{"id":11753,"date":"2013-08-18T16:33:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-18T21:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=11753"},"modified":"2013-08-18T17:02:07","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T22:02:07","slug":"mcgowan-sacrifice-subjectivity-enjoyment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/08\/18\/mcgowan-sacrifice-subjectivity-enjoyment\/","title":{"rendered":"mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

…[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.<\/p>\n

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

Enjoyment<\/span> has an inverse relationship to utility: we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions. …<\/p>\n

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<\/span> itself \u2013 a wasteful rather than a productive act \u2013 the arguments against belief would lose all of their force.<\/p>\n

Wasteful sacrifice<\/span> 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Through sacrificing<\/span> some part of ourselves,<\/strong> 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<\/span> sacrificial act<\/span> that creates it.<\/p>\n

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

Especially in the contemporary world, religious belief provides respite \u2013 an oasis of enjoyment<\/span> \u2013 for the subject caught up in the capitalist drive to render everything useful and banish whatever remains unproductive. 249<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don\u2019t 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 … Continue reading “mcgowan sacrifice subjectivity enjoyment”<\/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":[21,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jouissance","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11753","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=11753"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11755,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11753\/revisions\/11755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}