{"id":13995,"date":"2020-05-02T19:33:25","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T23:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13995"},"modified":"2020-05-02T19:42:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T23:42:08","slug":"zupancic-reviews-mcgowan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2020\/05\/02\/zupancic-reviews-mcgowan\/","title":{"rendered":"Zupan\u010di\u010d reviews McGowan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alenka Zupan\u010di\u010d reviews Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets<\/em>, 2016 Columbia University Press<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWith the onset of capitalism, the speaking being enters a system that promises relief from the absence that inheres within the basic structure of signification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to McGowan this promise (whichs also the promise of a better future) is an essential feature of capitalism. It is also what m akes critique of it very difficult: for how are we to criticize capitalism without (at least implicitly) proposing a better (alternative) future? Yet the moment we do this, we get entrapped into the logic of capital: \u201cThe task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly, German philosopher Frank Ruda dedicates his recently published book Abolishing Freedom almost entirely to a very similar task, formulated by Ruda in slightly different terms, namely as an attack on the concept of freedom as potentiality (to be realized). Freedom as possibility, as potentiality, as capacity to do something (exemplified in the liberal capitalist freedom of choice), argues Ruda, has become a signifier of oppression and functions as the best antidote to actual freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the mode of possibility enters the game and structures it, one should resist understanding or presenting the stakes simply in terms of possibility versus actuality (actual action), that is, in terms of the opposition between a possibility and its realization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this is precisely how freedom as oppression works in practice. It works following the logic of the superego, most concisely defined by \u017di\u017eek as the reversal of the Kantian \u201cyou must, therefore you can\u201d into \u201cyou can, therefore you must.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Possibilities are here to be taken, realized, by all means an at any price: You can do it, therefore you must! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The culture (and economy) of possibilities is not suffocating simply because there are so many possibilities, but because we are supposed not to miss out on any of them. A person who just sits at home, relishing in the idea of all the possibilities and opportunities capitalism has to offer and doing nothing to realize them is not the kind of person this system needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we are expected to do is to realize as many possibilities as possible (to act), but never to question the framework of these possibilities as possibilities. Which is precisely where \u201cactual\u201d freedom has to be situated: not simply in the actual realisation of possibilities, but in \u201cunscrewing\u201d the very framework which is based on the idea of freedom as possibility to be (yet) realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruda proposes to do this by advocating what he calls \u201ccomic fatalism.\u201d He formulates several slogans of such fatalism: they suggest that a way out of this freedom-as-oppression is to act as if there were no future <\/p>\n\n\n\n