Quotes from Todd McGowan

Love depends on the embrace of what is undesirable in the Other.

Here is perhaps the chief indication that we are in the midst of a society of enjoyment: even the attempt to restore prohibition follows the logic of the demand for enjoyment, albeit in the guise of opposing it. When we resurrect the father today, he doesn't appear in the form of the symbolic father, the barrier to enjoyment. Instead, he appears in a form consonant with the society of enjoyment.

The authority that we can't recognize as authority is always more powerful than the openly authoritative authority.

Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words.