Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity

by Todd McGowan

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we pure excess. He argues that the promise of more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. Capitalism, however, represents a revolutionary turn away from the good and the useful toward excessive growth, which now threatens the habitability of the planet.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, McGowan shows how the production of commodities explains the role of excess in the workings of capitalism. Capitalism and the commodity ensnare us with the image of the constant fulfillment of our desiresthe seductive but unattainable promise of satisfying a longing that has no end. To challenge this system, McGowan turns to art, arguing that it can expose the psychological mechanisms that perpetuate capitalist society and reveal the need for limits. Featuring lively writing and engaging examples from film, literature, and popular culture, Pure Excess uncovers the hidden logic of capitalismand helps us envision a noncapitalist life in a noncapitalist society.

The book is published by Columbia University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

Genres: Economics, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 31, 2024

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

[Nicholas Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anti-capitalism at its best.
If you read Capitalism and Desire and thought that it was exactly what the world needed, then Pure Excess is a must-read. McGowan cleanly updates Marx's insights without any sort of dogmatism (just in case that M word strikes fear in you) and he makes each point plain and useful.

McGowan highlights what seems like every detail of our way of life to display how capitalism betrays the modernist project. His analysis is structural and very easy to read, far from the tirade one might presume. McGowan, as always, is incredibly sympathetic to his subject and makes clear what capitalism reveals about ourselves as well, not simply providing lives of abundance/freedom but revealing the essential role that excess/sublimity plays in who we are. Anti-capitalism for McGowan means embracing the insights of modernity against the insistence on the commodity form. This genuine, political alternative means setting limits, welcoming the role lack plays in our enjoyment, and achieving sublimity on our own. Art demonstrates this for McGowan, not as escapism but as a material structure that achieves sublimity through lack/limit--art's example extends to daily life, as he amply shows.

If you are already engaged with McGowan's work, Pure Excess doesn't add new insight so much as apply it to some very pertinent, at-hand matters. Every subject of capitalism should read this work.

Favorite sections include the sublimity of collecting, Virginia Woolf, sublimity of the commodity form, fetishism, paranoia and the role of the good/experts, Jordan Peele's Us.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve had to read this one twice, and much more slowly the second time, highlighting bits along the way, which I might add some of at the end of this review. Why did I need to do that? Well, the problem is that this book is about the hardest idea in Marx coupled with Lacanian psychology. Another book by the same author explains that Lacan decided that so many people misunderstood Freud because he wrote so plainly and they read too fast, that the best solution would be to be so obscure that people’s eyes would bleed when they read you. It didn’t help, of course, people read into you whatever they want, whether you are clear or obscure. And since Lacan was a great fan of Hegel, he should have already known that.

Let’s start with Marx. In the first volume of Capital, Marx talks of the commodity as a fetish. The first thing Marx discusses in his explanation of how capitalist production works is the commodity and it takes up a big chunk of the book. The fetish of the commodity is an odd expression – particularly now when we are more likely to think of a fetish as being a dildo than a religious object, which are not the same, regardless of how often you scream Oh God using either. What Marx meant, in part, is that commodities hide their true nature by becoming a kind of religious fetish – an object that stops being just a lump of material, but rather god – not just a pointer to god, but an actual manifestation of godliness. We stop seeing the thing as a lump of plaster or metal and instead see god. The fetish illusion hides the true nature of the object. For Marx, the true nature of the commodity is not how it will make you incredibly attractive to the opposite sex, or change your life for the better – all that advertisements tell you will happen upon purchasing them – nor is it that the commodity creates its own value by how much you desire it. For Marx, the true nature of the commodity is in its exchange value, and this is determined by how much labour is contained within it. Worse than this obscuring of the social nature of the production of the commodity that its fetish nature obscures, it also obscures how capitalists make a profit, even from the capitalist. That is, profit comes from getting workers to labour beyond the time that is needed for them to reproduce their labour power. This means the capitalist only pays the worker enough to meet their basic needs – say, what they can produce in 4 hours work – but gets the worker to work for 8 hours, with the additional 4 hours producing profit to the capitalist – or what Marx calls surplus labour. Now, you need to have that idea in your head, because the author is going to run with it – even further than Marx does.

