Capitalism and Desire

In McGowan's argument, "Capitalism and Desire" names the specific psychic-structural relationship by which capitalism installs itself as a substitute for the failing big Other, redirecting and capturing desire through the market and its chief instrument, advertising. Where the death of God—or more precisely, the progressive collapse of traditional symbolic authority—leaves subjects exposed to the traumatic freedom of an Other that does not exist and does not know how to desire on their behalf, capitalism steps into that structural vacancy. It offers subjects an image of a gaze (figured, paradigmatically, by Fitzgerald's Dr. T. J. Eckleberg) that appears to authorize their consumer choices, thereby rescuing them from the anxiety of radical self-determination. The market becomes the new point de capiton, anchoring the floating signifiers of desire to specific commodities. What is most insidious in this structure, McGowan insists, is that capitalism presents this capture of desire not as conformity but as liberation: the subject is interpellated as a free consumer, individuated by their choices, even as those choices are most thoroughly directed.

The concept also resolves an apparent theoretical antinomy. Adam Smith's dual legacy—the moral philosophy of sympathy and the economic theory of self-interest—reads as contradictory only if we miss that capitalism requires a substitute Other to organize desire. Capitalism "killed God" and then immediately reconstructed a functional equivalent in the market mechanism, advertising, and the commodity form. This double movement—destruction of the earlier form of the big Other, installation of the new one—is the defining psychic cost McGowan diagnoses: desire is not liberated by capitalism but captured in a more totalizing and self-concealing way, because the new Other presents itself as the very condition of freedom rather than as a constraint.

This concept appears across two occurrences in McGowan's work (slugs: capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan and todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni) and functions as the organizing thesis of those texts. It is best understood as a synthetic re-application of several canonical Lacanian concepts to the terrain of political economy. Most directly, it extends the logic of the big Other and the point de capiton: capitalism operates as a new quilting point that retroactively organizes the field of desire, substituting market authority for theological authority. The cross-referenced concept of Desire is crucial here—desire is not simply expressed or repressed by capitalism; it is structurally constituted through capitalism's offerings, always falling short of satisfaction (as desire structurally must), which is precisely what keeps the consumerist cycle running.

The concept also draws on Anxiety and Gaze. The traumatic freedom that capitalism "rescues" subjects from is precisely the anxiety produced when the Other's desire is absent—when there is no one to tell you what to want. Advertising, as the new form of the gaze, provides an imaginary resolution: an operative, surveilling eye (Eckleberg's billboard eyes) that seems to authorize desire without being localizable as a finite subject. This aligns with Fetishistic Disavowal at the level of ideology: subjects "know very well" that advertising manipulates, that the market is a human construction, yet they proceed as if commodity choices express authentic selfhood. Finally, Identification is at stake in consumption itself—the consumer identifies with the image of the desired self reflected back by the commodity, an imaginary identification that forecloses the subject's encounter with its own division. McGowan's intervention is to show that these mechanisms are not accidental features of capitalism but its core psychic infrastructure.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (alt. ed.)Todd McGowan · 2016 (page unknown)

capitalism's installation of this new Other or new form of God comes on the heels of the destruction of the earlier form. In short, capitalism killed God.

The phrase "killed God" explicitly situates capitalism within the Lacanian-Nietzschean problematic of the collapse of the big Other, while "installation of this new Other or new form of God" names capitalism's structural move with precision: it does not simply benefit from the absence of symbolic authority but actively produces a replacement, making the market and advertising the new locus from which desire receives its authorization.