Quotes from Todd McGowan

The capitalist epoch is the first in human history that permits individuals to view themselves as isolated entities with no inherent connection to their fellow beings.

Despite the salience of Marx's critique of capitalism, this was the worst event to occur within the internal history of the project of emancipation. The theoretical turn from Hegel to Marx paved the way for a practical catastrophe.

subjects to continue to go on. Capitalist society's packaging of love as romance aims at eliminating the disruptiveness of love while sustaining its passion. This is an impossible task, and the love of the capitalist subject is always a diminished love insofar as it's safer.

Taking [Hegel's] philosophy as the point of reference, we could say that emancipation involves making explicit and embracing contradiction, whereas conservatism aims at repressing or eliminating it.

Romance under capitalism is a form of investment, and even a risky investment, as romance sometimes is, remains within the calculus of risk and loss. Love transcends any calculus and forces the subject to abandon its identity entirely, not simply stake its reputation or its fortune.

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.

The social authority undergoes a radical diminution in its capacity to grant recognition when someone is in love. This transformation grants enormous power to the beloved and, at the same time, lessens the power of the social order over the subject.

For Hegel, philosophy intervenes politically by making clear the relations that already exist.

By giving priority to the state, Hegel claims that we are public individuals before we are private ones. Our investment in the public sphere is not an option - like the decision to vote or not - but the basis for our private existence. The priority of the state indicates that one must go through the detour of the public in order to be a private individual.

The contradiction of the state - it creates the subject's singularity by thoroughly submitting its particularity to a universal law - provides the basis for the subject's freedom. Rather than creating the illusion of eliminating contradiction in the way that mutual recognition does, the state constantly confronts the subject with it.

By revealing that there is no external solution to the contradiction of being, the absolute tells us that we can no longer hope for relief from the trauma of history. This is the point when contradiction makes itself manifest as irreducible and when politics becomes unavoidable.

Recognizing the self-division of the other doesn't reduce everyone to sameness but eliminates the possibility for anyone's hierarchical elevation above another. It is a philosophy of universal equality through the split of every subject from itself.

According to Hegel, philosophy should not try to change the world because it cannot. It always arrives too late on the scene to offer concrete political proposals.

Though Hegel constructs a totalizing system, its airtight structure does not produce a perfectly harmonious whole in which nothing is out of place. Instead, the totality renders visible the ontological necessity of contradiction. This is the reason that Hegel insists on thinking the absolute idea... on their own, particulars create the illusion of the possibility of avoiding contradiction. This is, for Hegel, the great danger of the failure to think absolutely.

Hegel] sees that no principles is sustainable as a first principle since it implicitly relies on other principles in order to distinguish itself.

The death drive is the revolutionary contribution contribution psychoanalysis makes to political thought.

The fundamental wager of psychoanalysis - a wager that renders the idea of a psychoanalytic political project thinkable - is that repetition undergoes a radical transformation when one adopts a different attitude toward it. We may be condemned to repeat, but we aren't condemned to repeat the same position relative to our repetition.

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.

The very act of enunciating the most pessimistic system attests to a fundamental optimism and hope for progress beyond the status quo. Though the good may be impossible to realize, it is also impossible to abandon entirely. The production of knowledge itself points, often despite itself, toward a better future.

Rather than the death that occurs at the end of life, the death drive comes out of a death that occurs within life.

The appeal to identity is capitalism's secret sauce.

Love is the most radical experience we can have as subjects.

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.

Unlike all the other signifiers, the Master Signifier does not fluctuate, providing a ground for the system of signification. Whereas all other signifiers acquire meaning through their relationship to other signifiers - we can identify a table because it isn't a chair, which isn't a couch, and so on - the Master Signifier refers only to itself.