{"id":11655,"date":"2013-08-14T17:03:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T22:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=11655"},"modified":"2013-10-03T13:42:24","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T18:42:24","slug":"11655","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/08\/14\/11655\/","title":{"rendered":"mcgowan desire anorexic"},"content":{"rendered":"

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don\u2019t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis<\/em>. 2013.<\/p>\n

It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire<\/span>: the subject sacrifices nothing<\/span> in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire<\/span>. … The subject\u2019s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the object is nothing<\/span> as a positive entity and only exists insofar as it is lost.<\/span> This is why one can never attain the lost object or the object that causes one to desire<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The coming-into-being of this object originates the subject of desire, but, having no substance, the object can never become an empirical object of desire. We may see an object of desire<\/span> as embodying the lost object, but whenever we obtain this object, we discover its emptiness. The lost object is constitutively rather than empirically lost. 29<\/p>\n

The anorexic<\/strong> doesn\u2019t simply refuse to eat but eats nothing<\/span>, the nothing<\/span> that is the lost object. While all positive forms of food fail to address the subject\u2019s lack, nothing<\/span> does speak to the subject\u2019s desire and allows that desire to sustain itself. The anorexic starves not because she can\u2019t find … any food that would satisfy her but because she has found a satisfying food, a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being<\/strong>. The logic of anorexia lays bare the hidden workings of desire that operate within every subject.<\/p>\n

Subjects believe that they pursue various objects of desire<\/strong> (a new car, a new house, a new romantic partner, and so on) and that these objects have an intrinsic attraction, but the real engine for their desire resides in the nothing<\/span> that the subject has given up and that every object tries and fails to represent<\/strong>. Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object, which is what the anorexic reveals. Still the anorexic is exceptional, most nonanorexic subjects imaging that their lost object can be found in something rather than nothing<\/span>. 30<\/p>\n

The key to the politics of the death drive is grasping, in the fashion of the anorexic, the nothingness of the object and thereby finding satisfaction in the drive itself. But the subject\u2019s relationship to its object inherently creates an illusion that makes this possibility almost impossible.<\/p>\n

Though the lost object that initiates subjectivity has no substance, its status for the subject belies its nothingness. For the subject, the originary lost object is the<\/em> object that seems to hold the key to the subject\u2019s very ability to enjoy. Subjects invest the lost object with the idea of their own completion<\/span>: the loss of the object retroactively causes a prior state of completion to arise<\/strong> \u2013 a state of completion that never actually existed \u2013 and the object itself bears the promise of inaugurating a return to this imaginary prior state. In short, it promises to fill in the subject’s lack and answer its desire. As a result of this investment on the part of the subject, the initial lost object becomes the engine for all the subject’s subsequent desiring. 31<\/p>\n

Without the initial act of sacrifice, the would-be subject neither desires nor enjoys but instead suffocates in a world of self-presence<\/span>, a self-presence in which one has no freedom whatsoever.\u00a0 Through the loss of the privileged object, one frees oneself from the complete domination of (parental or social) authority by creating a lack that no authority can fill.\u00a0 Ceding the object is thus the founding act of subjectivity and the first free act.\u00a0 31<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don\u2019t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013. It is the initial act of sacrifice that gives birth to desire: the subject sacrifices nothing in order to create a lost object around which it can organize its desire. … The subject\u2019s desire is oriented around this lost object, but the … Continue reading “mcgowan desire anorexic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-objet-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11655"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12086,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11655\/revisions\/12086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}