Language Game

In McGowan's argument (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, p.216), the "language game" — borrowed from Wittgenstein's later philosophy — is mobilized as a philosophical analogue to the Lacanian concept of the symbolic order: a self-enclosed rule-governed practice that has no foundation outside itself. The crucial theoretical move is that the beginning of a language game is an absolute beginning — it is not grounded in any prior, extra-linguistic reality, natural law, or metaphysical origin. Fantasy, in Lacan's sense of the term ($◇a), functions here as the subject's way of disavowing precisely this groundlessness: it constructs a retroactive fiction of continuity, origin, or foundation so that the radical break introduced by the language game (i.e., by symbolic entry) appears to be a smooth passage rather than an abyss.

This reading aligns the Wittgensteinian problematic with the Lacanian account of alienation: just as alienation marks the irreversible and non-dialectical entry into the signifying chain — the "vel" in which being is sacrificed for meaning — the language game introduces a cut that cannot be sutured from within its own operation. Fantasy is the ideological operator that conceals the absoluteness of this cut, making what is structurally without ground appear to have one. McGowan's point is comparative and genealogical: Wittgenstein's critique of language-fascination (the idea that language itself generates philosophical pseudo-problems by hiding its own rule-bound beginnings) converges with Lacan's critique of fantasy as a screen for the Real of structural lack.

Within enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, this concept appears in a chapter-level argument about the cross-tradition universality of fantasy-critique. The "language game" is positioned not as a distinctively Lacanian term but as one of several philosophical formulations — alongside Frege's anti-psychologism and Heidegger's critique of metaphysical origin-seeking — that all converge on the project of dismantling fantasy's illusion of a ground. In this sense, "language game" functions as an external analogue that McGowan uses to show that Lacan's project is not idiosyncratic but continuous with broader philosophical self-criticism.

The concept draws most directly on the cross-referenced canonicals Fantasy, Alienation, Lack, and Language. Fantasy, in its canonical definition, is precisely the structural screen that covers over constitutive impossibility; here, its specific task is to conceal the absolute break that the language game introduces — i.e., the same groundlessness that the Lacanian vel of alienation formalizes as the loss of being in the choice for meaning. The concept is further connected to Ideology, since the fantasy-mediated concealment of the language game's groundlessness is a paradigmatic ideological operation: it makes a contingent, rule-bound beginning appear necessary and founded. Language and Subject are the structural poles between which the concept operates — the subject is constituted through entry into a language game that precedes and exceeds it, mirroring the Lacanian account of the subject's alienation in the field of the Other.

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of PsychoanalysisTodd McGowan · 2013 (p.216)

the beginning of the language game represents an absolute beginning, and fantasy serves to disguise the absolute nature of the break that the language game introduces.

The phrase "absolute beginning" is theoretically loaded because it refuses any continuity or grounding — it names the same structural rupture that Lacanian alienation formalizes as the non-dialectical, irremediable entry into the signifying chain; the word "disguise" then precisely identifies fantasy's ideological function as the operation that retroactively sutures this break, making the groundless appear grounded.