Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis

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Synopsis

Todd McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013) argues that a genuinely emancipatory politics can be derived from psychoanalysis — but only if one takes as its foundation the later Freudian discovery of the death drive rather than the early theory of sexual liberation. The book's central wager is that what all previous psychoanalytic politics (Reich, Fromm, Marcuse) missed is the irreducible structural link between enjoyment (jouissance) and loss: subjects do not desire to obtain objects but to repeat the originary sacrificial act through which those objects came into being as lost. Against Marxism, which grounds emancipation in justice and ultimately in a future good society, McGowan argues that psychoanalysis shows the good society to be constitutively impossible — not merely difficult — because the good itself is constituted by its own prohibition. The positive political program that follows is not nihilism but a politics of identification with the limit and the barrier rather than the pursuit of transcendence: embracing what capitalism systematically misrecognizes (that we enjoy absence, not presence), confronting anxiety rather than fleeing it, recognizing the structural necessity of belief rather than combating religion with Enlightenment rationality, and identifying with the missing signifier that prevents any symbolic order from closing in on itself. Running through eleven chapters and a conclusion, the book moves from a theory of subjectivity (how loss constitutes the desiring subject) through an economic critique of capitalism (which distorts the death drive by forging a false link between enjoyment and accumulation), through analyses of anxiety, sacrifice, knowledge, fantasy, bare life, religious belief, and the missing feminine signifier, arriving at a sketch of what McGowan calls "a society of the death drive" — a social order that recognizes sacrifice as its own reward rather than as an investment in a future good.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes McGowan's book within the Lacanian political-theory corpus is its systematic, chapter-by-chapter demonstration that the death drive — typically treated as the obstacle to any politics — is in fact the positive foundation of an emancipatory project. Most Lacanian political work (Žižek, Stavrakakis, Mouffe, Copjec) either deploys the death drive negatively (as that which disrupts ideology) or gestures toward it without constructing a comprehensive political program from it. McGowan instead builds a sustained argument across the full range of political problems — capitalism, class, anxiety, sacrifice, knowledge, fantasy, religion, gender — showing in each case how misrecognizing jouissance as something to be obtained rather than as something already enjoyed through loss is the precise mechanism by which ideology operates. The book is thus the most architecturally complete attempt in the secondary corpus to derive a positive political program from Lacan's theory of the drive rather than from his theory of the subject or the big Other.

A second distinctive contribution lies in McGowan's engagement with the economics of capitalism at the level of psychic structure rather than at the level of social critique. Drawing on both Marx's Capital and Grundrisse and on Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, McGowan argues that capitalism does not deprive subjects of enjoyment but rather prevents them from recognizing where their enjoyment lies — locating it in accumulation and acquisition when it actually resides in the circuit of loss and repetition that the drive already enacts. This allows McGowan to reframe the psychoanalytic political project not as a call for "less suffering" or "more repression-lifting" but as one for "more enjoyment" in a highly specific sense: a transformation of subjects' relationship to the satisfaction they already, unknowingly, obtain. This argument, anchored in Freud's own economic metaphors and Lacan's four discourses, makes the book the most thoroughgoing psychoanalytic critique of capitalism's libidinal economy available in the secondary literature.

A third contribution is methodological: McGowan consistently uses close readings of popular cinema (Short Cuts, Magnolia, Crash, Twin Peaks, Babel, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Da Vinci Code, Bowling for Columbine) and historical-political events (September 11, the Iraq War, the Schiavo case, the estate-tax debate, creationism debates) as analytical objects for developing and testing his theoretical claims, rather than as illustrations of pre-formed positions. This makes the book unusually concrete and deployable across film studies, political theory, and psychoanalytic practice alike.

Main themes

• The death drive as positive foundation of emancipatory politics rather than obstacle to it
• Jouissance as structurally tied to loss and absence rather than to acquisition or presence
• Capitalism's misrecognition of the drive: ideologically forging the link between enjoyment and accumulation
• Identification with the limit (barrier, social symptom, missing signifier) as the psychoanalytic political program
• The failure of Marxist-Freudian synthesis and the inadequacy of sexual liberation politics after 1920
• Anxiety as ethical-political stance: embracing rather than fleeing the enjoying Other
• The shift from master's discourse to university discourse and its consequences for emancipatory politics
• Fantasy's ambivalent political valence: both ideological veil and path to the traumatic Real
• The structural necessity of religious belief and the inadequacy of Enlightenment atheism as political strategy
• The missing binary signifier (the feminine) as the constitutive gap that simultaneously enables and destabilizes every social order

