Todd McGowan > Quotes

“One thing that capitalism cannot function with is people that accept that failure is itself success. Because you have to be bent upon success in order to be a good capitalist subject. If you accept that 'I'm never going to get that object I desire,' then you are no longer seduced by accumulation or advertising.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“In valuing the image over the word, we fall victim to the image’s appearance of full revelation. Whereas the word prompts suspicion and questioning, the image produces belief and devotion. It is in this sense that Gilroy sees a latent fascism in the contemporary elevation of the image. The image today signifies the possibility of a completely successful process of manipulation.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure.
Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille.
But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures.
The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.” Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance. The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“This belief in the truth of the image leaves us especially vulnerable to ideological coercion (which is not to say, of course, that the image cannot be subversive as well). The image, much more than the word, inspires trust, and this trust is precisely what ideology hopes to engender. This is why fascists rely so heavily on imagery. In fact, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy links the rise of the image to the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth century.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“change, those in love care much less about how others outside of the beloved see them. They are willing to act strangely in public or draw attention to themselves in embarrassing ways because the only recognition that counts is that bestowed by the beloved.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Freedom emerges out of an unconscious desire that doesn’t jibe with social demands, not in our free will. Acts of freedom do not occur when I consciously weigh the options and make a decision to revolt but when I feel that I cannot do otherwise and act in accordance with my unconscious drive. This is the paradox of freedom and the result of its origin in what we lack rather than what we have (our conscious will).

The universality of this internal distance in all subjects marks their freedom from total coercion. If the demands of the social order and the responses of the individual subject lined up perfectly, there would be no space for universal freedom.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The production of knowledge itself points, often despite itself, toward a better future.”
― Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