This is where Lacan is brought in. Lacan is interested in desire and enjoyment. For Lacan, the commodity doesn’t only contain surplus labour, but also surplus enjoyment. This makes an interesting twist on Marx. For Marx, and for most economists, the commodity is first and foremost a use value. If it has no use, no one will by it and so it doesn’t matter how much labour it has contained within itself, it can’t turn a profit, because surplus value is only realised once it is purchased. This is what the author thinks of as the great myth of capitalism and the great mistake of Marx. He points out that the whole point of capitalism isn’t to produce use values, but to produce excess. We’ve already seen this in the fact the capitalist gets the worker to work beyond the time needed to produce what is necessary to reproduce their labour power. Excess is the key to capitalism in that it is in this ‘producing beyond what is necessary’ where profit lies. But the story goes deeper still. As the author says, every society prior to capitalism was interested mostly in its own reproduction. And this meant it was interested in ‘the good’ – however that was defined by the society. But capitalism is only really interested in excess. It isn’t as interested in ‘need’ as it might claim. It is interested in producing excess that is beyond need, and this excess is portrayed as having no limits. I’ve just read a few books on the tech bros and how they want there to be a trillion humans spread across the stars. They want this because capitalism needs to endlessly grow – capitalism without growth isn’t capitalism. This idea of capitalism being endlessly excessive is central here. And it impacts all aspects of capitalism, both economically (destroying the planet due to wasted production directed at endless excess) and psychologically (in driving us to desire excess without loss, without limits).

The problem is that capitalism cannot deliver on this lossless excess. Every commodity promises that it will fill the void we feel through excess – the excess that capitalism creates through the surplus value it extracts from workers – but this desire is always thwarted. For the author, the reason why this is always thwarted is because pure excess is psychologically impossible.

Many, perhaps too many, people think that if we are going to save the planet from capitalism we are going to have to limit our enjoyment and produce and consume only what we need. This sounds reasonable – but like the idea of a lossless excess, it isn’t actually possible. Our problem is that the capitalists are right, in a way, enjoyment comes from excess, not from merely meeting our needs – enjoyment comes from the useless, not use values and ‘what we need’. As that old joke would have it – always exchange life’s necessities for life’s luxuries. The author says that pre-capitalist societies understood this and that was why excess was constrained to holidays, carnivals and the potlatch. The grind of the everyday was replaced by a wasteful excess – and this was the most enjoyable time of the year. Capitalism turns this on its head. It produces wasteful excess as its main reason for being. The use value of the commodity is its least interesting feature. It is only in extravagant waste and excess that capitalism makes money – and it is in this excess that we find pleasure.

He talks of coke as an example here. He explains that coke is a diuretic and so drinking it makes you thirstier than before you drank it. Making it the nearly perfect capitalist commodity – a drink that makes you need to drink more. And like that Lou Reed song, Strawman, he also produces lists of things we desire, but ultimately do not need.

Does anybody need another million dollar movie?
Does anybody need another million dollar star?
Does anyone really need a billion dollar rocket?
Does anyone need a sixty-thousand dollar car?
Does anyone need another president?
Does anyone need another faulty shuttle
Blasting off to the moon, Venus or Mars?

The point is that none of us need any of these things – but that only heightens our desire for them. Use value is our ultimate justification – ‘yeah, but the new iPhone has a better camera and 5G and…’ but we are unlikely to ever use half of these features, but the useless excess is what makes the commodity desirable, not its meeting our needs.

And yet, this excess never proves to be enough. We still feel empty once we have purchased the commodity. In fact, perhaps even emptier than before – since wanting to obtain the commodity, like seducing a new lover we desire, is often better than the sex we have with them – something Sartre talks about somewhere. Capitalism promises we are one purchase away from living a life in a permanent state of orgasm – the thing is that not only is living in such a state not possible, it isn’t even something we would rationally desire. An endless orgasm would quickly become more of a punishment than a pleasure.