Chapter outline

• Introduction: Psychoanalytic Hostility to Politics — p.1-22
• Chapter 1: The Formation of Subjectivity — p.25-51
• Chapter 2: The Economics of the Drive — p.52-78
• Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment — p.79-98
• Chapter 4: Sustaining Anxiety — p.99-120
• Chapter 5: Changing the World — p.121-142
• Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice — p.143-166
• Chapter 7: Against Knowledge — p.167-195
• Chapter 8: The Politics of Fantasy — p.196-222
• Chapter 9: Beyond Bare Life — p.223-256
• Chapter 10: The Necessity of Belief — p.257-282
• Chapter 11: The Case of the Missing Signifier — p.263-296
• Conclusion: A Society of the Death Drive — p.283-296

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Psychoanalytic Hostility to Politics (p.1-22)

McGowan opens by identifying what he calls the central paradox of the book: psychoanalysis begins with individual suffering and has no explicit political program, yet it contains within it a viable and indeed superior alternative to Marxist emancipatory politics. The Introduction lays out the historical trajectory from the pre-1920 Freud — who could still endorse sexual reform — to the post-1920 Freud of the death drive, whose discovery makes any politics of amelioration theoretically untenable. Thinkers such as Reich, Gross, Fromm, and Marcuse are presented as belonging to the pre-death-drive moment, and the Frankfurt School synthesis of Freud and Marx is shown to be structurally limited by its inability to theorize sacrifice as an end in itself rather than as an investment in future pleasure.

The Introduction then establishes the book's core philosophical problem: psychoanalysis absolutely rejects the good or the good society. Drawing on Lacan's Seminar VII formulation that 'there is no Sovereign Good' and that das Ding (the mother, the object of incest) is a forbidden good that constitutes the good as such, McGowan argues that the barrier to the good society runs deeper than competing individual desires — it is internal to the very structure of the good itself. This is not Rawlsian liberalism's problem of reconciling competing interests, nor Marx's problem of overcoming material antagonism. The prohibition on the good does not block a pre-existing good but constitutes it.

The Introduction concludes by sketching the paradoxical political program that will unfold across the book: rather than identifying with the good society and trying to remove the limit that separates us from it, a psychoanalytic politics must identify with the limit itself. 'Identification with the barrier' replaces 'progress toward the goal.' Derrida is cited as an example of a thinker who cannot fully abandon the idea of progress (his 'emancipatory promise' in Specters of Marx remains a futural teleology), and the Introduction argues that any such residual progressivism remains theoretically inadequate to the reality of the death drive's interminable repetition.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Jouissance, Lost Object, Ideology, Lack, Pleasure Principle Notable examples: Reich, Fromm, Marcuse; Derrida, Specters of Marx; Rawls, veil of ignorance

Chapter 1: The Formation of Subjectivity (p.25-51)

The first chapter constructs the psychoanalytic theory of subject-formation around the foundational concept of constitutive loss. McGowan traces the genesis of the desiring subject from autoerotic undifferentiation through the 'new psychical action' of primary narcissism to the inaugural sacrifice of a privileged object — a sacrifice that creates the object precisely by losing it. Crucially, this is the loss of nothing (there was no substantial object to lose), and the entire structure of desire is organized around the misrecognition of this nothing as something. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are credited with anticipating Freud's turn from the subject of knowledge to the subject of desire, but are shown to fall short because they retain a biological conception of will that Freud overcomes by showing that instinct is deformed through its submission to language.

Anorexia is introduced as the paradigmatic exemplar of desiring subjectivity rather than as a pathology of oppressive femininity. The anorexic 'eats nothing' — she has found a food that nourishes the desiring subject rather than the living being. Unlike Naomi Wolf's account of anorexia as victimization or Elizabeth Grosz's reading of it as proto-feminist resistance, McGowan argues that the anorexic reveals what is structurally operative in all subjects: objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object. Most nonanorexic subjects imagine the lost object can be found in something rather than nothing; the anorexic dispenses with that illusion.

