂 The upshot of this is that the master invests in the idea of symbolic status and derives an identity from it while the slave adopts an attitude of indifference toward symbolic identity and is thus able to enjoy. 94

🙂 In capitalism this structural elimination of the outside position (the slave’s position) means the elimination of a site for enjoyment that existed in earlier societies not found on appropriation of surplus value. Here the slave can enjoy and its only limit to enjoyment is what his/her master dictates, the restriction is an external one. McGowan is trying to make that point that with capitalism, the restriction becomes internal.  According to McGowan:

Within capitalist society, recognition becomes that which no one can avoid – a universal that structures subjectivity. If one becomes an enjoying subject, one can do so only by passing through and then rejecting the lure of recognition and class status. One can enjoy only after having initially sacrificed enjoyment in search of recognition. This process reveals the true nature of enjoyment, obscured in precapitalist societies. Enjoyment is never direct but always based on a prior loss or sacrifice. One enjoys through this loss, and thus one enjoys partially.

[…] the partiality of today’s enjoyment does not point toward a future enjoyment that would be complete. Its partiality is based on an internal necessity: without the loss of the its object, the subject cannot enjoy; it enjoys the object only in its absence. This enjoyment, like that of precapitalist epochs, has an infinite quality to it. But it is a fully realized infinite, an infinite that includes its limit – the necessity of the prior loss – internally, rather than continually moving toward this limit and never reaching it. 97

To give in to the temptation of recognition and class status is to continue to sacrifice one’s enjoyment for the sake of the production and reproduction of the social order.

The path to enjoyment is much more difficult. It involves resisting the image of enjoyment that social recognition uses to sell itself and focusing on an enjoyment that can’t be imagined.

This is the real enjoyment that the subject endures rather than performs. It is an enjoyment that generates anxiety and suffering; it is rooted in loss but at the same time, it is the only enjoyment that leaves the subject satisfied rather than continually seeking a richer experience elsewhere. 98

On page 95 McGowan’s argument goes a bit haywire. He should stay away from trying to connect sacrifice of enjoyment with surplus enjoyment. I think we need to connect with Zupancic here.

Capitalism we have surplus labor which worker performs over and above the paid labor. There is necessary labor time which worker must perform to reproduce itself, surplus labor time “in contrast is done for the sake of progress. … In the act of performing surplus labor, one spends time working that might otherwise be spent enjoying; one works excessively at the expense of one’s enjoyment, which is itself excessive.” 95

🙂 Surplus labor is the excessive work and time that could have otherwise gone towards enjoyment. McGowan states, “surplus value that surplus labor creates is the way that sacrificed enjoyment manifests itself in the capitalist system, and the universality of the appropriation of surplus value renders this sacrifice inescapable. 95

McGowan class and enjoyment dirty jokes

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2013.
Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment.

🙂 This chapter really takes off from Žižek’s claim that I don’t want to hear about your food and costumes, tell me your dirty jokes.

Thesis: Psychoanalytic critique of capitalism differs from Marxist theories because it recognizes that even the rich, well-off upper class do not enjoy, in fact they enjoy less than the workers and lower classes. This is because the former must sacrifice more enjoyment to attain the material worth etc.

But McGowan states that even though they may be on top in the the game of capital, they are still are unable to get satisfaction from their satisfaction. “It is only when one blows up one’s class possibilities that the opportunity for real enjoyment appears. Enjoyment requires sacrifice, but not the sacrifice of one’s time for the sake of accumulation. It demands the sacrifice of accumulation itself.” 86

But this isn’t libertarian, Hayekian right-wing platitudes. These conservatives generally argue for an emergence of an aristocratic elite, that with freedom class division is inevitable. Whereas for psychoanalysis class society is founded on a particular form of non-freedom, arguing that its “implicit ideal guiding psychoanalytic treatment is that of a classless society.” 81 Hmm sounds like Marx; so what gives Todd?

While Marxism shows the economic and social costs of class exploitation … psychoanalysis emphasizes the psychic costs of capitalism for the whole society, including those that most directly benefit … the upper and middle classes. Its concern is … the suffering endured by those who, when one regards their situation from the outside, should be happy. Psychoanalysis arises in response to the psychic costs demanded by capitalist class based society. 82

Psychoanalysis shows how even those who most surely benefit the most from capitalism don’t really enjoy.

If this sounds rather odd for a socially progressive guy like McGowan, he then explains:

Of course, no one wants to lament the misfortune of the poor little rich kid or try to generate sympathy for the suffering of Bill Gates. The point is rather to emphasize the unfreedom and lack of enjoyment that haunt the beneficiaries of capitalism and all class society. Even those who win in the capitalist game lose, and this provides what is perhaps the ultimate indictment of the capitalist system. 82

This is an interesting tact, McGowan implies here that Marxist theory by unearthing the exploitation of workers, and thus basing the overthrow of capitalism on a sense of justice and equality, should also stop to look at the fact that the rich owners are not as well off psychically as many assume.

The reason being is that for McGowan

  • Workers suffer less repression
  • Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment 84
  • Class privilege demands repression in exchange for the social advantages that it offers 83

McGowan cites Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious where Freud explains the trajectory of jokes in terms of social class.

  • lower classes (w/o privileged status in class society) the true sexual or smutty nature of joke can be openly revealed
  • as go higher in class status in order to remain acceptable the joke undergoes more and more “deformation and repression, so that the original sexual dimension appears only obliquely or indirectly.” 84

McGowan concludes the upper classes have made more of a sacrifice of enjoyment than lower classes, “Class status involves forgoing more enjoyment and living more strictly according to the dictates of the social law that commands its sacrifice.” 84 Class privilege requires a more circuitous route to enjoyment. 84 What does he mean exactly?

When the upper class experience a smutty joke, they feel outrage or disgust. But this is an unrecognized enjoyment, but an enjoyment nonetheless. “But enjoyment in the form of outrage or disgust is a case of enjoyment that occurs with too much trouble.”

“The upper-class subject who enjoys its superiority takes a circuitous route to find its satisfaction, and this circuitous route is the inevitable product of upper-class status. Though wealth and social recognition make material life easier, they elongate the path of the drive and thereby deprive the subject of the ability to embrace its own mode of enjoying.”

The commodity does provide enjoyment, but only insofar as one doesn’t have it. 85

Capitalism is a system in which we cannot avow our enjoyment. Therefore psychoanalysis calls for more enjoyment, not less. The call for more enjoyment, not less, is a tricky proposition because it threatens to devolve into erecting enjoyment as a social duty, which is the fundamental form of contemporary authority.

We must also clearly distinguish enjoyment, which one endures and suffers, from pleasure and happiness, both of which promise the overcoming of loss. Note 14 p. 303

Recognition

Here McGowan gets into Hegel’s Master/Slave. He distinguishes between acceding to the demand and on the other hand, going beyond demand to desire. Being stuck on authority’s demand and trying to fulfill it, follow it slavishly. But the authority doesn’t know what it wants.

The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the other’s desire, does not exist — that the authority doesn’t know what it wants.   88

Flashy cars, conspicuous consumption … Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other.  90

Sacrifice enjoyment:

But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can’t initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition’s appeal. 90

Everything in society works against this indifference. The social order receives energy for its functioning from the enjoyment that subjects sacrifice for the sake of recognition. IT continues to operate thanks to a constant influx of enjoyment from those subjected to it.

When subjects embrace their own enjoyment rather than readily sacrificing for it, they do not contribute to the process of production or reproduction in the social order.  Enjoyment has no use value for society, though it organizes and sustains the subject’s existence. (The subject who can no longer enjoy loses the will to live altogether.) 90

“The higher the one rises in class status, the more one invest oneself in an order that demands the sacrifice of enjoyment.” 92 McGowan argues that if we can’t entirely overthrow class distinction “we can take up a different relationship to it.” We can view it as what he calls a “necessary encumbrance.” By this he means that social recognition can be viewed as just another thankless task that society must perform.  Not so fast though. There is only one problem, and that is the way capitalism has invested in the pursuit of recognition. This investment we all make in social recognition crosses all class barriers and it is what marks “the decisive break that capitalism introduces into history, and it marks the fundmanetal barrier that it erects on the path to tadopting a different relation to social class and recognition.” 92  In order to argue this point he moves to Hegel’s master/slave relationship.

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

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

mcogowan object never existed nostalgia for the fullness that never was

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

Even though loss is a constitutive experience that founds the subject in its relation to the object, this initial loss misleads us into believing that we have lost something substantial.

We often fail to see that we have lost nothing and that our lost object is simply the embodiment of this nothing.

The belief in the substantiality of the lost object fuels the prevalence of nostalgia as a mode of relating to our origins. We dream of recovering the object and restoring the complete enjoyment that we believe ourselves to have once had prior to the experience of loss.

This enjoyment never existed, and the recovery of the object, though it may bring some degree of pleasure, always brings disappointment as well, which is why sustaining our feeling of nostalgia depends on not realizing the return to the past that the nostalgic subject longs for.

By insisting that loss is constitutive for the subject, psychoanalytic thought works to combat nostalgia and its poisoning of contemporary politics. 39

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 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