We seem to be trapped. We are drawn to excess, are only happy when we obtain excess, but this excess is fleeting and destroying the planet and our lives. Is there a way out? Well, this is where the author comes back to Nietzsche, in part, anyway, and talks of the benefits that come from making your life a work of art. The thing with art is that it is obsessed with form – and most importantly, with the constraints of form. Why does someone write a sonnet rather than about 140 words in some other structure? The author says that the loss of writing in the form of a sonnet (loss in the sense that you can’t write in any of the other ways that would otherwise be available to you if you weren’t writing a sonnet) presents access to a true excess – rather than the fake excess of the commodity. It is a dialectical relationship, where true excess is found within the constraints imposed by the otherwise ‘loss’ of options available to you that you must work within. Here is the path out of the wastefulness of capitalism without reducing it to the drudgery of only having out needs met. Rather than seeing pure excess as the path to happiness, a pure excess that is always thwarted, we learn instead that excess is only realisable through loss – through placing limits and constrains on our desires. This is where desire – which is always directed towards what we do not have – becomes love, a working within the limits and seeking to transcend those limits. Rather than drudgery, it is here that we find true joy, pure excess.

I’ve just finished reading another book on Shakespeare’s sonnets – one of the things I found most interesting about it was how often the author said one or other of the sonnets was a bit rubbish – well, rubbish for Shakespeare. But this book makes it clear that that is necessary, rather than a terrible flaw. Perfection, true excess, is rare, even if you are Shakespeare, but seeking after perfection is an excess beyond that of the promise of lossless excess.

Some quotes:

What characterizes the commodity form is the promise of pure excess. 2
Excess is always impure, which is not a defect but precisely what enables it to be excessive. 2
If a society emphasizes production over reproduction, it will necessarily produce too much rather than enough. 3
Once capitalism emerges as the ruling socioeconomic system, limiting production to what is merely necessary ceases to be a feasible option. 4
The survival of the planet as a habitable place for humanity is not a concern of capitalist society. 5
The point of capitalist society is not sustaining things as they are but acquiring more than what one already has. 8
The fantasy that organizes the structure of capitalist society is one of
pure excess or excess without anything missing. 9
Attempts to replace popcorn and Coke with carrots and fruit smoothies have been tried at certain theaters, but such efforts failed miserably. Why? Because healthy alternatives such as these do not pass the test of enjoyability. They are useful, good for us, rather than excessive and useless…10
We become engaged in a satisfying way when we work to accomplish something, when we struggle to realize what isn’t immediately doable. No one would enjoy a game that they won instantly every time that they played. 11
When one thinks about it, the image of pure excess is an image of total boredom. 12
Through an act of limiting myself, I create my own form of excess. By devoting myself to one thing and cutting off others, I give that thing a sublime value that it otherwise wouldn’t have. 14
The challenge of modernity is liberating excess from the chains of the commodity form. 15
Artistic form is the antipode of the commodity form. The former provides a productive limit, while the latter promises production without limit. 16
Capitalism marks revolutionary change in human history. Instead of orienting the society and the subjects in it toward the good, the enjoyment of a useless excess becomes the organizing principle. 18
Coca-Cola is here the archetypal commodity: because it is a dehydrating diuretic, far from quenching my thirst, drinking a Coke makes me thirstier. Its value stems directly from its absence of any use value at all. 20
We enjoy limits rather than the unlimited. This is why a 6.5 ounce bottle of Coke is enjoyable in a way that the two-litre jug is not. 23
But to obtain the object is to deprive oneself of what makes it enjoyable. 27
The useless has priority within capitalist society because we enjoy what has no utility. 34
Utility serves as an alibi for the capitalist system, but this system is not here to respond to our needs. 34
Gold, silver, and diamonds also have great value for the same reason that money does. They are divorced from any use we might make of them. We value inutility because we enjoy what we cannot use. 37
Capitalist society promises an infinitude that can never come. 69
Value for capitalist society resides solely in excess, and this excess is what keeps it going. 77
Fetishistic disavowal obscures the fact that all enjoyment stems from lack, that there is no pure excess. 93
Once one has a debt, one has become a capitalist subject. 122
Seduced by debt, one looks to the promise of the commodity form that will deliver excess untainted with lack. But no satisfaction will ever prove excessive enough to overcome lack altogether since all our satisfaction derives from lack. 124
Capitalism turns lacking subjects into indebted persons. 124
This is why the very wealthy (without money troubles and with all the possessions they could want) are always depressed and seeking more. 126
The lacking subject can see that the lack itself is the source of the excess rather than the object that promises to fill this lack. 127
… capitalists produce more than is necessary, and they require someone to purchase it. For this to happen, people must go into debt. 130
Capitalism takes over the future of those it burdens with debt. 132
The logical outgrowth of capitalism is not communism but authoritarian populism. 159
Even with the greatest shared abundance, we will necessarily suffer from a shared scarcity because it is through what we don’t have that we enjoy ourselves. 162
Trump’s disdain for experts derived from his disdain for any limit on enjoyment. 165
Enjoyment is the excess that we experience beyond what is useful for our prosperous survival: we enjoy through the sacrifice of the useful for the sake of the excessive. 165
The good doesn’t lead directly to enjoyment. Instead, it gives us something to sacrifice so that we might enjoy. 167
We keep ourselves alive for the sake of a useless excess because this is what enables us to experience our lives as worthwhile. 174
Although we should be ruthlessly critical of capitalism for many things, we should thank it every day for its turn away from use value. 175
An emancipated society is not one that commits itself to a return to the useful. Nor is it one invested in procuring nonlacking excess for everyone. It is rather one that grasps how a sublime excess emerges out of lack. 179
Art functions through a self- determination that requires formal limits. An art that disdained limits would cease to be an art at all. 190
Art is a way of giving oneself a path to enjoyment through less. 191
Form is what prevents artists from doing whatever they want. Form is limitation. 192
All creativity has its basis in a fundamental negativity. 192
The artist receives nourishment from limitation, while the entrepreneur sees limitation only as a barrier to go beyond. 193