“Love in an act of proximity. The lover refuses to remain at a safe distance and bombards the subject with its mode of satisfaction, a mode of satisfaction around which the subject must try to orient itself. This satisfaction is what we almost always recoil from, but in the act of love we embrace it. This is why lovers can accompany each other in the most private moments: they can tell each other their most revelatory dreams or allow the other into the bathroom with them. What would alienate or even repulse everyone else becomes integral to the love relation.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe.
The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“What's great about love is we don't know how the other is going to respond to our openness. When love is turned into a commodity, that aspect is totally lost.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“We know that someone is in love when the beloved’s most repellant qualities undergo a complete reversal of valence. A person’s unpleasant smell, slovenly attire, or obnoxious eating habits become appealing quirks rather than reasons for keeping a distance. The lover embraces the most unflattering characteristics of the beloved and treats them as sublime indexes of the beloved’s worth. The unpleasant odor resulting from a refusal to shower, for instance, would become an indication of the beloved object’s disdain for obsessive daily rituals with which others waste their time. There is no quality so universally negative that it could not undergo this transubstantiation in the act of love: fat can become cuddliness, emaciation can become fitness, bad attire can become idiosyncratic style, and so on. In contrast to desire, love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the object.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the Other.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“These conservative critics call for a return to “family values,” to a world in which prohibition kept us safe from outbreaks of enjoyment. This desire for a return to the past, however, is rarely genuine. Which is to say, such proclamations don’t really want the return to the past that they claim to want. Instead, they want the best of both worlds—the “benefits” of modernity (computers, cars, televisions) without their effects (isolation, enjoyment, narcissism)—and fail to grasp the interdependence of the benefits and the effects”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“In Love in the Western World , Denis de Rougement was the first to theorize the distinction between love and romance. Though Rougement does not discuss romance explicitly as a commodity, his framing of this distinction already anticipates the association of romance with the logic of capitalism. For Rougement, we opt for romance over love in order to keep our desire alive. He notes, “unless the course of love is being hindered there is no ‘romance’; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion.” Romance here is the obstruction of love, the delay in its realization. Romance, as Rougement sees it, allows us to continue to desire and to avoid the act of love. By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring. We can treat the love object like any other commodity and thereby escape its exceptional danger.
Though we tend to associate monogamy with the repressive demands of capitalist society, one is almost tempted to call monogamy an anticapitalist practice. In contrast, the subject who moves from object to object in romantic life follows the logic of accumulation. Even if this subject avoids the capitalist fantasy and doesn’t believe that any one object will have the final secret, it is often the equally compelling fantasy of quantity that drives this activity. One believes that accumulating a vast quantity of romantic objects will unlock the secret of the ultimate satisfaction, which is exactly the fantasy capitalism proffers. But love, in contrast to romance, doesn’t provide anything for the subject to accumulate. Instead of contributing to the subject’s wealth, it takes away from it.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“This is the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction). Whereas formerly society has required subjects to renounce their private enjoyment in the name of social duty, today the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible. The fundamental social duty in contemporary American society lies in committing oneself to enjoyment.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Degrading oneself for the sake of the beloved reveals the disruptiveness of the love relation. The person in love agrees to sacrifice social identity for the sake of winning the other’s love. When in love, all other considerations disappear before the response of the beloved. This experience of a complete loss of one’s usual coordinates is at once the appeal and the trauma of love. Though we tend to think of love as a pleasant experience, it actually produces much more suffering than pleasure. We feel pleasure when our lives move along smoothly and with relative security, but love is always rocky and insecure. As we fall in love, we can never be sure if the other truly loves us in return, and we spend our time worrying about what the other is doing. This is why it is easy to picture the lover phoning a beloved an abundance of times when there is no answer. The lover experiences of the trauma of love with each unrequited phone call. Life no longer just goes on when we love. Instead, it bombards us with a series of traumatic jolts that preclude any peace of mind. Our very symbolic identity loses its stable coordinates.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“will respond by reciprocating this desire. The difference between romance and love is that the former never leaves the terrain of desire. The subject seeking romance sees in the other the possibility of the realization of its desire and thereby reduces the love object to an object of desire. This is why romance inevitably produces disappointment.
Love, though it disturbs the subject, does not disappoint. In love, one can find satisfaction with the love object. But love also removes the subject from the terrain of desire. Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” 5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself.
When one falls in love, one loses all sense of oneself and one’s symbolic coordinates. Love is never a good investment for the subject, and this separates it definitively from romance. This is why capitalism necessitates the transformation of love into romance. This transformation allows us to love on the cheap. Many theorists of love, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, have remarked on love’s inherent disruptiveness. But this is apparent as early as Plato’s approach to the question of love.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“By enjoying in a public way, the subject becomes what we might call a fool. The fool is a subject who ceases to court the social authority's approbation and becomes immune to the seduction of social recognition or rewards. Recognition has a value for the subject only insofar as the subject believes in the substantial status of social authority-that is, insofar as the subject believes that the identities that society confers have a solid foundation. The fool grasps that no such foundation exists and that no identity has any basis whatsoever. The only possible foundation for the subject lies in the subject itself-in the fantasy that organizes the subject's enjoyment. Such a subject becomes a fool because it constantly acts in ways that make no sense to the social authority. It acts out of the nonsense of its own enjoyment.”
― Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

“The distinction between love and romance is essential for an analysis of the psychic appeal of capitalism. Romance domesticates the trauma of love, but it doesn’t eliminate it altogether. Capitalism gives love such a central place in its workings and encourages subjects to devote so much of their time to it because the trauma of the love encounter enlivens them and keeps them going. Without the traumatic satisfaction that love provides, life often ceases to seem worth living. While it relies on love, capitalism must contain its fundamental disruptiveness and mitigate its trauma so that the capitalist system can continue to function. This is what the transformation from love to romance aims at accomplishing. Though love isn’t a capitalist plot, romance is. Romance enables us to touch love’s disruptiveness while avoiding its full traumatic ramifications.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“Not only does romance transform love into an investment, but it plays a crucial role in the development of capitalism by suggesting to consumers that they can find the perfect commodity, the commodity that will create wholeness for them. Every act of consumption has its basis in an attempt to access the lost object, to find the perfect commodity that would provide an ultimate and lasting satisfaction. Although this fantasy underlies every purchase of a commodity, with most commodities we see easily through the illusion. Very few buy a roll of toilet paper thinking that they’ve found their lost object once and for all. With a Twinkie, the fantasy becomes more tenable. But with a romantic object, one can fully invest oneself in the promise of the object. Romance immerses subjects in the capitalist fantasy of the perfectly satisfying commodity, and this commodity has a precise name—the soul mate.”
― Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

