Quotes from Todd McGowan

In the act of seeing through the symbolic fiction and thereby failing to recognize its efficacy, the cynic does not escape its influence. In fact, this influence is all the more powerful for its having become wholly inconspicuous, which is precisely what befalls the subject in the society of enjoyment.

Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping away the content of all particular identity by imposing the commodity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.

In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction. This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order.

Identity, no matter if it seems intrinsic (like race and seuxality) or the result of a conscious choice (like club membership and religious affiliation), is always rooted in the social recognition that sustains it. The most private form of identity has its origin in the given social possibilities. Identity politics hides the alienating quality of all identity and thus has an ideological function.

An actual turn to universality requires a break from conservatism and even from liberalism.

The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces.

Because of their rejection of the public law, cynical subjects feel as if they have no investment in the big Other, as if they have distanced themselves from its power, but this is belied by their investment in the fantasmatic underside of that law.

Because of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order.

Universality is the nonbelonging that becomes evident when a structure runs up against an external barrier as it strives to reproduce itself.

No society can include us without simultaneously alienating us from it. My belonging in a society always breaks down, which enables me to turn against this society when it takes a direction that I cannot accept. This is why I am free. Freedom is not a value of belonging, of being a member of a free society. Freedom becomes apparent as a value when we experience our nonbelonging, a nonbelonging that is universal because it applies to everyone, even those who most feel like they fit in.

This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. This image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves in the midst of their dissatisfaction.

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.

Imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order. Our imaginary enjoyment remains a confined and policed enjoyment, an enjoyment relatively amenable to symbolic authority.

Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.

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.

Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday lives—we lose the ability to find meaning—because it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible.

Plato's distinction between lovers of opinion and philosophers is a distinction between those who embrace present particulars just as they self-evidently are and those who instead recognize absent universals as what makes particulars into what they are. The implicit link between philosophy and emancipation is clear here. Emancipation is nothing if not the refusal to rest content with what is merely present.

Universals bring us together not by imposing a common structure on us but by revealing that we share what we don't have and can never have. The fact that no one can have a universal—no one possesses freedom or equality—is the source of their emancipatory quality. Universals are not possessions to have or lose or give away. We don't have to be suspicious of the universals because no one can ever impose them on us, even if someone wanted to.

Love seems like a capitalist plot.

Love emerges out of a disruption, and it lives on through dissymmetry.

object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love's authenticity rather than its absence.

Identity - conceived as a singular or as an intersection of multiple aspects - is not a basis from which I can fight against ideology but the result of ideology's operations.

Nazism is not dangerous because it proffers a universal system that threatens to engulf the whole world but because it refuses to think universally. Its efforts at world conquest stem from its lack of universality, not an abundance of it.

The radicality of the universal lies in its imperceptibility.