[Joey · Rating 4 out of 5]

great explainer for young folks probably a bit grating for older experienced materialists and definitely not for the anti-freudians.

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

May 2025 Reading
In many ways, Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity is a sequel to McGowan’s 2016 work, Capitalism and Desire. In Pure Excess, McGowan expands upon his understanding of capitalism’s psychic cost by exploring the role excess plays. He writes, “Capitalist society, I claim, organizes everyone and everything around a useless excess. Capitalism’s orientation toward a better future is really an orientation toward a future of pure excess without any admixture of lack. This is the promise that defines capitalist society and drives its reproduction” (20). Capitalism’s promise of a life, set of relations, and economy predicated on excess while eschewing lack is a fantasy, but a necessary one. This excessive fantasy encourages consumers to gravitate toward the next (and hopefully best) commodity. If capitalism behaved honestly, it would avow the necessary role lack plays in enjoyment. McGowan writes, “Equality of excess depends on recognizing that we enjoy through lack rather than through attaining a pure excess untrammeled by lack” (23). In short, we “enjoy limits rather than the unlimited” (23). But capitalism would fail in its primary objective (i.e., unbridled accumulation) if it acknowledged this. Much like the capitalist consumer, capitalism must behave as if transcending lack is possible. This is why inequality is so rampant in capitalist economies. As McGowan suggests, “Insisting on pure excess leads to inequality because it forces someone to silently sacrifice so that others can believe in the accessibility of pure excess. There can be no egalitarian capitalism because the fantasy of pure excess ensures that some will try to have this excess at the expense of others” (24). Try as it might, capitalism will always resort to a zero-sum calculation.

McGowan’s solution, one he develops in other works, is for the subject to understand the necessity of lack tethered to excess as an expression of one’s enjoyment. That is to say, pure excess is impossible; the only hope we have to understand how lack, when married to excess, is the true source of enjoyment. McGowan writes, “The challenge is to create a modernity without capitalism—a society that privileges excess over the good but recognizes that the enjoyment of excess depends on lack” (29). Blending lack and excess is important because this “bond between lack and excess is inherently egalitarian” (29). The commodity form, a unique and particular capitalist phenomenon, blinds the subject to the actual source of enjoyment, thus perpetuating capitalism’s inequality. But for McGowan, the commodity form is a particular site of inequality. He writes, “The commodity form doesn’t just give us a useless excess. It also hides the sacrifice that laborers undergo to create the excess” (91). In the most interesting chapter in Pure Excess, McGowan explores how this process of hidden sacrifice (i.e., commodity fetishism) connects to a psychoanalytic concept called fetishistic disavowal, or the “process through which people deny lack” (91). Both commodity fetishism and fetishistic disavowal hide something. For commodity fetishism, it hides the exploitation of the laboring class, but for fetishistic disavowal, it hides the inevitability of lack in the formation of subjectivity. In a sublime move, McGowan suggests that the origins of capitalism are best understood through psychoanalysis. He writes, “The commodity is the promise of escaping castration. In this sense, fetishistic disavowal represents the origin of capitalism” (113). From a psychoanalytic perspective, castration is symbolic, not literal. Subjectivity is a confrontation with lack, and another way to understand lack is to frame it as castration or a cut. We are all “cut,” but capitalism attempts to convince us otherwise. This is the role the commodity plays, and in playing this role, we see how capitalism flourished as a response to the incontrovertibility of lack. The commodity form is the rejection of lack personified. This explains why an egalitarian society is so hard not only to produce but also to imagine. So long as we reject lack’s radical potential, we will find ourselves in an unequal, commodity-driven society, which is to say, a capitalist society.

The tension within capitalism is a manufactured one between lack and excess. Capitalism wants us to imagine that lack is a problem to solve, instead of understanding lack’s constitutive nature. That is to say, excess is something we realize through the barrier that lack produces. Once we see the undeniable connection between lack and excess, we have a chance to imagine an emancipatory world.

***

August 2025 Reading
Supplemental reading. Nothing new to add.

[Trenton Class]

I've been waiting for a book just like this. A book to take all these disparate concepts that are usually discussed separately and seem to be be almost touching but actually put's them in direct conversation. I'm thinking of when I'd be reading Heinrich's Capital intro and the way he would discuss value form would sound like Lacan speaking into a mirror. While McGowan isn't the first to bring Marxism and Analysis into dialogue, he does get the conversation going in a way that for me at least that felt more productive (not to mention accessible) and was turning on light bulbs for me left and right.

McGowan stages the dialectic of Excess/Lack and poses our capitalistic society as one that turns around the former while vehemently disavowing the latter. In other words if capitalism is the universalization of the commodity form, then McGowan is interested in bringing attention to how this ushers in a mass obfuscation and retreat from the lack that the commodity promises deliverance from. Alternatively he suggests that the freedom/emancipation (i.e. excess) that modernity promises can only truly be universalized and made available to everyone by foregrounding the very negativity/subjectivity (i.e. lack) that capitalism requires to disavow.

[leren_lezen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow forgot to review this, but this book is very good. McGowan argues, inspired by Nietzsche, how living like an artist can function as an antidote against capitalist ideology. Mainly however through a reading of Lacan's understanding of desire and enjoyment, McGowan shows how true enjoyment only exists within limits (and through lack), and that a recognition of this can lead to more equal and enjoyable forms of living with others, as well as with the earth.

McGowan can be a bit repetitive here and there, yet I can only applaud him for writing an accessible book on Lacan against capitalism, through plenty of relatable examples from popular culture.

[Matt Kelland]

DNF.

[a2badger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating argument. I'll never look at a concession stand, a grocery store or economics the same again.

[geakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

This is the book I’ve been waiting for. It’s like reading Žižek if his writing was more focused, more direct. Still a challenging read at times so I decided to take it slow.

[n · Rating 1 out of 5]

Intellectual equivalent of a college freshman Writing 101 essay about the negative impact of social media on body image.