“In response to the command to enjoy, contemporary cynicism is an effort to gain distance from the functioning of power, to resist the hold that power has over us. Hence, the cynic turns inward and displays an indifference to external authorities, with the aim of self-sufficient independence. Symbolic authority—which would force the subject into a particular symbolic identity, an identity not freely chosen by the subject herself—is the
explicit enemy of cynicism. To acknowledge the power of symbolic authority over one’s own subjectivity would be, in the eyes of the cynic, to acknowledge one’s failure to enjoy fully, making such an acknowledgment unacceptable. In the effort to refuse the power of this authority, one must eschew all the trappings of conformity. This is why the great Cynical
philosopher Diogenes made a show of masturbating in public, a gesture that made clear to everyone that he had moved beyond the constraints of the symbolic law and that he would brook no barrier to his jouissance. Byfreely doing in public what others feared to do, Diogenes acted out his refusal to submit to the prohibition that others accepted. He attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic law had no absolute hold over him and that he had no investment in it. However, seeming to be beyond the symbolic law and actually being beyond it are two different—and, in fact, opposed—things, and this difference becomes especially important to recognize in the contemporary society of enjoyment. In the act of making a show of one’s indifference to the public law (in the manner of Diogenes and today’s cynical subject), one does not gain distance from that law, but unwittingly
reveals one’s investment in it. Such a show is done for the look of the symbolic authority. The cynic stages her/his act publicly in order that symbolic authority will see it. Because it is staged in this way, we know that the cynic’s act—such as the public masturbation of Diogenes—represents a case of acting-out, rather than an authentic act, an act that suspends the functioning of symbolic authority. Acting-out always occurs on a stage, while the authentic act and authentic enjoyment—the radical break from the constraints of symbolic authority—occur unstaged, without reference to the Other’s look. 9 In the History of Philosophy, Hegel makes clear the cynic’s investment in symbolic authority through his discussion of Plato’s interactions with Diogenes:

In Plato’s house [Diogenes] once walked on the beautiful carpets with muddy feet, saying, “I tread on the pride of Plato.” “Yes, but with another pride,” replied Plato, as pointedly. When Diogenes stood wet through with rain, and the bystanders pitied him, Plato said, “If you wish to compassionate him, just go away. His vanity is in showing himself off and exciting surprise; it is what made him act in this way, and the reason would not exist if he were left alone.


Though Diogenes attempts to act in a way that demonstrates his self-sufficiency, his distance from every external authority, what he attains, however, is far from self-sufficiency. As Plato’s ripostes demonstrate, everything that the cynic does to distance himself from symbolic authority plays directly into the hands of that authority. Here we see how cynicism functions symptomatically in the society of enjoyment, providing the illusion of enjoyment beyond social constraints while leaving these constraints completely intact.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself ).
It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The non-
relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.” Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and
that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include. Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit.