The chapter then addresses ideology's relation to loss. Whereas ideology promises that loss is redeemable (the Christian model: endure earthly suffering for heavenly reward; the Marxist model: sacrifice now for future pleasure), psychoanalysis insists on the absolute, unproductive character of founding loss — loss as its own reward, not exchangeable for anything. Nostalgia and paranoia are analyzed as the two primary political-libidinal structures through which subjects misrecognize their constitutive loss. Nostalgia converts the nothing that was lost into a substantial object of the past (the Eden myth, Braveheart, the heroic grandfather); paranoia converts it into a threat posed by the Other who has stolen the subject's enjoyment. Both structures are shown to function conservatively: nostalgia closes the space of freedom by making loss appear recoverable, while paranoia is 'political in its very structure,' producing hostility and ultimately closing the gap in social authority by positing an 'Other of the Other.' The chapter ends with the abandonment of the seduction theory as Freud's originary theoretical move toward the death drive: by relocating violence from external seducer to the subject's own self-inflicted sacrificial loss, Freud laid the groundwork for the entire psychoanalytic political program.

Key concepts: Lost Object, Death Drive, Desire, Ideology, Nostalgia, Paranoia Notable examples: Anorexia (Naomi Wolf, Elizabeth Grosz); Eden myth; Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, Cinderella Man; Seduction theory (Freud/Fliess)

Chapter 2: The Economics of the Drive (p.52-78)

Chapter 2 develops the explicitly economic dimension of the psychoanalytic political project. McGowan reads Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology as the first formulation of a psychic economics, in which the aim of the psyche is initially conceived as returning to a zero level of excitation. The discovery of the death drive in 1920 transforms this: satisfaction ceases to be a state achieved through discharge and becomes instead a structure that the drive enacts through its very circuitousness. The drive always-already finds satisfaction; the analytical intervention is therefore not a cure from dissatisfaction to satisfaction but a quantitative shortening of the detour through which the subject reaches its inevitable enjoyment.

The symptom is reframed: it is not a barrier to enjoyment but its source and foundation. The symptom is the disruption of the circuit that the death drive follows, and its disruptiveness constitutes the circuit. Without the symptom there would be no drive, only a living organism. Analysis does not eliminate the symptom but changes the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it provides — from experiencing the disruptiveness as a barrier to recognizing it as the source. This leads to a central political argument: capitalism functions by sustaining the neurotic's misrecognition of drive as desire. Capitalism needs subjects who mistake their satisfaction-in-absence for dissatisfaction-in-need, because this drives accumulation. The capitalist subject structurally fails to see its own inherent self-satisfaction, and it is this failure that keeps it going as a capitalist subject.

The chapter concludes by theorizing the ego as the ideal psychic apparatus for capitalist subjectivity. Drawing on Freud's Project, the ego's 'side-cathexes' diffuse the excitation of trauma and produce additional detours for the death drive, generating subjective alienation from one's own enjoyment. A strong ego — the goal of American ego psychology and the self-help industry — is shown to be precisely what makes subjects receptive to racist appeals about the excessive enjoyment of the Other, because it causes the subject to experience its own enjoyment as alien. The Freudian theory of the joke is invoked to illustrate the alternative economics: the joke economizes on expenditure in order to release an excess of enjoyment, a logic that capitalism must suppress. The chapter thus establishes the psychoanalytic political critique of capitalism as operating not at the level of justice (Marxism) but at the level of the misrecognition of enjoyment.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Death Drive, Surplus-jouissance, Pleasure Principle, Symptom, Capitalism Notable examples: Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology; Adam Smith on accumulation; Marx, Capital and Grundrisse; Freud's theory of jokes

Chapter 3: Class Status and Enjoyment (p.79-98)

This chapter repositions the psychoanalytic critique of capitalism relative to the Marxist critique. Whereas Marxism takes injustice as its fundamental point of departure, psychoanalysis takes freedom — or more precisely, unfreedom. McGowan draws on Kant (via Karatani) to show that even the most rigorous Marxist analyses retain a moral-ethical foundation, while psychoanalysis reveals something different: class privilege is above all a barrier to enjoyment, demanding repression in exchange for social advantages. The upper-class subject is necessarily more invested in class privilege and therefore more subject to the repression it demands.

The chapter examines how recognition functions as a structural barrier to enjoyment. When subjects pursue social recognition, they structure their lives around the demand of the social authority, which always conceals an unarticulated desire that the demand cannot represent. The pursuit of recognition — whether through the student flattering the professor, the slave seeking the master's recognition, or gay marriage advocates seeking institutional approval — always runs aground on the groundlessness of social authority itself. No agency that could grant recognition is itself authorized. This critique extends to 'pseudo-Hegelian' political projects centered on recognition, showing their fundamental limitation.

The chapter then offers a detailed reading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic, arguing that Hegel misses what Lacan correctly identifies: it is the slave, not the master, who is free to enjoy. The master, having wagered life itself for prestige, finds that recognition constitutes a barrier to enjoyment rather than its fulfillment. Capitalism is shown to differ from the master/slave structure by universalizing the demand for recognition and thereby eliminating the 'outside' position that allowed the slave to enjoy — but this universalization also makes visible, for the first time, that enjoyment is always based on a prior loss. The chapter uses the American opposition to the estate tax as a sociological illustration of how even working-class subjects identify with upper-class privilege and thereby psychically invest in a structure that systematically prevents their own enjoyment.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Identification, Symbolic Identity, Lack, The big Other, Alienation Notable examples: Hegel's master/slave dialectic; American estate tax poll; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (class and jokes)

Chapter 4: Sustaining Anxiety (p.99-120)

Chapter 4 addresses the transformation of social authority from the traditional demand-based paternal structure to the contemporary imperative-to-enjoy. In traditional social arrangements, authority prohibits enjoyment and offers recognition in return; subjects face a choice between sticking to the explicit demand or seeking the hidden desire beneath it (the neurotic path versus the path of desire). Contemporary capitalism has replaced this dialectic with an injunction to enjoy, personified by authority figures who publicly flaunt their enjoyment (Berlusconi, Charlie Sheen, Sarkozy). The subject no longer faces the choice between demand and desire but between pathological narcissism (obeying the imperative to enjoy) and fundamentalism (searching for the missing demand).

The encounter with the 'enjoying Other' is theorized as the primary source of anxiety in contemporary subjects. McGowan draws on Robert Altman's Short Cuts as exemplary: nearly every encounter in the film is an encounter with the enjoying Other, producing anxiety that characters manage through flight or violence. Twin Peaks is read alongside to show how violence directed at the enjoying Other is insatiable and self-defeating — its real aim is not to eliminate but to sustain the Other's enjoyment. The War on Terror and suicide bombing are analyzed as mirror images: both are misguided attempts to eradicate an enjoyment that is in fact the subject's own fantasmatic projection.

Against Heidegger's account of anxiety as the revelation of the nothing (which McGowan treats as inadequate because it figures anxiety as arising from absence), McGowan follows Lacan in arguing that anxiety arises from an overwhelming presence — the excessive proximity of the Other's jouissance, the moment when the lost object seems about to return. The ethical and political position is then derived: to sustain oneself in anxiety rather than flee it through cynicism or fundamentalism. Crucially, the Other's enjoyment and the subject's own enjoyment are not distinct: 'to reject the experience of anxiety is to flee one's own enjoyment.' Anxiety is therefore not merely an ethical burden but the key to genuine jouissance.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Objet petit a, Anxiety, The big Other, Death Drive, Ideology Notable examples: Altman, Short Cuts; Twin Peaks (Lynch/Frost); War on Terror / September 11; Heidegger, 'What Is Metaphysics?'; Lacan on anxiety (Seminar X)

Chapter 5: Changing the World (p.121-142)

Chapter 5 confronts the political implications of the death drive for the project of transforming the world. McGowan surveys the modern critique of normality (Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze) and shows that each shares the project of liberating difference from normality's hegemony, but that none adequately theorizes the source of normality's power. The chapter diagnoses normality as reification in Lukács's sense — the glazing-over of its own production, the presentation of a contingent arrangement as permanent and beyond question.

The traditional left-wing critique of psychoanalysis as a tool of adaptation (represented by American ego psychology, especially Heinz Hartmann) is carefully addressed. McGowan acknowledges that psychoanalysis does transform dissatisfaction into some degree of satisfaction, but argues that this is not adaptation to the social order but rather a reorientation of the subject toward the fantasmatic enjoyment it already obtains. Freud's figure of the 'normal subject' in the Five Lectures is read against the grain: the normal subject is not the subject adapted to society but the one who publicly avows its fantasy and insists on it at the expense of social recognition. Neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are all shown to involve a retreat from the truth of one's enjoyment, while successful subjectivity involves publicly insisting on fantasy — not as private retreat but as a path for transforming social reality.

The chapter distinguishes the psychoanalytic political subject from both the neurotic (who keeps fantasy private to maintain functioning within the social order) and the pervert (whose public show of enjoyment is actually a demand for the law to appear and prohibit). The genuinely psychoanalytic political subject insists on fantasy at the expense of recognition — avowing, publicly, the fantasmatic enjoyment that social authority demands be kept private. This is the positive political form that identification with the limit takes at the level of individual subjectivity.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Neurosis, Sublimation, Symbolic Identity, Ideology Notable examples: Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation; Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis; Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Lukács on reification

Chapter 6: The Appeal of Sacrifice (p.143-166)

Part II of the book opens with the problem of the social bond. Chapter 6 argues that society is constituted through a shared sacrifice of an impossible pleasure — a repetition of the individual's originary sacrifice, now done collectively in order to enter the social order. The transition from impossibility to prohibition is the key move: the social authority's prohibition of the ultimate enjoyment functions to make that enjoyment appear possible (merely prohibited) rather than impossible in itself. This is ideology's foundational lie: it transforms the constitutively impossible into the merely forbidden, giving subjects the fantasy of a lost plenitude that social authority is preventing them from recovering.

McGowan deploys Lacan's theory of sexuation (Seminar XX) to distinguish two modes of organizing the social bond: the male logic (constituted through exclusion — the exception of the primal father — that creates a closed, whole set) and the female logic (constituted through the 'not-all,' a social bond that exists through the shared experience of loss without positing an exception). The September 11 attacks and their aftermath are read through this schema: the immediate social bond formed around the attacks followed female logic (any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could participate; 'Nous sommes tous Américains'), while the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq represented a turn to male logic — the pursuit of pleasure through having and possession, which then returned American society to the traumatic loss it was trying to flee.

The chapter also argues against teleological thinking about social action, introducing the concept of the 'immanent cause' — action done for its own sake rather than for a larger final cause — as the alternative that the death drive proposes. The perspective of the final cause (whether identified with power, the good, or utility) systematically blinds social thought to the possibility that sacrifice might be its own reward. The chapter draws on Marcel Mauss on the gift and Georges Bataille on unproductive expenditure, while distinguishing the psychoanalytic position from both: for psychoanalysis, what makes sacrifice the source of enjoyment is not the discharge of excess energy (Bataille, who McGowan aligns with the pleasure principle) but the production of a lost object through the very act of sacrificing.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Sacrifice, Symbolic Order, Death Drive, Lost Object, Fantasy Notable examples: Lacan, Seminar XX (sexuation); September 11 and War on Terror; Hegel, master/slave dialectic; Marcel Mauss on the gift; Georges Bataille

Chapter 7: Against Knowledge (p.167-195)

Chapter 7 addresses the shift from master's discourse to university discourse (Lacan, Seminar XVII) as the political-historical transformation that most directly affects emancipatory politics today. In traditional societies organized around the master's discourse, knowledge had a potentially revolutionary function: exposing the master's arbitrary authority could destabilize it. In the contemporary epoch of expert authority, however, knowledge has relocated to the position of the agent within the dominant discourse, and what was once a challenge to authority has become authority itself. Emancipatory politics, insofar as it takes the side of knowledge and consciousness-raising, aligns itself with the expert authority it purports to oppose.

Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? is invoked as evidence: conservative politics wins not by persuading subjects that right-wing policies will benefit them, but by offering a superior way of organizing enjoyment. Conservative populism — creationism, anti-expert rhetoric, the figure of the rebellious traditional-values champion — positions itself as liberation from the constraints of expert authority, even while embodying precisely the authoritative structures it claims to oppose. Michael Moore's documentary career is analyzed in detail: his early films (Roger and Me, The Big One, Bowling for Columbine, Sicko) succeed when they mobilize enjoyment in opposition to capitalism, but Fahrenheit 9/11 fails because it takes the side of expert knowledge (documentary form as consciousness-raising) and thereby cedes the terrain of enjoyment to conservatism.

The Lacanian theory of the four discourses is elaborated: master's discourse, university discourse, hysteric's discourse, and analyst's discourse. The shift from master to university discourse is shown to produce a corresponding transformation in the superego from Freud's prohibitory internalized law (the ego's submission to the categorical imperative) to Lacan's imperative to enjoy — an injunction that the subject can never obey because the ideal it posits always recedes. The conclusion is that emancipatory politics must abandon its alliance with expert authority and instead align itself with the enjoyment that exceeds all authority — the enjoyment that is proper to democracy's excess (Rancière: democracy is 'the reign of excess').

Key concepts: Jouissance, Knowledge, Master Signifier, Ideology, Surplus-jouissance, Unconscious Notable examples: Lacan, Seminar XVII (four discourses); Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?; Michael Moore (Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko); Creationism debate; Rancière, Hatred of Democracy

Chapter 8: The Politics of Fantasy (p.196-222)

Chapter 8 undertakes a sustained argument for the positive political valence of fantasy against the dominant traditions of Western philosophy and Marxism, both of which treat fantasy primarily as ideological delusion to be overcome through critique. McGowan surveys the philosophical hostility to fantasy from Plato through Frege, Wittgenstein, and analytic philosophy, noting that all share the project of stripping away fantasmatic illusions in order to reveal the productive/structural conditions of experience. Marx is placed in this tradition: despite his attack on philosophy as merely interpretive, his own political program consists substantially in a critique of the fantasmatic individual of bourgeois ideology. The fundamental fantasy of the capitalist subject — the belief in a self-sufficient individual who owes nothing to the social structure — is the target of Marx's historicizing analysis throughout the Grundrisse.

Against this consensus, McGowan argues that fantasy has three irreplaceable political functions that philosophy and Marxism cannot account for. First, fantasy opens up possibilities foreclosed by ideology: contemporary ideology has made capitalism the horizon of thinkability, but 'if we can't think about the possibility of capitalism's end, we can fantasize about it.' Second, fantasy provides an express path to the traumatic kernel that ideology excludes from everyday reality: the fantasy scenario stages the origin of the symbolic law and thereby brings the subject into contact with the Real that ideology constitutes as a present absence. Freud's dream of Irma's injection is analyzed as an example. Third, and most importantly, fantasy dictates the way subjects enjoy — and to struggle against fantasy is to pit oneself against the very organization of the subject's enjoyment. Nationalism, for instance, is a fantasmatic object, and Marxism's failure to displace nationalist fantasy is not simply a failure of consciousness-raising but a failure to offer an alternative organization of enjoyment.

The chapter engages Stavrakakis's reading (in Lacan and the Political) of psychoanalysis as primarily about 'traversing the fantasy of utopian thought,' arguing that this remains too committed to the philosophical-Marxist antipathy toward fantasy. Psychoanalytic interpretation, unlike hermeneutics, does not seek the missing object behind the fantasy but finds without seeking — recognizing the traumatic gap that fantasy simultaneously conceals and reveals. The chapter uses Ursula Le Guin's science fiction trilogy (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven) to illustrate different modalities of fantasy's political work.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ideology, Real, Jouissance, Fetishistic Disavowal, Signifier Notable examples: Plato, Republic; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Marx, Grundrisse and German Ideology; Freud's dream of Irma's injection; Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political; Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / The Lathe of Heaven

Chapter 9: Beyond Bare Life (p.223-256)

Chapter 9 situates the psychoanalytic theory of the death drive in relation to the contemporary geopolitical opposition between those who champion life (global capitalism, secular modernity) and those who champion death (Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism's 'culture of life'). McGowan begins with Osama bin Laden's framing — 'you love life as we love death' — and shows that this opposition is accepted by both sides, including by left psychoanalytic thinkers like Erich Fromm (biophilia vs. necrophilia). The chapter's central argument is that the death drive marks a third position between both: death-in-life, or the death within life that constitutes subjectivity as such.

Capitalism's alignment with 'life' is analyzed as ideologically complex: by reducing everything to bare life (in Agamben's sense), capitalism strips life of all value except survival and accumulation. Fundamentalism emerges as the symptomatic reaction to this stripping-away of value — it restores value precisely by introducing death back into life. But both positions are complicit: capitalism requires the bare life it denies having, and fundamentalism needs the decadent enjoyment it professes to destroy. The chapter reads Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ as a symptom of American conservatism's actual commitment to death (a 127-minute immersion in sadistic torture) while Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the signifier as a force of death is engaged and partially contested: the signifier does not simply repress life but is the vehicle through which the death drive constitutes subjectivity.

