Quotes from Todd McGowan

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.

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.

The production of knowledge itself points, often despite itself, toward a better future.

This marks a dramatic change in the way the social order is constituted: rather than being tied together through a shared sacrifice, subjects exist side by side in their isolated enclaves of enjoyment.

But if Marx errs, his error does not lie, as his critics often allege, in underestimating "innate human selfishness." Instead, his error—and, again, it is the common error today—lies in the other direction, in underestimating the capacity of subjects to act against their self-interest.

Imaginary enjoyment seems to occur in open disdain of symbolic authority, thumbing its nose at that authority. But symbolic authority depends on this imaginary enjoyment that would "subvert" it because this enjoyment renders subjects docile. For symbolic authority, the danger of the imaginary is only an imaginary danger.

Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the commonsensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest.

Entrapped by the image, contemporary subjects come to inhabit a world without distance.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

Any return to the past, to traditional values, will necessarily be mediated by the present.

In proclaiming the inevitability of this type of world, we help to make it inevitable, to make the status quo all the more unassailable. In this way, the strategy of cynical embrace of the society of enjoyment is every bit as flawed as the nostalgic attempt to return to a previous epoch. Both positions share a fundamental refusal to recognize their own complicity with the society of enjoyment.

Nonstop motion becomes our way of trying to assure ourselves that we are not lacking—that is, nonenjoying—subjects.

If a society were based on only a common positive characteristic (the same language, for instance), this characteristic would not in any way act as a control on people's behavior. It would not stop them, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, from doing just what they please, in the way that prohibition, and specifically the incest prohibition, does.

America "is no country for the infirm" because infirmity indicates a failure of enjoyment. To be sick is thus to be guilty. The sick illustrate the persistence of dissatisfaction and distance within the society of enjoyment. In acknowledging the sick, one acknowledges lack as well. Hence, like Roy Cohn, we opt instead for nonstop motion, for trying to eliminate the distance that the sick would introduce into the contemporary world.

We do not spontaneously produce our identity from our own free act. Identity has an external origin.

Identity is how I want others to see me and thus always involves a capitulation to one form of social authority or another. Despite the feeling that we really are this identity, it is not the product of our freedom. It is a capitulation to the dictates of the social order. We do not make ourselves who we are, but social and natural determinations structure our identity.

Rather than asserting an essence of femininity that society must value and protect, Beauvoir's move here is the opposite: she wants to demolish feminine identity in order to assert women's participation in universality. Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one's politics. Clinging to a particular identity cannot possibly be the source of emancipation since it clearly functions as the driving force for female subjugation.

A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.

By giving up the feminine as an identity, the feminist simultaneously undermines the masculine as well. Masculine identity depends on its feminine counterpart that affirms it as its complementary other. Without this support, masculine identity collapses. This is why the feminist struggle against feminine identity Beauvoir advocates is a battle against patriarchy.

The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisible. It is not a fight to preserve the particularity of a local culture that European colonialism wiped out.

The universal is what the ruling order doesn't have, not what it does have. In this way, it is always on the side of those fighting on behalf of freedom and equality because they are what is missing, not what is manifested.

The theoretical attempt to avoid colluding with totalitarianism has created a situation in which we have lost the thread of universal emancipation.

The universal is what particulars share not having.

This object is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The objet a constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an engine for the desire of the subject and also directs that desire in its circuit. In fact, Lacan notes repeatedly that "the petit a is the cause of the subject." It causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire. Desire is, in this sense, part of what one gets in exchange for the sacrifice of one's enjoyment.