However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available” and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.” We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded. In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“The universal necessarily imposes itself on even the most self-interested act. We can see this in a variety of instances. It is the great lesson of the capitalist economic system, which functions on the basis of the self-interested particular actually working on behalf of the whole. When I try to enrich myself at the expense of everyone else in society b selling real estate, for example, I inadvertently benefit others by helping them find a place to live and by giving them jobs working for me. What's more, I can only sell real estate within a social system that guarantees the protection of private property. My private act of selling real estate cannot escape involvement with universality. Despite its ultimate betrayal of universality (through its destruction of the public world held in common), the capitalist system reveals universality's triumph. It shows that no matter how we try to avoid it, we make reference to the universal.”
― Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

“Universality is the nonbelonging that becomes evident when a structure runs up against an external barrier as it strives to reproduce itself.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“If we completely divorce epistemology from politics, we lose sight of the nature of the political opposition. If we think about the opposition between Right and Left as the opposition between particular and universal, it is clear that the struggle is epistemological as much as it is political.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“For the conservative or the liberal, the collective is always on the verge of collapsing. This is because the universal that holds it together—a collective link always requires a universal—is constructed rather than constitutive. As a result, conservatives constantly try to secure it through appeals to national or ethnic identity that would create collectivity through exclusion. Conservative politics has its basis in the opposition between friend and enemy because this is the only way for the conservative to secure a collective bond. Liberals suffer from the same tenuousness but avoid the divisiveness that conservatives use. Instead, liberals advocate forging the connection through difference. For them, the negotiation of differences can be the source of our bond.

For the leftist or the proponent of emancipation, the situation is altogether different. Universality is the condition of possibility for particulars. It plays a constitutive role relative to its particulars. As a result, the collective link established through the universal forms an indissoluble connection. The universal is not a foreign outsider but an intimate point at which each particular finds itself lacking. Through this lack, the universal holds the series of particulars together even when they themselves do not register the connection.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“A society of prohibition requires all its members to sacrifice their individual, private ways of obtaining enjoyment for the sake of the social order as a whole. That is to say, one receives an identity from society in exchange for one’s immediate access to enjoyment, which one must give up. This is, traditionally, the way in which society as such functions. This type of society operates in the manner of a sports team: the team demands individual sacrifices in order to ensure the team’s success. In order for the team to win, the individual must give up her or his dreams of wholly individual achievement and fit her or his abilities into the structure of the team. In a society of commanded enjoyment, this dynamic changes dramatically. Rather than demanding that its members give up their individual enjoyment for the sake of the whole, the society of enjoyment commands their enjoyment—private enjoyment becomes of paramount importance—and the importance of the social order as a whole seems to recede. Contemporary complaints about sports stars who are more concerned about individual statistics and money than about their team’s fortunes are indicative of this transformation. These sports stars are not simply anomalous narcissists. In the society of enjoyment, individual, private accomplishments and rewards are more important than the success of the team. In such a society, it is no longer requisite that subjects accept a constant dissatisfaction as the price for existing within a social order. To return to the example of the sports team, one can remain a member of the team without having to subordinate one’s own individual agenda to the larger plans of the team. Dissatisfaction now appears as something that one need not experience, in contrast to life in the society of prohibition, where dissatisfaction inheres in the very fabric of social existence itself. In the society of enjoyment, the private enjoyment that threatened the stability of the society of prohibition becomes a stabilizing force and even acquires the status of a duty.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“Nonetheless, the path that the command to enjoy lays down for us remains enticing. What makes this path so attractive is that it seems to allow us to bypass the demands of castration, to access the enjoyment that the old father had hitherto prohibited. But the enjoyment that the anal father allows us always remains imaginary: we are permitted to lose ourselves in a world of images. Whereas the symbolic father’s prohibition of enjoyment had the effect
of reminding us of our position within the symbolic order (as subjects of castration), the anal father’s command to enjoy forestalls this kind of recognition. It prompts us to view ourselves and the other on the imaginary plane—to miss our situatedness within the symbolic order. Thus, the world of the anal father is at once a world of the image.”
― Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment

“All social hierarchies depend on our collective belief in them. Simply by collectively disbelieving in someone’s importance, we can cause this importance to vanish, which reveals the universal equality that becomes evident through the lack of belonging.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The act of articulating a system of thought implies the belief that a better world is possible and that the knowledge the system provides will assist in realizing the better world.”
― Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis