Category: jouissance

mcgowan missing binary signifier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mcgowan god contingency the other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mcgowan on stavrakakis 1

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

The main thrust of Yannis Stavrakakis’s The Lacanian Left involves forging the link between democracy and enjoyment. He sees that this is a link that most advocates of democracy – even radical democracy – have insufficiently emphasized because they fail to see the possibilities of an enjoyment derived from the experience of failure or of the not-all.

He says: “Far from being antithetical to jouissance, democratic subjectivity is capable of inspiring high passions. … They mobilise a jouissance beyond accumulation, domination and fantasy, an enjoyment of the not-all or not-whole.”

Severing democracy from the image of the social good requires emphasizing its scandalous dimension – the location of power in an entity (the people) that does not substantially exist.

Democracy emerges not through the expression of the popular will in institutionalized forms but when we experience the ultimate groundlessness of political power itself, when we experience the absence of any foundational social authority making itself felt.

The democratic impulse is tied to the absence at the heart of the social order, but the association of democracy with capitalism and the good has had the effect of filling this absence with the myth of the sovereign substantive people. The contemporary geopolitical universe has broken this association and returned the scandal to democracy, placing it in the position of the lost object. 194

But we are already seeing the enjoyment that derives from contemporary invocations of democracy. The enjoyment that surrounded Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the enjoyment that the 2011 Arab revolutions evinced are but two examples of this phenomenon, which becomes possible when the status of democracy shifts from being central to the capitalist order to being excessive.194

Identifying democracy with enjoyment can also change the way that we articulate its appeal.

We can make evident the contemporary disjunction between democracy and the good and emphasize the necessity of sacrificing the good for the sake of democracy and the enjoyment it provides.

If democracy becomes recognized as a lost object among contemporary subject and the advocates of democracy can marshal the enjoyment that it might engender, they will have a chance to triumph over the reign of the universalized service of goods that is global capitalism.

The political project of psychoanalysis is fundamentally democractic, but it envisions democracy as an excess that we can enjoy, though we cannot reconcile it with our enlightened self-interest.

It is not more knowledge that will bring about our emancipation but more enjoyment. 195

mcgowan on michael moore

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

When [Michael] Moore succeeds as an activist filmmaker, he mobilizes the enjoyment of the spectator and works to align this enjoyment with increased freedom and equality.

Highlighting Bush’s obscene enjoyment fails as a political strategy because the people who identify with Bush do so precisely because of this enjoyment, not in spite of it.

If Bush doesn’t read reports, skips meetings, vacations too much, or stumbles when talking to reporters, such failures provide possibilities for identification. Popular identification with a leader occurs on two distinct levels. On the one hand, we identify with the strength of the leader and see ourselves expressed in that strength. This identification affirms our ego and provides pleasure. On the other hand, we identify with the weaknesses of the leader. This identification is the key to our ability to enjoy the leader. The more [Moore’s film] takes the side of knowledge against Bush’s obscene enjoyment, the more it cements the identification between supporters and him through a shared enjoyment. 188

Many figures on the side of emancipatory politics see the documentary as a valuable tool because it provides knowledge that traditional media outlets do not. It helps people to break from the ideological manipulation that dominates them. But … the documentary form’s obsession with the facts causes it to miss the role of enjoyment. … the focus of documentary form on revealing facts rather than facilitating enjoyment hinders its effectiveness as a political tool. It seems inherent to take the side of knowledge and thereby enable opponents to enjoy through disregarding what it teaches. 188

[Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth] Gore warns against excessive enjoyment – overuse of electricity, driving environmentally unfriendly vehicles, consuming without educating oneself, and so on. The entire film is an act of consciousness-raising and enjoyment-restricting. By seizing on Gore’s film as a rallying point, the forces of emancipation again cede the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism … 189

mcgowan superego

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

Freud’s vision of the superego emphasizes its role in prohibition. The superego restricts what the subject can think and do; it extends the power of mastery by placing an authority within the subject’s psyche that is more demanding than any external master.

… Lacan picks up on Freud’s claim that the superego draws its energy from the reservoir of the id … Lacan dissociates the superego from prohibition and aligns it with an imperative to enjoy. Even when the superego bombards the subject with imperatives that appear in the guise of prohibitions, Lacan insists that these imperatives actually command enjoyment. 183

The superego … constantly reminds the subject of its failure to enjoy, and it promulgates an ideal of the ultimate enjoyment as a measuring stick against which the subject can contrast its own failures. No subject can obey the demands of the superego because the ideal it provides remains ever out of reach. The closer the subject approaches to it through obedience, the faster it recedes. The superego enjoins an enjoyment that it never allows the subject to find. 183

… the superego only emerges as such with the rise of expert authority and the decline of the traditional master. .. under the regime of the master, the idiotic and purely despotic dimension of the law manifests itself in the figure of the master. The master lays down the law that must be obeyed not because it is justified or practical but simply because the master says so, and the master’s authority derives from the nonsensical and completely random fact of birth or wealth.

This idiotic dimension of the law seems to disappear with the rise of expert authority. In every way, the expert’s status and dictates have a justification that the master’s don’t. 183

Under the regime of the expert, the idiocy of the law migrates to the superego, allowing the superego to exert a power that it never had under the rule of the master.

Thus, the proper birth of the superego occurs with the rise of expert authority and the evacuation of the external law’s idiocy. As the horror of external punishments abates — the practice of drawing and quartering criminals in public is no longer widespread, for instance — the internal horrors mount. This is a ramification of the rule of knowledge. 184

mcgowan war and loss sacrifice

But the result of war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss. … of course no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it sacrifice and loss, which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond. The pursuit of pleasure of having leads to the loss that inevitably accompanies this pursuit. 161

… one cannot discount the fact that societies also go to war simply to defend themselves and survive. But even the seemingly pure war of defense produces sacrifice that allows subjects to enjoy the social bond, and in this way it goes beyond simple defense. Note 28, 316

The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial possession can provide – the enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they can’t conquer… powerful societies ultimately go to war in order to re-enact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails. 161

mcgowan loss enjoyment

Few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss becomes visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159

Attacks of September 11, 2001 … immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society. Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity. …

This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an attack, this bond was not one formed though the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the heading in Le Monde on September 12, 2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.”

The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become a part of American society at that moment.

The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable. One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation. The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma – the shame of enjoyment itself. 160

In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness – the recovery of an imaginary perfect security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints.

Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss – that is, only according to the female logic of not-having. 160

mcgowan fantasy 2

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

The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. At the point of this encounter, the symbolic law’s hold over the subject evaporates as its ultimate groundlessness and meaninglessness are revealed.

Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. Thus, fantasy’s ability to lure the subject toward the encounter with this trauma attests to the political importance of fantasy.

Fantasy assists public ideology by obscuring the dimension of the trauma, but in this very act of obscuring it, fantasy stages an encounter with it. In this way, the qualities that allow fantasy to assist ideology allow it to subvert ideology as well. 216

The political task as it might be envisioned by psychoanalytic thought entails not attempting to eliminate fantasy but transforming our relationship to it.

Fantasy functions in an ideological way when it works to cover over the structural necessity of absence within the social order, but fantasy appeals to us because it also conveys an experience of loss or absence that we can access nowhere else. One could say that we are never more inauthentic than when we fantasize but never more authentic at the same time. In order to provide the pleasure that comes from overcoming absence, fantasy must introduce and narrate loss. As it does so, it allows the fantasizing subject to experience the impossible loss that founds subjectivity itself. In every fantasy, this loss is enacted, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The political task involves fostering the recognition that we enjoy our fantasies for their depiction of loss rather than for the illusion of return. 221

mcgowan fantasy stavrakakis

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

Marxist claim: subjects must break the hold that fantasy has over them before they can take authentic political action and act according to their own class interests. Attacking fantasy thus becomes, for Western philosophy and for Marxism, the sine qua non of political activity. 207

🙂 McGowan disagrees with Stavrakakis, as McGowan thinks his notion of of traversing the fantasy is caught up, like the Marxists that Stavrakakis himself criticizes, in trying to rid oneself of fantasy, since fantasy hides the gap, we need, according to Stavrakakis, to make this gap apparent, be cool with it.

Quoting Stavrakakis “Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production.”  Here, Stavrakakis sees the ideological dimension of fantasy, and psychoanalysis for him facilitates this recognition and provides a way to dissolve fantasy’s power.

This kind of psychoanalytic politics evinces the attitude toward fantasy that both modern philosophy and Marxism take up, and this attitude certainly seems faithful to psychoanalytic practice and its attempt to assist the subject in “traversing the fantasy.”

Fantasy offers the subject a transcendent experience, and this transcendence, despite its illusory quality, has a political content. It represents a moment at which the subject is no longer bound by the limitations of the symbolic structure that ordinarily constrain it. As such, this moment of fantasmatic transcendence poses for the subject a fundamental challenge to the authority of that symbolic structure. In fact, the radical import of fantasy is located in precisely the same feature that causes fantasy to further ideology: the illusions of fantasy keep subjects content with the ruling symbolic structure, but they also provide a venue for thinking beyond that structure.  209

That is to say, the politics of attacking fantasy does not allow us to transcend the limitation that the prevailing ideology places on us. Through offering us an illusory image of transcendence, fantasy takes us beyond the limitation that the symbolic order places on us, and in doing so, it opens us to possibilities that were previously foreclosed. It is through fantasy that one sees the possibility of the impossible. If psychoanalysis allows us to see the political effectiveness of fantasy, it doe so because it emphasizes how fantasy allows us to experience the impossible. 211

mcgowan enjoyment is veil not miniskirt

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

They see an enjoying other where there is nothing but the image of enjoyment. The suicide bomber sees Western women in revealing clothes and believes that the bare skin promises an opening to enjoyment, but this represents a failure to understand that enjoyment operates through limitations and barriers rather than through revelations and transgressions. One can never go far enough in the direction of transgression to reach real enjoyment. It is the veil, not the miniskirt, that is the true garment of enjoyment . 110