The Terri Schiavo case and the culture-of-life debates around abortion are read as illustrations of how the value-creating power of death operates within conservative politics. The chapter concludes by arguing that recognizing death-in-life would not produce Marxist utopia nor fundamentalist purity but a social order containing both more suffering and more enjoyment — one that sees the trauma of loss as destiny and loss as the site of enjoyment.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Jouissance, Real, Trauma, Subject, Alienation Notable examples: Osama bin Laden's fatwa; Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness; Agamben, bare life; Mel Gibson, Passion of the Christ; Terri Schiavo case; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Chapter 10: The Necessity of Belief (p.257-282)

Chapter 10 takes up the political problem of religious belief and the Enlightenment strategy of combating it with atheism. McGowan argues that psychoanalytic thought reveals the structural necessity of belief: religious belief is not the result of irrationality, evolutionary misfiring (Dawkins), ideological manipulation (Marx), or infantile attachment to the father (Freud's own account in The Future of an Illusion), but an effect of the structure of signification itself. When the subject enters signification, it encounters a master signifier without a binary signifier to close and justify its meaning. This absence of a binary signifier — the missing signifier that would make sense of the senseless injunction of the master — is the structural condition that produces belief in God as the occupant of that empty slot.

The chapter provides detailed critical readings of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, arguing that all Enlightenment-style arguments against belief are self-defeating because they leave intact the enjoyment that belief provides. Indeed, arguments that demonstrate the inutility of belief augment this enjoyment rather than diminishing it, because enjoyment has an inverse relationship to utility — we enjoy in proportion to the uselessness of our actions. The political prescription that follows is counterintuitive: rather than fighting belief by arguing for atheism, one should fight it by insisting on its absolute necessity and universality. If everyone must believe (even the professed atheist), then the privileged status of the believer evaporates, and with it one of the key motivations for religious affiliation.

The chapter uses Alejandro González Iñárritu's films (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) to illustrate the cinematic possibility of an 'unconscious God' — a structure in which the missing binary signifier appears as contingency rather than providence. In Babel, the hub-and-spokes structure shows how the central traumatic event (the accidental shooting of an American tourist) radiates outward through chains of contingency, undermining the ideological conception of individual agency without substituting a hidden conspiratorial force. This is the positive political form that recognizing the necessity of belief takes: not fundamentalism's God and not atheism's denial, but the embrace of contingency as the structuring absence that animates the social field.

Key concepts: Signifier, Master Signifier, The big Other, Jouissance, Knowledge, Unconscious Notable examples: Dawkins, The God Delusion; Sam Harris, Victor Stenger; Iñárritu, Babel / Amores Perros / 21 Grams; Pascal / Lacan on God (philosopher's vs. believer's God); Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Ivan Karamazov on atheism)

Chapter 11: The Case of the Missing Signifier (p.263-296)

The final chapter addresses the most fundamental political problem: the missing binary signifier — the signifier of the feminine in patriarchal society — whose absence constitutes the social order as such. McGowan argues that this missing signifier is not merely absent (as it would be for a hermeneutic approach that seeks it endlessly) but present as an absence, a constitutive gap that is already operative within the signifying structure. The distinction is politically crucial: the hermeneutic search for the missing signifier (what we might call liberal feminism or The Da Vinci Code's quest for the sacred feminine) leaves subjects in an endless quest that precludes the political act of identifying with the limit. Psychoanalytic interpretation, by contrast, finds without seeking — recognizing the missing signifier as a structuring presence.

The Da Vinci Code (both Dan Brown's novel and Ron Howard's film) is subjected to extended critical analysis as the paradigmatic contemporary fantasy about the missing binary signifier. The film stages three attitudes toward the missing signifier: the fundamentalist (Bishop Aringarosa / Silas) who wants to destroy all trace of it; the positivist (the villainous Teabing) who wants to make it fully present and thereby eliminate the gap; and the hermeneutic stance embodied by the hero Robert Langdon, who respects the signifier in its absence and maintains its transcendence. McGowan argues that The Da Vinci Code's fantasy of sexual complementarity (restoring the sacred feminine to balance the masculine) is thoroughly ideological — psychoanalysis insists on the non-existence of the sexual relationship — but that the film's single-minded focus on the missing binary signifier makes it an unusually productive object for psychoanalytic political analysis.

