Means Without End

In McGowan's political-Lacanian framework, "means without end" (borrowed from Agamben) names the gesture of privileging the means of activity over any final cause or telos — pursuing an activity for its own sake rather than for the product or profit it yields. This is not mere formalism or aestheticism; it carries a structural-political valence. Capitalism, McGowan argues, is organized entirely around the final cause: every act is subordinated to an end (profit, accumulation, the promise of future satisfaction). The ideological grip of capitalism lies precisely in this teleological orientation, which ensures that no present moment is complete in itself — all value is deferred to the future product. "Means without end" names the immanent counter-movement: the latent possibility, already present within capitalist activity, of divorcing the doing from the goal. To insist on means for their own sake is to break with the capitalist structuring of jouissance-as-deferred, replacing the promise-logic of endless accumulation with a satisfaction located in the activity itself.

This concept is also a philosophical act in the sense that it does not require a blueprint of an alternative system constructed from outside the existing one. Rather, it is a revelation of what is already latent — a way of inhabiting the present differently by stripping away the teleological supplement that capitalism imposes on every activity. The philosophical move is thus structurally akin to what Lacan would call traversing the fantasy: not building a new world, but dismantling the ideological frame that makes the current one appear as the only possible order.

Within capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, "means without end" occupies a pivotal position in McGowan's political conclusion: it names the only properly immanent alternative to capitalist ideology. Against the canonical concept of Ideology (which, as synthesized across the corpus, operates not through false belief but through jouissance and fantasy — and which cannot be escaped by mere critical distance), McGowan's move is to locate the escape hatch not outside capitalism but inside it, as a repressed possibility. This aligns "means without end" with the logic of the Real: just as the Real is not a beyond but the structural impossibility that already inhabits the Symbolic, so the post-capitalist possibility is not a utopian elsewhere but the point where capitalism's own teleological logic breaks down. The concept also intersects with The Act: insisting on means for their own sake is a gesture that restructures the symbolic coordinates of the subject's relation to activity — it is not ordinary political action (changing policy, building a new program) but a cut that retroactively reveals what was already possible.

The cross-reference to Jouissance is equally crucial: capitalism captures jouissance by deferring it — binding the subject to the promise that satisfaction lies ahead, in the next purchase or achievement. "Means without end" short-circuits this deferral by relocating satisfaction in the activity itself — a form of enjoyment no longer mortgaged to a final cause. The concept also resonates with Sublimation (elevating an object by changing its relation to the drive's aim rather than changing the object) and with Final Cause (the Aristotelian telos that capitalism colonizes and to which "means without end" is the direct antithesis). In this sense, "means without end" is best understood as a specification and politicization of several canonical Lacanian concepts: it takes the structural logic of the Real, jouissance, and the Act and applies them to the question of what immanent political resistance to capitalism could look like.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.189)

we unleash our capacity to pursue means for their own sake, what Agamben calls means without end.

The phrase "unleash our capacity" is theoretically loaded because it positions the post-capitalist gesture not as construction but as release — a liberation of something already present but constrained, which mirrors the Lacanian logic of the Real as what is already there but foreclosed by the Symbolic order. "Means for their own sake" directly inverts the Aristotelian final cause, and the attribution to Agamben signals that this is a philosophical category being recruited for a political-clinical argument rather than an empirical program.