Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

by Todd McGowan

Although there have been many attempts to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to political thought, this book is the first to identify the political project inherent in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. And this political project, Todd McGowan contends, provides an avenue for emancipatory politics after the failure of Marxism in the twentieth century. Where others seeking the political import of psychoanalysis have looked to Freud’s early work on sexuality, McGowan focuses on Freud’s discovery of the death drive and Jacques Lacan’s elaboration of this concept. He argues that the self-destruction occurring as a result of the death drive is the foundational act of emancipation around which we should construct our political philosophy. Psychoanalysis offers the possibility for thinking about emancipation not as an act of overcoming loss but as the embrace of loss. It is only through the embrace of loss, McGowan suggests, that we find the path to enjoyment, and enjoyment is the determinative factor in all political struggles—and only in a political project that embraces the centrality of loss will we find a viable alternative to global capitalism.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Science

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Todd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

dear mr author,

i present: a dumb review of a smart book (not that knowledge is the answer but you already knew that).

i think i understand what you’re getting at - in fact, it’s been speaking to me for quite some time, albeit not in terms of psychoanalysis as an anti-capitalist project. i’m glad to get your take though - it’s genuinely altered the way i approach life. i think it also made me depressed for a month. oh well, you win some, you lose some, but actually all that you have is nothing… or something to that effect, i think i’ll need to read this several times to be sure.

anyways i have a notes doc full of quotes from this book which i send verbatim to friends at every loosely related opportunity. they must think i’m obnoxious l-o-l

[Funda Guzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çok çok iyi. Odak hiç kaybolmuyor ve sonuç oldukça tatmin edici . Farklı bakış açısı 👍🏻 birkaç yıldız da buradan olsun ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound, insofar as this essay shows us how the traditional division between left and right doesn't exhaust politics. Mcgowan pushes hard our mind to make us reflect deeply.

McGowan, sustaining his discourse on profound philosophical and clinical insights (Kant, Marx, Hegel, Freud, Bataille, Lacan, Derrida or Althusser, amongst others) and highlighting his master on psychoanalitic theory, reflects about the following topics: sublimity and commodities, knowledge and social change, jouissance and consumism, fantasy and individuality, mankind unsatisfied condition, sacrifice within production, the gap of belief... What is overwhelming, indeed, is the fact that McGowan has synthetized all in less than 300 pages!

Once read, it is understandable that Zizek himself has considered this essay a classic.
However, just one advice: this is not a divulgative book. It demands previous acquaintance with, at least, lacanian theory (theory grounded on clinical practice). If not, you could feel lost easily.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting argument on what psychanalysis could contribute to political projects that are in resistance to capitalist oppression. McGowan offers many penetrating insights at trying to understand the unconscious connections that have allowed capitalism to succeed as a political project, despite the general psychological toll it has brought upon its participants on all levels of class society. One of the few things that held the book back for me though is that instead of trying to ground the arguments in real-world situations, almost all examples used were through the analysis of cinema. I don't have a problem with using this technique to make ideas more understandable but when it becomes the primary method for making apparent people's psychological way of being in the world, it seems like an overdone tactic.

[David Gutshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be safe to say that I “enjoyed” this book. Todd McGowan continues his oeuvre of exploring society through a psychoanalytical and Hegelian lens. Psychoanalysis is a rather diverse topic with not just a theoretical and clinical divide, but with different camps that pick and pull from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Fromm, Kristeva, LaPlanche, and the Frankfurt School (amongst many others) to frame their respective theories. McGowan is definitely from the school of thought of the late works of Freud such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his formulation of the Death Drive, and late Lacan and his focus on the contingency of the Real. McGowan does not write in an overly academic style, and he is skilled at explaining psychoanalytic concepts that can be rather counter-intuitive to laypeople; however, one is expected to have some working knowledge of terms like lack, jouissance(enjoyment), drive, death drive, trauma, Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, objet a, and constitutive loss that forms subjectivity through language in Lacan’s thought. There will be some exposition on these topics by McGowan, but these are short and if it is your first time encountering these terms they may not be enough to fully grasp his argument. This is not to dissuade anybody from reading this wonderful book, but to encourage potential readers to do just a little homework to help digest his thoughts and not to become frustrated with the terminology.

I wouldn’t consider the thought contained in this book to necessarily be a feasible political praxis. McGowan is invested in understanding how right-wing populism and its flirtation or outright support of fascism harness the power of enjoyment (jouissance). While he does outline a political orientation for left-wing politics with enjoyment; the truth is the left has the extremely difficult task of understanding how they enjoy and the need to adjust their relationship to it. Unfortunately, capitalism operates through the Death Drive (McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire is a great work about the subject), and our relationship between desire and enjoyment is intimately tied to capitalism being the horizon of our thought. So a left political praxis requires a reorientation to enjoyment in line with a reorientation to the commodity. For a leftist, this should be obvious, but it is not as simple as overcoming a false consciousness or escaping commodity fetishism common in Marxist thought. McGowan’s understanding of the death drive and enjoyment reorients leftist thought to be concerned with subjectivity itself, and to understand the blind spots that come with the human subject for projects of emancipation.

[Христо]

I don't know how many stars to give this. It's well written stylistically, but McGowan, much like late-Zizek, doesn't outline THE political programme of Lacan's teaching (as there is none, Lacan's apparatus is strictly not-political), but cobbles up the Knowledge to sustain his own sinthomatic political vision. The sinthome of course being "the emancipatory project." Or, you know, a "re-turn" to Communism.

Lacanian "politics" tends to either be orthodoxized as radical Democracy or not-Communism these days. But it has all the groundwork to sustain a project of radical Lottocracy, or perhaps even not-Fascism. It's the war of Master discourses. Luckily, it outlines a few strictly impossible political modes, such as anarchism, classical utopianism, and so forth. That doesn't stop people from engaging the discourse war with a phantasy of their making. More power to them I suppose, long as they know it's a war they're starting.

[Esma Ertürk · Rating 5 out of 5]

şimdiye kadar psikanalizle ilgili okuduğum en iyi kitap. psikanaliz teorisinin disiplinlerarası bağlamını (daha çok freudcu ve lacancı psikanaliz) yaşamdaki izdüşümlerini de aktardığı için teori kafamda daha iyi oturdu, daha anlaşılır oldu. odaklanarak, notlar alarak okumak gerekir.

[Quentin Paquette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is helping me start to approach politics differently. I’m going to have to let it work on me a little longer to fully appreciate it. I particularly appreciate how it highlights the questions instead of offering answers, encourages a path and not a destination.

[Indiana Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of an academic trudge but the jewels of insight along the way make it worthwhile

[Amar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably the best introduction to any political project involving Lacan.

[Peter Zhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one warped my brain a lot. i need to reread it but its a very useful leftist frame for interpreting US politics.