todd-mcgowan

[todd-mcgowan]

the capitalist subject fantasises that it owes nothing to the larger structure writes Todd McGowan

[todd-mcgowan]

“The isolation of the subject, for Hegel, is the basis of its solidarity."

[todd-mcgowan]

“‘The sense that one is radical or subversive’ ‘is so pervasive’ ‘especially among the most conservative’ people, Todd McGowan writes.”

— (via lacanians)

[todd-mcgowan]

““We feel guilty not for our sins but for our failures to enjoy,” says Todd McGowan.”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/840852405285769216 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

““We can enjoy the object, but we can enjoy it only through its absence,” says Todd McGowan”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/900630039221456896 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

““For the neurotic, the real me is the one that I hide, not how I manifest myself publicly. The neurotic’s wholly private revolt … fails,” writes Todd McGowan. “The belief that one already is a radical subject — the defining belief of the neurotic"”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/933904760754884608 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

“The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces.”

— Todd McGowan, End of Dissatisfaction?, The: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, 2012 

[todd-mcgowan]

““To retreat into nostalgia is to flee one’s own freedom,” writes Todd McGowan.”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/939783007921164288 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

“The recognition that we are not really pursuing pleasure frees us from the chains of capitalism more completely than any other revolutionary gesture.”

—

Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, 2016 (p. 50)

“… The capitalist subject oscillates between dissatisfaction and pleasure, between absence and presence, and it cannot recognize the satisfaction that underlies this oscillation. This subject remains, however, a subject animated by a lost object. As such, it derives its satisfaction from the series of failures to arrive at the pleasure it seeks. Late in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggests what was for him at the time a disturbing hypothesis. He says tentatively, “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.” If we understand “death instincts” here as the subject’s attachment to loss, this brief sentence at the conclusion of Freud’s brief book provides the most thoroughgoing critique of capitalism that anyone has ever written. The recognition that we are not really pursuing pleasure frees us from the chains of capitalism more completely than any other revolutionary gesture.”

[todd-mcgowan]

“The normal subject, conceived in the properly psychoanalytic sense, has no external entity by which to measure its own deviation from the norm. In this sense, to become a normal subject is to recognize that there is no authorized social authority, no guarantee for normality.”

— Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, 2013

[todd-mcgowan]

““progress triggers the very forms of oppression that it hopes to combat & thereby incessantly undermines itself. There is a backlash written into every progressive program from the outset. ..Death drive creates an essentially masochistic structure within the psyche” says McGowan”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/1004486670924820480 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

““The social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. …The moments..the shared sense of loss becomes visible are..quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. …When enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure,” says McGowan.”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/1059491845347119109 (via andre-vantino)

[todd-mcgowan]

““The satisfaction that capitalism produces stems from the incessant failure of desire to realize itself, but capitalism…enables us to believe in the possibility of success, which hides the traumatic fact that our only satisfaction lies in failure and loss.””

— Todd McGowan

[todd-mcgowan]

“neurosis … is a refusal to sacrifice the hope that the Other holds some ultimate enjoyment that the subject itself lacks.”

— todd mcgowan (via alterities)

[todd-mcgowan]

Todd McGowan

[todd-mcgowan]

“the alternative, if we don’t find a way to live with antagonism, is just mutually assured destruction, says Todd McGowan on Freud’s message”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/1360730316550385665

[todd-mcgowan]

““The more that we experience a desire as transgressive, the more ardently we feel it. In this way, the superego enables us to enjoy our desire while consciously believing that we are restraining it,” says Todd McGowan. https://t.co/kzc2Qlpxcy”

— http://twitter.com/AndreVantino/status/1389285798323933192