Wasteful Sacrifice

Wasteful sacrifice, as theorized in McGowan's "Enjoying What We Don't Have," names the libidinal structure that makes religious (and analogous ideological) belief impervious to rational refutation. The concept designates a form of expenditure whose value derives precisely from its uselessness: the believer does not primarily seek a utilitarian payoff (eternal bliss, moral reward) but obtains enjoyment from the very act of giving something up without return. This is jouissance in its most naked form — satisfaction extracted not from attainment but from loss itself, from the circuit of sacrifice as such. Because the enjoyment is lodged in the wasteful act rather than in any calculable benefit, the standard Enlightenment move of demonstrating that the belief yields no practical return is not merely ineffective; it is structurally counterproductive. Rational debunking implicitly confirms that belief demands real costs, and thereby augments the libidinal charge that sustains it.

The mechanism follows an inverse-proportional logic: the more useless the belief is shown to be, the more enjoyment it generates for the believer, because uselessness is precisely what marks the sacrifice as genuine and total. This is why McGowan insists that arguments against belief "would lose all of their force" if they engaged the actual driving force — the sacrifice — rather than the manifest content (eternal bliss). The enjoyment at stake here is not desire's restless search for a missing object, nor simple pleasure, but surplus-jouissance: the remainder produced when symbolic expenditure exceeds any economy of equivalence, leaving a leftover that cannot be re-absorbed into utility.

Wasteful sacrifice appears in enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan as a pointed intervention into the debate over ideological critique and rational demystification. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts in the corpus. Most immediately, it is a specification of jouissance: it names the particular mode of jouissance operative in sacrificial religious practice, where satisfaction accrues to the drive's circular, non-productive repetition rather than to any object attained. The concept also engages Ideology: McGowan's argument is structurally parallel to the Žižekian critique of cynical reason — just as knowing that ideology is ideology does not dissolve it (because ideology operates at the level of enjoyment, not belief), knowing that belief yields no return does not dissolve belief (because its enjoyment is located in the sacrifice, not the promised reward). Fetishistic Disavowal provides an additional frame: the believer "knows very well" the sacrifice is materially fruitless, but nevertheless continues, sustained by the jouissance of the wasteful act itself.

The concept also implicitly indexes the Lost Object and Desire. The sacrificial economy McGowan describes bypasses the logic of desire — which would circle an absent object in the hope of recovery — and instead directly inhabits loss as enjoyment. This is closer to the drive than to desire: the drive's satisfaction lies in the circuit itself, not in reaching a goal. Surplus-jouissance is the canonical anchor that most precisely names what is at stake: the "waste" is exactly the non-exchangeable remainder left over after every utilitarian calculation, the plus-de-jouir that cannot be reabsorbed. In this way, wasteful sacrifice is not an extension of these canonicals so much as their application to a specific, politically charged domain — the stubbornness of religious commitment against secular critique — demonstrating that ideological attachment is always, at bottom, an attachment to a particular economy of enjoyment.

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of PsychoanalysisTodd McGowan · 2013 (p.262)

if the driving force behind belief is not eternal bliss but the very act of sacrifice itself — a wasteful rather than a productive act — the arguments against belief would lose all of their force.

The quote's theoretical weight hinges on the opposition between "wasteful" and "productive": by locating the driving force in a wasteful act, McGowan identifies jouissance (which Lacan explicitly defines as "what serves no purpose") as the libidinal motor of belief, thereby showing that any critique framed in terms of utility — productivity, payoff, rational benefit — is addressed to the wrong register entirely and must fail.