Simone de Beauvoir's insight that 'the problem of woman has always been a problem of men' is invoked to argue that the signifier of the feminine is not the property of women but the internal disturbance of male identity from within. The proper feminist politics derived from psychoanalysis is not the inclusion of what has been excluded (which implicitly valorizes the master signifier by demanding that the binary signifier join it) but combat against the conception of the subject as integral whole. The chapter concludes that identifying with the missing signifier — recognizing its constitutive presence within the structure rather than seeking it outside — is the foundational political act of a psychoanalytic politics: an identification with the limit that transforms the cause of every political failure into the basis of a new kind of emancipatory politics.

Key concepts: Signifier, Fetishistic Disavowal, Fantasy, Ideology, Gap, Symbolic Order Notable examples: The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown / Ron Howard); Simone de Beauvoir; Lacan, Seminar XI (hermeneutics vs. interpretation); Lacan, 'The Woman does not exist'; Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Conclusion: A Society of the Death Drive (p.283-296)

The Conclusion sketches what a social order grounded in recognition of the death drive would look like. McGowan is careful to note that this does not entail a utopian transformation — 'it would leave everything as it is' in one sense, because the death drive is impervious to change and the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment cannot be eliminated. But in another sense it would change everything: the same sacrificial activity would be done for its own sake rather than as an investment in a future good. The fundamental problem with all ideological misrecognition — whether capitalist, religious, or utopian-political — is that it replaces the partial enjoyment of the death drive with an image of complete enjoyment to come, and thereby prevents subjects from locating where their enjoyment already lies.

The Hegelian concept of the 'bad infinite' versus the 'achieved beyond' (from Hegel's Science of Logic) is invoked to characterize the difference between ideological enjoyment and the enjoyment the death drive properly provides. Capitalist, religious, and utopian enjoyment is a 'bad infinite' — an endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach. The death drive's enjoyment is an 'achieved beyond' that includes the limit within itself: it is both infinite and limited, revolving around a lost object that it never possesses but that it continually and satisfyingly approaches. This is the 'fully realized infinite' that a society of the death drive would sustain: not the abolition of loss, suffering, or antagonism, but a transformed relationship to these as the irreducible conditions of enjoyment itself.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Jouissance, Lack, Repetition, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Act Notable examples: Hegel, Science of Logic (bad infinite vs. achieved beyond); Adrian Johnston on the death drive

Main interlocutors

• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
• Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar X
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX
• Karl Marx, Capital
• Karl Marx, Grundrisse
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Hegel, Science of Logic
• Slavoj Žižek
• Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
• Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
• Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
• Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
• Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
• Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy
• Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Giorgio Agamben
• Erich Fromm
• Wilhelm Reich

Position in the corpus

Within the Lacanian secondary literature, Enjoying What We Don't Have occupies a position proximate to Žižek's work on ideology and the death drive (especially The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Plague of Fantasies, and Tarrying with the Negative) and to Copjec's Read My Desire, but it distinguishes itself by constructing an explicitly comprehensive political program from these resources rather than a series of ideological analyses or philosophical arguments. Readers who have worked through Žižek's treatment of surplus-jouissance and ideology, or Copjec's reading of Lacan against the historicists, will find McGowan's book the most sustained attempt to translate those frameworks into a systematic politics. It also shares ground with Stavrakakis's Lacan and the Political but argues explicitly against Stavrakakis's conclusion that the psychoanalytic political task is primarily one of 'traversing the fantasy of utopian thought.' McGowan's engagement with Marx and the Marxist tradition is deeper and more sustained than most Lacanian political theory, making it an especially productive companion to Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and to Althusserian readings of ideology.\n\nFor readers approaching from film studies and cultural theory, McGowan's book is best read after his earlier The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007) and alongside his Capitalism and Desire (2016), which develops the anti-capitalist dimension of the argument. Those entering from political philosophy will benefit from reading it alongside Rancière's Disagreement and Hatred of Democracy (both cited here), and from the Copjec and Mitchell texts that McGowan directly engages. As a general orientation text in Lacanian political theory, it works best after readers have established familiarity with the basic Lacanian concepts through Fink's The Lacanian Subject or Evans's An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, since McGowan assumes fluency with objet petit a, jouissance, the four discourses, and the theory of sexuation without stopping to derive them from scratch.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Jouissance
• Death Drive
• Surplus-jouissance
• Lost Object
• Lack
• Fantasy
• Desire
• Objet petit a
• The big Other
• Symbolic Order
• Master Signifier
• Signifier
• Repetition
• Trauma
• Identification
• Pleasure Principle
• Real
• Fetishistic Disavowal
• Ethics of Psychoanalysis
• The Act